Robert Lowell: A Biography

by Ian Hamilton

  15. R.L., “Tribute to John Crowe Ransom.”

  16. R.L. to John Crowe Ransom, December 8, 1961 (Chalmers Memorial Library, Kenyon College).

  17. Kenyon Collegian, December 15, 1974.

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

  19. Ibid.

  20. R.L. to Richard Eberhart, November 12, 1937 (Dartmouth College Library).

  21. Richard Eberhart to R.L., 1937 (Dartmouth College Library).

  22. R.L. to Richard Eberhart, November 27, 1937 (Dartmouth College Library).

  23. Richard Eberhart to R.L., February 7, 1938 (Dartmouth College Library).

  24. R.L., review of The World’s Body, in Hika, October 1938.

  25. Ms (Dartmouth College Library).

  26. R.L. to Richard Eberhart, November 27, 1937 (Dartmouth College Library).

  27. John Thompson, interview with I.H. (1979).

  28. R.L. to Frank Parker, n.d.

  29. Peter Taylor, “1939,” p. 338.

  30. Ibid., pp. 343, 347, 348.

  31. The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), pp. 179–93.

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

  33. Seattle Times, December 29, 1938.

  34. Charlotte Lowell to Merrill Moore, May 27, 1939 (Library of Congress).

  35. Day by Day (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977), p. 122.

  36. R.L., “Tribute to John Crowe Ransom.”

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

  38. Ibid.

  39. Merrill Moore to R. T. S. Lowell, June 27, 1939 (Houghton Library).

  40. Merrill Moore to R.L., July 11, 1939 (Houghton Library).

  41. R.L. to Merrill Moore, n.d. (Houghton Library).

  42. Merrill Moore to R.L., July 11, 1939 (Houghton Library).

  43. Merrill Moore to Charlotte Lowell, July 26, 1939 (Library of Congress).

  44. Ibid.

  45. Charlotte Lowell to Merrill Moore, November 12, 1939 (Library of Congress).

  46. Merrill Moore to Charlotte Lowell, March 24, 1941 (Library of Congress).

  47. Ibid.

  48. Merrill Moore to Charlotte Lowell, May 4, 1951. Moore notes that this was “a little game Mrs. Lowell and I are playing with each other. She said that I reminded her of the King in ‘The King and I’ and she identified herself when she saw it with Anna, the governess, who was always in conflict with the King. It is a little game we keep going just for fun” (Merrill Moore Papers, Library of Congress).

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

  50. Orations in the state contest of the Ohio Inter-Collegiate Oratory Association, 1940.

  51. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, n.d. (Houghton Library).

  52. Ibid.

  53. R.L. to A. Lawrence Lowell (typed copy in Houghton Library dated “Wednesday”).

  54. A. Lawrence Lowell to R.L., February 21, 1940 (Houghton Library).

  55. Merrill Moore to R.L., February 28, 1940 (Blair Clark papers).

  56. R. T. S. Lowell to R.L. (Houghton Library).

  57. R. T. S. Lowell to Richard Eberhart, December 20, 1938 (Dartmouth College Library).

  58. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, July 9, 1939 (Houghton Library).

  59. Ibid., April 22, 1940 (Houghton Library).

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

  61. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, n.d. (Houghton Library).

  6

  When Lowell’s train pulled into Memphis in the summer of 1940, he peered out of the carriage window at the ugly, run-down Southern freightyard and proclaimed: “All this must change. All this must go.” His companions, Peter Taylor and Jean Stafford, put it down to overtiredness, though Taylor was privately “outraged”—fond as he was of Lowell, he didn’t feel that the South was in need of any messiahs from New England.1

  But with Taylor, the fondness usually prevailed and Lowell was always susceptible to his deflating banter: the standing joke between them was that—in Lowell’s mock opinion—the Southerner lacked “intellectual power.” Taylor was prepared to play the whimsical buffoon, provided the play remained a play; Lowell had sufficient sense of Taylor’s actual strength to keep his tyrannical impulses carefully in check. It was hard for the two friends to have a lasting quarrel—between them there was a mutual, unshakable respect, a balance of both style and temperament that Lowell found almost impossible to catch with other friends. He was never in any doubt, it seems, that Taylor really liked him.

  The plan was that Lowell and Stafford would stay with Taylor’s family in Memphis before moving on to Baton Rouge, and in spite of the unpromising beginning these were relaxed and pleasant weeks:

  My parents loved Cal and Jean, and my sister did. And we had parties. And Cal—he looked so awful, his long hair, his shoes—worse in those days than later—but he was still an attractive person and I remember a girl in Memphis saying: “That marriage won’t last long. He’s such an attractive man.”2

  And for the first few weeks at Baton Rouge, Lowell and Stafford found themselves “unexpectedly normal and happy.” Lowell was intrigued by the exotic appearance of the place—“a mushroom fake Mexican set-up, very relieving after the Gothic-heavy North”3—and he enjoyed watching Stafford fix up their new three-room apartment, even though at first the “fixing up” seems to have involved puzzling over where to put the “23 chairs and 22 imitation Navajo carpets” that had been “sent down” from Boston. Stafford took a secretarial job at the Southern Review (based at Baton Rouge and co-edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren), and Lowell began attending classes: “The climate here,” he wrote his mother, “is humid, the people are affable, the architecture parvenue, and the work is tough but useful.”4 And to his grandmother (Mrs. Arthur Winslow):

  Of course we have been daily enjoying your furniture and my slowness in answering is not a sign of ingratitude. Other articles from other people have also come until our apartment has grown to opulence; nothing more is needed.

  I wonder where you have been this summer. I think mother mentioned Mattapoisett. Baton Rouge is the utter opposite, inland, windless, waterless, suburban. In place of Mrs. Curtiss, the Casino, the wharf, the ocean etc. are immense twentieth-century-Mexican dormitories, iron pipes blazing with crude oil, palm-beachy trees and Huey Long’s two million dollar sky-scraper capitol. This world is new to me; so is a coëducational summerschool and a negro woman, named Loyola who arrives at six-thirty every other day to give us a grand house-cleaning. We have entertained with an elaborate dinner and now have a guest.

  The war and our coming draft are “leveling.” Nobody, conventional or unconventional, has good, unclouded prospects. I am neither a member of our military reserve, nor driving an ambulance in England; I am not looking for a vocation or marking time. If war comes and they want me, I’ll gladly go; if not, I’ll continue in this peaceful and sedentary occupation of university work. I suppose writing is something of a career, something that steadily grows more secure and substantial.5

  To his old Kenyon classmate Robie Macauley, he wrote in a more sardonic vein:

  About L.S.U. I have taken as my motto, “In Rome consort with the Romans and never do as they do”. Here reign the critical approach, “the aesthetic approach”, “metaphysical poetry”, “drama in the lyric” etc. The students are weak and worthy: Brooks and Warren/Brooksandwarren are excellent. Especially Warren; result: I am reading English theology.

  This, as perhaps Randall Jarrell would say, is not as crazy as it sounds, but it’s pretty crazy and must not be amplified. My poetic terminology using: heresy, diabolic, frivolous gnosticism etc, should worry the solemn and liberal English majors.6

  As to poems, Lowell seems at this point to have run into a trough. He had been writing a long, blank-verse “hell and damnation poem against England”; he was to continue to rework and revise this piece for several years but never seemed really to take it very seriously. It was almost certainly clear to him that his Kenyon poems were stiff
and manufactured: Ransom, for example, after printing two poems in the Kenyon Review’s first issue, had turned down all subsequent submissions as “forbidding,” “clotting,” “too ambiguous.” It was to be five years before Lowell appeared again in Ransom’s pages. A poem called “The Protestant Dead in Boston”7 reveals something of Lowell’s predicament in 1941. Knowing what we do about his later development, we can see that Lowell already has his subject, the subject that was to become thought of as peculiarly his, but is a long way from having any confident, let alone individual poetic, voice:

  THE PROTESTANT DEAD IN BOSTON

  Alas, the rosaries, how they have broken down

  Crutches for the jaded gravestones, the trunks

  of columns, to the visitors are soapstone or sandstone

  and the cluttering plaques of obelisks are placards,

  platters for the antique surnames: Adams

  or Otis or Hancock or Prescott or Revere

  or Franklin. Flittering leaves and bunches of lilac

  liven a presbyter’s horticulture with baroque

  and prodigal embellishment, but the settled ground

  admits no outlets, the play and pedantries,

  the paradises and baits of the simonist, gothic

  eschatologies that fascinate with the Walpurgis

  Nacht, the additions of an animal; hallowed,

  impassive, appalling, its expression is painted

  with facts, the filagreed swaths

  and bathos of samplers of forget-me-nots.

  And forged with animation, integer

  and the individual is a link in an unending chain,

  the animal whose dissolution is private, publishing

  no revelation of its unnatural properties.

  Où sont les rangs de l’hierophante Aquin,

  et leurs corps, les incarnations d’Alighieri?

  And, Necropolis of Boston’s skeletons and flowers,

  your creed is neither magnificent nor natural,

  its morals extort labored and identical

  lucubrations, the fanatical caution

  of the Calvinist … The masochistic rote

  of Sisyphus relapses at the peak of achievement.

  Boston cemetery is the world—here in the heyday,

  the spirit hawked elections, and the decemvirate

  of Morals, Ten Commandments, fostered

  the perfection of a faction, regimented a mortal

  yard of provincial, enterprising, prolific

  Protestants. These dissenters, now the servants

  of the earth were fatally chosen and beatified:

  secured from temporal torrents, the ocean’s

  masterless surges, the contagion of human

  contact, their lives were as single as their skeletons.

  Ah, diet and raw material for a creation’s consumption,

  this was an unbaptized inattention to Epicurus,

  who, basket in hand, rambled through worlds

  and worlds, the basket his garner of perishable

  flowers.

  R.T.S. Lowell

  The movement is leaden and disgruntled; the onslaught, willed, gratuitous. Boston-style Calvinism may have become the enemy, but Lowell’s old New England sensibility continued to crave Order—rules and tests; ideally, he required for himself the sort of regime that he imposed on others, a regime whose disciplines could be seen as different from those of Boston in their antiquity, their opulence, their intellectual distinction: rules for a better life, not rules made to protect the mediocre, rules that would engender art, not view it with suspicion. He would have seen that in a poem like “The Protestant Dead in Boston” he was attacking Boston in a Boston voice: bleak, crabbed and vengeful. And the heavy prose rhythms were the rhythms of a sour utilitarianism, whatever the avowed meaning.

  After a couple of months at Baton Rouge, Lowell began to extend his reading of “English theology” to include the work of the French theologian Etienne Gilson: in particular, his Spirit of Medieval Philosophical Experience—shortly afterwards described by Lowell as the key book during this period—and his Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. From there he moved into Newman, Maritain, and E. I. Watkin: “the best English philosopher, a bit off the Thomist line.”8 He was also reading Hopkins and Pascal, and had formed a friendship with a Catholic student of philosophy called Patrick Quinn. As Peter Taylor commented, “In Louisiana, very French, Catholicism was in the air.”9

  Jean Stafford had been converted to Roman Catholicism a few years earlier but had soon lapsed—“my mission had not been accomplished, despite my fervor and my need”10—and she watched with a mild horror as Lowell buried himself in ever more weighty and more hallowed texts: “Except for meals and two games of chess after dinner he does nothing but read. I think he’ll die soon and die blind.”11 In a short story called “An Influx of Poets” (published in 1978) Stafford has a nakedly autobiographical narrator describe the first months of her marriage to the poet Theron:

  Half a year after we were married, Theron, immersed in the rhythms of Gerard Manley Hopkins the poet, was explosively ignited by Gerard Manley Hopkins the Jesuit and, as my mother would have said, he was off on a tear. We were in Louisiana then—in steaming, verminous fetor; almost as soon as the set of Cardinal Newman’s works arrived from Dauber & Pine, the spines relaxed, for the Deep South cockroaches, the size of larks, relished the seasoned glue of the bindings and banqueted by night. Like Father Strittmater [in the story, the heroine’s original Catholic instructor], Theron’s instructor was Pennsylvania Dutch—a coincidence that only mildly interested me but one by which my husband set great store: Our Lord (he adopted the address with ease) had planned likenesses in our experience.12

  Lowell’s instructor at Louisiana State University was in fact called Father Shexnayder, and he may or may not have chosen Baton Rouge as his parish “because it afforded him so excellent a chance to chasten his chaste flesh,” but what does seem to have been accurate is that “his austerity was right up Theron’s alley, and before I knew what had happened to me I had been dragged into that alley which was blind.”13

  *

  Patrick Quinn remembers that it was in the spring of 1941 that he received a call from Shexnayder asking him to act as sponsor for Lowell’s baptism into the Roman Catholic Church:

  So I went along and there was a group of about four students, including Cal. It was the full ceremony and vows were taken. I’d never heard them before. It was a very forbidding, oppressive signing in. I’d never bothered to look up that bit of the ritual, and listening to it for the first time I felt overwhelmed at the magnitude of the promises made. I thought that was enough, but it then turned out that the neophyte had the opportunity to go to confession, which seemed to me almost untheological because, you see, baptism is a complete clearance of all your sins from birth on up. But Cal went to confession and he was in there half an hour, with Father Shexnayder. Meanwhile Jean and Peter Taylor and I were cooling our heels—it was all most embarrassing.14

  A week later, at his own insistence, Lowell remarried Jean Stafford in a Catholic church; the previous year’s marriage had been, he said, invalid. And from this point on, according to Stafford, their life together went into a decline. Her own view of Catholicism was “lighthearted … though she had serious moments about it,” but for Lowell it had become a round-the-clock obsession: “Once Cal went for Romanism, he was all Roman.”15

  Jean started drinking heavily and also began falling victim to a series of minor illnesses—six-week flu, kidney infections, lung conditions, strange fevers that came and went for no diagnosable reason. Lowell imposed a stern domestic regimen: mass in the morning, benediction in the evening, two rosaries a day. Reading matter was vetted for its “seriousness”—“no newspapers, no novels except Dostoevsky, Proust, James and Tolstoy.”16 Food was similarly scrutinized: “Jean said that she once tried to serve him soup on a Friday, and he tasted meat stock, or thought he tasted meat stock, so he took the so
up and dumped it in the sink.”17 There were frequent quarrels about Stafford’s smoking and drinking, or about her minor lapses from full piety, and Lowell’s rages were no less intimidating than they had been at St. Mark’s or Kenyon. On one occasion, in a hotel in New Orleans, Lowell hit her in the face and broke her nose for the second time. The incident was witnessed by Frank Parker and Blair Clark—they were on a trip to Mexico and had met up with Lowell and Stafford for a “night out” in New Orleans. I quote from my interview with Parker:

  Jean and Cal had been having some sort of argument and Jean came down to our room, wanting to stay with us, and she did for a long time. We were sort of talking on the beds and so on. And then finally she went back to her room. And the next thing, we were taking her to the hospital in Baton Rouge. The nose which had been carefully repaired was broken again. She had to start all over again repairing the nose, after the awful time she’d had getting it repaired in the first place. I really don’t understand how Cal could have done that.

  Did he do it? It wasn’t just Jean saying he did?

  No. No.

  He admitted it?

  Oh yes. He said he hadn’t meant to. But he tried to strangle her. Jean was never afraid of him. I don’t know why, because he was one of those people who didn’t know his own strength. No, Cal said he really did hit her and he felt the nose go and everything, so there’s no question of that. Mind you, we none of us ever thought Cal was crazy or anything. He was just a violent man doing his own thing.18

  People who knew Jean Stafford advise caution when dealing with her versions of events: she tended, they say, to get the spirit of the thing right but to inflate or wittily distort the facts. In this case, though, there are two “witnesses”; and it was Blair Clark who had the job of getting Jean into a hospital in New Orleans. There is (as there would have to be) no such direct evidence to substantiate Stafford’s most dramatic claim about the marriage: that she had no sexual relations with Lowell from the day they were remarried in the Catholic Church. She told this to Blair Clark and to Joan Stillman, who made notes of an interview she did with Stafford in 1952: “She told me they had had a glorious affair before they were married, but after he became a Catholic, they never slept together.”19 And in “An Influx of Poets” Stafford writes: