Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
He never asked her. It did represent something he felt very strongly about, but at a certain level he knew that it was not possible. He knew perfectly well that she was homosexual. But that was a complicated issue in Elizabeth’s life. She did have affairs with men when she was younger—she was about six years older than Cal. It was only when she moved to Brazil in about 1950 that she lived with a woman permanently. Cal and Elizabeth never made love—Elizabeth was very explicit about that. She would joke and say that she never wanted to marry Cal but she would have liked to have a child with him. And I think that was partly a joke and partly serious.
52
“The Two Weeks’ Vacation,” begun some ten years after the event, seems to have been unfinished, but the second stanza reads (in part) as follows:
So we sat, you talked of Marianne Moore
Taking her water cress sandwiches to
Tomfeed the Bronx Zoo “denizens.”
How she stopped by a steel-point of Robert Burns
Saying, “But he couldn’t have been
that
handsome!”
Dear Elizabeth,
Half New-Englander, half fugitive
Nova Scotian, wholly Atlantic sea-board—
Unable to settle anywhere, or live
Our usual roaring sublime….
53
Shortly after his Maine vacation—in August 1948—Lowell wrote a strange letter to his mother, announcing that he had made a will “which gives you everything I have during your lifetime and then
splits the trust between Randall Jarrell and Peter Taylor, the most needy of my friends.”
54
Relations with his parents had been going through a placid phase since the success of
Lord
Weary’s
Castle,
and Charlotte had been writing enthusiastically about his spreading fame: “wherever we go we are showered with congratulations on your achievements.”
55
She had not taken to Carley Dawson and shortly after meeting her had told Lowell that she wished he could find a “nice” wife: “but until you do, remember that you have much more than most people to show for your 31 years even if it is not a wife and children.”
56
Lowell’s drafting of a will may have been the result of anxiety about his father’s health. Mr. Lowell had had a stroke earlier in the year and was no longer able to work. He had become “rather ashamed of himself, mastered by mother—and not knowing what to do with himself—and mother dreading the years of amusing him.”
57
Around the time of Lowell’s letter they were planning to move out of Boston for the sake of Mr. Lowell’s health:
Mother had bought the Beverly Farms house as a compensation for Father, whose ten years’ dream of moving from Boston to Puget Sound had been destroyed by a second heart-attack. Fearfully, she had looked out of her windows at Beverly Farms, as though she were looking from the windows of a train that was drawing into the station; one station beyond her destination. From the beginning she … lived with one eye cocked toward Boston. She wanted to be in Boston, and she dreaded Boston’s invasion and mockery of this new house, which was so
transparently
a sheepish toy-house for Father. Organizing and tidying with prodigal animosity, she kept her rooms alerted—not to be judged by visitors, but to judge them.
58
Charlotte replied to Lowell’s August letter by return of post:
When I came to the part of your letter about leaving everything to me I almost cried. It reminded me of the time you gave us all of your allowance before starting to St. Mark’s and we bought an electric toaster which we still use; it is sweet of you, Bobby, but I hope that you will inherit whatever I may leave, as I really would not care to live without you and Daddy.
59
In September Lowell left Washington. His plans were to spend the winter at Yaddo, and he was scheduled to arrive there at the
beginning of November. During October, though, his friends seem to have lost track of him, and on October 5 Allen Tate wrote a worried and unwittingly prophetic letter from New York to Peter Taylor:
Cal seems to have catapulted himself from the L of C to the Adirondacks. No sight or word of him except by grapevine: he is forcing his poetry as he forced his religion. He should go back to his religion and force it again, if only to protect his poetry.
60
1
. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, December 19, 1946. Eileen Simpson writes, in
Poets
in
Their
Youth:
“Aquaphobia, which [Jean Stafford had] suffered from since childhood, kept her from swimming or boating. She confessed that as a child taking a bath had made her so anxious she had been able to manage only by organizing an elaborate ritual around it (like Molly in
The
Mountain
Lion
)” (New York: Random House, 1982), p. 134.
2
. Gertrude Buckman, interview with I.H. (1980).
3
. Ibid.
4
. Jean Stafford to Eleanor and Peter Taylor, December 13, 1946.
5
. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, December 19, 1946.
6
. Jean Stafford to R.L., n.d. (Houghton Library).
7
. Ibid., n.d. (Houghton Library).
8
. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, November 26, 1946.
9
. Jean Stafford to R.L., n.d. (Houghton Library).
10
. Peter Taylor to R.L., November 19, 1946.
11
. R.L. to Peter Taylor, December 27, 1946.
12
. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, December 31, 1946.
13
. Ibid., n.d.
14
. Randall Jarrell, “From the Kingdom of Necessity,”
Nation
164 (1947), 74-77.
15
. Selden Rodman, “Boston Jeremiads,”
New
York
Times
Book
Review,
November
3, 1946, pp. 7 ff.
16
. Anne Fremantle, review of
Lord
Weary
’s
Castle,
Commonweal
45 (1946–47), 283–84.
17
. Austin Warren, “A Double Discipline,”
Poetry
70 (1947), 262–65.
18
. Louise Bogan, “Experiment and Post-Experiment,”
American
Scholar
16 (1947), 237–52.
19
. Howard Moss, “Ten Poets,”
Kenyon
Review
9 (1947), 290–98.
20
. Richard Eberhart, “Four Poets,”
Sewanee
Review
55 (1947), 324–36.
21
. Robert Giroux, interview with I.H. (1980).
22
. Jean Stafford to R.L., n.d. (Houghton Library).
23
. R.L. to Peter Taylor, March 10, 1947.
24
. Jean Stafford to R.L., n.d. (Houghton Library).
25
. Ibid.
26
. Gertrude Buckman, interview with I.H. (1980).
27
. Descriptions from a letter by R.L. to Gertrude Buckman (July 8, 1947); quoted to I.H. in interview (1980).
28
. Yaddo brochure.
29
. R.L. to Gertrude Buckman, July 8, 1947; quoted to I.H. (1980).
30
. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, July 10, 1943.
31
. John Thompson to R.L., October 13, 1947 (Houghton Library).
32
. R.L. to J. F. Powers, December 1, 1947.
33
. Robert Frost to R.L., July 17, 1947 (Houghton Library).
34
. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, February 18, 1948 (Houghton Library).
35
. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1982).
36
. Marcella Winslow, letter to I.H., February 19, 1982.
37
. R.L. to Gertrude Buckman, October 1, 1947.
38
. Elizabeth Bishop to R.L., May 1948 (Houghton Library).
39
. Gertrude Buckman to R.L., April 13, 1948 (Houghton Library).
40
. R.L. to Peter Taylor, February 18, 1948.
41
. Gertrude Buckman to R.L., September 22, 1947 (Houghton Library).
42
. R.L. to Allen Tate, September 24, 1947 (Firestone Library).
43
. Gertrude Buckman to R.L., September 22, 1947 (Houghton Library).
44
. Carley Dawson, interview with I.H. (1980).
45
. Ibid.
46
. Ibid.
47
. Jean Stafford to R.L., n.d. (Houghton Library).
48
. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, June 26, 1948.
49
. Carley Dawson, interview with I.H. (1980).
50
. Ibid.
51
. “The Two Weeks’ Vacation,” unpublished ms, c. 1957 (Houghton Library).
52
. Interview with a friend of R.L. and Elizabeth Bishop (1982). The friend wishes to remain anonymous but says, “I know I mustn’t be the source of this, but I’m sure Elizabeth Bishop told me these things because she wanted them to be on the record to some extent.”
53
. “The Two Weeks’ Vacation,” unpublished ms, c. 1957 (Houghton Library).
54
. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, August 24, 1948 (Houghton Library).
55
. Charlotte Lowell to R.L., June 22, 1947 (Houghton Library).
56
. Ibid., August 1948 (Houghton Library).
57
. R.L. to Peter Taylor, May 12, 1948.
58
. R.L., draft autobiography 1955–57 (Houghton Library).
59
. Charlotte Lowell to R.L., August 26, 1948 (Houghton Library).
60
. Allen Tate to Peter Taylor, October 5, 1948.
Even after Lowell’s arrival at Yaddo the grapevine continued to report that he was in a frighteningly “wound-up” state of mind. T. S. Eliot was said to be concerned that Lowell was drinking heavily and was on the verge of a crack-up. This story reached Jean Stafford and she wrote to Peter Taylor on December 22: “I can’t believe it, and it makes me so sick at heart that I want reassurance.”
1
Apparently, no reassurance came, and on January 1,1949, she wrote to Lowell at Yaddo: “Is it true that you are drinking too much and going to pieces and that that ungainly bird Eliot is worried to death about you? So the story goes….”
2
The evidence of Lowell’s own letters at this time suggests that his friends’ fears were premature: the letters are relaxed and witty—he is enjoying Yaddo and is glad to be back at work after his
bureaucratic
spell in Washington. He was also no doubt relieved to have disentangled himself from Carley Dawson: Yaddo was, in so many ways, the perfect sanctuary. In December 1948 Lowell wrote to Caroline Tate (who would also seem to have been “worried to death” about him):
I don’t know how my soul is—pretty uncombed, I guess. But my spirits are fine. I have a small black room to sleep in (fine, but last night, the mattress suddenly dropped through the frame) and a largish light room to work in—five windows, four tables, three chairs, two lamps and one work-bed.
I liked Washington, but what a delight to be done with it; and back to work. With what I’ve saved from the library and Yaddo and my Guggenheim, I can easily last two years before I have to think of teaching.
3
And a letter to Robie Macauley suggests that Yaddo had lost none of its satiric appeal: apart from the young Southern novelist
Flannery
O’Connor and the critic Malcolm Cowley,
… Yaddo is a little dim. O No, a man writing a history of Harvard, who almost swallows himself when he misses a ping-pong shot, who spent the first three dinners telling us long set-pieces on Harvard (
leaving
out crucial anecdotal facts, then recovering them). At the 4th dinner he said he wished he could afford to belong to the Harvard Club; at the 8th during a discussion on smoking “Have you ever tried Harvard Club tobacco?”; who has a six foot five son, and who finally, out of a blue sky, said: “Is there anything as perfect as an acorn?” (Holding one).
4
Lowell was not required to spend Christmas in Boston with his parents; they had left for Florida for an extended holiday, which, it was hoped, would restore his father’s health. His mother’s letters were friendly and optimistic, and he had no new reason to be anxious on this score:
How are you? And does the book progress satisfactorily: I think of you as walking in snow-filled woods or writing with such absorption that you cannot think of anyone or anything. Still you did remember us at Christmas! But do try to write to us occasionally. Your poems will live long after we are here no longer.
5
In his first few days at Yaddo, Lowell had briefly encountered the novelist and book reviewer Elizabeth Hardwick—she had been at Yaddo during the summer and was about to leave as he arrived. Hardwick was a Southerner, from Kentucky, a friend of Allen Tate’s. She had left the South in 1940 to do graduate work at
Columbia
University and had never properly returned. After two years at Columbia she had abandoned her Ph D and begun writing stories. In 1945 she published her first novel,
The
Ghostly
Lover,
and shortly afterwards started writing regularly for
Partisan
Review.
By 1949 Hardwick had built up a reputation as one of that magazine’s more fearsome critics. Peter Taylor, indeed, was one of her recent victims:
How could any magazine print the tripe that Elizabeth Hardwick writes for criticism? I had never realized how truly dreadful she is till I saw her mind and her prose style at work on my own dear stories.
6
And Elizabeth Bishop, on hearing that Hardwick was at Yaddo, wrote: “I forgot to comment on Elizabeth Hardwick’s arrival—
take
care.
”
7
Lowell had met Hardwick before and had warmed to her—if only because she was a rich source of stories about Allen Tate (of these, Lowell could never tire since they usually involved some sexual folly). Taylor, for instance, had written to Lowell at Washington demanding ever more scandal about Tate: “I wish I knew what Madame Hardwick told you about Allen. After reading Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male I can believe anything about
anybody
.”
8
Elizabeth Hardwick recalls their Yaddo meeting:
I met him up at Yaddo. I’d been there in the summer—I was about to leave when he arrived—but we were both there for a couple of days and we talked quite a bit, and he said, “Why don’t you come back?” We were all quite young then and living in furnished rooms and things like that. So I did go back after Christmas for a couple of months. And I suppose he had the beginning of his breakdown there. But I didn’t know him well enough to know. It takes a lot of experience. And he was a very gripping sort of character. Anyway, I don’t think I did know and everything got terribly wound up there.
9
There is certainly a slight edge of hysteria in a letter Lowell wrote to T. S. Eliot in January 1949. He was corresponding with Eliot at Faber and Faber about a British edition of his poems—to be called
Poems
1938–49.
Lowell and Eliot had first met in 1946 (they were brought together by Eliot’s American publisher, Robert Giroux), and it is unlikely that Eliot thought they were close enough for Lowell to address him as “Dear Uncle Tom”:
… After Washington, I had a tough two weeks of writing rubbish and knew it; then by rather sweating blood I got back. The poem is going to be long and long in doing. I have one book (?) between 600 and 800 lines coming into shape; I hope to have it all together in a couple of months. I’m not sure how long the whole will be; maybe some 3000 lines—I don’t want to hurry—rather brood over it like a mother bear, till the form flashes (another fine mixed figure).…
This is becoming chatter…. I guess everyone here feels like Timon’s guests, and has to blow off steam, at times.
I would like to get the judgment of Eliot the poet on my poems—off the record. Not so much judgment as the pointing out of things that are
good or on their way to being good, that I might usefully explore further. The limiting negative kind of criticism I think I know
something
about (I always appreciate that too) but the other is limitless.
For “Eliot the editor” I’ve been trying to think of impossible
typographical
suggestions. But I don’t give a damn really as long as you don’t split stanzas.
Ah, yes, Europe! I’d like to go. This is perfect, though barbarous and isolated. If I could travel a little, then settle down and write day in and day out, till my poem is over—with a little good company and joy.
FORGIVE ALL THIS CHATTER
This is sort of a monk’s life, so you bend some one’s ear off when you have a chance.
Monk isn’t right, of course. This letter is about as organized as one of Merrill’s; God help me. By the way,
I
do
not
drink
here
the
way
I
did
in
Washington.
I begin to think Burgundy’s about perfect for the long run.
Wish Eliot the poet and Eliot the editor would take a look at Jarrell and Bishop (Elizabeth).
10
The “winding up” that Elizabeth Hardwick refers to seems to have become intensified in February 1949 when a coincidence of
circumstances
offered a focus for Lowell’s already disturbed sense of where he stood. Tate was later to describe his situation at this point:
As I see Cal over the past twelve years, and no one I think knows him better, three things held him together: the Church, his marriage and his poetry. He gave up the Church; he gave up Jean; and some months ago he virtually gave up poetry. He had been pushed forward too rapidly as a poet and he had attempted a work beyond his present powers; he couldn’t finish it.
11
It is likely that the work in question was Lowell’s first attempt at the long poem that became “The Mills of the Kavanaughs.” During 1948 he had printed “Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid” and “Mother Marie Therese,” and it was to be over two years before he published in magazines again.
Tate probably did know as much as anyone about Lowell’s state of mind during his first two months at Yaddo. In November he and Lowell had gone on a fishing trip together and they had also been in touch as members of the Library of Congress committee
responsible
for awarding the Bollingen Prize for Poetry (the committee members also included Conrad Aiken, Louise Bogan, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Robert Penn Warren and Karl Shapiro). It had been decided to award the prize to Ezra Pound for his
Pisan
Cantos,
and nobody on the judging panel was in any doubt that this would provoke an outcry from the left and re-inflame (as it did) all the art-versus-politics disputes that had been raging on and off since the early 1930s. Indeed, an outcry was anticipated in the judges’ citation:
To permit other considerations than that of poetic achievement to sway the decision would destroy the significance of the award and would in principle deny the validity of that objective perception of value on which civilized society must rest.
The debate was to develop in the summer and autumn of 1949 (with Allen Tate as the most vigorous champion of Pound), but in
February
the essential argument was launched.
In April, William Barrett wrote an article in
Partisan
Review
attacking the prize judges, and in the fall issue of
PR
there were replies from Auden, Shapiro and Tate—Shapiro had voted against Pound on the grounds that his anti-Semitism did indeed “vitiate” his art. Tate (almost) challenged Barrett to a duel. Later, two articles by Robert Hillyer in the
Saturday
Review
of
Literature
kept things on the boil—in Tate’s view, Hillyer exploited the Bollingen
controversy
in order to “sanction and guide” an attack on the whole of modern poetry, and in particular the New Criticism.
12
With John Berryman, Tate gathered seventy-three signatures for a letter in defense of the prize jury. The letter eventually appeared in the
Nation
on December 17, 1949. Radcliffe Squires, in a biography of Tate, writes:
That pretty much ended the episode, for while an occasional article appeared in the next year or two, the excitement subsided. The triumph for Berryman and Tate, however, was that the Bollingen Foundation decided to continue the prize under the auspices of Yale University, with the same jury. The campaign had been trying.
13
The Pound matter must certainly have been in Lowell’s thoughts, and he would probably have held the view that those who most fiercely opposed the Bollingen Award were as pro-Communist as
they were anti-Fascist. Although Lowell had printed more poems in
Partisan
Review
than in any other quarterly, he had never been drawn into its political wrangling—indeed, by managing to be closely associated both with
Partisan
and with the Southern
Agrarian
reactionaries of the
Sewanee
Review
circle, he had performed a small miracle of adroit noninvolvement. This was a period when every thinker had a label—Stalinist, anti-Stalinist, ex-Stalinist,
ex-anti
-Stalinist, Fascist, ex-Fascist, Catholic, ex-Catholic, and so on. In a year’s time (February 1950) Senator Joe McCarthy was to make his first big speech alleging that the State Department had been
infiltrated
by Communists. In 1949 the climate for his witch-hunts was already building up.
Lowell, then, would have known as well as anyone who “the Stalinists” were, and according to Robert Fitzgerald, his general belief was that “since Marxism lost intellectual honor its adherents have been limited to those for whom such a loss has no particular meaning.” If, in his already “wound-up” state, and with the Pound business in the air, Lowell needed an immediate target for his political hostilities, then Yaddo could hardly have been more obliging. Agnes Smedley, a writer on Far East politics, had lived at Yaddo until March of the previous year, had been there since 1943, and had enjoyed special privileges—a private telephone, for instance, and her own taxi instead of the one that regularly served the Yaddo guests. She was not known as a “creative writer,” and her lengthy residence at Yaddo had long been thought odd by the “real artists,” whose visits were limited to two or three months at a stretch; but it had been assumed that she had a close friendship with the director, Elizabeth Ames, and although Smedley was a known Marxist, this was simply thought to be a hangover from the days when Yaddo prided itself on its “anti-Fascist”
hospitality
.
On February 11, 1949, however, Agnes Smedley became
front-page
news. The
New
York
Times
announced:
The Army made public today a 32,000-word report on a Soviet spy ring in the Far East that was credited with a major development in diplomatic history and with having aided materially in the defeat by the Soviet Union of the Nazi armies invading Russian soil.
The report, put out under the name of General MacArthur, went on to identify Agnes Smedley as one of the spy ring’s contacts; she had been, it said, “one of the most energetic workers for the Soviet cause in China for the past 20-odd years.” Her writings on China had “hoaxed” a number of “high American officials,” and the time had now come for her to be “exposed for what she is, a spy and agent of the Soviet Government.” The
Times
then quoted a denial from Smedley: “I am not and never have been a Soviet spy or an agent for any country.”