Robert Lowell: A Biography

by Ian Hamilton

  Lowell continued to write almost every day from Pau; he didn’t want Hardwick to settle for Amsterdam unless she was genuinely willing, but he also pleaded:

  I want to be a human and imaginative creature again—up till now I’ve been in a condition of blank drifting broken by manic enthusiasms….

  Make up your mind on either Florence or Amsterdam in the next five days.

  And in another letter:

  We must recover nervously and break this terrible wheeling of abuse and blind sudden fury. I now think getting settled comfortably and out of the swim comes before anything else.

  On September 21 Hardwick wrote from Amsterdam that she had found a shabby but adequate two-room apartment. Lowell joined her there, having left Charlotte in Paris for the remaining three weeks of her vacation, and on October 6 he wrote to Randall Jarrell:

  So now we are stopped—after a trying and tumultuous visit from my mother. Amsterdam is outwardly a sort [of] eighteenth century Boston—all canals and lovely, small, baroquish brick houses, worldly, protestant, English speaking, the people sound and look German.54

  And two weeks later he wrote to his mother just before she set off for home: “Amsterdam is on the whole a much handsomer (less beautiful) city than Florence—Life is more like it is in America and one feels more in control.”55

  *

  During the first “rain-every-day months” in their tiny Amsterdam apartment, both Lowell and Hardwick felt claustrophobic and on edge; they both “suffered from the spleen and mastered … every wrinkle of domestic argument and sabotage.”56 Hardwick found Holland “not the land of tulips but the land of drudgery … it’s a nightmare,” but Lowell was gradually “calming down.” He began work on a “poem about Florence after coming to the damp flats because it was impossible to write about Italy,” and started reading “the complete records of the Nuremberg trials,” which he borrowed, four volumes at a time, from the USIS library. At first Hardwick felt isolated and depressed, but things improved when they got to know a group of young Dutch intellectuals who had “read everything”;57 with one of these, Huyk van Leuwen, Lowell would “talk for hours about philosophy.”

  In February 1952 Lowell borrowed Van Leuwen’s houseboat as a daytime workplace: “Poor dear, he’s got it into his head that he’s a strong, simple and capable man of the people, like a Dutchman.” While Lowell was thus “at sea,” Hardwick would sit at home “worried to death that he’ll leave the gas on, trying to heat a can of soup, and I’m sure I’ll have to trudge out tomorrow to see that he’s all right.”58 From his houseboat, Lowell wrote to Jarrell:

  This has been a sedentary winter…. We read continuously, except when interrupted, then we sigh querulously, “But I never have any time to read.” In this way I’ve gone twenty volumes of the Nuremberg trials, a book by a psychiatrist on the prisoners, Hannah Arendt, Macaulay’s History, Motley’s Dutch Republic, a lot of Clarendon, a lot of North’s Plutarch and a thousand other things … all of which you could no doubt have finished on a bus trip to North Carolina, and been at a loss for more before you were half there….59

  Holland had, after four months, almost served its purpose; it now seemed “a flat country with a flat grey climate that too often reminds one of Mount Vernon and Columbus.” Dutch literature was “a sober review of other literatures”: “Nowhere is the gay commercial bourgeois seventeenth century so present, nowhere do you meet so many people who put you at your ease. But this winter has been enough….”60

  From Amsterdam, they visited London and Belgium, and in both places Lowell made a characteristically wholehearted effort to educate himself in music: in Brussels he and Hardwick attended five Mozart operas in six nights, in London they saw Der Rosenkavalier, Fidelio and Wozzeck. Lowell declared himself “nuts about opera” and set about studying scores, quoting from Tovey’s Essays in Musical Analysis and trying “to imagine, though tone deaf, modulating from the tonic to the dominant.”61 Hardwick’s sardonic response to this new passion was to compare Lowell to “an advertisement I remember from America: ‘Learn to play the piano in three weeks, no scales, no weary hours of practice and no talent required.’”62

  In March, Lowell received an invitation to teach at the 1952 Salzburg Seminar, an annual American-organized event that ran through most of July and August; there was no salary involved, but there would be free passage, room and board, and it would be a way of seeing Austria. The invitation had come from the seminar’s director, Shepherd Brooks, who had met Lowell at a cocktail party in Amsterdam and been beguiled by a brilliant account of his family’s involvement in the slave trade:

  To the best of my knowledge, the Lowells had no dealings whatever with slaves. Cal was making one of his extraordinary histories. But it struck me then that he would probably make a superb teacher so I invited him to teach at Salzburg.63

  For Hardwick the prospect was exhilarating, not to say reviving: “I think only of leaving the Netherlands, my only thought, in fact, for the last seven months.”64 She busily arranged an itinerary that would take them through Germany to Vienna, after a short visit to Paris, where they “couldn’t resist … at least a part of that fabulous ‘Art of the 20th Century’ conference.” Tate would be in Paris for this event, along with Katherine Anne Porter, Auden, Spender and “even Faulkner.”65

  On May 4 Lowell and Hardwick set off for Brussels and were in Paris by May 16, when Hardwick wrote the Macauleys a more cheerful letter than she had been able to muster for some months:

  Allen Tate arrived [as a delegate to the Congress for Cultural Freedom] yesterday and I must say we were delighted to see him and had a marvellous time…. Cal still can’t get used to this new pace, jumping into taxis every moment with Tate, meeting at Champs Elysées cafés, etc. Secretly, he’s quite shocked that Tate won’t retire to his hotel room in the afternoon, carefully study the text, and attend, in gallery seats, an evening performance at the Comédie. When Cal suggested this, Tate looked at him as if he had lost his mind…. As for me, I am most certainly enjoying the frivolity, except that by now Cal has me so well trained I sometimes feel as if I were failing all my school subjects.66

  Lowell’s comment on the Paris jaunt was: “We had a terrific time with Allen in Paris—religion seems to have freed him from all inhibitions.”67 Tate had become a Catholic in 1950.

  *

  It was almost a year now since The Mills of the Kavanaughs had appeared in the United States.68 In fact, Lowell’s “excitement” of the previous summer had coincided with his reading of the book’s largely grudging and bemused reviews. Even Jarrell, though he extravagantly praised two of the book’s six shorter poems, was in doubt about the 600-line dramatic monologue which gives the book its title. “Mother Marie Therese,” he wrote, “is the best poem Mr. Lowell has ever written and ‘Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid’ is—is better.” “The Mills of the Kavanaughs,” however,

  does not seem to me successful as a unified work of art, a narrative poem that makes the same sort of sense a novel or a story makes. It is too much a succession of nightmares and daydreams that are half-nightmare; one counts with amusement and disbelief the number of times the poem becomes a nightmare-vision or its equivalent. And these are only too successfully nightmarish, so that there is a sort of monotonous violence and extremity about the poem, as if it were a piece of music that consisted of nothing but climaxes. The people too often seem to be acting in the manner of Robert Lowell, rather than plausibly as real people act (or implausibly as real people act). I doubt that many readers will think them real; the husband of the heroine never seems so, and the heroine is first of all a sort of symbiotic state of the poet. (You feel, “Yes, Robert Lowell would act like this if he were a girl”; but whoever saw a girl like Robert Lowell?)69

  Jarrell felt that the poem was “a sort of anthology of favorite Lowell effects,” that Lowell “too often either is having a nightmare or else is wide awake gritting his teeth and working away at All The Things He Does Best.” And there was an echo o
f Tate’s view that Lowell had been “forcing” his talent in Jarrell’s concluding quip: “As a poet Mr. Lowell sometimes doesn’t have enough trust in God and tries to do everything himself: he proposes and disposes….” Lowell replied to this in a letter to Jarrell in February 1952; he had, he said, been warned that Jarrell’s review was hostile and had “worked up an imaginary rebuttal.” Having now read Jarrell’s piece, though, Lowell was pleasantly surprised: for all Jarrell’s reservations, the title poem was still “a powerful and impressive poem, with a good many beautiful or touching passages and a great many overwhelming ones.” Lowell wrote:

  My defense was the same as your attack, i.e. that I had poured every variety of feeling and technique into it I knew of. The poem is meant to be grandiose, melodramatic, carried on by a mixture of drama and shifting tones, rather like Maud. I agree with most of what you say, except the heroine is very real to me, and that in a freakish way the poem has more in it than any of the others. Anyway I am delighted with your review and have read it many times out of vanity. Perhaps I agree with it all, but since I’ve finished nothing new I go on overrating the Kavanaughs.70

  Another review that would have interested Lowell was by William Carlos Williams in the New York Times Book Review. Predictably, Williams rather skirts the question of what the title poem is about, and concentrates on “the formal fixation of the line” and on Lowell’s use of rhyme, or “the rhyme-track,” as Williams loftily describes it. Rhyme, he says, is clearly necessary to Lowell, if only so that he can appear to surmount it with his wrenched enjambments; you can judge the strength of the tide, he implies, by what it does to the dams:

  In this title poem, a dramatic narrative played out in a Maine village, Mr. Lowell appears to be restrained by the lines; he appears to want to break them. And when the break comes, tentatively, it is toward some happy recollection, the tragedy intervening when this is snatched away and the lines close in once more….71

  A year earlier, Williams had called Lowell’s rhyming “the finest I know,” though it reminded him of a “tiger behind bars.” And Lowell had praised the first two books of Williams’s Paterson in print—although more for their ability to “get everything in” than for their prosody. Now Lowell had tried to get “everything” into The Mills of the Kavanaughs but was being chastised for monotony. Williams, he knew, would say that the source of this monotony, this leveling, reducing factor, was an enslavement to traditional verse forms. More and more, Lowell was inclined to learn from Williams. Jarrell might laugh at Williams’s “long dreary imaginary war in which America and the Present are fighting against Europe and the Past,” but to Lowell—reading Paterson in Amsterdam—there was a simple, subtle and perhaps alarming issue here that should be pondered. In his letter to Jarrell, he is almost embarrassed to confess his admiration for a writer he knew Jarrell regarded as naïve, as an unthinking primitive who had somehow got it marvelously right with Paterson Book 1 but had since got “rather steadily worse.” “Maybe,” Lowell writes, “it’s being away from home…. Well, we’ll wrangle it out when I see you.”72 To Williams he wrote, almost wistfully, “I’d be as unhappy out of rime and meter as you would in them,” and from Amsterdam he had interestingly tried to define the differences between them:

  I think I get what you mean about Eliot for the first time. You say, I think, that at the time the Waste Land appeared a whole flood of “American” poetry, that is poetry more in the present and more congenial to you was about to prevail. Then it was driven underground, into small privately printed editions, non-paying, ephemeral little magazines etc. There’s a chance you are right, and of course you are right in a way. But it was fairly heroic of Eliot, whose personality and opinions are after all very special, not in tune with the times, not at all what anyone in America or England really wanted—to have set out with all these disadvantages, and then by one’s artistry and sincerety [sic] to dominate.… No, that’s something! For the counts that you would think are against him, and they are against him are more amazing than what is superficially fashionable about his work. I think the field was open, and that the other poets had the more direct road. You shouldn’t complain. Then for your method. I don’t think it’s good or bad. Your way of writing doesn’t help without your eye, experience and sense of language. Your followers are mostly dull because none of them combine these qualities. Still I wish rather in vain that I could absorb something of your way of writing into mine.73

  The other reviews of The Mills of the Kavanaughs had less to offer than those by Williams and Jarrell; in most of them respectfulness jostled with puzzlement, with mild “disappointment” the usual, cautious outcome. Indeed, such was the prevailing timidity that there is something refreshingly plainspoken about Rolfe Humphries’s single-paragraph dismissal in the Nation:

  … I am sorry. I find him dull and I cannot make out what he is getting at; I am willing to take the blame for lacking whatever key is necessary to unlock the barriers in communication and understanding.74

  Others had evidently run up against these same barriers but were not so ready to admit it. David Daiches in the Yale Review was fairly typical in speaking approvingly of Lowell’s “poetic richness and dexterity” while wondering if, perhaps, there was not “an element of irresponsibility in the presentation.”75 And Richard Eberhart in the Kenyon Review wished he was able to devote his review to Lowell’s revisions, but had had to content himself with not being able to understand “this ambitious poem of major complexity.” The lines were “dense, close-packed, gnarled, intense and savage,” and yet “the gold is embedded in schist,” he said. But his review did have some interest in its attempt at a reply to the Williams type of stricture: “Lowell is a traditionalist. He is not going to throw over the iamb or anything of that sort,” and also, on the question of the Williams requirement for a distinctively American poetic speech:

  there does not seem to be any poetic speech purely or exclusively American, certainly not in Lowell…. maybe the roughness, the turgidity, the boxer-like brilliance is the American thing.76

  It is probable that most of the Kenyon’s younger readers would have been quite baffled by that “boxer-like” designation.

  Jarrell was right to single out “Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid” as the most effective poem in The Mills of the Kavanaughs; certainly it is the one that most explicitly defines the difference in character between this book and Lord Weary’s Castle. In it, an old man dreams over his Virgil and, when he wakes up, finds that he’s too late for church—the Aeneid has served him as a Bible. And even in “Mother Marie Therese” it is the Mother Superior’s delinquencies that are obliquely celebrated. Throughout the book, orthodox religious passion is viewed as either deranging (“Thanksgiving’s Over”) or debilitating (witness Father Turbot in “Mother Marie Therese”). The book is full of truants and delinquents, and there is no reduction in the level of self-loathing, but the Church no longer affords Lowell his symbolic armory; and without it he is—almost literally—unmanned. Whereas in Lord Weary’s Castle autobiography made for clarity and exactness, in The Mills of the Kavanaughs it produces something close to chaos: the reason for this is that Lowell is attempting to adjust the instincts of the confessional to the decorum of an “objective” work of art, to speak of his most personal shames with supreme impersonality. Hence the cardboard characters, the dramatic monologues that all sound the same, the classical myths that don’t quite fit, the narratives that weave in and out of dreamed and “real” experience, past and present actions, without ever yielding enough clues for us to sort out which is which.

  Since the book is, in so many of its parts, impenetrable, the reader has to work in a piecemeal fashion, making the best sense of what can be made sense of. And much of this “making sense” can involve fitting the poem to what was happening, or had just happened, in Lowell’s life when he wrote it. It is immediately noticeable, for example, that the book is a clamor of distraught, near-hysterical first-person speech, and that almost always
the speaker is a woman. The men in the book are usually under attack. Thus, the rhetoric of “Thanksgiving’s Over” and of large sections of the title poem can, not too fancifully, be heard as a fusing of two rhetorics—the enraged, erupting aggression of Lord Weary somehow loosened and given a new spitefulness by echoes of the letters Lowell had been getting—throughout 1947—from Jean Stafford, and echoes too (we might reasonably speculate) of the “adder-tongued” invective that she used to pour into their quarrels:

  “If you’re worth the burying

  And burning, Michael, God will let you know

  Your merits for the love I felt the want

  Of, when your mercy shipped me to Vermont

  To the asylum. Michael, was there warrant

  For killing love? As if the birds that range

  The bestiary-garden by my cell,

  Like angels in the needle-point my Aunt

  Bequeathed our altar guild, could want

  To hurt a fly! … But Michael, I was well;

  My mind was well;

  I wanted to be loved—to thaw, to change,

  To April! …”

  And again:

  “Husband, you used to call me Tomcat-kitten;

  While we were playing Hamlet on our stage

  With curtain rods for foils, my eyes were bleeding;

  I was your valentine.

  You are a bastard, Michael, aren’t you! Nein,