Robert Lowell's Language of the Self

Katharine Wallingford

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780807857144, 9780807817995
• eBook ISBN: 9781469644271
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Katharine Wallingford’s incisive study treats Robert Lowell’s work as a poetry of self-examination and explores the ways in which he used methods common to psychoanalysis and other forms of psychotherapy in his poetry. Although he was never psychoanalyzed in a strictly Freudian sense, Lowell spent many years in psychotherapy. Wallingford stresses not the pathological aspects of Lowell’s work, however, but rather his lifelong process of self–examination, a process with ethical as well as psychological dimensions. She links this process to the tradition of self–scrutiny that Lowell inherited from his New England Puritan ancestors.

Through close readings of the poetry and of unpublished drafts of several poems as well as letters from Lowell to George Santayana, Allen Tate, and his cousin Harriet Winslow, Wallingford treats Lowell’s use of specific psychoanalytic techniques: free association, repetition, concentration on the relation between the poet and the “other” to whom he addresses himself, and the use of memory to probe the past. The book considers as well the role the narrative plays in these psychoanalytic and poetic techniques.

Lowell believed firmly in the identity of self and language — “one life, one writing” — and this study brings us closer to an understanding both of the poet and of his dense and moving poetry. It enriches our reading of Lowell’s poetry by calling attention to the ways in which his poetic techniques are analogous to and to some extent derived from psychoanalytic techniques — techniques that have in our time become integrated into our culture as a whole.

Originally published in 1988.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition — UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

1

A Poetry of Association

IN A LETTER he wrote in 1949 to George Santayana in Rome, Robert Lowell describes a process of thought that sounds remarkably like the psychoanalytic technique of free association:

Dear Mr. Santayana:

I was just nodding and I saw an image of a fat, yellowish dog receding down the center of a country road—the center was grass and the ruts clam-shells; so much for flux.

I had hoped to send you a book of my poems as a sort of Christmas present; but no. One thing written brings up another—somewhat as the dog-image. Should one shut these things out? It seems safer to let them come, take one’s time, to be helpless….

Vocation is love, I think: for beauty, or the Muses, or what you wish…. Now at 31 it’s just there—I can’t send it away for long or find alternatives. There’s the power side, the making side, the craft one learns. But now I am struck by the other, the powerless—powerless, when it does not come; most of all powerless, when it does, like the dog taking you God knows where!¹

When Lowell pays attention to images that pop into his mind unbidden like the yellow dog, when he determines not to “shut these things out” but to “let them come,” when he asserts his willingness to follow along as the dog takes him “God knows where,” he might well be describing what Jacques Lacan has called “the forced labour of this discourse without escape, on which the psychologist (not without humour) and the therapist (not without cunning) have bestowed the name of ‘free association.’”² Free association is a “forced labour” indeed, because in order to sneak through the bars of repression and gain access to the unconscious, a subject must be willing, in Freud’s words, to “entirely renounce any critical selection … and say whatever comes into his head,” to follow his associations wherever they lead, no matter how unpleasant such a process may be.³

If we can judge by a prose piece written while he was a student at Harvard, Lowell seems always to have been willing to submit himself to the uncontrolled flow of associational thinking:

Sometimes, when we are in disorder, every pinprick and scraping blade of grass magnifies. A pebble rolls into the Rock of Gibraltar. I got a sunstroke regarding the gardener mow the lawn. He dumped matted green grass into a canvas bag and emptied the bag into a rut pond behind a clump of shrubbery. … I watched him dump grass on the surface where there ought to have been frogs. I smelled the odor of dried verdure in my sleep; tons of it, wet and lifeless, floating and stifling. At morning the grass tide rose up gruesome.⁴

This sketch develops into an impression of the ominous “Nether World or antideluvian scene; shimmer of shiners, floating logs and submerged shadows” that we discussed in connection with Lowell’s attraction to things of the sea. Later, in a draft of a piece he then called “The Balanced Aquarium,” Lowell described the strong pull of the submarine, what we may interpret as the unconscious breaking through into consciousness:

One morning in July of 1954 I sat brooding by the open door of my bedroom on the third floor of the Payne-Whitney Clinic….

… I counted the tiers of metal-framed windows, and in their place I imagined … a wall bedizened with sparkling new tessalation, thousands of molasses-golden lions rampant on blue tiles. In my mind the tiles were as blue as sky yet I was unable to prevent their glowing from time to time with the lurid, self-advertising, chlorinated blue-green of an indoor swimming pool. Brick by brick, and white block by block, I was myself as if building this hospital like a child.⁵

Throughout his career, Lowell would build his poetry out of just such an interplay between the conscious and the unconscious, using free association not necessarily with any specific intention, but rather because, as the prose pieces and the letter to Santayana demonstrate, it was natural for him to think in this way. Meanwhile, other poets were using free association more self-consciously. Lowell wrote his letter to Santayana before the poet’s notable reading tour in California, when he was exposed to Allen Ginsberg and other members of the Beat school. Unlike Lowell, these poets used free association as a deliberate means of writing poetry; indeed, according to Deanna Silberman, “Ginsberg’s theory of composition … is built on the Freudian idea of revealing the unconscious self through the technique of association.”⁶ Ginsberg names Blake and Whitman among his predecessors, but the “biggest influence,” he said, was “Kerouac’s prose.”⁷ Jack Kerouac’s prose, with its echoes of William Carlos Williams, both describes and at times demonstrates a technique based not on “ ‘selectivity’ of expression but following free deviation (association) of mind.”⁸ This method of writing relies heavily upon habits of mind of the sort that Lowell reveals in his prose pieces and in his letter, upon a willingness to concentrate on the yellow dog and to follow it, to begin, in Kerouac’s inimitable words, “not from preconceived idea of what to say about image but from jewel center of interest in subject of image at moment of writing, and write outwards swimming in sea of language to peripheral release and exhaustion.”⁹

The Beat poets were not the only writers who deliberately and self-consciously focused their attention on psychoanalytic methods such as free association. Surrealism may be said to have begun with this experience of André Breton:

It was in 1919, in complete solitude and at the approach of sleep, that my attention was arrested by sentences, more or less complete, which became perceptible to my mind without my being able to discover (even by meticulous analysis) any possible previous volitional effort. One evening in particular, as I was about to fall asleep, I became aware of a sentence articulated clearly. … I am unable at this distance to remember the exact sentence, but it ran something like this: “A man is cut in half by the window.” What made it clearer was the fact that it was accompanied by a feeble visual representation of a man in the process of walking, but cloven, at half his height, by a window perpendicular to the axis of his body. … Preoccupied as I still was with Freud, and familiar with his methods of investigation, which I had practiced occasionally on the sick during the war, I resolved to obtain for myself what one seeks to obtain from patients, namely a monologue poured out as rapidly as possible, over which the subject’s critical faculty has no control—the subject himself throwing reticence to the winds—and which as much as possible represents “spoken thought.”¹⁰

Freud says that in the freely associating subject we see “the establishment of a psychical state which, in its distribution of psychical energy … bears some analogy to the state before falling asleep.”¹¹ The reader will have noticed that Breton, like Lowell in his letter to Santayana, is reporting an occurrence that took place as he was on the verge of sleep. Both Breton and Lowell report images that spring into the mind unbidden, and both commit themselves to following the image along the path of associations. This experience led Breton to define surrealism in 1924 as the “dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations”; surrealism “rests in the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association neglected heretofore”—which is to say, in free association rather than reason or logic. And the aim of surrealism is to unite exterior reality with that interior reality that we apprehend through free association.¹²

It would not be quite correct to call Lowell a surrealist; he was a careful craftsman and a tireless, even obsessive reviser, whereas the surrealists prided themselves on their spontaneity and made a point of not revising their work (or at least professed not to revise—one wonders whether they would sneak in a change now and then to heighten an effect). But Lowell’s willingness to follow the yellow dog into his unconscious led him from time to time to write poetry that he himself described as surrealistic in the “Afterthought” to Notebook 1967–68:

I lean heavily to the rational, but am devoted to surrealism. A surrealist might not say, “The man entered a house,” but “The man entered a police-whistle,” or … make some bent generalization: “Weak wills command the gods.” Or more subtly, words that seem right, though loosely in touch with reason: “Saved by my anger from cruelty.” Surrealism can degenerate into meaningless clinical hallucinations, or worse into rhetorical machinery, yet it is a natural way to write our fictions.

The reader of Notebook, particularly if she tries to read the volume as a whole rather than to browse haphazardly among the individual sonnets, may well become impatient; some of the less successful poems indeed seem to “degenerate into meaningless clinical hallucinations, or worse into rhetorical machinery.” For the most part, however, whatever Lowell is doing, it seems to work. In the “Afterthought” to the revised Notebook, Lowell changed the word “surrealism” to “unrealism” and counterbalanced his warning about its dangers with the affirmation that “the true unreal is about something, and eats from the abundance of reality.” Alan Williamson describes how the successful surrealistic poems work in Notebook: they “turn … to the unruliness of the moment, showing us how many separate strands of sensation it contains, how weirdly the mind shuttles between them and its own equally abrupt and mysterious patterns of fantasy-thought. Lowell struggles … to deliver the feeling, if not the literal contents, of a basic mind-flux.”¹³ The poems show us, in other words, how free association feels.

Consider “Long Summer 3” (N 25), the third in a sequence of fifteen sonnets.¹⁴ Lowell begins by evoking in the reader the feeling of the state he describes:

Months of it, and the inarticulate mist so thick

we turned invisible to one another

across the room …

Months of what? The preceding poem, ending with the im...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: A Poetry of Self-Examination
• 1. A Poetry of Association
• 2. A Poetry of Repetition
• 3. A Poetry of Relation
• 4. A Poetry of Memory
• Afterword: The Language of the Self
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Permissions
• Index