Memories of West Street and Lepke (1959). Content and Description

First collected in Life Studies, “Memories of West Street and Lepke” documents the 10 days Lowell spent in the West Street, New York City, jail for being a conscientious objector. As do “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” and many other poems in this groundbreaking book, the poem employs a much more conversational diction than his early poetry. Unlike “My Last Afternoon,” however, this poem retains some of the traditional poetic characteristics that defined his early work.

For instance, Lowell rhymes much of “Memories of West Street and Lepke.” In the first stanza we see “book-worming / each morning,” “man / cans / Republican,” and “daughter / granddaughter / infant’s wear.” By varying the rhythm and tightness of rhyme, however, the structure resists a particular scheme or pattern. Lowell builds a very subtle aural relationship between the lines that differs aesthetically from both his very traditional mode of writing and his strictly free-verse mode.

Lowell uses the more moderate style to explore the extremes of his political position within a rapidly changing society. The poem begins by making several observations about his personal living situation and the general 1950s cultural scenario. The first three lines describe the author as a domesticated professor tucked away in his large, mundane house. The quote about Marlborough Street hints at Lowell’s discontent with his dispassionate environment. The following lines make that discontent more explicit by satirically commenting upon the homogeneity of his upper-middle-class neighborhood. After establishing himself as a professor, father, and rich white man—ostensible aspects of institutionalized America—Lowell launches into a recollection of his “seedtime” during the 1940s.

As a “fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,” Lowell spent time in jail, where the population seemed much more dangerous and diverse than his “Young Republican” neighbors. He tells of a “Negro boy,” a vegetarian, a Jehovah’s Witness, two “Hollywood pimps” (actually extortionists), and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, head of a band of murderers for hire nicknamed Murder Incorporated. The subtly humorous description of jail adds a tone of levity to the poem, even endearing some of the prisoners to the reader. The final image, however, uses that sympathy for Lepke to take the tone down to a more serious level. We see him concentrating on his demise, the electric chair, before Lowell finishes the poem with two abstract and inexplicable lines: “hanging like an oasis in his air / of lost connections. . . .” (ellipses Lowell’s 188).

Many critics assess the poem as ultimately pessimistic on the basis of those final lines. We could read the image of Lowell’s young, brightly clothed daughter as a hopeful symbol of the future, but even he, old enough to be her grandfather, suggests wasted years of misdirection. With that in mind, the final two lines connect Lepke to Lowell through the experience of “lost connections.”

We see in “Memories of West Street and Lepke” the poet looking back over the past two decades of his life and reevaluating his political, social, and artistic positions. Rather than offer us a wholly optimistic or pessimistic perspective, Lowell attempts to reconcile contradictory aspects of his life by connecting them in his writing.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. In “Colloquy in Black Rock” Lowell uses the racialized phrase “nigger-brass percussions” (11). “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” written about 10 years later during an era of heightened racial awareness, includes an updated phrase, “Negro boy.” Despite the change in terminology, how do the two poems signal and use race in a similar way? Does the more politically correct use of Negro lessen the political repercussions of Lowell’s depiction of race?

2. In the second stanza Lowell asks, “Ought I to regret my seedtime?” (187). The suggestion that he might regret the idealism of his youth seems peculiar in a poem so critical of the tranquillity of his middle age. What else might Lowell mean by the word regret? In your own words, what does the question ask?

3. Lowell greatly admired Ezra Pound’s poetry and helped award him the Bolligen Prize. He mentioned several times that he particularly liked Pound’s Pisan Cantos (1948), which discuss Pound’s time incarcerated. Read the Pisan Cantos and the way Pound and Lowell treat the experience of imprisonment.