Manic power: Robert Lowell and his circle

Manic Power: Robert Lowell and His Circle

PAGE THROUGH this book about five poets (Lowell, Berryman, Jarrell, Roethke, Plath) and what you'll almost never find on exhibition is poetry (you know, lines with uneven right margins: just what justifies their claim on our attention). Swept together by some tidy janitor, Mr. Meyer's samplings of his subjects' verse would sit neatly on a single page.

That may be just as well, since when he does quote he saps confidence. Thus Randall Jarrell, he tells us, was a poet who had mental breakdowns and so wrote about Freud. And "Though Freud was not mentioned in 'Deutsch Durch Freud,' Jarrell used him to justify his refusal to learn German. For he believed with Freud that the sympathetic imagination acts more powerfully in the unconscious than in the conscious mind, that he could translate more effectively with intuition than with intellect: A feeling in the Dark Brings worlds, brings words, that hard-eyed Industry And all the schools' dark Learning never knew."

Well, let's see. "Deutsch Durch Freud": that twist on the slogan Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) should hint that we're entering a playful poem. As we are; and one clear thing about it is that its speaker, like many a tourist, knows a good deal of German--he embeds some 75 German words in the text--but not enough for confidence. (He imagines asking a German physician if he's dying, only to have his grammar corrected.) he reads Rilke, it's clear, and Heine, both of them with pleasure. No, not an excuse for refusing to learn German. Rather than Freud, we might remember Eliot, on his undergraduate pleasure in a Dante he could only haltingly translate. "Deutsch Durch Freud"--not the best of poems, even of Jarrell's--does deserve being read for what it says: about Language and Poetry, not about the unconscious. But really, poetry isn't a Meyers metier.

No, his metier is pathology. Manic Power fulfills the promise of The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis, where the fullest meditations I know of on the urinary tract of a man of genius comport with nescience on the necessities that drove his art. Hear now its author's crisp words on Greek Though: "The Greek idea of the deranged artist found expression in the Ion, Where Plato equated poetic power with a state of divinely inspired insanity: 'the authors of the those great poems which we admire . . . create . . . in a state of divine insanity.'" (It's unwise, by the way, to cite Plato via the translation of Shelley, whose "Defense of Poetry" should alert you to his take in unreason.)

But (hubris!) he's next unlucky in pointing us to The Greeks and the Irrational by E. R. Dodds, a little time with which may reassure us that loony-bin madness wasn't at all what Plato had in mind. (From Plato's Greek word mania the Lidell-Scott Lexicon refers us to mantis, someone in touch with a god.) The god (Dodds is firm about this) gave you information you couldn't otherwise have been privy to; it's for information that homer called to the Muse. And if Democritus--not Plato--promoted the notion of the "frenzied" poet, "set apart from common humanity by an abnormal inner experience," well, says Dodds, "Plato's attitude to these claims was in fact a decidedly critical one."

But the Greeks are but a detail in a relentlessly reductive book, where you take you mind in you hands if you trust its paraphrase of anything. Amid Winchellesque haste to trample all down to lurid derangement, Dylan Thomas even gets aligned with "Eliot's teacher, friend, and opposite: Ezra Pound. Both Pound and Thomas were lyrical, emotional, outrageous, self-indulgent, and mad." And by golly, didn't Lowell, Berryman, and Jarrell make "pilgrimages to Pound when he presided in St. Elizabeth's hospital for the criminally insane"? For "they shared a tender and terrifying kinship." Aha.

Dylan Thomas and Ezra Pound! not only could you not mistake three lines of either for the other, Thomas was boorish and drunken and could urinate on rugs, Pound a seldom drinker whose manners were impeccable. ("Since you are younger and more vigorous than I, perhaps you will not mind if I sit here"--it's typical that the first words I heard him speak were contained in a subordinate clause.)

Let me shorten this. i knew pound; and what he preached, both in St. Elizabeths (no apostrophe, please) and out of it, was the opposite of self-indulgence; it was craft, and you obligation to visit the great men of your own time, and the need to get your facts right. I knew Lowell too. If Pound's "madness" was juridically assigned, Lowell's was biochemical. The last two times i saw Lowell (in Ohio for two hours; briefly over coffee in a Cambridge, Mass., cafe) the decline from the man I'd enjoyed in the Fifties was shocking. Zombified by the thorazine that did at least let him walk streets, he'd utter vacuities in a tone that hoped you'd endorse a trenchant new insight. I could make this appallingly vivid if I could remember what a single one of them was. That I cannot is the saddest thing I can find to say about the last state of Cal Lowell.