Robert Lowell: A Biography

by Ian Hamilton

  Dear Peter, This will come as a shock to you but I had better get it over with now. Elizabeth and I are separating…. I think that I will keep explanations to the minimum. We are perfectly friendly, oddly enough, still and both in very good spirits. There are no “sides.” There is no great story to tell: we just exhausted each other, I more than Elizabeth, but we both did.3

  This was written to Peter Taylor on March 19; two days later, in a letter to Blair Clark, Lowell was, if anything, more jaunty:

  I’d better start off with the coup de foudre, as Merrill Moore would say (You ought to have heard him struggling with various incorrect forms of this expression the last time I saw him, even spelling them out on an envelope, and so abashed and for once wordless about Mother’s death!) Elizabeth and I are separating. You’ll hear from her, and may have already; but my self-respect demands that I write too. But we don’t have two camps and two versions. I’m not going to plumb the causes; briefly, we were worn thin by each other. We are on perfectly good terms and E is now in New York at the Algonquin looking for a comfortable apartment.4

  Both letters, having disposed of tiresome private business, launch into speedy chat about his Cincinnati schedules, his views of Henry Adams’s genius (“He’s wonderful, by the way, on his and our manic-depressive New England character”) and current politics: “Wasn’t Nixon’s speech the most servile mush you ever heard. I was amazed by Stevenson, the first long speech of his I’ve heard on the radio. You really learn from him.”

  The next round of letters, a week later, added a new piece of information; he had decided to remarry. During his week in Italy he had contacted Giovanna Madonia, the woman he had briefly, but intensely, focused on two years before in Salzburg. She had not, he’d found, “got over” him, although she had in the meantime married an Italian “man of letters” called Luciano Erba. Blair Clark recalls:

  Somehow we met and had dinner with Giovanna and her husband, Luciano. It was very strange, all that. I didn’t know how crazy Cal was at that point. I mean, I didn’t think there was any great danger. Giovanna came to the opera and there was a lot of dodging around the pillars of La Scala to avoid the husband, and I saw some of it, like in an Orson Welles movie. I don’t know quite what happened that night. Somehow the husband was spirited away—maybe I had something to do with it—and they had some time together, a couple of hours.5

  For Madonia, Lowell’s reappearance was miraculous, and on his return to the United States she wrote to him ecstatically: although, for those two years, she had “suffered, because of you, that which a normal woman suffers in two lives,” she was now convinced that “you are giving life back to me: you must give me a happy life.”6 Her marriage to Erba was, she said, a torment:

  Luciano lives through words, in this sense he is a real man of letters, and every day when I get home from work I am forced into conversations with him that last for hours and hours, conversations that leave me completely exhausted.7

  With Lowell, she believed, it would be different. Lowell had told her that he had separated from Hardwick, and in response to this, Madonia (on March 21) pronounced herself

  immensely happy … now that you are alone, only now, are you mine. I love you and you are mine and that is enough for me. That’s all. Nothing other than you binds me to life. I want to live with you and for you. I want to have your child.8

  Elizabeth Hardwick had indeed retreated to New York, but at first she was by no means sure that Lowell was entering another manic phase; he was puzzlingly “rational,” she wrote to Blair Clark, even comically so:

  Poor Cal! He’s really a great comic character! “Uncle, honey, it’s all over!” This was the way he announced the whole thing. And Blair, the way he has carried on over his mother’s death is really extraordinary. I, of course, would never say this to anyone but you, but I think Cal is in an elation which is brought about by guilt feelings over his relief, quite unexpected, at his mother’s death, guilt feelings complicated by his profiting from her death. Then Giovanna’s telling him that she would never have married Erba except for him, that she was unhappy, etc.9

  Lowell was producing some powerful rationalizations of their split: “Our marriage was really contra naturam for her as well as me. Marriage to me wronged her fundamental nature, her vocation—she was very gallant, but it gave her psycho-somatic jaundice.”10 And Hardwick was exhausted enough to see these—for a week or so, at any rate—as genuinely held beliefs:

  It is like coming out of a cave to be free of this. I don’t know how I ever had the sense to pick up and go, but I suppose it was desperation. I feel fine, a bit bruised now and then. People have been awfully nice to me and I wish to forget the whole marriage and start all over. I want to marry a nice, sleepy old man who snoozes in front of the fire all day.11

  Meanwhile, Lowell had announced to all his Cincinnati acquaintances that he was determined to remarry, and had persuaded them to stand with him on the side of passion. Some members of the faculty found him excitable and talkative during this period, but since the talk was always brilliant and very often flattering to them, they could see no reason to think of Lowell as “ill”; indeed, he was behaving just as some of them hoped a famous poet would behave. They undertook to protect this unique flame against any dampening intrusions from New York. Thus, when Hardwick became convinced that Lowell was indeed sick—over a period of two weeks his telephone calls to New York became more and more confused, lengthy and abusive—she ran up against a wall of kindly meant hostility from Lowell’s campus allies. Her version of Lowell was not theirs, even when they were discussing the same symptoms; what to her was “mad” was to them another mark of Lowell’s genius. She wrote to the chairman of the English Department pleading that he arrange for a doctor to see Lowell before the episode could gather full momentum, but was told that “Cal was fine, reading poetry, seeing friends, etc.”12 She persuaded Merrill Moore to write a letter and Moore was given the same style of rebuff. The view from Cincinnati was that the great poet was “better if anything” than he had been before; his tireless energy, his ranging eloquence were taken as signs of a newly liberated spirit and there was enchantment in the idea of his remote Italian lover—Hardwick was the ousted wife, to be handled sympathetically but firmly. As for Hardwick, her position had become, to say the least, exasperating. “I can’t say: ‘Cal wants to leave me, therefore he’s crazy,’” but equally she didn’t want Lowell “to come to with Giovanna at the docks, a not unlikely happening because if what he says is true she’s moving fast.”13 And so she was. Encouraged by cables from Lowell, Giovanna was dismantling her marriage, arranging passport and visa, and—she vowed—would soon be on her way to Cincinnati.

  But gradually, even some of the fond Cincinnatians began to have their doubts. One of them gave a party for Lowell, and he walked out after ten minutes, having insulted one of the other guests; he began making frequent visits to the Gaiety strip club—“every day, not just once but twice, and he didn’t have enough money and one day, coming home, he jumped out of a moving taxi—to keep from paying.”14 George Ford, then of the Cincinnati English Department, remembers Lowell “talking like a machine gun with blazing eyes”:

  My clearest memory of him was having him to our house for dinner, with only one other guest, Professor Carl Trehman, of the Department of Classics. Trehman asked a few questions about Virgil, Catullus, and other Roman poets, and Cal discoursed brilliantly about them, non-stop all through cocktails, dinner, and after dinner, as well. It was dazzling, but also alarming, and one felt that he might be on the edge of a breakdown. When the lectures resumed, the tensions increased. It was his habit sometimes to stop in the middle of a lecture, and stare at the audience, and give a little talk on American Republicanism. Sometimes he looked very belligerent indeed, and the Chairman of the Department, William S. Clark, became worried that some incident might happen in public. It seems weird to look back on it now, but we decided that some of the strongest and biggest members of the department
should sit in the front row in case anything violent happened—being 6’2” and 200 lbs myself, I served in this capacity. But for some reason or another I was not present at the last of his appearances on the lecture platform.15

  Lowell gave lectures on Ezra Pound and his madness, and on the darker aspects of Robert Frost’s sensibility—on both occasions, Ford thought, he was “tense”; according to one member of the audience, Lowell’s final lecture turned out to be on “Hitler, more or less extolling the superman ideology,”16 and this seems to have been the one that persuaded the English Department that Lowell’s “brilliance” needed to be curbed. By the time of this “Hitler lecture,” though, Hardwick had decided to intervene. She traveled to Cincinnati with John Thompson and was eventually obliged to have Lowell detained under a court order. Thompson recalls:

  He had this circle of weak-minded Cincinnatians who were hiding him—from being arrested, from Lizzie. So I went out there with Lizzie—and I guess we finally called the cops on him and managed to get him committed. He would cave in at that point—once the cops came he would cave in. He’d say, “All right—I don’t go willingly, but I’ll go.”17

  A few Cincinnatians continued to “protect” Lowell; a lawyer called Gilbert Bettman was recruited, and it was some days before he could be persuaded that his efforts were misguided. Bettman and his wife, Elizabeth, had been on Lowell’s “side” throughout, and had even written encouraging letters to Giovanna Madonia. As Mrs. Bettman now recalls: “We were not very ‘up’ on the course of mental illness in those days, and felt somewhat mousetrapped and awkward to be placed in a role which seemed contrary to Elizabeth’s interests.”18

  Throughout these weeks of intensifying mania, Lowell had been writing frequently to Ezra Pound. On March 10 he told Pound of his mother’s death:

  You didn’t know my mother, so there is no point in going elaborately into our relationship. We were very much alike … only for most of her life she had no idea where or who she was. Most of our lives we weighed on each other like stones, but at the end (during the last ten months or so we were in a funny way speaking different languages, very close—the same metabolism, the same humor, the same boldness, and slowness.

  Well now to my reason for writing you—she died in the clinic of your friend Dr. Bacigaiupo—the young man, not his father. So for a week or so—I was also in Siena picking up Mother’s belongings—I was very close to you. And I think I know better now my old friend, the man under the masks, under the “agenda” much better than I did—say when I was in Washington last November or December.19

  On March 25 he announced his separation from Hardwick and his betrothal to Madonia:

  I am getting a divorce from my wife and can’t afford to pay for anything I can get free. Don’t you admire the casual way I introduced this all-important item to me. I am going to marry an Italian girl—have been wasting half-dead, Ezra, now for two years.20

  And on March 30, a week before his lecture, he writes Pound,21 sending him a new poem, “An Englishman Abroad,” which is an early draft of the poem later called “Words for Hart Crane”:

  Pardon this spate of letters, but for the moment you speak my language, and there’s no telling how long that may continue. Yes, in spite of your Idaho humor, which is hardly the Tuscan of Ovid. Not reading Vergil is your furneral [sic], not his or mine. Imagine you thinking poor Mr. Dryden’s translation had anything to do with the original! Sometimes I think you were born in Sioux City instead of Venezia.

  Iambics—yes, you are partly right; but a man must sweat with his meters, if he is ever going to be a fabbro, and not just a prophet. Thirty-seven years has been too long for me. You’ve got a point, but I knew that in my cradle—you must have told me.

  I can push my own Jambics [sic] where I want to—you can scratch your own back with your own. i.e. jambics.

  Here’s a new poem—no iambics—see what your cigar-store wooden Indian solid Kansas humor can do with it. Every syllable is meant to be there.

  Con amore

  Cal

  Also, perhaps with this same letter, he enclosed “Adolf Hitler von Linz (Siegfried)”—it seems possible that this was the text of Lowell’s so-called Hitler lecture. In fact, in the diary notes of Van Meter Ames, a philosopher at the university, there is complaining about the way Lowell had said of his “last poem” that “no one could follow [it] without coaching—lines from different parts of Juvenal, Dante, some of Hitler’s German and some of Lowell’s make-up German.” The poem is a mischievous parody of Pound, and although too fidgety to make much continuous sense, it is quite clearly not a celebration of the Nazi “dumkopf.” It reads as follows:

  ADOLF HITLER VON LINZ (SIEGFRIED)

  Hitler Adolfus? Shall I weigh him?

  Expende Hannibalem: quot libros in Duce summo

  Invenies? Crepat ingens Sejanus.

  The lungs of Luther burn. You might say

  He laid his cards on the table face-up, and called the hands.

  Short suits, short suits: a ten year Marathon talker

  For ten years talking the State on his talking tongue

  To plum-pudding. For what?

  For six million Jews?

  The salt of the earth has burned like flax

  To dirt in the craw of the lime-pits of Auschwitz

  Ach, das schreklichsten UnMench in diesem unmenchlicher Welt!

  Vielleicht. Vielleicht? Das schrecklichsten!

  He was. You were. Du! Du! Believing in Germany

  Enough to break the Prussian spine.

  Or the stiff neck of Europe?

  Chiropractor, I went to jail

  In my own country to save those German cities

  You smashed like racks of clay pigeons,

  Gyring through colored glass balls on Christmas trees

  And Manchesters of Chicago Gothic—broken windows!

  And my gorge stuck in my bowells [sic]

  When they sent me down the Hudson, through neat Connecticut,

  Through an alchemist’s autumn, and hand-cuffed to two two-bit

  Porto Ricans for Danbury, for my place of correction.

  You nothing, whom we might have called Lucifer,

  If only you’d lasted un poco—

  una cosa picciola, animula blandula, believing in Italy,

  Like no other German; no, not the Duce

  Dragged for four hours by his bootstraps

  Down the Uffizi a Firenze

  By a thick Linz dumkopf cracked on the paint of Florence,

  By a Barbarus Induperator, a German tourist,

  Federigo Secondo, Manfredi, Winkelman,

  By Freud!

  Six million … Ma basta, un poco …

  May the bastard rest in peace,

  May the burn-out dust rest.22

  On April 8, Lowell was committed to the Jewish Hospital in Cincinnati on a 24-hour warrant, and Hardwick had to go through the further ordeal of a court hearing before the committal was confirmed. Giovanna was contacted by Blair Clark and persuaded to await developments. Clark cabled Hardwick: GIOVANNA IN NICE EXPECTING CAL HOTEL LUXEMBOURG STOP SHE KNOWS HE SICK FROM MAD CABLES AND RETURNS ITALY TOMORROW.23

  The Jewish Hospital’s first diagnosis was “hypomania,” and it was explained to Hardwick that this latest episode was different in character from the “acute mania” of earlier attacks. In hypomania

  the patient has a lot of control, a lot of ability to function, while being at the same [time] extremely unwise, deranged. Dr. Piker says that he always tells his students that such a state is the most difficult one in psychiatry—usually even the family thinks the patient is all right and friends nearly always resent any restraint being put upon a man who has so much of his powers left.24

  After a few days of sedative and warm-bath treatment, Lowell was put on a course of electric shock therapy, and for a month his condition fluctuated: frivolity alternating with reproach, and Giovanna still a constant (though increasingly more abstract) obsession. Hardwick wr
ote:

  You see he doesn’t really know her—a curious state—and so he cannot know whether he prefers Giovanna to me! How disarming this wild situation is. Today, much better but still “gay” Cal said, “I’m just crazy about you, but I’ve got to get to Europe as soon as possible to see what Giovanna’s really like. How can I say until I know!”25

  Giovanna, it should be said, was in a somewhat similar position. As she wrote to Blair Clark:

  Cal’s love for me is more phissical [sic] than anything else (actually we talked very little, also because it is very hard for me to understand his English …) so I know that he cannot change idea, at least untill [sic] this love will be less platonic.26

  For Hardwick the Cincinnati breakdown was even more painful than the episodes that had centered on Chicago and then Salzburg. The Chicago breakdown had not involved hostility to her, and the Salzburg episode had been kept relatively quiet. This latest eruption was a grotesque public judgment of her marriage. At the beginning of April she had written a moving letter to Blair Clark:

  I grow more doubtful every day. I am shocked and repelled by what Cal has done to me this time. It is true he doesn’t seem to realize emotionally any of the real nature of his conduct; even, to mention the least, the unnecessary ungentlemanliness of it, the quite gratuitous bad manners. That is the superficial conduct, the rudeness, the meanness, the stinginess—and on a deeper level he has been of course indescribably cruel. I simply cannot face a life of this. I suppose I will sound self-righteous but no one has the slightest idea of what I’ve been through with Cal. In 4½ years, counting this present break-up, he has had four collapses! Three manic, and one depression. These things take time to come and long after he is out of the hospital there is a period which can only be called “nursing.” The long, difficult pull back—which does not show always to others. I knew the possibility of this when I married him, and I have always felt that the joy of his “normal” periods, the lovely time we had, all I’ve learned from him, the immeasurable things I’ve derived from our marriage made up for the bad periods. I consider it all a gain of the most precious kind. But he has torn down this time everything we’ve built up—he has completely exposed to the world all of our sorrows which should be kept secret; how difficult these break-ups are for both of us. I’ve put on a show to some extent. But he has opened the curtain and let everyone look in. Now everyone knows that Cal goes off, says anything degrading he pleases about me, then comes to and I’m to nurse him back to some sort of sanity. There is nothing petty in my resentment of this—things like that cannot be pushed aside by a person of any pride.27