Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
A lot is lost and a lot was never seen and understood. We stand in our own characters, of course, and warp our own knowledge. Still, it’s fascinating to see what one can fish up, clear up and write down. … it’s like cleaning my study, like going perhaps to some chiropractor, who leaves me with all my original bones jumbled back in a new and sounder structure.
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The fragments of Lowell’s autobiography which remain, and which are not early versions of “91 Revere Street,” are mostly a series of false starts, the same page retyped, slightly revised and then seemingly abandoned. In one fragment, Lowell writes that he is working on his autobiography “literally to ‘pass the time.’ I
almost
doubt if the time would pass at all otherwise.” The book, he said, would cover his early life up to 1934, the year of his first summer in Nantucket with Frank Parker. Lowell now viewed that summer as “a period of enthusiasm”; “enthusiasm” is a word he regularly uses to describe his manic episodes (the term probably derives from his reading in theology, where it would denote
extreme
religious zealotry, but by 1956 he would be more likely to accept the view of William Law, the eighteenth-century writer on Christian ethics and mysticism: “To appropriate Enthusiasm to Religion is the same ignorance of Nature as to appropriate Love to Religion: for Enthusiasm, a kindled inflamed spirit of Life is as common, as universal, as essential to human Nature, as Love is….”).
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Lowell felt that when his autobiography was completed, he would perhaps find that he had
“found
myself”: “I also hope that the result will supply me with my swaddling clothes, with a sort of immense bandage for my hurt nerves.”
22
In other words, this calm, industrious prose period of Lowell’s life was a lot shakier than it seemed; every so often he would falter in his researches and stray off into agonized, present-tense unburdening:
For two years I have been cooling off from three months of pathological enthusiasm. I go to sleep now easily, but sometimes I wake up with a jar. In my dreams I am like one of Michael Angelo’s rugged, ideal statues that can be tumbled down hill without injury. When I wake, it is as though I had been flayed, and had each nerve beaten with a rubber hose.
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And in another account, which in Lowell’s manuscript runs on from his description of breaking his glasses at Payne Whitney:
Yet all this time [in context, the time-placing is a problem—“all this time” could mean the days immediately following the breaking of his glasses, or it could mean the two years’ “cooling off’ period, 1954–56, or, since Lowell is never reluctant to dovetail and amalgamate, it could mean both] I would catch myself asking whining questions. Why don’t I die, die: I quizzed my face of suicide in the mirror; but the body’s warm, unawed breath befogged the face with a dilatory inertia. I said, “My dreams at night are so intoxicating to me that I am willing to put on the nothingness of sleep. My dreams in the morning are so
intoxicating
to me that I am willing to go on living.” Even now [i.e., in 1956] I can sometimes hear those two sentences repeating themselves over and over and over. I say them with a chant-like yawn, and feel vague, shining, girlish, like Perdita, or one of the many willowy allegoric voices in Blake’s Prophetic Books. “For my dreams, I will endure the day; I will suffer the refreshment of sleep.” In one’s teens these words, perhaps, would have sealed a Faustian compact. Waking, I suspected that my whole soul and its thousands of spiritual fibres, immaterial ganglia, apprehensive antennae, psychic radar etc. had been bruised by a rubber hose. In the presence of persons, I was ajar. But in my dreams, I was like one of Michael Angelo’s burly, ideal statues that can be rolled down hill without injury.
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The bulk of Lowell’s manuscript “autobiography,” however, is in the form of character sketches and anecdotes from childhood—his mother and grandfather are the characters most lovingly worried over, and there are some affectionately remembered minor figures. Lowell’s father—the third principal—is usually made mock of, with his weakness a constant measure of the others’ strength.
Throughout
there is a kind of double vision: the child’s-eye view judged and interpreted by the ironical narrator, with a good deal of adult
invention
around the edges. It is a method that is particularly hard on Mr. Lowell. Lowell makes little effort to salvage any childish awe of
“Daddy” from his later hostility to the spinelessness of R.T.S. Among the “91 Revere Street” drafts, there is a touching paragraph in which Lowell explicitly confesses an injustice of this sort:
As I try to write my own autobiography, other autobiographies
naturally
come to mind. The last autobiography I have looked into was a movie about a bull terrier from Brooklyn. The dog’s name was, I think,
House
on
Fire.
The district he came from was so tough, that smoking had to be permitted in the last three pews at high mass. House on Fire’s mother had been deserted by his father. House knows that his father is a great dog in the great world, either as a champion fighter or as a champion in exhibitions. House on Fire keeps saying with his Brooklyn accent, “I want to be a champ so that I can kill my father.” In the end there is peace.
My own father was a gentle, faithful and dim man. I don’t know why I was so agin him. I hope there will be peace.
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Almost two-thirds of the material in Lowell’s drafts is worked into “91 Revere Street,” but in addition to the confessional
material
already quoted, there are two interesting anecdotal pieces that he also chose not to include, possibly because he found both tales so heavy with symbolism that they had become “significant to the point of being meaningless.” In each case, Lowell was fascinated by the tangle of religiosexual suggestiveness, or “black magic,” as he calls it. In the first story Lowell is aged three or four and the setting is Philadelphia, where, apparently, his parents got regular visits from a local Quaker lady, Martha Bent. Bent doted on the child Lowell and also developed coy and bantering relations with his father. Bob Lowell found Martha a “regular fella” because she listened to his naval yarns; Charlotte considered her “flaccid and flirtatious.” As to the child Lowell: “I felt torn in two, and wanted to prove Martha both good and bad. She was an object to be wooed and despised.” Martha wore around her neck “a plain black cord on which she had attached a cracked ivory elephant the color of jaundice and no bigger than a man’s molar” and this modest ornament fascinated Lowell; it resembled rock candy and he wanted to possess it: “She must give me the ivory elephant. I wanted the elephant also because it was small, heavy, precious, useless, animal and the soul of Martha.” Soon he does possess it; indeed, swallows it:
I was looking up and letting the ivory tap on my teeth as though it were a piece of rock candy. And then it went down. Doctors came. Mother kept saying with Gargantuan suavity, “Bobby has swallowed an elephant.” Then it was unmentionably ascertained that the ivory elephant had come out in my chamber-pot. I was told that it was
broken
in three pieces so that I couldn’t see it again. And even now I have no idea how Mother managed to mention the chamber-pot, my
movement
and the marvelous elephant all in one pure, smirking breath.
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The other story has similar ingredients: a surrogate maternal
presence,
a seductively (or so it seemed) sweet-tasting but forbidden token of the mother figure’s “soul,” a token that the child possesses, then destroys, and then a thrilling climax, an unmasking; in each story the child regains his real mother’s attention by his theft of the adopted mother’s “essence.” The second incident in particular would have struck the adult Lowell as having been remarkably prophetic, and thus might be even more highly polished than the first. The setting is Brimmer Street in Boston, and Lowell is—he says—aged two:
When I was two years old I had a young nurse who was, herself, only eighteen or so years old and had come to Boston from Ireland…. Her name was Katherine. Katherine’s rosary was a memorable work of religious mass-production. It was designed with a Celtic exaggeration and the beads were made of some material which had the appearance and texture of rock candy. These beads were so hard, cold and
precious
and of such fascination that immediately the fat, warm, wooden beads which decorated my crib lost all their appeal to me. But what I loved more than the beads of Katherine’s rosary was the silver crucifix. It was heavy, intricate and important, as I could see from Katherine’s awed and loving glance upon it. Katherine told me about Jesus and I regret to recall that my feelings were highly egocentric: I saw, with despair, that I was second fiddle even in my nurse’s affections. And then suddenly the rosary disappeared and the house was disturbed by the mystery. I was questioned, but I merely gaped sweetly and
presented
myself as a figure of innocence, all sunlight and brown curls. I smiled and smiled and smiled, very much in the way my father smiled and smiled and smiled. A day or so later the rosary was found, hidden under the corner of the rug, where it had slipped by mistake according to the decision taken by the household. However, it was noticed that the Christus was missing and also, with embarrassment, that the chain of the rosary had been chewed. I returned to my denying smile, but
later Mother saw me pushing a piece of paper down the register. “You will burn up the house” she said. But two days later she again saw me pushing a whole handful of paper strips down the register. “You are setting the furnace on fire,” she said. I smiled and smiled, to her
intense
displeasure. “Yes, I know,” I said. “That’s where Jesus is.”
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For nearly two years Lowell toiled on his prose reminiscences and continued tracking down remote ancestral possibilities. He would be delighted to get letters from eighth cousins in Springfield,
Illinois
, and to be told that the “maternal side of J. R. Lowell’s ancestry has never been done justice. It was from them that he got his talent and his charm.” He would compile lists of his literary antecedents and feel “mighty set up” when he managed to establish a (very) distant cousinship with Boswell.
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And the interest was not altogether antiquarian. On January 4, 1957, Elizabeth Hardwick gave birth to a daughter, Harriet; the Traill-Spence line of Lowells had actually been added to. In letters, Lowell seems both awed and captivated by this strange event. When, in May 1956, he had learned that he was to be a father, he wrote to J. F. Powers:
We are in a state of tremendous excitement, we have just learned that like almost all other mortals we are to have a child … months ahead, but for certain unless there is some accident. It’s terrible discovering that your one moral plank, i.e. an undiluted horror of babies, has crumbled! We’re so excited we can hardly speak, and expect a prodigy whose first words will be Partisan Review.
29
And again, after the birth:
Yes, we do have a little girl, Harriet Winslow Lowell, born on the 4th of January. She is very various, yet sedate and makes her parents feel like infantile, stone-age cretins. She was born looking like the great—Ted Roethke, or times when her hair was in evidence—Churchill or Dylan Thomas…. Chaos grows like a snowball in our house; all values are standing on their ears.
30
In two years Lowell had become a father, a university professor (he had taken up the Boston University job in 1956) and a house owner—all in all, a sober and industrious Bostonian. Throughout 1956 he and Hardwick had enjoyed showing off their grand new house and
had won a small reputation for their stylish hospitality. When
Marianne
Moore visited them, she wrote to Elizabeth Bishop that she had had a “notable” tea with “R and E Lowell … I do like them—heartfelt, generous, genial, initiate and so prepossessing….” and that she had greatly admired their “Boston-in-its-glory” residence on Marlborough Street.
31
In other words, Lowell was at last
living
the sort of life that Charlotte might have been impressed by. And—“tamed” and “tranquillized” by psychiatric drugs—he had avoided the “emotional excitement of poetry” for a full two years.
*
In March 1957 Lowell began his fortieth year with a reading tour of the West Coast; it was a strenuous trip, with readings “at least once a day and sometimes twice” for fourteen days, and he was later to describe it as an important influence on his quest for a “new style.” The Beat poets had already trained Californian audiences to believe that poetry could be enjoyed by the untrained, and Lowell found himself willing to make some small compromises:
At that time, poetry reading was sublimated by the practice of Allen Ginsberg. I was still reading my old New Criticism religious, symbolic poems, many published during the war. I found—it’s no criticism—that audiences didn’t understand, and I didn’t always understand myself while reading.
32
Lowell began simplifying poems as he read, adding syllables,
translating
Latin into English: “I’d make little changes just impromptu. … I began to have a certain disrespect for the tight forms. If you could make it easier by just changing syllables, then why not?”
33
In fact, Lowell’s respect for tight forms had been crumbling since 1953; that is to say, he knew then (and probably earlier, with the reviews of
The
Mills
of
the
Kavanaughs
)
that whatever he wrote next, it would not be in strict meter. Indeed, he had already written the odd piece that “broke meter”: his poem on “Ford Madox Ford,” for instance, was first published in the spring of 1954.
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