SOURCE: "Why Not Say What Happened? E. L. Doctorow's Lives of the Poets," in Critique, Vol. 34, No. 2, Winter, 1993, pp. 113-25.

[In the following essay, Matterson addresses the ideas about writing suggested by the stories in Doctorow's Lives of the Poets.]

Lives of the Poets, E. L. Doctorow's seventh work, first published in 1984, occupies a unique space in his writings. Its most obvious difference from the other work is announced in its subtitle, A Novella and Six Stories, because, apart from the 1979 play, Drinks before Dinner, Doctorow's previous work had been in the novel form. A case could be made for considering Lives of the Poets almost an aberration within the Doctorow canon. Among its diverse themes and settings the collection becomes an exploration of the nature of writing itself and of the relation of writing to the life of its author. Doctorow had never before treated this issue so explicitly, though a debate about the reliability of fiction had often been implicitly present in his work. The style of the book is also markedly different from the other work. Doctorow appears willing to allow his self and voice to emerge more fully than they ever had before. Lives of the Poets could also be said to lack something of the ambitious breadth of Doctorow's novels. The multiple plotting and discontinuities that might be considered typical of Doctorow's writing are here apparently disregarded in favor of a series of self-contained stories. Doctorow's typically sustained focus on a particular time period is also absent. Whether writing of the 1870s, the turn of the century, the 1960s or the 1930s, Doctorow had maintained the focus on that time even while diffusing the action. In contrast, the short stories here range broadly in time and setting. However, in spite of the elements that would make Lives of the Poets an oddity among Doctorow's works, the book illuminates and adds much to our understanding of the novels. It may remain an aberration, but one that it was essential for Doctorow to write and that is in itself a major achievement.

For the reader to appreciate fully the unfolding of its meanings, Lives of the Poets must be read in sequence. It would be possible to detach particular stories and consider them complete in themselves, but Doctorow's achievement in the book is an overall one in which the stories are interdependent and contribute to a developing meaning. Lives of the Poets works in part through a series of correspondences that are established in the first story and are developed by the others.

These correspondences achieve two effects. First, they establish a series of connections, which, when taken together, make up the theme of the whole book. Second, the correspondences between this book and Doctorow's other writing indicate the seriousness and urgency of the themes and issues it raises. It addresses fundamental questions about the nature and function of the writer, questions that Doctorow is applying to himself and to his already published work. In some respects, chiefly through what it reveals about the writer and the need to write, Lives of the Poets could be said to alter our understanding of Doctorow's preceding novels. After reading this work we reconsider some aspects of Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, and Loon Lake. Lives of the Poets is an outstanding example of the supposition that T. S. Eliot made in 1917 [in "Tradition and the Individual Talent"]: "The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered" (5). Indeed, it can be argued that one of the urges driving Lives of the Poets is Doctorow's need to re-examine some of the ideas that Eliot originated in that essay.

I

The situation established in the book's first story, "The Writer in the Family," is important for appreciating this dual series of connections. The narrator, Jonathan, is in his early teens when his father dies, leaving a widow and two sons, Jonathan and his older brother Harold. The father's elderly mother, however, is still living, in a nursing home. Fearing that the shock of her son's death will be too much for the old lady, the narrator's wealthy Aunt Frances persuades Jonathan to write a letter purporting to come from his father, pretending that the family has moved to Arizona. Aunt Frances is delighted with the letter and prevails upon Jonathan to write more. Eventually the deceit disturbs the boy and to end the letters, he writes one that he knows Aunt Frances cannot show her mother.

Because of the dual system of correspondences in Lives of the Poets, "The Writer in the Family" is not a self-contained, straightforward story. It establishes within the book, a set of fundamental questions and observations about writing and the role of the writer. It is suggested that Jonathan has to give up the letters because they are dishonest. In anticipation of the novella "Lives of the Poets," young Jonathan is already haunted by Robert Lowell's question from the poem "Epilogue," quoted in the novella: "Yet why not say what happened?" On one level, "The Writer in the Family" is about the boy's almost heroic stand, his refusal to use writing for deceit. Yet the story introduces other, potentially more important, areas. First, in spite of the deceit involved, Jonathan actually comes to a truthful image of his father by writing the letters through the fiction that he makes up. Thus, in the final letter, he invents the father's longing for the sea, and, in so doing, he uncovers two kinds of truth about his father, the factual and the psychological. His father actually was, as Jonathan later discovers, in the navy for a year. Psychologically, the father was restless and unsatisfied, a man for whom living in Arizona would have been a kind of death.

The second significant point about the fictive letters is that they come to have a function far beyond their ostensible one of deceiving the grandmother. Their immediate effect is somehow to keep the father's memory alive, to keep him real and living to the boy (he has a vivid dream that his father is still alive), and to Aunt Frances. The first brief letter has a profound effect on Aunt Frances:

My aunt called some days later and told me it was when she read this letter aloud to the old lady that the full effect of Jack's death came over her. She had to excuse herself and went out in the parking lot to cry. "I wept so," she said. "I felt such terrible longing for him. You're so right, he loved to go places, he loved life, he loved everything."(5)

The talent of the young writer has given the father a truth, a reality, that keeps him alive for others. Jonathan never really grasps this fact, and Aunt Frances' motives are misunderstood. His brother, Harold, points out that the letters are unnecessary: "Grandma is almost totally blind, she's half deaf and crippled. Does the situation call for a literary composition? Does it need verisimilitude? Would the old lady know the difference if she was read the phone books?" (13). Both the brothers misunderstand Aunt Frances because they fail to realize how much the letters help in dealing with the loss of her brother.

For all of its darkly comic situation, "The Writer in the Family" concludes subtly with a complex and dual message: although fiction is deceit, made-up stories, it can reveal truths that facts alone cannot. Jonathan is as yet too young to grasp this fully; to him the letters are deceptions that he cannot continue. It is significant here to suggest the ways in which this dual approach to fictions pervades Doctorow's other works. "The Writer in the Family" forces the reader to recognize how much of Jonathan's situation has been repeated in the novels. This happens most obviously in World's Fair, which followed Lives of the Poets; there, Aunt Frances and the family all reappear at much greater length. There are particular changes; for instance, the brother Harold is renamed Donald, and the family situation is amplified from "The Writer in the Family." Edgar in World's Fair, who wins a prize in an essay contest, resembles Jonathan in the earlier story. Though absent in "The Writer in the Family," the father is a prominent figure in World's Fair, and his longing for the sea is further outlined, appropriately enough, by Aunt Frances herself (240-41).

There are also correspondences with the earlier novels. The reader recognizes much of the family situation from The Book of Daniel. Although the figure of Paul Isaacson is never explored as fully as the father in World's Fair, there are striking similarities between them. Like the father in World's Fair, Paul Isaacson has a shop; in World's Fair it is a record and radio shop, in The Book of Daniel a radio repair shop. The fathers also share a reciprocated devotion to their mothers and similar politics. The mother in The Book of Daniel, World's Fair and "The Writer in the Family" remains a constant and recognizable figure.

The similarities shared by these three works are especially striking because they suggest how far Doctorow has inserted himself and his own experience into The Book of Daniel, which often has been considered an exploration of an historical moment and an examination of the postwar period and of how the temper of the times could bring about the execution of the Rosenbergs. But, like "The Writer in the Family," it also is concerned with the nature of writing and truth. On one level, this is obvious because Daniel self-consciously writes the novel in front of us as he sits in the library at Columbia. But, more covertly, Doctorow is considering the same questions that are raised explicitly in "The Writer in the Family." In repeating something of the childhood situation that existed in The Book of Daniel, he is already asking Lowell's question that will haunt him in Lives of the Poets.

In his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times, Doctorow had apparently avoided a reliance upon personal truth and fact. In part, the setting of Welcome to Hard Times in the 1870s, and in the West, which Doctorow had never visited, safeguarded him from the dangers of the overly autobiographical first novel. As he has said, "Somehow I was the kind of writer who had to put myself through prisms to find the right light—I had to filter myself from my imagination in order to write" (McCaffery [in "A Spirit of Transgression" (1982)] 34). However, in reconsidering even Welcome to Hard Times from the perspective made available by Lives of the Poets, the reader is likely to place more emphasis on the questions the central character, Blue, asks himself about writing and its effect. In the novel, Blue receives identity by his role as a historian; the role is analogous to his role as rebuilder of the town Hard Times. Yet he too doubts the validity of his writing as a means of interpreting and changing the world: "as if notations in a ledger can fix a life, as if some marks in a book can control things" (187).

When Doctorow said that he needed a prism through which to write, he was suggesting a strategy that is crucial to an understanding of Lives of the Poets. "The Writer in the Family" introduces a dilemma about the honesty of writing compared to the kind of truth that fiction offers. Taking Jonathan as the writer of the stories that follow, one sees how the dilemma is either avoided or further developed. The connections between "The Writer in the Family" and the subsequent stories are apparent even though they are not made explicit for the reader. In "The Water Works" a boy who is apparently shadowing an undertaker follows him one day as he collects a drowned corpse from the water works. The corpse, that of a child, is taken away, and the story ends with the boy observing the water workers drinking whisky; it represents one of their rituals for dealing with death: "There is such a cherishing of ritual too among firemen and gravediggers" (24). The boy and his family are curiously absent from this story. We do not learn his name or anything of his family situation. Strategically, the story represents one way of writing—distancing oneself from the theme. The self is extinguished, erased, in exactly the way that T. S. Eliot had described in "Tradition and the Individual Talent": "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality" (10) and "The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality" (7). It is obvious that this erasing or distancing strategy is only apparently successful. Given the context of "The Writer in the Family," "The Water Works" develops in different ways. It can be read as a deepening of the boy's fascination with death deriving from the death of the father in the other story. It also develops from one brief statement in "The Writer in the Family"; faced with his grief at the father's death, Jonathan is comforted by Harold who tells him:

Look at this old black stone here…. The way it's carved. You can see the changing fashion in monuments—just like everything else. (9)

"The Water Works" is much more than an isolated epiphany, a Joycean moment of recognition and truth. It has a context that is provided by the previous story and by the overall questions about writing that Lives of the Poets considers. The story suggests the boy's unstated recognition that there are ritualistic ways of dealing with death. In seeing the water workers drinking the whisky, he immediately recognizes the ritual that is followed also by "gravediggers and firemen." The unspoken realization or implication is that the act of writing about the dead is in itself a ritualistic means of coping with grief and loss. But at that moment the boy gives no sign of recognizing this fact; and in effect, "The Water Works" is evidence of a split between the persona adopted for the telling of the story and the author of the tale. Mention of the rituals of firemen, is a glance toward Ragtime; one of its chief plots depends on how a ritualistic practical joke that the fireman play on their victim Coalhouse Walker turns into a shocking and extreme situation.

The division between author and narrator widens in the next story, "Willi." Essentially, "Willi" is a boy's reminiscence of his mother's infidelity and what happens when he tells his father of the adultery. Like "The Water Works," this story involves a moment of recognition and realization, not about death but about sexuality, jealousy, and, more personally, about the boy's learning that he is not exempt from feelings of sexual longing and arousal. "The Water Works" is in effect a fictionalization of Jonathan, using fiction to explore his feelings; this strategy is even more extreme in the case of "Willi." Jonathan is erased from "The Water Works," necessarily absent from it, and a further displacement takes place through the suggested displacement in time; the undertaker has a horsedrawn hearse. In "Willi," there is displacement of time, place, and persona. The story is set in Galicia in 1910 and has a certain familiarity, even a predictability, with its props of aristocratic husband, younger wife, and adultery with the boy's tutor. On a more significant level, "Willi" is about displacement and comes to echo the displacement that made feeling into fiction. Galicia in 1910 is firmly invoked by the narrator (untypical of Lives of the Poets where most of the stories are not specific about time and place), as is the fact that the father is not at home there:

He was a Jew who spoke no Yiddish and a farmer raised in the city…. We lived alone, isolated on our estate, neither Jew nor Christian, neither friend or petitioner of the Austro-Hungarians.(32)

Galicia itself occupied a precarious position in 1910, divided between Austria and Russia and agitating for autonomy. "Willi" has various effects. A satisfying and stimulating story in itself, but like a chameleon it takes on a variety of colors from the stories and contexts in which Doctorow has placed it. The narrator has created the persona of the boy and used the historical position of Galicia to find concrete analogies for his own puzzlement and alienation. The father, of course, reflects Jonathan's father; the Jew in a land of Gentiles, the would-be sailor living in the city. The implications of "Willi" are deepened further when, in "Lives of the Poets," Doctorow uses the same phrases to describe the fighting of Jonathan's own parents (114-15). Whatever its theme, of adolescent longing, awareness, alienation, "Willi" is also concerned with how fiction starts in feeling and seeks concrete situations and symbols—objective correlatives—to explore and express that feeling. The feelings themselves may be explored more deeply through the very act of displacement, of locating them in a fresh context.

With this last recognition one starts to reach to the center of Lives of the Poets. Although the individual stories succeed on their own, the book as a whole takes for its theme the origin and purpose of fiction. The stories not only exist separately as units but also join together to form a much greater whole. Indeed, Lives of the Poets can be considered as a book that helps to unify Doctorow's own work up to that point. Like Jonathan in the book, Doctorow had transposed the self, seeking historical analogies and circumstances, recreating over and over the father, the mother, the family situation, the Jewishness. Even a brief tale such as "Willi" has implications for re-viewing Doctorow's other fiction because it makes explicit what had been implied in the recurring situation of father and mother seen from the child's perspective, the one offered in The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, and Loon Lake. Further, it suggests how the remote settings of Welcome to Hard Times and Big as Life can be considered self-consciously manipulative on Doctorow's part.

II

The first stories establish this questioning of the origins of fiction, in the second half of the book the stories go further and ask another, related question. In part, this is Lowell's question, "Yet why not say what happened?" It is another question too, which is not about the origins of fiction but about its usefulness and its responsibilities. That "The Hunter," which follows "Willi," raises these issues is not fully apparent until reading "Lives of the Poets." The novella reveals that Jonathan had (and possibly is having) an affair with a woman who had taught in a grade school to pay for her university tuition. "The Hunter" represents Jonathan's imagining her situation; perhaps, though we cannot know this, deriving it from a story she had told him. Once this fact is revealed, "The Hunter" takes on various meanings. At first the story seems more remote from Jonathan than even "Willi" because the central consciousness is the young woman. But the story may also be read as Jonathan's self-examination because, being the story's maker, he has also entered into the life of another character, a young bus driver. Again, "The Hunter" explores aspects of alienation: the landscape is cold and bleak; the young woman is out of place in the town and is also deeply unhappy. In the story she apparently invites the bus driver's sexual attentions, but, then, in a moment of disgust, she spurns him. The act is one of both hope and despair; hope for love, yet despair at the predictability of the young man and at the restrictions in her life. She recognizes that an affair with the bus driver, rather than being a liberating force, will confirm her imprisonment in the small town and her self-restriction. In effect, she is the "hunter" of the title because, unlike the other characters, she seeks a life that is not predictable but imaginative and spontaneous.

Ostensibly "The Hunter" has a fairly standard theme, but "Lives of the Poets" suggests that it has other ones. On one level it is concerned with the writer's empathetic ability to enter and understand other lives, and perhaps it is also about the writer's need so to do. If we accept that the story is written by Jonathan, then it is also a story of self-examination because he has created the persona of the bus driver. Even the setting of "The Hunter" is glossed in "Lives of the Poets" as the town to which Jonathan and the woman go to be discreet in their love making (134-35). In this regard, the story could be read as a kind of disguise: guilt will not allow Jonathan to write frankly and honestly about the woman, but he needs to write about her, and thus the fictive displacement represented by "The Hunter" is born of guilt and the need to camouflage feelings. If this is the case, then the adult Jonathan is confronting the question of fiction in a much more complex way than could the child Jonathan. In "The Writer in the Family," the dishonesty of the fictive letters forces him to stop writing them. But here Jonathan, is, as it were, using Eliot's "objective correlative" and the notion of the distanced, disguised self as a shield, a self-protective device, as if the insertion of one's self into a fictive self were one of the "deliberate disguises" that Eliot's "Hollow Men" sought. Jonathan has not yet reached the crisis brought on by the devastating simplicity of Lowell's question that is evident in the novella.

In the next two stories, "The Foreign Legation" and "The Leather Man," Doctorow uses these by-now-established questions about fiction as a basis for exploring other themes, particularly variations on the theme of the writer's responsibility. Morgan, the chief (and, really, sole) character in "The Foreign Legation," is not a creative writer but is used to represent aspects of the writer's apparent isolation and supposed self-reliance. Morgan's wife and children have left him (his story could have been suggested by those told in the novella about broken and failing marriages); alone in the house, he tends to brood. One day his habitual morning run takes him by the house of an unspecified foreign legation. At the end of the story Morgan is again jogging by the legation one winter morning when a bomb goes off, and he is injured.

Like the other stories, "The Foreign Legation" establishes its meanings from different contexts. In part this story is about the impossibility of withdrawing from the world, either as an individual or as a nation. For instance, Morgan recognizes an analogy between his job as "assistant curator of pre-Columbian art at the Museum of the Under Americas in New York City" (57) and the international aspect of a diner he visits.

The counterman handed him a large laminated menu and smiled a gold-toothed smile. Hey, compadre, he said.

Morgan looked at the menu. He could have the chili, or the chicken soup, he could have pigs' feet or Irish lamb stew or lasagna or souvlaki. (61)

This recognition precedes the bombing, where the implication is that because we are all involved, no one can be entirely innocent or claim to have no interest in "foreign affairs." Doctorow makes the lack of insulation between the private and the political shockingly clear. Morgan's erotic fantasies about the girls in the convent school are brutally echoed when, after the bombing, he finds himself holding the severed leg of one of the girls. This theme alone makes the story a powerful one, but, once again, its placement in Lives of the Poets makes it resonate with other possibilities and analogies. It corresponds to "The Leather Man" and "Lives of the Poets" in that it is about the writer's responsibility in the world and his inability to withdraw from it. In several ways, Doctorow signals Morgan as surrogate writer. Like Jonathan in "Lives of the Poets" Morgan has, as it were, withdrawn temporarily into the self. If we read "The Foreign Legation" as a story explicitly written by Jonathan, we see again how he is exploring the self through displacement and how essential displacement is for such an exploration. Jonathan's voluntary withdrawal from his wife and family in "Lives of the Poets" is something he does not especially want to examine. In "The Foreign Legation" he avoids scrutinizing the act simply by making it an involuntary one. Morgan's wife and children have left him, allowing Jonathan to concentrate on the story's other themes. Further, Morgan's insight in the local diner is also Jonathan's, inserted into fiction:

When I walk into the Bluebird Diner on lower Broadway the counterman gives me the gold-toothed grin. Hey, compadre, he says. He tosses me the laminated menu…. The plates slap through the slot, oh chili, soup of chicken, oh pigs' feet, oh lamb stew, lasagna (homemade), fried steak and souvlaki. (104)

Jonathan uses Morgan to exemplify the inability to be separate from the world, and this inability is part of his own self-examination as a writer, an examination that had started in "The Writer in the Family" and will reach a climax in "Lives of the Poets." However, the realization that the writer cannot be immune from politics and choice is also made by the authorities, as is evident in "The Leather Man." At first reading, this story, which directly precedes "Lives of the Poets," makes little sense. Only on subsequent and careful readings does its point emerge.

"The Leather Man" has the not altogether convincing setting of a semi-formal meeting by a group, apparently the CIA. The meeting is concerned with whether vagrants and drop-outs can be considered politically or socially subversive and, if so, what subsequent course of action should be adopted toward them. Slater, who dominates the meeting, sees drop-outs and vagrants, characterized by a centenarian, the Leather Man, as necessarily subversive because they possess, and potentially provide, an alternative perspective on society.

What is the essential act of the Leather Man? He makes the world foreign. He distances it. He is estranged. Our perceptions are sharpest when we're estranged. We can see the shape of things. (74)

Because Slater accepts this as fact, his position is that the group should infiltrate and make contact with these individuals. One of the clues that this group is a CIA meeting is in Slater's reminiscence of having been part of the group that infiltrated the Woodstock festival (68-9). Once more, it is the writer, not just the drop-out who is the focus here. When Slater argues that the vagrant forces us to re-see the world, he is also detailing one of the effects that the writer achieves. Furthermore, Slater's final point concerning infiltration seems to be aimed deliberately at the writer rather than at the vagrant. The writer provides a perspective on society similar to that of the outsider, the Leather Man, and at first it appears that Slater wants to utilize the writer's perspective as a resource: "We've got thousands of people in this country whose vocation it is to let us know what our experience is. Are you telling me this is not a resource?" (76). The twist, however, is that rather than learning from the writer's perspective, Slater visualizes controlling the writer through infiltration. His group will seek to curb the writer's power by limiting the range or effectiveness of fiction as resource. The exact means of achieving control is not stated, but Doctorow is likely to have had in mind government patronage of the arts as a covert means of control. The New York Times of 11 January 1986 reported that Doctorow objected to then Secretary of State George Shultz's addressing the PEN conference (I, 23:2).

III

From the very opening of "Lives of the Poets," it is obvious that the postures and stances that Jonathan has assumed in the other stories are now dropped and that the novella itself is exploratory, self-conscious. "My left thumb is stiff, not particularly swollen although the veins at the base are prominent and I can't move it backward or pick up something without pain" (81). As the novella develops, it is clear that the fictive personae Jonathan has used are not merely dropped but are being explained. He provides hints that lead to our detecting the sources of the preceding stories. In one regard, the novella is about a mid-life crisis, about turning fifty. Jonathan chronicles the anxieties and problems of his class and his age group. "Lives of the Poets" works successfully on this level alone, but it becomes immeasurably richer and finer because Doctorow is also examining the nature of writing and living. The questions that Jonathan faces—ones that he cannot even fully articulate—are about the nature of being a writer, about what the writer can hope to achieve, and about the responsibilities of fiction. In considering these issues, "Lives of the Poets" corresponds to the doubts that other writers have expressed in their work. These would include Shakespeare's "How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,/ Whose action is no stronger than a flower?" (Sonnet 65); Auden's statement that "poetry makes nothing happen," ("In Memory of W. B. Yeats") and, as Jonathan himself indicates, Lowell's question, "Yet why not say what happened?"

One way of considering "Lives of the Poets" is to see that Jonathan is asking such questions within a framework that provides their answers. The preceding six stories become variations of the possible answers about why one writes. Jonathan invents stories to make something real to him, to give comfort to himself and others, to deceive, to disguise the self, to explore his emotions and conflicts. Another answer to Lowell's question is that a kind of truth can emerge through fiction, though that truth is not necessarily factual. For example, Jonathan may learn something of himself through displacing his own situation, setting it in Galicia or making a fresh character for himself. Displacement represents another aspect of the Leather Man's significance: in making the world foreign for the reader, writers may also provide themselves with a fresh point of view. These are all sound reasons for writing. In "Lives of the Poets" Jonathan is at the end of his fictional resources, his Eliotean deliberate disguises. He drops his personae and in so doing, deftly (or, perhaps, to him, accidentally), reveals to us the sources of the preceding stories.

Doctorow's title for the novella and the book, Lives of the Poets, now reveals more of its significance. Perhaps more than any other art form, twentieth-century poetry has faced a crisis in the perceived relation between author and persona. For Eliot, at the start of modernism, the poet's progress, as outlined in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," was a "continual extinction of personality." When this process is made apparent in his poetry, however, it often appears as disguise, as in the "deliberate disguises," but it is there also in "Portrait of a Lady":

      And I must borrow every changing shape
      To find expression … dance, dance
      Like a dancing bear,
      Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.

The oblique revelation of the self through the dramatic monologue is a variation of this strategy of the impersonal. But Lowell's question strikes to the heart of this strategy, exposing it as somehow dishonest. Indeed, Lowell's question, "Yet why not say what happened?" comes from one of his last poems, published in his last book, Day by Day (1977). To reach the simplicity of the question in "Epilogue" Lowell himself had undergone the same process that Doctorow explores in Lives of the Poets. Starting off, as he often acknowledged, as a poet under the influence of Eliot and the New Critics, Lowell had espoused the impersonal in poetry. But his break with this aspect of modernism came with Life Studies in 1959. Strikingly, Life Studies itself follows something of the same pattern as Lives of the Poets. Lowell's book starts with monologues, as he invests his personality and feelings in figures such as Marie de 'Medici and a mad negro soldier. He continues through a prose reminiscence, which, like Doctorow's "Lives of the Poets," provides essential clues to the other works in the book. After a section on four writers—Lowell's own "Lives of the Poets"—he comes to a series of poems that are, apparently, more nakedly about the self and the personal, undisguised by persona. Rather than being a continual extinction of personality, both Life Studies and Lives of the Poets represent a gradual emergence of the personality behind the fictions. An astute reader of "Lives of the Poets" makes a connection between Jonathan and Lowell because Jonathan attended Kenyon College (133-34), where Lowell and Randall Jarrell had followed their teacher John Crowe Ransom. Indeed, the ostensible gloss on the title Lives of the Poets derives in part from Jonathan's interest in poetry; it seems to have been the title of a projected reminiscence about the poets he knew (123).

After he finished Life Studies, Lowell said that he was unsure whether the book was a "life-line" or a "death-rope" (277). Something of the same question is tackled in "Lives of the Poets" because Jonathan's new style of writing could represent either a dead end or a way out of his crisis. However, Doctorow complicates the question in several ways. The story ends with Jonathan's starting to become engaged in a political action, shielding Salvadorean refugees. This act can be seen as the logical consequence of one of the debates that has emerged in the second half of the book, about the impossibility of being self-reliant and disengaged from political realities. In theory, it could also mean the end of writing; hypothetically, Jonathan could find in political action an outlet for his temporarily suppressed creative energies. The choice between silence and action would be by no means new; it derives from Auden's "poetry makes nothing happen" and reflects, for example, the silence at the end of Saul Bellow's Herzog when Herzog is liberated from the compulsion to write his letters. The actual ending of Lives of the Poets is not so straightforward, however; it closes with the child refugee now assisting Jonathan at the typewriter:

hey who's writing this? every good boy needs a toy boat, maybe we'll go to the bottom of the page get my daily quota done come on, kid, you can do three more lousy lines. (145)

The positive suggestion at the end is that political engagement, or, at least, a reawakening of the quality of compassion, can reinvest writing with the energy and power that are otherwise in danger of being lost. There is a neatness to this ending because man and boy now compose together, thus echoing and developing the situation in "The Writer in the Family." But rather than looking back to the first story, the novella ends by looking outward to a future that in other parts of the book seemed hopeless. Jonathan's action resolves nothing. It solves none of the dilemmas he had outlined, but it reveals a source of energy from outside the self. It is as though to be re-engaged as a writer Jonathan finds the advice of Yeats insufficient. Rather than returning to the "foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart" as Yeats advised in "The Circus Animals' Desertion," he must do the opposite and look outside the self.

In "Epilogue" Lowell's complaint about his "threadbare art" involved a doubt over whether he was a true artist. The artist, he suggests, transforms reality rather than reproduces it. Lowell's sense of failure derives primarily from a romantic view of the role of the poet, a view that stretched from Coleridge and Wordsworth to, in Lowell's time, Wallace Stevens. Rather than a romantic, Lowell designates himself a recorder, a photographer rather than an expressionist painter. Nevertheless, "Epilogue" ends with a note of triumph at this fact; art itself should be accurate, should exist in order to preserve because it involves the recognition that we are mortal and human:

     Yet why not say what happened?
     Pray for the grace of accuracy
     Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
     stealing like a tide across a map
     to his girl solid with yearning.
     We are poor passing facts,
     warned by that to give
     each figure in the photograph
     his living name.

In some regards, Lives of the Poets closes with the same recognition, and, as for Lowell, "why not say what happened?" becomes not so much a question as a half-aggressive statement of post-romantic sensibility. For Jonathan, dropping fiction and saying "what happened" can be a refreshing, if temporary, triumph. Indeed, it is possible to see that "The Hunter" touches on this time. After her frustrated night with the bus driver, the teacher calls in the school photographer. To do so is most unusual because there is no special occasion, and the children are not dressed up for so unexpected a visit. They become uneasy and upset over the event and the teacher's vehement insistence. On one level, the teacher's gesture could be considered symptomatic of her overall frustrations. But the event becomes almost a trope for Lives of the Poets. Like the teacher, Jonathan finds authenticity in the snapshot rather than in the composed, formal portrait, in saying "what happened" as well as in the ways of disguising it.