0 1 ,AqW w« 4 "LIFE STUDIES":* Robert Lowell Enters His Own Distinct Idiom By RUSS GREGORY LIFE STUDIES, by Robert Lowell. Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. New York. 1959. 90 pages. $3.50. ROBERT LOWELL is regarded as the outstanding American poet under fifty. "Life Studies," his new book, is a brilliant explanation of why he is so highly rated: he has not only talent, which is fairly common, but the genius to change, a quality which demands new praises. His new book reveals an altered man from the gifted poet of "Lord Weary's Castle" (1947) and "The Mills of the Kavanaughs" (1951). When "Lord Weary's Castle" ap- peared (after a first, privately- printed volume) and won the Pulitzer Prize, Lowell achieved a considerable fame, not all related to his poetry. Life magazine, for example, published a photographic essay on Lowell. A descendant of a great Amer- ican family (a Boston Lowell, re- lated to Amy, James Russell, A. Lawrence, and seven or eight earlier generations of "Mayflower / screwballs"), who criticized and damned Boston and New England (there is a great difference), em- braced Roman Catholicism, who did not graduate from Harvard College-all this was a Life-Time dream. The"Lowell of "Lord Weary's Castle" was angry, hurt, strident of tone, and devout with the peculiar Puritan fervor which seems reserved to Roman con- verts: "I walk upon the flood: j My way is wayward, there is no way out: Now how the weary waters swell,- The tree is down in blood: All the bats of Babel flap about The rising sun of hell ." I mOXEEs Specia ity\ .,{ fho W 7,0 I LOWELL'S poems are gnarled, knotty and, in complexity of rhyme, diction and metrics, re- vealed a conscious craftsman who had not always unlearned enough G. M. Hopkins or, in "The Mills," one who had learned too much Browning. But there was no doubt that Robert Lowell was a real poet Critics called him "a genuine, formidable, various and active poet . . . a talent whose ceiling is invisible," with a "moral earnest- ness operating in intense con- scious activity." "Life Studies" is both fruition of Lowell's previous lines of de- velopment and a new departure in an idiom distinctly his own. The eight years between "The Mills of the Kavanaughs" and "Life Studies" are a parallel to the changes Yeats accomplished be- tween 1904 and 1914: where Yeats left the soft aestheticism of the 'nineties to write major poetry of a new order, Lowell has left the perverse, whimpering didacticism which passes for orthodox mod- ernity to grapple with his own muse: "For there's more enterprise / In walking naked." What sharpens the parallel of Lowell to Yeats is Lowell's auto- biographical prose piece, "91 Re- vere Street," in this new book (it was.in 1914 that Yeats published the first of his Autobiographies, "Reveries over Childhood and Youth"). It seems apparent that at a similar point both ,men passed through an initial engagement to a movement and set of attitudes, only to find what they had avoided, coming to grips with the self, contained the only truths they were likely to find-in poetry or out. And Lowell, like Yeats, writes superb prose; one has the feeling that it is almost too good. The years since "The Mills" have brought to Lowell a detachment which precludes repudiation of his earlier poems; they stand as valid -for their time. Where he once appeared to resent and deny his heritage as a curse, he now seems to regard it and all its cumulative weight with a humorous, ironical, but not unkindly eye: COUSINCASSIE only became a close relation in 1922. In that year she died. After some un- pleasantness between Mother and a co-heiress, Helen Bailey, the estate was divided. Mother used to return frozen and thrilled from her property disputes, and I, know- ing nothing of the rights and wrongs, would half-perversely con- fuse Helen Bailey with Helen of Troy and harden my mind against the monotonous' parti pris of Mother's voice. "Shortly after our move to Bos- ton in 1924, a score of unwanted Myers portraits was delivered to our house on Revere Street. These were later followed by 'their dowry'--four moving vans groan- Russell Gregory received his B. A. in English from the, University. ing with heavy Edwardian furni-1 ture. My father began to receive his first quarterly payments from the Mason - Myers Julian - Jamesj Trust Fund, sums 'not grand enough to corrupt us,' Mother ex- plained, 'but sufficient to prevent Daddy from being entirely at the mercy of his salary.' The i TrustI sufficed: our lives became tan- talized with possibilities, and my father felt encouraged to take* the risk-a small one in those boom: years-of resigning from the Navy on the gamble of doubling his in- come in business." But it is in poetry that Lowell has accomplished most. His four portrait-poems on Ford Madox Ford, .George Santayana, Delmore Schwartz and Hart Crane, are' acutely appropriate to their sub-1 Sects. They are perceptive criticisml and, consequently, moving elegies. These are clearly writers for whom! Lowell has a gentle, human ad-j miration, orthodoxy or heresy not- withstanding. In "For George San- tayana" Lowell writes -- "In the. heydays of 'forty-five bus-loads of souvenir- deranged G.I.'s and officer-professors of philosophy came crashing through your cell, puzzled to find you still alive, free-thinking Catholic infidel, stray spirit, who'd found the Church too good to be believed. Later I used to dawdle past Circus and Mithraic Temple to Santo Stefano grown paper-thin' like you from waiting. . . There at the monastery hospital, you wished those geese-girl sisters wouldn't bother their heads and yours by praying for your soul: 'There is no God and Mary is His Mother'" . -a kind of poetry that suggests he has looked again at William. Carlos Williams' metrical magic, that he has earned, at no small suffering, to ask Ought I to regret my seedtime? I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O., and made my manic statement, telling off the state and president, and then sat waiting sentence in the bull pen beside a Negro boy with curlicues of marijuana in his hair." AND, AT NO LESS sacrifice, to answer himself with the lines, "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-" which comments strikingly on the V 4JGU l' l.AiJC 4-O'1 h.l r t I "* . brilliant sonnet, "Words for Hart Crane": "When the Pulitzers showered on some dope or screw who flushed our dry mouths out with soap, few peoplewould consider why I took to stalking sailors, and scattered Uncle Sam's phoney gold-plated laurels to the birds. Because I knew my Whitman like a book, stranger in America, tell my country; I, Catullus redivivus, once the rage of the Village and Paris, used to play my role of homosexual, wolfing the stray lambs who hungered by the Place de la Concorde. -My profit was a pocket with a hole. Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age, must lay his heart out for my bed and board." The Lowell of "Lord Weary's Cas- tle" would not have written that poem. The last group of fifteen poems gives the book its title. Here, more forcefully than before, one ad- mits the parallel between Yeats and Lowell, for who else has suc- ceeded in this century in both co- ceiving and executing a poem in the grand manner? With a bare simplicity of self that lacks self- consciousness, with counter-point- ed and crossed rhythms, in a language that is the colloquial transfigured until the simplest words take on a rare luminous qdality, Lowell's "My Last After- noon with Uncle Devereux Wins- low" bears comparsion with Yeats' "Ancestral Houses." "My Last Afternoon" is surer- handed than the earlier "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket," and far more beautiful. It has an ease and precision which proclaim a poet who sees history as some- thing contained and summed up in himself, a poet whose art is high without inflation and is carefully sustained through a long poem. ", .. I was five and a half. My formal pearl gray shorts had been worn for three minutes. * , * My Uncle was dying at twenty-nine. 'You are behaving like children,' said my Grandfather, when my Uncle and Aunt left their three baby daughters, and sailed for Europe on a last honeymoon I cowered in terror. J wasn't a child at all-- unseen and all-seeing, I was Agrippina in the Golden House of Nero. .. (Concluded on Page 15) Clairvoyance (Continued from Page 2) dreaming of a relative at the mo- ment that relative is dying and all fail to tell a competent witness of the dream before learn- ing of the actual death. Only. 80 letters could be en- dorsed as "worth following up," Mrs. Dale said, and the follow-up. conducted through correspond- ence, reduced the number to 20. If only eight or 10 viable accounts turn up in a year, the Society be- lieves it has accomplished some- thing, she continued, because through the accumulation of in- formation from similar societies throughout the world considerable information is gained. These phenomena have been classed by most as 'strange' and then completely discounted as a hoax. However, Dr. J. B. Rhine of Duke University has conducted scientific research on the out- posts of consciousness. His find- ings have "established proof that Jnan is something more than a physical being - not, therefore, dependent wholly upon his human brain and physical senses for his perception, knowledge and devel- opment," a pamphlet published by the Virginia Beach organiza- tion said. Can these phenomena be true? Onec an nnlv wnnder - . By THOMAS TURNER " WANT To Live in America," Manhattan - dwelling Puerto Ricans sing in Broadway's "West Side Story." And in real life, half a million Puerto Ricans have come to this country. But the traffic is two-way, and ones who return have transplanted to booming Puerto Rico one of west-side New York's biggest headaches: teenage gangs and in- creasing juvenile crime. , Walls in every section of San Juan, the island's capital, bear evidence of the gangs' existence. They've used stores, residences, schools and even churches to mark off their "territories" with their signatures in paint. The Lions, The Viceroys, The Nomads, The Diggers, The Cos- sacks, The Daltons and so on. THIS widespread painting is re- cent, according to San Juan residents, having developed in the last year or so. And the startling upswing in juvenile crime as a whole has occurred in the same period.- In fiscal 1956-57, police inter- vened in 3,292 cases involving mi- nors (under 18 years old). In 1957- 58, the total rocketed to 8,167. Better than a third of these Thomas Turner, a re ident of Puerto Rico, describes the transplanting of New York's juvenile delinquency problem to that small southern island. Turner is acting editor of The Michigan Daily. Puerto Rico's TE Caribbean Island Combats 'West Side Story's' Problem cases (38.5 per cent) coricern serious crimes: murder and vo untary homicide, involuntaj homicide, rape, armed robber breaking and entering, theft an automobile theft. CRIME as a whole increas only 16 per cent for the perio the newspaper El Mundo point out in a front-page article in N vember, and at present grow rates, juvenile offenses in the ser bus crime group will "eventual compare with similar crimes con mitted by adults." Police Superintendent Ram Torres Braschi, quoted in the san article, attributed the mushroom ing delinquency rate to "a sicl ness largely produced by the d terioration of our cultural values He said he was rather "preo cupied" than "alarmed" by ti problem, since organizations su as the Children's Commission ar the Police Athletic League we doing such good work in the are Only the next set of police st tistics will provide an adequa basis for substantiating or refu ing the superintendent's cautio optimism. But there are certain factors involved in juvenile d linquency other than those it mediately reparable by you work. For example, the head of t Family Relations Division of t Children's Court in San Juan, r ports that most of those broug before the court are 13-15 yea old, and three-fourths of th do not attend school. SHE POINTED out that this both a cause and an effect ena ge Gangs juvenile delinquency. In some cases the young offenders are not in school because of lack of par- ental concern or because of school crowding, but in other cases be- cause they had been expelled. ed Educational .authorities must l- act to alleviate this situation, she. ry said, but she went on to charac- ry, terize San Juan's juvenile delin- nd quency situation as "not grave." Since these statements last fall, however, 'juvenile crime has con- ;d tinued to increase. Each week the d, newspapers have carried new stor- ed ies of gang activity. o- In November, for example. The th Cossacks and Nomads engaged in ri- a "rumble," or fight with switch ly blades, stones, clubs, and at least m- one revolver. Over 100 youths were reported involved. on The next week, six Nomads were me apprehended outside the juvenile m- home, trying to free three of their ;k- comrades with a hacksaw. e- And in December, the leader of a gang called The Volares was c- shot and killed by a policeman, ;he whom he had attacked with a c1h knife. ,nd re IN BETWEEN such spectacular ea. outbreaks, dozens of lesser in- a- cidents occurred, including at one ate point three stonings of police in t- one week., us Measures taken to fight the ly under-age crime wave have in- G de- cluded expansion of the police m-- force, legislation enabling youths .th to be tried as adults for certain crimes, and a nine o'clock curfew he for youths 14 years old or young- he er. re- Whether or not these measures ht will be sufficient to check Puerto ars Rico's rising juvenile delinquency ese is as yet uncertain. Whatever the outcome of the battle, it is cer- tain that the island Common- is wealth is undergoing real Amer- of ican-style growing pains. rngs mark-off tc ';< : <{ :: .. :: _: Greenwich Village in Its Heyday: The Improper Bohemians \W' .. " " WHITE BONE BLACK . Moxees perfect combination 95 of ingredients for the casual, 7 supreme -- with just a light touch of Italian flavoring . . . to give new excitement to your everyday dash. ing about. FATHER'S DAY GIFTS THE IMPROPER BOHEMIANS: A Recreation of Greenwich Vil- lage in Its Heyday. By Alleni Churchill. Dutton. $5.y LOOKING over the distinguished company occupying the plat- form at National Institute of Arts and Letters ceremonies a year ago, Malcolm Cowley noticed that1 every single person had been atE one time a resident of Greenwich Village. It is with this persuasive ob- servation that Churchill ends his exciting book. But to begin the name-throwing which is an amaz- ing part of his account, he goes back to 1910, the start of the two decades of the Village's heyday. Mrs. Edward Dodge,'who became the friend of the Steins in Flor- ence and today's Mabel Dodge Luhan, lived at 23 Fifth Ave. Among those she entertained were Carl Van Vechten, Jo David- son, Lincoln Steffens, Walter Lippman, Hutchins Hapgood, Max Eastman, Frank Harris, Margaret Sanger, Harry Kemp, Alan Seeger, Amy Lowell, Emma Goldman and Big Bill Haywood. A DECADE or so later, the people who lived on this "Left Bank of the United States" as Churchill rightly calls it included Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, Reginald Marsh, John Sloan, William Glackens, George Luks, Carl Ruggles and Edgardj Varese, who lives there still. John Reed, Mabel Dodge, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eugene O'Neill and Maxwell Bodenheim were the denizens whose lives are told in fullest detail here, and who en- joyed or suffered crucial years in their careers in the shadow of Washington Arch and the neigh- borhood of Washington Square. W. G. Rogers is art editor for The Associated Press. But it was "enjoyed" more than "suffered." Rents were cheap; they drank tea-yes, tea-and ate modestly and danced in the Mad Hatter, Crumperie, Samovar, Black Parrot, Mouse Trap, Pollywooge. And no one had inhibitions. In later years it got rougher; there would be the Village mayor- ess who : danced nude, and the pitiable end of Maxwell Boden- heim. CHURCHILL describes the per- sonal idiosyncracies, the wild parties, the love affairs, the quar- rels, the accomplishments and the failures of a horde of creative and near-creative men and women. They wrote and painted, they lived and loved, they drank, danced and made merry madly. For people who knew the glamorous Village and also for unlucky people who didn't, this is the grand essential book. Robert Frost used to argue, and no doubt still does, that the Vil- lage did not produce, it was sterile. Perhaps it was just a period of incubation. In the pages of this book you do not find Frost, Faulk- ner, Hemingway, Wolfe, even Fitzgerald. Churchill estimates the Village's "two main contributions to Ameri- can culture are to be found in the masses and in the Provincetown Players." Perhaps he might have added the Anderson-Heap Little Review which among other things kept on printing Joyce's "Ulys- ses" almost as fast as the post office burned it up. -W. G. Rogers I ed SIT ORAGE of- BIKES EAST MEETS WEST n an air tied with obi bow ... the bibf II 11 at CAMPUS BIKE and TOY 217 South Main 514 E. Williams NO 3-7125 ....