Quote of the Day (Robert Lowell, on Poetry and Feeling)

“The whole problem of writing poetry is to bring it back to what you really feel.” —American poet Robert Lowell (1917-1977), “The Art of Poetry No. 3” (interview with Frederick Seidel), The Paris Review, Winter-Spring 1961

This Day in Literary History (O’Connor Puts Editor in His Place)

February 18, 1949—Flannery O’Connor might have been only a few weeks short of 24, but she would not be condescended to be an editor twice her age as “a slightly dim-witted Camp Fire Girl.” One day after writing her agent that she wouldn’t respond to John Selby until hearing back from her first, she fired off a letter to the Rinehart editor in chief anyway, telling him that, while perfectly amenable to criticism, it would only be “within the sphere of what I am trying to do.” In fact, contrary to the “conventional novel” that he was trying to steer her toward, the finished book, though “less angular,” would still be “just as odd if not odder than the nine chapters you have now.”

Anyone who has read any of the work of the Georgia writer can guess that O’Connor and Selby did not work together—certainly to the relief of both parties, but not to the ultimate benefit of Selby and his reputation. A short-story writer and author of 10 novels himself, he might have been expected to have been sympathetic to the likes of O’Connor, and his firm had, only the year before, made a splash with a first novel by another twentysomething author, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead.

But O’Connor, while finishing up her stay at the Yaddo artists’ colony near Saratoga Springs, NY, was annoyed that it took Selby so long to get back to her about his opinion of her manuscript—and that the criticism he did send was “very vague and totally missed the point of what kind of novel I am writing.” This only increased the misgivings created by her friend, poet Robert Lowell, who believed that the very inadequacies seen by Selby were, in fact, part of the manuscript’s strength.

Three years and who knows how many revisions later, Wise Blood would go on to establish O’Connor as perhaps the leading voice of Southern gothic fiction.  Its humor was so dark, its descriptions so stark (“He had a nose like a shrike’s bill and a long vertical crease on either side of his mouth”) that initial reviews were mixed. 

In time, it would come to be recognized as a distinctly powerful vision of a spiritually blind male pilgrim (the first and last name of its protagonist, Hazel Motes, doubly reinforces the notion of diminished sight) in a barren, lost contemporary landscape seemingly aching for his “Church Without Christ.” It would be regarded as stark as a Hieronymus Bosch painting in the way it used the outlandish to underscore religious concerns, an allegory that would be adapted for film in 1979 by John Huston.

It is easy to regard Selby as benighted in his dealings with someone now regarded as a midcentury master of American fiction, and he didn’t help his case for posterity when, upon giving her release to take her manuscript elsewhere, he noted that O’Connor was “stiff-necked, uncooperative and unethical.” But his kind has not disappeared from the modern publishing landscape. An author I know was told by at least one editor that a major problem with his long novel was the multiple-character perspective he used on the plot. He disregarded the advice, took the novel to another house and was rewarded with an American Book Award.

Moreover, Selby was almost certainly in something of a state of shock, because the 108 pages he read were far, far different from what he had originally seen. O’Connor began her work while a graduate student at the University of Iowa. That material had helped her win the school’s Rinehart-Iowa Fiction Award, which gave the publisher the first shot at publishing the novel.

But midway through, O’Connor developed a far different narrative voice—one less sympathetic and more “strident and detached,” according to The Art and Vision of Flannery O'Connor, by Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. If you want to see another example of how a mid-revision change can alter a book’s dynamic, the closest counterpart would be Moby-Dick, transformed, after Herman Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne and delved deeply into William Shakespeare, from a conventional sea account of a voyage into a symbol-laden examination of an obsessive quest to destroy evil.

The editor who became the lucky beneficiary of Selby’s befuddlement was Robert Giroux, then at Harcourt, Brace and Company. The two had a common faith—Roman Catholicism—which helped him understand her unique worldview. Moreover, he felt her “tremendous strength, creative and moral,” and came to admire not only the very self-confidence that had put Selby off but also another quality: that “She not only knew exactly what she wanted to write but was prepared to sacrifice everything to achieve it,” according to an interview he gave George Plimpton a half-century later for The Paris Review.

This Day in Literary History (Robert Lowell, ‘Confessional’ Poet, Dies)

September 12, 1977—Robert Lowell, blessed with so much technical skill as to be regarded as the greatest poet of postwar America—and cursed with a manic depression so severe as to require periodic hospitalizations—died at age 60 in the back seat of a taxicab, having left his third wife in Ireland to return to his second, long-suffering one in New York.

Related to two other famous New England poets, James Russell Lowell and Amy Lowell, as well as a President of Harvard, Robert Lowell had to earn his high regard among contemporaries by breaking away from established forms of writing. He was both the most public of poets (refusing to fight in World War II, refusing to be honored by the Johnson White House because of his opposition to the Vietnam War) and the most personal, allowing readers an unparalleled glimpse of his private agony.

In his attempt to enable readers to come as close as possible to his personal difficulties, Lowell increasingly put aside the modernist mannerisms of his early career in favor of the kind of stripped-down language employed by William Carlos Williams. His technique and personal example put him at the forefront of a group of “confessional poets” that also included John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. Their work sought to mold order from the chaos of their lives: substance abuse, love affairs, broken marriages, madness, and suicide.

The following lines, from Lowell’s seminal poem “Skunk Hour,” were crucial to the formation of this new consciousness:

“A car radio bleats,

'Love, O careless Love . . . .' I hear

my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,

as if my hand were at its throat . . . .

I myself am hell,

nobody's here.”

Clearly, this is a mind that, for reasons not understood even by the poet (especially by the poet), is disintegrating. If he were born in the baby-boom era, Lowell might have related his struggles, in exhaustive detail, in a bestselling memoir. Prozac might have gotten him over the worst of his hurdles. But in his era, even to acknowledge his psychiatric condition was enough to make many uncomfortable. As he aged and his condition worsened, he caused enormous pain not just to himself but to those closest to him.

One—the “long-suffering” wife I mentioned earlier—was the novelist-critic Elizabeth Hardwick. In three poetry collections from the early 1970s, Lowell not only revealed details about his infidelities with his eventual third wife, the Anglo-Irish Lady Caroline Blackwood, while still married to Hardwick, but also included excerpts of Hardwick’s correspondence with him as their union unraveled. Even longtime friends of Lowell, such as poet Adrienne Rich, believed Lowell had gone too far this time with this massive invasion of another's privacy.

Lowell’s condition was also noticeable to his students at Harvard, where he taught one semester each year for the last couple of decades before his death. One of those students was a professor of mine at college, who recalled that she and her classmates had become attuned to when he was having one of his psychotic episodes.

Another one of those worshipping students, critic-biographer James Atlas, recalled some of the more legendary episodes of Lowell on campus:

“I had never witnessed one of these breakdowns, but I had heard about them in grim detail: Lowell showing up at William Alfred's house and declaring that he was the Virgin Mary; Lowell talking for two hours straight in class, revising a student's poem in the style of Milton, Tennyson, or Frost; Lowell wandering around Harvard Square without a coat in the middle of January, shivering, wild-eyed, incoherent. In the seminar room on the top floor of Holyoke Center, we waited nervously—perhaps even expectantly, given the status accorded anyone who had been present at one of these celebrated episodes—for it to happen before our eyes.”

Notoriety might have made Lowell compelling to read about, but it was his prodigious talent that made him compelling to read in his own right. As Adam Kirsch wrote five years ago in The New York Sun about Life Studies, the 1959 volume from which “Skunk Hour” was taken: “In challenging the old canons of impersonality, Lowell had shown the world that the most intimate parts of life — childhood misery, Oedipal longings, marital discord, mental illness — could be made the subjects for great poetry. Never before had a poet risked so much of himself on the page.”