Puritan Paradox
IGNATOW, DAVID
Puritan Paradox NOTEBOOK 1967-68 By Robert Lowell Farrar, Straus- & Giroux. 161 pp. $6.00. Reviewed by DAVID IGNATOW Author, "Rescue the Dead" In his eighth volume of poetry. Notebook 1967-68,...
...Accommodation, then, can be cited as the cause of the difficulties —Notebook 1967-68 as a whole suffers from the defects of compromise...
...It is to this phenomenon that Lowell would adapt himself by the use of his conversational tone, in an apparent search for a restatement of his heritage in current terms...
...It may also be seen as an effort to discover a shape to one's thoughts and responses through the very passage and impact of time and events...
...Using the 14-line sonnet form, unrhymed, he attempts to adapt his tone to the level of worldly, circumstantial affairs...
...Hence, it is not surprising that Lowell, a direct New England descendant, should find himself writing and living in its context...
...the hand's knife-edge is pressed against the future...
...You grow more comforting, as you excite...
...whoever noticed...
...Indeed, the very scope of the material the poet covers would seem to lend itself to such a reading...
...For all significant purposes, his faith has lost its original relevance in the face of the constant, almost automatic transformation each of us undergoes every day...
...Lowell is not ready to give up that Puritan sense of things in which he was raised, or at least to modify it significantly for modern life...
...Nothing new in tliem yet their old roles startle...
...This is expressed with fullness in "Mexico...
...Hope not in God here, nor the Aztec gods...
...As many of the poems indicate, this is the paradox he recognizes in himself, and which he is apparently unwilling or unable to resolve or reorient...
...it blinded me...
...What help then...
...Nevertheless, it echoes old disillusionment and moral presuppositions...
...For Lowell, however, the "opportunist" method and inspiration by "impulse" obviates personal transformation as a controlling principle of composition...
...The informal approach that Lowell adopts, however, is obviously in contradistinction to the apocalyptic, transcendent anger of, say, "As a Plane Tree by the Water...
...we sun-people know the sun, the source of life, we two are clocks, and the only count in time...
...But they are surely welcome, above all as possible hints at what is to come in future poems...
...Othello never caught Cassio reeking Desdemona's musk...
...Cats will be here when man is prehistory, man doomed to outlast the body of his work...
...like the Macbeth murk of Manhattan in sunset smog...
...History, his own above all, has taught him a skepticism toward his origins that we can recall from earlier poems...
...His new low-key treatment of materials familiar to readers of his past work suggests a discovered, welcome desire to meet the flux and drift of both the world and himself on their own terms...
...then 1 saw a score marked sans rigeur on the little grand piano, muddy white, a blank white and medallion-little bust of Franz Schubert, a blow-up photograph of the owner's wife, executiveBronzino?this frantic touch of effort...
...Lowell's voice can be heard in these new poems—it could never be mistaken for another—but at a level that I suspect he may not have anticipated in using this mode of casual statement...
...the multiple mosquito spots, round as pesos...
...in Lord Weary's Castle, which is typical of his major style...
...The poem lies flat on the page...
...you, some sweet, uncertain age, say twenty-seven, unballasted by honor or deception...
...In poetry, a failure of this kind could derive from an attempt to mediate between the "real" world and oneself without troubling too deeply with the effort...
...The method founders in ordinariness...
...Night air is not loo pure to rub them clean...
...The difficulties, the impossibilities stand out: I, fifty, humbled with the year's gold garbage, dead laurel grizzling my back like spines of hay...
...Toward life's everyday particulars—which Lowell over and over has shown himself capable of handling vividly—he here remains, strangely enough, resigned and withdrawn...
...Dunbarton" and "At the Indian Killer's Grave," among others...
...For it is his Puritan ethic, with its emphasis on the hopeless corruption of spirit and doom without salvation, that finally emerges in these new poems...
...But to maintain his identity in this tradition of elect individuality represents a severe contradiction, since he is painfully aware of the impersonal, undifferentiated character of the modern world...
...AH was respectability, dark and secret, dalliance means to dwell the hours of Eros?this flower I take away and wear with fear...
...Inexhaustible the springs from which I flow...
...He still relies, though, on the rhetorical posture of the Puritan faith—as in the poem just quoted—and the reader therefore continues to see in his work a personal and world outlook that by and large no longer obtains...
...Another view of Notebook 1967-68 is suggested by Lowell's concluding prose statement, "Afterthought...
...Is it a hobby like heroin or birds...
...Thus in "Dalliance," he ponders his past and present conditions, achieving a tentative yet encouraging resolution in the last two lines...
...The style recalls the "free verse" line in For the Union Dead and Life Studies, and the poem itself succeeds in grasping the environment through its images...
...Kept within itself, with reference only to preconceived ideas of order, such self-pity results in the destruction of the very objective for which it is supposed to exist: individuality and independence...
...Each night I drink their love, if any love is: miles below heaven, luminous in some courtyard, dungeoned by primitive wall-brick windowless, the grass conservative cry of the cat in heat...
...The sonnet, in its concentration on a single insight or metaphor, is certainly suited to the purpose...
...asked to adapt, they fear they cannot swerve...
...Still, Notebook 1967-68 as a whole (he would like us to view it as one poem) reflects his continued preoccupation with guilt and renunciation, and the predestined doom of hope or action...
...The conversational voice in "Sounds in the Night" is filled with that sense of futility we bring to our daily existence once we have reduced ourselves to insignificance in our own sight by comparison with the great, stony outside...
...The language of some of the new poems?Sounds in the Night," for one—is altered to accommodate an emphasis on the circumstantial...
...so did it me...
...Set at the helm, facing a pot of coals, the sleet and wind spinning me ninety degrees, I must not give me up then to the fire, lest it invert my fire...
...Thus the book could have meaning for us as a personal epic, like William Carlos Williams' Paterson and Ezra Pound's Cantos...
...True, Lowell is not a throwback to the past...
...I stress this aspect of his influences in full awareness of his conversion to Catholicism many years ago...
...Yet the informal tone, an effort at a pragmatic approach, serves in the end merely to state past responses in a diluted form...
...Lowell is keenly aware of this sensibility, precisely toward those very excitements and abrasions of daily existence that are the inspiration to his thought and writing...
...I can imagine this sort of poem being written by Lowell's cultural ancestor, the early Puritan poet Edward Taylor, with his paradoxical and insatiable curiosity about the world...
...Or out-window, two cunning cylinder skyscraper apartment buildings?six circles of car garage below the homes, moored boats below the cars—• more Louis Quinze and right than anything in this apartment...
...For the most part, these too are limited by Lowell's reluctance to relate affirmatively to the outside world, even in tragic terms...
...Even if Notebook 1967-68 does not achieve the unity Lowell intended, some of the sonnets do manage to meet the challenge of his low-key manner, particularly those, like "Fear in Chicago...
...except the little girl's bedroom, perfect with posters: "Do not enter," and "Sock it to me, Baby...
...dealing with subjects that take the poet out of himself...
...He asks that the 300 sonnets be looked on as a single poem —a kind of daily record of oneself and the world throughout a year, from summer to summer...
...Elsewhere in the book, the anger and contempt aroused in him by the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, as well as certain tender poems to his daughter and wife, are further lightenings of Lowell's burden...
...Notebook 1967-68, Robert Lowell has returned to the iambic pentameter of his earlier books, Lord Weary's Castle (1946) and The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951)—but with a pronounced difference...
...This idea in itself expresses a faith in the ability of life to serve us under all conditions...
...This is clearly with the intention of capturing and fixing, each in its own singularity, the evanescent events and emotions that composed his life, and the lives of his friends, relatives and the world around him, from day to day throughout the course of one year...
...Not the sun, the scarlet blossom, and the high fever of this seventh day, the wayfarer's predestined diarrhea, nausea...
...Equally effective are several portraits of poet friends, family poems, poems about historical figures, and a translation from Dante...
...there's wisdom that is woe, but there is a woe that is madness...
...Who cares if the running stream is sometimes stopped...
...he would have enjoyed the sensation of mingling pleasure and exotic horror...
...as my eye roved, everything freshly French...
...Surely, this represents a triumph of personal adjustment for the poet, who for years has lived in agonizing confrontation with problems of the spirit...
...machines our only friends who live to serve us, metal, mortal and mechanical, their dissonance varied as the northern birds...
...The little millionaire's place, sheen of the centuries...
...Puritan Calvinism, while often transmuted into contemporary and generally unrecognizable forms, remains at the root of American experience...
Vol. 52 • September 1969 • No. 16
