John Logan's 'confessions'; a poet ever restless.

Although the name of John Logan (1923-87) is not widely known outside the community of American poets, he was--and remains to this day--very well regarded by his contemporaries. Indeed, he was a poet's poet. James Dickey said of Logan's poetry: "Yes, this is what poetry can sometimes do; this is what it can sometimes be." More than twenty years later, Robert Bly was equally emphatic: "John Logan is one of the five or six finest poets to emerge in the United States in the last decades. He has won a position of considerable respect without the help of the major schools or their magazines."

Bly wrote, in a memorial piece, "John Logan was a master of sound. In an age when most poetry is written for the page, that is, mumbled, on the page and in the air, John Logan's work with sound is awesome." His work has also enjoyed the critical approval of writers as diverse as Marvin Bell, Dudley Fitts, Stanley Kunitz, William Dickey, and Donald Hall.

Logan's Collected Poems and Collected Fiction, both of which were published after his death, remain in print and there are plans to publish a collection of his nonfiction prose. From 1956 to 1960 he published five reviews and a number of poems in Commonweal. His first Live books of poems were also reviewed in Commonweal between 1955 and 1974.

His career ended as his life sank into the disabilities of alcoholism and, finally, two strokes. His last years were haunted by the pain of failed love and friendship, as well as the grim recognition that over the years he had conferred grief on others while attempting to accommodate the conflicting demands of his own sexuality. At the same time he was never free of an overriding fear of loneliness and isolation. Yet there had been joy and good times.

He nurtured other poets with a magnificent generosity, often, I suspect, to the detriment of his own career. In 1961, he and Aaron Siskind. the photographer, founded Chicago Choice (later, CHOICE magazine) which Logan edited until its demise in 1980. For a few years, he was poetry editor for the Nation and the Critic. Looking back, his editorial taste seems remarkably prescient for having identified major poets of our own time.

When he died in 1987, John Logan had published twelve books of poems and three books of short stories, essays, reviews, and interviews. His last book, Manhattan Movements: Poems 1981--87, was in manuscript and was later published in 1989 by his executors as the concluding section of John Logan: The Collected Poems. For most of his adult life Logan was an academic, teaching with distinction and a wonderful erudition, first at Saint John's College in Annapolis, then the University of Notre Dame, then Saint Mary's College in California, and, finally, as a full professor, at the State University of New York, Buffalo.

In the thirty years I knew him, especially after I had become a graduate student at Notre Dame and a frequent guest in his family's home, his reputation as a teacher was outstanding. His first book, Cycle for Mother Cabrini, was published in 1955 by Grove Press, a major publication for a young, obscure poet. Its easy mix of a traditional and even pious religious sensibility with an intensely felt awareness of the flesh and its weakness won an immediate, though sometimes slightly puzzled, audience. Like the later work, Cycle was heavily influenced by Saint Augustine and the Confessions, the admission by an aging Augustine of his own dismal failures set in the context of the infinite providential mercy of God.

Logan came to the Catholic church when he married and when that marriage ended he left the regular practice of Catholicism. During those early years, he read widely and deeply in the primary theological texts, especially of the mystical tradition. In a 1961 interview Logan said, "I think the essential impulse to poetry--the desire to hold in one's arms the beauties not yet created, as Stephen Dedalus puts it--is religious." In an interview in 1968 he said, "I'm not religious in any dogmatic sense at all ... but I am more interested in poetry than I ever was before." Yet echoes of his earlier Catholicism are in his work right up to the end of his life.

The major poem from that first book is an account of a visit to the shrine in New York City of the recently canonized Mother Francis Xavier Cabrini. As the narrator, the persona adopted by Logan the poet, observes the various details of the shrine, the displayed body of the saint, the lines of people, school children as well as adults, and as his vision then moves away from the shrine to a consideration of the facts of the saint's life, he begins a lengthy meditation on the nature of sanctity and that displayed flesh, now fallen and decayed, that will rise again, whole, at the end of the world.

Logan presents in the opening lines of this long poem a theme central to his work:

I thank God Mother Cabrini's

Body is subject to laws

Of decay. To me it is

A disservice when flesh

Will not fall from bones

As God for His glory

Sometimes allows. I say this

For flesh is my failing:

That it shall fall is my

Salvation. That it shall not

Conquer is my blind hope.

That it shall rise again

Commanding, is my fear.

That it shall rise changed

Is my faith....

This poem teases as it takes the reader from the general to the particular and back again. From a consideration of that flesh common to all of humanity the poet turns to his own flesh. This playfulness, this ready verbal wit was characteristic of Logan's poetry.

In December 1961, Logan visited another shrine of Mother Cabrini, this at the place of her death in Chicago. In the earlier poem he had rejoiced at the triumphant humility, the sanctity, of the woman whose heroic virtue was being celebrated. In "Revisit to the Room of a Saint," included in his third book, Logan is humbled by the saint's final hours, the smallness and the insignificance of the very ordinary items which had surrounded her. These, simplest of things, find a stunning contrast in the poem's exultant conclusion:

White doves wound above the field at her birth.

Now wine, gold, and turquoise doves

rise surely for her death. Their tissue wings

thin and lucid as her light hands

make a light wind.

Let it breathe on my hidden face

as my beast

kneels a moment in this child's place.

Logan's first book included the poem "Prologue and Questions for Saint Augustine: On His Sixteenth Centenary." Like most of Logan's earlier work, this poem has received little critical attention. In many ways the poem intimidates. It uses the elegiac mode to address a saint who had been, until his radical conversion, a notorious sinner. It is not a simple poem, but then Augustine's life was not simple. And though Logan here finds in Augustine a paradigm for his own life, as time passed the paradigm would be less and less relevant.

The poem contains a series of questions propounded as riddle upon fiddle without answer. The subject matter is the contradictory nature of life itself, the mystery of why one's highest intentions can be so confounded by the twists and turns of actual choices. By the rhetorical device of piling question upon question, Logan details in a whirlwind of allusion the potential for intellectual paralysis that he saw in the mind of Augustine, a mind which Logan well knew was the product of both Cicero and Plotinus. Before progressing to comment on the outcome, he says, in a marvelous display of alliteration and rhyme,

Your mind hung in the hell

Of minds the tortured

and tumescent 

Intellect, unrested....

For Augustine, known to later generations as "Doctor of Grace," the only answer to this existential quandary, a viable reconciliation of the intellect's need for knowledge and truth with the body's need for sensual gratification, was a theology centered on the mysteries of grace and salvation. And for Logan, who had not enjoyed the grace of a radical conversion, an appropriate answer to the same question would require other, more ordinary agents of interior reconciliation.

The poem typifies much of Logan's earlier poetry. Its richly allusive texture makes abundant reference to the literary and graphic arts of the last sixteen hundred years while it also gives evidence of a thorough grounding in the texts of Augustine. Logan demonstrates that the saint and his autobiography are central to the work and the imaginations of artists ever since.

During the years Logan taught at Notre Dame, Augustine's Confessions--in the translation by Frank Sheed--and The City of God were central features of his seminars. For Logan these were not books read once by a young man and then remembered through the passing years with fondness. On the contrary, over a period of about ten years, and with each new class, he read and reread both and they were the bases of many lectures and discussions.

In this early poem the first of two references to the Confessions occurs in the epigraph, which Logan quotes from the Latin prose of Book X:30, and which I translate: "Images of my former actions are set firmly in my memory, a faculty which I have discussed elsewhere in very great detail. Even now, these images buffet me." This statement is significant to an understanding of the Logan who reveals himself in his poems, much as Augustine revealed himself in the Confessions. A second reference to the Confessions occurs later with the image of the dark wood overrun by menacing beasts, placing the poem also in the tradition of Dante's Commedia. Having asserted--with Augustine--the role of sensory memory in the progress of his life, the poet veers away from any further attention to the idea so that what remains unsaid is almost as important as what is said. The poem is cast as a quite disarming, familiar, address to Augustine, even to the extent of using an English variant of the saint's name in the opening lines:

Austin you write all

Our lives and Petrarch

Was sensible to keep you

All his later years

Beside his heart; I too

Have loved this book

Over any other

Have held it in my hand

Long times: have been its author.

But the degree of Logan's identification with Augustine must be carefully understood. The tone of familiarity is initially suggested by the diminutive form of the name, a form more commonly given to another saint, Augustine of Canterbury. Furthermore, the use of "sensible" in the third line has the ring of a faint archaism evoking in my ear an old-fashioned and entirely desirable wisdom. The poem echoes Augustine with whispered ambiguity, and while it strongly invokes the Augustinian heritage, it seems to caution against a too rigid reliance on that tradition.

Logan's second book, Ghosts of the Heart: New Poems (1960), used four epigraphs, the first from the writings of Mother Cabrini, followed by passages from Pirandello, Melville, and Joyce. The latter three were variations on the idea that every human being is a composite of many personalities, each manifesting different, if not opposed, characteristics. But the epigraph from Mother Cabrini seems curiously tangential to the other three: "Contradictions--there is a really sharp hair shirt! There is a penance which has made saints and which everyone can practice."

At first glance it seems that the lines from Mother Cabrini do not really belong. But then one remembers that she is writing from a lifelong practice of what Logan hopes to acquire, that traditional, anchoring, Christian spirituality which nevertheless finds much of its substance in Saint Paul: "That which I would, I do not; that which I would not, that I do." In other words, a major source of contradiction for every individual resides in the confusing complexity of the individual personality which can reveal a nearly infinite potential for conflicting ambition and necessity.

Logan wrote in 1981 about a second visit to the Cabrini shrine in New York, now housed in a separate chapel. As a matter of fact, the title poems of his first and last collections were both the result of visits to this shrine. While the later poem necessarily invites comparison to the earlier Cycle for Mother Cabrini, it is clearly the work of an older and changed man.

In the earlier poem the poet confronted the saint's mortality with little or no antidote for his own terror at the prospect of mortality beyond a hope for salvation. And even that hope is qualified by a very Augustinian wish to be saved, but, like Augustine, "not yet, O Lord." In the later poem the fact of human mortality manifest in the enshrined body of the saint is sharply mitigated by other, perhaps more pressing, facts of friendship, companionship, the medieval splendors of The Cloisters--only a short walk from the shrine of Mother Cabrini--the beauty of a show of photographs, the simple joys of wine and dinner with old friends, and finally the recognition of a pleasing beauty in his sleeping younger companion.

Logan's poems are driven by a restlessness of the heart and the opening lines of the Confessions are significant to an understanding of them: "... we are made for you, O Lord; our hearts are not at peace until they take rest in you." Always hungry for the satisfactions of beauty, Logan leads his reader through darkness and light until both poet and reader, like Augustine and Dante, achieve a garden of rest, a measure of order composed in chaos.

But while Augustine addressed his Confessions to God and professed to find salvation in God's transcendent grace to the exclusion of all creatures, Logan went his own way, addressing others--heroes, readers, friends, and family--finding at least some degree of salvation in the beauty of created things. For Augustine, sensation and sensory memory were dangerous obstacles to the life of grace. For Logan's later poems, these two functions were the human condition.

Logan, near the end of life, came back to his earlier preoccupations with shame, guilt, and innocence. With no explicit reference to Augustine, he addressed a series of long poems to the people nearest him. A recital of events encompassing the most startling uxtapositions of pain and joy, they are a plea for forgiveness, a repeated mea culpa. As I read these later poems I remember the earlier poems and I cannot help recalling a short passage in Augustine's The City of God: "The peace of all things is the tranquillity of order." For Augustine, this described every kind of peace--personal, social, civil, and moral--and finally describes the universe as well as the creator of the universe. And where, for Logan, was the order? I would suggest that it was the resplendent order of the poetic form into which he cast these bits and pieces of his life.

The Collected Poems span a period of some thirty-five years. They are charged by ambivalence, an overriding hope for salvation tempered by longing for the necessarily forbidden. This crisis, this juxtaposition of the ascetic and the sensual in the earliest poems, provided the spark which kindled his later work. And for those who knew John Logan, this tension, so easily and gracefully stated in the poems, delineates the distinctive and at times exasperating features of his personality. Logan, both man and persona, saw his best intentions too often frustrated.

In one of his last poems, "Letter to My Son" (1985), he speaks with pride of his son's achievement and with sadness of his own failure to provide an appropriately generous affection:

I knew you wanted to live with me,

but I was too selfish--too jealous of my lifestyle

which included a lot of drinking and other men.

... I offered

money (stingily I am afraid), but you said no,

"Just take me to dinner once in a while." I was a

real shit, I confess, not much help ...

I would give anything now if I could change that time

and be a help to you, my son.

With the suggestion of sexual indulgence--in this case homosexual--the pathos of the poem moves dangerously close to the maudlin. But it is the pathos of a life once lived, never to be retrieved, never to be made right. It is the pathos of opportunity lost to a deficiency of thought and care.

Like every life, Logan's was a mix of oppositions, of injury and forgiveness, an unsatisfactory manifestation of the failures to which we can be victim and the joys so desperately sought but only sometimes gained. This neither excuses the failure nor ignores the joy so much as it tries to say that his life was entirely human. Out of such a profound, even chilling, paradox--the paradox which sees in the flesh the reality of both death and salvation, chaos contending with order--he made a wonderfully rich and precious work, a work to be read and read again.

Harold Isbell's critical essay on John Logan is another in our series of articles on contemporary Catholic writers. We have asked our essayists to give an overview of the author's work, showing our readers where and how this writer locates the central human drama, the big questions, the religious crisis of our time. What does the Catholic sensibility of John Logan tell us about our common world, about the state of our souls? The most recently published article in the series was written by Edwin T. Arnold on Cormac McCarthy (November 4,1994).