by Ian Hamilton
But not for long. In one account of Lowell’s night at the opera, he is said to have risen to his feet and, from the front of Robert Giroux’s private box, begun conducting the orchestra. In another, he is seen backstage congratulating one of the performers. Sidney Nolan gives the following account:
I do remember that night at the opera in New York, with Bob Giroux. There was a dinner with a course between each act. And Cal was pretty high and he kind of did in the dinner. The opera was Don Carlos. And as we were having the first course Cal started quoting remarks that some dead friend had made about the various people present. Things like “Oh, Bill always said you were a nice girl but you had legs like a table.” That was the name of the game—you know, dead friends can’t be contradicted. And he kept it up all night. It was quite awkward. And there’s a scene in Don Carlos where a chap is shot in the dungeons. So there’s this shot and dead silence, and Cal said in a loud clear voice, “Oswald!” And we went around afterwards to see the chap, an Italian tenor—we finally got to see him and Cal said to him, “You were a king tonight.” And he said, “No, no, I sang well, but no king, not a king, just a tenor.” And Cal said, “You are a real king, do you understand?” And then turned to his wife, who was there, and said, “Your man is a king, a king amongst men.” And I thought, Oh God. Then Cal said, “Since you are a king, I’ve brought the Duke of Wellington to meet you.” And the man’s face fell—and I had to disentangle and get out.33
In Robert Giroux’s account, the opera was Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades (or Pique Dame), and after the first act he spotted Nolan in the audience:
The hero of the evening was gentle Sidney Nolan. I saw him in the box (he was probably William Meredith’s guest), and told him how sick Cal was, and wondered how we could persuade Cal to leave. He said, “I don’t think Cal likes opera that much. I’ll suggest that the three of us go back and discuss my illustrations for his book.” I was amazed that it really worked; Cal seemed happy to go. We sat him between us in the taxi, and when we reached his apartment on West 67th Street there, standing in the doorway, with her arms folded, was his doctor. When he wouldn’t get out of the taxi, she actually said to him, “Cal, how can you do this to me?” She got in the front seat. Again Nolan was the hero, and suggested we drive around Central Park. The driver, a typical New York taxi man, said, “What’s this all about?” I told him to keep the meter running and drive around the park. The second time around, Nolan quietly directed the driver to Cal’s hospital. He was much calmer now, and when we got there, Nolan said, “Cal, why don’t you and I go in the hospital. You know you want to get this settled.” He quietly got out with Nolan, and the doctor joined them. I drove back to The Queen of Spades, and called Elizabeth before I went in for the last act, in which mad Hermann keeps muttering, “Three cards! Three cards!” before he’s done in by the Pique Dame.34
These were clearly two different nights at the opera and two quite separate escapades—there is an understandable tendency for Lowell’s friends to muddle the events of one illness with those of another, and during this period Lowell was a frequent opera-goer. What seems certain, though, is that after a day in a hospital in New York, Lowell was driven up to Boston with Nolan and admitted to McLean’s on December 7, 1965. The following day, Dr. Bernard wrote to Blair Clark: “Mr. L. reached McLean yesterday by car, accompanied by Mr. Nolan—left with good feeling toward wife and myself and pleased to be going to McLean’s.” On December 30 Lowell had a letter from Jackie Kennedy.35 She thanked him for a book he had sent her for Christmas—a book on Alexander the Great—and assured him that she had been assiduous in her reading of Joinville and Cato: two earlier Lowell recommendations, it would seem. About Alexander, she was puzzled about Lowell’s reasons for introducing her to the less than lovable world conqueror. It is a touching, slightly bewildered note—she rather envies Lowell, she says, for being “in retreat” over the Christmas season. If she were he, she would stay in McLean’s forever; but Lowell, she believed, had more courage than she did, and would no doubt soon be back in town.
*
Just as there is a tendency for the details of Lowell’s episodes to get blurred in his friends’ memories, so there was almost a probability that his antics would get distorted or embellished as reports of them went into general circulation. There were now “Cal stories” that could be swapped at dinner tables and chuckled over at literary gatherings. The Jackie Kennedy story, the Tecumseh story, the Latvian dancer story, and so on: the more celebrated Lowell became as a poet and as a public figure, the more avid the requirement for fresh pranks. And, more troublingly for those who cared for him, his enemies could all too easily construct from accounts of his delusions a portrait of Lowell as a sort of near fascist—How was it, they could disingenuously wonder, that this renowned spokesman for correct liberal causes persistently “revealed,” in mania, a fascination with tyrants and monsters of the right? Lowell was by now a much envied “star” of literature, and with each new breakdown, each new round of malign gossip, he seemed—almost willfully—to be mocking the supposed invulnerability of his position and prestige.
As for Lowell’s closest friends, they knew that in his illnesses there was always an element of simple mischief, of sly, childishly perverse outrageousness—“I am going to appall you by doing, or being, the worst thing you can imagine,” and so on. But by now they had seen it all so many times, the shock tactics no longer had much sting. In letters these friends would now make only passing reference to Lowell’s latest “crack-up.” It was not that “everyone’s tired of my turmoil”—although many were; it was more that everyone was now used to it, and knew that it was almost certainly incurable. A letter from Allen Tate to Peter Taylor, written a week after Lowell had been admitted to McLean’s, provides some indication of the tone that was now being taken by his friends—still deeply sympathetic, but resigned and (as Taylor himself said) “one has to laugh”:
I was in N.Y. last week and heard a play-by-play account by Stanley Kunitz of the purchase of Tecumseh. The statue, it appears, is now back with the dealer, who will not refund the $1,000 deposit; it remains with him as a credit towards the purchase later of another “work of art.” I have not heard about Cal’s debut as an opera conductor. All this is very sad. Stanley fears that the gap is closing, that the seizures are becoming more frequent. Elizabeth assured me on the telephone that the present upset is milder than the others; at least there was no Lady Poetess, or dancer, this time. I feel that the crush on Madame Jacqueline is an improvement in the direction of sublimation. Perhaps we should encourage it, even going so far as to implore Madame’s assistance as a sort of therapy-at-a-distance. Wystan Auden told me that Cal had told him that I had written last summer 800 lines because I was away from “that stupid girl from Boston.” I wrote 200. To exaggerate only fourfold indicates real restraint in Cal.36
A week before Lowell was admitted to McLean’s he had agreed that his name be put forward as a candidate for one of England’s more eccentric academic posts: the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford. Even if Lowell had not been in an elated mood, he would have relished the sheer quaintness of the job, and the small, donnish dramas that surrounded it. The Poetry Professorship was not a conventional university appointment; indeed, it was famous for offering “no power, little work, and less money.” For three lectures a year the Professor would receive a token £300 (then $840); and he would be expected to serve a five-year term. The drama of the thing, though, derived not from the job itself but from the time-honored method of deciding who should get it. The Poetry Professorship was the one Oxford chair that was decided by election. Every five years the university’s thirty thousand or so Masters of Arts were entitled to vote for one or another of the nominated candidates—but they had to vote in person, and they had to wear the regulation cap and gown. It was all faintly absurd, but Oxford loved it; during the buildup to an election, high tables would be abuzz with barter and intrigue, and the weightier national newspapers would fol
low the campaigns with full front-page solemnity.
It is not clear how much Lowell knew about the job when Charles Monteith, of his London publisher Faber and Faber, proposed his nomination; it may well have been enough for him that the post had in the past been held by some illustrious figures—Matthew Arnold, W. H. Auden, Robert Graves—and that, were he to be elected, he would be Oxford’s first non-British Poetry Professor. On November 27 he cabled to Monteith: “Propose my name if you have the courage to do so.”
With Lowell’s agreement secured, Monteith began recruiting sponsors for his candidacy, and within days had enlisted the support of substantial Oxford figures, such as Sir Maurice Bowra (the Warden of Wadham College), Isaiah Berlin, Professor Nevill Coghill (Merton Professor of English Literature) and Mr. Alan Bullock (Master of St. Catherine’s). He also persuaded W. H. Auden and Cecil Day Lewis (another previous Professor) to sponsor Lowell’s candidature. Auden’s agreement was offered, though, with a cautionary postscript:
I am entirely in agreement…. I think, however, that his supporters should be aware, if they aren’t already, that Cal has times when he has to go into the bin. The warning signals are three a) He announces that he is the only living poet b) a romantic and usually platonic attraction to a young girl and c) he gives a huge party.37
By the time Auden’s reply arrived, Lowell was of course already in “the bin.” News had reached Monteith of his performance at the opera, and there was an uneasy period when it seemed likely that Lowell might make an appearance in London (he had agreed to do a BBC interview with Malcolm Muggeridge). But the visit was canceled; Monteith wrote back in reassuring terms to Auden, and the campaign continued to build strong support.
The Lowell lobby in Oxford, however, had already made a vital tactical mistake. They had neglected to solicit the support of Enid Starkie, the reader in French literature at Somerville College. Miss Starkie had organized the campaigns of Day Lewis in 1951 and Auden in 1956, and was indeed celebrated for her labors in this field (as well as for wearing red underwear and a French sailor’s hat, though not, so far as anybody knew, “a turtle-necked French sailor’s jersey”). Starkie was piqued by the oversight, and set about organizing a campaign of her own; her candidate was the very English, indeed very Oxford, poet Edmund Blunden (well known for his writings on the First World War, but associated also with the pre-modernist Georgian poets: a critic in the thirties had nicknamed him “the Merton fieldmouse,” and Lowell in 1946 had called him “heavy, clumsy, careless, academic and sentimental”). It was, Monteith concedes, “an inspired choice”:
I think the truth is that Enid was extremely miffed that she hadn’t been approached first. I think if only we’d had the nous to approach her straight away, we’d have wrapped it up. And she picked Blunden, which was of course an inspired choice on her part. It untapped a great deal of crypto-xenophobia, I think. Blunden had of course been a fellow of Merton, and he was liked very much. There were lots of people around who remembered Blunden very well and liked him—and he was a very nice man. And a large number of people came floating in like backwoods peers to vote for the British poet, the war hero, all that kind of thing. When it came to the actual voting, I remember myself running into people like Roger Fulford brought down from the wilds of north Lancashire simply to vote proudly for Blunden—it was like voting for England. It was a brilliant choice.38
A week before the election (to be held on February 5,1966) Starkie had collected over three hundred signatures to support Blunden’s candidacy, and although Lowell was evidently backed by the students and by the London literary magazines, his nomination was endorsed by a mere forty names. Lowell’s men would contend that theirs were “quality names,” and that only a handful of Starkie’s three hundred were in the same league. Starkie, even so, toiled on right up to polling day, and Lowell’s chief Oxford backer, Maurice Bowra, was soon reduced to blustering protests about her vulgar methods:
When I knew she was going to fight me, we both agreed we wouldn’t go round collecting names. It degraded the whole thing. This was a serious academic affair until Dr. Starkie turned it into something like the Oxford and Cambridge boat race. We’ll be standing on Magdalen Bridge selling rosettes next.39
On February 6 the New York Times announced:
LOWELL DEFEATED FOR OXFORD CHAIR:
Oxford has repelled the American poetical invasion…. The new professor of poetry at the university will be Edmund Blunden of Britain. The voting was 477 to 241…. Mr. Lowell said here yesterday of Mr. Blunden’s victory, “I think it’s a swell choice. I have read his poetry and admired it for years.”
The report in the New Statesman was headed “Someone Has Blundened,” and Stephen Spender wrote a letter to the London Times suggesting that, next time round, the undergraduates should be allowed to vote. Lowell himself may well have been more irked by the result than he pretended. It was a month after the event that he wrote to Charles Monteith:
I hope you haven’t [sic] I have retired into a morose silence after Oxford. I very much enjoyed your cable and letter and the stream of clippings—a marvellous comic novel, every word, not American, but English. Then I’m glad Blunden got it in the end; he is a good poet and I was encroaching on his yard.40
Throughout the summer of 1966, Lowell worked on an adaptation of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound—this in response to a commission from Peter Brook of London’s Royal Shakespeare Company—and prepared his volume Near the Ocean for the press. The book was to be illustrated with drawings by Sidney Nolan, and would include his “Near the Ocean” sequence, two other short poems (an elegy for Roethke and the poem “1958,” much of which he had salvaged from the first draft of “Waking in the Blue”). He also included a number of imitations—of Dante, Juvenal and Horace, as well as the two seventeenth-century Spanish poets Góngora and Quevedo. These had been written during the summer of 1962 and could therefore have been included in For the Union Dead; it is probable, though, that Lowell had not then thought them worthy of book publication. The Dante and the Juvenal are painstakingly closer to their originals than anything in Imitations—“Maybe I felt ragged by people telling me I wasn’t close enough”41—and these take up eighteen of the book’s forty or so pages. Lowell’s prefatory note to Near the Ocean has a rather strained and hopeful ring: “The theme that connects my translations is Rome, the greatness and horror of her Empire…. How one jumps from Rome to the America of my own poems is something of a mystery to me.”
Lowell seems to have written no poems of his own throughout 1966; indeed, not since the summer of 1965. His decision to put together a new volume at this stage suggests either that he felt himself to be at something of a dead end, or that the public or occasional aspect of poems like “Waking Early Sunday Morning” made him see the book as his timely contribution to the intensifying antiwar campaign. But there was no suggestion of haste in the book’s actual production. When it appeared in the spring of 1967, its lavish appearance was derided by most of the reviewers:
It is a pretentious volume; printed on expensive paper, bound in heavy cloth and stamped in three colors, decorated with twenty-one drawings by Sidney Nolan, designed lavishly and wastefully in an outsized format, jacketed in varnished sixty pound stock—in short, a very self-conscious looking collector’s item.42
Or, as David Kalstone put it, more equably, in Partisan Review: “the slick coffee-table design of the volume entirely misrepresents the poems, which, at their best, challenge things that are shiny and bright.”43 Perhaps, sensing a strain of vulgarity in his wish to get a book out quickly, Lowell had been anxious that its physical appearance should seem leisured and aloof. According to Hayden Carruth in the Hudson Review, the book’s publication “had been postponed several times, and … the price had been announced progressively at $4.95, $5.50 and $6.00. Why?”
There were moments during the summer at Castine when Lowell would confess that his retreat into the “prosing” of Aeschylus might simply be a way of “escaping my dest
iny.” He could, he said, “bury” himself in Prometheus: “Often three or four hours would go by before I looked up, and saw low tide changed to high.” But on the other hand, “Oh destiny, where is it?”44 He wrote this on July 16, 1966, two days after learning of yet another death. On July 11 Delmore Schwartz’s body had been found in a corridor of the Columbia Hotel in New York; he had suffered a heart attack. Lowell had not been close to Schwartz since those months in 1946 when he had shared a house with him in Cambridge; they had quarreled then over Schwartz’s supposed flirtation with Jean Stafford, and a year later Schwartz had been none too pleased to hear of Lowell’s association with his ex-wife, Gertrude Buckman. In 1959, though, Schwartz had responded warmly to the poem Lowell addressed to him in Life Studies and had lavishly praised the “new style” poems in that book: “an intensity so moving it is heartbreaking.” In the same letter, he also thanked Lowell “for the money and for the very nice things you say about my own work.”45
Lowell, in fact, had for some time been nervous of the idea of Delmore Schwartz, of his decline from early promise, of the ways in which he had wasted his real talent, and towards the end he had avoided Schwartz because of “his suspiciousness, his paranoia, his setting of people against each other.”46 In 1966, though, Lowell remembered the Schwartz of “humorous early days—all good sense and promess [sic]!” Some of this, he felt, had lasted, but “in flashes, and mostly with young acquaintances in bars.”47 On hearing of his death, Lowell wrote to William Meredith: