In today’s New York Times, Christopher Isherwood reviews Dear Elizabeth, a play by Sarah Ruhl that tracks the friendship (mostly epistolary) of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. Isherwood writes something near the end of his review that caught my attention: “Both writers could be viewed as superficially successful, becoming celebrated poets, if on different scales.” He doesn’t elaborate—but the implication, I guess, is that Lowell’s achievement was the more celebrated one, on balance. And that was surely true, during the time of their correspondence; but it isn’t true now. Bishop is nearly inescapable in undergraduate and graduate workshops these days; one has the feeling that without “One Art” or “The Fish” the entire helping-young-people-to-write-poetry enterprise would collapse. I’ve taught both poems in my own workshop this semester, along with “The Sandpiper” and a few others. Like everyone, I love Bishop.
But I also love Lowell, whose celebrity (and audience) is on the wane. By odd coincidence, I had planned to write something about Lowell today, on the anniversary of his and John Berryman’s 1963 joint reading at the Guggenheim Museum. The friendship of Lowell and Berryman was marked (more so than that of Lowell and Bishop) by a kind of rivalry. When Robert Frost died in early 1963, Berryman asked, “Who’s number one? Who’s number one? Cal is number one, isn’t he?” (Berryman had hoped to be corrected in this judgment. “Cal” was Lowell’s nickname—short for Caliban, and Caligula.) In the recording of the Guggenheim reading, it’s fascinating to hear both the affection (mostly on Lowell’s part) and the guardedness (mostly on Berryman’s part) that the two display. Berryman was reading, for the first time in public, from The Dream Songs—the poems he believed would help him claw himself (eventually?) to the top of the poetry heap. (From Stanley Kunitz’s introduction to Berryman that evening: “For several years he has been a kind of underground poet, the kind you hear digging, at work on a sequence that I can only describe as indescribable.”) Two months earlier, he had mailed Robert Giroux sixty of the Songs, adding in a note that it was “not the poem, of course. But a heavy proportion of what so far is best in it. I don’t count on collecting any fame from these sixty pages but I shn’t be surprised if some of them proved more or less immortal.”
Only that! Immortality! Well, who can say. But just as Bishop has (currently) passed Lowell in the posthumous race to the summit, Berryman has done so, as well. (There may be some disagreement on the latter point. See David Wojahn’s 2005 essay in Blackbird.) The Dream Songs has gotten under our collective skin, and what Lowell wrote about the series in The New York Review of Books over fifty years ago—“This great Pierrot’s universe is more tearful and funny than we can easily bear”—feels even more true today. But Lowell’s universe still has the ability to work its hold on us, as well. From “For the Union Dead”: “The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere, / giant finned cars nose forward like fish; / a savage servility / slides by on grease.” From “Skunk Hour” (for Elizabeth Bishop): “I myself am hell; / nobody’s here—”
I had originally planned to transcribe some of the Guggenheim reading—Lowell’s gracious asides, Berryman’s comic half-mumblings and grumblings—but it’s getting late in the day, and holiday preparations beckon. Anyway, do yourself a great favor and listen to the part of the reading that’s available online: Berryman’s opening dig at Lowell (“I’m going to ignore Mr. Lowell’s remarks, umm . . . he seems to have constituted himself this evening as sort of a cheering section”), Berryman’s botched trick-or-treat joke (which doubles as a lesson in diction), Berryman’s “Dream Song 29” (with that shouted “But” at the 33:48 mark). It’s probably my favorite reading in the history of the world. It’s also frightening.
Happy Halloween.
