‘The Elusive Neutron’: Stephen Jonas & Robert Lowell

This year marks the 60th anniversary of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, a collection which notwithstanding the ups and downs of its author’s reputation, has proved inarguably influential ever since. Nevertheless, despite the book’s renown and popularity, it is now often forgotten that one of its most high-profile reviews was anything but flattering. In fact, M.L. Rosenthal’s “Poetry as Confession,” the first work of criticism that popularized the notion of ‘confessional poetry,’ mostly revolved around the critic’s dissatisfaction with Lowell’s supposedly amoral approach to his subject matter. “It is hard not to think of Life Studies” Rosenthal opined, “as a series of personal confidences, rather shameful, that one is honor-bound not to reveal.” Rosenthal had evidently been shocked by Lowell’s treatment of his parents, and, rather revealingly, for the manner in which it discredited his father's “manliness and character.” While acknowledging that the autobiographical element had formed a cornerstone of American poetry since Whitman and Dickinson, Rosenthal believed that Lowell had desacralized the notion of poetic disclosure by employing his jagged earnestness to chip away at the hallowed figure of the father. On first reading this review some years ago, I concluded that it was better read as a shallow defense of patriarchy than a serious consideration of a collection that has proved immeasurably influential, and my opinion hasn’t changed since then.

Clearly, Rosenthal had failed to grasp that at its best, the so-called ‘confessional’ approach is only a springboard the poet employs to achieve a heightened state of consciousness, luring the reader into analyzing the poem’s network of historical, cultural, and social associations through the sheer force of the speaker’s emotional intimacy. Thus, according to Rosenthal, the fact that Life Studies was immersed in a conversation with many of the West’s literary and philosophical traditions paled in comparison to how Lowell had dared suggest that his father was ‘unmanly.’ Nevertheless, Rosenthal was merely voicing a discomfort that would later become more pronounced among Lowell’s readers. Having essentially earned his early renown—a Pulitzer at 29—by finally proving that America, like Europe, was capable of producing an aristocrat who wrote internationally-renowned poetry, Lowell began to enjoy subverting the expectations that had been placed upon him.

Indeed, while Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV (1917–1977) was the poster-boy of New England’s Puritan élite, benefiting from all the privilege that came with it, his rebellion against that background shouldn’t be underestimated. He refused to fight in WWII and marched against the war in Vietnam. He broke the omertà of wealth, by turns mocking and criticizing its hollowness, and wore his mental illness on his sleeve at a time when one was expected to silently and chemically repress it at all costs, spoiling Boston’s do-gooder image of itself vis-à-vis civil rights along the way. Much of that has been lost amidst the biographic fog that now surrounds his work, and which has obfuscated the breadth of his achievement. This same obsession with the biographical elements of the poet’s life—or rather over whether they make sense to us, or we deem them worthwhile through the lens of our present—has also inevitably affected the reception of another great poet of mid-twentieth-century Boston: Stephen Jonas (1921–1970).

In many ways, Jonas was Lowell’s complete opposite. While the latter could easily trace his lineage to the colonial era, nearly every statement made about Jonas tends to include some variation of the following statement: “little is known of his life.” Due to an utterly mysterious lack of documentary evidence, what few attestable clues we possess about Jonas’s life come from “what he told friends or wrote in notebooks,” as David Rich put it, who also provided the afterword for Arcana: A Stephen Jonas Reader (City Lights, 2019). Jonas alternatively claimed (or alluded) to being Native American, African American, Cape Verdean, and Puerto Rican, with roots in either New York, New Jersey, Georgia, or Massachusetts, origin stories which Rich investigated to little avail, although concluding that a childhood in a Boston-area orphanage was likely. What is conclusively known about Jonas could fit inside a fortune cookie. He spent the last 25 years of his life in Boston, keeping a fairly miserable lifestyle afloat thanks to a pension he’d somehow secured himself, and belonged to what is now referred to as the School of Boston, alongside John Wieners (1934-2002) and Gerrit Lansing (1928-2018), who also served as the co-executors of Jonas’s literary estate—a School which as The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature tells it, “provided one of the avant-garde’s responses in the 1960s to the mainstream works of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath.” In addition, the fact Jonas was gay “further estranged him from the mainstream,” as Joseph Torra stressed in his introduction to Jonas’s last Selected Poems (Talisman House, 1994), which was reprinted in Arcana.

Yet for all these biographical differences, both Jonas and Lowell produced bodies of work that can be relished for being highly immersive investigations into their respective backgrounds and contexts, investigations which nonetheless betray a great deal of common ground. Both poets, it seems to me, produced poems that are unusually accessible, expansive, and technically masterful, while nonetheless retaining an appealing improvisatory nature that lends itself to infinite re-readings. While Jonas was far more comfortable in the avant-garde mode than Lowell could possibly conceive of, both were mechanically clever, had a fine ear for music, were prone to musing about the craft—“one life, one writing” (Lowell), “the poet is a surprise to / every one / including me” (Jonas)—produced autobiographical pieces of prose—Jonas with “What Made Maud Hum,” Lowell with “91 Revere Street”—enjoyed performing their life stories in a cheeky tone reminiscent of the Commedia dell'arte, and had penchants for resurrecting and incorporating older dictions into their work—Elizabethan for Jonas, Miltonian for Lowell. Unfortunately, both were also severely debilitated by their mental illnesses and subsequent hospitalizations—Jonas’s suffering, predictably, owing to his station, being far worse than his wealthier colleague’s. Not to mention that they were born only four years apart, being fated by history to witness similar changes.

Juxtaposing their work allows some striking parallels to emerge. Both Lowell and Jonas were very clearly fueled by a determination to not be defined by their backgrounds, thus perhaps explaining why they were equally drawn to chronicling what Jonas dubbed the “bourgeois dullness / that settles plumb blank upon / the blobs of american cities” (“Back ’O Town Blues”). Compare Jonas’s “The Street”: “it's a nice street / I live on a very nice street / w / nice little ole ladies / who remark on yr / window boxes / & go on to say what a nice say / it is for death / they have dividends / & memories of horse cars / on Tremont St.”—to Lowell’s “Memories of West Street and Lepke”: “I hog a whole house on Boston’s / 'hardly passionate Marlborough Street,' / where even the man / scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans, / has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate, / and is a 'young Republican.'” It is difficult not to note that both poets here find themselves suffocated by the parochialism of socio-economic conformity and are compelled to sardonically critique it. They were also equally inspired by the urbanistic upheavals facing Boston at the time, as shown by Jonas’s “XXXIII”: “for as I write, the hammer falls against the best houses / built in North America & for what? high-rise matchboxes/ stood on end. Beacon Hill surrender'd to tourisme & poseur artist / on Charles St.” —and Lowell’s “For The Union Dead”: “I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized // fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage, / yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting / as they cropped up tons of mush and grass / to gouge their underworld garage. // Parking spaces luxuriate like civic / sandpiles in the heart of Boston.”

Rosenthal, eat your heart out: if this is what comes from being ‘amorally’ candid about one’s parents, then I’m all for it. As for Jonas, since this great, under-read poet is experiencing a brief revival—for what is one’s posthumous reputation if not little gasps for air interspersed by years of oblivion?—I would not see him become categorized as another Weldon Kees (1914–1955), remembered more for the alluring conundrums he presented rather than for his work. After all, it was not their ‘confessions’ that made Jonas and Lowell so unforgettable; it was their brilliance of detail which created, in their own unique ways, fully-formed emotional universes that demand repeated visits from us in the future, the further removed we become from their realities. Who knows? Perhaps Jonas and Lowell aren’t as similar as I think they are, but what is clear to me is that I am wholly in agreement with Randall Horton, who wrote that Jonas’s work “tightropes the fringes of narration while resisting a singular mode or aesthetic that he can be grouped in.” Thus, he seems to me exactly the sort of poet that defeats the validity of the narrative of ‘schools’ or ‘scenes,’ and if we are to take these lines from “Following The Same Route But At A Different Pace” at face value, this is what Jonas himself desired: “I want to be free / uncategorized the – / X factor   the elusive neutron / not to be tagd and / shut between musty volumes / on shelves above / heads of bookworms.” Lest I have not made this point strongly enough, Arcana: A Stephen Jonas Reader should become a fixture on everyone’s shelves and as such, I think that the book’s editors—and City Lights—should receive some praise not so much for rescuing (I hate that word) but for reinvesting in such a talent as Jonas.