Robert Lowell: A Biography

by Ian Hamilton

  Michael. It’s no more valentines.”

  (If a hint of “You are a bastard, Michael, aren’t you! Nein” found its way into Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through,” then Plath—it could be said—chose a thoroughly apt poem to borrow from.) Lines like these could fit, without evident strain, into almost any one of Stafford’s pleading, vengeful letters:

  What do I care if Randall likes my book? Or anyone? Why should it console me to be praised as a good writer? These stripped bones are not enough to feed a starving woman. I know this, Cal, and the knowledge eats me like an inward animal; there is no thing worse for a woman than to be deprived of her womanliness. For me, there is nothing worse than the knowledge that life holds nothing for me but being a writer. But being a writer and being a robbed woman whose robber will doubly rejoice in her stolen goods.

  If you had loved me, you would love me now completely as I completely love you so that this is another dreadful truth that I must swallow: these bitternesses that I have tried to swallow still make me retch, still after all these months and months of sickness and because I am as sick now, I see no end and I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish to die. I do not see any other way except to live until I die: this is what it is now and what it is always to be.77

  These are two paragraphs from a closely typed five-page letter; and throughout 1947 Lowell was for periods bombarded almost daily with similarly intense communications from his sick, abandoned wife. The voice is unmistakably the voice he borrows for Anne Kavanaugh. And the lines that Lowell’s Anne puts in her husband’s mouth seem meant to exemplify the “calm olympian brutality” which—according to Stafford’s repeated accusation—was Lowell’s actual posture at the time:

  … “Anne, my whole

  House is your serf. The squirrel in its hole

  Who hears your patter, Anne, and sinks its eye-

  Teeth, bigger than a human’s, in its treasure

  Of rotten shells, is wiser far than I

  Who have forsaken all my learning’s leisure

  To be your man and husband—God knows why!”

  But Lowell was not just using poetry in order to recapture the flavor of marital quarrels. He seems genuinely to have been trying to fathom how he seemed to his women—to know this, and to judge it. And—being Lowell—to judge it without mercy. The paradox is that although he needed to do this in poetry, he could hardly bear to do it in public.

  In her short story “A Country Love Story”78 Jean Stafford has a narrator who is trapped in a sterile marriage to an ailing, intellectual husband; to sustain herself—and indeed the marriage—she invents an imaginary lover. Her husband doesn’t guess this. In life, Lowell was susceptible to rumor about Jean’s amorous fancies: there is evidence in letters that he was at various times led to believe she was interested in one or another of his friends, and that violent quarrels could result from these suspicions. With these two elements in mind—her restlessness, his jealousy—the central scene of “The Mills of the Kavanaughs” can easily be read as a parable of his marriage to Jean Stafford. In it, Anne Kavanaugh is in bed with her husband and dreams that she is being seduced by a young boy. Harry wakes and hears her speaking to her imaginary lover, attacks her in a jealous rage and then, in remorse, tries to destroy himself. The scene presents an extraordinary tangle of sexual angers and anxieties. It is worth quoting at some length (the “snowplow” mentioned in the first stanza here appears in Stafford’s story and—years later—in “The Old Flame,”79 where there is also reference to Stafford’s “ghostly imaginary lover” whom “No one saw”):

  “You went to bed, Love, finished—through, through, through.

  Hoping to find you useless, dead asleep,

  I stole to bed beside you, after two

  As usual. Had you drugged yourself to keep

  Your peace? I think so. If our bodies met,

  You’d flinch, and flounder on your face. I heard

  The snowplow banging; its eye-headlights set

  On mine—a clowning dragon—so absurd,

  Its thirty gangling feet of angled lights

  Red, blue and orange….

  … Then I slept. Your fingers held….

  “You held me! ‘Please, Love, let your elbows … quick,

  Quick it!’ I shook you, ‘can’t you see how sick

  This playing … take me; Harry’s driving back.

  Take me!’ ‘Who am I?’ ‘You are you; not black

  Like Harry; you’re a boy. Look out, his car’s

  White eyes are at the window. Boy, your chin

  Is bristling. You have gored me black and blue.

  I am all prickle-tickle like the stars;

  I am a sleepy-foot, a dogfish skin

  Rubbed backwards, wrongways; you have made my hide

  Split snakey, Bad one—one!’ Then I was wide

  Awake, and turning over. ‘Who, who, who?’

  You asked me, ‘tell me who.’ Then everything

  Was roaring, Harry. Harry, I could feel

  Nothing—it was so black—except your seal,

  The stump with green shoots on your signet ring.”

  Harry tries to strangle her; she threatens to “shout it from the housetops of the Mills” that her husband is mad, that he has tried to kill his wife “for dreaming.” The next scene in Anne’s reverie shows Harry:

  “Looking in wonder at your bloody hand—

  And like an angler wading out from land,

  Who feels the bottom shelving, while he sees

  His nibbled bobber twitch the dragonflies:

  You watched your hand withdrawing by degrees—

  Enthralled and fearful—till it stopped beneath

  Your collar, and you felt your being drip

  Blue-purple with a joy that made your teeth

  Grin all to-whichways through your lower lip.”

  Harry doesn’t recover his sanity; he lives on for a short time—“to baby-smile into the brutal gray / Daylight each morning” and to stare unknowingly at his “charts of … New England birds.” What little we see of Harry’s madness, in fact, has echoes of Lowell’s later descriptions of his father’s terminal days. And there are other strands in the poem that have as much to do with Boston as they do with events at Damariscotta Mills. Thus, at times, Anne is identifiably Stafford as Persephone—trapped in the underworld, half worshiping, half loathing her dead husband, but finally rejoicing in her freedom from his sexless tyranny. At other times the voice in which Anne despises Harry is more like the voice Lowell might have imagined his mother using to speak of her dead husband—although Lowell had begun writing the poem in 1948, it was completed after his father’s death. Who else, one thinks, but Charlotte could he have had in mind when Anne declares:

  “My husband was a fool

  To run out from the Navy when disgrace

  Still wanted zeal to look him in the face.”

  Harry’s naval career in the poem might even be viewed as the kind of career Lowell would have had if he had been his father’s son: it ended at Pearl Harbor.

  Altogether, then, The Mills of the Kavanaughs is a confused, self-punishing, bleakly secular performance—and a crucial one in Lowell’s development. But if one can catch his “own” voice—Lowell as Lowell—in the noise of those berating female voices he invents, then it is a voice that is perilously close to despair. If anything is yearned for in the book, it is silence, space, “sea-room”; in life, he seems to say, these must be stolen, but not so in death: “All’s well that ends: / Achilles dead is greater than the living.” And it is surely Lowell and not his Stafford-derived heroine who speaks the anguished closing lines of “Her Dead Brother”:

  O Brother, a New England town is death

  And incest—and I saw it whole. I said,

  Life is a thing I own. Brother, my heart

  Races for sea-room—we are out of breath.

  Notes

  1. Elizabeth Hardwick to Peter and Eleanor Taylor, October 20
, 1949.

  2. Ibid., September 20, 1949.

  3. Elizabeth Hardwick to Peter and Eleanor Taylor, October 20, 1949.

  4. R.L. to Peter Taylor, n.d. (Houghton Library).

  5. Allen Tate to R.L., October 11, 1949 (Houghton Library).

  6. Caroline (Gordon) Tate to Elizabeth Hardwick, n.d. (Houghton Library).

  7. Ibid.

  8. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1982).

  9. Merrill Moore to Elizabeth Hardwick, October 5, 1949 (Houghton Library).

  10. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, December 26, 1949 (Houghton Library).

  11. R. T. S. Lowell to R.L., November 11, 1949 (Houghton Library).

  12. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, November 5, 1949 (Houghton Library).

  13. R.L. to Allen Tate, December 29, 1949 (Firestone Library).

  14. Elizabeth Hardwick to Charlotte Lowell, February 5, 1949 (Houghton Library).

  15. Ibid.

  16. R.L. to Allen Tate, March 15, 1950 (?) (Firestone Library).

  17. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, March 10, 1950 (Houghton Library).

  18. Elizabeth Hardwick to Charlotte Lowell, May 13, 1950 (Houghton Library).

  19. John Crowe Ransom to R.L., September 7, 1950 (Houghton Library).

  20. Charlotte Lowell to R.L., August 26, 1950 (Houghton Library).

  21. R. T. S. Lowell to R.L., August 26, 1950 (Houghton Library).

  22. Cable to R.L. and Elizabeth Hardwick at the Little Hotel, 33 West St., N.Y.C. (Houghton Library).

  23. Autobiography, draft ms, 1955–57 (Houghton Library).

  24. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1979).

  25. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, October 10, 1950 (Houghton Library).

  26. Postcard from R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, October 10, 1950 (Houghton Library).

  27. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robie and Anne Macauley, November 12, 1950.

  28. Ibid.

  29. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, December 26, 1950 (Houghton Library).

  30. R.L. to Peter Taylor, January 15, 1951.

  31. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, December 26, 1950 (Houghton Library).

  32. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1979).

  33. R.L. to Peter Taylor, January 15, 1951.

  34. Ibid.

  35. Ibid.

  36. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, December 26, 1950 (Houghton Library).

  37. George Santayana to R.L., July 25, 1947 (Houghton Library).

  38. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robie and Anne Macauley, November 12, 1950.

  39. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1982).

  40. Elizabeth Hardwick, “Living in Italy: Reflections on Bernard Berenson,” in A View of My Own (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1962), pp. 203–14.

  41. Ibid.

  42. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1982).

  43. R.L. to Randall Jarrell, October 6, 1951 (Berg Collection).

  44. R.L. to Harriet Winslow, n.d. (Houghton Library).

  45. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1979)

  46. Charlotte Lowell to R.L., October 18, 1951 (Houghton Library).

  47. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1979).

  48. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, from Hotel Bristol, in Pau, France, n.d.

  49. Ibid., September 17, 1951.

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

  51. R.L. to Randall Jarrell, October 6, 1951 (Berg Collection).

  52. Ibid.

  53. R.L., draft autobiography.

  54. R.L. to Randall Jarrell, October 6, 1951 (Berg Collection).

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

  56. R.L. to Peter Taylor, April 30, 1952.

  57. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robie and Anne Macauley, November 29, 1952.

  58. Ibid., February 22, 1952.

  59. R.L. to Randall Jarrell, February 24, 1952 (Berg Collection).

  60. Ibid.

  61. R.L. to Peter Taylor, April 24, 1952.

  62. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robie Macauley, April 15, 1952.

  63. Shepherd Brooks, interview with I.H. (1980).

  64. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robie Macauley, May 7, 1952.

  65. Ibid.

  66. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robie Macauley, May 16, 1952.

  67. R.L. to Peter Taylor, July (?) 1952.

  68. The Mills of the Kavanaughs (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1951).

  69. Randall Jarrell, “A View of Three Poets,” Partisan Review 17 (1951), 691–700. Reprinted in Poetry and the Age (London: Faber & Faber, 1965).

  70. R.L. to Randall Jarrell, February 24, 1952 (Berg Collection).

  71. William Carlos Williams, “In a Mood of Tragedy,” New York Times Book Review, April 22, 1951, p. 6. Reprinted in Selected Essays (New York: Random House, 1954).

  72. R.L. to Randall Jarrell, February 24, 1952 (Berg Collection).

  73. R.L. to William Carlos Williams, from Amsterdam, n.d. (Beinecke Library).

  74. Rolfe Humphries, “Verse Chronicle,” Nation, 173 (1951), 76–77.

  75. David Daiches, “Some Recent Poetry,” Yale Review 41 (1951), 153–57.

  76. Richard Eberhart, “Five Poets,” Kenyon Review 14 (1952), 168–76.

  77. Jean Stafford to R.L., 1947 (Houghton Library).

  78. Jean Stafford, “A Country Love Story,” The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), pp. 133–45.

  79. For the Union Dead (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964), p. 6.

  12

  After more Mozart and Strauss in Vienna (“the most dramatic show … in the world”1), Lowell and Hardwick arrived at Salzburg in July 1952. The Seminar in American Studies was held in an eighteenth-century rococo castle called Schloss Leopoldskron—it would have been hard to find a less mundane location for this multilingual gathering of some one hundred poets, artists and musicians from all over Europe. Lowell was entranced. After nearly two years in Europe he was no longer just a “literary man”: his whole disposition now was to seek comparisons, connections, genealogies—painting, music, poetry held common ground, and that ground was international. And here was a castleful of European creativity. He had been assigned a group of about twenty poets, but his task was vague enough for him to be able to range as widely and excitedly as he pleased. In a matter of days, Shepherd Brooks, the seminar’s director, has recalled, “he developed an extraordinary following. There was a series of very intense seminars. People were almost passionately involved with him—with his ideas.”

  Hardwick looked on apprehensively, and later wrote to Charlotte Lowell:

  Cal was a huge success at the Seminar. I don’t like to pay him empty compliments but as it worked out he was a gift from heaven for the whole session; he probably is, as much as anyone can be, a good representative of an intellectual American and he is also in love with Europe and has spent so much time on European literature and history in these last two years. It all paid off wonderfully. But the whole thing was exhausting simply because it was so stimulating, and he responded to nearly every one of the 100 students and worked much too hard, organizing poetry readings in nearly every known tongue, studying German poetry with a tutor on the side.2

  By his own account, Lowell presented “all American poetry from Emerson to Jarrell.” He organized readings in French, German and Italian—“which meant studying the stuff pretty intensely myself”—and gave seminars on Chaucer, Pope and Wordsworth:

  My triumph and my most pretentious moment was a shot at Achilles’ speech over one of Priam’s sons, prefaced by “Greek quantities are anybody’s guess”: meaning, I think, verve must excuse sloppiness.3

  He met a music student called Giovanna Madonia and, in Hardwick’s phrase, “took up” with her. Salzburg was Mozart’s birthplace, and Lowell now saw himself as a serious student of music. A real-life Italian with connections at La Scala was not to be viewed lightly. And, as with the Stafford/Buckman interlude, he expected his wife to sympathize with his intense new fr
iendship.

  It is probable that Lowell had been on the verge of a second breakdown in September 1951; then he had instinctively sought refuge and stability in Amsterdam. This time, though, he couldn’t travel north, and in the souped-up atmosphere of Salzburg there was no possibility that he would simply “stop,” “calm down” or “take it easy.” For Lowell, the enticements of Art were supremely—some would say destructively—“not of this world.” A few days before the end of the seminar—towards the end of August—he was missing for a day. He was eventually found wandering alone near the Austrian/German frontier and brought back to the Schloss. Shepherd Brooks describes what happened next:

  Then the next night I came back to the castle about eleven and there were a number of police cars outside. My assistant told me that all the faculty were at one end of the castle and at the other Professor Lowell was on the top floor surrounded by police…. They were Austrian police. I met with John McCormick and Dr. Jerome Bruner and an Austrian psychiatrist who had come from the city hospital to discuss the situation. Cal was barricaded in his room and wouldn’t come out.4

  It was proposed that Lowell be taken to the city hospital, but Brooks and his staff opposed this; it would surely make things worse for Lowell, “who lived so much in words,” to be confined in a hospital where he couldn’t understand the language. At this time Austria was still under occupation, and the American Army had its headquarters at Salzburg. Brooks contacted the military police, and, in a bizarre scene, the MP’s came out to the castle and replaced the civil police who were standing guard outside Lord Weary’s castle. Brooks recalls:

  A message then came through that Cal would not come out for anybody except me. So I went to his room—there was this surprisingly small military policeman standing just outside his door, rather frightened, a Southern boy. I went in, and there was Cal wearing just a pair of shorts, looking wild and terribly strong, and charged with adrenaline. I wasn’t entirely sure what was going to happen next.5