Reviews
Clarkson, Jesse D. & Care, Norman S. & Feldman, Burton
NOTEBOOK, 1967-68, by Robert Lowell. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 161 pp. $6.00. ROBERT LOWELL'S NEW VOLUME of poetry continues his passionate meditation on history selectively...
...but Che was killed, the others lived, so Che is lamented...
...Both can rage in a language at once harshly modem and traditionally splendid, and make it an instrument with which to invade the political mysteries...
...And solving the problem of whether to withdraw (not the logistical problems of withdrawing) from a foreign adventure that has gone morally sour, is simply not a "task" to be "performed," no matter how adept we are at analysis and design...
...In his opening chapter entitled "The Sources," Ulam devotes considerable attention to citing instances of continuity between Czarist and Soviet Russia, but he is unable to explain them...
...they are met by "the other army, the Martian, the ape, the hero...
...Meanwhile a police sergeant picks up some of Kirk's fuddy-duddy books, a "defiled White Goddess or is it/Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe...
...There is hardly a poem in these several hundred that does not obsessively return to murder, almost as the metaphor of existence...
...Dundee "won the battle, lost his life and Scotland...
...What other poet would—or could—comment on our politics by turning in the next line or poem to Tamerlane, Alexander, Joinville, Agamemnon, or find the right tribute for Robert Ken nedy by using Plutarch...
...The 1920 world depression was a major factor, both in the introduction of the NEP (New Economic Policy) and in the about-face made by the Comintern at its Third Congress (in 1921) on the question of world revolution...
...It is almost a category of poetic power by itself: Dante could curse, King Lear could curse (Timon BOOKS of Athens only spat), Swift could, Melville could, Yeats could, Lowell can...
...What is strikingly new in this present volume is an obsession not so much with history as with immediate politics...
...A few pages after the Pentagon March poems, Lowell shows us the Nazis and Fascists .. . marching...
...It is doubtless only niggling to insist that a real prince, as Kennedy may have been, could rule like a real prince: and for a real prince, getting involved in a Bay of Pigs (as the older Kennedy did), may be a sign of his genuine nobility...
...like a plane gunning potato bugs or Arabs on the screen— one of the mighty...
...He does convince us, though, that the police are not at all a very good way of getting at what's really wrong with us...
...The clarity of his presentation is not aided by his propensity for interrupting his narrative with anticipations ("as we shall see") of future developments (though sometimes he has the grace BOOKS to admit: "but these reflections anticipate our story...
...The bullring is a murderous place, but in Lowell's poetry there is a real man alone out there...
...But where Yeats's political poetic raging spends itself powerfully and directly on its enemy, Lowell's curses are by comparison diffuse...
...the poet approaches the "cleansing guillotine peeping" over the judge's shoulder, thinking, ". . . my last words,/no matter how unjust, no longer matter...
...This may be an antithesis for Yeats, but not for Lowell...
...New York: Harper & Row...
...At the Pentagon March, for example, the marchers are a "green army," greenly innocent, nobly natural...
...Fitting that vision to the American scene isn't easy...
...He does not explain how the Bolsheviks "achieved a majority" in the Second Congress of Soviets, nor does he explain Lenin's insistence that the overthrow of the Provisional government "coincide" with (actually precede) the meeting of that Congress...
...Yet, on page 247 he sums up Russian policy in the 1930s by remarking, "a strange fatality pushed events toward the crucial turns of 1939 and 1941...
...The fact that their number is growing will have repercussions throughout our social life...
...He can find murder in a grain of sand...
...He permits no importance or substance to the center...
...He wants to be more humane, more generous, more open perhaps than any politics could afford to be and remain worthy...
...315 pp...
...and Lowell, of course, knows Pound...
...but we are instead led to a picture of technocrats and professional politicians battling for power, with "the people" on the sidelines as apathetic, perhaps helpless spectators...
...Why then should Lowell support student and antiwar demonstrations, since they lead the good to the same violence as the vicious...
...The book may serve some of the purposes of political scientists (though one is not sure that any "science" is so interested in moralizing as is Professor Ulam), but historians will have to look elsewhere for a valid "analytical" account of Soviet foreign policy...
...On page 42 he writes, "The March Revolution . . . started as a demonstration" though on page 33 he had simply written, "Food riots in Petrograd in March 1917 turned into a revolution...
...These poems make it hard to see that, and hard also to see why he is so drawn to the Left...
...In Lowell, Christ's mercy is less a way of redeeming than a cause for cursing this world for its lack of mercy...
...It is all heights and depths, a demonized realm, monstrously inhuman power above and what is all-too-human beneath...
...One result of this is an inner strain and unevenness, a roar of poetic force alternating uneasily with ardent but inconclusive and even sentimental gestures (which is perhaps why so many of these poems begin so well and end weakly, or vice-versa...
...What shot Stalin up the tree BOOKS of power, to kill friends and millions of others...
...But it prompts the same question that arises in connection with Meynaud's work, that concerning the relationship between the people of a society and (in Drucker's case) the governmental organization which, amidst a system of organizations, is to perform the tasks of protection and decision...
...All these more than 250 poems, Lowell explains in his afterword, are in fact a single poem, sprung mainly from the short short period between summer 1967 and summer 1968...
...He can elevate us to historical magnitude...
...402 pp...
...Nothing ever is in his poetry, but everything is daemonically: A repeating fly, blueblack, thumbthick—so gross, it seems apocalyptic in our house— whams back and forth across the nursery bed manned by a madhouse of stuffed animals...
...Accordingly, we can begin to see a change in industries, from those based upon the productivity of workers whose skills are developed through apprenticeship, to giant multinational corporations operating relatively independently of nation-states...
...And I: "Who else has been in Purgatory...
...The author himself acknowledges that, for the period after 1928, his "sources are mainly either official statements or revelations of defectors from the Soviet diplomatic service and the Comintern...
...Lowell here or elsewhere isn't drumming the world up to intensity...
...Government is of course involved in the system, but not according to what Drucker believes is the currently accepted conception of government as a jack-of-all-trades, e.g...
...The author envisions the Comintern in those years as peripheral to Russian foreign policy...
...Even in the first part of the book much is left to be desired in a presumably factual History of Soviet Foreign Policy...
...Lowell's poem slides by that conelusion...
...Well, whatever else, we know how depressing and debased but also how honestly confusing, ambiguous and complex our own immediate political troubles are...
...So: "If you want to make the frozen serpent dance,/ you must sing it the music of its mouth...
...He has also written several other books and become more pontifical in the process...
...New York: Free Press...
...TO CONTRIBUTORS When sending manuscripts, please make sure that you do not send your only copy...
...Writing directly against his political enemies or for his friends in this uncomplicated way, Lowell isn't very convincing...
...Right after this consecration comes a poem degrading Grayson Kirk of Columbia by reducing the wrecking of his office to petty malicious details...
...And he, "To begin with a swelled head and end with swelled feet" To know is doubtless to forgive...
...We are cursed most by our own itch to kill, and Lowell curses us for it...
...the usurpation by the "technocrat" of the voice in decision-making which traditionally belongs to the politician as the representative of the people...
...This kind of writing is simply petty—or worse...
...We Americans hardly seem to have reached (yet) those real disasters and sins any German or Russian knows...
...the New Left...
...Kirk is the `old king" who enters his study with the police...
...Clausewitz toughly saw war as a continuation of politics BOOKS by other means, but Lowell prophetically sees politics as murder continued by other means...
...Because power here has nothing to do with programs, parties, or laws, this finally makes Lowell's "politics" vague, but that may be the real point...
...Poor old Kirk sees "woman-things that can't be his," and he comically fumes, "To think that human beings did this...
...His targets don't seem monstrous or even dangerous, only grotesque...
...On page 311, however, Ulam had remarked more perceptively: "There are limits even to the most absolute dictator's powers, and it is unlikely that Stalin could have acceded...
...I love you so...
...of actual text) is devoted to this speculative period...
...These Dates preside without mercy, and beneath them, the poems sometimes comment directly, sometimes move off to other matters, with politics out of sight not out of mind and heart...
...That "point" of honor as a historic judgment is staggering...
...These changes he calls "discontinuities," and he argues that they involve radical departures from structures of social life that would be continuous with 19th-century science and liberal social thought...
...If rage is becoming one of our readier moods, this has little to do with Lowell's...
...In America now, those like Lowell, who for good or bad reasons BOOKS distrust and even despise what politics is and has been, may find their natural home on a Left better at demonstrating against than legislating for...
...In the second portion of this chapter, which deals with Marxism, he is on surer ground...
...ROBERT KENNEDY'S MURDER, June 5, 1968...
...Jesse D. Clarkson Over Thin Ice EXPANSION AND COEXISTENCE: THE HISTORY OF SOVIET FOREIGN POLICY, 1917-67, by Adam B. Ulam...
...The problems of compensatory justice that arise from a history of separatist racial practices, and of withdrawal from absurd foreign entanglements, are probably examples...
...student leaders will be murdered, Che, Martin Luther King, all of us...
...If the reassertion he desires is really of the people through their representatives, then Meynaud's claim that apathy is permanent washes out his remedy for the threat of technocracy, and we fall into political pessimism...
...In general, a people whose decisions are to be implemented through a government which must "make attractive" these decisions to various enterprises (each of which has its own interests determined by its special competence and its own specification of profitability) is a people handicapped in setting its own course—even, in some cases, inhibited from setting its own course...
...Norman S. Care Views on Technology TECHNOCRACY, by Jean Meynaud...
...begins his poem to Eugene McCarthy...
...He turned and said, looking with shining eyes: "Jonathan Swift made a soul for the gentle men of this city by hating his neighbors as him self...
...Four pages later, the author BOOKS wrote: "A temporary loss of territory might not affect the final outcome of the war, but it could spell disaster to Stalin...
...What government is primarily designed to do, as one organization among others, is to provide protection for citizens, and to provide the direction we describe as "determining social priorities...
...Ulam accepts without cavil Kerensky's assertion that he was an SR (Socialist Revolutionary), and he finds that Kerensky's "pusillanimity" was the cause of his downfall...
...There seems little need to comment on the major portion of this book (dealing with the period 1928-1967), which is a melange of occasional profoundly true judgments in cisively stated, of a mass of far-roving and long-winded, undocumented speculations which often verge on the psychoanalytic, and of sheer absurdities...
...The chief value of Meynaud's book lies in his illustrations of how technocrats influence BOOKS and even control decision-making in public policy...
...He devotes only two paragraphs to the content of the "Twenty-one Conditions" (of 1920), while offering pages of "interpretation" of their role...
...7.95...
...Che Guevara was "gangstered down/for gold, for justice—" and once again that was "violence cracking on violence...
...These "Dates" open with "The Vietnam War, 1967" and close with "The Vietnam War, BOOKS 1968...
...As against the inflated sloganizing, Lowell can foretell the death of a student leader at Columbia by rising almost to pious martyrology...
...The radical emphasis, however, would be upon organization as a tool of man, such that when people have their say about the direction of their lives, their technology obeys, despite criteria of profitability, productivity, performance, and the like...
...they are school- rather than apprenticetrained, and their expectations and self-image are more those of the "intellectual" than the "laborer...
...Ulam omits discussion of the struggles in the Central Committee, totally ignores Wilson's Fourteen Points, and substitutes a series of subjective judgments both as to Russian participants and Allied (and Associated) governments...
...His rage wells from an older, deeper source than most contemporary violence can command or even imagine...
...As for the rest, for whatever reason, politics makes them all losers...
...This needs to be said at once because a poetry so involved with politics may look at first like only another example of politicized poetry...
...ROBERT LOWELL'S NEW VOLUME of poetry continues his passionate meditation on history selectively knotted up out of his personal torments, family and friends, his New England and religious ancestries, and the heroic or ruined underside of the past...
...This Third Congress is dismissed in two paragraphs, though later Ulam offers extended discussions of the Sixth (1928) and especially of the Seventh (1935) Congresses, when the Comintern had lost what practical importance it ever had had...
...No matter how the politico says Yes, the poet's No drowns it out, viscerally and savagely...
...below, the cop or the "hero hired for terror...
...This variety of examples makes his attempts at defining the "technocrat" unhelpful...
...one of the helpless...
...and it rolls evilly over the world like the corruption of the whale's viscera in his early poem...
...What political action could help or ennoble us, without infecting us again, and worse, as we took it up...
...This is not the ideological conservative's point that governmental activity in areas in which private enterprise could operate is somehow immoral...
...But because Lowell is nonetheless on the Left, his kind of political poetry is something new for us...
...To speak of Lowell as on the Left—when we can hardly define in any clear political way what that label means now—puts the problem of his poetry neatly and painfully...
...And World War II turns out a tragic farce explainable by picayunish pride: "Is it worse to choke on the vomit of cowardice,/ or blow the world up on a point of honor...
...It might seem that here a politics and poetry of rage and outrage have found each other, both insisting on the tyrannic moment of war, riot, political murder and high sell-outs as the nonnegotiable authority for what political reality is...
...It must make the performance of a task "attractive to one of the autonomous institutions," which is to say that the implementation of the decisions of the people depends on the opportunities for "profitability" which determine the willingness of different institutions to take on whatever tasks are at stake...
...Lowell himself invites it in many ways...
...Compared to Yeats or Eliot or Pound, maybe Lowell is less consistent, maybe simply inconsistent...
...In his Preface Ulam quotes with unction, what I wrote elsewhere: "The student of Soviet affairs has as his first task to be neither hopeful nor pessimistic [why then so many injections throughout the text of the words fortunately and unfortunately?] but simply to state the facts and tendencies of Russian politics...
...perhaps God above is good, but "sees us all as straw dogs" and "finds no profit in descending here...
...Stalin" is all underplayed restraint...
...At no point does he even mention the world depression that began in 1920, though it had a far more profound influence on Russian foreign policy than the depression that began in 1929, to which the book's index refers four times...
...Power or politics is the evil, universal condition of our lives...
...Even in his present work he on occasion cites as his authority for a quotation from Lenin a page reference, not to Sochineniia or Polnoe sobranie, but to one of his own previously published books...
...Power is Attila, who "never entered a house that wasn't burning," who puzzles why the ancient world collapsed, but who leaves only his own refuse behind in turn...
...Bessarabia "had been a part of the Russian Empire" (when, how long, and under what circumstances...
...THESE TWO BOOKS, while both useful and informative, are essentially prologues to a theory of society and technology...
...That is from the second poem in the volume, a poem to his daughter...
...Although the Preface is dated May 15, 1969, when Czechoslovakia under Dubcek's leadership was causing the Soviet Union immense worry, this aspect of Soviet foreign policy had evidently completely escaped Ulam's notice...
...It is true that his account of Russian foreign policy closes with a passing reference to the fiftieth anniversary celebration, but eventhen the Novotny regime was clearly in serious trouble...
...That can be seen first by looking again at his list of "Dates...
...New books by Peter F. Drucker and Jean Meynaud, both of which assume the need for technology, hit between these poles, but on the whole Drucker's leans toward the first and Meynaud's toward the second...
...The terms are correctly used, but why, in a book that so constantly stresses ideologies, is their significance nowhere explained...
...IN 1960, IN HIS BOOK The Unfinished Revolu tion, Adam Ulam gave promise of being a rising star in the field of Soviet studies...
...But surely there are major social problems which cannot be "made attractive" to institutions like business and education, and cannot be turned into opportunities for "profit," and there are others which cannot be fitted into the logic of "tasks" and "performance" that Drucker seems to have in mind...
...Lowell has always seen history that way, and his politics follows suit...
...WHAT LOWELL NEWLY BRINGS to a poetry of this long-familiar political emptiness is just such abhorrence, expressed now as a music of rage...
...My initial trouble with this vital part of Drucker's account is that his overall scheme makes it unclear what meaning we can attach to the notion of "community," and thus to the notion of a community acting through its government to police an over-zealous organization or, more important, to establish priorities for social effort...
...For Lowell politics is always political murder, the primal inexpungeable lust to kill...
...Most of the great modern ragers at mankind like Yeats, or depreciators of modern culture like Eliot or Pound, only yesterday located themselves on the Right...
...That line has great force if we don't know more about that pitiable and by no means ignoble king than the official textbook version...
...If his study is doubtless a bit upset, it is probably not really more messy than Lowell's own study if he let it go a month...
...THE AGE OF DISCONTINUITY, by Peter F. Drucker...
...What spurs this campus orator is not simply blind ambition, blinder courage (or glands), but: it was his miracle that closed his eyes, when his whole face took on a flesh of wood —and, listening to his electric orating, the student audience naturally understands "without listening"—"they too swayed/to the predestined poignance of his murder...
...In contrast to Yeats, he has a much less clearly defined political enemy out there, and infinitely much less clear a political program or goal...
...But I do not think he carries us much beyond illustration...
...but in a loveless world, hate can at least bite through...
...Therefore, his unrelenting efforts to discuss Soviet foreign policy in the early years yield no useful result, for at that time the Bolshevik government was not recognized anywhere abroad (Afghanistan was the first foreign government to recognize it, in 1920), and consequently there could be no foreign relations in any normal sense...
...These "cocks of the new order, the Nordic Cop" elsewhere "smile and kick .../the hurt blue muscles work like testicles...
...EUGENE MCCARTHY'S CAMPAIGN FOR THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION, November 19 67 Au gust 1968...
...But what Lowell the partisan of the Left raises as politically important here, Lowell the poet ultimately seems to subvert...
...Perhaps politics is the only heaven we have in sight now...
...But if ours is a world abandoned or near it, Lowell will not give an inch on its being still a sternly moral realm...
...On the next page Ulam speculated that "it is conceivable that Stalin might have been replaced by the marshals...
...Spock...
...yet Ulam makes no mention whatever of Czechoslovakia after 1948, save for an evidently last-minute interpolation of six words in the midst of his account of Soviet troubles in Poland in 1956...
...What is to emerge from present discontinuities is a social life given structure by a complex system of organizations—business, health care, education, etc.—each of which is, and ought to be, BOOKS autonomous in its own sphere of competence...
...That certainly may have begun to happen in the novel, say with Mailer's recent history-as-novel or in Black Humor, or especially in the theater, directly in Macbird, indirectly in Hair...
...And why, exactly, should we object to their doing so...
...STILL, EMPHASES LIKE THESE are not the final or best way to get at Lowell's deeper political vision...
...He curses us out of love, not hate...
...ON ONE VIEW, the development of what is called "technology" is a promise, not only of improvement in the material conditions of life, but also of peace and even social justice...
...Among the other views perhaps the most interesting sees in technological development the coming of a new and vicious bondage for men...
...But as is clear from the page of "Dates" Lowell has appended at the end of the book, his poetic seasons here roll compulsively under the immediate political heavens...
...he is far more concerned with his own lucubration...
...There is need for moral self-control on the part of the new knowledge-based organizations, since "power always causes problems of morality," and, besides, "if the knowledge people refuse to tackle the problem, if they refuse to admit that a problem exists (as they still largely do), the community will inevitably tackle it...
...THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION IN MIAMI, Au gust 5-9, 1968...
...We have enough of that...
...He even has a vision where "my judge" (maybe "Saint-Just" or a mercantile ancestor) appears against a mongrelized modern setting...
...We may grant that independent "experts" encroach upon traditional responsibilities of elected politicians, and intuitively we may see this as a danger...
...One has to read this volume straight through to see how narrowly American Lowell's political world remains...
...New York: Frederick A. Praeger...
...As a political scientist, not a historian, he cannot think in terms of material factors, such as geography, while "ideological" interpretation is here obviously of little use...
...sometimes, as on election night, the particulars themselves are desperate but dead, and we also get an ending as strained as...
...Still, we are not quite there...
...It would be too bad because in another way—less hotly relevant and thus likely to be scanted—Lowell's poetry cuts into politics at a deep, dark and savage angle we are not really used to in American poetry, or in American politics either...
...Drucker intends to mark a contrast between his view and that of the New Left when he writes that the major concern of the society he sees emerging from discernible social changes "will be with making organization fully effective as a major instrument and tool of man and as a central organ of human society...
...I should think that any democratic radical would agree with this...
...now the fallen angels/open old wounds and hunger for the blood-feud," and so on...
...it doesn't matter—injustice slays disorder— it doesn't matter, new establishments will serve the people, the people people serve...
...To the first question Meynaud provides several parts of an answer...
...Yeats has a little conversation (Conor Cruse O'Brien once cited it) also prophetic for Lowell...
...That "coldly" and that "smash" make one stop and think...
...The Unfinished Revolution nevertheless could be called a brilliant study, presenting ideological views that, though not original, at the time had not been generally accepted...
...THE RUSSIAN OCCUPATION OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA, August 21, 1968...
...The community, then, through its government, becomes a kind of social planning agency, but, so far as I can see, an agency deliberately lacking in power to back up its policy decisions...
...Only a few who make the grand refusal escape such corruption, but their escape is usually through death, ruin, or failure, like Thomas More or closer to home, Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, or Dr...
...THE PENTAGON MARCH, October 21, 1967...
...Since 1960 Professor Ulam has evidently read widely, though mainly secondary works, most of them in themselves excellent...
...But the nature of that relationship is at least as important for Meynaud's aim of determining the threat posed by technocracy as that of the relationship between politicians and technocrats...
...For these corporations productivity is a function of "knowledge workers" whose main concern is to exploit technology so as to respond effectively to the market demands of the world economy...
...Consider Drucker's discussion of how government is to respond to the various organizations in the system: Government would become increasingly the decision maker, the vision maker, the political organ...
...Nor is it helpful to read his brief discussion of the Revolution, in which he often accepts slogans at face value...
...Does he want a Left in power...
...Reading Lowell we often awake to find the usual, recognizable fact of our world vanished, indeed annihilated...
...All political schemes, he tells us, are like the Republic, "steam from the ordure" of Plato's city-state or our own: This much still certain: whoever takes the sword must die by the sword, or someone else will die...
...But he isolates certain features common to them, and these suffice to make clear the threat he has in mind...
...a demand, in Meynaud's words, for "more courage and forcefulness in the face of technocrats" on the part of politicians themselves, then apathy may be less cause for pessimism...
...A French political scientist writing about "advanced" Western nations, with France as his chief example, Meynaud is mainly concerned with the political aspect of the development of technology—i.e...
...The reader is left free to suppose that Lenin, for some reason, was from the outset in favor of making peace with the Germans, save for a parenthetical remark about "Lenin, as usual, more realistic than most" Bolsheviks...
...It would, in other words, be the "con ductor" who tries to think through what each instrument is best disposed to do...
...Sometimes Lowell succeeds brilliantly, by details of our waste and deadness...
...At all times, you must keep one copy...
...His world and politics simply is like that, helpless or mighty, with little in between...
...THE COLUMBIA STUDENT DEMONSTRATIONS, April 23 into May 1968...
...What about Lowell...
...and power—murderous, inwardly malignant, outwardly suffocating—is the only form politics really takes in these poems...
...It may be possible to make productive knowledge workers of black ghetto youth, but the motives of profit or condescen BOOKS sion from which a business institution might undertake such a project, assuming that the project could be made attractive to it, might well exacerbate the problems of attitude and conscience which are at the core of "racial troubles...
...that he is court ing trouble...
...It is poetry at war with what Lowell considers all political necessities, his own as well as those of others...
...Tins LINE OF THOUGHT seems internally coherent, as far as it goes, and it may even be attractive in quarters Drucker is inclined to oppose, e.g...
...In Lowell's world, men in politics turn either into false gods or real near-brutes: above, Truman loses "a minute's sleep for Hiroshima," or Caligula slaughters...
...Needless to say, both these sources have to be treated with caution" (see p. 193, fn...
...All Ulam supplies is some account of Allied attitudes toward the Bolsheviks, against a background of his own imaginings of what the Bolsheviks were thinking...
...What seems lacking here is an account of technology itself— the nature of systematic application of knowledge to social problems by so-called experts— that makes clear what, if anything, is special about how experts, in contrast to other political contenders, come to control decisionmaking, and what, if anything, is untoward about their rise to power...
...But Christ, too turns the word "forgiveness to a sword...
...Yet most of the book (572 pp...
...What makes it possible for technocrats to emerge as holders of political power anyway...
...For Lowell, in fact, the single poisoned spring and truth of all politics seems nothing else but men murdering and murdered...
...They both stop short of what is the most troublesome problem in the development of technology, namely, its effects on the relationship of people to the instrument of government, by which they try to control, in some measure, certain aspects of their lives...
...But even when he rages against outrage, Lowell hopes against hope...
...But to the second question he provides little or no answer...
...Life there, and in these poems, is suspended animation...
...yet he fails to clarify the extent of Lenin's departures, in practice, from Marxist doctrine, or the underlying reasons for these departures...
...This will be no surprise to anyone who has already read some of these poems published on political occasions in The New York Review of Books, or who has followed Lowell's recent, sometimes sensational career as a public man of the radical Left...
...THE DEMONSTRATIONS AND DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION IN CHICAGO, August 25-29, 1968...
...the usual lust to break the icon,/ joke cruelly, seriously, and be himself...
...and after a while, Lowell's verbal artillery can seem like petulant overkill...
...The fault here lies in a lack of attention to the relationship between the people and their representatives...
...Translated by Paul Barnes...
...For example, we are in the midst of a developing "world economy" with its own supranational credit and exchange mechanisms, rather than an "international economy" based upon commerce between independent national entities...
...or it is Lenin, listening to Beethoven and thinking: "what we need are people to chop the head off...
...For example, on page 603 Ulam affirms ms that "any failures or near failures in Soviet foreign policy threatened [Khrushchev]—something which, as we have seen, was unimaginable under Stalin...
...No mere citizen lives or could live in this poetic pressure, only gods or brutes— which may be a fair way of putting Lowell's corrosive view of politics...
...His world is under almost suffocating spiritual pressure, squeezed now to a moral vacuum, but that vacuum— politics itself—is to be abhorred...
...All this shows most flagrantly in Lowell's enraged but too easy rhetoric on police and student demonstrations...
...But this is not to deny the force of what he says...
...The Notebook is astonishingly and unrelievedly choked with corruption, pain and death...
...That kind of tension between what he hopes politically as against what he says poetically may be why this volume shows so few undeniably successful poems...
...Of the more than 250 poems here, perhaps only half a dozen turn out as good as Lowell's gifts always promise...
...He mentions that technocrats often employ the language of mathematics, which is opaque to the ordinary citizen, and that the apathy of most citizens "is a permanent factor of our political systems...
...Something is out of proportion, too, since Lowell often seems far less savage with some who are far more politically monstrous than the cops or Establishment...
...Lowell reaches Swiftian disgust here because he so deeply affirms the Christian beginning point...
...This theme is not new, and Meynaud's treatment of it is made tedious by an excessive number of cautions against exaggeration, as well as a lumbering translation and a text spattered with misprints...
...And in Lowell's moving and noble tribute, Robert Kennedy is "like a prince" who daily left his "tower" to walk through "dirt" in his "best cloth...
...So Lowell would rather affirm a politics that has failed than any more successful, i.e., more violent politics...
...McCarthy, Lowell says admiringly, is "coldly willing/to smash the ball past those who bought the park...
...Lowell is faithful to this fact of American politics, by making the hell of that politics not the Inferno but Limbo...
...His poems give us the enraged helplessness of the man in the useless, empty vacuum left by power politics...
...What the poet says No to is power...
...but with skewing effect also on the politics he handles...
...He is truly one of those rare poets, a magnificent curser, probably the most formidable we have had in American poetry—a Baudelaire with a political conscience...
...and power is murder extended deliriously, institutionally...
...Among these features are a very high premium on "efficiency" in government, faith in the "rational analysis of social problems," and lack of accountability to the electorate, as a result of such career safeguards as tenure...
...There, our local history is written down as all history used to be—as a chronicle of high event, of the wars, intrigues and successions of power and powermakers...
...Whatever his "Dates" proclaim, the rest of the world is only offstage...
...To be sure, there are "frames smashed" (wittily: "their honorary honors lost") and files rifled ("all the unopened letters have been answered...
...paper $4.95...
...They area very different species from those involved in the industry of the past, e.g...
...But if the reassertion is of the politician for the people, i.e...
...One of Yeats's characters is reduced to saying: "It is not necessary to judge every one by the law, for we have also Christ's commandment of love...
...That kind of cursing should not be confused with mere anger, or with some ice-cold misanthropy like Robinson Jeffers's...
...Perhaps it is Yeats whose political poetry can best help us understand Lowell's...
...And the sarge too talks funny: "Would a human beings do this things to these book...
...Still, that is partly a fair charge against this volume...
...12.95...
...but then Lowell is always apt to deck out his political enthusiasms in kid gloves while making his immediate political enemies wear brass knuckles...
...But if we do, and if we did in 1819, Shelley's line turns cruel, a poetic example of the very political heartlessness that is being protested against...
...If many disagree that Lowell is simply the greatest living poet we have, it is hard to see how anyone could deny he is our only poet whose language and temper have greatness in the older, terrible sense of the word: a royal, wrathful poetic power, rhetorically splendid and violent, rage barely bridled, a force which in earlier times was made for tragedy or for making tragedies...
...12.95...
...Why is no explanation offered when Bukharin, several times mentioned as leader of the "Left Communists," suddenly appears as a leader of the "Right Opposition...
...There is a lack of clarity about his use of the notions of "the people" and "politicians" at this point...
...THE BLACK RIOTS IN NEWARK AND ELSEWHERE, July and August 1967...
...It would try to figure out how to struc ture a given political objective so as to make it attractive to one of the autonomous institu tions...
...There is indeed something Kafkaesque about Lowell's America...
...Nor shall all of Lowell's partisan piety or wit cancel out one bit of that living confusion...
...For his is a poetry turned over not to its smaller angers but its larger ones, not narrowly politicized but the opposite...
...Examples of technocrats, for Meynaud, are higher civil servants and military leaders as well as members of the "scientific elite" linked with government at various levels...
...He believes the technocratic take-over is becoming a reality, and that a reassertion is needed of the po litical practices that vest decisions about social priorities in the people...
...Whatever politics hopes to do or claims to know about them, men are never saved but ruined by becoming political...
...He can take a large, disillusioned view of "Munich, 1938," featuring Hitler and Mussolini, Daladier and Chamberlain pulling our strings...
...We see Pound's "blotched, bent hands," while Pound says, When I talked that nonsense about Jews on the Rome wireless, she knew it was shit, and still loved me...
...His claim is that liberal social thought has led us to overextend government, to view it mistakenly as the agency to which we can turn for solutions to any problems vaguely qualifying as "social...
...To be sure, his interpretation of Lenin suffered seriously from being a mere paraphrase of a book published in 1941 by a disillusioned and embittered emigree, whose quotations Ulam did not take the trouble to check against Lenin's collected writings and speeches...
...Or the "earliest sportsman" in history wakes a killer, "saw the red cane was sweet in his red grip...
...His "plot rolls with the seasons...
...Lowell's invective works better if we close our eyes a little, much as with Shelley's famous, persuasive line on George III: "An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king...
...Yeats after all could flirt with some kind of fascism, that summary solution to all political difficulties...
...Lowell writes poetry against politics—against the enticing illusion of any political hope, even his own...
...He does not even mention Russia's repudiation of her foreign debts (in February 1918) until, in reply to the Allied invitation to the various regimes then existing in Russia (in February 1919) to meet at Prinkipo, Chicherin with tongue in cheek offered to review the question...
...And please also be sure to enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...Even if technocracy is a danger to representative democracy, how useful is Meynaud's proposal for reassertion of control by the people through their elected representatives...
...But like the unthinkable bomb, American political evils too often seem indescribable: our nightmares sprawl untidily, maddeningly intangible and synthetic...
...War is murder extended...
...But we expect the theorist to explain and assess the encroachment so as to show how—or if—it is a danger...
...ROBERT KENNEDY'S CAMPAIGN FOR THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION, February 1968—June 1968...
...Drucker's aim is to characterize certain basic changes he sees occurring in economics, politics, and education...
...Why was it ever worth my while?'" Unlike the Kafka man, impotent in the only world he can know, Lowell fights back...
...But at the heart of an adequate theory of society and technology will be an account of the means by which the people's decisions concerning social priorities and directions can be realized as the society's decisions in these matters...
...THE FRENCH STUDENTS' AND WORKERS' UPRISINGS, May 2 into June 1968...
...Lowell, the public and private man, is also of course a man of the Left...
...In between are the headlines of that close span: THE ARAB-ISRAELI Six DAYS' WAR, first week in June 1967...
...There are some basic contradictions in Ulam's own opinions, but in so loosely written a book it is not surprising that even the author should forget what he has written 300 pages earlier...
...Technology is not itself an insurmountable obstacle in the way of a humane society...
...Didn't Norman Mailer once describe McCarthy as looking like a hanging judge from hell...
...We breathe, we live,/since our death is useless to killed or killing...
...Drucker believes that each autonomous organization ought to police itself in regard to the "morality of its knowledge," which I think means its impact upon people generally in society...
...CHE GUEVARA'S DEATH, October 8, 1967...
...as a controlling agent for economic activity and a dispenser of welfare and prop for research of various sorts, ad infinitum...
...Lowell's Vietnam or "the other army" at the Pentagon or Chicago is shorthand for what we are heading to...
...Ulam rarely offers statements of narrative fact...
...PETER F. DRUCKER, by contrast, is less concerned with the political dimension of the development of technology, though his book contains some fascinating discussion of technology itself...
...MARTIN LUTHER KING'S MURDER, April 4, 1968...
...If so, perhaps another ideologic and blood alliance between our new politics and literature has been consummated...
...In the poem mentioned before about the fly in his daughter's room: "I kill it," the poet continues, "and another instant's added/to the horrifying mortmain of/ephemera...
...One should also compare Lowell's overheated polemic against the cops or Kirk with his quite compassionate poem on Ezra Pound, whose politics come finally to seem a spur to a wiser humanity...
...Christ, he says, is "our only king without a sword...
...Perhaps this kind of vision is why Lowell succeeds in his new book only when conveying politics at its breaking point or beyond, or when evoking our own outsized response to such gross sins and dooms...
...But in a time when American poetry is tiresomely private, or modestly dry about large events, or only childishly or revengefully political, Lowell is a poet who can dare to say that "Still, it's a privilege to enter the bullring...
...out of the 750 pp...
...Drucker adduces vast factual and statistical material in support of his claims about trends in social change, and on the whole the case he builds is instructive and even exciting...
...Rather, Drucker's point is that any organization is limited structurally and by its command of competence in such a way as to exclude the performance of all but a few tasks...
...In general, knowledge workers are those who can analyze problems, whether they are commercial, social, or educational, into their components and then design programs for their solution which can in principle be carried out mechanically...
...But it would be too bad, since in more than a few poems Lowell's radical views are as simplistic as those hatched by Protest placard-poets a tenth his weight...
...It is when he begins to see in certain political trends the in evitabilities of the future...
...Nor will it be surprising, in our current political clamor, if these poems are widely admired or piously approved simply for their partisan side...
...but "had been seized by force by the Rumanians in 1918...
...but however mild or minute the subject, the remorseless rush and terror never ceases...
...to really demeaning conditions . . . and yet remained at the helm...
Vol. 16 • November 1969 • No. 6
