Our Savage Art

by William Logan

  A letter writer may tattle his secrets only to find, when coat is turned or heart broken, that his words hound him like revenants. (Many a lover has demanded the return of his billets-doux or paid hard cash for the privilege. Better, perhaps, to follow the iron words of the Iron Duke—threatened with exposure by one of his mistresses, Wellington is said to have thundered, “Publish and be damned!”) Since the letter’s words are sounded for private ears rather than the mobbish ears of the public, how much can we trust them? Rare is the writer who doesn’t play to his audience, seduce by his gossip or gossip of seductions, use discretion to be indiscreet, salt his pages with what must be taken with salt.

  Nothing a writer writes can be trusted (there’s no gospel truth even in the Gospels)—facts are altered by will or whim, to make a point or a joke, to comfort a friend or confuse an enemy. Writers are guilty in letters of their share of pettifoggeries and persiflage, of white lies and red herrings, humbling themselves before their elders, bowing when they should be brazen, praising to the skies some book meant for the sties. Yet for all their insecure facts and intransigent fictions, indeed in part because of them, letters seem to draw us closer to the devious imagination behind them.

  The letters in The Letters of Robert Lowell are peculiar not least for their antic honesty. A young man trying to wheedle his way into Pound’s household might be inclined to flatter. Although Lowell praised the Cantos in the letter following (“like lily pads on a lake: a flat surface swaying with vigorous and beautiful images”), he wrapped a nettle of criticism inside a question: “Can the main current of English literature float such a vast quantity of spondees [sic] and compound nouns?” Lowell could be candid to the point of cruelty, especially during his bouts of mania (he learned tact from the Tartars); but the dry, harried scruples and homely truths of these letters were, without being prickly or petty, the sort few writers dare—he even criticized Pound’s definition of poetry. “I don’t flatter,” Lowell wrote Robert Frost some years later, while praising Frost’s poems. However graciously praise falls when it doesn’t fall like fawning, in such rectitudes there’s a thorn waiting.

  A poet begins in the threats and responsibilities of language (Auden claimed to be far more interested in a young poet who liked “hanging around words listening to what they say” than one who claimed to have “important things” to express). In Lowell’s college letters, we hear the earliest scratchings, the casual densities of expression, before he had written a memorable line of poetry—Lowell told Pound he felt “choked with cobwebs” and his parents that he didn’t want work as a “comma-pruner for Atlantic Monthly or head pencil sharpener” for his father’s brokerage firm. Compare this to the adult whose adjectives sometimes strike like rattlers. On solitude: “It doesn’t drug me, but I get fantastic and uncivilized.” Florence “is gray and sand-colored, Bostonish, compact, very unvegetable.” Bostonish! Unvegetable! When his third wife suffered nervous depression, she nevertheless remained “quite lively, oxlike and functioning”—oxlike conveys the deadening lethargy of nervous illness better than any diagnosis.

  It would be too simple to suggest that Lowell’s talents lay in such virtuoso brushwork, the comic and adjectival touches akin to the finishing strokes by which the master leaves his imprint on an apprentice’s canvas. Lowell’s poems are littered with brilliant phrases, phrases that learned to let syntax not just marshal thought but be twisted into it, like the fibers of a rope. The muscle-bound rhythms of his early verse were never entirely banished—even his free verse is full of metrical angles and wounds—but he learned the appearance of ease, even when the verse was uneasy. In the late poems, there’s still a sense of violence ready to break out—Lowell never found the sweetness and grace he admired in Elizabeth Bishop. When he imitated her in “Skunk Hour,” he could manage only rueful, poisoned self-regard.

  After a long bout of reading, Lowell complained, “My head rocks, as though it held the lantern-slides of the world.” Such images landscape an inner realm, the realm from which the poems came. What in poems entertained a certain severity, in a letter could be merely entertainment (in poems, Lowell’s seriousness darkened the glint of humor). Of a pair of his father’s hairbrushes: “On my own hair, their action has been perplexed, like clearing a swamp with a toy-lawn mower.” This genial self-mockery Lowell rarely dared in poems, but in letters his character is bulked out by a joking, genuine humility. Lowell’s eye for frailty makes him seem exposed and fragile, perhaps because we are most vulnerable to our own comedies if not armed against those of others. After his mother visited Lowell and his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, in Florence, he wrote,

  She is a very competent, stubborn, uncurious, unBohemian woman with a genius for squeezing luxury out of rocks. That is, she has a long memory for pre-war and pre-first-world war service; and thinks nothing of calling the American ambassador if there’s no toilet-paper on the train.

  Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was born to a minor branch of an important New England family—his mother’s ancestors had come over on the Mayflower, and his relatives included Jonathan Edwards, the astronomer Perceval Lowell, and the Revolutionary War general John Stark. Lowell’s parents, the crippled familiars of his memoir “91 Revere Street,” were a study in mutually corrosive insecurities (they destroyed each other from the inside out). Even as a boy, he found himself at odds with his mother—armed like a first-rate with self-indulgent grandeurs and casual cruelties—as well as with his hen-pecked, emasculated father, who left the navy as a commander (that middling rank for timeservers) for a dry-dock career in business. He became, to his wife’s disdain, a minor executive selling soap. This family of long heritage and good connections, which Lowell’s mother was never slow to use (a distant cousin was president of Harvard), was living on borrowed capital. In their ruined and fractious household, during a steamy argument over a girl he longed to marry, at nineteen Lowell knocked his father flat. His mother wanted him committed to a mental hospital.

  Merrill Moore, her psychiatrist, a minor member of the Agrarian movement, tried to heal this breach in the family by channeling Lowell’s literary ambitions. He drove the brutish young man south to Vanderbilt (a significant distance from home, before the interstate highway system) and introduced him to John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate. Soon Lowell had bulled his way into pitching a tent on Tate’s lawn, the southern poet too genteel, or too astonished, to turn the gangling youth away. Following Ransom to Kenyon College,

  Lowell roomed at different times with Randall Jarrell and Peter Taylor. Lowell was a peculiar example of a type familiar to teachers: the wayward and insufferable student, harboring the worm of ambition without a thing yet to show for it, convinced of his own genius but with something cracked or missing in his makeup. He was, however, a young man to whom things happened—eight years after the letter to Pound, Lowell published Land of Unlikeness (1944), the chapbook that first won him attention. His first book, Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), won the Pulitzer Prize; soon after, he was named poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (the position we now call poet laureate). The peculiarity was that Lowell amounted to something.

  Lowell’s search for a father figure forms the underlying drama of these letters. The father’s inadequacy left the son eager to transfer his filial devotion; his relation to the ideal parents of the literary world marks off the limits of his discontent and the measure of his ambition. His letters to the philosopher George Santayana, for example, are full of untroubled and abashed fondness. By then elderly, cared for in a Rome hospital run by nuns, Santayana had been attracted to the Catholic piety in Lord Weary’s Castle. The poet was forced to confess that he had since lost faith and become “something of a mild, secular quietist—usually in trouble though—and an anarchical conservative.” This may have appealed to Santayana, the “Catholic atheist.” He was so drawn to the young man that on Lowell’s marriage to Elizabeth Hardwick he sent a gift of money, to the poet’s embarrassed gratitude. Arriving in Rome after many th
warted plans (Lowell’s conviction as a conscientious objector during the war, a felony, made it difficult to secure a passport), he had a touching meeting with the half-deaf philosopher. Returning a couple of years later, Lowell was crushed to find that Santayana had died only weeks before.

  Lowell became a model and attentive son, visiting Pound in his confinement at St. Elizabeths in Washington, corresponding with Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams and T. S. Eliot, confiding but confident, critical but not captious. He was never deceived about the needs of his fathers. It moved Lowell that Williams once kissed him goodbye after a visit, saying, “You’re my son. That’s what I do to them.” (Surrogate fathers sometimes have no sons of their own or troubled relations with those they have—a son searching for a father may find a father searching for a son.) When his own father died, Lowell said, “He was not a suffering or heroic man, but rather … always smiling or about to smile—and deep under, half-known to him: apathetic and soured.” The difference in susceptibility is marked.

  Lowell showed impeccable taste in choosing fathers, and even more impeccable taste in leaving them behind—when his devotion fell away, they were outgrown and sometimes simply discarded. At nineteen, he wrote Richard Eberhart, only recently his teacher at St. Mark’s, that one of the older man’s poems was “effective enough as a tour-de-force, but only an etymological fanatic armed with a Webster’s dictionary could read through it.” Later, during a manic episode, Lowell gave Tate’s wife the names of her husband’s lovers. Having arranged the publication of Land of Unlikeness and written the preface, then gone to pains to find Lowell a job, Tate remained bewildered by his former disciple. Their earliest breach seems coincident with the moment Lowell had drawn all he could from Tate’s poems. How odd, then, that Lowell so rarely committed the Oedipal betrayal, writing respectfully to his literary fathers into their great age (the modernist generation was spectacularly long lived).

  Lowell had a gift for friendship the poems scarcely reveal (he needed friends the way some people need food). Wounded, at times self-righteous and hectoring (he was not always a stranger to his mother’s noblesse oblige), Lowell had a personality held together with baling wire. Like many men who are a difficult proposition, he was grateful to those who bore his assaults and forgave his affronts. (It’s easy to suggest that in madness the shackles of behavior are discarded, but often madness steals the shackles of our affections instead.) Throughout his life, Lowell stayed close to two friends made at St. Mark’s. It is with hilarity that one reads, in Ian Hamilton’s biography, of the monastic discipline Lowell imposed on them the summer before he entered Harvard (ideal followers, they proved all too compliant to his will)—their regimen included a course of improving reading bound to an improving diet of eels as well as some awful cereal laced with honey.

  Though like most dictators he was blind to his dictatorial bearing, Lowell pricked down the names of friends for jobs, shoved their careers forward, responded with boyish delight when they wrote something remarkable. Friendship is an act of taste as convincing as criticism—his close circle included, apart from Jarrell and Taylor, Elizabeth Bishop, Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, John Berryman, J. F. Powers, Flannery O’Connor, and Theodore Roethke. (Lowell once said that Delmore Schwartz, a man whose friendship it was not hard to mislay, was the only literary friend he’d ever lost.) These friendships were often uneasy (the letters to Mary McCarthy after Hardwick’s harsh and pseudonymous review of The Group show one source of strain). The poet complained of his friends, perhaps forgetting his earlier boast about flattery, that “it’s like walking on eggs. All of them have to be humored, flattered, drawn out, allowed to say very petulant things to you,” while admitting that he probably behaved no better. Perhaps, like many devotions (especially in a man who has lost faith), Lowell’s went a little too far.

  Most of his friends remained indefatigable in return, Peter Taylor rescuing him during a particularly gruesome manic episode. The poet’s relations with Jarrell were cooler, one of many things these letters reveal—Lowell often felt like a spurned suitor for Jarrell’s affections. The older poet’s lavish reviews of Land of Unlikeness and Lord Weary’s Castle had done much to establish Lowell’s reputation. Even the slightly brutal review of The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951) contains some of the fondest things one poet has ever written about another:

  I cannot think of any objection at all to “Mother Marie Therese” and “Falling Asleep over the Aeneid,” and if I could I would be too overawed to make it. “Mother Marie Therese” is the best poem Mr. Lowell has ever written, and “Falling Asleep over the Aeneid” is—is better.

  Still, Lowell was unsure of his ground:

  I’m boiling mad at Randall. … He gave a tremendous Philippic at Harvard against our culture that has no time or taste for poetry—something that would have made Jonathan Edwards sound like Montaigne. Then what with his tennis tournaments, swimming and new enthusiasms had no time to read my poem and never apologized. Ah me!

  Jarrell’s wife suggested, “You and Elizabeth are the kind of people that make friends.” Randall, she said, just wasn’t. Lowell bore this well, but it rankled—Jarrell was the man whose literary judgment he most respected and whose praise he most desired.

  From adolescence, Lowell suffered episodes of nervous distress or elation; his first full-blown manic outbreak occurred when he was thirty-one, and he endured more than a dozen in the three decades remaining to him. There have been arguments enough about the diagnosis. The editor of these letters, Saskia Hamilton, believes the illness was what is now called “mixed mania,” where mania and depression appear in tandem, the patient “simultaneously elated and lethargic.” (I’m not sure this accords with the evidence of the letters—Lowell seems all too wild at the onset of his attacks.) Her attempt to gauge the precise stage of mania in which Lowell wrote certain letters is comically obtuse. Since many letters written between the hailstorms of his illness sound little different, you’d need a theodolite and his doctor’s charts to distinguish one mania from another.

  Lowell’s “enthusiasms,” as he sometimes called them—they were also christened “excitements,” “crack-ups,” “mix-ups”—affected his friendships, his ability to write, and most spectacularly his love life. When the shadows came, the first sign was a talking jag, usually with mention of Hitler or Napoleon. (It was also a bad sign if he began rewriting the classics.) The brilliant talk became too brilliant, a dense and crazed monologue that scared people—those who weren’t aware of his illness sometimes thought it a magisterial performance, just how a Romantic genius was expected to act. Friends who knew the signs could sometimes wrestle him into care; but, if the illness found him among strangers, he could be dangerous—Lowell stood over six feet and could have wrestled a bull. He tried to strangle one lover in an argument over Shakespeare and once ran the streets of Bloomington, Indiana, hollering about the evils of homosexuals and devils, convinced he was the reincarnation of the Holy Ghost. Lowell’s third wife, Caroline Blackwood, grew so nervous around him that any mention of Hitler set her antennae waving.

  Over the years, there were attacks of the most baroque character. The first episode began in 1949 at Yaddo, where he accused the director of harboring Communist spies; continued in New York, where Lowell held Allen Tate at arm’s length out a second-story window while reciting, in a bear’s voice, Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead”; and ended in the unfortunate events in Bloomington. In 1963, while eating lunch at the presidential palace in Buenos Aires, Lowell insulted the general who was about to be made president. Later, having insisted on touring the city’s equestrian statues, Lowell undressed and clambered up beside the bronze horsemen, a half-naked emperor himself. He sent telegrams to the pope and President Eisenhower, anointing himself Caesar of Argentina. Long stays in mental hospitals were the usual result, accompanied by straitjackets, shock therapy, large doses of Thorazine, then slow recovery and remorse. Or, as Lowell put it, “short weeks of a Messianic rather bestial g
low, … then dark months of indecision, emptiness etc.”

  Often there was a woman involved, the attacks attended by Lowell’s crush on some girl and an impulsive decision to leave his wife. More than once, he set up his new inamorata in an apartment and moved in. Whenever he fell for someone, he was eager to begin housekeeping, a mock marriage with a mock picket-fence around it—Lowell was of a domesticating strain that suggests certain discomforts in childhood. The only child hated being alone. Lowell’s poems are the residue of the complications of modern love—For Lizzie and Harriet (1973) and The Dolphin (1973) are as close as the twentieth century came to the distracted sonnets of George Meredith.

  Lowell seems to have been a serial monogamist, though his monogamy was geographic (one city, one woman at a time). As for wives, he preferred novelists, three of them. The strains on his marriage with Hardwick, during which many of these attacks occurred, were heartbreaking. She once said, he reported, that the “only advantage of marriage is that you can be as gross, slovenly, mean and brutally verbose as you want.” Lowell apparently did not recall half what he’d done during his “enthusiasms,” so his letters are short on incident but long on excuses—he wore the battered piety of a good apologist. This worked longer for him than for most.