Robert Lowell: A Biography

by Ian Hamilton

  I have hardly had one real, uninsulting review in America, but many of the English are all that I could ask—comparisons with Yeats’ last poems. Well, that’s secondary—I feel rather like one of the black scorched grasshoppers in Hemingway’s fishing story—burned by notoriety.23

  In the same letter, he discusses his plans for returning to Harvard in September; he had rented a house in Brookline and would resume his old teaching pattern (Elizabeth Bishop had been filling in for him since 1970). On August 31 he wrote to William Alfred:

  It does seem strange returning. The summer tho quiet has been worrying. I am afraid relations with Lizzie are broken off; at least I haven’t heard from her for about two months. The reviews fanned the fire, but I now think the exposure of publication was bound to do it…. I do think the business is blowing away. Was it Calvin or Harry Levin that said acting is a choice of evils. It so often is in little things (that makes them so irritating) then every so often something big is. I must have been right to publish. How could I know?24

  Even so, there was a certain exhilaration in the idea of reappearing at the scene of his most recent crime; he was looking forward to “students who talk,” he said, to his “long religious and gossipy talks” with Alfred, and to the loyal companionship of Frank Bidart. On September 7 he and his English family would arrive in Boston: “weary, plane-squashed, all ages, hardly able to speak our language.”25

  *

  In Lowell’s August 31 letter to William Alfred there is a note of both exhaustion and relief, as if a reckless and turbulent chapter of his life had been heroically survived. He had left his country, he had signed away his wealth, he had risked the condemnation of his dearest friends: the worst, he now might think, was over—and literally “the worst.” Even Lowell could not imagine misdemeanors grander or more comprehensive than those already lived through, or inflicted. Now he could count the profit and the loss in the “familiar air” of Harvard:

  The summer’s end and the month’s end, and now the English heat wave has so far retired that my hands are still and cold as I write. In a week we will be in Brookline. Harvard seems a recovered universe; if I looked in the mirror, I imagine I would have the white beard of father time.

  I don’t know why I am writing you this way. From not having written verse perhaps.26

  For nearly seven years Lowell had written only “sonnets”; between September and December 1973 he wrote nine poems in a relaxed, almost meandering free verse:27 “single poems in short free verse lines about being 56–57.”28 They were also about returning from exile (indeed, one of them was a rewriting of a poem from Lord Weary’s Castle called “Exile’s Return”); the poet sees himself as Ulysses “circling” the geography of the life he left behind:

  He circles as a shark circles

  visibly in the window—

  flesh-vain, sore-eyed, scar-vain,

  a vocational killer

  foretasting the apogee of mayhem,

  breaking water to strike his wake.

  The colors in these new poems are autumnal: “firm brown and yellow, / the all-weather color for death”; “I cannot read everything I’ve written, / it’s a greenless brown”; “things wrong / clothe summer / in gold leaf.” And in all of them there is an elegiac, penitential note:

  Past fifty, we learn

  with surprise and a sense

  of suicidal absolution

  that what we intended and failed

  could never have happened—

  and must be done better.

  He writes to his parents, as if for one last time attempting to resolve their ancient quarrels. In “To Mother” he writes:

  I’ve come home a third time to your Boston,

  I almost lifted the phone to dial you

  forgetting you have no dial….

  Your exaggerating humor,

  the opposite of deadpan

  and so unfunny to a son, is mine now …

  It has taken the years since you died to discover

  you are as human as I am….

  And there are two linked poems: “What We Were” (a monologue spoken by his father) and “Before We Are,” his own middle-aged address to Sheridan—“Three ages are a moment, / the same child in the same picture, / he, I, you, / chockablock, one stamp….” To his old friend Peter Taylor he addresses “The Afterlife,” which, in a letter to Blair Clark, he rightly calls “about the grandest” of the group. In this poem the drastically shortened lines seem, and are probably meant to seem, a symptom of the poet’s shortened breath, his diminished aspirations:

  Southcall—

  a rival couple

  two Tennessee cardinals

  in green December outside my window

  dart and tag and mate—

  young as they want to be.

  I’m not;

  my second fatherhood

  and four years in England

  have made my friends and connections

  twenty years older.

  We are dangerously happy,

  our book-fed faces

  streak like the red birds,

  dart unstably

  ears cocked to catch

  the first shy whisper of deafness.

  This one year killed

  Pound, Wilson, Marianne Moore and Auden;

  the daughters and nieces lose their bloom,

  the inheritors grow

  large and red on middle-age,

  like red roses

  nodding, nodding, nodding.

  Peter, in our boyish years,

  30 to 45,

  when Cupid was still the Christ of love’s religion,

  time stood on its hands.

  Sleight-of-hand.

  Of the deaths that Lowell lists here, the one that mattered most to him was Pound’s, and in January 1973 he had spoken at a Pound memorial gathering in New York:

  It’s not my duty as fellow poet, critic and his friend to defend or clear Pound’s record. I can’t see him as a bad man, except in the ways we all are. I do see him as a generous man to other artists, and this in a way none of us will touch. The Broadcast smears seem, if not acts of madness, at least acts of dementia and obsession….29

  In the same speech he recalled his last meeting with Pound in Rapallo, in March 1965 (when he himself had been fleeing to Egypt in the wake of the Vija Vetra upheaval). Pound was “emaciated, neat in blacks and whites, silver beard, he looked like the covers of one of his own books, or like an El Greco, some old mural, aristocratic and flaking.”

  He held up his blotched, thinned away hands, and said, as if he were joking at them, “The worms are getting to me.” Later, I must have said something about Hamilton or Pennsylvania College, where he had studied. He said “Yes, I started with a swelled head and end with swelled feet.” He was thinking of Oedipus. I said, “You are one of the few living men, who has walked through Purgatory.” Watching me like a cat, and catching my affectation and affection, he answered, “Didn’t Frost say you’d say anything once—for the hell of it?”30

  Pound was almost the last of Lowell’s revered “elders.” A year before, there had been the suicide of John Berryman, certainly the last of Lowell’s “generically” doomed generation. Berryman had jumped to his death (aged fifty-seven) from a bridge over the Mississippi near the University of Minnesota. The papers said: “Mr. Berryman apparently left no note, and the only identification on his body was his name on a pair of glasses and a blank check.” A malicious joke (said by many to have originated with Auden) was that Berryman did leave a note. It read simply: “Your move, Cal.” If Lowell never heard the joke, he did respond to the spirit of it, and in his elegy for Berryman he wrote:

  I used to want to live

  to avoid your elegy.

  Yet really we had the same life,

  the generic one

  our generation offered….

  We asked to be obsessed with writing,

  and we were….

  You got there first.

&
nbsp; Just the other day,

  I discovered how we differ—humor …

  even in this last Dream Song,

  to mock your catlike flight

  from home to classes—

  to leap from the bridge.31

  In an obituary article in the New York Review Lowell says of Berryman that in recent years “as he became more inspired and famous and drunk, more and more John Berryman, he became less good company and more a happening,” and he describes their last meeting in New York:

  I met John last a year or so ago at Christmas in New York. He had been phoning poems and invitations to people at three in the morning, and I felt a weariness about seeing him. Since he had let me sleep uncalled, I guess he felt numbness to me. We met one noon during the taxi strike at the Chelsea Hotel, dusty with donated, avant-garde constructs, and dismal with personal recollections, Bohemia, and the death of Thomas. There was no cheerful restaurant within walking distance, and the seven best bad ones were closed. We settled for the huge, varnished unwelcome of an empty cafeteria-bar. John addressed me with an awareness of his dignity, as if he were Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth’s, emphatic without pertinence, then brownly inaudible.

  His remarks seemed guarded, then softened into sounds that only he could understand or hear. At first John was ascetically hung over, at the end we were high without assurance, and speechless. I said, “When will I see you again?” meaning, in the next few days before I flew to England. John said, “Cal, I was thinking through lunch that I’ll never see you again.” I wondered how in the murk of our conversation I had hurt him, but he explained that his doctor had told him one more drunken binge would kill him. Choice? It is blighting to know that this fear was the beginning of eleven months of abstinence … half a year of prolific rebirth, then suicide.32

  For four years Lowell had felt himself to be reborn, but by 1974 the persistent obsession is with death. The comparison of The Dolphin with the last poems of Yeats had been both heartening and chilling. Lowell had grown his white hair long, and friends were disturbed by his willingness to seem old: his white mane unkempt, his movements effortful, his clothes those of a man who has stopped caring how he looks. In spite of all this, though, Lowell monitored his own health and the health of his friends with a kind of fatalistic dread: “As we get older,” he wrote to Frank Bidart, “we are incurables.” Peter Taylor had had a heart attack, and in the first months of 1974 there was “a deluge of strokes, Hannah Arendt in Scotland, Lillian Hellman in Paris, Frank [Parker] in Cambridge. I’m afraid the strain of giving up cigarettes is suicidal.”

  In January 1974 Lowell and his family returned to England, and Lowell revised his new poems for magazine publication in the spring. In April he visited America again, for a reading tour of Southern colleges—“Vanderbilt, Charlottesville, South Carolina, Washington, almost all the south”—and when he returned to London, there was yet another death, this time unsettlingly close to home: “When we got back we discovered that Israel [Citkovitz] did not answer his telephone. The fire brigade broke into his flat because the police refused and he was found dead in his bed.”33 Citkovitz had had a stroke earlier in the year and had been partly paralyzed and in the hospital for weeks; Lowell had seen him there and had found him “Ten years older in an hour.” A fond, low-key elegy called “In the Ward” has an almost conspiratorial ring:

  You are very frightened by the ward,

  your companions are chosen for age;

  you are the youngest

  and sham-flirt with your nurse—

  your chief thought is scheming

  the elaborate surprise of your escape.

  Being old in good times is worse

  than being young in the worst.34

  To William Alfred, Lowell wrote: “I don’t think you ever met Israel Citkovitz, Caroline’s former husband. He died of a stroke about two weeks ago, not unexpected—maddening, grotesque, rather lovely man. We have lived in the world of his death.”35 And then, as if in some rehearsed drama, July brought the death of Lowell’s Kenyon mentor, John Crowe Ransom. Ransom had been ill for some time, so his death also was “not unexpected.” Its timing, though, helped to plunge Lowell even more deeply into a “grey blank.” He wrote to Peter Taylor:

  John’s death. It does seem right, right that his death should show an untroubling anyone courtesy [Ransom died in his sleep, aged 86]…. He was my teacher and kept me from breaking myself. I’m struggling to write on him.36

  Taylor was also low and fearful after his heart attack, and Lowell writes to him as a companion in “death’s shadow”:

  In depression and even more in travelling, I too go over my life trying to understand it—I think in a way, I never understood it, that it is addition not to be understood just completed…. Yet I can’t live that way, must live with a point to be reached—even a reward card to be won.37

  In October 1974 Lowell was at a party given by the London publisher George Weidenfeld. He was not drinking; indeed, to aid in this latest of several efforts to renounce alcohol, he was taking the drug Antabuse. On October 9 he writes again to Taylor:

  The other night at a large party I suddenly felt an acute nausea as if I had been drinking heavily, then a rather comforting feeling of changing inside to ice, then I was being rolled about by six merry people on a low table, like a gentle practical joke. I had fainted. It may have been from accidentally drinking something like vodka and orange juice, or it may not. The doctors can’t tell. Anyway it’s not serious but it made me feel close to you. I’ve written you a second poem about this and about the years that brought us to now….38

  The poem read, in part, as follows—Lowell revised it for book publication:

  My thinking is talking to you—

  last night I fainted at dinner

  and came nearer to your sickness,

  nearer the angels in nausea.

  The room turned upside-down;

  I was my interrupted sentence,

  an accident tumbled alive

  on a low, cooling black table.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  1974,

  the Common Market,

  the dwarf-Norman fruit-tree

  espaliered to the wall—

  the old boys drop like wasps

  from windowsill and pane.

  This year for the first time,

  even cows seem transitory.

  The Psalmist’s glass-mosaic Shepherd

  and bright green pastures

  seem art nouveau for our funeral.39

  And around the same time, Lowell wrote a similar reminiscing, near-elegiac poem to Frank Parker; it recalls their early friendship at St. Mark’s, the high ambitions they evolved during their 1935 summer at Nantucket: “I want to write,” “I want to paint”:

  We once claimed alliance with the Redskin….

  What is won by losing,

  if two glasses of red wine are poison?40

  After his fainting attack, Lowell was examined by a London heart specialist and “was cleared of any heart trouble, as earlier of lung trouble,”41 but for weeks afterwards he brooded on the incident. In December he responded reassuringly to concerned letters from Elizabeth Hardwick—“my heart and lungs are completely cleared by science. Nothing is durable or easy-moving at our age”42—but to Taylor he continued to dwell on symptoms of decline:

  For several years I haven’t felt my “true self.” Most embarrassing, when I get out of one of the large taxis, the driver sometimes asks if I need help; I take stairs too with a considered seriousness, I forget names and faces as always only more; if I give someone a comic name … I am liable to think it is his name. I forget things, have no memory of where I put my cigarette lighter after a few minutes, no recollection even after I find it irrationally lying on a distant bureau. I act, as all flesh must, my age.43

  In October, Lowell was also writing of “troubled times with the stock market and with Caroline. She is having what we call an acute nervous depr
ession.” He would go to Harvard in the spring without her—“I don’t think we are up to the great expense and weight of moving our whole family to Cambridge”—but he was also now pondering the possibility of a permanent move back to the United States: “There’s the now insoluble question of whether we should live in England or come to America where I can earn and make connections. Well, this will solve itself?” In December it was decided that Blackwood and the children would, after all, join him for the Harvard spring semester, and she flew over to Boston for a week to look at houses. On December 14 Lowell wrote to Frank Bidart:

  I am unable to thank you sufficiently for Caroline’s week, it’s [sic] pleasure and success. I did not want to force her hand about coming to Boston, or even try to make a delightful prospect, until she had seen and judged for herself, both the kind of house and the whole atmosphere. … I see now, as I saw when Caroline determined to fly, that everyone coming with me meant more to me than I know how to say, running through all my nerves … like our San Domingo marriage….44

  It was unlikely that Lady Caroline would have agreed to any permanent resettling in America, whatever the financial advantages. She believed that Lowell became dangerously excited whenever Harvard was in prospect:

  In a new place he wasn’t as threatened by his inner things as he was in the place of his birth. At Harvard it was always touch and go. He was so edgy at Harvard and he was so on the brink all the time—encouraged by all those hangers-on who tried to make him sit up all night drinking.45

  Although lithium had for over four years prevented a full-blown manic attack, there were certainly periods when Lowell’s friends had thought that he might be “on the brink.” During Lowell’s “exile’s return” in the winter of 1973, Jonathan Raban had been teaching in Boston, and he remembers that he and Blackwood had devised a code: if Lowell began to show symptoms of mania, she would telephone Raban and say something to him about “laundry”—Raban should then call for help. The code was never used, but its very devising suggests something of Blackwood’s continuing anxiety. The memory of her 1970 “lock-up” was keen enough for her to be watchful of any “highs”; she was convinced that there were grave risks involved whenever Lowell set foot on his home ground. And there is no reason to suppose that her anxiety did not communicate itself to Lowell.