Robert Lowell: A Biography

by Ian Hamilton

  The tough guys in Douglass House found Jarrell hard to take—two of them even wrecked his newly done-up room one night—but everyone was agreed about his talents. “He was very bright—preternaturally bright. He knew everything,” recalls John Thompson (who found Jarrell very hard to take). Lowell, though, never wholeheartedly joined in the Jarrell-baiting. He could see what the others meant and was prepared to gossip and to tease, but he never lost sight of Jarrell’s worth—or usefulness. Peter Taylor remembers:

  Jarrell treated everybody pretty badly. Cal and I were the only ones who stuck by him through thick and thin. We would take his insults because—and I think Cal taught me something here—Cal was determined to learn what he could from Randall. From the very beginning. He wouldn’t reject him the way other people did. Because Randall was hard to take. Have you read his early reviews? They were just acid.19

  Lowell published half a dozen poems in the college magazine during his two and a half years at Kenyon, but the first one of these did not appear until December 1938. In his first year he continued to solicit the good opinion of Richard Eberhart, although his regard for Eberhart’s homely pieties was beginning to crumble in the shadow of the New Criticism’s care for detail. In November 1937 Eberhart sent Lowell a group of his own poems and was shocked to find that his ex-pupil had become confident enough to issue a few lessons of his own: “Your generalities are commonplace … If you want to write poems that will outlast the age you must condense.”20 Eberhart, much piqued, attempts in his reply to outpatronize the upstart. Only the immature, he says, have ambitions to “outlast the age”; wise types like himself simply aim “to get through life without pain.” Lowell, he suggests, has been spoiled by Tate’s good opinion and will probably “peter out by 25”—but that need not worry anyone: “You’ll always be able to relapse into the soft arms of your Harvard background. Your name will probably get you down before it will set you up.”21 Lowell wrote back in icy terms:

  If you mention my relapsing into the soft arms of a Harvard background, I’ll ask you about becoming a celibate in a fancy boarding school…. I have had little praise that would allow me to spoil and am not expecting to peter out at 25. The underlined words in your letter are undecipherable. Please reproduce them in the established alphabet.22

  Lowell continued to send poems to Eberhart over the next three months (in January 1938 he sent “Elegy,” “Epitaph,” “Maternal Disorder,” “Refusal,” “Narcissus” and “The Flame Coloured Satin of Lust”). At best, Eberhart found them “so-so”; at worst, repugnant: “You have a hard lesson to learn,” he wrote, “that poetry is supposed to please.”23 For Lowell, this kind of cozy motto was opposed to everything he was beginning to believe about what poetry is “supposed to be.” It was clear to him that he had already outgrown Eberhart.

  Lowell’s own manifesto was not fully worked out at this stage, but near the end of 1938 a review he wrote of Ransom’s The World’s Body gives an idea of what he must have been groping towards around the time of his correspondence with Eberhart. He would certainly have thought that “Popular poetry is as worthless as popular science” and (almost certainly) that “Our best and typical poetry is characterized by its strenuous, alexandrian complexity. Alexandrians are circuitous; they are needfully so.” In many ways, the review—when it appeared—would have struck Eberhart as a riposte to his “poetry should please” requirement:

  Proudly we declare that common and quotidian experience is beneath the grace of art…. Physical poetry is valuable because it is concrete. Two varieties are imagist and pure poetry. Imagist would present the particular in all its contingencies, and actually is, in varying degrees, artificial, filled with submerged intentions of its author. Pure poetry presents fanciful fictions in objective forms, and religiously avoids moral application and generality. Metaphysical poetry makes the miraculous explicit: epically, Christ or heroic actors; lyrically, the agony of departing lovers. Christ is not reducible to the good, or to modesty. He is an ejaculation of nature decently vested in an inseparable humanity. If the tears seem to have a cosmic importance, blotting out all else, becoming a flood which destroys the whole world, destroying at last the lovers themselves, such poetry substantiates its hypothesis. It preserves the richness of particulars and can, as in the great religions, make explicit the most supernatural reality, God.24

  The “difficulty” that Lowell prizes is evident in the poems he was sending off to Eberhart, and in those that appeared in Hika, the Kenyon College magazine. Eberhart is not to be mocked for finding them unpalatable—they are awkward, overpacked and rhythmically laborious. In aiming for an exalted tone, they usually end up sounding ludicrously stiff and self-important. Classical references and a proudly Latinate vocabulary contribute to the hoped-for “density,” but they always seem forced in for grandiose effect. And often the crushed syntax will make whole stretches of a poem unintelligible. At this stage there is no evidence of anything distinctive or spontaneous; Lowell’s college poems are as artificial and pretentious as most other people’s college poems. Here, as an example, is a poem called “Walking in a Cornfield, After Her Refusing Letter”:

  The sun was forward and to him the sky,

  pale or at least sooty, wan without cloud

  harshly precluded penitrance [sic]; its glare

  abashed his eyes upon mollases [sic] shocks.

  The cold October corn defiling, passed

  pedestrian in stepping jolt his eyes,

  his eyes diffusely focussed on the ground;

  —O felly blank, O general review!

  Thus outwardly, this inwardly the view;

  loose paper blew about his voided eyes,

  his sinewed eyes, wildish elliptic orbs,

  compressed intensity in jellied meat,—

  a last dismissive crashed his moated eyes;

  uncombed hair and his sleavy [sic] coat not neat

  or clean sprawled on his sight, and shovel-fuls

  of sprawling print and longish finger-nails

  such as left humid gloats of jet-black earth

  on linnen sheats [sic]; the climax having reached

  of corn he looked down and a long league down

  clearly a cool brook ran on his chafed shoes

  A rillet classical since grass implied

  the cold rusticity of Maro’s sedge.25

  Eberhart, it should be said, also complained about Lowell’s spelling and received the following reply: “In my defense I might add that mis-spelling seldom obscures meaning.”26

  *

  It is not known who sent Lowell a “refusing letter,” but it may well have been Jean Stafford. Lowell had kept in touch with her since their meeting in Boulder, and during 1938 he “wooed her something fierce”27 —presumably by post. This could account for the nervous overstatement of a letter Lowell wrote to Frank Parker in that year. Parker had evidently met a girl who he thought might be “the real thing” and seems to have applied to Lowell for advice. The reply from Lowell perfectly combines a flushed adolescent awkwardness with the heavy didacticism of a headmasterly ascetic:

  In living maintain morality and coolness. Don’t marry until you’re passed thru puberty. Punning, I would add, until you’ve approached property.

  We dangle (actually and vocally) sensualizations after flitting females. “That’s just what I’m looking for, the real thing” etc. Such sensations should be understood as ebullitions of the blood. In reality you must ceaselessly search for regions of artistic florility [sic]. Art may be found flourishing in a group, in a single artist stuffed somewhere in your populous city, and always in your own imagination compounded with aesthetic products. But whenever you uncover the growing flowers you must chew and suck them, rembering [sic] that they are your staple. Women until you surpass puberty are sweets, not to be ignored, not to be lived on.28

  Peter Taylor’s story “1939” provides a further insight into Lowell’s lumpish and lordly view of how to handle the troublesome “ebullitions.�
� In the story two Kenyon students—the first-person narrator and his friend Jim Prewitt (Lowell)—set off to see their girlfriends in New York. On the way, the two complacently discuss the girls’ “suitability”:

  We agreed that the quality we most valued in Nancy and Carol was their “critical” and “objective” view of life, their unwillingness to accept the standards of “the world.” I remember telling Jim that Nancy Gibault could always take a genuinely “disinterested” view of any matter—“disinterested in the best sense of the word.” And Jim assured me that, whatever else I might perceive about Carol, I would sense at once the originality of her mind and “the absence of anything commonplace or banal in her intellectual make-up.”29

  On arrival in New York, things speedily go wrong for the narrator. Nancy is flippant and offhand, she has been seeing a lot of an old boyfriend, she laughs at the proud three days’ growth of fluff on the narrator’s chin. The trouble was: “Nancy had never seen me out of St. Louis before and since she had seen me last, she had seen Manhattan.” Even so, things might improve when they meet up for dinner with Jim and his girl. Not so: the conversation is stilted; Jim’s girl is more interested in the other diners than she is in Nancy; and worst of all, Jim’s verdict—when they discuss the evening afterwards—is that “Nancy’s just another society girl, old man…. I had expected something more than that.” The narrator makes a handsome effort to strike back:

  Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of Carol at the newsstand and took in for the first time, in that quick glance, that she was wearing huaraches and a peasant skirt and blouse, and that what she now had thrown around her shoulders was not a topcoat but a long green cape. “At least,” I said aloud to Jim, “Nancy’s not the usual bohemian. She’s not the run-of-the-mill arty type.”

  I fully expected Jim to take a swing at me after that. But, instead, a peculiar expression came over his face and he stood for a moment staring at Carol over there by the newstand. I recognized the expression as the same one I had seen on his face sometimes in the classroom when his interpretation of a line of poetry had been questioned. He was reconsidering.30

  In the story, Jim decides that Carol, after all, “won’t do”—in spite of her beauty, wit and talent (she is a coming writer, and on the day Jim Prewitt visits her in New York she hears that her first novel has been accepted and that two sections of it are to appear in Partisan Review).

  The real-life Carol, though, fares differently. By Christmas, 1938, Lowell’s courtship of Jean Stafford had advanced to the point where he could invite her to Boston for the holidays. It was a fateful, indeed almost fatal, visit. On December 25, Lowell borrowed his parents’ car and, with Jean in the passenger seat, crashed it into a wall at the end of a Cambridge cul-de-sac. Jean’s nose was badly crushed. Lowell may or may not have fled the scene; according to Eberhart’s verse play, he does. He may or may not have been drunk; according to Blair Clark, he’d bought a bottle of cheap wine, but he was also a notoriously bad driver. The upshot was that Jean was taken to the hospital to begin a long saga of dreadful operations on her nose: “She had months in hospital—she had, as her story “The Interior Castle” very savagely describes,31 bits of bone picked out from near the brain. It was terrible. She had massive head injuries—everything fractured, skull, nose, jaw, everything.”32 Lowell was fined seventy-five dollars in the Cambridge District Court for “driving an automobile while under the influence of liquor and driving dangerously.”33

  Lowell returned to Kenyon in January 1939, with Jean still in the hospital and his parents hugely angry and distraught: for them the incident was further evidence of Lowell’s instability (or, worse, in his father’s eyes, his irresponsibility). As for Lowell, his guilt was painful enough; Boston-style recriminations simply goaded him into a deeper fury. Mr. Lowell’s attitude to his son had now hardened into blank hostility; Mrs. Lowell still believed that psychiatric help was what was needed. Both were dreading the further scandal that would soon erupt: it had been agreed by Lowell and Stafford that she should sue him for insurance against her medical expenses. A trial had been scheduled for the summer of 1939. On hearing this, the Lowell parents decided that a summer trip to Europe was necessary in order to soothe their shattered nerves—and Charlotte was able to convince herself that she was “doing something” for her son by persuading Merrill Moore to arrange a consultation with Carl Jung. On May 27 she writes thanking Moore for his assistance: “Your very complete presentation of the case to Dr. Jung will be of the greatest help.”34 Unluckily, no notes have come to light revealing Dr. Jung’s diagnosis—but years later Lowell wrote:

  That year Carl Jung said to mother in Zurich,

  “If your son is as you have described him,

  he is an incurable schizophrenic.”35

  Lowell struggled through an uneasy spring at Kenyon. His classics professor there was Frederick Santee, and Lowell spent a good deal of time in the Santees’ “open house” across the street from Douglass House. It was a dramatic and chaotic household, and Lowell recalled it later on with some affection. Santee, he wrote,

  was a child-prodigy, who entered Harvard at thirteen, wrote the best Greek verse by an American in England, and later married another classics-child-prodigy—egregious people but fated for divorce and tragedy. They were plain and Socratic yet their divorce was marked with violence and absurdity; a sheet wetted to cause pneumonia, a carving knife left threateningly on a stairpost, a daughter held incommunicado by the Ransoms from both parents, insomnia, evidence, floods of persuasive, contradictory and retold debate. On the much adjourned day of the trial, the presiding judge, the master of sarcasm, was kicked and incapacitated by a mule.36

  Stories of this sort surround the figure of Santee, and Lowell must have been attracted by the farce and the melodrama; Santee’s chief usefulness in 1939, though, was that he had medical connections at Johns Hopkins and held views about how Jean’s injuries should be treated. In the early summer, Blair Clark—who had been appointed to look after Jean in Boston—received instructions from Kenyon:

  I was told to bring Jean from Boston to Baltimore. Santee had recommended to Cal that she have another big operation at Johns Hopkins. Jean was of course being taken care of by all sorts of doctors in Boston—but she was simply told by Cal that she should have this operation. Sort of on the spot, without consultation with her regular doctors. I was in the middle. Santee was all for the operation—though I don’t think he knew the nasal passage from the other passages. But Jean said to me, “Don’t let them do this operation to me.” And I said, “They can’t if you don’t want them to.” … So there was a scene then, and she decided to leave Baltimore: a scene on the railroad platform, when I was taking Jean away. There was no fight about it. Cal had to give in. But Cal and Santee felt that they had lost a battle.37

  It is clear from this and other evidence that Lowell’s feelings of guilt about the accident ran fairly deep. Jean was not one to make light of her injuries—indeed, according to some who knew her she was a chronic exaggerator; nonetheless, she had suffered considerably and, Clark says, “There was about a 25 percent reduction in the aesthetic value of her face.”38 At times during the summer, Lowell considered leaving Kenyon to marry Jean (they had become “engaged” at Easter). Not only did he feel himself to have an obligation to her, but he also knew that his parents strongly disapproved of the association. Jean could not even boast the “society” advantages of an Anne Dick; and she came from Colorado: the source of grandfather Winslow’s wealth but—or maybe “therefore”—impossibly nonsmart.

  When the Lowells left for Europe, Merrill Moore was asked to serve as Lowell’s acting guardian and he seems to have played a skillful double role. In June 1939, for example, shortly after a visit to Boston by Ransom, he wrote to Lowell’s father:

  Please do not worry about him or his problems. I am only too happy to do this and act in loco parentis. Apparently Ransom’s visit did a lot to calm them all down and keep them busy. I wro
te Charlotte some notes about Ransom and what he told me, particularly about Cal’s plans. I think all will go smoothly. Ransom expects Cal to come right back to Kenyon and tells me that Jean will not be welcome there of course. He said it in a polite way.39

  In July, though, he writes to Lowell:

  I resent your father’s putting me in the role of holding the purse strings. I would not want this position and had he not surreptitiously done it on the eve of his departure to Europe I would have refused. As it so happens the information about it came to me in a letter the day after he left Boston. I did not have an opportunity to suggest other arrangements.40

  Moore goes on to describe Mr. Lowell as “relatively hopeless … problem child no. 1”; he feels that the “flight to Europe” is a mistake, a “running away from things,” and he fears too that Lowell’s father is heading for serious financial trouble: “It is possible that you and your mother can do something to prevent further dissipation of his property.”

  Lowell was responsive to Moore’s man-to-man approach and particularly liked the suggestion that it was the parents who needed guidance and mature goodwill:

  My family are still a triffle [sic] difficult, but I think with your aid and good will everything will go on amicably…. the past year has been the most enlightning [sic] I have ever spent, so I am confident that given anything like an even break, I shall in the future achieve things of considerable value. By an even break I mean chiefly to be able to act without the autocratic guidance of friends and parents.