by Ian Hamilton
He wasn’t dangerous to himself or others but he was so obstreperous. The thing that struck me about those visits was that he’d get through two pounds of chocolates and two packs of cigarettes. He was a factory of energy. I wasn’t physically afraid of him. He was awfully gentle.35
On March 17 Meredith wrote to Adrienne Rich and Philip Booth, two poet friends of Lowell’s who had sent letters to the hospital:
People who have seen these attacks at close hand before, as I have not, say that this is a mild one: there was no real violence, only a kind of modified social violence, at the outset, he went to the hospital of his own accord, etc. Elizabeth is very much shaken, although her friends here are taking care that she has company. No one predicts how long it will be before the drugs take hold & Cal begins to be himself again. Meanwhile he writes and revises translations furiously and with a kind [of] crooked brilliance, and talks about himself in connection with Achilles, Alexander, Hart Crane, Hitler and Christ, and breaks your heart.36
Lowell spent about six weeks in Presbyterian, but for a period after his discharge it was still, Hardwick says, “all Sandra”:
It was all “I’m going to set up with her. You’re wonderful, and Harriet’s wonderful and everything’s wonderful, but I’m going to live with Sandra.” He was still in the hospital when he set up an apartment with her over on the East Side someplace. So at one time there was the Hochman apartment, the Riverside Drive apartment, the house in Boston and we had bought W. 67th Street. I was utterly petrified. I was terribly upset. This was one of the few times when I can say I was truly depressed, and crying, and just terrible….37
Hardwick’s instinct was to move back to Boston immediately. Lacking any support from Lowell’s doctor, she could see no point in exposing herself to any further firsthand humiliations: “I wanted to take my little girl back up there, where we had someone to work for us, someone waiting for us to come home.”38 Dr. Bernard’s view (gleaned from Lowell’s friends: Bernard herself feels ethically bound not to discuss the matter) was that Lowell should break with his old habits—if he wanted to change his life, he should be allowed to do so. What if his manic breakouts were simply a measure of his essential discontent? Bernard was also reluctant to dampen Lowell’s enthusiasm with any sustained drug therapy, although she seems to have assented to some drug intervention when the mania was at its height. It was not, according to Hardwick, that Bernard was especially pro-Hochman; she did believe, though, that Lowell should somehow “break the pattern” of earlier breakdowns.
It was Lowell himself who ensured that the pattern was restored. Not long after Hardwick had returned to Boston, Lowell walked out on Hochman: “He left her. He called up Dr. Bernard and said, ‘I want to go home.’ He came home very low and sad. Just shattered.”39
On June 30 he wrote to T. S. Eliot:
We drive to Maine tomorrow. Our troubles are over and Lizzie and I are together again. The whole business has been very bruising, and it is fierce facing the pain I have caused, and humiliating [to] think that it has all happened before and that control and self-knowledge come so slowly, if at all. I have a very good doctor though and have unravelled many things. Life still has blood in it, and love has come back to our small family.40
In June 1961 Hardwick and Harriet had left Boston for Castine; Marlborough Street was sold, but the future still seemed shaky. On June 17 Hardwick had written to Lowell:
I am thinking about the winter and trying to see how I can learn to manage it—a very odd, ironical trick of fate that finds me worrying about New York. But I fear my own disintegration there, and I also fear the estrangement in our feelings—something the manifold necessities of life had not brought about until that terrible last winter…. At least I am determined to save myself, somehow, even if I don’t know just how. And it means a lot to me to know that you’ll be where you most want to be, leading the life and with the people you trust the most.41
When Marlborough Street was being sold, Lowell was at the Beverly Hills Hotel; he had gone to California to take part in a CBS film about Boris Pasternak, who had died the year before. He felt “dull and grieved,” he wrote to Hardwick, that the Boston house had gone: “All that life! It haunted me during the long, whizzing, ten miles a minute jet flight. How I miss you, and how alone I feel here!”42 From California he returned to New York and stayed there until the furniture arrived from Boston. An anxious letter from Hardwick suggests that for each of them the move still seemed provisional and hazardous:
I hope you won’t become so vexed with the horrors of settling into our new life that you’ll want to flee it. By the way, do you think you would be happy with a little apartment of your own? I don’t see how we could ever afford it and yet several things you said on the way to the airplane haunt me. I really want to make the effort to give you—or allow you—the life that is most healthy for you and am going to make a really superhuman effort to improve as a wife so that your home and daily life won’t make you sick again.43
As this letter hints, the intention was for Lowell to continue his sessions with Dr. Bernard, even though, his irony restored, Lowell was again treating these as necessary chores. Bernard, he wrote from California,
has decided my dreams are more rewarding than my actuality. This adds great plot, color and imagery to our sessions and seems to remove them to the for me safe and detached world of fiction—my disease in life is something like this.44
And, on the hotel stationery, he had even jotted down some of his Beverly Hills dreams; dreams almost too healthily Freudian to be believed:
1. Aunt Sarah’s old maid complaining Cal has been rude to her and to Aunt S.
2. Surrounded by a wing or line of people, problem as in a game to meet or manipulate moves.
1. Images—a girl’s legs said to have nothing on under her dress. But this merely meant no slip. Not particularly sexy image.
2. A girl in flamingo-red dress, beautiful. California tan and figure.
3. Small cannon, hand-sized, a toy but acquiring the strong hard materials and precise mechanism of a real cannon (modern).45
By July, Lowell was back with his family for the summer in Castine, calm and industrious again. In mid-August, Hardwick wrote that “this has been the best summer of all”:
Bobby goes to the barn [his regular workplace in Castine] at 9:30 with his lunch and writes … until 3:30. He comes back, we play tennis 4 to 6 and then have a bath, make a few dinner preparations, I have a drink; we dine at 7:30 or a quarter to eight. Play music or read and then in bed and asleep by ten. I don’t think of this schedule as exciting reading and only put it in to show what a wonderful peaceful summer it has been.46
Between July and September, Lowell completed his play, Benito Cereno. It was, he said, “thunderously effective, though thin…. I feel like Randall, playwriting is so easy it’s a crime.”47 As if to prove this, he had also done two other short plays—both based on short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Lowell wrote to William Meredith on September 8:
There are now three, Governor Endicott and the Puritans cutting down the May-pole at Merrymount, Hawthorn’s [sic] My Kinsman Major Molineux and Benito. All told, they come to an evening and a hundred and ten or twenty pages. God knows if they are any good, but change is fascinating after short poems. One feels stuck with writing yet every so often, it becomes a wall, impossible to climb and unlikely to crumble. Plays seem an opening, if I can work them. I’ve always wondered why people like Eliot wrote them, but I see there’s a sea of energy inside one that can’t come out in poems and will come out this way.48
To this letter, Lowell added the postscript: “We’ve really had a wonderfully and much needed summer.” He had been reading himself asleep over Dickens and had not had a drink since July: “I feel pretty used to not drinking now though a little grudging and unsociable around six o’clock as I swig my bottle of concentrated Walsh’s [sic] grape juice. Our family is as calm as such nervous people can be.”
*
&nbs
p; By October 1961 the Lowells were settled at West 67th Street. Lowell spent October and November “in an aweful [sic] wrestle trying to get my play reworked so it will act,”49 and also waiting for the reviews of his book Imitations, a collection of the sixty or so translations he had done since 1958. Lowell called the book a “small anthology of European poetry”; it ranged from Homer to Pasternak and “Lowellized” from originals in Greek, French, Italian, German and Russian. The verb “to Lowell” might usefully have been invented for this book; certainly, there was much hesitation about what exactly these “translations” should be called. For Lowell, they had simply been a way of moving “into a new air”; there had been nothing programmatic or even methodical about their making. At the outset, certainly, they had been speculative exercises: what would Rilke or Baudelaire be like if they “were writing their poems now and in America”?50
But by 1961 they had become a book, and they had to be presented with some measure of solemnity. At first, Lowell had thought of following Allen Tate’s suggestion and calling the book Versions. T. S. Eliot, however, had written to Lowell in June, with his firm verdict on the title:
I think that the right title for this is Imitations and I don’t agree with Allen if he thinks that Versions would be better. I think also that a subtitle is a mistake: your translations are indeed imitations, and if you use the word translation in the subtitle it will attract all those meticulous little critics who delight in finding what seem to them mis-translations. You will remember all the fuss about Ezra Pound’s Propertius. Keep the word translation out of it.51
Imitations was published in the United States in November 1961, and although it carried no subtitle, it did have a modest and challenging introduction by the author. In this, Lowell admits to recklessness with “literal meaning”—he had been more concerned, he said, to “get the tone” of the originals, to make “live English” out of them. Such a disclaimer might have mollified the “meticulous little critics” Eliot warned against, had Lowell shyly left it there. But, as Ben Bellitt later commented, there is a further paragraph in which “Mr. Lowell … delivers himself up to would-be assassins with the resolute fatalism of Caesar in the Roman Senate.”52 Lowell writes:
Most poetic translations come to grief and are less enjoyable than modest photographic prose translations, such as George Kay has offered in his Penguin Book of Italian Verse. Strict metrical translators still exist. They seem to live in a pure world untouched by contemporary poetry. Their difficulties are bold and honest, but they are taxidermists, not poets, and their poems are likely to be stuffed birds. A better strategy would seem to be the now fashionable translations into free or irregular verse. Yet this method commonly turns out a sprawl of language, neither faithful nor distinguished, now on stilts, now low, as Dryden would say. It seems self-evident that no professor or amateur poet, or even good poet writing hastily, can by miracle transform himself into a fine metricist. I believe that poetic translation—I would call it an imitation—must be expert and inspired, and needs at least as much technique, luck and rightness of hand as an original poem.53
Having thus thoroughly failed to “keep the word translation out of it,” Lowell goes on to list some of his many “licenses”: Villon was “somewhat stripped,” Victor Hugo “cut in half,” Mallarmé “unclotted,” and so on. In places, he said, he had even added verses of his own or shuffled stanzas from one poem to another: “And so forth! I have dropped lines, moved lines, moved stanzas and altered meter and intent.”
The book version of Lowell’s Phaedra—A Verse Translation of Racine’s Phèdre was also published in 1961, and it was equipped with an introduction not dissimilar in tone to that of Imitations: “My version is free … I have translated as a poet.” In many reviews it was coupled with Imitations as further evidence of Lowell’s cultural imperialism. George Steiner’s careful response in the Kenyon Review is perhaps the best summary of the prosecution case:
I submit that Phaedra has an unsteady and capricious bearing on the matter of Racine. Far too often it strives against the grain of Racine’s style and against the conventions of feeling on which the miraculous concision of that style depends. … what Lowell has produced is a variation on the theme of Phaedra, in the manner of Seneca and the Elizabethan classicists. To link this version with Racine implies a certain abeyance of modesty. But modesty is the very essence of translation. The greater the poet, the more loyal should be his servitude to the original; Rilke is servant to Louis Labe, Roy Campbell to Baudelaire. Without modesty translation will traduce; where modesty is constant, it can transfigure.54
And modesty did turn out to be the theme of the several hostile notices that greeted Imitations: Lowell had presumptuously turned Rilke into Lowell, and the result was neither good Lowell nor recognizable Rilke. His howlers were itemized, his overburly modernizing was shown to be thuggish, disrespectful: respect for the original was spoken of as if it were something like respect for a parent, or grown-up. At least part of Lowell’s crime was to have treated these great poets as his equals—as his playmates, almost. “I suppose,” wrote Louis Simpson in the Hudson Review, “Imitations will interest some people as a mirror of Lowell’s mind.”55 And Thorn Gunn in the Yale Review complained that
Hugo’s suave gestures similarly become spasmodic jerks, Villon takes on the flat clinical sound of the “confessional” poems in Life Studies, and others I am not able to read in the original, Homer and Pasternak for example, all speak with the unmistakable voice of Robert Lowell. Preserving the tone of most of these poets is, in fact, the last thing he has done.56
Gunn also suggests that when Lowell doesn’t make his originals sound like Lowell, as with Baudelaire, he turns them into Allen Ginsberg. A number of reviewers took the following comparison as a crushing indictment of the Lowell method:
BAUDELAIRE: Ainsi qu’un débauché pauvre qui baise et mange
Le sein martyrisé d’une antique catin,
Nous volons au passage un plaisir clandestin
Que nous pressons bien fort comme une vielle orange.
LOWELL: Like the poor lush who cannot satisfy,
we try to force our sex with counterfeits,
die drooling on the deliquescent tits,
mouthing the rotten orange we suck dry.57
In fact, the critics might more damagingly have quoted the limp translatorese that crops up throughout Imitations: the stale archaisms, the mechanical poeticizing—lines and stanzas, that is to say, that Lowell would never have wished to call his own:
Lively boy,
the only age you are alive
is like this day of joy,
a clear and breathless Saturday
that heralds life’s holiday.
Rejoice, my child,
this is the untroubled instant.
Why should I undeceive you?
Let it not grieve you,
if the following day is slow to arrive.58
George Kay’s prose translation of Leopardi reads as follows:
Mischievous boy, this flowering age of yours is like a day full of joy, a clear cloudless day which precedes the holiday of your life. Have enjoyment of it, my son; a sweet state, a happy season, it is. I do not want to say anything more to you; but may your holiday which still hesitates to come, not be heavy.59
Lowell’s version could not be accused of irreverent muscularity; its fault rather is to seem insipid and mechanical, the work of an amateur poet or an overworked professor.
In spite of spirited defenses by Edmund Wilson (“the only book of its kind in literature”)60 and A. Alvarez (a “magnificent collection of new poems by Robert Lowell, based on the work of 18 European poets”),61 Lowell was taken aback by the vehemence of some of his assailants—although the review that seems to have most nettled him, by Dudley Fitts in the New York Times Book Review, was more condescending than fierce. It ended: “The book is fun; but schoolboys should read it in a salt mine.”62 In November, Lowell wrote to A. Alvarez, who was to print h
is superb Villon over a full page of the London Observer:
Your remarks on my Villon are very opportune—Time Magazine in a longish panning review says half my poems bear the smudge of translation and the other half seem to have been written by some talented foreigner. Dudley Fitts in the New York Times says they should be read in a salt mine, with a grain of salt, and three hysterical Frenchmen writing to Encounter say my Rimbaud is an insane slaughter and hopeless trash. On the other hand, every decent judge from Edmund Wilson down like them or some of them. I feel misunderstood, not a bad feeling.63
And to Randall Jarrell:
I seem to be getting a rain of mangling reviews. Time magazine and now Dudley Fitts who says my poems should be read in a salt mine with grain of salt. I must know something about what I’m doing. I’m sure I do.64
To this, Jarrell fired back a bracing shaft of poet-to-poet lordliness:
I saw that stupid review in Time—Time’s the cheapest magazine in the world and Dudley Fitts’s the cheapest poetry reviewer; I can imagine what he was like when he had a chance to hurt a real poet in “his special field,” translation—as if he had once in his life translated a line of poetry into a line of poetry.65
Jarrell could not have chosen a better moment to sound this note of solidarity. By November 1961 Lowell had at least two new poems of his own—an elegy for a St. Mark’s schoolmate, “Alfred Corning Clark,” and “Eye and Tooth,” which Lowell described as “my farewell to contact lenses.” By the end of the year he had five more—“Old Flame,” “Water,” “The Scream,” “Middle Age” and “Fall 1961.” These were his first poems in over eighteen months.