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Robert Lowell's Still Lifes and the Market Economy of the Poetic Profession
In the 1970s, Robert Lowell began to feel financially constrained or insecure. He therefore occasionally meditated on poetic art that would cater to consumerist cravings in the fashion of Dutch seventeenth-century still-life artists and French painters of food such as Chardin and Manet. In his descriptions of dishes and laid tables, Lowell toyed with poetry's ability to construct images of pleasure and obscure the work and procurement mechanisms necessary to obtain these commodities. The poet began to wonder about the market value of such poetically constructed comforts.
However, Lowell was also aware of his dissimilarity to the classical still-life artists. His own attempts at representing foodstuffs are irresolute. Moreover, they are volatile, easily giving in to various reflective moods such as vanitas or ethical ponderings on labor. Almost never can Lowell's poetic still lifes be experienced purely sensually. His lack of enthusiasm for such a commodity poetics helps explain the decline of Lowell's posthumous reputation in the subsequent decades.
In the 1970s Robert Lowell toyed with the idea of shifting to a commodity, alimentary poetics. He became deeply invested in the Dutch still life, following the various modes of this pictorial tradition to an unsuspected degree. The episode eventually reflected his constitutional disinclination to turn outside the self and become more exploratory, epistemological, or radically materialist. That central authoritative self, remembering, reflecting, indulging in irony or sadness, is what compromised his success in still-life aesthetics and what alienated the more avant-garde poets that came in his wake. Lowell's intermittent interest in commodity aesthetics reveals also some facets of his economic life. It thus affords glimpses of the important but neglected "subplot," which Langdon Hammer (2019) noticed, of the famous controversy over the poet's use of his wife Elizabeth Hardwick's letters in The Dolphin that has recently dominated the Lowell criticism. The marital conflict, raising important ethical and gender issues, was aggravated by the economy of proprietary rights to the letters and to the Dolphin sonnets derived from them when both the letters and the sonnets had a real market value while Hardwick and Lowell (2019) obsessed about becoming less comfortable financially. [End Page 463]
"I think poetry is a sort of still-life meant not to run on with, but to gaze at," Robert Lowell observed in a letter to his ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick on August 23, 1975, as he grew more appreciative of the advantages of prose (Hardwick and Lowell 2019, 413). In his oeuvre, one finds several other, more directly skeptical remarks about still life as a visualization of the danger that poetry is exposed to due to its static nature; for instance, late in life he wrote that thankfully his poetry changed and grew over the years—otherwise, it would have been "a still-life, the pilgrimage of a zombie" (Lowell 2003, 992). It can therefore come as a surprise that in the early 1970s, the poet occasionally contemplated engaging still-life aesthetics very literally as he thought he had found himself in a financial tight spot.
Can a poet cater to consumerist desires by producing vivid representations of food? This was a question that Lowell half-whimsically turned over in his mind when he felt strapped for cash and consequently confronted the economic feasibility of his poetic vocation. In 1972 he was finishing a triad of books—For Lizzie and Harriet, History, and The Dolphin—in an effort, partly, to offset his dwindling income from royalties. In those volumes, which share many themes and motifs,1 he also sometimes asks whether he could write poems of commodity display, as in still life; whether his poetry—in terms of its production and consumption—could be reconnected to, or reconciled with, the mainstream capitalist perception of life and the construction of experience.
The idea of representational arts advancing the illusion of commodities had its history, which must have been familiar to Lowell. We know that, in general, his poetic art derived from his early interest in painting and was periodically inspired by it.2 In particular, he was captivated by the seventeenth-century art of Antwerp, Bruges, and Amsterdam, where still-life figured greatly, albeit less so in the work of his favorite Dutch masters, Vermeer and Rembrandt (Hamilton 1979, C939/35, Part 1; interview by Elizabeth Hardwick).3 However, it appears that in the 1970s, Lowell contemplated how market-stall and still-life canvases in the Flemish and Dutch Baroque tradition had realigned art and the market. They had become commodities themselves—in Julie Hochstrasser's account (2007, 274)—by making groceries intensely present and permanent: the paintings delivered them "as if by magic," by leaving out all the work, commerce, and human effort necessary for their procurement. The poet was also aware of the continuation of this tradition in the latter half of the nineteenth century in an [End Page 464] increasingly materialist, consumerist France. The genre of still life was then rehabilitated, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779) reappraised, and Édouard Manet (1832–1883) lionized.4
Working in verse, Lowell must have also been thinking in terms of poiesis, the art of poetry as making. As is widely known, at the close of the sixteenth century Sir Philip Sidney argued (in his Apology for Poetry) that poetry should not lose its validity in the coming age of Puritanism, because poetry, unlike philosophy or history, can make the world of religious transcendence tangible and therefore worth striving for—it is capable of setting forth by verbal fiat what Sidney called the "golden" world of "pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers" (2002, 85). These textual delights were as palatable to austere Puritans as they were to conspicuous consumers at the Elizabethan court. Poetry can even emulate other mimetic arts, he wrote, like that of the Greek artist Zeuxis, the illusionist and trompe l'oeil painter whose images of grapes, in Pliny the Elder's account, were pecked at by birds (50). This sentiment—that the textual can produce material values—has had many expressions that can be traced into the twentieth century, though its religious dimension has faded. Modern examples would include—as Michel Delville (2008, 10–33) has amply demonstrated—the avant-garde experimental depictions of viands by Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, or Robert Bly. They all sought new modes of representing comestibles so that they would become nonemblematic but lifelike and materialized (Delville 2008, 3).
Most important, the representation of tasteful victuals was not remote from Lowell's confessional practice. His remark that poetry is "a sort of still-life" points to an affinity between the classical confessional representation of life and still life's representation of reality. Axelrod shows in detail how Lowell's inventories of everyday objects, depictions of material environment, are "structures of experience" personally and deeply felt, both expressed and performed in poems (1978, 4). Perloff similarly argued that confessionalism, from Life Studies through Notebook 1967–68, is the manifestation of the Romantic "I" combined with Tolstoyan/Chekhovian realistic description of physical reality consisting of extended metonymies of the self (1999, 75–77).5 The review of inanimate objects in "Father's Bedroom" in Life Studies for example—"blue dots on the curtains, / a blue kimono, / Chinese sandals with blue plush straps"—metonymize Lowell's yearning for his father as well as his scorn for Bob Lowell's weakness and his lack of side.6 In a related way, Dutch imagery of victuals and [End Page 465] table accessories were metonymic substitutes for a new consumerist imagination and pride in national agriculture, Dutch trade turning international, and new modern aspiration, if also troubled by worries of death, guilt, and transgression. In Lowell's later more sober confessionalism, where descriptions have lost some of their metonymic intensity, the everyday objects continue to be recognized as in still life painting. According to Nikki Skillman (2016), after Lowell was put on lithium, starting from Notebook 1967–68, he developed a diaristic, non-imaginative, non-subjective aesthetic. His conviction that he entered a new era of sanity translated itself into inventories of inanimate objects and detritus, as in "Long Summer 8": "The shore is pebbled with eroding brick / … / sticks of dead rotten wood in drifts, the fish / with missing eyes, or heel-print on the belly" (Lowell 1969, 8). The imagery of rot, death, and disregard certainly relates to his own fears at the time, but the emotional investment is not as great as in the father poems of Life Studies.
While still-life aesthetics permeates much of Lowell's poetic writing, this essay will explore a very specific type of still life to be found only in a specific moment of his career. Accumulated evidence shows that in the 1970s Lowell, too, began to contemplate harnessing poetic art to illusions that satisfied consumer cravings. Moreover, in descriptions of victuals or bedside accessories, he recognized and toyed with poetry's ability to obliterate—as still-life paintings often do—the work and acquisition mechanisms required to obtain these commodities. He wondered about the market value of such poetically constructed comforts. However, the poet was also aware of his difference from—and inadequacy in relation to—the classical still-life artists, who were better at rendering straightforwardly the experience of the objects of desire. Lowell's own attempts at still-life consumerist aesthetics are only half-hearted, and they easily succumb to various instabilities like those that threatened (though to a lesser extent) Dutch still lifes. The poet's depictions deviate either, predictably, into a mode of vanitas, post-Christian anxiety stirred by this supposedly consumerist gaze, or into a form of pronkstilleven—that is, luxury still-life imagery ironically implicating and reflecting on wider social and historical realities. Finally, Lowell's portrayals of foodstuffs get displaced by his appreciation of the labor necessary for their preparation and delivery, which prevents him from falling into the trap of commodity fetishism. As we will see, rarely can his poetic still lifes be experienced in the purely sensual field, within the frames of pleasure and conviviality.7 This essay will therefore [End Page 466] arrive—though by a completely different route—at conclusions kindred to those of Frank Kearful on Lowell's alimentary motifs. As that critic argues, in comparison with Allen Ginsberg's delights among fresh food aisles at a California supermarket ("What peaches and what penumbras!"), Lowell's food imagery is "biting" and "fever-pitched rather than jubilant" (Kearful 2013, 97).
Truth be told, Lowell never really took to a poetics that would unequivocally promote a consumerist imagination or invest in making vivid the objects of desire. Nor did he honestly try it. In the Dutch still lifes, as Harry Berger (2011, 2) contends, vanitas was often something of a McGuffin—a self-therapeutic, vacuous gesture to pay some dues to the censoring superego while the ego edges toward the id. In Lowell, however, the more reflective modes are never simply perfunctory. They always take over, being the very stuff of his sensibility, temperament, and poetic imagination. In fact, in his still-life imagery the poet rather brooded on his ineptness which he ascribed to a more pensive disposition. The origins of this frame of mind are obvious, harking back to Calvinists from Leyden, the very people who sowed the seeds of Boston Puritanism and who, in the Netherlands, formed the epicenter of the vanitas still-life culture (Bergström 1983, 158). And there was no other more usable tradition Lowell could tap. Admittedly, some critics, most famously Charles Sterling (1981), argued that Dutch still life came from the xenia paintings meant to enhance the festive mood of dining halls—that is, from frescos and mosaics in the houses of wealthy Romans such as those in Herculaneum and Pompeii (ca. 62–69 CE). However, the more predominant opinion seems to be that voiced by Ingvar Bergström and Norman Bryson: that Dutch images of laid tables belonged to a separate movement steeped in Calvinism from the very beginning and were always disguised religious symbols.
lowell's money worries
For much of his career Lowell seemed to adhere conventionally to the vision of the highest absolute value in literature which made it esoteric, obscure, and unfit for commodification. He lived in passive acceptance of values that removed literature from the marketplace (Delany 1999); if older modernists depended largely on patronage, old money, and prestige earnings, Lowell's generation were poet- critics who believed that poetry yielded mostly cultural capital which could be monetized through distinguished academic positions [End Page 467] (Kindley 2017). Indeed, between the 1940s and the mid-1960s Lowell was working largely at the autonomous end of the cultural field, one which, according to Bourdieu, is characterized by "a systematic inversion of the fundamental principles of all ordinary economies" (1993, 39). In several of his poems he wrote in the 1950s, Lowell even affirmed the primacy of quality poetry as outside the world of market (e.g., "Words for Hart Crane" or an imitation of Rimbaud's "Ma Bohème" [2003, 159, 265–66]). However, in his vivid, intuitive letters he was less affirmative: he not only recognized the irreconcilability of the worlds of nonmarketable worth, preferred by poets, and of market-determined values but also showed concern about the incoherence of his economic experience (Lowell 2005, 308). This may be the reason why he began to shift towards a more heteronomous poetry as early as mid-1960s—a development first noticed by Hilene Flanzbaum (1995, 47, 51–53) who, however, ascribed it mostly to his ambition to reach out to the more general audience and establish himself as a public intellectual (Near the Ocean has the charms of a coffee-table book and includes poetry of the most popular appeal—that is, the imitations of Villon and Dante).
The process sped up between 1970 and 1977 when Lowell felt that financial difficulties caught up with him. To be sure, his financial concerns of the 1970s were entirely subjective and more like rich people's concerns. Few will sympathize, recognizing his continued great economic security. However, his money worries seemed very real to him and spurred him to contemplate a more consumerist poetics.
In the spring of 1970, when on fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, he started an affair in London with Lady Caroline Black-wood. Before long, he left his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, and their daughter Harriet, both of whom had stayed behind in New York and expected his continuous economic support. The eventual breakup costs for him were indeed enormous. Under the divorce agreement of October 1972, he let his American family keep his income from trusts—around $100,000 in today's money—as well as all their real estate in Manhattan and Castine, Maine (Hardwick and Lowell 2019, 298; Robert Lowell Collection).8 Moreover, Lowell's relationship with Blackwood estranged him from his mother's sister, Sarah Winslow Cotting, and ended any expectations that he might inherit any of the Winslows' wealth she commanded (Schoenberger 2001, 181–82). [End Page 468]
After the costly divorce, Lowell felt plagued by his financial anxieties, left as he was with his university salary and royalties, along with whatever he was hoping to get for his manuscripts from Harvard. Indeed, although at the University of Essex he earned only slightly less (ca. $8,000) than what he had been making at Harvard ($9,500), proceeds from the sale of his books began to decline (Hardwick and Lowell 2019, 27, 261). Confessional poetry was losing prestige; there was a general feeling that Lowell, mired in his Notebook and History sonnets, was becoming less interesting as an author. More hurtfully, he was no longer in the spotlight. While in America, he was a modernist literary celebrity as conceptualized by Moran (2000) and Glass (2004): he exploited a lucrative tension, a dialectic and a synergy, "an inverted form of self-promotion," between "private interiority" which became his trademark and his public mass-cultural fame (Moran 2000, 123; Glass 2004, 8). Gone from the American scene and settled in England, Lowell found he suddenly lacked the celebrity status that had greatly boosted the sales of his books in the 1960s. No wonder that his annual royalties from Farrar, Straus and Giroux—translation and subsidiary rights included—fell rapidly from $15,000 in 19709 to less than $11,000 in 1971, barely leveling off for the next two years (Hardwick and Lowell 2019, 223; Robert Lowell Collection, 18–210). They then rose to around $12,300 in 1974 and 1975.11 While indicating merely a 20 percent average decrease over five years, they show a much more significant fall in sales and in the monetary value of his poetry. Otherwise, the 1974 and 1975 figures should have revealed a massive rise since, in what Hardwick called Lowell's "flooding of the market" he was "planning" he had put out three more books the year before (History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin, all three released on June 20, 1973) (Hardwick and Lowell 2019, 311). The money from Harvard for unpublished drafts, manuscripts, and letters—that began to arrive in installments from December 1973 ($131,000 in total)—could not mitigate his day-to-day financial concerns either, for at the advice of his accountants, he chose to convey everything to a trust for his children.12
As indicated, these difficulties need to be put in perspective: Blackwood, whom Lowell married in 1972, was by all standards opulent herself. In 1945 her mother had set up a trust for her children, granting Caroline an annual income of £17,000 (nearly £718,000 in today's money). Her means made his emigration possible and induced him to provide a generous settlement to Hardwick; if the divorce [End Page 469] alienated his rich aunt, his marriage to Blackwood connected him to the Guinness fortune.
With Blackwood's wealth, the poet's money worries were hugely exaggerated, but they beset him nevertheless. A calendar he kept in 1973 includes, on early January pages, repeated column additions, with the names of his bank accounts listed, showing clearly that he tried to take stock of his finances (Robert Lowell Papers, box 34, folder "1973 vol."). "One thing we managed was for both of us to feel poor," Hardwick wrote to Lowell soon after the divorce, in February 1973 (Hardwick and Lowell 2019, 311). At the root of this worry may be concern for children. Blackwood already had three daughters when she and Lowell got married, and in September 1971 she bore their son, Sheridan. In the year and a half he had spent in the UK, Lowell had essentially become the father of four more children. In addition, he grew "acutely aware that he must earn his keep" in Caroline's lavish mansions (Schoenberger 2001, 183). "I see myself changed," he wrote to Blair Clark in the spring of 1976, "into an expensive, parasitical burden" (Lowell 2005, 646).
Therefore, Lowell felt under greater pressure to get more books out. Certainly, he had serious artistic reasons to split Notebook into the more public History and the personal For Lizzie and Harriet, and no one is doubting his passion about his Dolphin project. Still, there was also a financial concern behind his effort to publish as many as three books in 1973. It is no accident that reviewers chaffed the poet for seemingly trying to extricate more money from his readers than usual (e.g., Cotter 1973). By the same token, profit was one of the motives for both rushing to publication his Selected Poems (1976) and scraping together enough of his memoir and critical pieces for the prose volume A Moment in American Poetry (planned for 1975, though never materializing). In a letter to Giroux on July 22, 1975, he joked that quantity-based productivity became his prime concern: "What I've been doing is madly or steadily writing new poems, and now have a possible minimum number, 30. I'd like several months more and plan for next spring or fall 1976. How the dates, the years rush on. Caroline has almost this day finished her book of three long stories. If we can chain the children to writing, we'll have a factory" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., box 213, "A Moment in American Poetry"). Poems, Lowell quipped, can be churned out even more efficiently by engaging unqualified labor. Similarly motivated, if more serious, was his notion that poetry might produce conventionally marketable values. [End Page 470]
poetry as commodity
Lowell's interest in art that provides illusions of consumable commodities can be found in his sonnet "Artist's Model 1" in The Dolphin. The poem considers Friedrich Hölderlin's immanent, beautifully pastoral opening of "The Middle of Life" alongside the still-life objects reflected in the mirror in Édouard Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, which the poet had seen at the Courtauld in London. It affects envy of how Manet's illusionism could be brought into the service of promoting and enhancing the objects of consumerist desire, recognizing the potential profitability of such art. Hölderlin's pastoral descriptions and Manet's enchanted depictions of commodities in turn lead him to reflect on his own aesthetic as, so far, different and therefore relatively poorly remunerated; Lowell evidently attributes his financial instability to his failure to produce similarly pleasurable illusions. As he says, his own style kept his profession "solvent," but not much more than that.
Hölderlin's thing with swan-scene and autumnbehind was something beautiful, wasn't it?Manet's bottles mirrored behind his bar-girlare brighter than the stuff she used to serve—the canvas should support the artist's model.
Lowell looks to Hölderlin's poetics and to Manet's late painting for models of a new aesthetics that could bring him greater profit. Hölderlin's "The Middle of Life" offers a kind of unified, immanentist voice—not split between subject and object—of emerging wonder. More relevantly, Lowell turns to Manet's liquor bottles in A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1881), displayed on the counter and reflected in a wall mirror behind. The Bar opened a new chapter both in Manet's lifelong preoccupation with still lifes and in the history of still-life painting as such (Armstrong 2002, 270). First among still-life painters, Manet focused on mass-produced interchangeable multiples of bar merchandise—liquor bottles enticingly suffused with light—that trumpet their commodity nature. In fact, the painter's illusionism is deployed entirely to intensify optical effects that facilitate the selling of commodities (Armstrong 2002, 281). Tricks of commercial display are pulled: the painting maximally foregrounds the products, stimulating the viewers' desire to reach out, grab, and possess (Iskin 1995, 30). The result is a shocking equation between the contemplation of art and astonishment at the effects of commodity display (Iskin 1995, 30). The commodities in Manet's Bar, with their fresh, bright colors, [End Page 471] create excitement and provoke—or interpellate, as Michael Hutter (2015, 166) argues—unabashedly commercial imagination. Critics never fail to point out that Manet's signature and the date of the artwork are on the label of one of the bottles on the counter (Rubin 2010; Iskin 1995, 30–31). Available for purchase, the masterpiece—like the alcoholic beverages and the barmaid—belonged and was regarded as identical to "experience goods, be it through aesthetic pleasure, inebriation, or suspense" (Hutter 2015, 166). The entirely commodified character of The Bar was certainly one of several reasons it was priceless by the time Lowell saw it in London.
But to Lowell, the liquor bottles seem even more tempting when reflected in the mirror, and it is in their reflections that he senses his target poetic model. Of course, it is quite natural to see the mirror as a poetic mode because mirrors are traditional symbols of art as imitation (Rubin 2010, 376). By a striking coincidence, however, they are also key enhancers of commodities' glow in retail stores. Since the late nineteenth century, mirrors have been used in commercial spaces to intensify lighting, thus sharpening and adding distinctness to the articles on display; moreover, they double the merchandise and amplify the impression of an unlimited plenitude of things (Abelson 2003, 205). Most crucially for Lowell, Manet's mirror makes the commercial hype the subject of his painting: there are bottles in it that are not reflections of any on the countertop, and some flasks are confusingly reflected twice, in impossible ways. These effects point to "the mutual imbrication of illusionism and commodity culture that is one of the painting's large themes" (Armstrong 2002, 286).
In evoking the imagery of Manet's bottles displayed in this Parisian temple of consumerism, the poet yearns to become "the lyric poet in the era of high capitalism," producing a Baudelairean aesthetics that embodies the satisfactions of an urban flaneur, as they were conceptualized by Walter Benjamin (2006, 68–72). We find Lowell wondering whether his poetry could mimic the delights of commodities by evincing "novelty," glitter, excitement, and modern "shock" (Benjamin 2006, 42); whether writing could incorporate the characteristics of a pure commodity that has fetishistic value alone. Such art would not be burdened by any utility value as in, for instance, a traditionally conceived poetic beauty or the poet's intelligible intention. Lowell does not envision himself as representing the use-value, the appetizing quality, of foodstuffs and liquor. Rather, more abstractly and purely, he fantasizes himself—like pop artists—to be whetting the consumerist passions themselves. [End Page 472]
Of course, Lowell implicitly makes clear that he is made of different material than Hölderlin and Manet. He does not even attempt Hölderlin's immanence, as is evident in his resigned and bland reference to "Hölderlin's thing with swan-scene and autumn" (my emphasis). Similarly, there is a calculatedly reserved casualness to his portrayal of Manet's painted merchandise. He writes of "the stuff" Manet's girl "used to serve," intentionally creating a contrast between the painter's supportive aesthetics and his own skeptical tone. While in the sonnet he is complaining that his poetics never brought him good money, Lowell looks to the multiplied commodities in the mirror and unequivocally stresses his distance from the aesthetic philosophy they represent. He capitulates without a fight, strongly suggesting that his poetry will never be more thoroughly involved in commodity culture. Neither will he be able to promote pleasure and sensual feasting. Lowell, instead of embracing the mode, only hazily ruminates on what the commercialization of his poetry would entail.
But in the same sonnet, Lowell is additionally aware of the financial ramifications of his indisposition to try anything like Manet's enticing illusionary aesthetics. The drafts show he consistently groped for vocabulary related to finance, economy, and business. In the last line, for instance, he first referred to his and Hardwick's way of life as a "calling" before replacing it with the word "profession." Moreover, he speaks of their poetic careers as an economically risky "venture" and says they are barely keeping "solvency" and making only "peanuts." In drafts, he also presents writing as an element in the industrial production of books for which demand is barely sufficient "to start the presses rolling" (Robert Lowell Collection, 4–8). To quote from the final version:
fiction should serve us with a slice of life;but you and I actually lived what I have written,the drunk-luck venture of our lives sufficedto keep our profession solvent, was peanuts to live.
The line about fiction serving "a slice of life" resonates with other words associated with food: "raw," "drunk," and "peanuts." It indicates that poets should find sustenance and a means of financial support in "fiction" understood as invention or fabrication, like that in Manet's mirror, rather than in truthful representation of experience. (Of course, Lowell is being ironic as well, because Émile Zola's "slice-of-life" realism is akin to his own aesthetics, which is now failing him as a reliable source of income.) To make money from poetry, [End Page 473] one must abandon the idea that it should provide truth. Why would people pay for truth, he asks, if that is what they live and can experience for free? Why has there been a market at all for writing that furnished but "raw venture of life"? By implication, it does not surprise him that the money was "peanuts" to live on; that what came from this demand hardly trickled down to them, writers, positioned as they were at the beginning of this production process.
The poem "Sick" from the sequence "Leaving America for England" in The Dolphin hints at a special value available to poets, one which still lifes also often hold. Poetry can advance a highly selective, rosy view of reality, obfuscating unpleasantries and boosting a feeling of comfort; it can cater to the reader's desirous imagination. Furthermore, "Sick" evokes economic exchange based on this value, an arrangement not too different from regular free market exchange. It harks back to the days when the omission of labor in poetic idealizations of country life was so pleasurable, so psychologically and ideologically convenient for the wealthy, that they were willing to reward poets with long-term support.
I wake now to find myself this long alone,the sun struggling to renounce ascendency—two elephants are hauling at my head.It might have been redemptive not to have lived—in sickness, mind and body might make a marriageif by depression I might find perspective—a patient almost earns the beautiful,a castle, two cars, old polished heirloom servants,Alka-Seltzer on his breakfast tray—the fish for the table bunching in the fishpond.None of us can or wants to tell the truth,pay fees for the over-limit we caught, while floatingthe lonely river to senilityto the open ending. …
The values poets can produce are most visible in the couplet: "a castle, two cars, old polished heirloom servants, / Alka-Seltzer on his breakfast tray." It strings together arrangements and objects of comfort that present themselves to the speaker, who is sick or hungover and craving restfulness. They bear no trace of how they arrived or of their cost—financial, human, or ethical. Even the mention of servants, which normally prompts considerations of labor, due pay, obligation, exploitation, and social inequality, does not complicate the reassuring imagery that brings healing and relief. The reference [End Page 474] reduces them, through the adjectival series "old polished heirloom," to trophies or possessions. Alka-Seltzer appears miraculously by his bed. The impression of coziness, mitigating the soreness, is established by verbal fiat, by the lines' ability to select and exclude the uncomfortable and the troubling. The speaker's moral imagination is muted by his indisposition; instead, he is focused on the poetic ramifications of such affliction-enforced, reductive concentration on the immediate.
Lowell wonders if this glamorization of reality is something that could have market value. Note that he talks about "a patient earning the beautiful." The remark is reinforced by his allusion to past instances of poetic mystification remunerated with worldly luxuries. Lowell's line about the fish eager to leap onto the table, its syntax inverted as in Elizabethan poetry, clearly evokes Thomas Carew's and Ben Jonson's images of fish offering themselves to diners; it echoes Carew's imagery in "To Saxham" (1620s), "The scaly herd more pleasure took, / Bath'd in thy dish, than in the brook" (Howarth 1969, 86), and even more plainly Jonson's "To Penshurst" (1612):
Fat, agèd carps, that run into thy net; And pikes, now weary their own kind to eat,As loath the second draught or cast to stay, Officiously, at first, themselves betray;Bright eels, that emulate them, and leap on land Before the fisher, or into his hand.
Caroline Blackwood's Milgate Park, a seventeenth-century country manor, is only thirty miles from Penshurst, where Jonson enjoyed the hospitality of Robert Sidney and reciprocated with his poetic mystification and idealization of country life. It is not too far from Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, where Carew feasted at Little Saxham, a castle of Sir John Crofts, and wrote his pastorals in return. Aware of this tradition and its nearness, living in Blackwood's English house and obsessing "that he must write to earn his keep" (Schoenberger 2001, 183), Lowell revisits those values that both Jonson and Carew delivered to their benefactors for room and board.
He evokes and imitates the very imagery that George Crabbe first criticized in The Village (1783) and that Raymond Williams famously dissected, in the 1970s, in his cultural materialist critique of English seventeenth-century pastoralism as held captive by the economy of patronage, where poetic pastorals were produced in exchange for the hospitality of the landlord. Williams (1973, 32) [End Page 475] argued these poets engaged in "a magical recreation of what can be seen as natural bounty" through a "magical extraction of the curse of labour […] in fact achieved by a simple extraction of the existence of labourers" effected "by the power of art." (Lowell may have even written his lines with Williams's argument in mind, for the article [Williams 1968] appeared in Critical Quarterly just two years before Lowell began to compose The Dolphin.) The line "the fish for the table bunching in the fishpond" points to how the material comforts a poet whereas enjoys can be well-earned. They can be exchanged for poetic images that put the landlords' mind at ease and cultivate the impression that whatever little labor is necessary is light, benevolently presided over, cheerfully and naturally performed, and therefore inexpensive (Wayne 1984, 39). Lowell had deservedly earned the riches by yielding, in the same proportion, illusions of commodities. By stimulating good feeling, literature could create real value, which should be appropriately remunerated.
Poetic beauty, not truth, has "almost earned" Lowell the conveniences of the Guinness fortune. He observes a certain reciprocity between what he gets as Blackwood's husband and what he contributes as a poet in his accounts of country bliss. Of course, he does give a highly selective vision of life, slanted to construct the feeling of well-being. Why not, Lowell asks, steer a little through the river of life, eschewing the claims of reality? This river is heading for senility, and ultimately, we cannot escape death; why not allow ourselves, through language, those little mod cons. Like Carew, Lowell strongly resymbolizes rural life to create a fictional mindscape of effortlessness, which he thinks should have a substantial market value like the amenities in his room. Lowell had earned luxury because he himself was a producer of the same.
In the manuscripts, this value available to poetry, of the verbally constructed illusion of comfort, is sometimes contrasted with the dubious value of truthful or realistic writing. For instance, the poem "Sick" is typed on the reverse of sheets with variants of the poem "Artist's Model 1," in which Lowell wonders why people had even been willing to buy his verse at all. After all, the reasoning goes, it gave only the experience of truth, which is anyway both plentiful and free (Robert Lowell Collection, 5–1). Manifestly, he suspends the need to be truthful in verse and instead contemplates poetry that supports "the over-limit" scooped up by the imagination, which may stay ahead of the costs accruing from the belated [End Page 476] recognition of reality's claims. In other manuscript drafts, in the poem "Fishpound," Lowell expressly approves of the obliviousness to labor of that line "the fish for the table bunching in the fishpond." "Fishpound" first evokes Auden taunting Yeats for having said, "I prayed an hour": "Wasn't it seven minutes or twenty-one?" But Lowell, for his part, takes issue with Auden's overscrupulousness and the modernist insistence that poetry be precise: "telling is much easier than doing, / like trout for the table swimming in a fishpond" (Robert Lowell Collection, 4–5, 4–7). Why not, he suggests, allow ourselves this myth, and thereby verbally create a sense of ease and comfort without worrying that someone had to catch the fish, scale it, gut it, and clean it? Why should a poet not furnish such pleasures?
Lowell intermittently continued to play with the idea that poetry might produce marketable value well into the 1970s. In his last volume, Day by Day, as well as in its drafts, he regrets he had written poetry that was useless. In drafts of "Our Afterlife II," one of two poems dedicated to his friend Peter Taylor, he writes he would rather his generation of writers had made useful things and been paid like doctors or mechanics (Robert Lowell Collection, 1–11). Moreover, Lowell expresses his amazement that their profession had remained an anomaly in that it had held out outside the Common Market that was otherwise ubiquitous, the European Economic Community having recently, in 1973, grown to incorporate Britain (Robert Lowell Collection, 1–11; cf. Lowell 2003, 734). In early drafts of another Day by Day poem, "Death of a Critic," he seems to have wished that print were "a necessity like bread" (Robert Lowell Collection, 2–2; cf. Lowell 2003, 757).
food for thought
In Lowell's poems exploring the still life tradition, his interest is mixed with self-doubt. Paradoxically, in the very volumes rushed to publication for—among other things—profit, Lowell both became absorbed in this pictorial mode to an extent unacknowledged by critics and reflected on his distance from still-life masters. Eventually, his depictions of viands and laid tables never quite perform the work he had envisioned for them in "Artist's Model 1" or "Sick." He was fully conscious of his utter inadequacy as a poet of alimentary pleasures: in one sonnet, he ponders his failures, contrasting himself [End Page 477] with one of the greatest still-life artists, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. In a number of other poems, he infuses his representations of victuals with religious, moral, and complexly intellectual significance, forsaking altogether the idea of producing marketable poetic values.
Some two years before Lowell became preoccupied with financial fears, his sonnet "Our Twentieth Wedding Anniversary 1 (Elizabeth)," which wound up in For Lizzie and Harriet, showed him invested in Chardin, the most important French inheritor of the seventeenth-century Flemish and Dutch still-life tradition and, in his turn, Édouard Manet's master. The sonnet also recognized the poet's difference from the French painter. In the poem, Lowell juxtaposes himself with Chardin, admitting that his writing calls forth a far more distanced and pensive gaze than does the French painter's work. He also mentions his inability to offer convivial images of commodities like those in Chardin.
Leaves espaliered jade on our barn's loft window,sky stretched on a two-pane sash … it doesn't open:stab of roofdrip, this leaf, that leaf twings [sic],an assault the heartless leaf rejects.The picture is too perfect for our lives:in Chardin's stills, the paint bleeds, juice is moving.We have weathered the wet of twenty years.
A glass window in the speaker's barn, with ivy or vine leaves arranged around its frame, becomes a metaphor for how he and Hardwick envisioned and perfected their marriage. That vision is marked by reflection, distance, and a tendency to idealize. In their connubial experience and, presumably, in their art as writers, they evaded direct sensuousness, emotionalism, and the experience of time—thus providing, in Lowell's view, an unfavorable contrast to Chardin.
Elizabeth Bishop once complimented Lowell's poetic sketch of a glass of water in "Waking Early Sunday Morning" as "simple like Chardin, maybe," no doubt having in mind the tumbler in either Chardin's Glass of Water and Coffeepot (ca. 1760) or The Basket of Wild Strawberries (ca. 1761) (Bishop and Lowell 2008, 588). But in the 1969 sonnet, the window representing his marriage is unmistakably likened to a painting to be juxtaposed with Chardin's. This is even clearer in a draft version, where Lowell writes of the glass-filled window as "too good a picture for us to hang" (Robert Lowell Collection, 7–9). [End Page 478]
In opposition to the effects suggested by the windowpane—a symbol of finish and a barrier interposing between subject and object—the Frenchman's art is praised for its radically vivid, intensely sensory hyperrealism: "in Chardin's stills, the paint bleeds, juice is moving" (in a draft, "the paint runs, the juice stains" [Robert Lowell Collection, 7–9]). Lowell refers to the striking lifelike quality of Chardin's painting, which the poet thought he never matched, at least not after "Waking Early Sunday Morning." The artist made full use of the viscosity of various paints to create the illusion of the textures and physical characteristics of the materials, household items, and edibles he portrayed (Rosenberg 1963, 50). Furthermore, he applied many layers of different colors to recreate the complex hues of semi-translucent surfaces. Though Chardin sometimes does imitate "glaze," evocative of Lowell's windowpane, to render the surfaces of bottles, china, or earthenware jugs and vases, his paint, as Bryson put it, just as often "dribbles," and at times "its texture is buttery, or like cream cheese, it is an almost comestible substance which everywhere announces that it has been worked" (1990, 94). The poet's characterization of Char-din's juice as "moving" and "staining" also reminds one of the perennial "dampness" of strawberries in The Basket of Wild Strawberries or the bloody smear left by a hare on the floor in Hare and Copper Pot (Rosenberg 1963, 100). Lowell's comments are similar to those of Denis Diderot on Chardin's Ray, in which the creature's underside is gashed, the bowels pouring out, made palpably graphic: "it is really the ray's flesh, it is its skin, it is its blood" (2011, 121; cf. Söntgen 2014, 123–24); the Frenchman wrote that Chardin painted with "the substance of the objects themselves" (2011, 121). More recently, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth noted the artist's "molecular fidelity" (2018, 90).
Lowell had long been fascinated with Chardin—most crucially, with the painter's ability to annul that barrier between the beholder's space and the picture. As early as fall of 1950 he sent Elizabeth Bishop a reproduction of Boy Playing with Cards (ca. 1740) (Bishop and Lowell 2008, 117). Later, in 1963, he mailed her a print of another painting from the same series, The House of Cards (1737) (Bishop and Lowell 2008, 504). The poet must have been especially affected by the trompe l'oeil effect augmented by the suspense of the house of cards being built. While the illusion of depth is created by the drawer that protrudes toward the viewer and by the three-dimensional tabletop, the moment-in-time tension stems from the moving precariousness of the structure formed by balanced playing cards. With the boy's utmost concentration heightening the imagined excitement of [End Page 479] that instant, the construction on the table almost induces us to hold our breath, lest it get ruined. These things sabotage the impression of a separation between viewer and subject matter. Beate Söntgen (2014) explains how Chardin's entire project thematizes the dominance of the contemplative mode, rationalism superseding the sensual, and seeks to reestablish emotion and communication within this restricted field.
Most importantly, with the description of an ivied window likened to a painting on a wall, Lowell's poem apparently reverses the situation in Chardin's Soap Bubbles (1733–1734), the famous picture, in three autograph versions, of a lad propped up on a window ledge and blowing a bubble. The sonnet especially brings to mind the version at Washington's NGA, and to some extent the one at New York's Met, where the aperture is fringed with clematis leaves. Here the French painter again undermines the boundary between spectator and subject: the painting creates the illusion of an actual window yawning wide in the wall where the canvas hangs, the sill juts out at the viewer, and the conventional impression of separate realms is broken by the boy markedly leaning out in our direction, his fingers gripping the sill's edge. The barrier is made to appear most fragile by the soap bubble inflated to the point of bursting or breaking free. The bubble is almost a sensuous embodiment of the precariousness of the two spheres' discreteness. Manifestly, the interposing glass pane in Lowell's image is meant for contrast.
One of the drafts includes the line "We've had twenty years to live beyond our means," which recognizes that the poet and Hardwick lasted together longer than they should have, given how they held emotions at arms' length. Their life was literally beyond their emotional, artistic, and intellectual means to comprehend or represent. The line, however, has an economic resonance as well: as artists, they managed even though they went beyond their royalties budget, which was limited due to the shortcomings of their art. It is not irrelevant that Chardin, because of his skill in rendering sensory experience, claimed the highest prices in his day and age—only Joseph Vernet, a French landscapist, was better paid than he was (Rosenberg 1963, 82).
And yet the sonnet's final lines pay tribute to Chardin's experiential immediacy: "we smell as green as the weeds that bruise the flower—/a house eats up the wood that made it" (Lowell 2003, 631). "Unfretted," carefree, spontaneous, direct experience of the summer proves available to Lowell's speaker, if only for a moment. His [End Page 480] usual shield of reflection separating him from material reality vanishes. The couplet signals a degree of interpenetration between the self and nature. It metaphorizes a more immediate emotional and sensuous existence that the poet admired in the still-life aesthetics but was normally incapable of rendering—a failure that he began to blame for his limited income.
With Chardin's aesthetics eluding him, however, Lowell's images of food, tableware, and other objects of comfort are never simply festive. They are troubled, "fretted," rather than appetizing or pleasurable. His descriptions swerve into imagery suggesting either uncontrolled manic gaze, a mode of vanitas, or guilty admissions of unwonted luxury, implicating wider frames of social and historical realities in which he feels complicit. Finally, Lowell's representations of victuals are made more complex by his ethical acknowledgments of the labor required for their preparation and delivery, thus saving him from commodity fetishism.
For example, the Dolphin sonnet "Diagnosis: To Caroline in Scotland" shows that joy at the abundance of farm produce on display can shift to unhinged, maniacal seeing.
The frowning morning glares by afternoon;the gay world in purple and orange drag,Child-Bible pictures, perishables:oranges and red cabbage sold in carts.The sun that lights their hearts lights mine?I see it burn on my right hand, and seemy skin, when bent, is finely wrinkled batwing.Since you went, our stainless steelware ages,like the young doctor writing my prescription:The hospital. My twentieth in twenty years….Seatrout run past you in the Hebrides—the gay are psychic, centuries from now,not a day older, they'll flutter garish colors,salmontrout amok in Redcliffe Square.
The sonnet begins with a market-stall scene. In the 1970s, the London National Gallery had at least two oils of market stalls loaded with food—Gerrit Dou's A Poulterer's Shop and The Fishmarket by de Witte (1615–1692) (National Gallery 1977, 67; Color Reproductions 1976, np). Depictions of abundance normally induce insensitiveness to realities of labor and economy, but in Lowell's poem, the initial sense of guilt (in "frowning morning") over the enjoyments of grocery shopping evolves into crazed gaze, into "glaring," stemming [End Page 481] from what Bryson calls the "disequilibrium of attention" frequent in still lifes such as those by Francisco de Zurbarán or Juan Sánchez Cotán (1989, 239). The poem shifts from "Child-Bible pictures" to an excessive scrutiny of colors and textures. The porous orange rinds and wrinkled cabbage leaves lead to the poet's realization that the skin on his hand resembles a batwing, and to his zooming in on both the smallest amounts of rust showing on steel and the wrinkles of his psychiatrist. As Bryson explains, instead of promoting "familiarities of appetite and of hospitality"—or even a more ethical consideration of how the pleasures being offered obliterate the facts of human mortality and human sweat—images of edibles may evolve into a perception in which things "appear radically unfamiliar, and estranged" (1990, 87). Defamiliarization produces a dramatic vision from which there is no "return" to normal seeing: "Still life can hardly avoid quickening attention, but beyond a certain point the self becomes enclosed within itself, saturated with perceptions now of a manic or obsessional intensity" (Bryson 1990, 89).
If "Diagnosis" shows food triggering manic gaze, the poem "Flounder" in The Dolphin offers a poetic dish whose succulence is dampened by the classical vanitas (Lowell 2003, 675). In manuscript drafts, the fish is described as "lying in a dish" and "still effervescing in its casserole" (Robert Lowell Collection, 4–6), but in better developed versions it is an easy prey for an iconographer hunting down traces of vanitas. In the contemplation of the fish, the festive mood is replaced with a state of mind appropriate for penitence and prayer. "Cooked and skinned and white," the flounder's flesh and eyes (described as bloodshot bubbles) are reminiscent of Chardin's gutted fish in The Ray as well as, more generally, the body of a martyr—most fundamentally, that of Christ crucified.
The third sonnet in The Dolphin's section "Fall Weekend at Milgate" also presents a laid table. However, it interweaves the vanitas mode with a recognition that Lowell and Blackwood's comforts originate from past injustices and abusive social relations:
We're landlords for the weekend,and watch October go balmy. Midday heatdraws poison from the Jacobean brick,and invites the wilderness to our doorstep:moles, nettles, last Sunday news, last summer's toys,bread, cheeses, jars of honey, a felled elmstacked like construction in the kitchen garden.The warm day brings out wasps to share our luck.
[End Page 482]
Another vista of the gifts of nature. There is a feeling of pastoral abundance in the image, strongly bringing to mind seventeenth-century still-life paintings of the laid table. In an unpublished draft, the relevant lines read, "childrensware, last Sunday papers, / bread, cheeses, pints of bitter and the felled oak / stacked like construction in the garden close" (Robert Lowell Collection, 4–4). References to mellow heat and October's balminess encourage the implied reader to pick and bite (Honig 1998, 34); the reader interpellated by the sonnet's gaze is almost a languorous consumer.
This impression is strengthened by the insistent physicality of the objects in this still-life scene, physicality which is underlined by their characterization as being in your face or up too close (they are "invite[d] […] to our doorstep") and by the absence of any syntactical framework ordering them. Their proximity seems stressed, as they are uncontained by any spatializing principle or a relational situation. The effect is similar to that produced by edibles excessively heaped upon the table in Dutch still-life painting, with items extending over the table's edge in the direction of the viewer, like an unwinding lemon peel or a knife handle in a Pieter Claesz. Finally, it is similar to the bottles painted in the very foreground of Manet's Bar. The space in the sonnet is confusing: moles and nettles are next to the food pile on the garden table, and the laid table sits right beside stacked elm logs.
With his list of bread, cheeses, and jars of honey (or alternatively, glasses of beer and beer cans), Lowell works almost squarely within the Dutch tradition. The poem obviously evokes the early seventeenth-century genre of Ontbijtje (i.e., "breakfast pieces") exemplified by Floris Claesz van Dijck's Breakfast Still-Life (1613), Floris van Schooten's Still Life with Butter and Cheeses (n.d.), or similarly titled canvases by Clara Peeters. These all depict Dutch domestic food, with dairy products predominating rather than ornamental fruit and flowers (Hochstrasser 2007, 23–25, 30–31). Lowell's "cheeses" evoke the multiple wheels of cheese cut into halves or wedges that, in the words of Julie Hochstrasser, "receive careful differentiation in the renderings of Dutch painters" (2007, 28). Lowell's mention of beer, in the manuscripts, brings to mind Jan Jansz van de Velde's Breakfast with Cards and Pipe or Pieter Claesz's Herring with Glass of Beer and a Roll (Hochstrasser 2007, 50–55, 37); possibly the poet alludes directly to Claesz's Still Life with Drinking Vessels of 1649, which he must have seen at the London National Gallery.13 Bread, a staple food of the seventeenth-century Low Countries, completes the typical repertoire [End Page 483] of viands in Ontbijtje (Hochstrasser 2007, 61–69). The presence of newspapers, meanwhile, relates the food to idling at lunch; "last Sunday news" conjures up leisurely reading, almost as inviting as the tableware jutting out over the edge of the table in traditional Dutch breakfast pieces.
Nevertheless, in Lowell's sonnet, one senses distance and reserve. The inventory of the provisions is spare; in contrast to the famous paintings, no attempt is made to reproduce any "mark[s] of the knife upon the cheese," no "subtle darkening around the edges where the light cheese began to dry" (cf. Hochstrasser 2007, 32). There might be no undertone of guilt in the poet's reference to "cheeses," though in the Dutch tradition, multiplied dairy products, images of stacked cheese wheels, connotes excess (2007, 33–34). The vanitas mode is more discernible in the poet's mention of nettles and moles—the former once used in penance, the latter reminding of the underworld; most evidently, both represent nature encroaching on or reclaiming this setting of ease. Also indicative of a memento mori are wasps. They signify "danger, pain, annoyance, theft or destruction," sitting on flowers in Still Life with Flowers in a Vase by Christoffel van den Berghe (1617), or in Balthasar van der Ast's Variegated Tulips in a Ceramic Vase, with a Wasp, a Dragonfly, a Butterfly, and a Lizard (1625) or his Still-Life of Flowers, Shells, and Insects (1635) (Jones 2019, 73, 76). In fact, every time Lowell visited London's National Gallery, he could have seen insects troubling flowers in Jacob van Walscappelle's Flowers in a Glass Vase (Color Reproductions 1976, n.p.).
In addition, one finds a whole range of subtle vanitas subtexts—from the notion of joy and camaraderie long gone to the idea of sinfulness and corruption. The "last summer's toys" (or, as in manuscripts, children's tableware) as well as the old newspapers strike a melancholy tone, as in Thomas Hardy, the tone of loss, the autumnal mood, reminding us of the passage of time, erosion, entropy, and ultimately mortality (cf. Costello 2008, 89; Berger 2011, 1). Moreover, while traditional still lifes feature tipped goblets, rumpled tablecloths, and stacked plates to indicate human slothfulness, drunkenness, self-indulgence, and vice, Lowell includes abandoned beer cans, uncleared garden paths, and untended toys that have never been put away. "Still life of the table," writes Norman Bryson of the elements of disorder, "is structured around the same anxious polarity, with vice and pleasure beckoning at one end, virtue and abstention admonishing at the other" (1990, 112). [End Page 484]
Most important, the vanitas mode coexists with class and historical consciousness. The lines "Midday heat / draws poison from the Jacobean brick" become clearer when read in tandem with their draft version: "The midday heat / draws pain from the Jacobean and Georgian brick" (Robert Lowell Collection, 4–4). The sun and the foodstuffs on the laid garden table mitigated only momentarily Lowell's awareness of the early modern English poverty and exploitative relations that made the poor build Milgate House. His and Blackwood's comforts exist among brick walls that witnessed, and grew out of, the poverty and inequality of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Georgian eras (Woodward 1995). We know from Ben Jonson about the "pain" of building craftsmen in the Elizabethan era, when Milgate was built. To be sure, he does praise Penshurst as built without straining the relations between landlord and laborers: "And though thy walls be of the country stone, / They're reared with no man's ruin, no man's groan; / There's none that dwell about them wish them down" (1985, 283). However, he makes clear that the house of his benefactor was exceptional in this respect, which only confirms the more general misery and deprivation of bricklayers at the time.
Aware of bitter class divisions, the poem acknowledges the civic sluggardliness and self-engrossment of those at the table, especially in the image of outdated Sunday newspapers. One is reminded of papers in still lifes by American painter William Michael Harnett (1848–1892)—always rendered illegible, sometimes dirtied with tobacco. Harnett has been criticized for positioning news consumption only as "a male vanity," part of private rituals indulged to the point of ruining "civic-mindedness" (Leonard 1995, 102). By the same token, Lowell evokes "last Sunday newspapers" to censure himself and Blackwood for their disinterest in larger questions of politics and history. Almost a week old, they are presumably tabloids such as London's Sunday Express and the Sunday Mirror—cheaply sensationalist, trivial, and devoid of serious content. In a draft, the poet attempted to work "wrapping paper" into the line to imply that he and Blackwood gave up on meaningful reading altogether (Robert Lowell Collection, 4–4).
In short, the poem enwraps the laid table in the contemplative vanitas frame of mind as well as in the awareness of the residual pain of Jacobean bricklayers and the vacuity of the British elite's Sunday reading. Moreover, it moralizes on the idolatry of their earthly [End Page 485] satisfactions by contemplating the fate of wasps that are mired in sticky, mind-numbing foods. Of course, the word refers both to the insects and, treated as an acronym, to White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. All these ironic references create a mental space that compels us to take in the wider social consideration of the presented victuals, spoiling the illusion of their alimental value.
An image of food that is similarly rich, both intellectually and emotionally, appears in Lowell's sonnet "At Offado's," following "Flounder" in the section of The Dolphin titled "Winter and London." The poem recounts an episode from when he was staying at his London studio at 33 Pont Street in Belgravia (where he had moved after his manic attack in July 1970 had frightened Blackwood). Lowell would sometimes dine alone at a Portuguese restaurant he calls "Offado." He meant "O Fado," four minutes away, at 50 Beauchamp Place in Knightsbridge. A sonnet narrating one such outing ends with an image of a meal less whetting the appetite than signaling his social conscience mixed with elitism and ethnic bias, as well as a meditation on London's social geography:
The Latin Quarter abuts on Belgravia,three floors low as one, …… … … … … … ….Usually on weekend nights I eat alone;you've taken the train for Milgate with the children.At Offado's, the staff is half the guests,the guitar and singers wait on table,the artist sings things unconsolable:"Girls of Majorca. Where is my Sombrero?Leave me alone and let me talk and love me—a cod in garlic, a carafe of cruel rosé." [sic]14
The sonnet ends with a tabletop still-life image. Two phrases conjoined with a comma, each opening with an indefinite article, suggest order, moderateness, elegant simplicity; a pentameter with a chiastic meter, the line evinces a perfect balance between variety and regularity. The rhythmical symmetry is made more complex because it is slightly shifted, not exactly or perfectly aligned with the grammatical equilibrium of the two phrases. Thus, it embodies refinement, quiet self-restraint, and thoughtful somberness.
This image of food is not a buoyant depiction of commodities in the tradition of Pompeiian xenia. The meal epitomizes restraint, if not penitence. Rosé is often crisp and austere (in a manuscript, he [End Page 486] called it "acid" before replacing the word with "cruel"), and carafes are used for table wine as opposed to bottled wine, which is usually better aged and more expensive. Cod flesh is so lean it goes well even with rosé, since there is no fat to conflict with a little bit of tannins. With Caroline and the girls gone to Milgate, it is manifestly Friday Fast, and the fish, in the words of Kenneth Bendiner, is "a kind of mortification of the flesh, a religious injunction to suffer and purify" (2004, 36).
This self-imposed austerity or self-denial stems partly from his class-conscious ethical stance. He chooses a relatively simple meal amidst impoverished immigrants in acknowledgment of their deprivation. He recognizes the overstaffing of the operation—"the staff is half the guests" (and in a manuscript, "staff the size of its custom")—and takes note of the Portuguese's desperation and the cheapness of their labor (in a draft, even "Two guitars, two singers, who help on table" [Robert Lowell Collection 4–6]). He resists the obliviousness to backstage labor and unequal social relations that is often encouraged by served food. His attention to the Portuguese can additionally be seen in his unease with the crude commodification of their culture. He sends away musicians because they play songs that mix up several Latin cultures and cater trivial exotica to the ignorant Londoners—imported authenticities that end up commodified and culturally appropriated.
The depiction of the unostentatious repast ties into Lowell's subtle references to his (partly ethically motivated) challenging of class divisions and his venturing outside his high-end enclave for dinner. The misnomer "Offado" may be less an error than a pun on the restaurant as off-limits, socially and ethnically, for the London elite. The sonnet begins with an allusion to the city's ethnic and class mapping. While Beauchamp Place in Knightsbridge, where "O Fado" operated, was a lower–middle class street in the 1970s, his studio was in the neighboring Belgravia, a very affluent district. Class differences are visible in contrasting architecture: houses near the restaurant have "three floors low as one" (and in a draft, "four floors seem two, a whole street the same house"). The edifice at 50 Beauchamp Place is an early eighteenth-century three-story Georgian townhouse with a very simple façade and sash windows, the ground floor rendered in a plaster material, and the rest whitened brick. By contrast, Lowell's 33 Pont St. was a rather grand five-story Victorian terraced property with ornate gables, colored brickwork, a porch, and bay windows. The poet admits he himself prefers the [End Page 487] simplicity, though self-conscious and classy, of Beauchamp Place to the excessive spaces of his studio at Cadogan Square. A plain dinner in a simple interior becomes an act of recognizing and defying the class divisions and wealth disparities running through London.
Curiously, the suggestions of austerity and modesty are mixed with Lowell's aloofness, conceit, and swelling awareness of his refinement. He finds the Portuguese pushy and vulgarly noisy, and the meal becomes a marker of his sophistication. Hence the intimations of a decadent luxury that exposes his unique status. The many drafts show that in his revisions he moves in the direction of a mode reminiscent of pronkstilleven of the late 1630s and later—the "banquet pieces," lavish portrayals of fine, luxurious and extravagant things. Like pronkstilleven, Lowell lays bare and ironically reflects on his complicity in, the "hierarchies of wealth, status and aesthetic culture" (Bryson 1989, 246).
The French-sounding English displaces the simple pleasures of food, hinting at the wider context of international trade, "the mercantilist space, at once geographic and financial" (Bryson 1989, 248). Still-life objects, as in Jan Davidsz. de Heem or Willem Kalf, sometimes become distanced again, turning into abstract symbols of wealth that have exchange value; they can no longer be experienced in the normal sensual way, in the spirit of spontaneous festiveness. The image of food, beside touching on the more bitter tone of vanitas, becomes a cogitation on how his privilege sets him apart from the Portuguese waiters. It is more of an intellectual picture of what he feels separates him from the poverty around him, or perhaps—inasmuch as it is an image of moderateness—of what he thinks is a proper meal for him, given the deprivation of others. "[A] caraffe of cruel rosee rosé" was the last evolution of a far more modest string of one-syllable Anglo-Saxon words, "quart of acid wine." The French "caraffe" replaced "quart" and "bottle," and Lowell spells it in an old-fashioned way, with "f" doubled. Moreover, the poet repeatedly tries "rosée," from the French vin rosé, writing it fancifully with double 'e,' the first stressed (Robert Lowell Collection, 4–6). Of course, the French language, as Jeanne Fahnestock observed, since the invasion of aristocratic Normans in the eighth and ninth centuries, "has continued to be a dominant source in English for describing luxury items, for haute couture and haute cuisine" (2011, 27). The "caraffe" replacing the "quart," then, is an intimation of a more opulent or costly objet d'art (more like the carafe with a gilt stopper in Chardin's La Brioche), while the more brightly colored rosé breaks away from [End Page 488] the monochromatic scheme—like that in Pieter Claesz or Willem Claesz Heda—set up by "cod in clover." In his revisions, in admission of his unearned privilege, Lowell edges toward the more pretentious, class-conscious register of a New England Francophile connoisseur who perhaps prefers the term scrutoir to "writing desk." Paradoxically, the poet's depiction brings to mind both austerity and luxury, both modes signaling (though in different ways) his rumination on his social position vis-à-vis the Portuguese serving him.
This reading is confirmed by Lowell's tendency to associate the poem with the class-conscious sensibility of Bishop. Some manuscript versions of "At Offado's" are titled "To Elizabeth Bishop" or are dedicated "To E.B." (Robert Lowell Collection, 4–6), a connection that he further makes explicit in a letter to her of December 1970:
The other night, part of a weekend alone, I was in a Knightsbridge Portuguese restaurant Offado [sic], more people worked on the tables, half in the kitchen, etc. than there were guests; even the guitarist and singer helped, then sang things like "Girls from Majorca," while I ate and consumed a carafe of rose, their table wine. After a while I expected you to come in the door any moment, even began nervously looking at my watch. So much I wanted to see you.
While Lowell may have been reminded of his friend simply because the place was Portuguese and she lived in Portuguese-speaking Brazil, probably more is at stake in the dedication. In the letter, too, the poet makes repeated references to how customers at O Fado were disproportionately few when compared to the staff, which demonstrated an economic gap between them. Lowell seems to have had in mind Elizabeth Bishop's social conscience and empathy for the servant class, as in the poems "Jerónimo's House," "Cootchie," and "Faustina, or Rock Roses" (2008, 26, 35, 55). His vacillation between self-imposed austerity and self-accusatory exaggeration of the luxury of his treat makes one think of Bishop, too. Her poem "Going to the Bakery" (2008, 142), for example, dramatizes the viewing of bakeries by somebody who had witnessed enough poverty in Brazil to see in food only suffering and deprivation (Costello 2008, 103–4). The speaker's aloofness during her bakery shopping trip shows her complicit in the economic and class divisions of Brazilian society (Longenbach 1995, 478; Dickie 1994). Lowell's complex reflection on eating Portuguese cod in Knightsbridge rekindled his memory of Bishop's ambivalent attitude toward the Brazilian poor. [End Page 489]
conclusion
"At Offado's" completes this review of Lowell's experiments with poetic depictions of victuals and tableware in the tradition of the Dutch still-life artists and their French continuators. In short, continuing his interest in objects characteristic for confessional poetics but confronted with financial challenges in the 1970s, Lowell became quite engrossed in this commercialized pictorial genre, though he also gave thought to his temperamental reluctance to embrace it in poetry. He concluded he could not bring himself to imitate the aesthetics of Manet's enticing bottles or Chardin's perennially fresh strawberries, where artistic means support the depicted objects of desire. It was evident to Lowell that he was incapable of such aesthetics, being chronically pensive, distanced, and conscientious. His renditions of foodstuffs and laid tables are undermined by vanitas, by ethical appreciations of labor (which combat the fetishization of commodities), and even by modes of pronkstilleven. Most crucially, in his resignedly bland depictions of comestibles, we get a glimpse of Lowell's distance from styles that began to attract subsequent generations of poets valuing immediacy, temporality, and materiality.
GRZEGORZ KOSC is Associate Professor of English and the Director of the American Studies Center at the University of Warsaw. He is the author of Robert Lowell: Uncomfortable Epigone of the Grands Maîtres (2005) and Robert Frost's Political Body (2014). He has articles in journals such as Wallace Stevens Journal, Papers on Language and Literature, and Partial Answers. Most recently, he coedited, with Steven Gould Axelrod, Robert Lowell's Memoirs in 2022 (published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and with Thomas Austenfeld, Robert Lowell in Context, to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2024.
notes
This essay was developed with the support of a research grant no. 2018/29/B/HS2/00749 from the National Science Centre Poland. I thank Professor Steven Gould Axelrod of the University of California, Riverside, for reading this essay at the final stage and for providing his helpful advice.
1. Robert Lowell called the triptych, in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop, "one heap, one binding, so to speak, though not one book" (Hardwick and Lowell 2019, 262).
2. Lowell's interest in painting and how it inspired his poetry were discussed by Frank Bidart and Frank Parker when they were interviewed by Ian Hamilton (Hamilton 1979, C939/23; C939/10).
3. For the marginal role of still life in Rembrandt, see Bergström (1983, 161–62, 248–50). For an extensive discussion of how Lowell engaged Vermeer and Rembrandt, see Helen Deese (1986, 184–98).
4. For a discussion of the reappraisal of still-life painting in France in the latter nineteenth century, see James Kearns (1993).
5. For other well-known analyses of Lowell's confessionalism as invested in the depictions of everyday objects, see Katharine Wallingford (1988, 32–35) and Willard Spiegelman (2008, 262–64). Also see Steven G. Axelrod's "Lowell's Influence" in Robert Lowell in Context, edited by Thomas Austenfeld and Grzegorz Kosc, which is slated to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2024.
6. For more relevant commentary on his empirical poetics in "Father's Bedroom," see Rei Terada (2006, 40–47).
7. The only exception may be his still-life image in "At the Green Cabaret," his imitation of Rimbaud's "Au Cabaret Vert" in Imitations (Lowell 2003, 266). That appetizing image of food only corroborates my argument since Imitations was a volume that let Lowell explore and temporarily adopt sensibilities remote from his own. See, for example, Donald Carne-Ross (1968, 161–62) and Grzegorz Kosc (2005, 64–73).
8. The divorce settlement is in the Robert Lowell Collection (box 18, folder 8). All the subsequent in-text parenthetical references to this collection will follow the same format, specifying box and folder numbers.
9. A report on Lowell's earning from FSG is appended to Blair Clark's letter to Robert Giroux, December 31, 1970 (Clark 1938–1983, box 1, folder 7).
10. See, specifically, Farrar, Straus and Giroux's Statement for Recipients of Miscellaneous Income for 1973 to Robert Lowell (Robert Lowell Collection, 18–2).
11. These numbers can be found in letters from Robert Giroux to Nathaniel Hoffman on January 28, 1975 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., box 212, folder "General Correspondence 1974–5"), and Giroux to Lowell on September 18, 1975 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., box 213, folder "A Moment in American Poetry—General").
12. A trust was recommended to Lowell by his lawyer Joseph S. Iseman from a New York firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, though, against Iseman's recommendations, the poet chose a revocable trust which was fully taxed but which he himself could use if necessary. See Joseph S. Iseman's letters to Lowell, November 8, 1972 and October 16, 1974 (Robert Lowell Collection, 18–2).
13. The Claesz is listed in a 1976 exhibit catalogue Art in Seventeenth Century Holland (Brown 1976, 32) by the National Gallery. The canvas was owned by the London National Gallery at the time.
14. On most of the poem's manuscript sheets, the last quote ends with the word "Sombrero": "[…] Where is my Sombrero?" (Robert Lowell Collection 4–6). Frank Bidart, helping Lowell with the editing, placed the end quote at the end of the poem reportedly at Lowell's dictation but for reasons that are unclear (Lowell 2019, 139). Such placement may suggest that the band was so noisy that even his self-talk seemed to be absorbed by their singing.
works cited
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