Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
Robert Lowell: A Biography (42 page)
The Ford Foundation decided it would be interesting to take a group of established writers who had not written plays and attach them to repertory companies and see if they turn out to be good dramatists. More poets than fiction writers, I think. Anthony Hecht was attached to one of the repertory theaters in Manhattan, Richard Wilbur to the one in Houston. Lowell and I expressed an interest in opera and we were accredited to the New York City Opera Company and the Metropolitan for a season.
18
The “study” would begin in September 1960, but as early as March, Lowell was writing to Meredith with the suggestion that they collaborate on a libretto based on Melville’s story “Benito Cereno”; other possibles were Richard Hughes’s
A
High
Wind
in
Jamaica
and Georg Büchner’s
Danton
’
s
Death
—“the best modern political play I know of’
19
—but it was the Melville that excited Lowell, connecting as it did with his study of the Colonel Shaw exploit and with his own uneasy, ambiguous feelings about “the razor’s edge of Boston’s negro culture.” As he paraphrased it for Cousin Harriet:
Benito Cereno [is] the story of an honest but rather thick-skulled
American
sea-captain from Dunbury, Mass., who spends a day on board a Spanish slave ship in 1799, unaware that the slaves have seized the ship and killed most of the Spaniards. The hero is a sort of Henry Jamesian innocent abroad.
20
“For the Union Dead” is, to be sure, an “abolitionist poem,” and Lowell was later to say that in it “I lament the loss of the old Abolitionist spirit: the terrible injustice, in the past and in the
present
, of the American treatment of the Negro is of the greatest urgency to me as a man and as a writer.”
21
But this correct thinking did not prevent him from responding to Melville’s tale of a Jamesian innocent confronted with the realities of a successful black rebellion. On this subject, Lowell wrote to William Meredith:
how can we handle the whole plot so as not to make it rather shockingly anti-negro: What I’d hope for would be something neutral, rather what’s happening now, wrong blazing into a holocaust, no one innicent [
sic
]. But the action—in Melville the negroes with their bloodthirsty servility are symbolic drama—on the stage will be much more unbearable than read, or even worse, likely to seem a sadistic unfelt farce.
22
(The phrase here, “bloodthirsty servility,” forces one to look back to the final stanza of “For the Union Dead”—is the poem’s vision of “savage servility” in truth Lowell’s vision of wrong blazing into a black-against-white holocaust?)
Meredith was not enticed by the challenge of
Benito
Cereno;
he thought it “full of problems. Quite possibly it is not the work we could best collaborate on.”
23
His proposal was that they wait until September and then “hang around the City Center and the Met for the first four months” and try to “define our concept of the opera.” Lowell, however, was not to be restrained, and during the summer of 1960, at Castine, he finished a draft of “the whole of Benito”—
47 pages, a sort of iambic free verse with a lot of show and charade and horror, more action than language. It went so quickly I am stunned and don’t know whether it works or how it can work in with what you’ve done. I am eager to compare notes. My version is a play, not an opera, if it is anything.
24
He also completed his heroic-couplet translation of Racine’s
Phèdr
—prodded here by a commission for Eric Bentley’s Classic Drama series—and started work on a group of Baudelaire “versions.” Since the spring of 1959 he had published almost a dozen translations in magazines—his Montale and Rilke, as well as poems by Pasternak
and Heine—and was beginning to think seriously of a collection. Although still “hanging on a question mark,” Lowell was able to write to Meredith in August 1960:
[I feel] wonderfully athletic, hackish and ready for opera, though I haven’t done anything yet. I wonder if Phèdre or something like it could be given in a singing version, though I’m still keen on Benito.
25
In September the Lowells moved from Boston to New York—the move was to be for the year of Lowell’s Ford Foundation grant, and they had exchanged their Marlborough Street house for Eric Bentley’s apartment at 194 Riverside Drive. Lowell and Meredith began to “hang around the Met,” watching rehearsals and—Lowell boasted—attending “four Puccinis in a week.”
26
In October, Lowell wrote to Peter Taylor, who was now in London working as a resident playwright at the Royal Court Theatre:
We feel the same way as you about London about New York, very engagé and anonymous. There’s a difference about my work, i.e. my total ignorance of music and opera. However, the rehearsals are great fun—full of things like Stokowski walking out and Christopher West walking out.
27
Lowell’s “theatrical” mood was sustained also by negotiations for a London and perhaps a Broadway production of his
Phaedra;
Lincoln
Kirstein had shown Lowell’s translation to the British producer George Devine, and the early signs seemed promising. “All very fantastic and unbelievable,” Lowell wrote to Taylor, and was soon busy speculating about the members of his “ideal cast”:
Would Laurence Olivier really do for Theseus? etc … There’s a terrific role for a young aging woman. The problem is whether any actor could deliver and any audience hear reams of heroic couplets of a rather pseudo 17th century grandiosity.
28
Even the three-year-old Harriet, Lowell now spoke of as “very bossy and Broadwayish,” and his letters to Taylor and Allen Tate in London were for a month or two full of rather boyish drama talk—the prospects for
Phaedra
, plans for future Brechtian spectaculars that would be “fierce and noble and indecent”
29
and jests about the
Met tenors who looked “like goons in the comic strip criminals.”
Lowell and Meredith, it should be said, might be forgiven for not treating their visits to the Met too earnestly. Meredith gives an example of the way the Met viewed
them:
We sat in Rudolf Bing’s office only once. When Bing found out that we were not members of the Ford Foundation staff but only grantees, he began to lose interest and be busy, and he suggested to Cal and me that as a beginning we might go up to Columbia University where there was an introductory course on the opera. I was about ready to bluster, but Cal said very sweetly, “You must understand, Mr. Bing, that Mr. Meredith and I are already professionals. We’ve come for some help in seeing how the opera company works.” It was so much gentler than need be, the way he said it, but it was exactly the right thing to say. So we were allowed to go to live rehearsals and hang around backstage and were given house passes. By the end Bing was calling me Mr. Lowell.
30
Lowell’s excitement with the theater was really, Meredith
believed
, an aspect of his excitement with New York—he felt himself to be in the “capital of intellectual life,” and of course “he could hold a larger court in New York” than he ever could in Boston. As early as October 1960 Lowell wrote to Peter Taylor:
In a way we like New York better than Boston (though Boston has pleasant memories for me, is physically more human, is easier to get out of and other things) and we are thinking of moving permanently.
31
By the end of the year the decision seems to have been made. In December, Lowell had written to Boston University that he wouldn’t be able to teach either term next year: what he hadn’t “yet written them” was that he intended living in New York. “Lizzie’s even now roaming about town looking at houses.”
32
In January 1961 an apartment on West 67th Street became available at a good price; both its location (no more than a hundred yards from Central Park) and its rather dramatically eccentric interior design seemed to
Hardwick
perfect, and on January 10 she wrote to Cousin Harriet:
Our new apartment is absolutely definite now, more than that—
irrevocable
. I had some misgivings and clung a bit to Boston just because we were there. On the other hand, there was no profound reason why we shouldn’t make the move. Bobby has wanted to even before this year and
we came here on the Ford grant to make certain and to look around. He never wavered and so there didn’t seem to be any turning back….
The apartment has “features” to say the least. It is a wonderful
building
, one of the few left here, built in the 1900’s for artists. Many
interesting
people have lived here, and still do. It is very well-run, very cozy, very old-fashioned. We have had to have all sorts of meetings and inspections with the others of the 9 owners and Bobby said it was worse than the Tavern Club initiation. We have a two-floor in height,
skylighted
living room, dining room, kitchen and little room on the first—very large, strange and baronial. Then you go upstairs, to the balcony for the bedrooms.
33
But the Marlborough Street house could not be sold until the
summer
, so Hardwick was in a sense still balanced between Boston and New York when, in February 1961, Lowell again began to show signs of speeding up. This time there was “a girl”—in the shape of a young New York poet called Sandra Hochman; and Lowell’s protestations soon manifested what could now be thought of as “the usual pattern”: the move to New York, he began saying, was a renunciation of Boston, and along with
Boston
, of Hardwick and the whole of his “old life.” Hochman and New York offered him rebirth; it was all going to be wonderful. The difference this time, though, from Hardwick’s point of view, was that the psychiatrist Lowell had been referred to in New York was adopting a quite different line from that of his doctors at McLean’s: that is to say, she was not convinced that Lowell’s “old life” was more “real” or more worthwhile than possible other lives that he might wish to change it for. Dr. Viola Bernard, whom Lowell had been seeing since his arrival in New York, was far more analytically inclined than any of his earlier “therapists” had been and more disposed therefore to seek existential “causes” for his sickness; she did not, in other words, assume him to be the victim merely of some metabolic imbalance that could be
chemically
set right. For Hardwick, understandably, this seemed like the last twist of the knife. In earlier episodes, when Lowell had turned on her, she had at least had the support of his physicians; now, it appeared, he had found a doctor who was prepared to encourage him in his delusions.
It was on March 3, 1961, that Lowell’s new bout of “elation” reached its climax. Blair Clark recalls the circumstances:
It happened at my house. The middle of the night before he went in. I didn’t know Sandra Hochman existed before then. Cal was in terrible physical shape, shaking, panicky, God knows what he was taking in the way of drugs. He was sweating, lighting cigarettes, talking nonstop. They both stayed overnight at my house. I locked my door and in the middle of the night she started beating on it; I think it was not so much that he was attacking her but that she was worried about him, because he was breathing badly, and drinking. So I spent the rest of the night trying to calm everything down, trying to get him to sleep. And I think the next day I took him to the hospital.
34
On Viola Bernard’s instructions, Lowell was taken to the
Neurological
Institute at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.
Meredith
recalls that he was in a locked ward on the twelfth floor; to visit him, “you had to be let through two sets of locked doors”:
He wasn’t dangerous to himself or others but he was so obstreperous. The thing that struck me about those visits was that he’d get through two pounds of chocolates and two packs of cigarettes. He was a factory of energy. I wasn’t physically afraid of him. He was awfully gentle.
35
On March 17 Meredith wrote to Adrienne Rich and Philip Booth, two poet friends of Lowell’s who had sent letters to the hospital:
People who have seen these attacks at close hand before, as I have not, say that this is a mild one: there was no real violence, only a kind of modified social violence, at the outset, he went to the hospital of his own accord, etc. Elizabeth is very much shaken, although her friends here are taking care that she has company. No one predicts how long it will be before the drugs take hold & Cal begins to be himself again. Meanwhile he writes and revises translations furiously and with a kind [of] crooked brilliance, and talks about himself in connection with Achilles, Alexander, Hart Crane, Hitler and Christ, and breaks your heart.
36
Lowell spent about six weeks in Presbyterian, but for a period after his discharge it was still, Hardwick says, “all Sandra”:
It was all “I’m going to set up with her. You’re wonderful, and Harriet’s wonderful and everything’s wonderful, but I’m going to live with
Sandra
.” He was still in the hospital when he set up an apartment with her
over on the East Side someplace. So at one time there was the Hochman apartment, the Riverside Drive apartment, the house in Boston and we had bought W. 67th Street. I was utterly petrified. I was terribly upset. This was one of the few times when I can say I was truly depressed, and crying, and just terrible….
37
Hardwick’s instinct was to move back to Boston immediately. Lacking any support from Lowell’s doctor, she could see no point in exposing herself to any further firsthand humiliations: “I wanted to take my little girl back up there, where we had someone to work for us, someone waiting for us to come home.”
38
Dr. Bernard’s view (gleaned from Lowell’s friends: Bernard herself feels ethically bound not to discuss the matter) was that Lowell should break with his old habits—if he wanted to change his life, he should be allowed to do so. What if his manic breakouts were simply a measure of his essential discontent? Bernard was also
reluctant
to dampen Lowell’s enthusiasm with any sustained drug therapy, although she seems to have assented to some drug
intervention
when the mania was at its height. It was not, according to Hardwick, that Bernard was especially pro-Hochman; she did
believe
, though, that Lowell should somehow “break the pattern” of earlier breakdowns.