Robert Lowell: A Biography

by Ian Hamilton

  It is not right for me to burden you with this, just before you go overseas, but you are probably Cal’s closest friend. I see I have given you no facts. Roughly this is it: after the war what Cal wants to do (he cries: “this is to be my life and I will not be hindered”) is to be a sort of soapbox preacher with an organization called the Catholic Evidence Guilds which operate in city parks, etc, preach and answer the posers of hecklers. I cannot write this down without seeing you smile…. And when I inquire of him how we will live, he points to the Gospels and says that we must not worry about that, that God will take care of us, that one cannot be a wage slave but must have leisure in which to serve the Church….

  I am frightened, feel that it will be three years before Cal has recovered from the pleasurable monasticism of the penitentiary….10

  In March 1944, Lowell emerged from the “closed order” of Danbury to face the more flexible requirements of parole. He was sent to Bridgeport, Connecticut, and given a job as a cleaner in the nurses’ quarters of Bridgeport’s St. Vincent’s hospital. He was paid fifteen dollars a week and had to start work at 7 A.M. each day. Jean reported to Taylor that “he feels like Nancy Tate’s valet [and] speaks distastefully of the ‘pink things’ hung out to dry in his work vicinity.”11 But the job was not entirely frivolous: as might be expected, Lowell managed to detect in it “a harsh somehow moral monotony.”12

  In Bridgeport, Lowell lived at first in a single room, sharing a bathroom with five others, and suffered the supervision of a fierce landlady who was convinced that he was a “draft-dodger.” Jean had given up her apartment in New York, and while Lowell swabbed the nurses’ floors she toured the Connecticut countryside in search of decent lodgings. Eventually she settled on Harbor View, Ocean Avenue, Black Rock, Connecticut—an address that thoroughly delighted Lowell when he heard of it:

  We have a large room with a bay window and a fireplace, a smaller room and a bath. The harbor we view brings tears to Cal’s eyes. He’d expected the ocean from the address and when he saw the pitiful little drop of water visible from our windows, he behaved as if he’d been deliberately cheated. We can however on a clear day see the Sound far far off and we have the illusion at least of being in the country.13

  The house itself, which provides the location for two of Lowell’s most celebrated poems (“Colloquy in Black Rock” and “Christmas in Black Rock”), is also brought to literary life in a story by Jean Stafford called “The Home Front.” The doctor in the story is quite clearly Lowell:

  It was large, shapeless and built of yellow stone. It stood behind a high brick wall, its back windows overlooking an arm of the sea which, at low tide, was a black and stinking mud-flat. A dump had been made at the end of the water and here was heaped all the frightful refuse of the city, the high-heeled shoes and the rotten carrots and the abused insides of automobiles; when the wind blew, the odor from the dump was so putrid in so individual a way that it was quite impossible to describe. But on a clear day, the doctor could look the other way and see, far off, the live blue Sound and the silhouettes of white sailboats and gray battleships.14

  Fortuitously, though, the house was owned by a Roman Catholic priest, and from the front steps it was possible to see the spires of both St. Stephen’s and St. Peter’s. Jean Stafford was also gratified to learn that the priest had bought it from a rum-runner who had used its location to good effect during Prohibition.

  Although Lowell’s release from his jail sentence was to become final in October 1944, there was still the possibility that he could again be inducted and, if he refused to serve, given a further spell in prison: quite likely, a far longer spell this time. In June, therefore, Lowell applied to join the army medical corps or some similar noncombatant branch of the forces: eventually he was classified 4F, “which means that save in the case of a great emergency, like the bombing of New York, he won’t have to go into anything, neither prison nor the medical corps.”15

  During his term at Danbury, Lowell wrote no poems. He read Proust, and corrected the galleys of Land of Unlikeness. The book had been delayed several times, not least because of Lowell’s inability (and this lasted all his life) to read a page of his own work without rewriting it. It had still not appeared by July, when Lowell, after almost a year’s silence, began to write again; indeed, Jean Stafford writes to Peter Taylor on July 26 that “Cal … is working with the same intensity he did in that great period of fertility in Monteagle” and to Eleanor Taylor on the thirty-first: “Cal started writing poetry again and his intensity and industry make me feel completely worthless. I’ve done nothing at all this summer.” By the time Land of Unlikeness appeared in the fall of 1944 Lowell had already completed seven poems in what he called “a new style, more lyrical and lucid” and rewritten several of the poems in his first volume.16

  Land of Unlikeness was a considerable critical success. For a first volume put out as a limited edition by a small press, it had prominent reviews; and most of them could be taken as “encouraging.” Accent placed it in a batch with Auden’s For the Time Being and with books by William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore; their reviewer, Arthur Mizener, was cagey about the book’s sometimes “ludicrous” complexities and warned that “hysteria may be mistaken for directness, the accidental personal experience for the generally valid,” but concluded that “When Mr. Lowell succeeds, what you hear is something like the voice of the prophetic poet, a voice which we have rarely heard since the seventeenth century; grand without grandiloquence and intimate without triviality or meanness.”17 In Poetry, John Frederick Nims coupled Lowell with Thomas Merton under the heading “Two Catholic Poets” and confessed that “After the glassy aureoles of Merton, it is good to discover the gnarled and oaken wainscot of Lowell’s chapel.” Nims goes on (a little unconvincingly) to praise the “brilliance” of Lowell’s technique, claiming to have discerned in it “an intricate counterpoint of form and diction, form and matter, feeling and idea,” and to express interest in “the strange marriage of Catholic belief and New England Puritanism.” But his conclusion is lukewarm and almost daringly wide of the mark: “What Lowell lacks is sufficient emotional drive to make his disparate images organic.”18

  Luckily, no other reviewer contrived to reproach Lowell for his lack of powerful feeling, but there was an element of wariness in even the most glowing notices. Usually, there would be an assent to the book’s power, its daunting physical attack, but a bewilderment about the poet’s motives, the true sources of his intimidating anger. Even Randall Jarrell, in Partisan Review, seems mildly shell-shocked. His piece strains for superlatives:

  in a day when poets aspire to be irresistible forces, he is an immovable object…. Mr. Lowell is a serious, objective and extraordinarily accomplished poet…. some of the best poems of the next years ought to be written by him.19

  But many of Jarrell’s assertions seem to describe poems that he wishes Lowell to write rather than the ones that are actually before him: “his harshest propositions flower out of facts.” This seems singularly wrong as a description of Land of Unlikeness; indeed, one might rephrase it: “if only his harshest propositions flowered out of facts.”

  Jarrell, though, is too good a critic not to see that Lowell’s political satires have “a severe crudity,” that his literary punning, his ubiquitous allusiveness, is often no more than “a senseless habit,” that there is something “Bismarckian” in his surveillance of the moral world, and a tendency throughout to slip into an “Onward Christian Soldiers” style of battle rhetoric. Even so, such censure is well hidden, and Lowell had achieved what many would have thought impossible—he had disconcerted the notoriously definite Jarrell.

  The other key review was by R. P. Blackmur and appeared in the Kenyon Review (Ransom later wrote to Lowell to apologize for Blackmur’s “patronizing and superior remarks”20). Unlike any of the other reviewers, Blackmur meets the book’s essential character head on, and his strictures may well have been the ones that Lowell brooded on most fruitfully:


  Lowell is distraught about religion; he does not seem to have decided whether his Roman Catholic belief is the form of a force or the sentiment of a form. The result appears to be that in dealing with men his faith compels him to be fractiously vindictive, and in dealing with faith his experience of men compels him to be nearly blasphemous. By contrast, Dante loved his living Florence and the Florence to come and loved much that he was compelled to envisage in hell, and he wrote throughout in loving meters. In Lowell’s Land of Unlikeness there is nothing loved unless it be its repellence: and there is not a loving meter in the book. What is thought of as Boston in him rights with what is thought of as Catholic; and the fight produces not a tension but a gritting. It is not the violence, the rage, the denial of this world that grits, but the failure of these to find in verse a tension of necessity; necessity has, when recognized, the quality of conflict accepted, not hated.21

  Since leaving Kenyon, Lowell had written two substantial pieces of literary criticism: on Hopkins and on Eliot’s Four Quartets.22 They are both admiring, but where they do offer reservations it is interesting that in each case those reservations could as easily be turned against the poems Lowell himself was writing at the time. Of Eliot he complains that “Occasionally the symbols are paradoxically too personal and too general to either exist in themselves or carry sufficient symbolic meaning.” As to Hopkins, his “rhythms … have the effect of a hyperthyroid injection”:

  As we know from the letters and personal anecdotes he lived in a state of exhilaration. But in some poems we feel that the intensity is mannered, in others we could wish for more variety.

  There is also in Hopkins, though infrequently, a tendency for lines to “collapse in a style-less exuberance.” Lowell quotes:

  This was that feel capsize

  As half she had righted and hoped to rise

  Death teeming in at her port-holes

  Raced down decks, round messes of mortals.

  and comments: “Messes of mortals! This is a murderous example of numb sprung rhythm and alliteration.”

  *

  In November 1944 Lowell and Stafford moved to Westport, Connecticut. In a desultory manner, Lowell began to look for work that would fit both his religion and his writing—at one point he speaks of taking a job counseling juvenile delinquents, but this seems not to have been followed through. His sense of Catholic mission was sustained, he said, by a vision of a postwar world dominated by the totalitarian threat: “there will be more wars, a universal materialistic state [and] Christians will be driven underground.” The time had come “to be very evident indeed about our Faith.”23

  Lowell’s letters of this period are full of gloomy, grand-scale prognostications of this sort, but there is little real passion in them; in reality, he was enjoying a stretch of low-pressure domestic stability—working on new poems and feeling grateful that someone else was cleaning up the nurses’ floors in Bridgeport. Jean’s letters are jaunty and contented, studded with fond anecdotes of married life:

  We have two cats. Or rather, we had two cats, really just kittens. The little female, who was always unhealthily tiny, fell ill on Christmas Day and was dying until yesterday. I had wanted to take her to the vets to have her put away or to get the farmer near us to shoot her, but Cal couldn’t bear it. He nursed her most tenderly, keeping her on a cushion in his study and tempting her with all sorts of things like liver broth.24

  Lowell would often conclude his weighty sermons on the coming darkness with some modest and agreeable disclaimer:

  I am with you about the family being the primary social unit, but I don’t think we will escape totalitarianism and another and worse war. However, all this will take time and might last forever. At worst, life is pretty wonderful; although anyone who has escaped this war has no right to talk. I don’t care about anything except writing and trying to be a halfway decent Christian. Politics is a spider’s web of unreality.25

  And in another letter, perhaps most tellingly of all: “We who have accreted illusions all our lives, must read just to be able to see.”

  While they were living in Westport, Jean Stafford’s novel Boston Adventure made its appearance and was an immediate success. Within a few months of publication 40,000 hardcovers were sold, and then a further 300,000 went via book clubs and overseas editions. Suddenly, Jean Stafford had some money; “We are neither respectable nor rich,” Lowell wrote triumphantly to Allen Tate.26 And Stafford took a special pleasure in reflecting that the source of her new wealth was a novel about Boston snobbery; shortly after the book appeared she made a point of visiting the Lowells:

  It was not a very good trip: we always expect things to be different and they never are. There are the same lectures and moral generalizations and refusals to countenance the way we live and the dredging up of all the mistakes of the past. I am more thoroughly, more icily, more deeply disliked than ever on account of my book, even though it is generally admitted that it’s a damned good thing Bobby married someone who makes money writing. This is the only way, you see, writing can be justified. And my inimitable mother-in-law who, as always, would stop a clock, said to Cal that his poetry was nice but valueless since “one must please the many, not the few.”27

  With the proceeds of Boston Adventure, Jean planned to buy a house in Maine where they would live for “all but the very coldest months.” In July 1945 their tenancy at Westport expired, and they found a temporary base in a small furnished cottage at Boothbay Harbor: “a sort of Maine Monteagle; the nights are cool, the scenery is beautiful and the summer people, to the number of 15,000, are atrocious. There are 27 gift and local color shops.”28 From there, Jean began her hunt along the Maine coastline and, within a month, discovered Damariscotta Mills, a village at the head of the Damariscotta estuary, seventeen miles from the sea. The house she bought there was on a hillside and overlooked the remarkable Damariscotta Lake, a lake “as long as the river, crowded with bass and salmon in the summertime.” For this alone, Lowell the fisherman would have given quite a lot, but the house itself was “large and grandly Hellenic” and to Jean “too wonderful to be believed in.”

  It is about a hundred years old, has a barn attached to it which we are going to make into two vast studios, has fine old trees, a 12-mile lake in the back yard and within a stone’s throw, the oldest R.C. church north of southern Maryland.29

  They took possession in September 1945, too late to fortify the place for winter living. It was decided to spend part of the winter in Tennessee visiting Jarrell and Peter Taylor, who was now discharged from the army; after that they would base themselves at Delmore Schwartz’s house in Cambridge and make occasional trips to Maine (or Jean would) to furnish and decorate the house in time for spring.

  Notes

  1. Ms in Houghton Library.

  2. Jim Peck, interview with I.H. (1980).

  3. Ibid.

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

  5. Charlotte Lowell to Jean Stafford, October 31, 1943.

  6. Allen Tate to Peter Taylor, April 10, 1949.

  7. Charlotte Lowell to Jean Stafford, November 10, 1943.

  8. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, December 22, 1943.

  9. Ibid., n.d.

  10. Ibid., February 11, 1944.

  11. Ibid., n.d. Nancy Tate is the daughter of Allen and Caroline Tate.

  12. R.L. to John Crowe Ransom, July 13, 1944 (Chalmers Memorial Library).

  13. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, n.d.

  14. Jean Stafford, “The Home Front,” Children Are Bored on Sunday (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945), pp. 104–42. In 1946 Robert Lowell wrote to Richard Chase: “Jean’s story ‘The Home Front’ is about where we lived in Black Rock—next to a huge dump and a horrible inlet of mud and refuse” (Columbia University Library).

  15. Jean Stafford to Eleanor Taylor, November 16, 1944.

  16. R.L. to Allen Tate, July 31, 1944 (Firestone Library).

  17. Arthur Mizener, “Recent Poetry,�
� Accent 5 (1944–45), 114–20.

  18. John Frederick Nims, “Two Catholic Poets,” Poetry 65 (1944–45), 264–68.

  19. Randall Jarrell, “Poetry in War and Peace,” Partisan Review 12 (1945), 120–26.

  20. John. Crowe Ransom to R.L., December 12, 1945 (Houghton Library).

  21. R. P. Blackmur, “Notes on Eleven Poets,” Kenyon Review 7 (1945), 339–52.

  22. R.L., review of T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets,” Sewanee Review 51 (Summer 1943), 432–35; “A Note/on Gerard Manley Hopkins/,” Kenyon Review 6 (Autumn 1944), 583–86.

  23. R.L. to Peter Taylor, January 12, 1945.

  24. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, December 29, 1944.

  25. R.L. to Peter Taylor, July 18, 1943.

  26. R.L. to Allen Tate, n.d. (Firestone Library).

  27. Jean Stafford to Cecile Starr, May 5, 1945.

  28. R.L. to Allen Tate, July 7, 1945 (Firestone Library).

  29. Jean Stafford to Cecile Starr, n.d.

  8

  When Randall Jarrell died in 1965, Lowell wrote of him: “Randall was the only man I have ever met who could make other writers feel that their work was more important to him than his own.”1 Twenty years earlier, in October 1945, Lowell sent Jarrell the manuscript of Lord Weary’s Castle; it carried ten poems from Land of Unlikeness, each of these slightly revised, and thirty new poems.

  Lowell could not have wished for a more rousing yet judicious mentor. Jarrell wrote back, declaring that Lord Weary