New Selected Poems

by Robert Lowell

  When I entered Brimmer I was eight and a half. I was distracted in my studies, assented to whatever I was told, picked my nose whenever no one was watching, and worried our third-grade teacher by organizing creepy little gangs of boys at recess. I was girl-shy. Thick-witted, narcissistic, thuggish, I had the conventional prepuberty character of my age; whenever a girl came near me, my whole person cringed like a sponge wrung dry by a clenching fist. I was less rather than more bookish than most children, but the girl I dreamed about continually had wheel-spoke black and gold eyelashes, double-length page-boy blond hair, a little apron, a bold, blunt face, a saucy, shivery way of talking, and … a paper body—she was the girl in John Tenniel’s illustrations to Alice in Wonderland. The invigorating and symmetrical aplomb of my ideal Alice was soon enriched and nullified by a second face, when my father took me to the movies on the afternoon of one of Mother’s headaches. An innocuous child’s movie, the bloody, all-male Beau Geste had been chosen, but instead my father preferred a nostalgic tour of places he had enjoyed on shore leave. We went to the Majestic Theater where he had first seen Pola Negri—where we too saw Pola Negri, sloppy-haired, slack, yawning, ravaged, unwashed … an Anti-Alice.

  Our class belles, the Norton twins, Elie and Lindy, fell far short of the Nordic Alice and the foreign Pola. Their prettiness, rather fluffy, freckled, bashful, might have escaped notice if they had been one instead of two, and if their manners had been less goodhumored, entertaining, and reliable. What mattered more than sex, athletics, or studies to us at Brimmer was our popularity; each child had an unwritten class-popularity poll inside his head. Everyone was ranked, and all day each of us mooned profoundly on his place, as it quivered like our blood or a compass needle with a thousand revisions. At nine character is, perhaps, too much in ovo for a child to be strongly disliked, but sitting next to Elie Norton, I glanced at her and gulped prestige from her popularity. We were not close at first; then nearness made us closer friends, for Elie had a gracious gift, the gift of gifts, I suppose, in a child: she forgot all about the popularity-rank of the classmate she was talking to. No moron could have seemed so uncritical as this airy, chatty, intelligent child, the belle of our grade. She noticed my habit of cocking my head on one side, shutting my eyes, and driving like a bull through opposition at soccer—wishing to amuse without wounding, she called me Buffalo Bull. At general assembly she would giggle with contented admiration at the upper-school girls in their penal black and white. “What bruisers, what beef-eaters! Dear girls,” she would sigh, parroting her sophisticated mother, “we shall all become fodder for the governess classes before graduating from Brimmer.” I felt that Elie Norton understood me better than anyone except my playful little Grandmother Winslow.

  One morning there was a disaster. The boy behind me, no friend, had been tapping at my elbow for over a minute to catch my attention before I consented to look up and see a great golden puddle spreading toward me from under Elie’s chair. I dared not speak, smile, or flicker an eyelash in her direction. She ran bawling from the classroom. Trying to catch every eye, yet avoid commitment, I gave sidelong and involuntary smirks at space. I began to feel manic with superiority to Elie Norton and struggled to swallow down a feeling of goaded hollowness—was I deserting her? Our teacher left us on our honor and ran down the hall. The class milled about in a hesitant hush. The girls blushed. The boys smirked. Miss Manice, the principal, appeared. She wore her whitish-brown dress with darker brown spots. Shimmering in the sunlight and chilling us, she stood mothlike in the middle of the classroom. We rushed to our seats. Miss Manice talked about how there was “nothing laughable about a malaise.” She broke off. Her face took on an expression of invidious disgust. She was staring at me.… In the absentmindedness of my guilt and excitement, I had taken the nearest chair, the chair that Elie Norton had just left. “Lowell,” Miss Manice shrieked, “are you going to soak there all morning like a bump on a log?”

  When Elie Norton came back, there was really no break in her friendliness toward me, but there was something caved in, something crippled in the way I stood up to her and tried to answer her disengaged chatter. I thought about her all the time; seldom meeting her eyes now, I felt rich and raw in her nearness. I wanted passionately to stay on at Brimmer, and told my mother a fib one afternoon late in May of my last year. “Miss Manice has begged me to stay on,” I said, “and enter the fifth grade.” Mother pointed out that there had never been a boy in the fifth grade. Contradicted, I grew excited. “If Miss Manice has begged me to stay,” I said, “why can’t I stay?” My voice rose, I beat on the floor with my open hands. Bored and bewildered, my mother went upstairs with a headache. “If you won’t believe me,” I shouted after her, “why don’t you telephone Miss Manice or Mrs. Norton?”

  * * *

  Brimmer School was thrown open on sunny March and April afternoons and our teachers took us for strolls on the polite, landscaped walks of the Public Garden. There I’d loiter by the old iron fence and gape longingly across Charles Street at the historic Boston Common, a now largely wrong-side-of-the-tracks park. On the Common there were mossy bronze reliefs of Union soldiers, and a captured German tank filled with smelly wads of newspaper. Everywhere there were grit, litter, gangs of Irish, Negroes, Latins. On Sunday afternoons orators harangued about Sacco and Vanzetti, while others stood about heckling and blocking the sidewalks. Keen young policemen, looking for trouble, lolled on the benches. At nightfall a police lieutenant on horseback inspected the Common. In the Garden, however, there was only Officer Lever, a single white-haired and mustached dignitary, who had once been the doorman at the Union Club. He now looked more like a member of the club. “Lever’s a man about town,” my Grandfather Winslow would say. “Give him Harris tweeds and a glass of Scotch, and I’d take him for Cousin Herbert.” Officer Lever was without thoughts or deeds, but Back Bay and Beacon Hill parents loved him just for being. No one asked this hollow and leonine King Log to be clairvoyant about children.

  One day when the saucer magnolias were in bloom, I bloodied Bulldog Binney’s nose against the pedestal of George Washington’s statue in full view of Commonwealth Avenue; then I bloodied Dopey Dan Parker’s nose; then I stood in the center of a sundial tulip bed and pelted a little enemy ring of third-graders with wet fertilizer. Officer Lever was telephoned. Officer Lever telephoned my mother. In the presence of my mother and some thirty nurses and children, I was expelled from the Public Garden. I was such a bad boy, I was told, “that even Officer Lever had been forced to put his foot down.”

  * * *

  New England winters are long. Sunday mornings are long. Ours were often made tedious by preparations for dinner guests. Mother would start airing at nine. Whenever the air grew so cold that it hurt, she closed the den windows; then we were attacked by sour kitchen odors winding up a clumsily rebuilt dumb-waiter shaft. The windows were again thrown open. We sat in an atmosphere of glacial purity and sacrifice. Our breath puffed whitely. Father and I wore sleeveless cashmere jerseys Mother had bought at Filene’s Basement. A do-it-yourself book containing diagrams for the correct carving of roasts lay on the arm of Father’s chair. At hand were Big Bill Tilden on tennis, Capablanca on chess, newspaper clippings from Sidney Lenz’s bridge column, and a magnificent tome with photographs and some American’s nationalist sketch of Sir Thomas Lipton’s errors in the Cup Defender races. Father made little progress in these diversions, and yet one of the authors assured him that mastery demanded only willing readers who understood the meaning of English words. Throughout the winter a gray-whiteness glared through the single den window. In the apoplectic brick alley, a fire escape stood out against our sooty plank fence. Father believed that churchgoing was undignified for a naval man; his Sunday mornings were given to useful acts such as lettering his three new galvanized garbage cans: R.T.S. LOWELL-U.S.N.

  Our Sunday dinner guests were often naval officers. Naval officers were not Mother’s sort; very few people were her sort in those days, and that was her
trouble—a very authentic, human, and plausible difficulty, which made Mother’s life one of much suffering. She did not have the self-assurance for wide human experience; she needed to feel liked, admired, surrounded by the approved and familiar. Her haughtiness and chilliness came from apprehension. She would start talking like a grande dame and then stand back rigid and faltering, as if she feared being crushed by her own massively intimidating offensive.

  Father’s old Annapolis roommate, Commander Billy “Battleship Bilge” Harkness, was a frequent guest at Revere Street and one that always threw Mother off balance. Billy was a rough diamond. He made jokes about his “all-American family tree,” and insisted that his name, pronounced Harkness, should be spelled Herkness. He came from Louisville, Kentucky, drank whisky to “renew his Bourbon blood,” and still spoke with an accent that sounded—so his colleagues said—“like a bran-fed stallion.” Like my father, however, Commander Billy had entered the Naval Academy when he was a boy of fourteen; his Southernisms had been thoroughly rubbed away. He was teased for knowing nothing about race horses, mountaineers, folk ballads, hams, sour mash, tobacco … Kentucky Colonels. Though hardly an officer and a gentleman in the old Virginian style, he was an unusual combination of clashing virtues: he had led his class in the sciences and yet was what his superiors called “a mathmaddition with the habit of command.” He and my father, the youngest men in their class, had often been shipmates. Bilge’s executive genius had given color and direction to Father’s submissive tenacity. He drank like a fish at parties, but was a total abstainer on duty. With reason Commander Harkness had been voted the man most likely to make a four-star admiral in the class of ’07.

  Billy called his wife Jimmy or Jeems, and had a rough friendly way of saying, “Oh, Jimmy’s bright as a penny.” Mrs. Harkness was an unpleasant rarity: she was the only naval officer’s wife we knew who was also a college graduate. She had a flat flapper’s figure, and hid her intelligence behind a nervous twitter of vulgarity and toadyism. “Charlotte,” she would almost scream at Mother, “is this mirAGE, this MIRacle your own dining room!”

  Then Mother might smile and answer in a distant, though cosy and amused, voice, “I usually manage to make myself pretty comfortable.”

  Mother’s comfort was chic, romantic, impulsive. If her silver service shone, it shone with hectic perfection to rebuke the functional domesticity of naval wives. She had determined to make her ambiance beautiful and luxurious, but wanted neither her beauty nor her luxury unaccompanied. Beauty pursued too exclusively meant artistic fatuity of a kind made farcical by her Aunt Sarah Stark Winslow, a beauty too lofty and original ever to marry, a prima donna on the piano, too high-strung ever to give a public recital. Beauty alone meant the maudlin ignominy of having one’s investments managed by interfering relatives. Luxury alone, on the other hand, meant for Mother the “paste and fool’s-gold polish” that one met with in the foyer of the new Statler Hotel. She loathed the “undernourishment” of Professor Burckhard’s Bauhaus modernism, yet in moments of pique she denounced our pompous Myers mahoganies as “suitable for politicians at the Bellevue Hotel.” She kept a middle-of-the-road position, and much admired Italian pottery with its fresh peasant colors and puritanical, clean-cut lines. She was fond of saying, “The French do have taste,” but spoke with a double-edged irony which implied the French, with no moral standards to support their finish, were really no better than naval yahoos. Mother’s beautiful house was dignified by a rich veneer of the useful.

  * * *

  “I have always believed carving to be the gentlemanly talent,” Mother used to proclaim. Father, faced with this opinion, pored over his book of instructions or read the section on table carving in the Encyclopædia Britannica. Eventually he discovered among the innumerable small, specialized Boston “colleges” an establishment known as a carving school. Each Sunday from then on he would sit silent and erudite before his roast. He blinked, grew white, looked winded, and wiped beads of perspiration from his eyebrows. His purpose was to reproduce stroke by stroke his last carving lesson, and he worked with all the formal rightness and particular error of some shaky experiment in remote control. He enjoyed quiet witticisms at the expense of his carving master—“a philosopher who gave himself all the airs of a Mahan!” He liked to pretend that the carving master had stated that “No two cuts are identical,” ergo: “each offers original problems for the executioner.” Guests were appeased by Father’s saying, “I am just a plebe at this guillotine. Have a hunk of my roast beef hash.”

  What angered Father was Mrs. Harkness’s voice grown merciless with excitement, as she studied his hewing and hacking. She was sure to say something tactless about how Commander Billy was “a stingy artist at carving who could shave General Washington off the dollar bill.”

  Nothing could stop Commander Billy, that born carver, from reciting verses:

  “By carving my way

  I lived on my pay;

  This reeward, though small,

  Beats none at all …

  My carving paper-thin

  Can make a guinea hin,

  All giblets, bones, and skin,

  Canteen a party of tin.”

  And I, furious for no immediate reason, blurted out, “Mother, how much does Grandfather Winslow have to fork up to pay for Daddy’s carving school?”

  These Sunday dinners with the Harknesses were always woundingly boisterous affairs. Father, unnaturally outgoing, would lead me forward and say, “Bilge, I want you to meet my first coupon from the bond of matrimony.”

  Commander Billy would answer, “So this is the range-finder you are raising for future wars!” They would make me salute, stand at attention, stand at ease. “Angel-face,” Billy would say to me, “you’ll skipper a flivver.”

  “Jimmy” Harkness, of course, knew that Father was anxiously negotiating with Lever Brothers’ Soap, and arranging for his resignation from the service, but nothing could prevent her from proposing time and again her “hens’ toast to the drakes.” Dragging Mother to her feet, Jimmy would scream, “To Bob and Bilgy’s next battleship together!”

  What Father and Commander Billy enjoyed talking about most was their class of ’07. After dinner, the ladies would retire to the upstairs sitting room. As a special privilege I was allowed to remain at the table with the men. Over and over, they would talk about their ensigns’ cruise around the world, escaping the “reeport,” gunboating on the upper Yangtze during the Chinese Civil War, keeping sane and sanitary at Guantanamo, patroling the Golfo del Papayo during the two-bit Nicaraguan Revolution, when water to wash in cost a dollar a barrel and was mostly “alkali and wrigglers.” There were the class casualties: Holden and Holcomb drowned in a foundered launch off Hampton Roads; “Count” Bowditch, killed by the Moros and famous for his dying words to Commander Harkness: “I’m all right. Get on the job, Bilge.”

  They would speak about the terrible 1918 influenza epidemic, which had killed more of their classmates than all the skirmishes or even the World War. It was an honor, however, to belong to a class which included “Chips” Carpender, whose destroyer, the Fanning, was the only British or American warship to force a German submarine to break water and surrender. It was a feather in their caps that three of their classmates, Bellinger, Reade, and another, should have made the first trans-Atlantic seaplane flight. They put their faith in teamwork, and Lindbergh’s solo hop to Paris struck them as unprofessional, a newspaper trick. What made Father and Commander Billy mad as hornets was the mare’s-nest made of naval administration by “deserving Democrats.” Hadn’t Secretary of State Bryan ordered their old battlewagon the Idaho to sail on a goodwill mission to Switzerland? “Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,” Commander Billy would boom, “the pious swab had been told that Lake Geneva had annexed the Adriatic.” Another “guy with false gills,” Josephus Daniels, “ordained by Divine Providence Secretary of the Navy,” had refused to send Father and Billy to the war zone. “You are looking,” Billy would declaim, “at martyrs in t
he famous victory of red tape. Our names are rubric.” A man they had to take their hats off to was Theodore Roosevelt; Billy had been one of the lucky ensigns who had helped “escort the redoubtable Teddy to Panama.” Perhaps because of his viciously inappropriate nickname, “Bilge,” Commander Harkness always spoke with brutal facetiousness against the class bilgers, officers whose “services were no longer required by the service.” In more Epicurean moods, Bilge would announce that he “meant to accumulate a lot of dough from complacent, well-meaning, although misguided West Point officers gullible enough to bet their shirts on the Army football team.”

  “Let’s have a squint at your figger and waterline, Bob,” Billy would say. He’d admire Father’s trim girth and smile familiarly at his bald spot. “Bob,” he’d say, “you’ve maintained your displacement and silhouette unmodified, except for somewhat thinner top chafing gear.”