Robert Lowell: A Biography by Ian Hamilton

slough.
    Why prolong our excruciation now?
    What is your purpose? Each night now I tie
    Ten dollar 30
    The draft version ends here, but the line finally (in “To Speak of Woe …”) reads:
                 Each night now I tie
    ten dollars and his car key to my thigh….
    The last poem in Life Studies —“Skunk Hour”—shows the poet free-lancing out on one of his nocturnal car rides. It is the most nakedly desperate piece in the book, and Lowell called it “the anchor poem of the sequence.” “Skunk Hour” was the first of the Life Studies poems to be finished: after his tour of the West Coast in March 1957 Lowell “began writing lines in a new style,” but
    No poem … got finished and soon I left off and tried to forget the whole headache. Suddenly, in August, I was struck by the sadness of writing nothing, and having nothing to write, of having, at least, no language. When I began writing “Skunk Hour,” I felt that most of what I knew about writing was a hindrance. 31
    He began the poem in mid-August 1957 and completed it in a month. It was modeled, he said, on Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Armadillo.” Both poems “use short line stanzas, start with drifting description and end with a single animal.” 32
    The “drifting description” in the first four stanzas of “Skunk Hour” is of an ailing Maine sea town. The inhabitants are either anachronistic or nouveau-absurd: “our summer millionaire, / who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean / catalogue”; “our fairy decorator .” According to Hardwick, all these people “were living, more or less as he sees them, in Castine that summer. The details, not the feeling, were rather alarmingly precise, I thought. But fortunately it was not read in town for some time, and then only by ‘people like us.’” 33 Perhaps because of the way the poem develops, explicators have been overeager to make these opening descriptive lines more weighty and sinister than they really are—in truth, they are meant as lightish social comedy: “I try to give a tone of tolerance, humor, and randomness to the sad prospect.” As Lowell said, “all comes alive in Stanzas V and VI”:
    One dark night,
    my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;
    I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
    they lay together, hull to hull,
    where the graveyard shelves on the town….
    My mind’s not right.
    A car radio bleats,
    “Love, O careless Love….” I hear
    my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
    as if my hand were at its throat….
    I myself am hell;
    nobody’s here—
    … This is the dark night. I hoped my readers would remember John of the Cross’s poem. My night is not gracious, but secular, puritan and agnostical. An Existential night. Somewhere in my mind was a passage from Sartre or Camus about reaching some point of final darkness where the one free act is suicide. 34
    The closing image of the mother skunk risking all to feed her “column of kittens” is meant as ambiguous affirmation—the skunkfamily are to be seen as a “healthy, joyful apparition—despite their diet and smell, they are natural power.” 35 The poet who feels lower than a skunk finds both comedy and renewal in the beasts’ quixotically defiant march up Main Street. They are scavengers but could never be “Republicans.” The skunks are both touching and funny, and, as much as anything else, it is Lowell’s wit, his delight in the barbarous and the absurd, that rescues him from “final darkness.” Read like this, the poem does indeed “anchor” a sequence that has asked, time and again, and in the worst of circumstances: “What use is my sense of humor?”
    *
    Apart from Allen Tate’s “dissenting opinion,” the response of Lowell’s friends to the manuscript of Life Studies had been enthusiastic, and in November 1958 Lowell was particularly gratified to get a view of the finished book from William Carlos Williams, a view that (although rather confused in its expression—Williams