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application. Nature for Lowell is his habitat, heritage and present exist–
ence; and his scrutiny of these things is anything but objective. More
than his former religious commitments, they vex his memory and con–
fine his ego. Two poems describe actual incarcerations: in a mental
hospital where he was a patient, and in a jail where he served a term
as a Conscientious Objector during the last war.
Indeed it is still a dark day in Boston even though it is no longer
Judgment Day. Hardly anything is what it should be even though the
discrepancies now produce more humor and quizzical tenderness than
fierce wit. The book abounds in second-class Lowells, in mothers who
were unequal to their pretentions when alive and to their black and gold
coffins when dead; in fathers who, though naval officers, preferred au–
tomobiles to ships and whose "Sunday mornings were given to useful
acts such as lettering three new galvanized garbage cans : R.T.S.
LOWELL-U.S.N."; and in only sons who had chronic asthma, chronic
truculence and got themselves expelled from the Public Gardens. Lowell's
often merciless anatomy of his parents is matched by his merciless ac–
count of himself. The volume that began with "Beyond the Alps" ends
with "Skunk Hour," in which he claims affinity with the noisome
scavengers of the title.
The persistent refusal of happiness, the constant indulgence of a
guilty conscience, would make a dreary spectacle
if
it were not for a
certain knowing humor and a certain poise of style in the offender.
But Lowell is not only the hunger artist practicing an art of famine
because he doesn't like food; he knows he is something like that and
makes a conscious role of it. The prose memoirs are the most triumphant
example of his essential composure. The surface of them is all anecdote
and caricature, malign and dazzling; but the interior is solid social
analysis of a family, a society, a period; and when completed the work
will probably excel any poet's autobiography since Yeats's. The portraits
and memories in verse are excellent in their command of a cadenced
as opposed to a metrical medium and they are exceedingly lively. But
given their intense response to what they describe, they suffer a little
from being inconclusive as to the meaning of it all. Where, Henry James
would inquire, is your denouement? Still, the poems add up to some–
thing like the effectiveness of
Mauberley,
Pound's sequence of scenes
and portraits from London life. They represent, perhaps, major poetry
pulling in its horns and putting on big spectacles and studying how to
survive. The once militantly tragic poet, who warred bitterly on him–
self, is pictured on the jacket of
Life Studies
wearing big spectacles.
F. W. Dupee
