That summer Lowell and Raban went to Orkney, in part to trace Lowell’s Traill and Spence bloodlines, which he believed to be the headwater of both his poetry and his instability. He was, recalls Raban, “terrifically excited,” repeatedly asking their driver, “Where are the Spences, where are the Traills?” He did not get far in his ancestral search, but he and Raban— “pretty bad fishermen”—fished the Scottish islands for trout. Lowell, distractible as ever, fell into a loch. (It was neither the first nor the last time when, mind elsewhere, he had to be pulled out of a river or lake. Lowell’s distractibility was well-known to friends and colleagues alike, as was his striking inability to negotiate three-dimensional space. He had an “eccentric sense of geography,” according to Raban, one of many who commented on Lowell’s palpable geographic shortcomings. He lacked compass to discern north from south, right from left. Whether he was trying to find his way to his office at Harvard or navigate Central Park, the direction he found was at best indirect. England was yet worse, said Raban. It was like Mars.)
While they were in Orkney, Lowell met George Mackay Brown, another poet of dark moods and religious conversion. Lowell was charmed by Brown, Raban recalls. They drank together and discussed the poetry and myths of Orkney. As someone with his own profound and deeply carved sense of his native New England, Lowell recognized in Brown a like personal and poetic tie to the land and sea, a like beholdenness to history and legend. Brown was, he said, “an animal in its own territory.”
Robert Sheridan Lowell was born in September 1971. “After 12 hours of labor pains,” his father wrote to Harriet, “Robert was born in thirty seconds.” He looked like “a lobster-red stiff gingerbread man, in crimson mud….like a bartender who imbibes as well as sells.” Two years after Sheridan’s birth he took the images into “Robert Sheridan Lowell”:
too much blood is seeping…
after twelve hours of labor to come out right,
in less than thirty seconds swimming the blood-flood:
Little Gingersnap Man, homoform,
flat and sore and alcoholic red.
Lowell’s young son brought energy, the chaos of a child, and a sharpening of Lowell’s already sharp sense of mortality. “I have a doctor’s and psychiatrist’s statement exempting me from ever throwing a football,” he wrote jokingly to Peter Taylor not long after Sheridan’s birth. In two poems for Sheridan published shortly before his death, Lowell spoke to the half-century gap between father and son. In “Sheridan” he described the green growth of childhood and the mortality that edged the lives of those older and less changeable:
How unretentive we become,
yet weirdly naked like you. Today
only the eternal midday separates
you from our unchangeably sunset
and liver-invigorated faces. High-hung,
the period scythe silvers in the sun,
a cutting edge, a bounding line,
between the child’s world and the earth—
Our early discovery that only children grow.
Later, in the same volume, in “For Sheridan,” Lowell makes clear the gap between intention and deed, makes clear the regret that the years bring:
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.
In 1973 Lowell published three volumes of verse. Two, History and For Lizzie and Harriet, were revised and expanded versions of Notebook. History, a book that begins with early time—antiquity, biblical, before—carries through the millennia and ends with the mid-twentieth century. The poems center on the rupturing ambiguities of power; the mutability of individual lives and empires; the cold sanity and hot madness of tyrants; the courage of a few; the fragile psychologies of artists; the steel, the backward glancing and dark imagination of the New England writers. The subjects of History spread out over a wide and untidy field: Ulysses and Alexander, Achilles; Beethoven, Lincoln, Schubert; the writers and thinkers who so influenced him: Henry Adams, Hawthorne, Dante, Thoreau, Emerson; the moon landing, Israel; Attila and Hitler; ancestors; his poet contemporaries, including Frost, Plath, Eliot, MacNeice, Berryman, Roethke, and Bishop.
For Lizzie and Harriet, a book that centers on his life with Elizabeth Hardwick and their daughter, Harriet, is steeped in regret and tenderness. It renders the conflict and human need that Lowell locates at the heart of marriage, the renewal he sought in his love affairs and the betrayal that they entailed. The long days of family summers in Maine—friends and children; writing, always; bay sailing and clambakes; martinis, talking into the morning—long days distilled into eternal, repeating, summer days. Like Henry Adams’s contrast between his boyhood days of summers in Quincy and the cold constricted winters in Boston, Lowell’s summer poems set children in nature against the passing of seasons and the intimation of mortality; regeneration against ending, fresh impression against irony and pain. Earlier, in “Soft Wood,” he had written of these things and more: that which lasts, and the constancy of mutability; the shedding of the worn; the layers of appearance; death; the reach of pain. He dedicated the poem to his cousin Harriet Winslow:
Lowell’s writing barn in Castine, Maine
“It’s right on the bay…rocky islands with pine trees ease off into birches and meadows.” Credit 45
Soft Wood
(For Harriet Winslow)
Sometimes I have supposed seals
must live as long as the Scholar Gypsy.
Even in their barred pond at the zoo they are happy,
and no sunflower turns
more delicately to the sun
without a wincing of the will.
Here too in Maine things bend to the wind forever.
After two years away, one must get used
to the painted soft wood staying bright and clean,
to the air blasting an all-white wall whiter,
as it blows through curtain and screen
touched with salt and evergreen.
The green juniper berry spills crystal-clear gin,
and even the hot water in the bathtub
is more than water,
and rich with the scouring effervescence
of something healing,
the illimitable salt.
Things last, but sometimes for days here
only children seem fit to handle children,
and there is no utility or inspiration
in the wind smashing without direction.
The fresh paint
on the captains’ houses hides softer wood.
Their square-riggers used to whiten
the four corners of the globe,
but it’s no consolation to know
the possessors seldom outlast the possessions,
once warped and mothered by their touch.
Shed skin will never fit another wearer.
Yet the seal pack will bark past my window
summer after summer.
This is the season
when our friends may and will die daily.
Surely the lives of the old
are briefer than the young.
Harriet Winslow, who owned this house,
was more to me than my mother.
I think of you far off in Washington,
breathing in the heat wave
and air-conditioning, knowing
each drug that numbs alerts another nerve to pain.
The third of Lowell’s 1973 books, The Dolphin, is a novelistic sequence of poems that focuses on the disintegration of his marriage to Hardwick and his courtship, marriage, and finally unliveable relationship with Blackwood. Lowell’s portrayal of love, and its limitations, is raw: There is gratitude for the renewal of life and for a second chance, for a quickening of the senses, for awakening the imagination. There is gratitude for the peace, however short-lived. “After fifty so much joy has come, / I hardly w
ant to hide my nakedness— / the shine and stiffness of a new suit, a feeling, / not wholly happy, of having been reborn,” he writes in “Flight to New York.” Many of the poems exult with a sense of new, faster blood in the veins. And, at times, a quiet joy. He describes “a happiness so slow burning, it is lasting”: “when I open the window, the black rose-leaves, / return to inconstant greenness. A good morning, as often.”
It is love, he makes clear, not madness:
My hand
sleeps in the bosom of your sleeping hands,
firm in the power of your impartial heat.
I’m not mad and hold to you with reason,
you carry our burden to the narrow strait,
this sleepless night that will not move, yet moves
unless by sleeping we think back yesterday.
Lowell conjures the image of cattle, for him a symbol of scarred innocence and primal terror. He describes in “Overhanging Cloud” the quiet breaths of an animal peace:
it’s enough to wake without old fears,
and watch the needle-fire of the first light
bombarding off your eyelids harmlessly.
By ten the bedroom is sultry. You have double-breathed;
we are many, our bed smells of hay.
The peace does not last. Blackwood—dolphin, whale, mermaid—twists into a darker muse: damaged, damaging, hard bound to alcohol and chaos. “None swims with her and breathes the air,” Lowell writes:
A mermaid flattens soles and picks a trout,
knife and fork in chainsong at the spine,
weeps white rum undetectable from tears.
She kills more bottles than the ocean sinks,
and serves her winded lovers’ bones in brine.
“I see you as a baby killer whale,” he writes, “free to walk the seven seas for game, / warm-hearted with an undercoat of ice.” The mermaid, muse to others before him, might move on: “One wondered who would see and date you next, / and grapple for the danger of your hand.” Lowell’s language becomes one of chaos, danger, hazard, and storm:
I’ve searched the rough black ocean for you,
and saw the turbulence drop dead for you,
always lovely, even for those who had you,
Rough Slitherer in your grotto of haphazard.
I lack manhood to finish the fishing trip.
Glad to escape beguilement and the storm,
I thank the ocean that hides the fearful mermaid—
like God, I almost doubt if you exist.
The depiction of marital bleakness in The Dolphin is, in its way, a poetic parallel to Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The play and the poems are deeply bound to memory and dead or dying hopes, deluded dreams. Both are fueled with ice and alcohol. “[W]e totter off the strewn stage,” Lowell writes, “knowing tomorrow’s migraine will remind us / how drink heightened the brutal flow of elocution.”…
It’s over, my clothes fly into your borrowed suitcase,
the good day is gone, the broken champagne glass
crashes in the ashcan.
Lowell won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for The Dolphin, and many critics acclaimed its originality, ferocity, and beauty. Others described it as the work of a poet who had turned too inward, become too self-bound, too obscure. The reviews were mixed, as they were for Notebook; some were damning, some enthusiastic. The issue for some critics, based on the source of material in many of the poems, became as much a moral as a literary one: Was it acceptable to incorporate, and in some instances change, portions of letters that Elizabeth Hardwick had written to Lowell during a time of emotional distress in their marriage and for which she might reasonably have assumed privacy?
It has been more than forty years since the publication of The Dolphin, and the indignation over Lowell’s taking lines from Hardwick’s letters has lessened but not disappeared. Time has a blanketing effect on outrage. In many respects, as literary and historical controversies go, the appropriation is not particularly egregious. The issue was an important one to many of those most involved, however, including critics, friends, and, of course, Elizabeth Hardwick, Caroline Blackwood, and Lowell himself. Elizabeth Bishop’s burning words to Lowell on first reading the Dolphin poems—“Art just isn’t worth that much”—are repeated still. They raise general questions about the use of private observation in art; they also raise questions of hypocrisy.
Lowell’s culpability for his behavior during mania, behavior that was beyond his control, is a different moral issue from his use of Hardwick’s letters, which he deliberated at length while sane. Throughout his life, Lowell, like most writers, incorporated into his art observations and words from others. He freely acknowledged this in the introductions to his books, as well as in his letters and in interviews. The essence of his work was personal; it would have been odd had he not drawn upon what he saw around him. For years he had taken bits of conversation and correspondence from his friends, including from T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Delmore Schwartz, Robert Penn Warren, Elizabeth Bishop, George Santayana, William Carlos Williams, Mary McCarthy, several of his lovers, and each of his three wives. He had folded into his work the words of earlier writers, as well: the Greek dramatists, the Greek and Roman poets, Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Henry Adams, and Jonathan Edwards. Lowell had a poet’s magpie eye and an imprinting ear: he spotted, snatched, rejected, revised, incorporated. Words of others became part of his available stock. But it was his imagination that picked, sorted, and built. That created poetry.
Lowell is scarcely the first writer to use privately communicated material of others in his work. It is as old as poetry; writers use what they see and hear. This does not make a moral case, only a human and artistic one. “The writer’s only responsibility is to his art,” said William Faulkner. “He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written.” Lowell, who lived with an acute sense of his place in history, felt that history would judge his art the most important thing. For Elizabeth Bishop, art just wasn’t worth that much. For Lowell, art was indeed worth it. Art was the most important thing. “I couldn’t bear to have my book (my life) wait hidden inside me like a dead child,” he told her.
Although Bishop was clear in her admiration for the poetry, she was unequivocal in her disapproval of Lowell’s determination to publish The Dolphin. She wrote to him that she thought the poetry was “wonderful,” “magnificent,” “marvelous.” But she vehemently decried his use of Hardwick’s letters. “Lizzie is not dead,” she said. Worse, Lowell had changed Hardwick’s letters so that they had become a “mixture of fact & fiction.” Such a mixture would not be the truth, but others would take it to be so. A gentleman, she said, would not do what he had done. “It is not being ‘gentle’ to use personal, tragic, anguished letters that way,” she wrote. “It’s cruel.”
Bishop was not alone in her excoriation. Stanley Kunitz thought that Lowell’s inclusion of Hardwick’s letters in the Dolphin poems was a “cruel invasion” of privacy, “morally and esthetically objectionable.” Lowell’s friend William Alfred wrote that he thought the poems would “tear Elizabeth apart, important though I agree they are to the wholeness of the book.” He had met W. H. Auden, Alfred continued, who told him that because of the book he would no longer speak to Lowell. In reply, Alfred had told Auden that he “sounded like God the Father.” He “gave me a tight smile,” Alfred wrote. Lowell, who seldom expressed anger in his letters, was outraged that Auden, who had not read the book (and was not perhaps the best person to be chastising anyone), would take such a moralistic stance. He cabled Auden: “DEAR WYSTAN—ASTOUNDED BY YOUR INSULT TO ME.” Lowell was angry and cut by the criticism, but he did not pull his decision to publish.
Other poets concurred with the criticism that had been leveled against Lowell. Donald Hall described Lowell
as a “cannibal-poet…dining off portions of his own body and the bodies of his family.” Adrienne Rich was yet more scathing. In a widely cited review she wrote, “What does one say about a poet who, having left his wife and daughter for another marriage, then titles a book with their names [For Lizzie and Harriet], and goes on to appropriate his ex-wife’s letters written under the stress and pain of desertion, into a book of poems nominally addressed to the new wife?” The book, she said, was “cruel and shallow,” and the “inclusion of the letter poems stands as one of the most vindictive and mean-spirited acts in the history of poetry.” This is a stretch. Whatever legitimate criticism there may be of Lowell’s including excerpts from Hardwick’s letters, it is far from one of the most vindictive acts in the history of poetry. There is too much competition. And, however hurtful was Lowell’s decision to publish the letter poems, there is no evidence that mean-spiritedness was the reason he did it.
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character Page 38