A Movement Outward

...Evidently, in the transfer to print of the acting version...

...The characters in all Lowell's unwritten tragedies-fragments of the explanatory discours that made this poet's choice of the end-stopped couplet so right for his purposes-speak out of the verse and to the reader, to the listener, from the proscenium Death Soon enough we saw Death Who learning and forgetting nothing, knew Nothing but ruin...

...we can approach, in cold blood, as it were, the mystery of selfhood, of identity as it is revealed by imitation...

...We'll be over quickly We won't last, but we will have our moment, I will have my hour of exultation and anguish...

...Lowell has had second thoughts which have not reached the copy-editing level...

...Although God's brother, and himself a god, Death whipped his horses through the startled sod...

...Why must we mistrust Ourselves with Death who takes the world on trust...

...I would account by the piratical notion of plunder for Lowell's employment of a device for having it both ways...

...No, it is not development that interests Lowell, as I read him, but transformation—these are not historical plays like Richard III, but romances like Pericles...

...In fact, we are specifically told that nothing of what we expect to be saved will remain...

...Waiting for that change is what we are left with, as the tarred-and-feathered Molyneux, like the bullet-riddled Negroes in the third play, is dragged off...

...They are deeper than can be told, and belong to the immensities and eternities...

...The likeness, I suppose, is what persuades Robert Brustein, in his swelling introduction, to refer to the work as being the first to employ American history in a theatrically compelling manner...

...Only God goes on existing...

...The character to be transformed is Lowell's own, as intimately, as ruthlessly, as in the books of poems, where it is the twist of expression, the idiom, the poetry, in short, that is the agent of change...

...Whether the furies will there (in Lincoln Center, I mean) be changed into The Kindly Ones is a matter of the greatest import and interest, but in The Old Glory, by the necessities of Lowell's discretion, his thirst (and his ability) to produce a glamorous object as well as a valuable one, we have not yet approached the moment where violence is forestalled as well as foretold...

...For the reader's assistance: The speech attributed to Captain Delano on page 188 is spoken by Atut'al, further the stage direction in which we are to understand that Bosun Perkins' head has been covered with a sack, after the scuffle with Eabu on page 185, is missing...

...As we see, there has been a movement outward, an impulse aggrandizing and even plundering the literal world, in fact the literary world, and now —misprints* and all—we have the text of Lowell's new "dramatic work," The Old Glory, whose "sources" the poet locates, cunningly, in Hawthorne's tales and in Melville's famous novella Benito Cereno...

...An erratum slip is needed...

...Lowell's own—which is, in either case, its triumph...

...Whatever the expedients involved—" You have to allow," one of his characters in The Old Glory says, "You have to allow a man of principle a little hypocrisy when he plays with power"—this further submission to an existing dramatic art follows at least an interesting progress of inflection: from translation to imitation of fiction to adaptation of sacred drama...

...On the page, without the luster of staging, good or bad, to distract us...

...At the point, for example, where Phedre explains that the source of her suffering derives from Aphrodite herself, not merely from her mother Pasiphae, in the celebrated formula "mon mal vient de plus loin," who but Lowell would have chosen the sense that was indeed "farther off" and articulated, in the heroine's very first scene, her consciousness of pain as "my evil...

...I do not see that the character examined can be said to alter, nor that it is any but Mr...

...In these short plays, something is killed ("there is your future," Amasa Delano says to the rebellious Babu as he shoots him over and over with all the uncomprehending finality of any LeRoi Jones segregationist), but we are not yet told what has been saved...

...I could hear The top-floor typist's thunder and the beer That you had brought in cases hurt my head...

...And yet we think the virgin took no harm: She gave herself because her blood was warmAnd for no other reason, Love, I gave Whatever brought me gladness to the grave Fragments, then, of a tragedy as yet unwritten, and indeed unpermitted by the very qualifications of the poet's convulsive gift...

...For there is, in all three plays, a deliberate emphasis on the nonhistorical view, and it is evident that when Endecott, the inclusive spiritual consciousness of the first piece, speaks in what is said to be 1630 of "imitation Roman republics of fanatics," he is anticipating the course of human events by 160 years...

...I am concerned with an identity, not a curriculum vitae-was to work free, to earn release from that principal predicament of his, the apprehension of the world as an inextricable convulsion, so that it is quite foreseeable that such violence should be subsequently turned upon the poet's own person and past-in Life Studies, in For the Union Deadby which means he became the principal actor in his own Calvinist auto dafe Yet the very energies which had seemed so novelistic, so prosaically adjusted for dealing with a reality our poetry had not found terms for -the terms to come to, so to speak -the energies of theater, as it turns out, provided Lowell the proper dialectical step at this point...

...The difference is as essential 1o it as the likeness, for without the difference it would be copy or facsimile...

...The old tyrannies are disposed of by the new, and the helpless, observing self—Endecott, the boy Robin and the complacent Captain Delano— obliged in guilt to "wait on Providence...

...His problem-I speak, of course, as a mythographer...

...At the end of each play, there occurs a violation of selfhood, a deplored but necessary corpse, and longing for rebirth...

...So often-from the very start, from this voice It must have been a Friday...

...It is a kind of glamor by association that Robert Lowell has wooed, and indeed has won, for the distinction of language, of phrasing and rhythm in which he has cast (and occasionally flung) his plays is altogether his own, and hence ours...

...Perhaps...

...They reach down to that depth where society itself originates and disappears...

...4.95 Reviewed by RICHARD HOWARD Contributor, "Poetry As long ago, or as recently, as The Mills of the Kavanaghs -the decision rests upon whether you calculate by the writer's avatars or his calendar-it was apparent that Robert Lowell was not only a dramatic poet but that his poems explored, literally cried out upon their condition, their stern commitment to the vernacular, in order to achieve the stage...

...the burden of it fairly pinned the poet down, and though Lowell's version is certainly anything but inert, it is so violent that he is embarrassed, even exposed, in using it as a vehicle for Racine...

...What Lowell himself deserves, only time and he can tell us...

...Sir" rendered pointless...

...Perhaps the next step will be that autonomous work which will truly release the poet into his selfhood—it was almost a foregone conclusion that after Phedre, that Jansenist chant of captivity, necessity, and doom, and after these violent dedications and enslavements wrested from Hawthorne's fables and Melville's outraged masterpiece, Lowell should engage our greatest dramatic emblem of transformation, the story of Orestes as it is mediated by Aeschylus into a metamorphosis of necessity into choice...

...For neither conscience nor omniscience warned Him from his folly, when the virgin scorned His courtship, and the quaking earth revealed Death's desperation to the Thracian field...

...In a theater like ours, starved for completion, for meaning, for form, that moment, that hour is something to have, and if it is not ever enough, it is perhaps already more than we deserve...

...This was Jansenism with, as we say, a vengeance...

...Indeed all three plays are romantic variations upon a theme of violent character: the proposition being that the outrage one does to others is inevitably visited upon the self, and that the violence one h> flicts upon oneself cannot be spared to others ("each drug that numbs alerts another nerve to p a i n " ) . For this terrible home truth, Lowell's real source, of course, is in the American psyche all right, but mythically not historically, and best articulated not by Hawthorne or Melville but by Emerson, in the crucially titled essay "Society and Solitude": "Such is the tragic necessity which strict science finds underneath our domestic and neighborly life, irresistibly driving each adult soul with whips into the desert, and making our warm covenants sentimental and momentary...

...For imitation, as Coleridge said, is the mesothesis of likeness and difference...

...Characteristically, the vacillating, haunted, Beckett-like Endecott—entirely the poet's creation, indeed the converse of Hawthorne's monstrous Puritan of that name—having ordered the burning of Merrymount and the murder of the Indians (as Major Molyneux is murdered, and Babu), asserts: I'll do something tomorrow or the next day...

...where the individual is lost in his source...

...The omission from the text of the Negroes' dance of celebration rou id the uncovered skeleton has worked havoc with the play's consecution on the page...

...It is scarcely surprising to learn that Lowell has begun work on a version of the Oresteia for Lincoln Center...

...I will delay and wait on Providence...

...We must infer that the ends of thought were peremptory, if they were to be secured at such ruinous cost...

...I bother to note the misprints because they occur most thickly at the climax of Benito Cereno, so that unless one has seen the play on the stage, it is impossible to understand what is happening...

...the capita] moment when Delano asks his own seaman, who is about to walk over the Spanish flag and kiss the mouth of the skull, if he doesn't "stand for anything" is obscured by our not knowing what has happened to him, and his reply "1 have only one life...

...He has written his own plays—again—within an outline, a locus of action provided by our two greatest Protestant writers, and thus cannot be chided for failing to be "original" any more than for cheating on the classics, though both reproaches have been levelled at him...

...But it is the difference, I insist, that counts here, nor can I understand what Brustein means by calling the three plays together "a dramatic history of the American character at three different points in its historical development," though I certainly agree with him when he speaks, accurately and nobly, of the success of Lowell's work as a theatrical enterprise...

...For when, in fact, Robert Lowell did translate Racine, our complaints and our compliments seemed to coincide: He had made his own play out of the contraption...

...Only Endecott, Lowell's finest, most complicated and autonomous creation, a figure without analogue in the sources, reveals the status of these plays in their author's search for his soul's salvation...

...In such acts of faith, an imagery of killing has been the terminology by which the writer, only God of his miracle plays, can represent the process of change...

...As Perkins screams to Delano: "Let him surrender...

...The dangling telephone receiver rasped Like someone in a dream who cannot stop and its accommodation of a despised quotidian-and so gratefully have we welcomed Lowell's recovery for poetry of material which by cultural drift or the complacencies of talent had defected to the novel, that there is a danger of missing the point: Anne Kavanagh's apostrophe to her dead husband is already the tirade of a Racinian tragedy, that machinery of identifications in which man suffers from a form...

...where the question is, which is first, man or men...

...because they are pasted on the desecrated bones of the traditional literature, these plays seem more personal, more inward, than any of the usual absurdities of self-expression (think of After the Fall and its awful publicity...

...I'd sent the pillows flying from mv bed, I hugged my knees together and I gasped...

...We want to save someone," and as Robin, watching the citizens of Boston, "city of the dead,' conspue the major, exclaims: "I want to save my kinsman, Father," the violence is done, the cruelty imposed, the doom suffered...