Word: fatherness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...love, and know beyond him--"God as seaslug, God a queen with forty servants, God. . .she gave up--things whirl in the chainsaw bite of whatever squares the universe by name and number." Harriet--outside, in life, sometimes is able to see through "the fog" which her father like "the first philosopher. . .trying to pick up a car key clumsily opaques with his headlights." Harriet appears frequently in the poems--to clarify, identify, be, to be hoped for: Harriet growing up. The book ends with poems to Lowell's wife, Elizabeth, his foil and sharer...
...largeness of impulse--Lowell's ambition to respond to so many happenings--results in uneven inspiration. Some, the beautiful Father and Sons poem for Alan Tate, the Writers series, Caracas, some of the Dream poems, others--are among Lowell's most brilliant. The three poems to R.F.K. seem low-key and common at first-then resonant and vital. The Mexico series on the whole is mediocre--although it has brilliant lines and cadences. Lowell's use of the sonnet to frame his vision emphasizes the uneven inspiration. A few poems are written long to fulfill the form and must take...
Hard times means that the Lampoon didn't make the killing they expected to on their Life parody last fall. As my paternal grandmother used to say about my father, "their eyes were bigger than their stomach." Just before the Life press run, they jacked up the number they would print from 400,000 to 650,000. They could only sell half of them, and the rest are rotting in warehouses from Sheboygan to El Paso. They lost $15,000 on the $200,000 deal. That's big business...
Assessing his life, Father Conroy sees that he has been a sleepwalker among sleepwalkers, mending, patching, temporizing with a world that has been deteriorating as inexorably as his body. Playing priest like a character part, he has simply avoided living, allowing Ireland's failure elitists-the drunks, the loafers-to recognize in him their kindred spirit. He has not even been able to fail grandly. The one rebel he has deliciously identified with, a protégé who once ran away with the canon's silver, has ended up by becoming a trivial middle-aged success...
Without a false drop of sentimentality, the author lets Father Conroy die as he lived: an absurd misfit. Power can afford the risk, and not just because he is so brilliantly in control of his story. In his Irish bones, he knows something that many writing contemporaries do not understand: that failure is, in fact, the natural state of man. Converting chronic self-pity into the beginnings of self-awareness, Power proves himself, if not quite a tragedian, at least a master alchemist at producing final honor from final defeat...