Cultural Cohesion by Clive James

intense, and those named—especially if they are artists—are mainly people the poet knows. By now, unquestionably, he is at the centre of events. But the book has already convinced us that all events, even the vast proportion of them that happened before he arrived in the world, are at the centre of him.
    History is a long haul through places, things and, preeminently, names. Helen, Achilles, Cassandra, Orestes, Clytemnestra, Alexander, Hannibal, Horace, Juvenal, Dante, Villon, Anne Boleyn, Cranach, Charles V, Marlowe, Mary Stuart, Rembrandt, Milton, Pepys, Bishop Berkeley, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Napoleon, Beethoven, Goethe, Leo­pardi, Schubert, Heine, Thoreau, Henry Adams, George Eliot, Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Lady Cynthia Asquith, Rilke, George Grosz, Hardy, Al Capone, Ford Madox Ford, Allen Tate, Randall Jarrell, John Crowe Ransom, F. O. Mattheissen, Roethke, Delmore Schwartz, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, MacNeice, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Stalin, Harpo Marx, Che Guevara, Norman Mailer, Dwight Macdonald, Adrienne Rich, Mary McCarthy, Eugene McCarthy, Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, De Gaulle, Lévi-Strauss, R. P. Blackmur, Stanley Kunitz, Elizabeth Bishop, I. A. Richards, John Berryman, Robert Lowell and many more: a cast of thousands. The range they cover, and the pertinent information Lowell is able to adduce when treating each one—these things are little short of astonishing. But they were already startling in Notebook . What makes these qualities doubly impressive now is the new effect of faces succeeding faces in due order. Leaving, of course, a thousand gaps—gaps which the poet seems understandably keen to set about filling.
    Lizzle and Harriet’s retributive presence in Notebook has been eliminated from History and given a book of its own. The Dolphin likewise enshrines a portion of Lowell’s experience which is plainly not going to be allowed to overbalance the future of History . It is possible to suggest, given the dispersal of foci represented by these three volumes, that Lowell’s “confessional” poetry is no longer his main thing. The History book now embodies his chief effort, and in relation to this effort the ordinary people inhabiting his life don’t make the weight. History is full of public names, rather than private ones: public names united not so much by prestige as in their undoubted puissance in shaping, exemplifying or glorifying historic moments. In History Lowell, alone, joins the great.
    And the number of the great grows all the time. Instructive, in this respect, to take a close look at the History poem called “Cleopatra Topless,” one of a short sequence of poems concerning her. Where have we seen it before? Was it in Notebook ? But in Notebook it is untraceable in the list of contents. Where was it, then? The answer is that the poem is in Notebook but is called simply “Topless” and has nothing to do with Cleopatra. In the Notebook poem she’s just a girl in a nightclub:
    She is the girl
    as Renoir, Titian and all full times have left her
    To convert her into Cleopatra, it is only necessary to get rid of the inappropriate Renoir and Titian, filling the space with a line or so about what men desire. Throughout History the reader is continually faced with material which has apparently been dragged in to fill a specific chronological spot. Nor does this material necessarily have its starting point in Notebook : the fact that it appears in that volume, if it does appear, doesn’t preclude its having begun its life in an earlier, and often far earlier, Lowell collection. For example, a version of Valéry’s “Hélène” is in Imitations , with the inspiration for it credited to Valéry. By the time it arrives in History , it is credited to no one but Lowell. It is true that the drive of the verse has been weakened with over-explanatory