Blood and Plunder
By M. L. ROSENTHAL
Though Lowell does acknowledge his indebted- ness in a one-sentence preliminary note, it is perfectly true that, by borrowing Hawthorne's and Melville's titles, dramatic situations and characters and then wrenching the works into new directions (or at least changing them in im- portant aspects), he has indeed violated the integrity of his originals and in a sense broken faith with their authors. In making poetic plays from these beautiful prose works of fiction, he has done the same kind of thing for which un- sympathetic readers have attacked some of his verse translations. He has not merely transcribed them literally into another medium, but has repossessed the originals by treating them as his subjects.
So there is some justice in the complaints, and I suppose that a certain prejudice against Lowell's plays is therefore bound to set and harden. But having—in the mood once described by Dorothy Parker as 'crazed with liberalism' —conceded all this, I must nevertheless insist that Lowell has done something new and valuable. Hawthorne and Melville still remain, inviolable, in their own texts. Meanwhile, Lowell has re-envisioned the crucial confrontations of the American past first brought into symbolic focus by their genius. In the perspective of this century's exposure of the naked force under- lying questions of principle, he projects a harsher view of the basic conflicts riddling America since its origins. He begins with the transference to New England of the struggle between Puri- tan and Cavalier, which from the first was intensified by the distances involved and the special problems of the New World—including the racial guilt and confusions attendant on the colonists' relationship with the Indians.
The most brilliantly concentrated of the plays is My Kinsman, Major Molineux. Where Endecott and the Red Cross has proved intract- able for stage productions so far, this second play is an absolutely economical organic unit. At the same time, it shares the virtues of the first play: a happy combination of stylised symbolic patterning with a hard directness and even realism, and a freely adaptable verse that is at times purely ritualised and incantatory, at other times based on racy common speech, and at still others richly lyrical or rhetorical. Its moment is just before the American Revolution. Hawthorne had caught the spirit of this moment with a miraculously enkindled insight—its fury and also the helpless pathos of the dying old order and the hypocrisy of many loyalties in the face of raging change.
It is in Benito Cereno, however, that he most • THE Ow GLORY. By Robert Lowell. (Faber, 21s.) t THE BELL JAR. By Sylvia Plath. (Faber, 25s.) obviously 'modernises' a classic. Melville's tale, itself based on historical sources, of a Spanish ship that has been taken over by its cargo of slaves and of the reactions of a typically half- innocent, half-worldlyYankee captain who cannot really believe in the existence of evil, becomes, eventually, an account of imperialism and racism when Lowell takes it over. The metamorphosis is not quite as crude as this sounds. Lowell's ironies and subtleties—his wide range of poetic and dramatic strategies—serve him strikingly. But the final bearing is clear, and it does replace Mel- ville's preoccupation with the mysteries of un- known modes of existence by Lowell's preoccu- pation with the ethics of military force.
In all these plays, but especially in Benito Cereno, we have a heartfelt dialogue with the past by a modern master. On the simplest level, the plots are bold and clear, the language force- ful and moving, the issues absorbingly provoca- tive. At the same time, Lowell's dialogue with the past starts from the premises of Hawthorne and Melville, their very diction and involvement with their own meanings, and then he tests his own understanding against theirs and arrives at a certain balance. He sometimes -shows himself up a little wanting, a little oversimplified, but on the whole his own recast vision proves burn- ingly relevant.
Sylvia Plath's The Bell /art was originally published in 1963 under a pseudonym. I very much regret missing it then, for now it is im- possible to read without thinking of her per- sonally and of the suicidal poems in Ariel. Written in the first person, it is about an Ameri- can college student who excels in competition, especially academic competition, but who is overwhelmed by her sense of inadequacy and unworthiness. In this novel, Sylvia Plath wanted to clarify the psychological condition, or patho- logy, of her suicidal compulsion, 'sitting under the ... glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.' She was arranging crucial motifs in her life around this symbol, using flashbacks to give depth to the simple surface account of unexpected break- down. The motifs occur in the poems of Ariel, her other posthumous book, as well—the family's German background (always connoting guilt for Nazism to the girl);_ber father's death when she was nine; the shock of seeing cadavers, and also of seeing a Caesarian operation, when shown around a hospital by her matter-of-fact boy- friend, a science student; the intertwined fear and fascination toward both death and sex; the longing to be with the dead father, which leads to hatred -of her mother for accepting his death and to attempts to destroy herself; the identifi- cation of personal and public anguish as functions of one another.
The Bell Jar is an inexpert, uneven novel, but it has magnificent sections whose candour and revealed suffering will haunt anyone's memory. In its capacity as 'Information,' it has a great deal to tell us about the mentality of persons under the desperate internal pressure of the protagonist. The sense of having been judged and found wanting for no externally discernible reason, and the equally terrifying sense of great power gone to waste or turned against oneself— these are the murderous phantoms against which the heroine pitifully contends.
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