‘BEYOND THE ALPS’
To the Editors:
In his review of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems, James Fenton puzzles over the meaning of “Beyond the Alps” and especially of the phrase “Paris, our black classic.” His interesting discussion misses at least one important trick.
After Phoebus Apollo and a brilliant mountain dawn, the train descends to Paris (Lowell’s European geography was conveniently and endearingly sketchy—he believed that all places forty miles from London must therefore be extremely close to one another, so Oxford, Maidstone, and Colchester ought to be immediate neighbors; he never quite managed to figure out why the University of Essex was so bafflingly far from All Souls, or why his wife Caroline Blackwood’s house near Maidstone was so far from Colchester). The descent in the poem is from lightness to darkness, illumination to chaos and old night. There are two Parises in play here, surely: Haussmann’s city, in its postwar grime, which, after Rome, would certainly have registered as “black” to an American—if not a British—eye, and Paris the treacherous houseguest of Menelaus, abducter of Helen and only begetter of the Trojan wars…black in character, classical in period, and of a piece with the killer kings on the Etruscan cup. The low morals of the prince of Troy are transferred to his namesake city, which seems to be crumbling into broken black-figure shards. Obviously Paris the wife-stealer could not have “broken up” in the manner described, but the city for which he stands could, and did. So Paris, France, reveals itself, by word-cricket, as a modern Troy. To Eliot’s falling cities—Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, London—are added Troy and Paris, while Rome still stands, just about, as the city of God, though Lowell had ceased to be a practicing Catholic by the time he wrote the poem, which revisits his loss of faith, as the leaving of Rome by train implies. The journey of the poem leads from Saint Peter, and his electric razor–wielding successor Pius XII, to Paris, prince of doomed, secular Troy.
This is the kind of far-fetched, verbal-sleight-of-hand connection that often infuriates Lowell’s detractors, but has magic for me. Rather obscure magic, admittedly, but magic still. There’s some mania in it. Lowell said, “I like to write in mania, and revise in depression,” and “Beyond the Alps” is perhaps one of the poems where a bit more depressed revision wouldn’t have come amiss, and rather too much playful manic brilliance survives. Paris/Paris is a characteristic manic pun, like “peter out” (“Peter out”) in “The Drunken Fisherman”—a pun Lowell made me eliminate from a Faber selection of his poems from which the footnotes of mine quoted by Fenton are drawn.
Just to add to the clutter of allusions, I notice that Fenton gives the poem an incorrect, but altogether more logical title in his second reference to it, calling it “Crossing the Alps”—which is the usual short form of the title of Turner’s painting Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, another study in darkness and light that reverses the terms of the poem by having Hannibal descend from the blackness of the clouds toward the sunlit valley below. Whether fortuitously or by intention, the two are satisfyingly complementary. Hannibal was an important figure in Lowell’s personal mythology, and I can’t imagine that Lowell could have crossed the Alps without thinking of him and Turner’s monumental painting.
Jonathan Raban
London
To the Editors:
In his review of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems [NYR, August 14], James Fenton worries over the concluding couplet of “Beyond the Alps”:
Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up
Like killer kings on an Etruscan cup.
Fenton wants to know what makes Paris a “black classic.” The answer is straightforward enough. Lowell calls Paris black because at the time he wrote the poem Paris was black, covered with the soot of centuries. (This was before André Malraux arranged to have the city cleaned up.) Lowell contrasts the black city, through whose irregular blocks the train is making its way to the station, with the white Alps that figure in earlier lines and, of course, in the title.
Edwin Frank
New York City
James Fenton replies:
In his 1982 biography of Lowell, Ian Hamilton calls the final image of “Beyond the Alps” “one of Lowell’s most perfect and impenetrable.”
Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up
Like killer kings on an Etruscan cup.
He goes on to concede that “it is entirely permissible to say of these extraordinary lines that ‘the black of Paris is in contrast to the pure whiteness of the Alps; it appears pagan, sinister, mysterious. He has returned to the twentieth century, Etruscan in its remoteness—a buried world.’” The author Hamilton is quoting here is Hugh B. Staples. Hamilton concedes the possibility of the interpretation, but goes on to say that “the image continues to resist simple exegesis.”
In my opinion, both Staples and Edwin Frank slightly overstate their case when they refer to “the white Alps” and the “pure whiteness of the Alps.” It’s what you’d expect at dawn in the Alps, but it’s not what the I of the poem necessarily sees. In the first stanza, while the stewards on the Paris pullman go through the train banging their gongs (calling travelers to dinner, I had thought), the train is described as “mooning across the fallow Alpine snow.” I understood, perhaps wrongly, a moonlit landscape. The next morning, at dawn, he sees
each backward, wasted Alp, a Parthenon,
firebranded socket of the Cyclops’ eye.
That is, he sees each Alp as a desert, a waste, a ruin, charred like the giant’s eye-socket of legend. It is from this vision of charred Alps that the poet, or the I, descends to Paris.
Although I agree with Frank and with Jonathan Raban that Paris would have struck one coming from Rome (or anywhere else) as grimy, my problem—and that of many other readers whom I have asked—is not with the word “black” but with the phrase “black classic.” Why is Paris a black classic, why is it breaking up, and why is its breaking up like the image of the beautiful last line? I find that many people believe that “black classic” has something to do with Baudelaire, and I am perfectly ready to accept that it does. But then it must surely count as a private reference, difficult for the uninitiated to fathom.
As to the word “Paris,” in line three of the poem we are on the Paris pullman. In the penultimate line we arrive in Paris. The headnote confirms that we are on the train from Rome to Paris. Nothing else in the poem suggests to me the presence of the Trojan prince Paris, and I resisted this suggestion when it was forcefully put to me at the editorial stage. I also resisted the idea that Paris was breaking up because of anti-NATO riots. I just feel that interpretation should stick closer to the text. I am sorry to have made a slip with the title of the poem, while berating others for their slips.
EDITING LOWELL
To the Editors:
Without a copy of Lowell’s text at hand, the general reader cannot possibly evaluate James Fenton’s use of specific textual details in his review [NYR, August 14] of Robert Lowell: Collected Poems (co-edited by myself and David Gewanter). So I feel I need to respond. Because Fenton’s characteristic way of moving from evidence to conclusion is magisterial but willful, weirdly deceptive, full of feint and sleight of hand, I hope to proceed calmly, carefully, in the reader’s eyes as if without prejudice. He has just quoted Part III of the Sappho poem in Imitations:
Modern readers and poets have often seen that little phrase [line 3], translated by David A. Campbell as “and time goes by,” as meaning “the hour of the appointed tryst has passed,” and read it therefore as a poem of disappointed love. A.E. Housman made two attempts at it, leaving it non-gender-specific (“The rainy Pleiads wester…”). In his day, Lesbians who knew no other Greek were said to have this poem by heart. Lowell himself puts it in another poem, “Sappho to a Girl,” in History, joining it up with number 31. None of this important, well-known information—and remember these notes are addressed to the reader who does not know that Boulder is in Colorado—is provided.
One winces: none of this “important, well-known information” is provided? Then one looks back to remind oneself what this “important, well-known information” is. David A. Campbell translated line 3 a certain way, and thought the poem “a poem of disappointed love”: why should an editor mention this? That “disappointed love” underlies the poem is perfectly clear from every modern version I’ve seen of it, including Lowell’s. A.E. Housman translated it twice: nice to know, but the notes don’t attempt to list every interesting prior version of the poems Lowell imitates. Next we learn that “in [Housman’s] day, Lesbians who knew no other Greek were said to have this poem by heart”; the notion that readers of Lowell’s Collected Poems should be informed that this was “said” in Housman’s day needs, I think, no comment. The notes generally attempt to cross-reference Lowell’s other versions of the same poem: so their failure to do so here, pointed out by Fenton, is definitely a slip-up. (This is the final item of his “important, well-known information.”)
The eerie disconnection between Fenton’s chastising conclusion—”none of this information is provided”—and the importance of the information itself is startling. It is characteristic of Fenton’s way of moving from evidence to conclusion. The reader might well ask if Fenton, so confident, so free from a critic’s normal self-protective caution, merely is contriving showily to display the bric-a-brac of his learning (however irrelevant he fears it is). But the answer that grows as one reads further and further is: no, he is obsessed.
Fenton artfully deflects questions about his “information” by a sudden interjection, as if kicking up dust: “and remember these notes are addressed to the reader who does not know that Boulder is in Colorado.” Lowell is studied in American literature classes all over the world. The “Boulder” reference occurs in a poem about Ford Madox Ford. Why should a Chinese student expect that Ford, who was English/German, one of the founders of Modernism, ever read from his work in Colorado? (Why should a foreign student even assume that “Boulder” is a city?) I remember my own surprise when I first learned that Ford had been there. When I am reading Tu Fu, I don’t recognize place-names that I imagine are familiar to a Chinese student; I am always grateful when they are identified. This issue extends, of course, much beyond place-names: the notes identify Tacitus, Lucan, Thoreau. Serious people disagree about the usefulness of this; but the crucible of teaching undergraduates drives one to value the kind of identifications earlier generations scorned.
