The Book of Lost Books (41 page)

Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV

{1917–1977}

WHEN ROBERT LOWELL was fifteen years old, and had already earned the nickname “Cal” (for Caligula), the poet Hart Crane jumped overboard and drowned. There was no causal link, though it raises a host of disturbing similarities.

Crane, born in 1899, was only just too young to be in the vanguard of Modernist experimental poetry. He cruised the whole gamut of stylistic innovation: he imitated Pound's robust Imagism and Eliot's vitreous ennui before realizing that neither model suited his ambitions or could adequately convey his experiences and enthusiasm. Eliot's disgust at the burgeoning metropolis and Pound's hankering after the medieval, the archaic, and the obscure must have seemed equally pessimistic and equally elitist. Crane, as opposed to these self-imposed exiles who berated the philistinism of the States, wanted a “mystic synthesis of America,” a modern epic that lauded Chaplin and the Brooklyn Bridge as much as it shunned the neat, buttoned-up little quatrains of traditional poetry. Crane knew that the Modernists had opened radical new fields of expression, but wanted a voice that could “go
through
” them toward a different engagement with the present.

As one of the many self-appointed laureates of America, Crane had a formidable, and internal, opposition to the role. Despite his louche good looks, he was hardly in the running for beau to the Homecoming Queen of the States Muse: high-school dropout, gay, alcoholic, and working in his father's candy store when he wasn't writing advertising copy. Eventually he was allowed to go to New York, where he indulged in dangerous affairs and problematic friendships, and gradually assembled the materials that would become
The Bridge.
He could have stayed at home and been but one more little suburban tragedy, rather than the operatic disaster he made of himself.

The Bridge
(1930) was the Modernist epic, and, as such, critics denied it was an epic at all. Fragmentary and allusive, it was a book of loneliness and crowds: but where was heroism? Where was narrative? After winning a Guggenheim fellowship, Crane traveled to Mexico, in order to write another epic on the original encounter between America and Europe: the humiliation of Montezuma II before Cortés. In short, it was a poem that could address the perceived gap between the epic tradition and modern verse. He failed to write it, and became mired in drink, brawls, and opportunistic sex, alienating his friends and frittering away his money. Returning home by boat, he declared to Peggy Cowley, “I'm not going to make it, dear, I'm utterly disgraced,” and bowed out over the railings of the SS
Orizaba.

Robert Lowell also tried to write an epic, when he was at Harvard, a few years after Crane's death. The subject was the Crusades, and he was rebuffed by the poet Robert Frost, who pronounced that the poem “
did
seem to go on a bit.” But the whisper of Crane, as poet, man, and symbol, kept needling in Lowell's mind: Crane's friend and Lowell's tutor, Allen Tate, wrote an “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” which Lowell, of old best-Bostonian stock, countered with “For the Union Dead.” Lowell wrote a remarkably sour elegy to Crane, where he ambiguously praised him as the “Shelley of my age” who “scattered Uncle Sam's / phoney gold-plated laurels.” By 1960, Lowell would, with patrician hauteur, admit that Crane was “less limited” than his contemporaries. Most tellingly, when Lowell was suffering one of his frequent mental breakdowns, he would, as a friend wrote, “talk about himself in connection with Achilles, Alexander, Hart Crane, Hitler and Christ.”

At school, Lowell had penned an essay entitled “War: A Justification,” foreshadowing his recurrent interest in belligerence, violence, and resistance. The Crusades also provided him with an arena in which to vent his confusions about religion in general, and militant Catholicism in particular. Lowell, like Crane, was also concerned with how best to respond to the advances in aesthetic technique pioneered by the previous generation, and how to introduce American history and landscape into modern poetry. At first, he wrote elaborate, tightly mannered meditations on New England themes, suffused with Catholic symbolism at odds with his Puritan heritage, reminiscent of the Metaphysical poets. But the lure of the epic did not pass away entirely, and when he started on his “long poem,” it had nothing to do with the
Mayflower,
the Aztecs, or the fall of Jerusalem.

Lowell imagined that his collection
Life Studies
was “a small scale
Prelude
”—an autobiography in meter “written in many different styles and with digression.” The “continuing story” evolved further into the free-verse sonnet sequences of
Notebook,
which itself was revised into
History, For Lizzie and Harriet,
and
The Dolphin.
Magpie-like, Lowell stretched the form to accommodate newspaper copy, critical reviews of his work, and even his ex-wife's anguished letters and telephone calls. As he says in “The Misanthrope and the Painter,” “I pick lines from the trash”; and in the eyes of the poet Adrienne Rich, this stench of the garbage stuck to Lowell. Her review of
The Dolphin
berated him for the inclusion of “private” materials, and denounced his “bullshit eloquence.” “A kind of aggrandized and merciless masculinity” typified the poetry; and though Rich intended this as a cutting insult, its sense of an almost Homeric palette and intensity applied to the life of a depressive, late-twentieth-century man is also oddly apposite. “History has to live with what was here . . . it is so dull and gruesome how we die, / unlike writing, life never finishes” may not be as thrilling as Achilles' rage, but it captures a seriousness and resonance that might fittingly be termed epic.

Unlike Crane, Lowell never reached a quintessence of shame from which he could not return, despite behavior that went far beyond disgracing himself. In a manic period he had allegedly held Allen Tate out of a second-story window while reciting “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” In the asylum he had become inordinately attached to a piece of metal, which he claimed was “the Totentanz” Hitler used to implement the Final Solution. Despite lithium treatment and electroconvulsive therapy, he was readmitted, hurt and crying, time and again.

One episode stands out, encapsulating Lowell's productivity, ambitious range, and pitiable megalomania. He discharged himself from Greenways clinic in 1975, and was found in the fashionable L'Escargot restaurant, where he buttonholed fellow diners to help him write an
Anthology of World Poetry.
He was, he informed them, the king of Scotland.

Sylvia Plath

{1932–1963}

IN A POEM unpublished in her lifetime, “Dialogue over a Ouija Board,” Plath described a glass that spelled out the phrase “IN-PLUMAGEOFRAWWORMS.” Any writer attempting to grasp her life, death, art, and reputation must face a similarly vermicular, seething corpus.

Sylvia Plath committed suicide on February 11, 1963. She died intestate, and, although she was separated from her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, divorce proceedings had not commenced. Hughes therefore became her literary executor, and controlled the copyright of her work, published and unpublished. The management of the estate was given over to Hughes's sister Olwyn, a move that, despite being pragmatic, was nonetheless highly contentious. Sylvia had not liked Olwyn, a fact confirmed by more than just the lacunae in her eventually published correspondence with her mother; nor did Olwyn like Sylvia, whom she described to one biographer as having “something of the terrorist” about her. Plath's mother chose not to read her final, unsent letter, which Hughes offered to give her: its final instruction, accusation, or bequest is shrouded. Nor did Plath leave a suicide note.

At the time of her death, Plath had only published one collection of poems,
The Colossus,
and a pseudonymous semiautobiographical novel,
The Bell Jar.
She had, however, been working on a number of projects, as well as continuing to keep her extensive diaries. In 1965, Hughes edited a new selection of her work, based on the collection she had been completing prior to her suicide. Hughes's
Ariel,
however, differed significantly from Plath's
Ariel.
The forty poems of the published version contained only twenty-seven of the forty-one poems Plath had grouped together as
The Rival,
then
A Birthday Present,
then
Daddy,
and finally
Ariel.
Some of the excerpted works were eventually released in another posthumous collection,
Winter Trees.
Hughes wrote in the introduction to Plath's
Collected Poems
(1981) that
Ariel
“was a somewhat different volume from the one she had planned” and that he had “omitted some of the more personally aggressive poems.” In the preface to a selection of her prose,
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams
(1977), he stated that he had taken the decision to burn her journals for the final months, since he did not want “her” children to read them.

Robert Lowell, himself no stranger to psychosis, described her poetry as like “playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder.” But the effect of reading her work was less dramatic than the consequence of not being able to read it. The revelations about the text of
Ariel
and the journals opened the floodgates: accusations of censorship and suppression soon developed into a full-blown psychodrama, in which the dead Plath and the still-living Hughes became archetypes of Sapphic self-destruction and chauvinistic manipulation. Burning manuscripts leads, among other outcomes, to scorched reputations. The controversy over subsequent biographies of Plath exacerbated the situation, and, by the early 1990s, when Hughes was poet laureate, it had generated its own critical literature. In 1998, Hughes wrote his own long-verse account of their relationship,
Birthday Letters,
a myth in a mirror, marbled with the aggrieved release of saying, “I remember.” Their lives are reproduced in other books and a film.

In such a morass of conflicting and unsettled accounts, there is still one lost work. In 1962–63 Plath was working on a second novel, provisionally entitled
Double Exposure,
or
Double Take.
She told her mother that she intended to use her recent, painful experiences (much as she had done with
The Bell Jar
), and apparently 130 pages of the manuscript were written. According to Hughes, these disappeared at some time before 1970. It is a frustratingly vague verb:
lost? shredded? burned?
The critic Judith Kroll saw an outline for the novel, and it is generally held that it featured a husband, wife, and mistress. The manuscript, it seems, has its own ghost: the librarian of the Smith College Rare Books Department had to take an unprecedented step and make clear that they did not possess the manuscript, nor was it housed with them under a seal to prevent its contents being made public too soon.

Though various biographers, aficionados, and devotees would dearly love to apply another prism to the myriad lives of Ted and Sylvia, we might pause to consider, as well as its possible revelations, the hypothetical literary merit of the work. The “double” in both prospective titles has itself a twofold resonance: the reduplication of the wife in the mistress, and the schizophrenic fissuring of the man into husband and adulterer. Plath's work always had certain elements of the Gothic. The mere title suggests a work that might have been a fusion of
The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
and
The Doppelgänger.

A sense of the self shattering into competing elements is thought to typify certain psychotic and depressive states of mind, and suicide can be read as a rational effort on the part of one facet to extinguish the others. Did Plath's novel embody these multiplied impulses? Her doctor had worried that giving her antidepressants to dispel her apathy might unleash the self-confidence to harm herself. Hughes is also implicated in this tragic fracturing: he dissolved into smithereens of “I,” “her husband,” and “TH” when he subsequently described the creative work of her last days.
Double Exposure
is, perhaps, a suicide note that, in its physical act of writing, defers an action more finally than rasping a tongue over a gummed envelope. Was she, like Nietzsche, keeping herself alive through immaculate imaginings of self-destruction?

Double Take
implies a Freudian moment of confusion and realization, when the world suddenly reveals a glitch in its smooth operation;
Double Exposure
refers to a photographic anomaly where one image is superimposed on another, as if the wife and mistress were somehow merged. She would be taken, and exposed. The titles alone conjure a work of more subtle texturing and novelistic layering than the earlier, autobiographical writing.

Hughes himself is now dead: the Plath-Hughes estate keeps the flame for two great poets. Never has the potential, ulterior capacity for that flame to become an agent of erasure been so obvious.