Robert Lowell: A Biography

by Ian Hamilton

  *

  In July 1937 the Tate ménage transferred itself to Olivet College in Michigan. The Tates, Ford, Janice and Lowell squeezed into the Tates’ car, but at the end of the first day’s drive Ford was so exhausted that he and Janice continued the journey by train. By this stage, Ford had had enough of the Tates’ argumentative intensity: “consorting with the Tates is like living with intellectual desperadoes in the Sargoza [sic] sea.”20 He was also nervous of Lowell; Lowell had written to Richard Eberhart earlier in the summer: “I am not on speaking terms with Mr. Ford, the explanation given being that he is afraid I will write memoirs 30 or 40 years from now in which I will describe him as an over-stout, gouty old gentleman deluded by the poetry of Christina Rossetti and potentialities of the ideogram.”21 Ford’s own version was: “That boy will write something terrible about me one day.”22

  At Olivet, Lowell listened admiringly to lectures by Ford, Tate and Katherine Anne Porter—“all of whom,” wrote Lowell to his mother, “I think would be numbered among the score of living writers worth reading”—and he showed around his poems: “Everyone I have seen here appears to be convinced that should I keep on as I have been doing I should be a really good poet, and good poets are rare.”23

  The “rarity” of the good poet was one theme on which Ford and Tate could be depended to agree. Ford’s lectures at Olivet, for example, were rambling, anecdotal, and now and then inaudible, but invariably they communicated “Ford’s conviction of the sacred character of the writer’s function, the unqualified dedication it required of anyone committed to it.” Robie Macauley, a student at Olivet in 1937 (and another who was to follow Ransom to Kenyon), commented: “This is a very subversive idea and, if it were taught clearly enough, it would probably … reduce all creative writing classes … to a couple of students here and there.”24 Of all possible subversive notions, none could have been more congenial to Robert Lowell.

  From Olivet, Lowell followed Ford to the University of Colorado at Boulder, where the conference starred John Peale Bishop, Sherwood Anderson and Ransom. The main attraction, though, was to be Ford’s formal lecture on “The Literary Life”; and this proved to be a symbolic enactment, almost, of the truly serious man’s separateness from the uncomprehending mass. Lowell certainly saw it in this way:

  I watched an audience of three thousand walk out on him, as he exquisitely, ludicrously, and inaudibly imitated the elaborate periphrastic style of Henry James. They could neither hear nor sympathize.25

  Ford’s biographer, Arthur Mizener, has modified this description by pointing out that the Boulder auditorium held only six hundred and fifty, that Ford refused to use a microphone even though his voice had been weakened by a recent illness, and that much of the lecture was a description of his relations with Jozef Korzeniowski, whom most people failed to identify as Joseph Conrad. As to the mass walkout, Mizener says:

  The audience behaved with sympathy and respect, but about halfway through, little clusters of them began quietly to slip away until, by the time Ford had finished, very few were left.26

  For Lowell, however, Boulder did boast some local seriousness; among the assembled literary hopefuls he was particularly struck by Jean Stafford, a graduate student who had taken her master’s degree there, and who had been delegated by the college to act as receptionist for the visitors. She herself had not yet published, but she was the daughter of a well-known writer of Western yarns (he called himself Jack Wonder but was sometimes known as Ben Delight), and she had been born and brought up in cowboy country. “As soon as I could,” though, “I hotfooted it across the Rocky Mountains and across the Atlantic Ocean,”27 so that by the time Lowell met her she had spent two years at a German university and was sparklingly eloquent on the “European scene.” She knew the latest on Auden and Isherwood; she was witty and attractive. Lowell was impressed, and although nothing developed between them during his eleven days at Boulder, Jean promised to write to him at Kenyon in the fall.

  Ford’s fear of future biographical barbs did not prevent him from taking Lowell back to Olivet at the end of August to serve “as a sort of conscripted secretary … taking dictation in the mornings, and typing it out afternoons.”28 Ford was desperately trying to meet a deadline for The March of Literature and did not mind if a few lines of the manuscript were refashioned by his young admirer; he did briefly panic, though, when he heard a (Stafford-inspired) rumor from Boulder that Lowell was planning to be on the boat when he and Biala eventually returned to Europe. His Boulder informant, Natalie Davison, tried to calm him with some commonsense advice: “If I were in your boots, and he succeeded in his little plan, I am sure I would push him off the rail before we reached Cherbourg.”29 Lowell seems to have been unaware of the small dramas of discomfiture that tended to erupt around him; so far as he was concerned, his work for Ford was all part of the essential apprenticeship he had embarked on: “As he is a very great master of English prose the training is very valuable and I would not want to miss the opportunity.”30

  On September 12, Lowell returned to Nashville to prepare himself for enrollment at Kenyon on the fourteenth. As he saw it, the initiation stage was over; he had found his true masters and the way ahead was finally uncluttered:

  The summer has been very hard work and very much worth all the sweat that has gone into it. Much credit is due to Dr. Moore for his initial decisions which made it all possible. Many of the people I have met are above average but the Tates and Ford and Ransom are in a class by themselves.31

  The bemused response from Boston simply underscored the victory Lowell knew he had already won:

  I am glad to hear that you met so many interesting people and think your plans for next winter with Prof. Ransome [sic] sound very pleasant.32

  Notes

  1. R.L., “Visiting the Tates,” Sewanee Review 67 (1959), p. 557.

  2. R.L. to Richard Eberhart, n.d. (Dartmouth College Library).

  3. R.L., “Visiting the Tates.”

  4. Ibid.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Allen Tate, “An Open Letter,” May 24, 1937, in John T. Fain and Thomas D. Young, eds., Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1974), Appendix C.

  7. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, May 24, 1937 (Houghton Library).

  8. Ibid.

  9. Ibid.

  10. R.L., draft autobiography, 1955–57 (Houghton Library).

  11. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, May 24, 1937 (Houghton Library).

  12. R.L., “Visiting the Tates.”

  13. R.L. to Richard Eberhart, n.d. (Dartmouth College Library).

  14. Ibid.

  15. Arthur Mizener, The Saddest Story (London: The Bodley Head, 1971), p. 439. Janice Biala to George Davis, June 21, 1937.

  16. R.L. to Richard Eberhart, n.d. (Dartmouth College Library).

  17. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, July 5, 1937 (Houghton Library).

  18. Blair Clark, interview with I.H. (1980).

  19. Anne Dick, interview with I.H. (1979).

  20. Ford Madox Ford to Dale Warren, June 11, 1937 (Mizener, p. 441).

  21. R.L. to Richard Eberhart, n.d. (Dartmouth College Library).

  22. Peter Taylor, interview with I.H. (1980).

  23. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, July 31, 1937 (Houghton Library).

  24. Robie Macauley, quoted in Mizener, p. 443.

  25. R.L., “Ford Madox Ford,” New York Review of Books, May 12, 1966.

  26. Mizener, p. 442.

  27. Jean Stafford, Author’s Note, The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969).

  28. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, August 24, 1937 (Houghton Library).

  29. Mizener, p. 598.

  30. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, August 24, 1937 (Houghton Library).

  31. Ibid.

  32. R.T.S. Lowell to R.L., n.d. (Houghton Library).

  5

  Ransom’s arrival at Kenyon was viewed with some resentment by a proportion of the forty
-strong and fairly close-knit faculty: rumors of his inflated salary had been “confirmed” by a story about the Vanderbilt controversy that had appeared in Time magazine, and also a popular junior instructor had been removed in order to make room for this Southern interloper. The Agrarians were thought of by some Kenyon Northerners as a somewhat cranky, perhaps even near-fascist Southern sect, and it was some time before Ransom’s courtly and benign manner, and his immense conscientiousness, persuaded his new colleagues that he was no reactionary firebrand, nor even a grand poet come to exploit the idealism of the college’s new president.

  At first, though, he did feel isolated and was glad to have “his” students to support him. He arranged for Lowell and Jarrell to share a second-floor bedroom in the large campus house he had been given and was grateful for their company. They are, he wrote to Tate, “both good fellows in extremely different ways. Randall has gone physical and collegiate with a rush: tennis is the occasion…. Cal is sawing wood and getting out to all his college engagements in a businesslike but surly manner.”1

  Ransom’s isolation at Kenyon didn’t last too long; any personal opposition gradually fell away as people got to know him, and his own involvement with the college became instantly more deep and durable with the founding—in 1938—of the Kenyon Review. A literary magazine of international pretensions (it aimed to fill the gap left by the demise of The Criterion), the Review enabled Ransom to transform Kenyon from a sleepy Midwest backwater into an acknowledged center of high-powered literary bustle.

  At first, however, his separateness from the faculty was thoroughly congenial to his disciples. For Lowell, certainly, it meant that he could legitimately keep himself to one side of the college-boy routine. He was still noticeably the wild man: “loud-humoured, dirty and frayed, I needed to be encouraged to comb my hair, tie my shoe-laces and say goodbye when leaving a house.”2 His tactics on the football field were as before: “the man of the Kenyon squad who played sideways into his own team-mates, but strong as a bull, spilling them over, [he] never won a game.”3 And the room he shared with Jarrell was soon reduced to such chaos that it was only a matter of time before “alternative accommodation” had to be sought.4

  The “alternative accommodation” turned out in fact to be the perfect move for Lowell. Douglass House, a “carpenter-Gothic” construction in the center of the Kenyon campus, was earmarked as the ideal “isolation block” for Ransom’s studious, eccentric followers. In 1938 Lowell moved in (after an interlude lodging in the house of another Kenyon professor: “There was a certain unpleasantness and Cal was asked to leave”5) and shared a room with Peter Taylor, a student of Ransom’s whom Lowell had briefly met between classes at Vanderbilt. As Taylor has recalled, Douglass House proved to be “the ideal thing…. Kenyon was a very small school and a rich boys’ school, and we were rather out of things. People lived in fraternities and dormitories and we didn’t want to do that.”6

  The eleven residents of Douglass House—with Jarrell also living in as a chaperon or “housemother”—had a common interest in Kenyon. Each of them wanted to be a writer, and each considered himself to be a “Ransom man.” John Thompson, Robie Macauley, David Macdowell—and, of course, Jarrell and Taylor—were to become Lowell’s lifelong friends; others—and conveniently Douglass House provided Lowell with the essential raw material for his compulsive teasing—remained figures of fun in his automythology for years to come. Douglass House offered Lowell what he had never really had: a small, manageable community inhabited by gods, fools and equals—and set at a superior distance from the dull, conforming herd:

  We were regarded by the rest of the community as being just eggheads and longhairs. One time, there was a tradition at Kenyon that on Sunday everyone stayed on in the great hall after lunch and sang songs—the college songs, of which Kenyon had a great many. But Cal and I got up to leave and as we went out the whole student body booed. We’d left before the singing. And that was generally how we were regarded there.7

  And even in the bohemian set Lowell was considered to be something special: “he was usually the most slovenly and ragged looking of us all. He really went about in tatters, sometimes even with the soles hanging loose from his shoes.”8 Peter Taylor, his room-mate at Douglass House, noticed that in his closet Lowell always kept his “good” set of clothes—a suit, a hat, a pair of shoes. These had been bought from Brooks Brothers by his mother, and Lowell made sure that they were kept in mint condition.

  Taylor’s accounts of rooming with Lowell are a mixture of affection and recalled exhaustion (not unlike Clark’s and Parker’s recollections of him at Nantucket). Lowell would read aloud to Taylor late into the night, and at one point recruited him as a rather passive co-editor of an anthology of English poetry. There were occasional quarrels, usually about when to put the lights out, but only one real fight. Lowell now and then teased Taylor about his interest in Catholicism; he called it “a religion for Irish servant girls”—remembering here his mother’s advice to an Irish maid who wanted to become Episcopalian: “No, you have your church and we have ours and it’s better to keep it that way.” And now and then Taylor would get exasperated by his friend’s grand-scale untidiness. Lowell’s bed was surrounded by a tumbledown but ever-mounting wall of books, dirty socks, letters from Boston, football boots and drafts of poems; when he’d read a book, he would simply toss it onto the pile and grab another. It could not be long, surely, before Taylor’s own side of the room became engulfed by stray Lowelliana.9

  There was also the business of the bears. Lowell had dreamed up a world peopled by “bear-characters”—or “berts,” as he called them—and his favorite off-duty sport was to invent bear-dramas or bear-parables, which incorporated caricatures of friends and relatives. Each friend would be given a bear-name and an appropriate bear-voice. Lowell himself seems to have been the chief bear, known as Arms of the Law (the hero of his “horrid” childhood “spoof”). John Thompson remembers that Lowell

  had a funny singsong whine he told these stories in and they were endless. They became compulsive, but I didn’t think they were all that funny. He would tease people with them. They were familiars of some kind—totems that he needed. I don’t know where they came from. Arms was like a sheriff—he was always arresting people and scolding people. They all had names, and they were all sorts of bears. They’d do outrageous things, get drunk and carry on, and then Arms would scold them—or he’d be drunk. I can’t remember.10

  Peter Taylor—whose bear-name was “Sub”—takes a more charitable view, simply pleading that “There are things which can be funny between friends at a particular time, and Cal’s bears were that way.”11 Lowell seems not to have been nervous that his bear-game might be boring for his friends; being made into a bear was, after all, a mark of his friendship and regard. It would have been a sour companion who didn’t even pretend to go along with it. For Taylor, as his room-mate, there was consolation in reminding himself that he “never felt Eliot’s Practical Cats were very funny.”12

  But these were details. Taylor was, in his own way, as intent on self-improvement as his more overtly fierce and dedicated roommate. Taylor wrote fiction; Lowell wrote poetry. There was no rivalry, and no leader-disciple arrangement as with Clark and Parker. The two of them were allies in a huge, world-altering adventure:

  We walked the country roads for miles in every direction, talking every step of the way about ourselves or about our writing, or if we exhausted those two dearer subjects, we talked about what we were reading at the time. We read W. H. Auden and Ivor Winters and Wyndham Lewis and Joyce and Christopher Dawson. We read The Wings of the Dove (aloud!) and The Cosmological Eye and In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.13

  “And how sad and serious we were,” wrote Taylor. “We didn’t hesitate to say what we wanted to be and what we felt we must have in order to become that. We wanted to be writers….”14

  *

  Robert Lowell had come to Kenyon knowing “more about Dryden and Milton than an
y other student,”15 but such accomplishment soon seemed narrow and too recent. On Ransom’s advice, he decided to take classics as his major, and of all the bits of advice that Lowell was bombarded with throughout his adolescence, this may well have been the bit that mattered. Certainly, he was always to be grateful to Ransom for setting him tasks large enough to match his energy and (at least some of) his youthful arrogance:

  I often doubt if I would have survived without you. I was so abristle and untamed, nor would any discipline less inspired and kind than yours have held me.16

  Lowell wrote this to Ransom in 1961. And at Ransom’s death in 1974 Lowell again named him as the most decisive of all guiding hands:

  The kind of poet I am was largely determined by the fact that I grew up in the heyday of the New Criticism. From the beginning I was preoccupied with technique, fascinated by the past and tempted by other languages. It is hard for me (now) to imagine a poet not interested in the classics.17

  Lowell’s tributes to Mr. Ransom (as Ransom continued to be called by his students long after they had left the college) were always to a rather remote, avuncular presence. They had little of the nervous edge, the intimacy, that went into his relationship with Tate or Jarrell. If Ransom was the wise and kindly uncle, and Tate the revered but comically exasperating father figure, then Jarrell was the exciting older brother: possibly the first person of more or less his own generation that Lowell genuinely held in awe. Not all the late-night chat at Douglass House was about Henry James or Homer; a good deal of it was about Jarrell—his tennis, the girlfriend he had in town, his sometimes scathing view of Ransom, and also his conceit, his intransigence, his primness: “Randall never in his life used a four-letter word. He couldn’t stand a joke about sex. He wouldn’t have it.”18