Free Robert Lowell: A Biography by Ian Hamilton

“91 Revere Street”—a highly polished slice of Lowell’s autobiography. It centers on the poet’s childhood from 1925 to 1928, and casts Mr. Lowell as the main character: his resignation from the navy, his business humiliations, his sad and amiable willingness to let himself be dominated not only by his wife, his friends, his employers, but also by his own low-level self-delusion. It is a merciless exercise; sorrowing, resentful, maliciously amused. The unforgiving child now armed, and armored, with grown-up literary poise.
    Lowell liked to think of his presentation of his father as “tender,” but only in the elegiac poems that appear in the fourth section of Life Studies does pathos outweigh ridicule. And even here the evidence of Lowell’s drafts suggests that ridicule could as easily have been outweighed by something close to hatred:
    “Still doing things the hard way, Feller?”
    He’d tease me. Ten years later,
    When I came home from Kenyon
    College, an arm-chair Agrarian
    Quoting in Latin from the Bucolics
    And Pound’s ABC of Economics
    He used to turn a puking green
    Reminding me how at fourteen
    He mailed a monthly check from Annapolis to his mother. 26
    This fourth section is arrived at by way of a group of chatty, affectionate pieces about literary figures: Ford Madox Ford, George Santayana, Delmore Schwartz and Hart Crane—a rather artificial yoking, this, of minor pieces with which Lowell had been tinkering for years. It is Part Four that actually bears the name “Life Studies”; and this is the section in which Lowell’s “new style” is unequivocally on display. The studies open with family portraits and reminiscences —versifications, in the main, of the more powerful of his prose vignettes. There are times when the “poetry” adds nothing to the prose. For example:
    Almost immediately he bought a larger and more stylish house; he sold his ascetic stove-black Hudson and bought a plump brown Buick; later the Buick was exchanged for a high-toned, as-good-as-new Packard with a custom-designed royal blue and mahogany body. Without drama, his earnings more or less decreased from year to year.
    This is from “91 Revere Street.” Reset in free verse (in “ Commander Lowell”), with some details added and some others dropped, it reads:
    whenever he left a job,
    he bought a smarter car.
    Father’s last employer
    was Scudder, Stevens and Clark, Investment Advisors,
    himself his only client.
    While Mother dragged to bed alone,
    read Menninger,
    and grew more and more suspicious,
    he grew defiant.
    Night after night,
    à la clarté déserte de sa lampe,
    he slid his ivory Annapolis slide rule
    across a pad of graphs—
    piker speculations! In three years
    he squandered sixty thousand dollars.
    The line breaks here seem random, and there is none of the rhythmic or imagistic subtlety that marks the later free-verse poems in the book. It is worth remembering that when Lowell first thought of “versifying” his prose autobiography, his instinct was to do it inmetrical couplets. Here, for example, is a draft of a sonnet about the family graveyard at Dunbarton, in which Lowell’s father is again to be found studying his graphs:
    Four years have left Dunbarton much the same,
    Mother, another stone, another name;
    And you, earth’s orbit? You are things,
    No you, no person. Ah, the king of kings,
    Little Napoleon, whose bolting food
    So caught your fancy, caught your horror stood
    Blotting your minutes after Father died.
    No bustle, bustle, bustle. Groom and bride
    Lie cot by cot. Once more they feel the spark
    Dive through the unnerved marrow of their dark,
    A person breaking through his prison term,
    Where now as then, relapsing, Oh a germ,
    Studies his navel, graphs and charts and maps
    Gentle to all, and loving none perhaps. 27
    It is small wonder that when Lowell made the decision to shift from this kind of mechanical regularity to the spacious relaxation of free verse, he was somewhat dazzled