Robert Lowell at 100: Thoughts on “Life Studies,” Oscar Night, and “Manchester by the Sea”
By Stuart Mitchner
Every now and then the right movie comes along at the right time. If you’re writing a column celebrating Robert Lowell’s 100th birthday, March 1, 2017, the right movie is Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea. The minute I saw the view of the buildings and boats along the harbor, I thought of Lowell’s “bleak white frame houses/stuck like oyster shells/on a hill of rock,” and of the way “the sea lapped/the raw little match-stick mazes of a weir/where the fish for bait were trapped.” The poem “Water” draws on a 1948 encounter between Lowell and his soulmate poet Elizabeth Bishop in Stonington, a fishing town on the Massachusetts coast. The closing stanza, which refers to the bonding between two poets, also, as it happens, evokes the emotional ambiance of the film’s most talked-about scene: “We wished our two souls/might return like gulls/to the rock/In the end, the water was too cold for us.”
Watching Casey Affleck
I’m glad I saw Casey Affleck’s Oscar-winning performance before I knew anything about the unwanted-sexual-advances controversy, which might have distracted me from the way my sense of the film resonated in Lowell’s poetry, in lines from “Eye and Tooth” like “I saw things darkly,” “I chain-smoked through the night/learning to flinch/at the flash of the matchlight,” “nothing to pour/on those waters or flames,” and, above all, words that could have been spoken or thought by Affleck’s tortured character: “I am tired. Everyone’s tired of my turmoil.”
Only two weeks ago I was knocking Hollywood and the Academy in a column celebrating Aden Young’s performance in Rectify and now here’s Affleck doing wonders with someone who has a lot in common with Young’s Daniel Holden. If anything, Affleck’s Lee Chandler is worse off. Holden hopes to reconnect with the human race while Chandler’s self-imposed exile from humanity reminds me of Melville’s admission to Hawthorne that he had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated.” At times the depth of Chandler’s estrangement is hard to watch, you feel like saying “Enough,” but not after you witness the event that blew up his life, and not in the heart-wrenching encounter with his ex-wife (Michelle Williams), played with such an extremity of desperation and loss and regret that it verges on a parody of Actor’s Studio acting, with two inspired players giving the definitive dual performance; yes, it’s pitch-perfect Method, but it’s a scene that, as Anthony Lane has noted, will be remembered “in years to come, when people look back on the movies of 2016.”
“Dread of the Day”
“In depression,” Lowell tells his biographer Ian Hamilton, “one wakes, is happy for about two minutes, probably less, and then fades into dread of the day.” Lowell goes into more detail about the onset of his manic sieges in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop quoted in David Kalstone’s Becoming a Poet, “These things come on with a gruesome, vulgar, blasting surge of ‘enthusiasm.’ One becomes a kind of man-aping balloon in a parade — then you subside and eat bitter coffee-grounds of dullness, guilt, etc.”
A Cozy Stepfather
Until recently I hadn’t read enough Lowell to form a relationship with his work. I knew about his manic depressive episodes, his hospitalizations, all that “turmoil,” but my image of him was nothing like the “crazed, self-obsessed monster” his stepdaughter Ivana cites in contrast to “the gentlest, coziest man possible” she knew from the age of four (she was 11 when he died).
In her memoir Why Not Say What Happened? (Knopf 2010), titled after a line in Lowell’s poem “Epilogue,” Ivana Lowell says that her stepfather “liked to work lying on his bed,” which “was strewn with manuscripts, all annotated in his spidery handwriting.” Her “favorite thing” was to race into his room with her half-Labrador-half Corgi Lulu and “run and jump onto his bed and send his papers flying,” something she says he “didn’t seem to mind …. He then would read whatever he had been working on that day to Lulu and me.”
Lowell’s nickname for Ivana was Mischief and whenever she lived up to it, he’d threaten to bring out the “Mary McCarthy spanking machine.” While the psychotic episodes Ivana recalls have a black-comedy brio, such as the time he hammered holes in the walls of their London apartment thinking he was an archaeologist “excavating ancient Roman mosaics,” there’s nothing funny in the episode when he severely burned himself by smothering his body with toilet cleaner, nor in the “terrible fights” with his third wife, Ivana’s mother, Lady Caroline Blackwood.
Laughing Out Loud
The only volume by Lowell I own is a 1968 Noonday paperback bringing together Life Studies and For the Union Dead with a blurb on the back cover from Richard Poirier, who cites the “critical consensus” rating Lowell “the greatest American poet of the mid-century.”
I don’t know how many times I tried to read Life Studies. Whenever I opened the book, I’d run aground on Part Two, the 35-page-long prose memoir “91 Revere Street.” I was put off by all the family history in the opening paragraphs, but this time I stuck with it and soon found myself laughing out loud at the dinner time visits of family friend Commander Billy Harkness, whose “verbose toasts” in “boozy Cockney-h’Irish” discombobulated Lowell’s decorous mother. It was exhilarating to find that Lowell could be so funny about life at 91 Revere, as when Commander Billy would “point a stinking baby stogie” at Lowell’s mother “and crow ‘Ave a peteeto cigareeto, Charlotte…. Puff on this whacking black cheroot, and you’ll be a match for any reeking senorita femme fatale in the spigotty republics…. When you go up in smoke, Charlotte, remember the Maine. Remember Amy Lowell [a relative], that cigar-chawing, guffawing, senseless and meterless, multimillionheiress, heavyweight mascot on a floating fortress. Damn the Patterns! Full speed ahead on a cigareeto!”
You can sense Lowell being liberated by the earthy perorations of the “rowdy, buffoonish” Commander Billy, whose brash irreverence can be read between certain lines five years later in For the Union Dead (1964). If you read both books in the same volume, as I did, the way the irrepressible dinner guest “abhorred Mother’s dominion over my father” is still fresh in your mind, as are the Commander’s sly references to “the forsaken frau … sojourning on Revere Street,” and particularly the closing paragraph of the memoir, when Lowell recalls the Commander gaping down at him “with sorrowing Gargantuan wonder,” saying “I know why Young Bob is an only child.”
Calling Norman Mailer
In “Florence,” which is dedicated to author Mary McCarthy (she of the spanking machine), you can feel the nudging of Commander Billy in the longing for “the black ink,/cuttlefish, April, Communists/and brothels” and “even the British/fairies who haunted the hills.” The city is presented as “patroness/of the lovely tyranicides!/Where the tower of the Old Palace/pierces the sky like a hypodermic needle.”
Poetry at that pitch likely caught the attention of Norman Mailer, who offers a vivid picture of Lowell in Armies of the Night (1968) while giving evidence of the poet’s willingness to put himself forward politically. Lowell told Ian Hamilton, “I think it’s the best, almost the only thing written about me as a living person.” Mailer saw in him “something untouchable, all insane in its force; one felt immediately there were any number of causes for which the man would be ready to die, and for some he would fight with an axe in his hand and a Cromwellian light in his eye.”
The Wall
After more than a month of this bizarre, high-risk presidency, it’s bracing to read “Fall 1961,” which was written after the building of the Berlin wall. Imagining “the ambassadorial face of the moon” on a grandfather clock, Lowell writes: “All autumn, the chafe and jar/of nuclear war;/we have talked our extinction to death.” Then: “Our end drifts nearer,/the moon lifts, radiant with terror.” Read now, in the absurd shadow of the threat of another wall, the imagery remains “insane in its force”: “A father’s no shield/ for his child./We are like a lot of wild/spiders crying together,/but without tears.”
“All’s Misalliance”
Surely it would be unjust to blame Trump for the unprecedented Oscar Night fiasco in which La La Land was mistakenly announced as the Best Picture. But why not? He himself blamed the mix-up on politics, according to Breitbart news. Given all the messes he’s created in his short time in office, why not take credit for this one? A side-effect of all the online noise about the gaffe is that it takes some of attention away from Casey Affleck’s moment in the spotlight, when last year’s Best Actress Brie Larson refused to applaud after presenting him with the Best Actor Oscar, a silent show of solidarity with the women who seven years ago accused Affleck of “unwanted sexual advances.” Whatever happened back in 2010 (both lawsuits were settled out of court) should not overshadow Affleck’s performance in Manchester by the Sea any more than psychotic episodes and domestic violence should intrude on the poetry of Robert Lowell. In “Epilogue,” the poem in which Ivana Lowell finds a title, he addresses intrusions: “sometimes everything I write/with the threadbare art of my eye/seems a snapshot,/lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,/heightened from life,/yet paralyzed by fact./All’s misalliance./ Yet why not say what happened?”