the boisi center interviews no. 28: November 19, 2008

paul mariani is a professor of English at Boston College and the author of such literary biog- raphies as Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life (2008) and The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane (1999). He spoke with Boisi Center associate director Erik Owens before his presentation on writing biography at the Boisi Center.

owens: So, one of the things that has For a time in the 1940s, Lowell was a At least four of the poets I’ve written struck me about the subjects of your convert and then had—after his di- about did suffer from manic depression, biographies in the past—William Carlos vorce—left the church, and a kind of exis- or what we call now a bipolar disorder. I Williams, Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, tential nihilism came to take its place, so wonder how many people, though, don’t Hopkins and Berryman – is that most, that his vision of the world and of the self experience some kind of deep depres- if not all of them, suffered from depres- got darker and darker. Poetry served as sion in their lives. I think we all, at some sion of some sort. Is that a poetic license point, experience a sense of major loss, of sorts? Is that an affliction that poets etc. And there are points where we feel deal with more than other people? In ebullient, too. I’m not saying that that’s your biographical work, how do you see clinical manic depression, but at least the relationship between depression and we understand something of what those creativity? states are. mariani: What I think happens is that owens: Does the creativity precede or those who are creative and also are prone stem from these periods—the depression to manic depression find in poetry or and recovery and ebullience that you writing or art or music a way of stabi- speak about? Are they tethered together? lizing that. It becomes a help for them, For me, to the extent that I’ve felt those and it evens out the effects of some of emotions, it hasn’t resulted in an extraor- their highs and lows. There are levels dinary flourishing of my own creative of manic depression, some more severe work. than others. Lowell, of the five that I’ve mariani: That’s well put. What I’m done, suffered the most the highest man- talking about here are writers. The ic episodes and the lowest depressions. urgency of creativity has to be there. In Once he underwent medical treatment, his mainstay. If he couldn’t have religion, each case, of course, these were writ- he would struggle courageously to get at least he had poetry and could shape an ers before the onslaught or the visible out from under the depression, and that’s inner order for himself. This is what he onslaught of manic depression episodes. when a lot of the poetry came to be writ- tried to do over and over again, including Lowell was already writing for a number ten. It was a way of stabilizing himself writing a book of blank verse sonnets of years before he suffered his first manic by profoundly searching himself. If you modestly called History. In it he asks: depressive bout, and I think that’s true of were to put it into spiritual terms, it was how do I shape human history? How do I all of these. Hopkins speaks of melan- a kind of kenosis or emptying of the shape it from a perspective which seems cholic fits. Hart Crane and Berryman self and then trying to fill that void with true to my own experience? It’s a very of being in hell and part way back. The something larger than one’s self-preoccu- dark perspective, but there it is. thing is, they ask, is this: how can I use pations. this ordering of words to order a world

1 the boisi center interview: paul mariani vertiginously and terrifyingly going out example, the life of Hopkins or Emily that might not be progressive, that may of whack? Dickinson or Wallace Stevens, where a be instead somehow random? great deal is happening, but in the inte- I don’t know if you’re born a writer, but mariani: You know, I’m not so sure rior space of the mind and the heart. On these five were writers before they experi- that the Beats really did live random lives. the other hand take Villon or Rimbaud or enced these manic episodes. Now, a clini- If you look at Ginsberg or if you look at Hart Crane or Berryman or Dylan Thom- cal psychologist might say that the manic Kerouac or if by extension Robert Creeley as or Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath or depression or the bipolarity was there. or if you look at Gary Snyder—I’m not Anne Sexton, where much of the drama That it just hadn’t manifested itself in a sure which ones you want to go with unfolds out there, on the streets of New clinically recognizable form yet. I don’t but—Beat doesn’t just mean a kind of York or Paris in the 1920s, or Mexico City know the answer to that. Was it there in empty vacuity. You get that with minor in the 1930s, to be set down and record- some nascent form, perhaps? The thing figures, but for them the word is in- ed. Those poets are living on the edge, is that they are poets and identify them- formed with the sense Kerouac gave it: of selves as poets, and then they have to find a kind of beatitude. So, there’s a kind of a way to deal with their condition in and journey implied there, towards Nirvana through their poetry. or some safe haven. owens: One of the things that struck “I think most Now, at one level the journey may be that me in some of your work is that you have people have a you get in a car with Kerouac and Cassidy such a thoughtful perspective on the and you drive from New York out to the art of biography. It makes me wonder sense that they’re West Coast. When you get out to the West if you—as a religious person and as a Coast, what can you do but drive back to biographer—have a trajectory or a tone to on a journey the East Coast. But I don’t think that’s your way of seeing? Like colors that work of some sort, the deepest Kerouac. That’s certainly not together in a large canvas to present some the deepest Ginsberg. There is a sense sort of a coherent or meaningful picture that their life is of a journey, of an unfolding. Now, I or a feeling or a meaning to a life? Is can’t say specifically or deeply what it is there in fact coherence to a single life that unfolding into in each of those cases. I would have to can be seen only by someone else looking spend a lot of time before I felt confident back over that life, when in fact it is the something like to say what that journey was, but I’ll tell very lack of coherence that constitutes the a recognizable you this. In all five cases, in all the biog- human condition on a day-to-day basis? raphies that I’ve done, I have found that there was a journey, a sense of journey. mariani: Wow! I think most people shape...that’s Surely in the directions they saw their have a sense that they’re on a journey of why stories are poetry unfolding. some sort, that their life is unfolding into something like a recognizable shape, or important to us.” The biographer can articulate that. The so they would hope. That’s why stories biographer can stand back. He can see, or are so important to us. Everybody wants she can see, what’s happened in 20, 30, to tell his or her story, or—if not their 40 years and see a trajectory. Is the trajec- and we find their broken, Romantic lives own—then the stories of others. Moses, tory nothing more than a rocket burst in pulling us after them. Most people think David, Achilles, Ulysses, Julius Caesar, its randomness? I don’t think so. Cer- of such lives as a kind of journey, even Jesus of Nazareth, Paul of Tarsus, Au- tainly what the poet wants is to be able if a journey over the edge into the abyss. gustine, Joan of Arc, Abraham Lincoln, to write the lines that need to be written, If you lose the sense that life is worth Jesse James, Teddy Roosevelt, Eleanor and written with an urgency most people living, if the quotidian becomes a dizzy- Roosevelt, McCain, Obama. We never get will not understand. But those lines are ing randomness for you, if it really does tired of stories, do we? And some of the what give the poet the sense that some- devolve like a flushed urinal into chaos, stories are really way out to lunch, like thing significant has been said. Even there’s a very good chance that you’ll go the stories of mass murderers or serial when Berryman didn’t feel as comfort- down with it. killers or con men or flesh eaters, and able with his later work as he had with then there are other stories that from owens: So, how does this relate to the the best of his Dream Songs, he needed the outside look as if nothing happened, Beat mentality in terms of a journey in something, it was very important that he where it’s all an interior drama. Take, for life, a progress, as opposed to serendipity still be a good teacher, and when he felt

2 the boisi center interview: paul mariani he’d lost even that, that’s when he ended his life. So, there has to be a sense that life has meaning – that one’s life is moving in a direction towards something. Or that it has arrived, and can bask in the comfort of that. Now, does that mean that the journey is going to move toward some kind of paradise? No. It just means that the journey has in some sense been worth it, or at least that the poet has borne up under the stress of living. That he or she will try to do the best they can with what they’ve got. If even that begins to really to unravel, then you’re really in trouble. I think we all need a sense that, as bad as things are – and I’m talking about alcoholics, cocaine snorters, etc., pose I didn’t believe in God, then what? the work of feeding the hungry whether they have to hope that somehow there’s But I can’t really go there for long. It’s too by feeding their stomachs or feeding a chance that things can somehow turn exhausting, too counter-productive. Like their minds and souls. It means St. around, that innocence can somehow be holding your breath while there’s a sea of Ignatius writing 50,000 letters at the end glimpsed again. If not tomorrow, then fresh air all around you to sustain you. of his life while he was in his room next maybe the next day. And if they really I’m so deep-wired at this point that I say, to the Gesù there in Rome, or Hopkins lose that, there’s a good chance that well, going in that direction is ridiculous. teaching elementary Greek to hundreds they’ll just call the whole game quits. What am I wasting time for? Let’s get on of students who couldn’t care less about with it. It would be like deciding for the what he had to teach them. Your job is to owens: In your own life and in that hell of it not to love my grandchildren do the work. of the people you’ve written about, how today. You can try it for a little while, but important is religion in that process of an At some point you look back and you say, you know it’s a game. Then you come unfolding narrative and of thinking that where’s it all going? At least in Hopkins’ back to the fact that they need to be fed. there’s a better day ahead? case and in my case and in Berryman’s Or that they might hurt themselves. Or case, a sense of consolation that it’s work- mariani: For them or for me? they need advice or comfort, or someone ing out. And that consolation can come at to hold their hand as they cross the street. owens: Whichever you choose. Which- the oddest moment, in the middle of the They need clothes, food, a comforting ever you want to talk about night, say, or at four in the morning. And word, whatever. And so you go back to it’s that which keeps you going. mariani: Well, I think that I feel closest that pattern of concern and love, and that to Hopkins. For me, the underlying pattern just becomes deeper and deeper. owens: Which came first in your case? Christian story or Christian mythos— Writing poetry or writing about poets? There are a lot of people that keep saying, whatever you wish to call it—is what in I do believe, I don’t, I do, I don’t. They mariani: Well, I wrote a couple of early fact informs my own life. That means not can’t make up their minds, and at a poems when I was 16 years old. I wanted just because it feels comfortable putting certain point, I get impatient with that. to win $10 from the nuns up in Beacon, that on as if you could put on a coat, At some point you say, okay, look, you’ve New York, when I was studying to be a because often, it doesn’t feel comfortable been having an argument back and forth priest. I had a great year in Beacon with at all. But at a certain point—at some about the existence of God. Well, what the Marianists. And I won that $10 and crossroads—you find the courage to go about your own meager existence? Let’s I had to go to some English text with a on in that direction. You can even try to say yes or no to the question and then get blue cover to unlock the secrets of how to fake it. But at some point, you either go on with our lives. For me, the subsequent write a poem because nobody there could over or you jerk yourself. I did say yes, trip after the honeymoon yes is what has teach me. And I’d write a poem now and Hopkins wrote. I DID say YES. become so very exciting. So, I’ve said yes, then, but when I got to college, I knew I’d It’s funny because I often wake up and now where do we go from here? Now, let’s have to make a living, and so the practical I’ll say something to myself, like: sup- get on with the day-by-day, the service, aspects came in. So I said to myself, may-

3 the boisi center interview: paul mariani be I can teach what I love. So, for years, I things might be otherwise. Also The God- makes the poet a special or different kind just did the critical work while the credits father, another tale about a dysfunctional of subject? and experience amassed. family that destroys itself even as it tries mariani: You mean, why am I not ever to keep itself together. Going over those Then in my mid-30s I said, if I’m ever going to write a biography of Clinton, for scenes again and again as in a nightmare going to participate in the actual creation example? Or Nixon? has been very important to me. of poems I have to start. I’ve already lost owens: Right. Truly, you have a fasci- too much valuable time. Then there was Besides that, of course—inextricably nation with lives, but not just any life. Giovanni Giudici, the Milanese poet. woven into the fabric or text—there’s He was staying at my house for a couple the spiritual, the deep need to somehow mariani: But not just any life—that’s of days as my guest while lecturing at get down on the page something of the right. What was so fascinating about the the University of Massachusetts, and I ineffable that I have felt. I mean, I know life of Hopkins is that I’m fascinated by showed him some poems that I had in I have felt these stirrings, this sense of the spiritual life of Jesuits. I never had a sheaf in my desk. I hadn’t published any formal Jesuit education in college anything, and he said to me—I’ll never or high school. I never had the Jesuits, forget—he said, Paolo, it is time for you but they have become my favorites. Willy to leave off being an altar boy and to enter “I’m very much nilly, for better or for worse. But then my into the abode of the high priest. That’s son never had the Jesuits either, and he what he said, High Priest. What a great interested in became a Jesuit priest. In truth, I love phrase: so Romantic, so Italian. But it the spiritual exercises. So, I’m very much worked its charm on me. It was time to the formation interested in the formation of the self start talking about other people’s poetry, of the self that that occurs through the spiritual exer- and write it myself. Instead of watching cises. Especially that sense of a composi- the dance from the sidelines, to get out occurs through tion of place, of being imaginatively in a there on the dance floor myself. place with Christ or God, because that’s the spiritual so much like what the poet has to do to owens: What are the key themes in “realize” a situation or a landscape or a your own poetry? exercises...that’s complex of feelings. mariani: I think all poets have to deal so much like what I remember the poet, Denise Levertov, with loss, evanescence, the Heraclitean writing that she never knew that she’d impermanence of things. You try to hold the poet has to been writing Jesuit poems all along. I onto something. And one way of holding never knew, she said, that the Jesuits onto it is to write about it. Otherwise, it’s do.” had something called the composition of gone. This is why people keep journals, place, but that’s what she was doing. And etc. So there’s that: the theme of loss, and then she read Ignatius, bingo! Realized the attempt to recover something from that was what she’d been doing for years. that wake. There’s also a sense of blessed- the mystery inherent in the quotidian, ness, I think, as I’ve gotten older, a sense but how to convince others through Ignatius is a poet. And I’m fascinated by of looking at what I’ve been given. To words that I’ve really seen something or the language of poetry. I’m fascinated by stop and look at the things around you. touched something. And so that dimen- the bendings of language, the nuances, if A beautiful wife. Kids and grandkids. sion is also very important. In fact, the you will, the over and under readings, the Friends. And to write about these in the whole human God-suffused spectrum interlacings between prose and poetry. celebratory mode. So, then, there’s the of feelings from despair to great joy and Where does one begin and the other end? elegiac mode and the celebratory mode. ecstasy: they’re all important. And the How do prose and poetry interlock? Can Family’s very important. In America, I things is to get them all down on the I make the prose itself sing? This is also think the theme of the family is absolute- page in lyric form. a part of what I try to do, so that I won’t bore my poor students when I teach. ly central. I think of all the great dramas owens: One last question, I think, and I had too many boring teachers and I – Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which is this has been so interesting. What’s dif- vowed long ago that I would do every- my favorite, by Eugene O’Neill or Arthur ferent about writing a biography of a poet thing in my power to avoid boring my Miller’s Death of a Salesman. These are as opposed to anyone else—a writer of audience. That’s something I told myself two of my favorites. They’re about the prose, a different kind of creative artist, 50 years ago. I don’t know how success- tragedy of the family, about the wish that a business leader, the war hero? What

4 the boisi center interview: paul mariani ful I’ve been, but I never forget what I suburbs seventy and eighty years ago. For these big mournful eyes, and it’s clear told myself back then when I teach my all the poetry that he’s written, I’m most that he wants Hawthorne to pick him students. fascinated by a story like this. He goes up and hold him. But he’s so filthy. And into a tenement house in mid-winter and dark, brooding Hawthorne picks him It’s that sense of engaging them, of there’s an elderly woman living by her- up and holds him. His daughter never bringing them along into a creative self, a widow, and she’s got a very serious forgot that story, which is one reason space that’s so critical. I’m not there cold, but the house is cold because the she went on to become a nun working to teach physics or mathematics, true, furnace isn’t working. So, he gives her among the poor and desperate. It’s those but I am there to engage their minds. some medicine, but then he goes down stories, those deeply human stories, I think if they can go away feeling that into the basement and gets the furnace which touch me, I think, the most. they’re interested in something, in the working. What good would it do, he says, big questions that the philosophers and if I left you here and said have a nice day theologians and artists have been asking and you were freezing and I just gave you [end] for centuries, then you’ve done a service the medicine? You see what I mean? Just and earned your keep I’m not giving that human aspect, that human touch, them a final word on anything, as if that somehow deeply touches me. were ever possible, but I am saying: look at this, really look at it. Pay attention to One other story—Hawthorne, whose it, and perhaps what you learn from this, daughter, Rose, founded the Sisters of you can take into your own life when the Charity. Hawthorne’s in Liverpool work- time comes. ing as an American emissary, and he’s invited to inspect an orphanage. When he Take William Carlos Williams, for exam- gets there, a little street urchin with snot ple. Here’s a doctor making house calls. running down his face looks at him with Day in and day out down in the Jersey

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