ROBERT LAX: HOLLYWOOD’S CONTEMPLATIVE POET
What kind of a mystic was Robert Lax? One who could make the dictionary sound otherworldly. He was once asked what advice he could give young writers. He advised studying the dictionary occasionally: “Inside are the seeds you’re going to plant in your field.”
Lax was also the kind of mystic who in 1946, after writing poetry for The New Yorker and his dissertation on St. Thomas Aquinas at The University of North Carolina, could haul his prayerful body off to Hollywood to work as researcher and scriptwriter for the ill-fated potboiler, Siren of Atlantis.
He found lodging at the “pistachio colored” Castle Argyle, which could have sprung straight from Nathaniel West’s Hollywood apocalypse, Day of The Locust. The landlord, an old Russian general, rented rooms to screen writers, songwriters, mothers of movie workers, and some Syrian émigré girls “of moderate income & modest wardrobe: earnest young women, albeit cheerful, with bookshelves full of self-help manuals.”
His friend, Trappist author Thomas Merton, had tried to turn the poet towards the priestly vocation, and away from the epicenter of lucre and lust. But Lax couldn’t resist the invitation of director Arthur Ripley, father of one of his North Carolina friends, to be part of the grand process of movie making. In his Journal entry dated September
1, 1947, Lax wrote: “He became part of the life around him only to a very limited degree. But he watched it; tried to make sense of it at all times.”
Much of what we know of his inner and worldly life at the time comes from his Hollywood Journal. Years later, in Greece, where he spent the last forty years of his life as an expat hermit, his journals would mirror the day-to-day world of the poet, who continued to watch and make sense of the ever-changing face of the present moment.
Lax would observe Saturday nights in Hollywood, and write of the guys, “They were young men with blank faces which time would slowly write on.” The gentle equine face of Lax, age 31, had already been extravagantly written on. It bore the markings of Groucho Marx, James Joyce and Jack Kerouac, as well as St. Augustine, Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and abstract artist Ad Reinhardt. It also bore the markings of the Cristiani’s, the circus family he met up with in New York and wound up performing with as a clown in Canada. The then thriving movie capital does not usually find in its midst a poet with a commitment to voluntary poverty. Of his wanderings around Europe, Michael N. McGregor would write in Pure Act, his biography of Lax: “When he was tired, he slept on the ground. When he was hungry, if no one gave him food, he ate what he found in the garbage.”
In Lax’s poetry there is not a trace of morbidity. An admirer of Beckett (who in turn admired him), Lax leaned strongly toward absurdism:
………….A good life all in all
………….except for those last few moments
………….in front of the firing squad
There is little in the Hollywood Journal about his actual experience as a researcher and script writer. The film, an overblown love story conjoined with a version of the Atlantis myth, was a strange precursor for a writer who would soon begin crafting his minimalist works that led to lines like these from his Marseilles Diaries:
………….strange music
………….in the ancient
………….fairgrounds
………….the eyes
………….of strangers
………….the moments passed
………….like parables
………….the joy
………….of being
………….alone
………….and in
………….a foreign
………….land
Only towards the end of his life (Lax died at 84 in September of 2000) did his poetry find major publishers. New Directions published his 33 Poems in 1988, and Grove came out with Love Had A Compass in 1996. Volumes that were reprinted by their respective publishers in 2019.
In his wanderings, he saw Hollywood with an eye that was at once sly and sacral. He saw Groucho Marx in a long black limousine. He stopped at the purifying shrines of the palm trees:
………….Only the palm leaves toss and rattle.
………….Only the palm leaves nod and whisper
………….in the cool breeze of the afternoon.
………….And the movement of the palms is like a dance
Lax could, with such phrases, make Hollywood sound like a place plucked straight out of the Bible.
Or he could express himself in a flat, almost Raymond Chandler like voice some might mistake for cynicism, a trait never associated with him:
………….The sun shines on everyone in Hollywood:
………….On the $1500 a week screen writers
………….lying out by their swimming pools in the thin
………….shade of a house
But also:
………….On the crowds of assorted bums & shoppers who
………….hurry in the streets of downtown Los Angeles;
………….On the young attendants who sit in the reflected
………….glare of polished fenders
It was Hollywood’s light, not its crass hand, that shape-shifts in his journal as voiceless mother, fellow traveler:
………….The light which says;
………….“I have always been here
………….& you have always been a child
………….& I have always loved you.”
And there is the light Lax spun from his poetics of wonder:
………….They move a house
………….The men are moving a house
……………….white in the sunlight
……………….white flowing material
……………….now hardened
……………….baked in sunlight.
………….And they move it out on rollers.
Lax was prone at that time to destabilizing comparisons, as well as an unwillingness, as he put it, to be “attached,” though he had long since converted to Catholicism. He attributed his quandary to “perhaps a simple dislike for the risks inherent in attachment.”
But his spiritual reference points remained those of the old contemplatives: “If you are yourself, then you are on the right track, isn’t that so? But yet it says in St. John of the Cross (and in the Bible) that he who would find himself should lose himself, that he who loses himself finds himself.”
Lax lost himself in exploring the desperate “imaginative arena” called Hollywood, which he left gladly, just as he lost himself in the warmth, depth and simplicity of Patmos, which he left only to die back where he was born in Olean, New York. By losing himself in all things, he tried to find himself in all things. More than most poets and contemplatives, he really did try, and, say his friends, with his sense of humor wholly intact.
His house atop the wind-swept hill in Patmos is where you would go for the best good laugh in Patmos.