Brian takes (and gives) great pleasure in finding "Skunk Hour" a visionary if haunting evocation of landscape. I have another view. There are simple differences, such as Brian's appreciation of Robert Lowell's care signaled by the near-alliteration in "hermit / heiress." Absent fabulous purpose, I find such repetition annoying, and over the span of the poem not a little cloying: "the hill’s skull," "hull to hull," "spar spire." I'm not interested in countering Brian's solid attention to qualities in RL's poem that he admires, only to sketch my alternative intake that may appear flippant but is, I sorta insist, not so.
RL writes on "Skunk Hour":
The first four stanzas are meant to give a dawdling more or less amiable picture of a declining Maine sea town. I move from the ocean inland. Sterility howls through the scenery, but I try to give a tone of tolerance, humor, and randomness to the sad prospect. The composition drifts, its direction sinks out of sight into the casual, chancy arrangements of nature and decay. Then all comes alive in stanzas V and VI. This is the dark night. I hoped my readers would remember St. John of the Cross's poem. My night is not gracious, but secular, puritan, and agnostical. An Existentialist night.
Though closely observed insofar as it reports on verifiable data well within the writer's circle of credible experience, "Skunk Hour," I feel, is a text in drag, an inducement to hilarity, and a hideous poem. The piece is hideous because it literally follows RL's 'thirst' for superordinance fashioning his voyeurism: rubbing our noses in another of his signature circumstances, here summering late among the highly placed while granting primacy (the first two of eight stanzas) to the kind of lightweight privilege synecdochically realized in and around the property lines of his dotty Victoriana heiress. A recipient of good fortune, remarkable in only her consorting with power, a bishop's mom and employer of the "first selectman," she is grand majorette of a bland isle, one who is schooled in wintering within her "Spartan cottage" (read as
shingle style mansion) and holding on, plunderingly, to "her shore."
"Skunk Hour" is hilarious, however, because, who else could this island dweller be but RL?
quel type monstrueux with undepletable resources for minor vices and self-loathing. Note the conventional and attentive third-person pronominals in the first and second stanzas addressed to the hermit (aspirated) who is – careful, now – an heiress (unaspirated), and note, as well, how archly these pronominals shift to the first-person in stanzas III through VIII: "our summer millionaire," "our fairy," "my mind," "my Tudor Ford," "my ill-spirit sob," "my hand," "our back stairs." Hermit / Lowell, she and he can 'buy and sell' or, better, look down on their arriviste millionaire who has, unfortunately, merely, the appearance of seacoast swank ("from an L. L. Bean / catalogue"); and in further descending order, as it were, he and she look down on the fairy decorator whose obsession is with appearance but who, notably, has no money.
It's revealing, for me, that Frank O'Hara gives the offensive "fairy" a pass but chose to attack stanza V that follows with RL's stalking roadside rest spots, ogling couples in "love-cars." Here is an instance, according to O'Hara, of RL's "confessional manner that lets him get away with things that are really just plain bad but you're supposed to be interested because he's supposed to be so upset." Lowell claims this and the last three stanzas were composed before the opening four. In other words, the genesis to "Existentialist night" is voyeuristic shenanigans, pestering kids making out in sedans. That's ok, of course, even if RL was not having fun ("My mind’s not right"). It's peculiar, though, that Lowell brags of stanzas V and VI coming "alive," as though the first four were staged any differently, were any less or more a thrill.
The full poem evidences RL's narrowed frames of reference. His human subjects, heiress, millionaire, decorator, lovers, the I, are not specified in any way close to living individuals but caricatured from a distance, as though by a
Times travel editor, with a nasty, sociological bent, who phones it in. Caricature leads to stilted exaggeration. In stanza VI, any confusion determining the antecedent to 'its' would be more absorbing were RL to drop the hyphen and melodrama from the 19th century:
…………………………….I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat……
Tightly fitted within heightened registers and prosodic embellishments, "Skunk Hour" appeals to conflicting but hugely positive lines of criticism that somehow find such craft enobling, perhaps especially so given the tragicomic atmosphere. The poem has been nicely laid to rest as a "confrontation with death" (Steven Gould Axelrod); a symptom of "pervasive cultural breakdown" (Paul Breslin); an "emblem of secular communion" (Charles Altieri). [There's a crib sheet for Skunk commentary
here.] I wish "Skunk Hour" a good rest, too, under the spar whatevers, and can see it inspiring countless dragsters of the future as they intone its wedge-head shrill and will not scare.
