Poetic Jekylls and Hydes
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing POETIC JEKYLLS AND HYDES BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL FAR AND AWAY the most affecting chapter in Lives of the English Poets is Samuel Johnson's account of his doomed friend Richard...
...Death came to him at 45, in a debtor's prison...
...But Savage genuinely believed his own tale...
...His "unmistakable voice??weary, nasal, hesitant, whining, mum?bling, a curious hybrid blend of Yankee and Confederate into?nations that descended from both family and literary sources...
...Savage would have passed quickly into obscurity...
...I am inclined to trust Holmes' depiction of an appealingly vulnerable Johnson, for it resolves the hitherto per?plexing riddle of why the morally fastidious critic cared so deeply about a convicted murderer, sponger and sometime poi?son-pen...
...A few months earlier, Lowell had galvanized the literary world with Life Studies, for which critics coined the term "con?fessional poetry...
...No wonder he lacked empathy for the younger Johnson he had not known, who acknowledged impulses dark?er and more tragic than would suit an Enlightenment hero...
...Ac?cording to Savage, the woman who raised him possessed docu?ments authenticating his parentage and his mother's efforts to keep him needy and obscure so he would not embarrass her...
...Davison prefers "revelational...
...Two of Lowell's neighbors chose different routes, and Davi?son casts them as foils...
...The poets of his coterie shared in his disquietude, as Davison observed in "To a Mad Friend": Our ties were tied, our shoes were always shitted, But icy eyes and tightness around the smile Are marks enough to know your brothers by Rest easier, friend: we've all walked through your dreams And are no strangers to that company...
...He was audible everywhere: reading, writing, teaching, socializing, translating??and dramatizing his own suffering in semi-public agony...
...The Earl had engen?dered two children in an adulterous affair with Lady Maccles?field...
...Shortly before the appearance of The Bastard, he had been condemned to death for killing a stranger in a tavern brawl...
...could not keep the smile from fading: in fact, his powerful mind and his competitive ambition would relentlessly hunt the smile down until it became a rictus of agony...
...Davison begins his memoir with a vignette of Lowell, mad and hospitalized, seemingly revising one of his poems...
...He wanted to make of the Great Cham an ideal father figure...
...It is the tone one finds in the early English Romantics, of whom Wordsworth wrote, "We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;/But thereof come in the end despondency and madness...
...Looking back, Lowell's psychological instability seems an objective correlative for a period of literary upheaval and trans?formation...
...Merwin, found a new kind of voice for his work??spare, almost fragmented, gnomic, and vibrating with a powerful moral authority none of his contemporaries man?aged to attain...
...Hispoetic masterpiece, London, was profoundly influenced by its evo?cation of a city at night, haunted by thieves, cutthroats, whores, and the poor...
...Savage (Pantheon, 260 pp., $23.00), there was something about the scapegrace poet, "his ability to exploit or live out the image of the unrecognized and persecuted genius, [that] held Johnson??and [his] age??in a grip of guilty enchant?ment...
...I can think of no one better suited to chronicle this resurgence than a poet who went to Harvard, then stayed in Boston to make his own verses and edit those of others for the Atlantic Monthly...
...His poetry," Davison reflects, "has continued till this day to carry a faint happiness (a favorite word) on its face, like the impenetrable smile of the sixth-century Greek kouroi...
...Yet a decade later Stanley Kunitz would write with some regret, "There was a sense then that a new era was about to begin, which we don't have now...
...Later that fall he started acting at the Poet's Theater in Cambridge, where Richard Wilbur, W.S...
...was never made wiser by his Sufferings, nor preserved by one Misfortune from falling into another...
...Though he began as a Grub Street hack, the succes de scandale of his verse autobiography, The Bas?tard, brought him the regard of some of the leading poets of his day...
...Yet even to the sympathetic Johnson, the "night-walks" were symbolic of a sleepwalking, dream-laden existence: "By imputing none of his Miseries to himself, [Sav?age...
...The 20th-century reader will note the striking similarities between Savage's fantasy of star-crossed origins and the typi?cal plot of the Victorian "sensation novel," like Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White or No Name...
...Psychotherapy, then fashionable, made resentment against parents a major subject for poetry...
...John?son's life of Savage stands as the first Romantic biography...
...Henceforth, he styled himself her "Volunteer Laureate.' Alas, the epic work with which Savage hoped to secure his reputation, The Wanderer, was deemed disorganized and in?comprehensible...
...and convinced Johnson of his ill-treatment...
...A last-minute pardon by Queen Caroline saved him from the gallows and not coincidentally boosted his sales...
...Merwin and John Ashbery were among the play?wrights and Edward Gorey designed sets...
...the Lady professed that both had died in childhood...
...Thanks to Johnson, his unhappy career survives as one of the supreme cautionary parables of literature: the ruin of talent by misfor?tune and self-destruction...
...She dumped him before taking off for England and the rest of her life, but her discipline taught him to work seriously at poetry...
...There, says Holmes, lies the final clue to why Pope, Johnson and others found Savage so intriguing: He was a harbinger of Romanticism, with its stress on the unconscious that Rationalism tried to suppress...
...Friends had trouble keeping up with his alternations between witty, generous sanity and malign mania...
...Indeed, readers today recognize the buoyancy and optimism peering from behind the psychic trauma...
...Life Studies seems the archetyp?al product of its time...
...Peter Davi?son has now charted its American revival in The Fading Smile: Poets in Boston, from Robert Frost to Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath, 1955-1960 (Knopf, 346 pp., $24.00...
...Confessional" fails to convey the impres?sionistic quality of the verse...
...he wrote poignantly...
...They struck back first at the nice-girl images of their youth, and ultimately at the male-dominated poetry establishment, by tapping into the disruptive power of the female outcast: the witch, the prostitute, the lesbian, the hysteric...
...Johnson was one of its rare admirers...
...Against Boswell's portrait of moral scru?pulousness and ponderous wisdom, he presents an insecure man starved for love and friendship, depressed by his ugliness and poverty, and readily able to identify with the misery and lapses of others...
...the poem's guiding figure, Holmes contends, was modeled on Savage, who had introduced the young author to nocturnal ramblings...
...Jekyll and Mr...
...He and his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, had returned to live in the city so closely associated with his famous ancestors...
...He had no trouble sustaining the part of an educated gentle?man down on his luck...
...At the center of the Boston literary universe was Robert Low?ell...
...Here Holmes concurs with the accepted view for once, judging him deluded...
...Yet as Richard Holmes argues in Dr...
...Boswell, having dismissed Savage as an imposter, was mystified by John?son's attraction...
...In Holmes' view, Johnson considered Savage his doppel-ganger...
...seems in retrospect to dominate the poetic harmony of the late 1950s in Boston...
...Eventually Davison served on the theater's board...
...The first, Richard Wilbur, achieved a new naturalism for his lyrics without abandoning formalism...
...Waking in the Blue," "Man and Wife," "Skunk Hour"??are searing accounts of an earlier breakdown...
...In the sum?mer of '55 Davison also dated Plath...
...Merwin was dismayed that the Lowell crowd persisted in seeing all experience in terms of some book or poem...
...Richard Savage took his name from the Fourth Earl of Rivers, whom he claimed as his natural father...
...Alexander Pope became an occasional benefactor and used his scabrous stories about other writers in The Dunciad...
...Lowell...
...He found their air stale...
...Pity the monsters...
...In biographies of Shelley and Coleridge that tended to con?tradict the received impressions of scholars, Holmes broke through the plaster pieties of the literary icon to show us men who might well have been our contemporaries...
...All these groundbreakers, male and female, paid a high price in emotional wear and tear...
...Several of the most talked-about lyrics...
...Hyde" AFTER DOMINATING 19th-century literature, Romanti?cism was driven underground by the Modernists...
...Writers & Writing POETIC JEKYLLS AND HYDES BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL FAR AND AWAY the most affecting chapter in Lives of the English Poets is Samuel Johnson's account of his doomed friend Richard Savage (1698-1743...
...Both men were self-taught, not well-bred enough to be comfortable in society, unloved by their mothers (real or puta?tive), and constantly hobbled by financial hardship...
...But Savage's sudden prominence did not rest on literary skill alone...
...As for the title of Holmes' tour de force, the author confesses in his concluding sentence, "The echo you hear, of course, is of Dr...
...at the same moment, writers were beginning to reject the formalist strictures of their surro?gate fathers, Frost and Eliot and Tate...
...Johnson ended the chapter with a famous warning, "that Negligence and Irregularity, long con?tinued, will make Knowledge useless, Wit ridiculous, and Genius contemptible...
...Merwin's verse of the '50s and '60s does not date...
...By then he had alienated most of his admirers and lost touch with Johnson, whose own destitu?tion, in any case, could hardly have relieved him...
...They frequently failed in marriage, lost their jobs, and sometimes their sanity...
...Johnson & Mr...
...Were it not for that memorial...
...The young women, "those Bacchae of our generation, Plath, Rich and Sexton," re?acted no less drastically...
...The second, W.S...
...That was not surprising, except this time, his visitor was startled to observe, the piece in hand was Milton's "Lycidas...
...In his new work he dares to spar with James Boswell, Johnson's companion and celebrated biographer...
...But it is the Jekyll-and-Hyde presence of Robert Lowell, for all his failings, that predominates in The Fading Smile, mesmerizing us just as he did in life...
Vol. 77 • October 1994 • No. 10
