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Pity the Monsters: The Political Vision of Robert Lowell. By Alan Williamson. Yale University Press. £5. $10.00.

THE PROLIFERATION of scholarly studies devoted to living authors is a dreary phenomenon, promoting as it does the claims of pure academic criticism at the expense of a more engaged, less consciously ‘professional’ mode of discourse. Authors still in the midst of their careers are becoming hostages to the Ph.D. system, which subjects them to the rigours of explication de texte, itself all that is left of the New Criticism. Most of these books are undistinguished, and I can’t imagine who reads them. It seems that only in turning to a writer’s own contemporaries or active practitioners of his art does one find genuine criticism; perhaps competition alone can elicit the keenest intelligence.

     In the case of Robert Lowell, several dispiriting books have so far appeared, none of which have anything in common with Alan Williamson’s new study; for his Pity the Monsters is a work of original, imaginative clarification, full of brilliant argument and dense with intuition. Apart from John Berryman’s commentary on ‘Skunk Hour’ and Randall Jarrell’s review of Lord Weary’s Castle, Williamson’s is the most sympathetic (in the sense of affinity no less than praise) evaluation we have of Lowell, and by far appeared, none of which has anything in common with Alan thorough and elaborate that one often suspects them of being more realized than the poems themselves; so taken is he with the ambiguities implicit in all of Lowell’s work, the complex modulations of his many poetic voices, that Williamson often abandons the scrupulous examination of a poem for exhilarating speculations about its deepest social meanings.

     There are, of course, risks involved in such speculations; in this instance, though, the poems invite them, require that even their most subliminal content be explored. We have become accustomed now to reading contemporary imaginative literature as autobiography; it is a habit of mind that works of supposedly deliberate artifice like Lord Weary’s Castle induce in us no less than Life Studies, if only because authors can no longer depend on being shielded by literary convention from the inclement climate of psychoanalysis. To follow such a course leads easily to the sort of insinuation and veiled gossip that vitiates Philip Cooper’s book on The Autobiographical Myth of Robert Lowell. Alan Williamson, while establishing necessary connections between Lowell’s poems and what is known of his personal life, does so only to plot the nature and origins of those conflicts which provide a unified motif in the span of Lowell’s work. This he has accomplished with remarkable tact, calling as much on Lowell’s literary sources (Jonathan Edwards, Marvell, the many Biblical analogues) as on the specifically biographical, so that his book provides both textual exegesis and sudden inspirations. Lowell’s poetry demands the latter; only flights of invention combined with a sort of grand architectonic view of human history can really hope to exhaust his virtual infinitude of nuance.

     Williamson’s organizing notion, stated at the very beginning, is to mean by political ‘the collective shaping of human destiny — ranging from the pressure of a family on an anarchic individual to the cumulative action of almost the entire human race in the current crisis of technology and ecology’. Well, he certainly gives himself sufficient latitude to say what he wants; and yet there is a thematic principle at work in Pity the Monsters, one that advances parallel to Lowell’s own development. In its most generalized form, this principle could be identified as a mediation between the properties of our mental world, imagination, will, desire, and the manner in which these properties impose themselves on reality. Put another way, it is the rude, urgent impulses of the unconscious that direct us toward our inevitable, biologically determined actions; in even the collective sense, ‘character is fate’.

     All of this Williamson documents in his long chapter on Lord Weary’s Castle, which here receives the most intimate, comprehensive discussion I know of; to him it seems ‘as deeply and rewardingly personal a book as Life Studies’, an opinion he persuasively puts forward by looking to the poems’ hidden motives more than to their overt religious material. In this way, ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’ discloses an obsession with guilt and human violence, a ‘new stress on Darwinian inevitabilities’, and a ‘Faustian drive to know and control of the fundamental causes of the material world’. Such interpretive strategies, and a (for once in literary criticism) judicious use of Freud, allow him to propose that Lowell’s Catholicism seems involved in the desire to see the world reshaped by the force of his visions’; this, to Williamson, is the most notable feature of Lowell’s greatness, for it implies some nearly talismanic power over otherwise intransigent reality.

     From Lord Weary’s Castle, he turns to Life Studies, about which he has much of interest to say; hut these poems have been so assimilated into recent literary consciousness that no discussion of them could hope to be very startling. It is in the following chapter, on For the Union Dead, that Williamson’s most concentrated, eloquent remarks occur. Using for illumination Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death. Williamson amplifies Lowell’s already devastating evocations of apocalypse and the spiralling alienation of man from the natural world to arrive at a profound gloss of the poem’s concluding stanzas:

Protected from the knowledge of his animality and mortality by the spurious permanence and orderliness of the machine-world, man becomes not only more powerful, but also more dangerous, because he is spared direct responsibility: he is so shielded from the horror of reality that he can not only commit the Hiroshima bombing, but then use it to advertise a safe.

This ability to move from Lowell’s metamorphic statements (in lines so well-known that we tend to blur their import) toward generalizing ideas of great power is rare in criticism; to succeed in it requires both feeling and audacity.

     These qualities show themselves to particular advantage in the chapters on Near the Ocean and Notebook, where Williamson’s appraisals are more controversial and demand persuasion. Both these books drew considerable criticism, from which perhaps only the polemical energies of an openly partisan reader can extricate them. Williamson, convinced that Near the Ocean ‘cannot ultimately fail to be recognized as a major poem’, alternates between the notation of his own responses, stated with restraint, and a sustained hermeneutics, in which the poems’ deliberations over change and stasis, political chaos and individual experience, are explored. For one who feels, as I do, that Near the Ocean is not a wholly successful book, Williamson’s argument is valuable, for it involves no less than a revaluation of Lowell’s entire work, in which each successive innovation represents the further development of a single enterprise: to articulate ‘the power and brutality, the discontent, the helpless participation in sweeping historical forces that he knows about concretely and can give a particular artistic shape’.

     Williamson’s critical faculties are taxed even more in his defence of Notebook, if only because its virtues are less evident than those of Lowell’s earlier works. Here Williamson is least effective, and must resort to emphasizing the ‘bardic’ character of the poem, placing it rather tenuously in a tradition of Blakean visionary politics. Such a solution is not entirely satisfactory, given the overly self-revelatory tendencies of Notebook; and it leads Williamson to some fanciful, even banal and laboured justifications.

     Still, the great value of Pity the Monsters resides in its unified argument, the creative intensity and purposiveness with which its author has elucidated the genuine grandeur of Lowell’s career. Perhaps the most convincing sign of its success is that it sends us inevitably back to the poems themselves, and with a new sense of their urgent, pitiless truth.