by Ian Hamilton
20. R.L. to Charles Monteith, February 26, 1965.
21. John Thompson, interview with I.H. (1979).
22. R.L., Peter Taylor and Robert Penn Warren (eds.), Randall Jarrell, 1914–1965 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967), pp. 101–12.
23. Ibid.
24. R.L. to Randall Jarrell, April 29, 1965 (Berg Collection).
25. New York Times, October 15, 1965.
26. R.L. et al. (eds.), Randall Jarrell, 1914–1965, p. 112.
27. Jacqueline Kennedy to R.L., January 5, 1965 (Houghton Library).
28. Blair Clark, interview with I.H. (1979).
29. Jacqueline Kennedy to R.L., November 24, 1965 (Houghton Library).
30. Peter Taylor to Allen Tate, December 7, 1965 (Firestone Library).
31. Robert Giroux to Charles Monteith, January 31, 1965.
32. Robert Giroux, interview with I.H. (1979).
33. Sidney Nolan, interview with I.H. (1980).
34. Robert Giroux, interview with I.H. (1979).
35. Jacqueline Kennedy to R.L., December 30, 1965 (Houghton Library).
36. Allen Tate to Peter Taylor, December 14, 1965.
37. W. H. Auden to Charles Monteith, December 20, 1965.
38. Charles Monteith, interview with I.H. (1980).
39. New York Times, February 1, 1966.
40. R.L. to Charles Monteith, March 8, 1966.
41. R.L., interview with D. S. Carne-Ross, Délos 1 (1968).
42. Hayden Carruth, “A Meaning of Robert Lowell,” Hudson Review 20, no. 3 (Autumn 1967).
43. David Kalstone, “Two Poets,” Partisan Review, 34 (1967), 619–25.
44. R.L. to William Meredith, July 16, 1966.
45. Delmore Schwartz to R.L., April 12, 1959 (Houghton Library).
46. Frank Bidart, interview with I.H. (1982). Bidart is here quoting R.L. on Schwartz.
47. R.L. to James Laughlin, August 31, 1966.
48. R.L. to William Meredith, July 16, 1966.
49. R.L. to John Berryman, March 15, 1959 (University of Minnesota Libraries).
50. R.L. to William Meredith, October 3, 1964.
51. R.L. to John Berryman, March 10,1966 (University of Minnesota Libraries).
52. R.L. to Philip Booth, October 10, 1966.
53. Ibid.
54. John Berryman, “Op. post. no. 13,” His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (Faber & Faber, 1969), p. 15.
55. Blair Clark, interview with I.H. (1981).
56. Richard Tillinghast, “Robert Lowell in the Sixties,” Harvard Advocate, November 1979, 14–16.
57. Helen Vendler, “Lowell in the Classroom,” Harvard Advocate, November 1979, 25–29.
58. Judith Baumel, “Robert Lowell: the Teacher,” Harvard Advocate, November 1979, 32–33.
59. Anne Sexton, “Classroom at Boston University,” Harvard Advocate, November 1961.
60. Grey Gowrie, interview with I.H. (1980).
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid.
64. Xandra Gowrie, interview with I.H. (1980).
65. Ibid.
66. Grey Gowrie, interview with I.H. (1980).
20
Lowell’s medical treatment up to 1967 seems always to have combined “drugs” (one or another of the phenothiazines) and “therapy”; that is to say, supportive talk sessions with psychiatrists. Although he had had brushes with analysts, he had never “gone into analysis.” The probability is that even had he wished to be analyzed, it would have been hard to find someone willing to accept a patient with his history of psychotic illness. In 1954 it had been thought that Thorazine (chlorpromazine) was the “wonder drug” that would stabilize him, but thirteen years later it was evident that Thorazine had no preventive function.
In 1967 a new wonder drug made its appearance: lithium carbonate. First tested in Denmark, it had shown remarkable results with manic-depressive patients: its effect was to balance the sufferer between the two poles, as it were, of his affliction—between the extremes of elation and depression. And it seemed to have none of the physical side effects of Thorazine: lithium users did not become sluggish, dazed, somnambulistic. Rather, they might appear suspended, uninvolved, disinclined to “follow through” their feelings: above the battle, they might sometimes seem to be striving for the old intensities, but it would be as if they were always being tugged back to “safety,” to the middle ground; such “side effects,” however, would probably be apparent only to the patient’s closest friends.
The drug itself is a salt formed by reacting the metal lithium with carbonic acid. The theory is that manic-depressives are deficient in this salt; regular blood tests will establish the extent of the deficiency and the appropriate lithium dosage will correct it. The prognosis is that properly monitored lithium treatment can keep a patient stabilized for life. Lowell was at first cautious and whimsical about his new treatment, which seems to have begun shortly after his discharge from McLean’s in the spring of 1967. Perhaps he had been told that the metal lithium was sometimes used in cooling systems for nuclear reactors (though not often, because of its corrosive tendencies) or that, rather poetically, “it burns in air with a brilliant white flame.” But he was ready to give almost anything a try. In June 1967 he wrote to Peter Taylor:
Oh, dear, I now have 3 glasses: far, reading and my old good for nothing which I prefer. Pills for blood pressure, no more tennis singles. But really it’s nothing. I’m in terrific shape! I even have pills that are supposed to prevent manic attacks, something (probably a sugar pill unnoticed when taken or after but which supplies some salt lack in some obscure part of the brain and now for the rest of my life, I can drink and be a valetudinarian and pontificate non-sense.1
Since March, he told Taylor, he had been “on the run”—a performance of his Phaedra in Philadelphia and a visit to London for the opening of Benito Cereno—“the reviews were lousy,” he said. “There were a lot of complaints about it being too short.” Perhaps in order to enliven his brief visit, he announced to the British press that he might now write plays about either Trotsky or the recently killed Malcolm X: “I could probably get him talking. But all the Negroes around him,—I don’t know how they’d talk.”2 His worries on this score were respectfully reported in the quality London papers.
Jonathan Miller had again directed Benito Cereno, and during Lowell’s visit the two of them discussed their next joint project: a Yale Drama School production of Lowell’s adaptation of Prometheus Bound. The National Endowment for the Arts had provided Yale with a $25,000 grant; $10,000 of this would go to Lowell, so that he could attend rehearsals and also hold occasional classes with the Drama School’s “student playwrights.” Lowell wanted Miller to direct, and Robert Brustein, the school’s recently appointed dean, was thoroughly in favor; after all, as drama critic of the New Republic, Brustein had been the most fervent champion of Lowell’s “prose style” in Benito Cereno. Prometheus did not pretend to be in verse. Brustein has written of the Lowell/Miller partnership:
The two men complemented each other strangely, Lowell taciturn and soft-spoken, mournful and reserved; Miller dynamic, convivial, hyperactive, marvelously funny, a cascade of anecdotes and insights always pouring from his lips.3
(Lowell’s mental state in April 1967 can be judged by Brustein’s distribution of adjectives—a few months earlier his description of Miller might happily have fitted Lowell.)
According to Brustein, the production of Prometheus at Yale almost faltered at the outset:
Later I learned that the grant had almost been canceled. President Johnson, enraged to discover that a government agency had awarded money to someone he believed had insulted him, demanded that the award be withdrawn. To the credit of the endowment—then under the chairmanship of Roger Stevens—Johnson’s efforts were resisted. But this represented the first attempt by government to politicize the decisions of the agency.4
President Johnson, though, could hardly have seen the text of Lowell’s Prometheus, since
it was not finished until the last moment; nor is it likely that he had heard rumors that Lowell’s Zeus, in his more dangerously potent moments, might easily be seen as a cartoon of LBJ.
Opening night was on May 9, 1967, and according to the New Haven newspapers, it was “a major social and literary event.” The contingent of notables from New York included “David Merrick, Robert Motherwell, Stephen Spender, Philip Roth, George Plimpton and Susan Sontag.” Opinions afterwards were mixed: there was some complaint about Miller’s decision to set the play in what seemed to be a ruined seventeenth-century castle, and also some uneasiness about Lowell’s “manhandling” of the original. He had, it was complained, turned Io into a dominating mother figure and Prometheus into a mumbling victim of “radical intellectual anxiety.” This last phrase came from R. W. B. Lewis, Yale’s professor of English and American Studies, who also thought that Lowell’s Zeus was “at once vaguer and more frightful than President Johnson”; it was more plausible, he thought, to see the dreadful god as “the true and demonic begetter of the fiercely muddled emotions that Johnson more or less accidentally arouses in us…. the result is a heroic demonstration of the near-impossibility of composing drama under the contemporary circumstances.”5
*
“It is impossible,” says Lowell’s Prometheus, “to think too much about power,” and Lowell’s own nonmanic reflections on this topic had been aired in an interview with the Observer during his March visit to London:
Once you get that enormous Government machine connected with power and world ambition it’s terrifying. And there are a lot of other machines in the world besides America’s: Russia’s is another. I’m haunted by the First World War, when these huge countries, despite inertia—or through inertia—went to war. Nobody could stop it; not even the people running the Governments. We’ve seen this twice in one century, and it’s impossible to see that very much has been done to prevent a third.
I think the best thing—it’s a little chilly to me—would be a sort of pax Americo-Russiana: just coming to terms by trying to keep the lid on the world: and Europe might be in this. I think that’s a strong possibility. It will be very much ‘Two Cheers for Democracy’; faute de mieux kind of thing: an attempt at peace and just-under-peace….6
Optimistic musings of this sort occasioned Lowell’s next appearance in the headlines of the New York Times. On May 17, 1967, he introduced a poetry reading by the Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky, and announced that “both our countries, I think, have really terrible governments. But we do the best we can with them and they’d better do the best they can with each other or the world will cease to be here.” The Times reported an “audible sharp intake of breath” from the audience; Lowell, they said, had not been available for further comment and “Mr. Voznesensky, who has avoided mentioning the Soviet and United States governments during his tour, turned away when asked to comment on the American poet’s remarks.” Lowell, however, had gathered that “Russian writers loathe Mao and couldn’t care less about Ho and what we are doing in Vietnam” and had genially added to his platform speech: “One wishes that in another year there would be a third poet here—a Chinese and a good poet, and one more detached than Chairman Mao.”7 But no one seems to have been much amused.
In June 1967 Lowell was in the newspapers again. He had declined to sign a public appeal to President Johnson to support Israel in its war with the Arab nations. The organizer of the appeal, Charles E. Silberman, explained that “Mr. Lowell’s reason was opposition to all war,” but Lowell swiftly corrected him: “I thought we should have guaranteed the boundaries of Israel and, if necessary, helped to defend them. I did not think the United States should have forcibly opened the Gulf of Aqaba.” He went on to praise Johnson’s neutral stance as “correct and humane” but added, “This war should never have happened; for this Russia and America, the suppliers of weapons, are to blame.”8 But privately he wrote to Peter Taylor: “I am pretending my great-grandmother Deborah Mordecai was a Syrian belly dancer.”9
The real issue for Lowell, though, in 1967 was Vietnam, and throughout the year he was in demand as a speaker and petition signer. He was vehemently opposed to the war, but equivocal about being identified too closely with the “peace movement”: there were many views he did not share with the more fiery of the “peaceniks” and it was not in his nature to join movements that he had no wish to lead. His friend Esther Brooks recalls an occasion in Cambridge that seems aptly to dramatize his general stance:
he found himself committed to read at Harvard for a group which, as it turned out, was one of the many disruptive organizations abounding on the campus at that time. The major part of its members weren’t students of the university at all but were outsiders, there for the purpose of stirring up violence. When my husband and the poet William Alfred and I arrived at the theater and took this fact in, we tried to warn Cal, but he was late getting in from New York and suddenly he was there before us on the reader’s platform—tall, awkward, disheveled, somewhat diffident, and gazing around him in what appeared to be a rather vague and absent way. Then he sat down. Someone wearing a red arm band came from the back of the hall to introduce him as “the great poet of the Revolution,” and a voice somewhere in back of me yelled, “Let’s have the poem ‘Che Guevara.’” Then another voice—“Yay, man, Che Guevara, viva la Revolución!” Cal stood up, muttered something about being a poet, not a revolutionary, and began to read a poem he had written to his daughter Harriet. And so for forty minutes or more he read some of his early poems and some more recent ones, while from time to time a voice from somewhere in the audience would call out for “Che Guevara, man, let’s have the Che Guevara!” But Cal kept on: a new poem for Allen Tate, an older one for George Santayana, something from Life Studies, but no poem for Che Guevara, no Caracas, no March 1 or 2, not a single political poem. However vague or diffident or vulnerable he had seemed at the beginning, he had grasped the situation almost instantaneously and he had set out to defuse its potential explosiveness. He had turned a radical protest meeting into a poetry reading. He had fulfilled his commitment to read but he had not been used.10
In September 1967 Lowell was one of three hundred and twenty signatories to a statement pledging “to raise funds to aid youths who resist the draft and the Vietnam war.” The statement, published as an advertisement in the New York Times and New Republic, called on “all men of good will to join us in this confrontation with immoral authority.” And on September 21 it was announced that “a sizable number” of the signers of the statement would take part in “an act of civil disobedience at the Department of Justice on October 20.” Lowell was one of this number, and his participation has been memorably described by one of his co-protesters, Norman Mailer, in The Armies of the Night.11 Mailer doesn’t just report the event: he also has some shrewd insights into Lowell’s personality—shrewd enough for Lowell later to describe the book as “one of the best things ever written about me.” At first, Mailer presents Lowell as a superior, strangely wounded spirit, a man of high, aristocratic guilts and cosmic sorrows, disdainful of the swirl of opportunism and radical overeagerness in which his ideals have, for the moment, trapped him—but determined, nonetheless, to see the whole thing through.
On the night before the draft-card demonstration there is a public meeting in Washington at which Mailer, Lowell, Dwight Macdonald and Paul Goodman are scheduled to appear. Mailer gets very drunk beforehand, and insists on appointing himself master of ceremonies; he then harangues the audience with obscure jokes and vivid obscenities. Lowell sits on the platform and on his face there is “the expression … of a dues payer who is just about keeping up with the interest on some enormous debt…. I am here, but I do not have to pretend to like what I see.”
As Mailer vigorously rambles on, Lowell continues to sit “in a mournful hunch on the floor, his eyes peering over his glasses to scrutinize the metaphysical substance of his boot, now hide? now machine? now, where the joining and to what? foot to foot,
boot to earth—cease all speculation as to what was in Lowell’s head.” But there is little need for speculation:
Lowell looked most unhappy. Mailer, minor poet, had often observed that Lowell had the most disconcerting mixture of strength and weakness in his presence, a blending so dramatic in its visible sign of conflict that one had to assume he would be sensationally attractive to women. He had something untouchable, all insane in its force: one felt immediately that there were any number of causes for which the man would be ready to die, and for some he would fight, with an axe in his hand and a Cromwellian light in his eye. It was even possible that physically he was very strong—one couldn’t tell at all—he might be fragile, he might have the sort of farm mechanic’s strength which could manhandle the rear axle and differential off a car and into the back of a pickup. But physical strength or no, his nerves were all too apparently delicate. Obviously spoiled by everyone for years, he seemed nonetheless to need the spoiling. These nerves—the nerves of a consummate poet—were not tuned to any battering.
Mailer then turns on Lowell with some imagined invective: What right have “you, Lowell, beloved poet of so many” to condemn me, Mailer, the ruffian whose element is “dirt and the dark deliveries of the necessary”; “How dare you scorn the explosive I employ.” This was Lowell’s reward for having, at one moment, looked up from his shoe and given Mailer a “withering glance, saying much, saying ‘Every single bad thing I have ever heard about you is not exaggerated.’” And now, with the meeting reduced to near disarray by Mailer’s boorish clowning:
Lowell with a look of the greatest sorrow as if all this mess were finally too shapeless for the hard Protestant smith of his own brain … fell backward, his head striking the floor with no last instant hesitation to cushion the blow, but like a baby, downright sudden, savagely to himself, as if from the height of a foot he had taken a pumpkin and dropped it splat on the floor. “There, much-regarded, much-protected brain, you have finally taken a blow” Lowell might have said to himself for he proceeded to lie there, resting quietly….