Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
On February 12 the army issued a cautious statement pointing out that they didn’t “necessarily agree with all of the MacArthur
Report
”; it had, after all, been written a year earlier. A week later, on February 19, they disowned it altogether:
ARMY ADMITS SPY FAUX
PAS
;
NO PROOF ON AGNES SMEDLEY
. The report, the army now confirmed, “had not been edited properly, from the public relations point of view.” On the twentieth, Agnes Smedley was reported to have thanked the army for “clearing her name”; in the same issue of the
Times
the Bollingen Award to Ezra Pound was officially announced under the headline:
POUND, IN MENTAL CLINIC, WINS
PRIZE FOR POETRY PENNED IN TREASON CELL.
During this week, or very shortly afterwards, two FBI
investigators
visited Yaddo. Four guests were by then in residence—Lowell, Flannery O’Connor, Elizabeth Hardwick and Edward Maisel—and of these the FBI men interviewed Hardwick and Maisel, who then reported back to Lowell and O’Connor. Yaddo, it transpired, had been under FBI surveillance for some time; the investigators had asked “highly circumstantial and specific questions” not only about Agnes Smedley, but about other Yaddo guests, and “seemed to have no confidence in either the words or the motives of the executive director of Yaddo, Mrs. Ames … but thought she had protected Mrs. Smedley to the point of misrepresentation.”
According to the account prepared later by Robert Fitzgerald (and sent as an open letter to various literary figures in an attempt to explain Lowell’s conduct during the weeks following the
Smedley
headlines), there was already at Yaddo a general feeling of unease; Lowell had early on felt “something unpleasant in the
atmosphere
of the place”—now he knew that this was “the result of long permeation by moods or influences that were politically or morally committed to communism…. The impression grew on Lowell that the outwardly benevolent institution had been given over to
scandalous
and sinister forces.” As Fitzgerald concedes, “impressions of this kind come easily to the poetic imagination and are easily
enforced
by it,” but in this case, he says, Lowell’s suspicions were supported by “the fact that three other guests were likewise affected.”
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Towards the end of February the four guests contacted the local directors of the Yaddo corporation and presented their misgivings. A meeting of the Yaddo board was convened, and Lowell was invited to present his case.
The transcript of the meeting makes fairly ugly reading.
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Lowell
’s introductory statement demands that Mrs. Ames be “fired” and that this action be “absolute, final and prompt.” The “exact” charges were that “It is our impression that Mrs. Ames is somehow deeply and mysteriously involved in Mrs. Smedley’s political activities” and that Mrs. Ames’s personality is such that “she is totally unfitted for the position of executive director.” Lowell goes on from this to employ “a very relevant figure of speech.” Yaddo, he says, is a “body” and Mrs. Ames “a diseased organ, chronically poisoning the whole system, sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes almost imperceptibly, sometimes, as now, fatally”:
I want to say that we have not taken this matter up lightly, nor do we intend to drop it lightly. It is only fair to present to the attention of the Board that no matter what decision is taken by the board, the present guests intend to leave in a body on Tuesday, March first [Lowell’s thirty-second birthday].
If action is not taken by the Board that we consider adequate, I intend to confer with certain people in New York, among them Trilling, Rahv, Hook, and Haggin, and immediately to call a large meeting of the more important former Yaddo guests; at this meeting we will again press our case at great length.
I think it only fair to tell the Board that I have myself influential friends in the world of culture, nine-tenths of whom in the course of my ordinary correspondence and conversation will be informed of this affair within three months. I want to give their names—I think it quite
relevant
: Santayana, Frost, Eliot, Williams, Ransom, Moore (in case you think I’m bluffing, I only know Miss Moore slightly but think she would agree), Bishop, Tate, Blackmur, Warren, Auden, Adams, Bogan,
Empson
. Of my own generation, Robert Fitzgerald, Jarrell, Bishop, Schwartz, Shapiro, Taylor, Powers, Stafford and Berryman. We shall also take steps to see that the important people in the world of music
and painting are fully informed. I should say, most of my friends are writers, but I have connections in Washington and I shall take steps to see that the matter is aired there, too.
Lowell then cross-examines the other guests, extracting from each of them a series of supposedly damaging “impressions.” Hardwick, for example, testifies: “I personally feel that at times there is a discrepancy between Mrs. Ames’s surface behavior and her true feelings, not towards me, but toward most matters. I only know the surface … I cannot read her heart.” There is mention of other Communist writers who have been entertained at Yaddo, of a “proletarian novelist” called Leonard Ehrlich, who was a longtime friend of Mrs. Ames and a frequent visitor at Yaddo, of Agnes Smedley’s proselytizing among the students at nearby Skidmore College, of mysterious Japanese and East German visitors, of
suspicious
jokes about “Molotov cocktail parties,” of Mrs. Ames’s
unpatriotic
caution in her dealings with the FBI, and so on. All in all, the “evidence” is a patchwork of devoured hearsay and rather
desperate
speculation: not one of the witnesses challenges Mrs. Ames’s “surface” friendliness and efficiency. Lowell, however, seemingly content with the forcefulness of his presentation, goes on to
harangue
the board as follows:
This may be impertinent but I think that the board cannot evade its moral responsibility because of any sentimental attachments or fear of any kind. I think of the Trasks [the founders of Yaddo] and I think it showed a touching innocent faith in the arts that they should have endowed Yaddo, and this faith has suffered hideous perversion, and I think the institution is faced with ruin.
The transcript continues for another thirty pages. There is lengthy testimony from Mrs. Ames’s secretary, who admits to having been an FBI informer for the past five years—“I have, ever since I have been here, whenever I heard people talking very brilliantly red, I have written down their name and address and dropped it off at a certain place in Saratoga for forwarding to the FBI.” And, after much haggling among the witnesses over small details of anti-
Smedley
gossip, there is a statement from Mrs. Ames herself: she explains that Agnes Smedley had been kind to her five years before when she (Ames) was nursing her dying sister, that she had “felt indebted to
[Smedley] after Marjorie died, as she had helped so much with the nursing and everything”; of Leonard Ehrlich she simply says: “He is a very good friend of mine and his brother and wife are. He was a very good friend of Russia and is still in the position so many of us are … of thinking we ought to try to reach some agreement.” And she gives her version of the past few days’ events:
About immediate events: These are just factual statements. There were five (one man [the novelist James Ross] left yesterday, he did not want to be mixed up in this). Here have been these five people for several months, living in great apparent harmony and good will toward me. … when I have stayed away from dinner, asking why I did not come; every one of them asking for more time … some invited for the first time pressing for a chance to stay longer; Mr. Lowell asked to stay until August; Miss O’Connor wanting to stay until July, and come back next year. Mr. Lowell has written three or four of his friends whom he wishes to get here this summer, he started correspondence between me and them; he writes these letters telling about the ideal state of Yaddo; no reservations at all. They frequently came to my house for music or cocktails, a harmonious life, with now and then little affectionate notes. … then all of this changed with the morning of Tuesday, when they appeared at my door, looking extremely grave and upset, three of them. I asked them, and they stated that the FBI had questioned them the day before. I was very much upset and disturbed … it was quite a shock to me to hear that. When situations arise and people are disturbed I try to hold the line and seek for calm.
Mrs. Ames then describes her own interview with the FBI, which took place on the following Thursday; they questioned her about Agnes Smedley and about earlier visitors to Yaddo and she
answered
with “complete candor”:
They stayed with me for two and a half hours, and when they left, thanked me for my cooperation, shook hands with me, and said if anything else comes up, may we come back, and I said yes. That was on Thursday and to me it is a very unsettling thing to go through, anything like that.
The next day, I did feel very tired out. As you know, I have not yet completely recovered from a serious operation ten months ago. On Friday, I came over for dinner, feeling very tired and very depressed and that night they say my attitude began to change. That is completely false.
What I want to stress is that they, after living here harmoniously, pressing for extensions of time, recommending their friends to come here … I can show letters they have written me … then like that, the whole thing changes …. I can attribute it to nothing but fear and hysteria. They are young people, in their 30’s; I can understand it, faced with a world such as we have. Miss Hardwick had some experience with Communism in her early years; she is disillusioned and bitter. That is the story.
The directors agreed to discuss the matter again at their regular meeting in New York in three weeks’ time. Lowell made one last appeal that Mrs. Ames be immediately suspended, but this was refused. Malcolm Cowley, a board member and a supporter of Mrs. Ames, wrote to a friend on March 8:
In the end nothing was done, nothing could be done, but everything was deferred to this new meeting in New York (in about two weeks or less) at which some sort of decision must be taken. The guests departed, vowing to blacken the name of Yaddo in all literary circles and call a mass meeting of protest. The directors departed. I stayed one day
because
I had to do a big review and would be too tired to finish it if I waited till I got back to Connecticut, but then I left too, feeling as if I had been at a meeting of the Russian Writers’ Union during a big purge. Elizabeth went to a nursing home. Her secretary resigned. Yaddo was left like a stricken battlefield.
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Lowell felt thwarted and outraged by the board’s indecisiveness; by now, according to Fitzgerald, the corruption of Yaddo had become symbolic of “the great evil of the world”:
Moreover, as he confronted this evil, he found himself drawn at the same time by many tokens of a different kind of which normally he would not have been so hyperconscious, towards the church which opposes evil with holiness and communism with Christianity. The day after the abortive meeting he went with Miss O’Connor, who is a Catholic, to mass for the first time in over a year. The change taking place in him was like the process which sometimes occurs at a late stage in the formation of a work of art where everything begins to coalesce, to flow together into patterns that had not been foreseen: it is a stage of inspiration that is well beyond the deliberative.
17
On the following day, Lowell and O’Connor visited the
Fitzgeralds
, and Lowell announced that “he had returned to the Church that morning after receiving an incredible outpouring of grace.” Sally Fitzgerald remembers that he was “shooting sparks in every direction,”
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but at the time the Fitzgeralds were sympathetic, indeed gratified; and Robert wrote:
During the rest of that week our friend labored under the strain and exaltation of religious experience: there were times when he was simply tired, interested and even amused, there were other times when
everything
he saw, everything that happened, seemed miraculous to him; when his steps were directed and his eyes were opened; when he felt that God spoke through him and that his impulses were inspired…. At the end of the week he visited a priest for absolution and then went off to make a week’s retreat for absolution and counsel with the Trappists in Rhode Island.
19
From Rhode Island, Lowell went back to New York, and at first seemed to have calmed down; friends like Fitzgerald, Tate and O’Connor were ready to view the whole incident as a symptom of his “reconversion”—although O’Connor had been worried by Lowell’s insistence that she was a saint. On March 3, while Lowell was with the Trappists, Tate wrote to Elizabeth Hardwick: “Cal seems to have been reconverted to the church and I for one think it is a good thing.” Tate, though, had not heard the full story of Yaddo, nor did he know the exact status of Lowell’s relationship with Hardwick:
Both Caroline and I thought at first that along with, or because of, or as a result of, his reconversion that he had fallen in love with you and was trying to marry you. Caroline said “Poor Miss Hardwick!” I knew Cal was in one of his manic phases but I could scarcely believe you had lost your reason.
20
An entry in Fitzgerald’s journal for March 4 records a telephone call from Lowell at six-thirty in the morning: “I want you to get a pencil and paper and take some things down.” Lowell wanted to remind Fitzgerald that “Ash Wednesday was the day of the Word made Flesh,” and that on that day Lowell had “received the shock
of the eternal word: tantum dic verbo et
sanabitur
anima mea.” Fitzgerald’s notes continue:
March 3 was the day of humors; I [i.e., Lowell] prayed to St. Anthony of Padua, who himself held the child (and prayed God to spare me His humor) and Elizabeth was miraculously purged of the pollution caused by her evasions. I prayed over her, and had to call on all the heavenly host, St. Michael and others, and prayed over her using the psalm (?) beginning “God said to the prophet, Even if the mother should forsake the child …” She was purged and became like that music of Haydn’s.
Today is the day of Flannery O’Connor, whose patron saint is St. Therese of Lisieux.
Also: you are to take St. Luke the physician and historian as your patron saint.
That morning, he said afterward, he filled his bathtub with cold water and went in first on his hands and knees, then arching on his back, and prayed thus to Therese of Lisieux in gasps. All his motions that morning were “lapidary,” and he felt a steel coming into him that made him walk very erect. It came to him that he should fast all day and give up cigarettes. After mass and communion he walked, going in to a
Protestant
Church to observe and think about the emptiness and speculate as to how it could be filled—also the “nimbleness” there (for Protestants have some good things that Catholics don’t) and then up to the Jesuit Church on 14th Street and then to the Church of St. Francis in the 30s feeling how in both love radiated from the altars. He went to the Guild bookshop to get Flannery a book on St. Therese of Lisieux but instead before he knew it bought a book on a Canadian girl who was many times stigmatized.
That night here he said to Elizabeth: It’s no good telling you these things that have to be experienced; but Christ is present in the Eucharist and love is at the heart of the altar, and this is something perfectly real, just like getting your hand wet. That you must be told.
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