Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
Robert Lowell: A Biography (31 page)
I had a friend who had a formidable mother and he said he used
sometimes
to stop in the street and say “Is Mama
really
dead?” Not out of any sentimentality but from a genuine wonder that such a strange force could suddenly vanish. In my heart I do four times a day pay Mrs. Lowell the compliment of profound disbelief in this latest event. There is plenty of evidence to show that she seriously believed she’d outlive Cal and I thought so too and so did he! I am really sorry. She wouldn’t have liked it at all! Think how furious this death would have made her and you can’t help but feel it’s a dirty trick.
I don’t mean to be flippant about this. Mrs. Lowell’s death is really a very interesting and amazing thing! I’m sure you know what I mean. And she had such a real death too! On far-away, sunny shores struck down at noon.
1
This was Elizabeth Hardwick’s candid response to news of
Charlotte
Lowell’s death (she wrote this letter to Blair Clark while
Lowell
was still in Rapallo), and she was probably in part echoing what she imagined would be Lowell’s own deepest reactions. For the moment, though, Lowell was not ready to engage in self-
examination
. His first response had been determinedly present tense: the drama of the death, the Napoleonic casket, the symbolic sea
crossing
, the ancestral burial at Dunbarton. The sheer metaphoric power of the whole episode was awesome. As to mourning, Lowell simply repeated that Charlotte’s trip to Europe had been an appropriate “last fling,” that staying in Boston would not have saved her life.
On his return to Cincinnati, though, a new voice is to be heard in Lowell’s letters. There are, for instance, callously brisk accounts of his new financial gains: “Mother’s death … has about doubled
my income and given some fifty thousand dollars in cash. All very handy at this point.”
2
He had become rich, he declared; he had been orphaned into a new and heady self-determination; he was starting a new life. Within ten days of returning to Ohio, he began issuing bulletins to friends:
Dear Peter, This will come as a shock to you but I had better get it over with now. Elizabeth and I are separating…. I think that I will keep explanations to the minimum. We are perfectly friendly, oddly enough, still and both in very good spirits. There are no “sides.” There is no great story to tell: we just exhausted each other, I more than Elizabeth, but we both did.
3
This was written to Peter Taylor on March 19; two days later, in a letter to Blair Clark, Lowell was, if anything, more jaunty:
I’d better start off with the
coup
de
foudre,
as Merrill Moore would say (You ought to have heard him struggling with various incorrect forms of this expression the last time I saw him, even spelling them out on an envelope, and so abashed and for once wordless about Mother’s death!) Elizabeth and I are separating. You’ll hear from her, and may have already; but my self-respect demands that I write too. But we don’t have two camps and two versions. I’m not going to plumb the causes; briefly, we were worn thin by each other. We are on perfectly good terms and E is now in New York at the Algonquin looking for a comfortable apartment.
4
Both letters, having disposed of tiresome private business, launch into speedy chat about his Cincinnati schedules, his views of Henry Adams’s genius (“He’s wonderful, by the way, on his and our manic-depressive New England character”) and current politics: “Wasn’t Nixon’s speech the most servile mush you ever heard. I was amazed by Stevenson, the first long speech of his I’ve heard on the radio. You really learn from him.”
The next round of letters, a week later, added a new piece of information; he had decided to remarry. During his week in Italy he had contacted Giovanna Madonia, the woman he had briefly, but intensely, focused on two years before in Salzburg. She had not, he’d found, “got over” him, although she had in the meantime married an Italian “man of letters” called Luciano Erba. Blair Clark recalls:
Somehow we met and had dinner with Giovanna and her husband, Luciano. It was very strange, all that. I didn’t know how crazy Cal was at that point. I mean, I didn’t think there was any great danger.
Giovanna
came to the opera and there was a lot of dodging around the pillars of La Scala to avoid the husband, and I saw some of it, like in an Orson Welles movie. I don’t know quite what happened that night. Somehow the husband was spirited away—maybe I had something to do with it—and they had some time together, a couple of hours.
5
For Madonia, Lowell’s reappearance was miraculous, and on his return to the United States she wrote to him ecstatically: although, for those two years, she had “suffered, because of you, that which a normal woman suffers in two lives,” she was now convinced that “you are giving life back to me: you must give me a happy life.”
6
Her marriage to Erba was, she said, a torment:
Luciano lives through words, in this sense he is a real man of letters, and every day when I get home from work I am forced into conversations with him that last for hours and hours, conversations that leave me completely exhausted.
7
With Lowell, she believed, it would be different. Lowell had told her that he had separated from Hardwick, and in response to this, Madonia (on March 21) pronounced herself
immensely happy … now that you are alone, only now, are you mine. I love you and you are mine and that is enough for me. That’s all. Nothing other than you binds me to life. I want to live with you and for you. I want to have your child.
8
Elizabeth Hardwick had indeed retreated to New York, but at first she was by no means sure that Lowell was entering another manic phase; he was puzzlingly “rational,” she wrote to Blair Clark, even comically so:
Poor Cal! He’s really a great comic character! “Uncle, honey, it’s all over!” This was the way he announced the whole thing. And Blair, the way he has carried on over his mother’s death is really extraordinary. I, of course, would never say this to anyone but you, but I think Cal is in an elation which is brought about by guilt feelings over his relief, quite unexpected, at his mother’s death, guilt feelings complicated by his
profiting from her death. Then Giovanna’s telling him that she would never have married Erba except for him, that she was unhappy, etc.
9
Lowell was producing some powerful rationalizations of their split: “Our marriage was really contra naturam for her as well as me. Marriage to me wronged her fundamental nature, her vocation—she was very gallant, but it gave her psycho-somatic jaundice.”
10
And Hardwick was exhausted enough to see these—for a week or so, at any rate—as genuinely held beliefs:
It is like coming out of a cave to be free of this. I don’t know how I ever had the sense to pick up and go, but I suppose it was desperation. I feel fine, a bit bruised now and then. People have been awfully nice to me and I wish to forget the whole marriage and start all over. I want to marry a nice, sleepy old man who snoozes in front of the fire all day.
11
Meanwhile, Lowell had announced to all his Cincinnati
acquaintances
that he was determined to remarry, and had persuaded them to stand with him on the side of passion. Some members of the faculty found him excitable and talkative during this period, but since the talk was always brilliant and very often flattering to them, they could see no reason to think of Lowell as “ill”; indeed, he was behaving just as some of them hoped a famous poet would behave. They undertook to protect this unique flame against any dampening intrusions from New York. Thus, when Hardwick became
convinced
that Lowell was indeed sick—over a period of two weeks his telephone calls to New York became more and more confused, lengthy and abusive—she ran up against a wall of kindly meant hostility from Lowell’s campus allies. Her version of Lowell was not theirs, even when they were discussing the same symptoms; what to her was “mad” was to them another mark of Lowell’s genius. She wrote to the chairman of the English Department pleading that he arrange for a doctor to see Lowell before the episode could gather full momentum, but was told that “Cal was fine, reading poetry, seeing friends, etc.”
12
She persuaded Merrill Moore to write a letter and Moore was given the same style of rebuff. The view from Cincinnati was that the great poet was “better if anything” than he had been before; his tireless energy, his ranging eloquence were taken as signs of a newly liberated spirit and there was enchantment in the idea of his remote Italian lover—Hardwick was the ousted
wife, to be handled sympathetically but firmly. As for Hardwick, her position had become, to say the least, exasperating. “I can’t say: ‘Cal wants to leave me, therefore he’s crazy,’” but equally she didn’t want Lowell “to come to with Giovanna at the docks, a not unlikely happening because if what he says is true she’s moving fast.”
13
And so she was. Encouraged by cables from Lowell, Giovanna was
dismantling
her marriage, arranging passport and visa, and—she vowed—would soon be on her way to Cincinnati.
But gradually, even some of the fond Cincinnatians began to have their doubts. One of them gave a party for Lowell, and he walked out after ten minutes, having insulted one of the other guests; he began making frequent visits to the Gaiety strip club—“every day, not just once but twice, and he didn’t have enough money and one day, coming home, he jumped out of a moving taxi—to keep from paying.”
14
George Ford, then of the Cincinnati English
Department
, remembers Lowell “talking like a machine gun with blazing eyes”:
My clearest memory of him was having him to our house for dinner, with only one other guest, Professor Carl Trehman, of the Department of Classics. Trehman asked a few questions about Virgil, Catullus, and other Roman poets, and Cal discoursed brilliantly about them, non-stop all through cocktails, dinner, and after dinner, as well. It was dazzling, but also alarming, and one felt that he might be on the edge of a breakdown. When the lectures resumed, the tensions increased. It was his habit sometimes to stop in the middle of a lecture, and stare at the audience, and give a little talk on American Republicanism. Sometimes he looked very belligerent indeed, and the Chairman of the Department, William S. Clark, became worried that some incident might happen in public. It seems weird to look back on it now, but we decided that some of the strongest and biggest members of the department should sit in the front row in case anything violent happened—being 6’2” and 200 lbs myself, I served in this capacity. But for some reason or another I was not present at the last of his appearances on the lecture platform.
15
Lowell gave lectures on Ezra Pound and his madness, and on the darker aspects of Robert Frost’s sensibility—on both occasions, Ford thought, he was “tense”; according to one member of the audience, Lowell’s final lecture turned out to be on “Hitler, more or less extolling the superman ideology,”
16
and this seems to have been the one that persuaded the English Department that Lowell’s
“brilliance” needed to be curbed. By the time of this “Hitler
lecture
,” though, Hardwick had decided to intervene. She traveled to Cincinnati with John Thompson and was eventually obliged to have Lowell detained under a court order. Thompson recalls:
He had this circle of weak-minded Cincinnatians who were hiding him—from being arrested, from Lizzie. So I went out there with Lizzie—and I guess we finally called the cops on him and managed to get him committed. He would cave in at that point—once the cops came he would cave in. He’d say, “All right—I don’t go willingly, but I’ll go.”
17
A few Cincinnatians continued to “protect” Lowell; a lawyer called Gilbert Bettman was recruited, and it was some days before he could be persuaded that his efforts were misguided. Bettman and his wife, Elizabeth, had been on Lowell’s “side” throughout, and had even written encouraging letters to Giovanna Madonia. As Mrs. Bettman now recalls: “We were not very ‘up’ on the course of mental illness in those days, and felt somewhat mousetrapped and awkward to be placed in a role which seemed contrary to Elizabeth’s interests.”
18
Throughout these weeks of intensifying mania, Lowell had been writing frequently to Ezra Pound. On March 10 he told Pound of his mother’s death:
You didn’t know my mother, so there is no point in going elaborately into our relationship. We were very much alike … only for most of her life she had no idea where or who she was. Most of our lives we weighed on each other like stones, but at the end (during the last ten months or so we were in a funny way speaking different languages, very close—the same metabolism, the same humor, the same boldness, and slowness.
Well now to my reason for writing you—she died in the clinic of your friend Dr. Bacigaiupo—the young man, not his father. So for a week or so—I was also in Siena picking up Mother’s belongings—I was very close to you. And I think I know better now my old friend, the man under the masks, under the “agenda” much better than I did—say when I was in Washington last November or December.
19
On March 25 he announced his separation from Hardwick and his betrothal to Madonia:
I am getting a divorce from my wife and can’t afford to pay for anything I can get free. Don’t you admire the casual way I introduced this
all-important item to me. I am going to marry an Italian girl—have been wasting half-dead, Ezra, now for two years.
20
And on March 30, a week before his lecture, he writes Pound,
21
sending him a new poem, “An Englishman Abroad,” which is an early draft of the poem later called “Words for Hart Crane”: