Ten Years in the Tub Read Free

literature is when he listens to Tom Clancy audiobooks once a year on holiday—not that there’s anything wrong with that.
    On top of that, I had recently watched a BBC documentary about Ian Hamilton himself, who was a good poet and a great critic, and a mentor to Barnes, Amis, McEwan, and that whole generation of English writers. (There is, by the way, an exceptionally good new BBC cable channel here, BBC4, which shows documentaries of similar merit and obscurity every night of the week.) And I’d met him a couple of times, and really liked him, not least because he wrote an enthusiastic review of my first book. (Did I mention that he was a great critic?) He died a couple of years ago, and I wish I’d known him better.
    I still wouldn’t necessarily have tracked down the Lowell biography, however, if I hadn’t spent a weekend near Hay-on-Wye. Hay is a weird town on the border of England and Wales which consists almost entirely of secondhand bookshops—there are forty of ’em, within a few hundred yards of each other—and one of which is an immaculately stocked poetry store. That’s where I found Hamilton’s book, as well as the Penguin Modern Poets collection, purchasedbecause Corso’s lovely “Marriage” was read at a friend’s wedding recently. I bought the Ern Malley book (for a pound, pure maybe-one-day whimsy, doomed to top-shelf oblivion), and a first edition of Something Happened (because it crops up in Dow Mossman’s The Stone Reader ), elsewhere in the town. Buying books is what you do in Hay, in the absence of any other options.
    Despite all these various auguries, I hadn’t necessarily expected to read every word of the Lowell biography, but Hamilton is such a good writer, and Lowell’s life was so tumultuous, that it was gone in a couple of days, like an Elmore Leonard novel. Sometimes, in the hands of the right person, biographies of relatively minor figures (and Lowell’s influence seems to be receding fast) are especially compelling: they seem to have their times and cultural environments written through them like a stick of rock, in a way that sui generis major figures sometimes don’t. Lowell, it turns out, is the guy you can see just behind Zelig’s shoulder: he corresponded with Eliot, hung out with Jackie and Bobby K., and traveled around with Eugene McCarthy in ’68. He also beat up his own father, had endless strange, possibly sexless extramarital affairs with innumerable young women, and endured terrible periods of psychosis, frequently accompanied by alarming rants about Hitler. In other words, it’s one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of “This is me! ”
    And as a bonus, I felt I learned more about the act of creating poetry from this one book than I did in my entire educational career. (A line from a letter Lowell wrote to Randall Jarrell that I shall endeavour to remember: “In prose you have to be interested in what is being said… it’s very exciting for me, like going fishing.”) In the end, the psychotic periods make for a wearying rhythm to the book, and perhaps Hamilton’s criticism of the poems tends to be a little too astringent—the Collected Poems runs to twelve hundred pages, but Hamilton seems to argue that we could live without a good eleven hundred and fifty of them. And this is a poet he clearly loves…
    But it’s a great biography, and now I was off on this Hamilton kick. I bought Against Oblivion , his book of little essays about every major twentieth-century poet bar four—Eliot, Auden, Hardy, and Yeats—absent because their work is, in the critic’s view, certain to survive; it’s in the bathroom, and I’ve got through half of it. (Shock news: Grown-up critics think e.e. cummings sucks. I honestlydidn’t know. I read him at school, put him in the “good” box, and left him there.) I