Sexton on Lowell in the classroom

The class met at Boston University on Tuesdays from two to four in a dismal room the shape of a shoe box. It was a bleak spot, as if it had been forgotten for years, like the spinning room in Sleeping Beauty’s castle. We were not allowed to smoke, but everyone smoked anyhow, using their shoes as ashtrays. Unused to classes of any kind, it seemed slow and uninspired to me. But I had come in through the back door and was no real judge. […]  

 In November I gave him a manuscript to see if he thought “it was a book.” He was enthusiastic on the whole, but suggested that I throw out half of it and write another fifteen or so poems that were better. He pointed out the weak ones and I nodded and I took them out. It sounds simple to say that I merely, as he once said, jumped the hurdles that he had put up. But it makes a difference who puts up those hurdles. He defined the goal and acted as though, good race horse that I was, I’d just naturally run the course. […]  

The last time I saw Mr. Lowell was over a year ago before he left for New York. I miss him as all apprentices miss their first real master. He is a modest man and an incisive critic. He helped me to distrust the easy musical phrase and to look for the frankness of ordinary speech. If you have enough natural energy he can show you how to chain it in. He didn't teach me what to put into a poem, but what to leave out. What he taught me was taste. Perhaps that’s the only thing a poet can be taught. 

-- from the recollection of Anne Sexton, published under the title "Classroom at Boston University" in Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs, edited by Jeffrey Meyers (University of Michigan Press, 1988); cross-posed to the BU Graduate Program in Creative Writing blog

Bishop, Botsford, Lowell, Borges

The volume Words in Air -- comprising 30 years of letters between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell -- was published last year. Several copies circulated among a crowd of us here in Boston, and we fought rather fiercely to extend our turn, to pick through their exchange of mutual esteem, respective exasperations, and reports from "the proper table-land of poetry". A fun way to pass the time, if you can't get your hands on a copy, is to enter queries like "wobbling" and "horrid" into the search feature for text of Words in Air available at Google Books.

One letter of pointed interest to me is found on page 414:

Keith is now coming to see me about some prose translations of you. [...] He comes through Rio traffic wobbling on a bicycle -- with his large wobbling pipe leading.

This is Keith Botsford she's writing about, he of long-time magazine collaboration in oft-varying proportions with Saul Bellow, who used to have a group of us young turks (pictured below) over to his house perched atop Savin Hill in Boston overlooking Dorchester Bay. We'd goggle at his multilingual library and receive orders on proofing mss or reviewing submissions for News from the Republic of Letters, and he'd make us strong coffee in tiny cups, and a nice lunch besides. For many years, he gave access to a view on world literature, and on kulchur, that I don't know we would have groped our way toward otherwise.

We reprinted in the most previous issue of The Charles River Journal (#2, published before the intervening long hiatus to be broken with the appearance of #3 this September), a journal of a trip he took with Robert Lowell through South America -- Brazil, Argentina. It begins:

Swooping down on Belem do Para. Bethlehem. Mouth of the Amazon. Ten at night, the Lowells due at midnight: hence the poet’s full moon turned out for us, and the river bright as tinfoil. We see it, distorted by the double-pained windows of our DC-6. Then we don’t see it. We have to punch through a storm, shaped like a trompe, which the OED calls a water blowing-engine (French has it as a musical instrument, the horn for instance): black turbulent air. Glimpses, as we buck about, of black-green forest below. We boil in our belts, then we get sleet: I can see it bouncing off the wings into the ocean, and I can see the pattern of the delta disemboguing, great semi-circular swatches of sand under shallow water. Then we circle around the forest again. Wet smoke rises from the forest, each wisp isolated by mile after mile of darkness.

(Anyone who'd like to read the full piece may request a PDF copy of that issue.)

Lowell, elsewhere in Words in Air, admits he gave KB "a hard run" on that tour. At one point, he apparently declared himself Caesar of the Amazon... one hopes there are photos. Later on the trip, they met with Borges in Buenos Aires. A 1962 issue of The Kenyon Review ran Botsford's piece, "About Borges and Not About Borges", a chimeric text based -- KB writes -- on "Dialogues of every kind. Some between the two of us, recorded on tape; some just noted; some that took place in my imagination; and some that are beyond both of us, whose relation to Borges is that they exist because Borges exists, and would not if he did not."

From that text, here is Borges speaking for the tape recorder:

I Americans are realistic in the Norse manner, which is a pity: people more easily forgive other kinds of imperialism. There is a glamor about fighting, about armies, whereas commercial feelings are hard to understand. The Americans have beaten everybody and seem hardly interested in the fact. Perhaps the only American war they remember is the War between the States, and that is remembered because the South lost. People don't admire them for their hesitations. But perhaps you've got to be romantic; everyone sympathizes with the Trojans, and no one with the Greeks. There's something quite vulgar about victory, something dignified and pathetic about defeat. I think Kipling is a very great writer, and he's been run down simply because he bragged, in a very un-English way, about the empire. Or take the Germans. They can be wonderful soldiers, but they have to be bolstered up by some theory. They have to think of themselves as Teutons, or as characters out of Tacitus, or as Norsemen.

You can find the full piece online. If you lack access to JSTOR, you might email me and ask to borrow my hardcopy; I am glad to sent it 'round.

*
From the archives: The Boston section of the TRoL staff, c. 2002 .
R-L: ST, LM, EH, KB, JJ, AW.