Robert Lowell: A Biography

by Ian Hamilton

  These wrangles were a kind of love-play—“Mother and I loved knocking our heads together until they bled. We couldn’t do without it for a day.” And it was from these early jousts that Lowell had his first taste of rhetoric, of argument pursued for the sake of wit and wordplay rather than for any just or true solution. He relished his mother’s “wonderfully detailed and good-humoured exaggerations” and strove hard to match her in comic outrageousness. A subject like St. Mark’s was in fact far too “real-life” for them to indulge the full range of their talents—and, in any case, each of them knew that the outcome was unshakably decided. But the teasing had to be kept up. It was a vital, if complicated, bond—and for Lowell an early training that was to have ambiguous rewards.

  St. Mark’s itself was not the wittiest of institutions, and still made much of its high-minded origins, its similarity to the British public school, and its annual football match with Groton. In theory, it molded the young spirit to an Episcopalian design; in practice, it provided Boston with an annual supply of clean-limbed bankers, lawyers and junior executives. Founded in 1865, it was an efficient, solemnly benign academy; its buildings were modeled on the cloisters and quadrangles of an Oxford or Cambridge college, its aimed-for style was effortless, agreeable superiority.

  The original devout conception of St. Mark’s was still in evidence, though not overemphatically. The headmaster, for example, was permitted to be a layman, but

  He must be a man of personal religion not first because he is the headmaster of a church school but because the faith, chivalry and mystery of religion are essential to the upbuilding of an American boy’s education and character. And being the headmaster of a church school his loyalty will be to the church and his heart will be in its worship. Only thus can the whole school, masters and boys, be one sympathetic family.2

  Lowell had his doubts about the “family” atmosphere when, as a new boy at St. Mark’s, he was introduced to the pettily sadistic rituals of Bloody Monday and Sanguinary Saturday. On these days of “initiation” the prefects would set the new boys silly tests or send them on complicated errands; the punishment for a less than perfect performance was to be thrashed with a paddle or a piece of kindling wood. In October 1930 (after over thirty years’ rule by William Greenough Thayer) St. Mark’s had acquired a new headmaster. A cautiously liberal historian from Harvard, Francis Parkman was to phase out some of the school’s more barbaric customs, but for most of Lowell’s stay there the British-style monitor system remained intact: big boys beating small boys, with old men watching fondly from the wings.

  Lowell’s own bloodthirstiness was maturing with the years. His hobby was collecting toy soldiers; his favorite reading was military history, or, more accurately, the history of solo, high-rank brilliance: he showed little interest in, say, the trench stalemate of World War One—unlike his contemporaries in Britain, his childhood had not been saturated with eyewitness horror stories or marked by the deaths in war of uncles, cousins, family friends.

  Aside from history, Lowell was a below-average student. It was only in his last two years at St. Mark’s (1933–35) that he began to see himself as distinctively an “intellectual.” At the end of his first year, for example, he was fifth from the bottom of his class, and his letters at this time are appallingly misspelled, with each block capital carved out as if it had cost, him an excruciating effort (this childlike “printing,” and a good deal of the bad spelling, were to stay with him for the rest of his life—and a number of his friends vaguely thought of him as “dyslexic”).

  As at Rivers, Lowell joined forces with the second most unpopular boy in the class: Smelly Ben Pitman or “a boy called Everett from Colorado.” He and Everett had to room together “because nobody else would room with them,” and “they did nothing but fight, from the beginning of the day to the end.” In football games, Lowell always contrived to be at the bottom of every scrimmage: “as if he were defying,” the coach remembered, “the combined might of both teams to crush him under.” At football, he was given to a bull-like domination of the mid-field, scattering opponents and teammates alike. An ex-St. Marker has recalled:

  Once years ago I returned to St. Mark’s as a reuning [sic] alumnus. The aging master (Roland Sawyer) who had coached football in Lowell’s time and had taught me trigonometry recognized me. “Still fighting the world?” he said. He appeared to remember me as a quixotic schoolboy rebel and I paraphrase what he told me. “You were always fighting the world, a little like Robert Lowell. But Lowell was stronger and a whole lot wilder than you. He was ready to take on everybody. That’s why they called him Caligula.”3

  The nickname “Cal,” which Lowell stuck to all his life, was part Caligula and part Caliban. Indeed, it appears that the Caliban came first, after a class reading of The Tempest, and that Lowell somehow had it transmuted to the (to him) more glamorous Roman tyrant. His classmates considered both models thoroughly appropriate:

  He was called Caliban. He was also called Caligula—the least popular Roman emperor with all the disgusting traits, the depravity that everyone assumed Cal had. So between the two, well, Caligula stuck and Caliban disappeared. When I began to know him well, I refused to use those names, but I couldn’t find another name that he would accept. Bobby was out, his parents called him that. I called him Traill Spence and he complained that it sounded as though I was summoning a butler and so I too had to call him Cal.4

  The “disgusting traits, the depravity” which Frank Parker speaks of here seem to have been fairly mild—unlaundered clothes, untied shoelaces and an intimidating physical awkwardness—but in the starchy atmosphere of St. Mark’s it is easy to see how Lowell came to be marked out as a “wild man.” He was also prone to intermittent fits of rage. These were “cautious rages,” according to one friend; “They weren’t really mad, challenging rages.” Even so, in someone of Lowell’s dark, disheveled bulk, they were vivid enough to isolate him from the spruce and orthodox achievers in his class. Not that Lowell was the only “Caliban” at St. Mark’s. Thirty years later he was still afraid of Billy Butler:

  I can remember when everybody and his dog began to tease me with the jingle about Boston being the city of beans, Cabots and cod, where the Lowells spoke only to God. I was at St. Mark’s Boarding School in Southborough, and away from home for the first time. My class-mates mostly came from Tuxedo Park and Westport. They found the school’s tone penurious and chafing; they felt out of sorts with the New England climate. One afternoon, Billy Butler chased me under the stone hood of the chateau-sized fire-place in the junior common room. We had been reading in Roman history about the Burgundian braves who greased their long yellow hair with rancid butter. Billy’s hair was like that, or like a girl’s. His nose was arched like Garbo’s. He was sensitive, powerful, backward and cruel. Billy so terrified me that afternoon, that today, almost thirty years later, I have no need to close my eyes to see him. In front of my nose, he is shaking an expensive compass stolen from mechanical drawing class. The legs open and shut like the claw of a lobster. “Lowell R.” Billy shouts, “If God talks to the Lowells in Boston, God talks Yiddish, by God!”

  I asked my Father about this Yiddish business. Father was a naval officer by profession and faith. Despite his name and connections, he felt like an outsider in Boston. “I don’t know about the Lowells,” he said, “but of course God talks Yiddish.” Father then slipped off into his typical whimsy. “God,” he said, “has promised the Zionists that he will brush up on his Hebrew. He finds it hard work talking the King’s English and Beacon Hill Brittish [sic] to Bishop Lawrence.” Suddenly, Father dropped his eyes, as though he had been blinded by sunlight. He studied the blue eagle tatooed [sic] on his fore-arm. He said, “You Bostonians want everyone, even God and Calvin Coolidge, to be cold fish and close as clams.” I was no more than twelve years old and a blithe second-former, but something in my Father’s voice made me feel meant [sic] and insulted.

  In Lowell’s fourth year, though, he made two imp
ortant allies—and this time they weren’t just comrades-in-mayhem. Frank Parker was one of them, and the other, Blair Clark, recalls:

  We were half intellectuals, half rebels. I never thought of Lowell, when he approached me and Parker, as an intellect, though God knows what I thought an intellect was, at the age of fifteen. He certainly wasn’t a jock, although he was the strongest boy in the class; people left him alone—although they thought he was crazy—because he was so strong. And now and then he proved he ought to be left alone.5

  In Blair Clark’s account, there was an awesome deliberateness in Lowell’s metamorphosis from lout to man of sensibility: “he created himself as an intellect, as a creative spirit. It was astonishing to see such focus.”6 Certainly, until the age of fifteen, Lowell’s natural competitiveness had had no focus. It found its expression in explosive showdowns with his parents when they came to see him on weekends, in dormitory punch-ups or carnage on the sports field. The association with Parker and Clark gave him a new sort of gang to lead:

  We were a mini-phalanx that he was head of—and there were only three members. But it had a definite moral function and he was unquestionably the leader—to the aggravation of both Parker and myself, as time went on. It was really the imposition of a will on us. And there was a slightly crazy element to it, even then.7

  Late-night bull sessions on “the meaning of life”; immersion in translated Homer; unmerciful self-scrutiny—“What do you do with yourself, how do you make yourself better?”: these were the terms for membership of Lowell’s alternative academy. As to the regular curriculum, the whole point of his rebellion was to find St. Mark’s sadly inadequate to the requirements of the really serious truth-seeker:

  On a cultural side, one art is taught, literature. In the modern languages this study is dilatory: the student never learns to speak the language; he reads, if at all, its classics without taste. Latin and Greek are better taught than at other schools but even at that with incomparably less discipline than in the last century. English is studied without enthusiasm or perception. After six uncomfortable years the student, still bordering on illiteracy, has no notion of literature’s urgency and value.8

  Lowell wrote this some five years after leaving St. Mark’s, so one can imagine that, at the time, the arrogance might have been even more nakedly emphatic. It was by force of self-righteousness and exclusivity that the trio conducted their dissident maneuvers, as Blair Clark recalls:

  We were never subversive of the order at St. Mark’s, however contemptuous we were of it, with its athletic values and its stockbrokers’ sons, and so on. The compulsion was moral—it wasn’t literary or cultural. It was an entirely priestly thing. He was the leader—and we were rather laggard acolytes in his view. We did challenge him a bit. But there was definitely a bullying aspect as time went on.9

  Lowell, indeed, showed that he had lost none of his old taste for fisticuffs when a new master, Richard Eberhart, made his appearance at St. Mark’s. Eberhart had studied at Cambridge with the Experiment group that included I. A. Richards and William Empson, he had a small but visible reputation as a poet, he had heard of Eliot and Picasso. Frank Parker showed signs of falling under Eberhart’s spell, and was instantly disciplined: “Cal beat me up because I was going to see Eberhart.” But Lowell eventually saw that the amiable Cousin Ghormley (as Eberhart was nicknamed) was no threat to his domination of trio ideology and there was a softening. And when, after reading Eberhart’s “The Groundhog,” Lowell perceived that the man might even be a genuine artist, he decided to adopt him as a kind of senior adviser to the group—a provider of booklists, and of books.

  During his final year at St. Mark’s, Lowell became associate editor of the school magazine, Vindex (Frank Parker was art editor), and published a few trifling and pretentious pieces in free verse. His most notable contribution, though, was an essay called War: A Justification.10 It was an effort Caligula himself might not have been ashamed of. Lowell’s aim is to counter the view that war merely “brings bloodshed, depravity and confusion.” He concedes that “these are very serious objections” but goes on to demonstrate that “not only the good that [wars] bring far outweighs the evil, but also that they are essential for the preservation of life in its highest forms.” In peacetime, he avers, the world is in a “pitiful condition,” there is a “spirit of listlessness and decay. The people are united by no common goal. They do not have to make any great sacrifices. Success comes to them almost without effort.” He cites Ulysses as “the man of hardship and war” who “radiates life, energy and enthusiasm.” But war is not only the test of the individual spirit: “It unites mankind, for it shows that greatness is to be achieved, not by individualism, but by co-operation.” It also gives “cowards and thieves … a chance to gain self-respect and honour.” And as to the preferred outcome:

  The more deserving side may not always win; but war is the fairest test of which we know. The nation which succeeds must have the greater moral, physical, mental and material resources.

  The year was 1935, but there is no evidence that Lowell was subscribing to any European periodicals. His toy soldiers had given way to a growing library of Napoleoniana, and he was already trying to reconcile his unruly energies with his almost monastic reverence for the disciplined, the harsh, self-abnegating Way.

  Up to the time of Eberhart’s arrival at St. Mark’s, Lowell seems not to have thought of poetry as his calling; indeed, at that stage, Parker was regarded as the likely writer in the group. Under the shadow of Eberhart’s example, the group’s literary self-awareness started to take over. For the summer of 1935, a trip to Nantucket was decided on. Lowell had rented a small cottage—not for frivolous holidaying, but for a stretch of intense, Lowell-directed self-improvement. Both Parker and Clark still remember this and later retreats with a kind of horrified puzzlement. What was Lowell’s power over them that they should have submitted to his reading programs, his rules of conduct, his imposition of roles? Parker (still ) recalls:

  I wasn’t physically afraid of him. I wasn’t really afraid of him. I think my picture of our friendship is of Aesop’s bronze vessel and clay vessel crossing the stream. The bronze vessel says: “Come and help me, give me company.” And the clay vessel foolishly does it and is jostled and of course the clay breaks and the bronze goes on. I think I rather saw myself as the clay vessel there. I didn’t want to go jostling across any stream with Cal.11

  But jostle he did, and so did Clark, whose chief memories of Nantucket are to do with Lowell’s “brutal, childish” tyranny. Lowell prescribed not just the trio’s intellectual diet; he was also in charge of the daily menu: “We had dreadful health food all the time. The diet was eels—cooked by me, badly—and a dreadful cereal with raw honey. All decided by Cal.” On one occasion, Lowell decided that Blair Clark should give up smoking, and when Clark resisted “he chased me around and he knocked me down, to make me give up.” On another, it was decided that Experience required the trio to know what it felt like to be drunk. Lowell announced that the brew would be rum mixed with cocoa:

  I remember I made the cocoa. And we drank it as if we were mainlining heroin. I remember the chair falling over and my head hitting the floor. We got blind drunk in about twenty minutes. Next thing I remember was staggering onto the porch outside—and how I didn’t choke on my own vomit, I don’t know. Why did we go along with it?12

  Like all “natural leaders,” Lowell was probably only dimly aware of his troops’ private agony, and if he did give heed to their misgivings, he would no doubt have seen them as weaknesses which it was his duty to correct—for their sakes. In letters to Eberhart from Nantucket, he makes it clear that certain essential decisions had been made:

  Dear Mr. Eberhart,

  Frank has probably told you all about our surroundings. They are in many ways almost ideal. The climate is cool and we are secluded; yet it is not too cool to be comfortable and we are not so secluded as to be shut off from life. The material side of living is not very di
fficult, although I am afraid we are not maintaining a particularly high standard.

  For the first fifteen days we studied the Bible (especially the book of Job) and I expect we will return to it off and on during the summer. I shall refrain from giving any critical opinions. It suffices to say that I now believe parts of the Bible rank with Homer and Shakespeare and that for vigour and force the Hebraic poetry is unequalled. I have been reading lately Wordsworth’s “Prelude” and Amy Lowell’s life of Keats. I have come across many magnificent passages in the “Prelude” and have found Amy Lowell invaluable as a critic. But what has impressed me most is the picture both give of the young poet forming into a genius, their energy, their rapid growth and above all their neverending determination to succeed.

  During the short time that has elapsed since school ended, I have come to realise more and more the spiritual side of being a poet. It is difficult to express what I wish to say, but what I mean is the actuallity [sic] of living the life, of breathing the same air as Shakespeare, and of coordinating all this with the actuallities of the world. My beliefs haven’t changed at all only now I am beginning to feel what before I merely thought in a more or less impassioned or academic sense.13

  A month later Lowell writes again to Eberhart. He has completed twenty poems, and is planning a long work called “Jonah” in Spenserian stanzas; he has read Blake, Coleridge, Lear, The Tempest, Cymbeline and a life of Christ. He also reports that “Frank is making good progress, although it is hard to define. I feel that he is standing on his own two feet, that he has a growing devotion for the highest forms of art, and he has the creative desire.” As to the group itself, its sense of a religious as well as a cultural mission had become a good deal more explicit than it was at St. Mark’s, where, although Lowell sneered at the school’s pretense to godliness (“In place of Christ the God of St. Mark’s is the Discobolus”), he had never been thought of as a particularly vehement believer. In August 1935 he submits to Eberhart the trio’s new aesthetic: