A Catholic Vision of America
The Mills of the Kavanaughs.
by Robert Lowell.
Harcourt, Brace. 55 pp. $2.50.
The tribe of visionary-poets, especially in English, where imagination must often work against a prudential language, is small. America offers four such poets in Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, and Crane; and of these, only Whitman and Crane have fused the private landscape of biography, its images intense and intimate, with the public landscape of a society, a history. Now Robert Lowell promises a like achievement.
Though more closely linked to the prodigal spirit of Crane than to the bottled anguish or facetiousness of his contemporaries, it is significant that, unlike the earlier American, Lowell has sought religious ribs and struts to moor his work. His secular frame may have been recalcitrant and sometimes inadequate, but Crane never deserted it for anything more sanctified. It is true that modern piety, on its side, has little need of poetry, which is an early and not a late child of the Church. The canon and the liturgy once fixed, the “collective lyric” established, the offspring, abandoned or runaway, is on its own, perhaps patronized, condescended to, even perhaps accepted—as in the case of Hopkins—if recognition has first been found elsewhere. Yet, though not cherished by the Church, modern poetry, outside of America, has sought religion on its own, unwilling to endure a neutral freedom.
But what can poetry seek out in American religion? American Protestantism is, except fitfully, institutional or nominal. Today, Niebuhr, for what he has to serve, draws from the Last Supper of Christian Existentialism in Europe; should sustenance be sought before him, Emerson presents the typical American Protestant spiritual wrestle, a spectacle heart-warming but diffused, and ending too often in Weltschmerz and platitude. And the cultural barrenness of American Catholicism is not at all the result of any question by the Church, “To what serves mortal glory?” American Catholicism is political-devotional, so that the loyal Irish-American Catholic, for instance, has forsworn—or suppressed—the complex intensity of James Connolly for the dourness of De Valera, and the Irish heretic in New York, Chicago, or South Boston has not matched the wrath, the pity of Joyce, who found in Catholicism a significant Satan or a Lucifer, fallen.
But it seems nevertheless that Catholicism, as a religion not dominant in America, shored up in the urban traps and not yet de-plebeianized, can still yield the off-center insight, the creative achievement. Oddly enough, the laud and the damnation have not been sung by South Boston, but by Beacon Hill; for, with the double-sight of the convert, Robert Lowell has seized upon the Catholic anguish in an America that non-Catholics have largely made—or unmade (“Monsieur de Montcalm, on Abraham’s / Bosom, asleep, perceives our world that shams / His New World, lost. . . .”), and has attempted to Americanize Catholicism (“In eighteen hundred, when our farmers saw / John Adams bring their Romish church a bell, / Cast—so the records claim—by Paul Revere”). Both these elements, often contradictory, mark Lowell’s present volume, which is more specifically Catholic than his Pulitzer Prize work, Lord Weary`s Castle (1946).
The title—and longest—poem, “The Mills of the Kavanaughs,” like most of Lowell’s poems, chiefly involves domestic experience. The sweat and stress is familial; the family is the Kavanaughs, Catholics who “came to Maine in the 17th century.” Their spokesman, “in 1943,” is Ann Kavanaugh who, as the program notes inform us, was first adopted by the Kavanaughs, then married to their son, Harry. The poem itself is memorial and summative, a revery by Ann, now widowed, “of her childhood and marriage.” “Addressed to her dead husband . . . a naval officer who was retired after Pearl Harbor,” it is an ambitious attempt to sacramentalize, through intense and integral—not random—symbolism, Ann’s and the Kavanaughs’ experience. Though the theme of this, and most of the poems in this volume, is elegiac, there is no quiescence and no weariness. The agony is legitimate, the resolution with memory and death absolutely convincing. Lowell never fakes. The image of Persephone, whose statue stands near the home of the Kavanaughs, is not invoked pedantically. Persephone’s balance between life and death, her knowledge of the violence that waits, apocalyptically, beneath the living and the dying is Ann’s; the diction and the detail packed within the whip-lash declamation and the staccato COMMENTARY of the lines establish a completely dramatic achievement. And though the drama of each scene is “staged” for us by the poet, and given an explicit décor, Lowell is probably our only poet (except Auden?), who can write description with the best of the novelists. The scenes: Ann’s adoption, her marriage, the return of the broken sailor (“to the ungarnished ruin of your mind / Came the persona of the murderous Saul / in dirty armor”), his death, and the total poem, attempting to redeem, through reconciliation, the going-underground in memory, the “futile dead”—are as solid, as turbulent, as the earth’s crust.
There is only one difficulty here. Lowell tries to weight the domestic, to give it historical density with Ann’s, “Harry, not a thing / Was missing: we were children of a king. / Our people had kept up their herring weirs, / Their rum and logging grants two hundred years, / When Cousin Franklin Pierce was President. . . .”; or later, “He [Harry] died outside the Church / Like Harry Tudor. . . .” The genealogy and the analogy are not phony, or puffed-up, but they seem to patricianize and “Americanize” Ann’s experience arbitrarily. This may only be my personal difficulty (or just non-Mayflower impatience), but I believe it does reflect some of the indigestion of elements in the title poem, for the same block did not present itself in the second poem, “Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid.” “An old man in Concord . . . falls asleep, while reading Vergil, and dreams that he is Aeneas at the funeral of Pallas. . . .” After the evocation of the Virgilian scene, he awakes to recall his uncle’s Civil War death. Such present-past juxtaposition usually serves as the rack on which the closer present is roasted (Eliot) or as a heraldic cross to dignify us with ancestral blessings (Yeats). This poem, however, uses its time planes less conventionally. Nowhere in it do the wheels of recurrence move mechanically. The plains where Aeneas slaughtered are here torn even more by the frightful lies and fitful triumph of war than is the quiet and transfigured coffin scene in which “My Uncle Charles appears / . . . and aunt, / Hearing his colored volunteers parade / Through Concord, laughs, and tells her English maid / To clip his yellow nostril hairs, and fold / His colors on him. . . .”
Impressive as this poem and the title poem are, even more realized, for this reader, was “Thanksgiving’s Over.” The allusionary background is wholly Catholic, un-New England and unhistorical; the mise en scène, Third Avenue, is the least encumbered of any in this volume. The rapture of St. Francis confronts the world in the mind of a mad German-American Catholic girl. And after her death, her “absurd garblings” rattle through her husband’s head in a dream. The agony, however, of this poem, of the title poem, and of “Mother Marie-Therese” (a wonderfully ironic memorial of an abbess drowned at sea) but confirms our question: is it the Catholic vision that measures this New World scene as zero—so that, at least, in the wings, Lowell’s Catholic celebration waits—or is that vision, too, unredeemable? For it is autumn’s hectic that glows within these pages, though so fiercely that the poems are their own redemption.
If he does stand independent of, though not unmoved by, what he describes, Lowell may yet succeed at that point where Whitman and Crane “failed.” Neither Whitman nor Crane was a squared-off self, neither was inhibited from honesty by self-consciousness, but in stretching for the larger scene they did not always succeed, as did Blake, in “setting an other” before them. They were hell-bent for the ego’s epic and not the objectively dramatic. Lowell, on the other hand, has grown more public and intelligible as his language, always colloquial in impact if not in diction, has been subserved to concrete human presences. His technical concern for structure and tight surface has heightened, not blanketed, the specific experience within.
Is that a Catholic experience? Or, rather, is that Catholic experience an adequate or, at least, significant look-out on the American scene? Historically, the quest for an American, and especially a New England, Grail seems a little artificial. Hopkins, for instance, lived in a country where the trauma of Henry the Eighth still lingered; his wrath against the “infidels” was, in some oblique way, natural; and his fellow Catholics had a continuous tradition. But between the Kavanaughs and Third Avenue lie worlds of discontinuity: potato famines, immigration, class—a zealous search for community seems somewhat antiquarian. What Lowell has articulated is superb, immediate poetry. But it exists most vitally, I feel, at its points of tension, in its uprooting, rather than its anchorage. Hopkins, after all, was not only a convert but a “heretic” Scotist among Thomists. Nonconformity is uncongenial socially, but it does keep the eye sharp, unsentimental, and unself-indulgent. Lowell, too, seems most vital when his Catholicism grates against America, and his Catholics against Catholicism (“I . . . wound my cowhorn beads from Dublin on my thumbs, / And ground them. Miserere? Not a sound”).
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