Robert Lowell: A Biography

by Ian Hamilton

  My carreer [sic], I hope, will be exceptional rather than queer. That is I have become more and more aware of the need for an at least surface conformity, dressing inconspicuously and neatly, living by a stable economy, flaunting [sic] convention by penetration rather than by eccentricity. Poetry depends on beauty, passion and comprehension, but even here the above remarks on conduct have a preliminary appropriateness.41

  As a postscript, Lowell asks Moore for the address of Milton Starr, the friend who had handled his finances in 1937; he wants to thank Starr for a summer invitation; but as if further to persuade Moore of his unremitting seriousness, he adds, “Also I feel that in this era of accumulating inhumanity every artist and thinker should do all he can to preserve and maintain the rights of the Jews.” Moore was suitably respectful: “I appreciate your attitude toward economy and dealing with conventions. After all, it does have to be dealt with,” and “I have the same feeling about the Jews as you have.”42

  Moore’s main interest, though, seems to have been to impress Charlotte Lowell with his astute handling of a tricky situation: thus to Charlotte he represents Lowell as volatile and in need of sensitive manipulation. Towards the end of July he writes to her that Lowell has returned to Boston and is lodging as his guest at the Harvard Club; the letter reads like a medical report:

  Yesterday, Wednesday, July 19, Cal spent the day rather quietly. He dropped into the office once or twice. I had lunch with him and continued to make suggestions about interesting and constructive things to do. When he is in a friendly attitude he accepts suggestions readily and easily. I told him about some interesting poetry magazines in the library and he went down in the afternoon to see them.43

  Moore also describes a lunch he has had with Lowell and Blair Clark, at which his two guests spent most of the time vigorously attacking the medical profession (possibly in relation to Jean’s treatment). Moore realized, or thought he realized, that “they were being unconsciously aggressive towards me.” But, he boasts, the wise physician refuses to be drawn into the trap:

  In other words I accepted their aggressions and turned it [sic] back to them, with sweetness and like [sic] and with insight on my part. I think my insight saved the situation…. At times I see how much Cal has developed and at others I see how far he has to go…. Of course I realize that Cal is coming up for trial and that latent guilt reactions are working. That is why I am treating him with so much consideration.44

  Both Frank Parker and Blair Clark recall that there was some speculation at the time about Moore’s relationship with Charlotte Lowell, and there is evidence that over the years some intimacy did develop. In 1939, though, the letters between them focus either on “Cal’s problems” or on Charlotte’s growingly confident sense of her own psychiatric skills. Her job with Moore involved two afternoons a week “taking case records, doing therapy and prehaps [sic] the Rorahach [sic] teat [sic],” but she was always ready to lecture her employer on basic principles:

  1. To make the patient feel that he can be helped, but to throw the responsibility for the case as much as possible upon the patient himself. Trying to show him the great benefits he will derive from earnest and faithful work towards this end.

  2. To find the most constructive way of escape, for each particular patient and to induce him to use this way in preference to his former destructive methods.45

  Charlotte’s son might have read this with a familiar thrill of horror, but Moore was ponderously titillated. He later praised Charlotte for being marvelously unspoiled by any medical-school training:

  I think you have a strength in your own character, a healthy balance in your own personality and a vigorous ego and a charming exterior personality that cannot be anything else but psycho-therapeutic.46

  By 1941 the exchange of letters had become more coy and whimsical—she sends him rose petals, and he sends her seashells, “for you to give away to patients whom you think might be interested in conchology as a hobby or as vocational therapy.”47 By 1951 (after a visit to The King and I), Charlotte had become Moore’s strong-willed “Anna”; and Moore himself was bizarrely self-promoted to “Yul Brynner alias the King.”48

  *

  Lowell resumed at Kenyon in the fall of 1939, and one of his first tasks there was to master the art of public speaking. Kenyon made two requirements of its graduates: whatever their academic prowess, they would not be permitted a degree unless they passed tests in swimming and oratory. Swimming presented no difficulty for Lowell, but—along with the other Douglass House verbalizers—he had a dread of making speeches. Peter Taylor has amusingly described what happened:

  We were all shy of public speaking. So we signed up together for Mr. Black’s public-speaking course. And we were all terrible. But Cal was the worst. You had to make speeches and so we talked about everything under the sun. I remember talking about popular dances like the Bunny Hug and the Bear Trot and that sort of thing. But Cal would get up, and behind there was a blackboard, and all the time he was speaking he’d be rubbing his bottom against the blackboard. He couldn’t keep still. So he was the worst. And of course it was a delight to all of us to see each other do it.49

  According to Taylor, Lowell was so stung by these humbling sessions that he set about turning himself into a speaker—and not just a competent speaker, but the best: “that old New England grit and drive.” Sure enough, Lowell came out first in the class, won a twenty-five-dollar prize, and with it the right to give the valedictory address on graduation. The address itself was taken to be Lowell’s revenge on those who had made him so exert himself: it was a densely worded attack on St. Mark’s and similar schools for rich young athletes. Many of the Kenyon trustees were convinced that it was really aimed at them:

  … customs are not a culture, Boston is no longer Athens. I am emphasizing a glaring problem, our aristocracy … has special advantages but no superior way of life. Its manners are the automatic accident of wealth.

  Think of the motto of St. Mark’s: Age Quod Agis. Unlike most mottoes, Do What You Do, is insanely accurate. Do in our American idiom means to do one’s job and more to plug and sweat at one’s job. Do What You Do, this is a fine utilitarian prescription for man and master. A scholar before a scholarly audience, I hesitate to invoke as my symbol our great, ox-eyed Statue of Liberty, Liberty brandishing her cyclopean incandescent torch; but as runners in a great race, it is our pleasant and devout ambition—not merely to Do What We Do, not run with a painted stick—but to hand on a torch. And so it is with aristocracies, they must have aspirations. For all of you know that as the Philistines and Goths proceed in their spiritless way to dismember civilization, they will come to all the golden palaces of learning, they will come at last to Milton, Groton, St. Paul’s and St. Mark’s [all fashionable East Coast boarding schools] and there, the students who are neither efficient nor humane nor cultured will be doing what they are doing. And the indignant Goths and Philistines will turn these poor drones out of the hive and there will be no old limbs, for the new blood, and the world will revert to its unwearied cycles of retrogression, advance and repetition.50

  In Boston, the Lowells were less concerned with “golden palaces of learning” than they were with the problem of What to Do About Jean Stafford. There were rumors (which reached Lowell at Kenyon) that Jean was being “got at” by his parents, or by intermediaries: that attempts were being made to persuade her to give Lowell up on the grounds that he would “go insane” if he married. Lowell was incensed:

  Kenyon has an unfortunate location. Everything said in Boston blows in my ears. I might as well be sitting in Dr. Moore’s office or dining at the Chilton Club…. I beseech you to observe the negative virtues of keeping quiet.51

  Letters of this sort (written to his mother) particularly irked Mr. Lowell, whose temper was shortening as his business affairs continued to decline. For a brief period at the beginning of 1940, Lowell toyed with the idea of seeking a Harvard fellowship; during his Kenyon examinations he wrote to his mother as
king her to “confer right away with Cousin Lawrence,”52 and in February he followed this up with a penciled note to Lawrence Lowell setting out a plan of studies:53

  Dear Cousin Lawrence:

  I appear to be embarked on the turbid waters of poetry and scholarship. And a career of poetry and knowledge is as hard to guide as Plato’s horses. On the one hand I must range about discovering the fundamentals of knowledge, dipping into science, politics and other arcana, forever seeking an education that is both profound and practical; on the other, I must keep spiritually alive and brilliantly alive, for poetry is, as the moral Milton conceded in practice and precept, a sensuous, passionate, brutal thing. I put in the last adjective because I am modern and angry and puritanical.

  So much for my rhetoric, but something such as the above must be stated. My qualifications are a wide reading in English and an ability to read poetry extremely closely; a knowledge of the classics which should enable me, in say three or four years, to read fluently not only Greek and Latin but all the Romance Languages. I have need of a thorough acquaintance with history, particularly with American history (I use the term history widely and vaguely but mean cultural history: and again I use cultural widely and mean the varieties of life man has been through). I have need of a knowledge of sciences and mathematics, and here I am totaly [sic] ignorant.

  The relevance of such schedule to poetry is obvious. I cannot think it pedantry that a man desiring to speak (or sing) something important should also desire to speak with certainty. Also if he lack scope, such as an acquaintance with science and an acquaintance with other languages, he will be romantic and an anachronism.

  This letter is written principally for general advice. I also wanted to ask you about “Harvard Fellowships.” I remember, when I was a freshman or a sophomore at Harvard, that you mentioned such. I think their advantages are that they pay well, demand no thesis, suggest a variety of fields along with men with various proficiencies. Then, as you said last vacation Caesar was probably wrong about being “second in Rome”; success in a big place counts for more than in a small. There is some question as to whether I am qualified for a Harvard Fellowship.

  This letter might pleasantly be re-written in English and with something less disgusting than a soft lead pencil; that would be much better but I am not sure of the gain.

  I was distressed that you were unwell when I left, and I would say much more that I really feel; but there is something gross and mercenary about concluding a letter of rant with amenities.

  Affectionately,

  Robert

  Lawrence Lowell was jauntily off-putting—“for you, not yet! not yet!”—but he made it clear that in some large part he was acting here on Merrill Moore’s advice: “Dr. Moore thinks you had better not come back to Harvard at present, and I suspect that in this he is wise.”54 A letter to Lowell from Moore later in the same month suggests that Moore’s objections had been fairly vehement:

  Dear Cal,

  I hesitate to write to you since it is not easy by letter to go into detail but I believe you can understand if I simply say to you that I am having a great deal of difficulty with your father at present on several scores most of which do not involve you at all but do importantly concern his personal problems and result in considerable friction and unhappiness at home. Accordingly and on account of that I should like to ask you (if you would like to be extremely helpful) NOT to come home unless absolutely necessary and, if it is and you do, would you not live at home or see him, if it can be tactfully done, and stay as my guest, if your stay is a short one, at the Harvard Club, and if it is a longer stay, take a room on Newbury Street. I would like to help you to do this, if you wish to. He is so deeply and so unconstructively antagonistic to your plans that contact can only lead to conflict and destructive outbursts that boomerang on the atmosphere of 170 Marlborough Street, on your mother, her work and on me, and wastes your creative energy in struggle and adjustment that is useless. The less you see of him (and he of you) the better, indefinitely. You may be sure that I want to help you in any possible way achieve the success you desire, hence this note.55

  Quite what Lowell’s objectionable “plans” were at this point it is hard to say. His father was an essentially amenable figure; for example, although he had opposed Lowell’s abandonment of a Harvard education, he had—in the spring of 1937—taken pains to assure his son that “No two people think alike and you and I are very different, though each striving for a worthy end. We must each try to accept the other as he is. I want to help you in every way that I can.”56 He was gratified by Lowell’s progress at Kenyon, and even took pride in his small successes as a poet. In December 1938—five days before the car crash—Mr. Lowell sent a copy of the first issue of the Kenyon Review to Richard Eberhart: “As you were the one to start Robert writing poetry, I thought that you might like to have a copy of the Kenyon Review, which is the first to print two of his poems.” In the same letter—and rather touchingly, since both his son and his wife were in the habit of mocking his passionate interest in radios—he writes:

  You might also be interested to know that Dr. Moore and Robert will each read some of their poems at 7:30 p.m. on Dec. 30 over the local short wave radio station WIXAL on 6.05 megacycles.57

  It is likely, therefore, that the “plans” were marriage plans. Lowell’s first serious breach with his father had been over the Anne Dick affair; the second had centered on the Stafford car crash and its aftermath. In both cases, Mr. Lowell had been obliged to adopt the kind of censorious posture that it was not in his nature to carry off with any subtlety or style. Lowell’s response to this heavy-handedness had in the past been crushing and contemptuous, even violent: and it was here that his father’s tolerance was always likely to give way. A typical example of the at-one-remove dialogue between them can be seen in a letter Lowell wrote to Charlotte in July 1939—just before his parents left for Europe:

  About Boston, I gather many people think you have behaved shabbily about Jean’s accident. Such opinion is not my concern yet I cannot feel the action of my family has in all cases been ethicilly [sic] ideal. I say this not in anger but as a suggestion for a better understanding which seemed to be making such strides this winter.58

  To this, Charlotte took the trouble to append a simple note: “This made Bob see red.” In the same letter, it should be said, Lowell complains about the financial arrangements that have been made for him during their absence in Europe: “both Merrill and I,” he writes, “are distressed with the secrecy with which it was done.”

  Poor Mr. Lowell must have been baffled by the reference to “secrecy”; had not Moore assured him that he was “only too happy” to concur in the arrangements? He might have been even more baffled, perhaps, if he had overheard Moore’s conversation with A. Lawrence Lowell on the subject of the Harvard fellowship. So far as Mr. Lowell was concerned, the obstacle to the fellowship was simple: if Lowell married Jean Stafford, he would not be able to support her; why—as with Anne Dick—could he not wait until his studies were concluded? So far as is known, no stiff notes were sent to Colorado, nor did Lowell and his father come to blows, but there were clear echoes of the Anne Dick confrontation. And it should not, of course, be thought that Charlotte was indifferent to the outcome.

  In April 1940 Lowell married Jean Stafford at a church in New York with the entirely happy name of St. Mark’s—although this St. Mark’s was in the Bowery; he graduated from Kenyon “summa cum laude, phi beta kappa, highest honors in classics, first man in my class, and valedictorian”;59 and he accepted a junior fellowship at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge. He was going South again; this time to study under Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, and with a letter of recommendation from Ransom that sent many a pang of envy through his Kenyon classmates: “Lowell is more than a student, he’s more like a son to me.”60

  As to his real parents—their view of all this can, as usual, be measured by the grandeur of their son’s defiance:

&nbs
p; You may enjoy talking about my sacrificed fellowship and forced marriage. The first is uncertain and the second untrue. Naturally I find such gossip very undignified and annoying….

  I am not flattered by the remark that you do not know where I am heading or that my ways are not your ways. I am heading exactly where I have been heading for six years. One can hardly be ostracized for taking the intellect and aristocracy and family tradition seriously.61

  For the first time, Lowell doesn’t sign the letter “Bobby.” He is now “affectionately, Cal.”

  Notes

  1. John Crowe Ransom to Allen Tate, October 10, 1937. Thomas Daniel Young, Gentleman in a Dustcoat: A Biography of John Crowe Ransom (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), p. 292.

  2. R.L., “Tribute to John Crowe Ransom,” New Review 1, no. 5 (August 1974), pp. 3–5.

  3. John Thompson, New York Review of Books 24, no. 17 (October 17, 1977).

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

  5. Ibid.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Ibid.

  10. John Thompson, interview with I.H. (1980).

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

  12. Ibid. Later Lowell was to wonder “who can doubt that bears are the wisest, most amiable, most benevolent, most virtuous and shaggiest of creatures?”—R.L. to Gertrude Buckman, March 1948.

  13. Peter Taylor, “1939,” The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), p. 335.

  14. Ibid., pp. 336, 337.