Where Have You Been? (12 page)

An adjective, an adequate adjective, is a thought or a perception. Where—as often happens in Lowell—adjectives come in twos or threes, they are constellations, distinctive and collusive, radiant with outward meaning and human prediction, and held together by inscrutable inward gravitational bonds. “Ready, afraid / of living alone till eighty,” going and stopping, affirming and reluctant; “Empty, open, intimate,” three complementary views of a space, the three bears, if you like, from outside, from the threshold, from within. In both instances, the contrasting or evolving meanings are underscored by similarity of sounds.

Three poems later in
Life Studies
, you encounter “Waking in the Blue,” longer, better known, more anthologized, more typical. The subject by now has moved from parents and grandparents to Lowell himself. It is the first of a little minigroup, “Waking in the Blue,” “Home After Three Months Away,” “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” that shows prismatic views of the poet against the background of three different institutions: mental hospital, what Jonathan Raban nicely dubbed “the slovenly freedom of university teaching,” and prison—the reduced term of three months that Lowell did as a conscientious objector in 1943–1944. “Waking in the Blue” is hospital:

The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,

rouses from the mare's-nest of his drowsy head

propped on
The Meaning of Meaning
.

He catwalks down our corridor.

Azure day

makes my agonized blue window bleaker.

Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.

Absence! My heart grows tense

as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.

(This is the house for the “mentally ill.”)

What use is my sense of humor?

I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties,

once a Harvard all-American fullback,

(if such were possible!)

still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties,

as he soaks, a ramrod

with the muscles of a seal

in his long tub,

vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing.

A kingly granite profile in a crimson golf-cap,

worn all day, all night,

he thinks only of his figure,

of slimming on sherbet and ginger ale—

more cut off from words than a seal.

This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean's;

the hooded night lights bring out “Bobbie,”

Porcellian '29,

a replica of Louis XVI

without the wig—

redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale,

as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit

and horses at chairs.

These victorious figures of bravado ossified young.

In between the limits of day,

hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts

and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle

of the Roman Catholic attendants.

(There are no Mayflower

screwballs in the Catholic Church.)

After a hearty New England breakfast,

I weigh two hundred pounds

this morning. Cock of the walk,

I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor's jersey

before the metal shaving mirrors,

and see the shaky future grow familiar

in the pinched, indigenous faces

of these thoroughbred mental cases,

twice my age and half my weight.

We are all old-timers,

each of us holds a locked razor.

Perhaps as with “For Sale,” one's immediate reaction is: How can there be anything the matter with someone, if they express themselves so insightfully, with so much wit and joy? What is defective or deficient here? It's a pervasive, almost an all-pervading question with Lowell, and it's one of the things I grappled with—in my head, mind, never on paper—in my unwritten PhD on him a few years later. A poem begins: “I want you to see me when I have one head / again, not many, like a bunch of grapes.” It's drastic and unforgettable, and partly for those reasons you're unwilling to entertain the possibility even that some sort of human hydra wrote the lines in front of you. Elsewhere, there's talk of “the kingdom of the mad— / its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye.” But when is this tailored speech ever hackneyed, and where is there a glimmer of homicide? Lowell wrote out of a condition called bipolar disorder or manic depression. From the mid-1950s, say, he suffered a manic attack pretty much annually. Typically, there's a fantastic description of it in the late book
The Dolphin
. The scene, as in “Waking in the Blue,” is a bathroom:

I feel my old infection, it comes once yearly:

lowered good humor, then an ominous

rise of irritable enthusiasm …

Three dolphins bear our little toilet-stand,

the grin of the eyes rebukes the scowl of the lips,

they are crazy with the thirst. I soak,

examining and then examining

what I really have against myself.

Perhaps the word “crazy” stands out; if not, then perhaps “thirst” and “soak,” or the “ominous / rise of irritable enthusiasm,” or the Calvinist / Jesuitical “examining and then examining.” That's it, anyway. I find it actually far more deeply present in Lowell's life than in his poetry and think it affected those around him—his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, his exceptionally devoted friends—far more than it did himself, though how is one to say that? It puts me in mind of a line from Montale: “Too many lives are needed to make one.” From the mid-'60s, Lowell was prescribed lithium, which made it a little easier perhaps to control the symptoms. He was upset and bemused by the disproportionate effect of what he termed the “lack of a little salt in the brain.”

I don't think there is very much for the clinician in Lowell's published poems. The drafts, yes, they are wildly, disturbingly different. Chapter 15 of Ian Hamilton's life of Robert Lowell begins with a frightening draft of “Waking in the Blue,” called “To Ann Adden (Written during the first week of my voluntary stay at McLean's Mental Hospital)”—the fully circumstantial titling of a Romantic epistle—and including such lines as:

Ann, what use is my ability

for shooting the bull,

far from your Valkyrie body,

your gold-brown hair,

your robust uprightness—you, brisk

yet discrete [
sic
] in your conversation!

II

(a week later)

The night-attendant, a B.U. student,

rouses his cobwebby eyes

propped on his Social Relations text-book,

prowls drowsily down our corridor …

Soon, soon the solitude of Allah, azure day-break,

will make my agonized window bleaker.

What greater glory than recapturing the moment of glory

in
miseria
?

.   .   .   .

Your salmon lioness face is dawn.

It feels thoroughly mean to quote as much as this, and thoroughly improbable that anything worth anything could come of such writing. Here, unquestionably,
is
the kingdom of the mad with its hackneyed speech and all the rest of it. It feels strange, too, to propose that mere cutting could not just restore something to sanity but also find purpose and control and expressiveness in it. It's at this point, perhaps, that one might return to Lowell's beginnings in will and imagination. (Not the worst aspect of “To Ann Adden” is the way that the footballer seems to have returned!) But for that desire to create himself, or to create, at any rate,
something
, he might not have been able to retrieve anything at all from such—to use his word—maunderings.

In the published poem, Ann Adden, a “psychiatric fieldworker” from Bennington, is gone, and so too is the operatic exaltation that came with her. (Both, it seems, were a function of the manic phase of Lowell's disorder.) Instead, there is a canniness and craftiness and dryness and confinement—a boundedness and mildness that you could never imagine in the original draft, even where the alterations themselves are pretty tiny. Not the “cobwebby eyes” but “the mare's-nest of his drowsy head,” an almost maternal note of solicitude. Not the “Social Relations text-book,” dry and theoretical, but the rich joke on
The Meaning of Meaning.
Not “prowls drowsily down our corridor” but “catwalks down our corridor”—a marine ease and fitness in the verb. Not “make my agonized window bleaker” but “makes my agonized blue window bleaker,” an almost unsayable blurt, the “bleaker” yearning to be “blacker.”

Without the encumbrance of Ann, “massive, tawny, playful, lythe,” the zany second person (the person of ode, and of poetry), the poem inhabits the comfortable third person of fiction. The “I” slips easily into the role of the little-account, lateral observer–cum–narrator figure, à la
Moby-Dick
or
Gatsby
, and leaves the stage open for the main protagonists, the “characters,” Stanley and “Bobbie.” (“Bobbie,” of course, is not a million miles away from “Bobby,” as Lowell appears elsewhere in
Life Studies
, in his mother's voice.) From this point on, what is interesting is the externality of the description of “these thoroughbred mental cases” and residual speculation on the speaker, or the person of the poet, if you prefer. Here is a poem about the mind in which, after the first four lines, the mind doesn't appear! A poem from which the reader takes blue, plumbing, sherbet, sperm whale, weight. A poem, it seems, of narcissistic self-regard and vanity, of weights and measures, of appurtenances and accoutrements. A sort of locker-room way back to health, golf caps, nudity, diet. Everything that's proposed here is physical, it's the sort of self-absorption—Mann again—of the sanatorium, of
The Magic Mountain
this time, with the Lowell figure like a sort of Hans Castorp, a visitor threatened with going native. The display of, as it were, rude health, is an effort to deny that there's anything wrong upstairs: the atmosphere is prankish, eccentric, overspecified.

“Waking in the Blue” isn't a tidy poem, with its ragged verse paragraphs, its sporadic full rhymes, its unkempt imagery. But it is precisely such looseness that allows it to accommodate so much realism. There are two main strands of imagery, one maritime and the other monumental: reading the poem puts one in mind, maybe, of a sort of Rushmore-by-the-sea. But plenty of things are not accommodated within this, and also, it doesn't seem in the least conniving or purposive. (One trusts poet and poem the more.) Scanning it, one picks up: catwalks, azure, harpoon, sunk, soaks, seal, sperm whale, crew haircuts, Mayflower, and the turtle-necked French sailor's jersey. On the monumental side, or perhaps more exactly, there where stone meets king, we have: propped, petrified, Victorian, kingly granite profile, seal (in the other sense, the royal seal, the keeper of the royal seal), Porcellian (if one allows porcelain, China shepherdesses and the like), wig, swashbuckles, ossified, Catholic, and maybe thoroughbred. Combining the two strands, one can perhaps come up with a sense of joining the crew of a ship, either voluntarily or press-ganged; stiffening—petrified, ossified—and movement or loss of movement—maunder, tense, ramrod, granite, strut, locked—are also thematized. The “mare's nest” has an overtone of the Medusa—also a word for jellyfish—suggesting a way the two types of imagery might be combined, in some sort of home for failed, Andromeda-less (Ann Adden–less?!), ossified or petrified Perseuses: “These victorious figures of bravado ossified young.”

The speaker in “Waking in the Blue” perhaps agonizes—his word—over whether or not to belong. The poem begins, like Kafka's “Metamorphosis,” with an awakening: out of fantasy into reality, from a personal unconscious into a shared conscious. The word “our” appears as early as line 4. “We” and “us” bring the poem to its conclusion. Lowell tries to fix his identity with recourse to other institutions, like B.U. and Harvard, to the sophomore, or “wise fool”, to “Bobbie,” and the “Mayflower screwballs”—the Lowells and Winslows were among the earliest American settlers. At the same time, he worries about the wisdom of throwing in his lot with these particular people—“more cut off from words than a seal”—not surprisingly. Unease is repeatedly signaled by the fishiness, the not-quite-rightness of things: “if such were possible,” “vaguely urinous,” the “crimson golf-cap,” “without the wig,” and the brilliantly suspicious “slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle” of the “attendants.” By the end, harrowingly, and again as in Kafka, the speaker has got himself adopted; “Bobbie” and Stanley are like monstrous parental figures, and Lowell is their son, half their age and twice their weight. The thoroughbred mental case is shut, if not “locked,” and the future is settled and looks “familiar”—almost familial. The poem is at its saddest when it is most in agreement: “After a hearty New England breakfast, / I weigh two hundred pounds / this morning.” It's like acceptance, or promotion. Making the grade. The locked razor is the badge of office, the scepter of this establishment.

Almost all of this is conjectural and interpretative, and some of it is not altogether serious. There must be many other ways of reading the poem. As I say, it's loose and accommodating, without ever seeming random or incoherent. Lowell was able to do this: to suggest meaning, but not insist on it or fussily encode it. I think of two lines from the lovely poem “The Old Flame”: “how quivering and fierce we were, / there snowbound together, /
simmering like wasps
/
in our tent of books!
” (my italics) where the four words “simmering,” “wasps,” “tent,” and “books” pull four separate ways but without exploding the image. The equivalent in “Waking in the Blue” is Lowell's use of so many different types of utterance, so that, without ever seeming to write from within madness, he is able to encompass it, or at least gesture at it. Labels and details are confidently placed; humor puts him outside the poem; the “slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle” is formidably intelligent; and the sentence “These victorious figures of bravado ossified young” seems to bristle impregnably. But the closer the utterances are to the speaker, the less interrogation they will bear, and the less “prose meaning” they seem to have. Rather, they seem somehow magical, as if they'd arrived from some other language. Why: “Absence!”? What is “Crows maunder on the petrified fairway”? Why the broken-down prickly-pear rhythm of: “This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean's”? There is witchery here, not very far below the surface, not haplessly, or distractingly, or out of focus, but as a part of things. Lowell's poems have this way of reaching out and making meaning after meaning, but controllably always. He once said—and this seems to me to capture it very nicely—“I am not sure whether I can distinguish between intention and interpretation. I think this is what I more or less intended.”