by Ian Hamilton
The war has entered on an unforeseen phase: one that can by no possible extension of the meaning of the words be called defensive. By demanding unconditional surrender we reveal our complete confidence in the outcome, and declare that we are prepared to wage a war without quarter or principles, to the permanent destruction of Germany and Japan.
Americans cannot plead ignorance of the lasting consequences of a war carried through to unconditional surrender—our Southern States three quarters of a century after their terrible battering down and occupation, are still far from having recovered even their material prosperity.
It is a fundamental principle of our American Democracy, one that distinguishes it from the demagoguery and herd hypnosis of the totalitarian tyrannies, that with us each individual citizen is called upon to make voluntary and responsible decisions on issues which concern the national welfare. I therefore realize that I am under the heavy obligation of assenting to the prudence and justice of our present objectives before I have the right to accept service in our armed forces. No matter how expedient I might find it to entrust my moral responsibility to the State, I realize that it is not permissible under a form of government which derives its sanctions from the rational assent of the governed.
Our rulers have promised us unlimited bombings of Germany and Japan. Let us be honest: we intend the permanent destruction of Germany and Japan. If this program is carried out, it will demonstrate to the world our Machiavellian contempt for the laws of justice and charity between nations; it will destroy any possibility of a European or Asiatic national autonomy; it will leave China and Europe, the two natural power centers of the future, to the mercy of the USSR, a totalitarian tyranny committed to world revolution and total global domination through propaganda and violence.
In 1941 we undertook a patriotic war to preserve our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor against the lawless aggressions of a totalitarian league: in 1943 we are collaborating with the most unscrupulous and powerful of totalitarian dictators to destroy law, freedom, democracy, and above all, our continued national sovereignty.
With the greatest reluctance, with every wish that I may be proved in error, and after long deliberation on my responsibilities to myself, my country, and my ancestors who played responsible parts in its making, I have come to the conclusion that I cannot honorably participate in a war whose prosecution, as far as I can judge, constitutes a betrayal of my country.36
Although Lowell addressed the letter as from his parents’ holiday home at Manchester-on-Sea, Massachusetts, he wrote to his mother on the same day from New York:
After your touching letter about my picture and poems, I fear you will find this a rather shocking return. Please believe that I have taken the only course that was honorable for me.
I cannot ask you to support or even in any way concern yourself with my ideas. I do ask for your love, above all for Jean whose part in this is much the hardest. Don’t be too alarmed about any consequences to me, they will be within just limits.37
He also wrote to his grandmother:38
Dear Gaga:
I hardly know what to say in writing you and have hesitated to send you the enclosed statement. Finally I decided that writing you was my duty. You know more about American history than I do and can certainly judge whether our recent actions in this war are justifiable. I think only a Southerner can realize the horrors of a merciless conquest.
I love you immensely and want you to pray for us.
love,
Bobby
Lowell’s letter to Roosevelt was immediately handed over to the relevant U.S. Attorney, to whom Lowell repeated his refusal. By this time the case was headline news. The front-page story in the New York Times was tersely headed “To Act on Draft Evader,” but in more obscure journals there was considerable excitement: “Member of Famed Family Balks at Military Service” (Bowling Green Sentinel); “Lowell Scion Refuses to Fight” (Providence Journal); and in the Boston Post, September 10, the story ran:
SOCIALITE’S MOTHER TO UPHOLD SON
“This would be the seventh time he would take a test for war service induction,” said Mrs. Lowell. “When he phoned me at midnight last night from New York City, he said he had acted in the conventional way and had notified the district attorney of his refusal to appear before the Draft Board. I believe it was a question of poetic temperament which had caused him to protest against the bombing, and especially of Rome. I really feel that if he had appeared for induction he would have again been turned down for poor eyesight.”
It is worth noting that Lowell did not mention the bombing of Rome in his letter to Roosevelt—for his mother, though, this was the significant connection. Lowell himself some years later suggested that there was a further incentive: in a draft for the poem “Memories of West Street and Lepke” he writes of “my conscientious objector statement meant to blow the lid off/ the United States Roosevelt and my parents.”39
On October 12, he wrote again to his grandmother “Gaga”:
I don’t [know] what to say to you except that I love you and am sorry to have caused you so much worry. That troubles me more than anything else.
I have talked at great length to my priest in New York and written the priest who baptized me in Louisiana. They are both very shrewd and experienced men. They are also very good men. They have told me to follow my conscience and trust in God. I have prayed for light and tried to persuade myself that I was mistaken; I cannot.
I shall be sentenced this Wednesday. I shall have to go to jail, but there is good reason to hope that in a short time I shall [be] transferred to the medical corps or to an objectors’ camp.
Please forgive me for you[r] disappointment and anxiety, and pray for us.40
On October 13, after a month in which he was treated “with almost alarming courtesy. (No-one has questioned my sincerity),”41 Lowell was arraigned before the Southern U.S. District Court in New York and sentenced to a year and one day in the Federal Correctional Center at Danbury, Connecticut. While waiting to be shifted there, he spent a few days in New York’s tough West Street Jail. Lowell’s famous poem on the subject is augmented by the recollections of a fellow inmate:
Lowell was in a cell next to Lepke, you know, Murder Incorporated, and Lepke says to him: “I’m in for killing. What are you in for?” “Oh, I’m in for refusing to kill.” And Lepke burst out laughing. It was kind of ironic.42
Notes
1. Peter Taylor, interview with I.H. (1980).
2. Ibid.
3. R.L. to Robie Macauley, 1940.
4. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, April 22, 1940 (Houghton Library).
5. R.L. to Mrs. Arthur Winslow, n.d. (Houghton Library).
6. R.L. to Robie Macauley, 1940.
7. Typescript, n.d. (Houghton Library). Parts of this poem are incorporated in “Park Street Cemetery” (Land of Unlikeness) and “At the Indian Killer’s Grave” (Lord Weary’s Castle).
8. R.L. to Robie Macauley, n.d.
9. Peter Taylor, interview with I.H. (1980).
10. Jean Stafford, “An Influx of Poets,” New Yorker, November 6, 1978, p. 49.
11. Jean Stafford to Robie Macauley, n.d.
12. Jean Stafford, “An Influx of Poets,” p. 49.
13. Ibid.
14. Patrick Quinn, interview with I.H. (1981).
15. Peter Taylor, interview with I.H. (1980).
16. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, November 1942.
17. Robert Giroux, interview with I.H. (1980).
18. Frank Parker, interview with I.H. (1980).
19. Jean Stafford, unpublished interview with Joan (Cuyler) Stillman, Westport, Conn., October 16–17, 1952.
20. Jean Stafford, “An Influx of Poets,” p. 49.
21. R.L. to Robie Macauley, 1943.
22. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, October 1941.
23. R.L. diary (1974).
24. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, August 1943 (Houghton Library).
25. R.L., “Sublime Feri
am Sidera Vertice,” Hika, February 1940, p. 17.
26. “On the Eve of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception 1942,” Land of Unlikeness (Cummington, Mass.: Cummington Press, 1943), p. 12.
27. Transcript of talk, undated but c. 1960 (Houghton Library).
28. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, August 1943.
29. Ibid., November 1942.
30. Ibid., March 30, 1943.
31. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, August 1943 (Houghton Library).
32. Ibid.
33. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, July 20, 1943.
34. Ibid., August 3, 1943.
35. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, August 1943 (Houghton Library).
36. Typescript in Houghton Library.
37. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, September 7, 1943 (Houghton Library).
38. R.L. to Mrs. Arthur Winslow, n.d. (Houghton Library).
39. Ms in Houghton Library.
40. R.L. to Mrs. Arthur Winslow, October 12, 1943 (Houghton Library).
41. R.L. to Peter Taylor, October 13, 1943.
42. Jim Peck, interview with I.H. (1980).
7
After ten days at West Street Jail, Lowell was driven up to Connecticut, “handcuffed to two Porto Rican draft-dodgers”:
The Porto Ricans scratched their crotches
with handcuffed hands, snatched matches
and photos of children from their trouser-cuffs.
Near Tarrytown, we passed a sand-red sow,
grubbing acorns by a cinder pile,
and line of women’s trousers.
Then some miles of artificial lakes,
a canoe as scarlet as a maple leaf,
finally, Danbury and “the country club”
our model prison.
Glassbricks biased over fields of blue denim men
Smashing rocks with pneumatic drills.
The cement building was as functional
as my fishing tackle box.1
Danbury specialized in housing CO’s and first offenders—bootleggers and black marketeers—and it prided itself on being correctional as well as punitive. The cell blocks were reassuringly named after the New England states, and the rules on visiting hours and letter writing were far more relaxed than they had been at West Street, where Jean Stafford had been allowed to see her husband only once, and then through a plate-glass wall.
At first, Lowell was viewed with suspicion by the other Danbury inmates: he had been given a comparatively light sentence (the usual term was three years), and Jim Peck, a CO jailed at around the same time, was in no doubt that the judge had been lenient simply “because he was a Lowell”:
We got three years. He got a year and a day—it had to be a year and a day to be a felony. He got parole after four months. They didn’t usually grant parole to objectors—he got it because he was a Lowell. I did three years minus seven months’ remission.2
Peck and others tried to involve Lowell in a strike against the segregation of black and white prisoners, and Peck also berated him for A. Lawrence Lowell’s part in the conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti (Lowell had served on the review commission that decided they had had a fair trial and should be executed), but Lowell made it clear that he had larger matters to attend to: “He was ‘spaced out’—he was only interested in one thing, Catholic communities.” Even so, Peck—along with most of the others—gradually warmed to this abstracted, shabby “man of God”; he may not have been their kind of protesting pacifist, but he was manifestly not a fraud:
Lowell was on one of those pick-and-shovel gangs. Dig up a hole, fill it in again, you know. Usually, these privileged characters got the best jobs. I mean rich men who were in there for defrauding the government on war contracts. There were several of them. They were the only men who got out at the earliest parole eligible. Others, they’d maybe get out three months after. But these, they never failed. But Lowell was definitely not an organization person. He didn’t play it uppity at all. You see, I mean, like a lot of these guys who played big shot, they get pressed pants and connection pants and all that. He just dressed sloppy like all of us, ill-fitting clothes, shoes.3
Ten years later, Lowell reminisced about his fellow inmates:
I belonged to a gang that walked outside the prison gates each morning, and worked on building a barn. The work was mild: the workers were slow and absent-minded. There were long pauses, and we would sit around barrels filled with burning coke and roast wheat-seeds. All the prisoner[s] were sentenced for a cause, all liked nothing better than talking the world to rights. Among the many eccentrics one group took the prize. They were negroes who called themselves Israelites. Their ritual compelled them to shave their heads and let their beards grow. But the prison regulations forced them to shave their beards. So with unnaturally smooth and shining faces and naked heads wrapped in Turkish towels, they shivered around the coke barrels, and talked wisdom and non-sense. Their non-sense was that they were the chosen people. They had found a text in the Bible which [said,] “But I am black though my brother is white”. This convinced them that the people of the old testament were negroes. The Israelites believed that modern Jews were imposters. Their wisdom was a deep ancestral knowledge of herbs and nature. They were always curing themselves with queer herbal remedies that they gathered from the fields. Once as we sat by the coke the most venerable and mild of the Israelites stretched out his hand. Below him lay the town of Danbury, which consisted of what might be called filling-station architecture; the country was the fine, small rolling land of Connecticut. One expected to see the flash of a deer’s white scut as it jumped a boulder wall by a patch of unmelted snow. My friend stretched out his arm, and said, “Only man is miserable.”4
Lowell commented that “this summed up my morals and aesthetics.”
Jean Stafford was able to visit Danbury for an hour each Saturday. During the week she stayed in a small apartment in New York and spent much of her time warding off the recriminations that were now flowing freely down from Boston (“If we had only known how Bobby felt before he sent that declaration all this trouble could have been avoided”).5 Charlotte was convinced that Lowell had suffered another of his mental seizures and even talked of asking for him to be transferred to the psychopathic ward at Danbury. Jean, she felt, should have noticed the symptoms and alerted her earlier, but she reserved her bitterest ill-feeling for the Tates: she deplored their general influence on Lowell and blamed them for persuading him to give up his steady job at Sheed and Ward in order to encourage him “in the emotional excitement of poetry.” Tate later commented: “I will never forget the phrase.”6
Stafford was receiving $100 a month from Lowell’s trust fund and was having a hard time surviving in New York. Her rent was $50, she sent $10 to Lowell and spent another $10 on her own medical expenses. This left $30 for “food, cigarettes, electricity, etc.” In November she wrote to Mrs. Lowell about her difficulties and got an icily Bostonian reply:
I am glad to hear you say that you can, and are willing to support yourself while Bobby is in prison. I have just heard of a woman whose husband was recently sent to prison for 3 years, after first losing her entire fortune. Although this woman, having always had a great deal of money of her own, was completely untrained to work, she obtained a job in New York, suported [sic] herself, and her children, for 3 years, and when her husband was released from prison, she had managed to save quite a sum of money with which to help him to get started: Such conduct is certainly both admirable and heroic.
We think that Bobby has been extremely generous in wishing you to have all of the income from his trust fund while he is in prison. This is all the money that he has in the world, and he will be completely penniless when he is released from prison, if you care to impose upon his generosity.
I hope, Jean, for your own sake, as well as for Bobby’s that you will see in the present situation an opportunity for courage, selfdevelopment, and integrity of purpose.7
Sharing a taxi to the prison with “two flashy looking ar
ticles … so opulent in their fur coats and highheeled shoes,” Jean is perhaps to be forgiven for having felt “envious that their husbands had left them well provided for while they were off being castigated for their ideals.”8
In addition to her money worries, Stafford was also running into trouble on the New York cocktail circuit. In one letter she describes a typical literary gathering at which Sidney Hook mockingly put it to her that Lowell could not—logically—be both a Catholic and a conscientious objector. Were not Catholics supposed to follow the Pope’s lead? Taking up Hook’s cue, “three quarters of the men there said that Cal was a fool or hysterical,” and Stafford was soon reduced to tears. The next day she wrote to Peter Taylor:
I wish I could talk to you long and completely about literary people in New York. They are such cutthroats, such ambitious and bourgeois frights and yet I, in my stupid lack of integrity, continue to see them.9
With this same letter, she included quotations from the sermon she had just received from “Charlotte Hideous.”
Although Stafford felt constrained to defend her “intrepid husband” against the skeptics in New York, she had her own doubts about the rationality of his position. At first, she had found his stand thrilling and admirable, but as the weeks passed she was getting more and more alarmed by his Catholic fanaticism; conversations with him, she said, had become so “insanely illogical” that they could be written into a case history of religious mania. She consulted a Jesuit priest in New York who had known and corresponded with Lowell and was relieved to have it officially confirmed that Lowell had indeed become “more Catholic than the church.” But although this meant that she was not being a bad Catholic in her response to his religious fervor, it was of little help in reconciling her to what she saw as a drastic alteration in her husband’s entire personality. The Lowell she visited at Danbury was, she says, “nothing like” the Lowell she had known at Kenyon. In February 1944 she writes a desperate letter to Peter Taylor: