by Ian Hamilton
Nolan had gone to Milwaukee with Lowell in 1968, and had also seen him regularly in Boston and New York. There are at least a dozen poems in Notebook that he can similarly “explain” but not illuminate: he will recognize snatches of his own conversation, or lines from books that he knew Lowell was reading at the time, and he can also identify characters and situations. But, as with “The Misanthrope and the Painter,” the poem in question very often stays elusive—or if not that, then trifling or self-indulgent.
Other friends can provide a service of this sort with other poems; there are letters in libraries which will reveal that “Friend Across Central Park” (p. 66) is addressed to Jackie Kennedy, or that Irving Howe is the “New York Intellectual” (p. 112), or that Allen Tate couldn’t remember telling Lowell’s daughter, Harriet: “I love you now, but I’ll love you / more probably when you are older” (p. 73); and the score or so amusing literary anecdotes—about Eliot, Ford, Jarrell, Pound—can be verified or contradicted. Such knowledge does not always generate forgiveness, and often Lowell’s opacity seems merely mischievous or vain. In the end, though, nothing much can be got from Notebook without giving some measure of assent to the hit-or-miss manner of its composition: for Lowell himself, it remained a text that he could tamper with, add to, and finally break into separate parts. It is a weird, unshapely monument to his belief that his experience had somehow not been served respectfully if it had not been transmuted into literature: the near literature of Notebook made it possible for him to “meathook” the mundane.
Published in June 1969, Notebook 1967–68 was received in most quarters with awkward respectfulness—“complex and imperfect … a propitiatory act to the modern god of chaos,” said William Meredith in the New York Times Book Review. The book’s sheer size was felt to compensate for its obscurity, its line-by-line unevenness, and the historic sketches—a gallery, this, of Lowell’s favorite “despotic gangsters”: Attila, Caligula, Napoleon and Hitler—caused several reviewers to marvel at his understanding of “the violence of our history and the moral stench of power.” A year later, Lowell was to publish a revised version, which he called simply Notebook—“about a hundred of the old poems have been changed, some noticeably. More than ninety new poems have been added”—and there was by then rather more resistance to his new fecundity: Donald Hall, for instance, spoke of “the seedy grandiloquence” of Notebook and dismissed the whole thing as “self-serving journalism.”9 In 1969, though, the feeling was that this almost official “major U.S. poet” had estimably tried to land The Big One.
*
Lowell had completed his final revision of Notebook 1967–68 in February 1969. In January he visited Canada and Newfoundland—“the setting of my grandfather’s longest and best-loved novel the New Priest of Conception Bay (really, you can look on a large Northern map)”10—and at the end of February he set off for a two-week tour of Israel. The plan then was for Lowell to go to Italy for a performance in Turin of The Old Glory and then to meet up in Spain with Hardwick and the Nolans (Sidney and his wife, Cynthia). Relations with Hardwick, though, seem to have been tense during the winter of 1968–69. Lowell again got through these months without a breakdown, but a letter he wrote Hardwick on January 9, 1969, suggests that the two years since his last illness had not been free of turbulence: there were his Cambridge infidelities (which he seems to have made little effort to hide) and also, it seems, a new attachment to the stimulus of alcohol:
I have been hard going the last couple of years, tho when haven’t I been? I am going to do everything to cut down on the drinking, even stop if I must…. Also, even harder, a pledge to try to do my duties and answer things. Can I become the pillar never absent from the family hearth? I love: your varied interests, your refreshing teaching, your neat clothes, your capacity for keen conversation and argument and most for our lovely child. You know it’s hard, I seemed to connect almost unstopping composition with drinking. Nothing was written drunk, at least nothing was perfected and finished, but I have looked forward to whatever one gets from drinking, a stirring and a blurring? I’ll really try as a child might say, but even the Trinity can’t make the crooked stick straight—or young again.11
Lowell arrived in Tel Aviv on March 6, 1969. His itinerary would take him to Nazareth, the Golan Heights, Jerusalem and Jericho: he was expected to give readings, to visit libraries, and to do the rounds of local literary figures, although—as he later reported—“At the University of Texas I met far fewer Americans than here.” On March 6 he wrote to Hardwick:
But I have the shakes. When I lift the coffee cup to my lips at breakfast table, I don’t know whether I can get it there. God, have mercy on me—may I not die far from you! Love (This is lovely if I woke a 100 years younger. Love again I miss you so.
And, in the same envelope:
My dearest, adored Lizzie
My hand almost shakes too much to write. I’ll see a doctor in a few minutes. I only pray to God that I see you and Harriet again, dearest!
Not surprisingly, when this letter reached Hardwick three days later, it “hit [her] like a bomb”:
After a few attempts to get Dr. Platman, unavailing, a few wondering fears of how I could get to you, I just collapsed in tears and called Barbara [Epstein], and put to good experience her executive years on the phone at the NYR by getting my loved one on the phone. I’m utterly relieved that you were there, thankful. And of course ecstatic to find you better…. Darling, I won’t let you go so far away ever again.12
By the time Hardwick wrote this letter Lowell had recovered sufficiently to move on to the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. From there he wrote to her on the tenth:
Dear Heart: I guess this has time to arrive before you depart. So loved to hear your voice—4 days ago I went thru a trauma and daze of thinking it couldn’t be possible I’d never meet you again. Not so much trouble, just high blood pressure, trembling of foot and hand—remedy don’t climb high places, overdrink, stay up too late (all the old things), and take pressure pills.
Lowell’s attack was never satisfactorily explained, although Hardwick thinks it was caused by thyroid medication prescribed by Lowell’s doctors to combat a possible side effect of lithium. Later on, Lowell wrote about his “trauma” to John Berryman:
I thought I’d had a stroke, but it turned out to be largely a wrong prescription. These wretched little black splinters mortality hits us with. Well, we both know it. I’d like to scorn it, not quite a Yeats. It seems silly to triumph that much. He too knew he couldn’t.13
Lowell spent the summer of 1969 in Castine with Hardwick and Harriet—“very cozy times here with hot weather and cold”—and in September resumed his split life, shuttling between Harvard and New York. His view of New York was as “jaundiced” as it had been a year earlier: “I’ve come back to New York for some reason with feet of stone … this place hammered together with stone, dirt and bad sounds! Anyway I feel autumnal, my feet drag.”14 And Cambridge offered only “riches of solitary speculation”:
Most of my close friends are gone from Harvard…. Is there anything more last man alive than a dinner with one’s self: One resolves to stop doing what one doesn’t enjoy. But of course it’s not that easy. It’s not that easy to say one now knows better what one wants than in earlier days. Still, it’s all pretty good, if we could only slow and hurry time at will.15
The Gowries had by this time left Harvard, and Lowell’s two closest Cambridge friends were William Alfred and the poet Frank Bidart. Bidart had joined Lowell’s writing class in 1966:
I was auditing it as a graduate student, and I was showing him poems of mine in his office hours. I’ve never known anyone else who did anything like this. He had what amounted to an open workshop once a week for two, two and a half hours, from, say, eight-thirty or nine in the morning to about eleven or twelve. He had this instead of having individual conferences with his students. People would bring their poems and sit around a desk and pass them around and everybody would talk about them
. You didn’t have to be connected to Harvard at all. He welcomed anybody. That was what was so extraordinary. Obviously, if your poems were liked you were a little more encouraged to come back, but a lot of people came again and again who had nothing to do with Harvard.16
Towards the end of the fall semester, 1966, Lowell had begun to speed up: “It was so painful in class,” Bidart recalls, “because this very brilliant person would start reading a student poem aloud and he couldn’t get through a line. He would read half of one line and his eye would skip down to the next line” Bidart visited Lowell at McLean’s in January 1967 and their friendship had developed from this point; but it was not until the fall term of 1969 that they formed what Bidart calls their “working relationship”:
When Grey Gowrie left for England and Richard Tillinghast left for Berkeley, Cal was a lot lonelier and I got to know him much better partly because he didn’t have his closest friends anymore—his closest friends among the students, I mean, because he would of course see Bill Alfred a lot. He had a real sense of loss that the people he felt most comfortable with were gone. Cal was always eager to hear criticism. He wanted you to like his poems, obviously, but he didn’t want you just to be a yes man. He once said the best reader of your work was someone who was crazy about your work but didn’t like all of it—and that’s certainly the way I felt. I can remember one afternoon in his rooms at Quincy House—I said I didn’t think this line was quite right, or something, and he changed it right in front of me, and it was unnerving, it was scary. It was a little like going into a museum and you say, “I’m not crazy about that arm,” and the statue moves. It was really unnerving. In a way, one didn’t want to have that much effect.17
By fall, 1969, Lowell was already at work on revisions to Notebook 1967–68, and he enlisted Bidart as a kind of chief adviser or assistant:
He started making lists of revisions, and we started going through these revisions and really talking about them. And that was really the beginning of our working relationship. I liked the poems very much, but I thought they were often too hard, too obscure. He often did not know when something was unclear. It’s not that he was trying to write something that opaque. So at that point I started seeing everything, I think, and particularly these two-and three-line revisions that he was making lists of.18
In December 1969 Lowell was back in New York, and he asked Bidart to join him there to continue the Notebook revisions. Bidart stayed in the studio at West 67th Street for a week in January 1970 and “we worked all day for about a week”:
These pages of revisions were very complicated and Farrar Straus wanted cleaner copy, so he asked me to help him put it together. That was the first time I ever stayed with him. He was making more revisions, but we were also typing these one-and two-line revisions into copies of the poems so the printer would be able to decipher all this. He was typing in one room and I was typing in the other. He just never stopped. He couldn’t type a poem without making a change.19
During the same fall semester that Lowell began working with Bidart, he formed another friendship with one of his students. Martha Ritter, at twenty-one, had joined Lowell’s class that fall and was writing a thesis on Notebook:
He said I could come and sit in on sessions he had with Frank Bidart. Every week the poems he had written that week were gone over by Frank and Cal. He told me, in that funny way he had of being sardonic and friendly at the same: “If you keep quiet in the corner, you can listen and take notes.”20
Ritter would occasionally be allowed to contribute one or two revisions of her own: “And I’d feel terrific, as if I’d become one of the guys.”
It was quite soon that I started seeing him alone—probably about October. He had a lot of invitations—to publishing parties, all kinds of readings, that kind of stuff. But he did feel quite alone. I would go to his rooms at Quincy House and spend quite a lot of time with him. Yes, I fell in love with him: gradually, during that fall. We developed these very secret kind of domestic interstices. I would go and cook things and type up poems and make typographical errors and invent new words.21
Lowell made it clear to Ritter that he “was very proud of the fact that he was one of the very few people he knew who’d had such a long marriage.” Unless he got sick, he said, he would never think of leaving Hardwick:
I think one of the attractions was that I was quite untouched; I was a virgin, and this fascinated him. He told me he had never slept with a woman who was a virgin. I think for him women were somehow distant, mythological, as if they were to be studied—as if he was watching them, like a child. Yes, he was conscious he was treading on dangerous ground. He would talk about it and was upset about it—almost ashamed. But we couldn’t keep away from each other. He said something to me, acknowledging that my love was greater than his. He said that most people can say that they love, but very few people can say they have been loved. And the fact that I loved him so deeply was an incredible thing to him.22
Towards the end of the fall semester, Lowell accepted a visiting professorship at All Souls, Oxford, for the spring of 1970. Ritter suggested that she abandon her thesis and join him in Oxford; Lowell persuaded her that she should complete her academic work: “Even though the effort was to keep his marriage together, this didn’t rule out the far future.” Ritter determined that she would graduate and then follow Lowell to All Souls; or, indeed, to wherever he might be.23
Lowell’s All Souls appointment would begin in April 1970, and he planned first to holiday in Italy with Hardwick. Between January and March he saw Ritter a few times in New York; looking back, Ritter now thinks that by this time he was “trying to distance, to change things.” But there had been no explicit break before he left for Europe, and he was aware that Ritter’s intention was to follow him.
Lowell’s own intention was to have his wife and daughter join him for a year in England. Arrangements had been made for Harriet to take time off from her New York school and for West 67th Street to be let to the novelist Carlos Fuentes. Hardwick also gave up her teaching job at Barnard College for one year. After Italy, Lowell would travel on to Oxford and shortly afterwards Hardwick would return to New York to settle the last details of their move.
Notes
1. R.L. to A. Alvarez, July 30, 1968.
2. Notebook 1967–68 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), p. 159.
3. Ibid.
4. Notebook 1967–68, p. 17.
5. R.L., draft autobiography, 1955–57 (Houghton Library).
6. Ibid.
7. Notebook 1967–68, p. 92.
8. Sidney Nolan, interview with I.H. (1980).
9. Donald Hall, Review, 29–30 (Spring-Summer 1972). See also review by I.H. in Times Literary Supplement, December 25, 1970, reprinted in A Poetry Chronicle (London: Faber & Faber, 1973).
10. R.L. to Peter Taylor, February 6, 1969.
11. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, January 9, 1969.
12. Elizabeth Hardwick to R.L., March 9, 1969 (Houghton Library).
13. R.L. to John Berryman, September 9, 1969 (University of Minnesota Libraries).
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., September 25, 1969 (University of Minnesota Libraries).
16. Frank Bidart, interview with I.H. (1981).
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Martha Ritter, interview with I.H. (1981).
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
22
Before his arrival at All Souls, Lowell received another English offer: a teaching appointment at the University of Essex, to begin in October 1970. The two jobs could hardly have been less alike. All Souls was unique among Oxford colleges: it had no students, either graduate or undergraduate, and a number of its fellows had no academic function. They might be politicians, clergymen, bankers; selected in the first place for their intellectual distinction, they might use the college as a retreat from their momentous lives in London. From time to time, i
t is contended, Britain’s political destiny has been decided over claret at All Souls—in the late 1930s Lord Halifax discussed Hitler’s “limited intentions” with the editor of The Times, and as one disaffected Fellow wrote in 1966:
in the common room beneath the high towers some of the most catastrophic decisions of the age were contested in vain—the refusal to bring down Mussolini, the refusal to help Republican Spain, the refusal to collaborate with Russia, the refusal to defend Czechoslovakia.1
By the time Lowell got there, All Souls’ reputation for “truly epoch-making political blunders” had largely been forgotten, but—in a period of “student power” and rattled academic self-questioning—the college was now being jeered at as a magnificent anomaly: one of Oxford’s oldest, richest and most beautiful but, to the “radical” observer, provocatively pointless.
Essex, on the other hand, was purposeful, ill-favored and postwar. Built in parkland outside Colchester, this “new university” (as the new universities were called) had been the scene of some of the most fiery student riots of the 1960s. The poet Donald Davie had recently resigned his professorship of literature on the grounds that Essex was overrun by Trotskyists and sociologists, and had indeed decided to abandon not just Essex but the whole of Britain in favor of what he called the “luxury of expatriatism.” Professor Philip Edwards, in his letter offering the job to Lowell, said that after Davie left, “the morale of the department went right down, and tempers were very short. Our well-publicized student riots of May, 1968 made things worse, since Davie found himself on one side of the fence and most of his colleagues on the other.”2 And Davie, when he heard that Lowell was thinking of accepting the Essex post, wrote from Stanford, California, in commiserating terms: “I have despaired of my country, as perhaps you have despaired of yours.”3 Lowell wrote to tell Hardwick of the Essex offer, suggesting that when she came over to England they could inspect the place before finally deciding.