A Delicate Aggression

by David O. Dowling

  Workshop members inevitably mulled the question of whether Lowell would cause such a disturbance in Iowa City, commenting on his antics and arrests with as much enthusiasm and wonder as they probed the metaphysical fine tunings of his poetry. Hardwick stood by him firmly through the episode, and accompanied him to Iowa as his pillar of stability; her own causticity kept Lowell’s native wildness under control. She was acutely familiar with the nature of his rages, aptly describing their effect in her poetry as a process by which “your old-fashioned tirade—/ loving, rapid, merciless—/ breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.”27 “Lowell regularly hurt those around him,” the critic Steven Axelrod explained. “As a boy he bullied classmates, and in his twenties he abused his first wife.” His second, Hardwick, “understood and tolerated these episodes as a manifestation of illness,” but others would be less sympathetic.28 Certainly Workshop students were in an agitated state of suspense around Lowell, wondering if and when this efficacious powder keg would explode. The creative process was inseparable from his madness, as Snodgrass explained: “This incredible force and extension of Lowell’s mind seemed to me frighteningly involved with his extreme personality changes, his manic-depressive episodes.” Like Lowell’s other students, Snodgrass monitored the famous poet for signs of outbursts, ever on the lookout for “violent episodes at Iowa.”29 Those close to him soon learned that “hidden under the sign of aristocrat and miscreant is a flawed, complex, brilliant, and productive human being, fully engaged with the currents of his time.”30

  Lowell at Iowa, 1950

  On January 25, 1950, when the new celebrity poet and his famous author wife settled into their apartment at 728 Bowery Street, Hardwick wrote her mother-in-law with her first impressions of Iowa City. She found it “flat and ugly,” a travesty of “snow mud and ice” utterly devoid of culture and history of the sort she was accustomed to in New England. Here, she said, anything over fifty years old is a landmark.31 Lowell similarly found the landscape bleak, “gray-white, monotonous, friendly, spread-out, rather empty, rather reassuring,” if not entirely devoid of culture. He delighted in the presence of “a theatre here that specializes in movie revivals—this afternoon we are going to Ivan the Terrible.”32 A strange mix, then, of “high brow movies, the new criticism,” and sensational local news stories such as the Bednasek “tuxedo murder” trial shared the stage with constant reminders of the meaningless flux of rural life, as seen in how “every afternoon a pack of very harmless and sorry-looking stray dogs settles on our pathway.” Oddly paired against its sophisticated intellectual culture, “this is one of the marks of Iowa City.”33

  Although he complained that “life in Iowa is a pretty dormant, day to day thing,” Lowell knew it could restore his mental health by returning him to the original principles that had been so essential to his success. Thus his weekly visits to an Iowa City psychiatrist began a steady course of recovery. “I am well out of my extreme troubles,” he reported to his mother in early 1950. Although he was candid about lingering effects of the breakdown, felt in “a stiffness, many old scars,” and “the toil of building up new habit,” he confirmed that “I definitely feel out of the old perverse dart maze.”34 The treatment he received, of isolation, electric shock, and drugs, brutal by today’s standards, may have traumatized him more than it healed him. But after later departing Iowa to seek further help at Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, he was gradually returning to health despite the rebel in him, “a mean streak in me [that] somehow hates to admit it.”35 Tate identified the cause of the psychotic episode in Lowell’s overly ambitious professional situation. “He had been pushed forward too rapidly as a poet and he had attempted a work [the Kavanaughs] beyond his present powers,” Tate argued, according to his sense that an acute creative crisis was behind the episode. “He couldn’t finish it,” and thus commenced disaffiliating himself from the “three things that kept him together: the Church; he gave up Jean; and some months ago he virtually gave up poetry.”36 Like Icarus, Tate believed, Lowell had flown too close to the sun.

  Unlike his first wife and the Catholic Church, both of which, “with a smile, he put off quietly,” Lowell joined the Workshop faculty as a means of reentering the world of poetry and reestablishing his dominance in it.37 Teaching at the Workshop failed to meet his lofty expectations. “My writing class is held in a temporary, modern, structure—plants and a large imitation Moore statue in the window, student-art on the walls—all kinds,” the antithesis of the permanent structures and authentic art of his days at Harvard. The workshop method struck him as facile and sophomoric, a perfunctory procedure by which “we arrange ourselves in a long empty, somehow dingy loop of chairs and hold mimeographed copies of the ‘poems of the week.’ ” The transience of the place echoed his own sense of impermanence there, as a temporary visiting faculty member with no investment in the future of the institution. Like the roving pack of dogs that occasionally took up housekeeping in his yard, “All during class, people drift in and out—looking for the sociology building, warming themselves, killing time, holding whispered conferences.” Needless to say, “no one comes to look at the [student] art” adorning the walls, but its cloying presence, a reminder of the lackluster creative skills of the student body, means that “you never forget that it is attending you.” The students’ writing itself would have demoralized him completely—“O, and the poems! Everything from poetry society sonnets to the impenetrably dark”—were it not for a few with genuine talent. He estimated that “about six of my students are pretty good—at least, they do various things I can’t and might become almost anything or nothing.”38 Others showed early promise, but “then they all begin to level off into Paul Engle,” that is, into vapid mediocrity.39

  To Lowell, writing was an intensely personal process, one that only a confidante or trusted editor could guide or nurture, as Tate had with his own work. At the Workshop, literature provided models for students to emulate in their own writing. Lowell had never developed his own creative writing repertoire with a classroom of his peers dissecting his every word. Instead, Tate had fulfilled that role for him. The implicit acrimony and overt hostility during workshop sessions left him bewildered at the array of defensive postures students produced, however understandably, given the savage arena in which they were thrown. Those mimeographed “poems of the week” were the objects of fierce contention, which they “defended with passion, shyness, references to Kant and Empson mysticism.” Their sophisticated array of survival tactics ranged from theoretical smokescreens to poses of passive aggression.40 He became aware that more creative energy often went into defending their work than composing it.

  Lowell never pretended that his teaching, at either the Workshop at this early stage or later at Harvard, nourished or sustained his writing. Although not prohibitive to his creative process, “My kind of teaching,” he said, “doesn’t intrude on my writing.” He made clear that “it doesn’t do me any particular good.” This was because teaching for Lowell was centered in the study of literature rather than creative writing. “You shouldn’t think of writing while you teach; you should think of English and American classics, which is what I do.”41 Although Lowell was “a powerful, commanding man” at Iowa, “Students took his class because he was a great poet and a great man but few realized beforehand that Lowell was a great teacher of literature and an awful workshop teacher.” Unlike others on the Workshop faculty, such as Donald Justice and R. V. Cassill, who greeted student work with their critical scalpels poised to dissect, “Lowell had very little help to offer in the form of direct, constructive criticism of line, structure, intent, execution of student drafts.”42 Rather than seeing his classroom role as a collaborator and coach of the sort Tate had been to him, he viewed teaching as a performance, according to his private school and Harvard education. He prepared accordingly, despite recognizing the futility in “boning up on what you can’t use, then faking.”43 Much of teaching was theater, as he soon dis
covered ways of entertaining students with anecdotal stories of poets’ private lives, or simply by reading poetry in a heavy accent, as he once did to their delight with a playful rendition of Burns in a swooping Scottish brogue. Levine recalled how Lowell read once “in what appeared to be an actor’s notion of Hotspur’s accent.” Transforming the classroom into his stage, “his voice would rise in pitch with his growing excitement,” his face would become animated by the words while “he tipped slightly forward as though about to lose his balance and conducted his performance with the forefinger of his right hand.” These classes, decidedly disinterested in developing student writing, were performative “memorable meetings in which the class soon caught his excitement.” Levine spoke for the student body when he described how “all of us sensed something significant was taking place.” This fanfare obscured how, as a writing instructor, he was “visibly bored by his students and their poems,” an attitude easily ignored in the wave of excitement generated by his willingness to play the part of Robert Lowell.44

  Given his lofty credentials and celebrity status, no one at the Workshop—students, faculty, or administration—objected to the fact that he essentially was not teaching creative writing, but sharing instead his voluminous knowledge of literature. Lowell’s own creative process was a matter he could scarcely articulate, much less teach, one that probed deeply within the recesses of his inner life. Students stood in awe of that inner life. Don Petersen, one of Lowell’s pupils at the time, asked incredulously, “Can you imagine how hard it is to live as Robert Lowell, with that inner life?”45 Students regarded him with a mix of reverence and jealousy.46 Envying Lowell’s creative power as so many Workshop members had done likewise presented a similar ethical dilemma at the fulcrum of authorial greatness and insanity. Lowell’s poetry had achieved such renown precisely because of the tumult of his inner life, the painful source of his greatest poetry. Lowell could achieve this kind of damaged grandeur as “a master of a powerful and fierce voice that all of us respected.”47 Poised, Lowell hewed close to reality from a revealing oblique angle expressed as brilliantly or more so than any living writer of his generation. Unhinged, he was an abomination, even to himself.48 For Lowell to “get sick again” meant enduring “a gruesome, vulgar, blasting surge of ‘enthusiasm,’ ” the doctors’ word that could hardly express how “one becomes a kind of man-aping balloon in a parade—then you subside and eat bitter coffee-grounds of dullness, guilt, etc.”49 With such issues weighing so heavily, there is little wonder why no one objected to his failure to tend to the vagaries of his students’ scansion, diction, and prosody in their pallid, ink-smeared, mimeographed “poems of the week.”

  The Tuxedo Murder

  Lowell’s twice-weekly performances before his adoring students usually began with a brief informal conversation about local events and news. Although the culture of midcentury Iowa City and its campus was not of particular interest to Lowell and Hardwick, the grisly “tuxedo murder” and the subsequent trial of a student, Robert Bednasek, fascinated Lowell, but not in the way it captured Hardwick’s imagination. She became captivated, “moving heaven and earth to enter [the courtroom] as an accredited reporter,” to gather material on the subject for a novel set in Iowa City. She found the trial a fascinating masquerade of pretension and bluff. It struck Lowell as “gruesome, blurred, silly, pitiful—sororities, fraternities, ‘pinned,’ ‘chained,’ ‘they seemed happy’ psychologists, Irish policemen—money, justice, and no good answer.” While Lowell listened, Hardwick “talked a book” about the proceedings.50

  The book Hardwick “talked,” from 1950 to 1954, became her novel The Simple Truth. Hardwick and Lowell had first been exposed to the lurid details of the case through local media coverage. The Iowa City Press-Citizen reported steadily on the trial from March 17 to April 6, 1950. The campus paper, the Daily Iowan, described “a golden-haired senior coed” found dead following the winter formal held by the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity. Robert Bednasek was accused of strangling his girlfriend, Margaret Jackson, at his apartment just east of campus. There “was no evidence of any molestation of the beautiful Kappa Alpha Theta coed,” according to officials. Bednasek claimed she wanted to marry him, and that her death was an accident caused by his “impromptu demonstration of choking a person,” which led to “one small bone being broken in her larynx.” During questioning by police, Bednasek went berserk and lunged at one of the officers, “in an attempt to seize the .38 caliber revolver from his holster.” Wrestling him to the ground, the officers managed to force the now hysterical suspect into handcuffs. They later testified that his “somewhat incoherent statements indicated that he intended to shoot himself.”51

  Hardwick used the occasion to satirize the intellectual culture of the campus from her privileged vantage point as Lowell’s spouse and thus a Workshop insider. In her fictional narrative, a married male graduate student and the wife of a faculty member seek admittance to the trial. Their discussion of the courtroom circus quickly moves to ruminations on life in the small Iowa town and the state university where the killing took place. The student and his wife live in a one-bedroom apartment, a stand-in for the place Hardwick and Lowell rented in Iowa City. “Although only of moderate size this single room had so many recesses given over to some function of housekeeping usually placed alone that there was hardly anything, unless it might be the little spot in the center covered with a tiny, red tufted rug, that could properly be called the living room itself.” The transient visiting writers in this university town “simply abhorred the place with a manic volubility. The aliens who had settled for good had more troubled minds, recalling sometimes with a sigh the lost hills and bays of San Francisco, horseback riding in Arizona, and most of all,” especially from Hardwick and Lowell’s New England perspective, “the great East from the Green at Concord.” Among the menagerie of intellectuals also passing through the university “were many teachers from Europe . . . remarkable souls pacing the Iowa pavements.” Those from overseas “were in America, no doubt about that, even if perhaps they had not bargained for so completely the real thing and wondered at their fate.”52 She astutely observes that “the citizens of Iowa shared the qualities of the weather: plain, open, their life was not luxurious, but not poor either, indeed prosperous.” Among the tokens of civilization in “sedate and glamorous colleges, pictures in the galleries, and wine in the fowl pot,” a flatness prevailed, so that “everything was indifferent to the eye.” Her comments on the lack of diversity were telling. “In Iowa, a few Southerners even longed for a black face around Woolworth’s on a Saturday night.”53

  In this climate, moreover, Hardwick depicts a distinct blindness to the simple truth that derives from a culture that is too intellectual for its own good. When Bednasek was eventually acquitted, to her it was symptomatic of the rural intellectual enclave’s liability to overanalysis, particularly from the vantage point of psychiatric evaluation, which was in its heyday and had played a central role in her husband’s life. The jury’s decision epitomized how psychoanalysis at the time could bury overwhelming evidence to the contrary by recasting the accused as “perfectly sane and normal, a good boy, more so than the average, one thinks.” The reconstruction of the killer into an admirable figure, especially through the verbal pyrotechnics of psychiatry, struck her as appalling. With dripping irony, she has one character admire the accused’s “sensitive face, but not what you would call weakly sensitive, either.”54

  Hardwick’s “Iowa City murder novel,” Lowell remarked after its completion in a private letter, “ ‘centers’ about a student murder that happened in 1950 when we were first here. It’s the best thing she’s done,” he estimated, which was high praise indeed considering her vast accomplishments in reputable literary journals up until that time. To him it captured the culture in ways he had not been able to articulate by being “very stern with a subdued satirical edge.” He well knew how much was left off the page. “And everything she tactfully didn’t say abo
ut the locale,” he added, “is tearing through her.”55 The book was profoundly significant to Lowell. “Today we are holding our breaths and waiting for the reviews and publication of Elizabeth’s Simple Truth,” he told Engle. “Or rather, I am,” he confessed, since “E. is typing a mile a minute, and launching off simultaneously into a book, an essay and a short story.”56

  “Solitude and Sweat”

  The steady routine of the Workshop combined with the intriguing subject of the Tuxedo Murder—on which Lowell and Hardwick could sharpen their wits at a safe distance—to stabilize the pair by the end of the spring semester in 1950. After a brief teaching stint at Kenyon College, they indulged in the cultural richness of Europe, both of them hungry to take in its history, literature, and thriving intellectual culture. After an extended stay in the Netherlands, a place where “we like the people we have met better than literary people anywhere,” they concluded, “one year is enough” in that nation.57 Among their contacts there, Bill Burford, who had been “writing a long autobiographical poem,” entertained them with his conversation, which was “a pure centerless flux. The three of us spent a long night. Burford managed to drink an entire quart of Dutch gin, so one had the contrast of unimaginable coherence and unimaginable incoherence.” Lowell concurred with a friend who remarked that, with Burford, “You always felt he was about to make a point.” Hardwick and Lowell grew closer on their European odyssey. Lowell happily reported to Bishop that, as his partner in crime, “Elizabeth has just said that the only advantage of marriage is that you can be as gross, slovenly, mean and brutally verbose as you want.”58 Next was Germany by way of Vienna, “then I will be teaching at Salzburg,” he told Bishop, saving “the winter for Florence or Rome.”59