Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
Robert Lowell: A Biography (60 page)
R.
Silvers
phone
conv.
with
B.C.
21/7/70
—worrisome situation: Cal was at Caroline’s in London, got cleaning woman to let him in—he was drunk—Car. can’t stand it yet doctors say he can’t be told. They won’t answer for consequences.
E.
Hardwick
conv.
with
B.C.
21/7/70
—“I talked to Cal about 2:30 and he said she’d had a nervous breakdown just like me and will be in hosp. for 2 weeks.”
B.
Silvers
conv.
with
B.C.
22/7/70
—Caroline is closing house in London—vanishing concerned that he not track her down
—Car. quotes “I can’t take responsibility” but “hasn’t thought through what ought to happen ultimately”
Jonathan
Miller
—
phone
conv.
with
B.C.
23/7/70
Cal in limbo—no social or therap. nexus—Drs. don’t know history—Car. not going to stay with him—she’s swept along in the energy of his dissolution, not understanding that she’s part of the illness
—he’s in “mood of curious, penitential, false meekness.”
E.H.
phone
conv.
with
B.C.
26/7/70
—(Cal) said as if saying he had a cold—“Trouble is that Caroline had had a nervous breakdown too”
23
On July 29 Hardwick decided she would go to London: there were reports that Lowell was able to wander out of the hospital at will, that he was drinking in the local pubs, that the doctors were
incompetent
, and so on. She telephoned Blair Clark:
—made up my mind—Bill Alfred going with him [
sic
]—I won’t have him killed—destroyed
—allowed to go out—in pyjamas—out to pubs—steals from handbags—(she weeps)—they don’t understand—he drinks—I’ll talk to
doctors
—brilliant, proud, dignified man, not an ape—
—Car. thing is secondary: he can marry her if he wants
—He might keel over dead, with drugs and beer
—Bill will go to pub, cut his hair, buy him shoes—until they can
control
him—sit there with him. Cal is really a marvelous person, not this detached idiot—not in emotional contact with his real
personality
24
Hardwick was reassured by her visit. She found Lowell heavily drugged, “hardly able to get across the street,” but she felt he was in good hands: the hospital
was
a
real hospital, even though it had the appearance of a rather shabby-genteel private residence. She had lunch with him downtown and took him to the film
Patton
,
which he liked a lot: he was not “saying outrageous things,” but on the other hand, there was “no rapport.” She decided to return to New York and left him a note saying: “If you need me, I’ll always be there, if you don’t, I’ll not be there.”
25
And the next day Lowell wrote to her:
You[r] last not[e] and much else that you said and have said through the yeras [
sic
]
go through my heart. You couldn’t have been more loyal and witty. I can’t give you anything of equal value. Still much happened that we both loved in the long marriage. I feel we had much joy and many other things we had to learn. There is nothing that wasn’t a joy and told us something. Great Joy. Love. Cal.
26
Blackwood returned to London in August. Lowell was calm, she found, but “he wasn’t normal,” and she refused to allow him back to Redcliffe Square. He wrote to her:
I assume
ceteris
paribus
that when I am in a certain state you are too. I could come out in a week or two, if I could have a place to stay. Do come and see me, it’s the best slow step we could make. Then I’d like to have the bottom rooms. We could be together without meeting till evening.
27
But the risks still seemed too high:
I told him he must get a flat of his own. Which he minded terribly—he was very wounded. But it was like it always was—he
wasn
’
t
all right: he was terrified of being alone. I think that was because he was terrified of being mad alone. He really couldn’t bear a night alone. But Israel [Blackwood’s estranged husband, Israel Citkovitz, who lived in one of the three Redcliffe Square apartments] said rightly, was saying, “I really don’t want a madman with the children.” I had to tell Cal that. Because Israel could have taken the children away from me.
28
Lowell rented an apartment at 33 Pont Street (about five minutes’ taxi ride from Redcliffe Square); his landlord was “a man named the Knight of Glyn, the only title of its kind in England. His mail comes addressed that way and his towels are marked K of G,”
29
and on September 11 he wrote to Blair Clark:
I am settled fairly near Caroline and we do things together, most things. I am well and not depressed. College begins early next month, and I’ll have to rub my eyes to know I’m not leading the old life. Yet I am not at all and it gives food for thought. A new alliance or marriage and a new country.
30
A month later Lowell writes again to Clark; he is planning a
Christmas
visit to New York but “there’s a problem whether to come with Caroline”:
it seems callous humanly for me to
arrive
in New York, in Lizzie’s home city, with Caroline. Or am I being meaninglessly scrupulous? Until the divorce is made, and it looks as though it will, and that I will marry Caroline—it still remains uncertain in my mind. When friends of mine have been in this dilemma, I’ve always thought they should stop
torturing
themselves and everyone else, and make a quick clean severance. But it’s not easy, unless one becomes some sort of doll only capable of fast straightforward action.
31
To Hardwick, he had been evasive, writing fond and chatty letters, but no more. On October 15 William Alfred wrote urging him to tell her “something clearcut about what you mean to do. Your letters, written in kindness though they are, only serve to deepen her conviction that you are of two minds about the years ahead. That makes her miss you more.”
32
Three days later, Lowell wrote as follows:
Dearest Lizzie,
I don’t know whether I’ve said or written I feel like a man walking on two ever more widely splitting roads at once, as if I were pulled apart and thinning into mist, or rather being torn apart and still preferring that state to making a decision. Is there any decision still for me to make? After all I have done, can I go back to you and Harriet? Too many cuts.
Time has changed things somewhat since we met at Greenways. I am soberer, cooler. More displeasing to myself in many little ways, but mostly about you. A copy of my new book came the other day, and I read through all the new and more heavily revised poems. A sense of the meaning of the whole came to me, and it seemed to be about us and our family, its endurance being the spine which despite many bendings and blows finally held. Just held. Many reviewers saw this, though it was something I thought pretentious and offensive to push in my preface, I saw it too. I have felt as if a governing part of my organism were gone, and as if the familiar grass and air were gone.
I don’t think I can go back to you. Thought does no good. I cannot weigh the dear, troubled past, so many illnesses, which weren’t due to you, in which you saved everything, our wondering, changing, growing years with Harriet, so many places, such rivers, of talk and staring—I can’t compare this memory with the future, unseen and beyond
recollection
with Caroline. I love her very much, but I can’t see that. I am sure many people have looked back on a less marvelous marriage than ours on the point of breaking, and felt this pain and indecision—at first insoluable [
sic
],
then when the decision had been made, incurable.
I don’t think I can come back to you, but allow me this short space before I arrive in New York to wobble in my mind. I will be turning from the longest realest and most loved fragment of my life.
33
And again, on October 22, he writes that he is going through “the usual, once annual depression” and that “whatever choice I might make, I am walking off the third story of an unfinished building to the ground”:
I don’t offer this as a good description, it’s too vague and grand, but to show you why my useless, depressed will does nothing well. Just the usual somberness after mania, jaundice of the spirit, and yet it has so many absolutely actual objects to pick up—a marriage that was both rib and spine for us these many years.
Caroline isn’t (if you really want me to be free to talk about her) one of my many manic crushes, rather this and everything more, just as you were at Yaddo and after. She is airy and very steady and sturdy in an
odd way. She has been very kind to me. I think we can make out. I love her, we have been together rather a long time—often and intensely. I have doubts that I by myself, or anyway, can make out, that dear you and Harriet can make out. I think somehow that Christmas will help us all. Great troubles but no longer everyone unreal to everyone, and Christmas is the season to lighten the heart.
34
Three weeks later, on November 7, he seems to have made up his mind; he asks Hardwick, “I wonder if we couldn’t make it up? … Maybe you could take me back, though I have done great harm.” Of course, she may not want him back; she may feel “happily rid of [her] weary burden.” A week later he is still pressing: “I will do all I can to make things work: I think we can—we have after all for more years than I have the wits to count, tho all remains
remembered
.” And to friends, throughout November, he writes, though warily, of a reconciliation. To Peter Taylor, he summarizes the year’s events as follows:
I fell in love, part manic, was sick in hospital a good part of the summer, got well, stayed in love. There was great joy in it all, great harm to everyone. I have been vacillating. I think Lizzie and I will come back together, if that can be done. Anyway, I’ll be home in New York during Christmas.
35
And to Blair Clark: “I think now, but it is hard to be very confident, that Lizzie and I will come together again…. When we are depressed, our only support seems to be old habits—mine for a quarter of a century.
36
Lowell speaks in this same letter of his “baffling vacillation,” the “jerky graph of the heart,” but he does not seem seriously to have entertained the thought that Hardwick might finally have had enough, that it wasn’t merely a question of
his
vacillation. On
October
23 Hardwick wrote to Blair Clark about Lowell’s proposed visit to New York:
For my business with Cal a visit is not necessary. I do not expect that any of us, even Harriet, will get anything out of it really and I will be glad when it’s over…. Caroline would never come. That is his fantasy and his need to keep a sense of our competing over him going. She has never competed for anyone in her life and I do not want Cal back under any circumstances. But I don’t see him coming here, supposing Caroline
would, and having a honeymoon visit when the whole purpose of the trip was to spend a bit of the Christmas with Harriet, to make
arrangements
for the future. This is the last time he will see me—something I don’t think he realizes, since he is reluctant just to face the lack of drama that the end of this would mean. Also I have the idea that he is afraid to budge one inch from Caroline—she might not be there when he got back. I don’t think he is really well, and he is kept going on this false sense of people competing for him.
I could not put Harriet and me through the giddy unreality I know Cal would be sunk in if he came over with Caroline. I feel it would be the end of Caroline’s feeling for him too, because she would see how he has to exploit or boast or else things aren’t real. In a way I doubt
he
will come. In all the months he has been gone I’ve heard from him a lot and he has never answered one question that I have put to him, or discussed really anything, me or Harriet or practical things or Caroline—except himself.
37
By the end of November, Lowell seems to have grasped that his “choices” might indeed be illusory: on the one hand, “it comes to me that I can’t pull this new marriage off,” that Blackwood might not wish to marry him; and on the other, that Hardwick’s response to his latest escapade was puzzlingly volatile.
38
On November 21 he wrote to Clark:
It must be like migraine getting stuck with all my affairs, from all sides. … Here’s what’s going on in me. I am haunted by my family, and the letters I get. There seems to be such a delicate misery. Lizzie’s letters veer from frantic affection to frantic abuse. Then somehow she and Harriet are fused as one in her mind. It’s not possible, but I get the impression they really are in Lizzie’s mind. It’s crazy, but I can’t from a distance do anything about it, perhaps less on the spot.
The thing is I am perfectly happy with Caroline. At first I was afraid of not being married—old feelings of being outlawed. But I see it doesn’t matter much. We can go on permanently as we are. We are permanent no matter what our status. Caroline has always been afraid of legal marriage. Not being married, somehow loosens the bond, man and woman’s mutual, self-killing desire to master the other. Then we might get married anyway when we knew we didn’t have to. I don’t know yet what will happen, but I increasingly fear for the blood I’ll have to pay for what I have done, for being me. Anyway, I’ll be coming to you around the 14th alone.
39
Lowell carried on living in Pont Street until his departure for New York; since October he had been teaching two days a week at Essex and finding his poetry classes there “rather retarded after Harvard. The college looks like Brandeis, if Brandeis had been built on a fiftieth the money, and with no Jews.”
40
Otherwise, he had been leading “a mole’s life,” with occasional readings—in Bristol and Cambridge and in London at the Mermaid Theatre and the Institute for Contemporary Arts—and a weekly lunch with Sidney Nolan. At his readings he would be told by the organizers that he had attracted “a record small audience,” and all in all he was enjoying England’s “famous more mumbled and muffled pace.”
41
As to America, he wrote to Hardwick that he dreaded “the
Review
circuit and the buzz of American politics.” One of the nice things about England was that “an American isn’t expected to follow issues.”
42
But in mid-December he set off “home”—with nothing
resolved
, and no clear idea of what would happen next. After he left, Caroline Blackwood wrote him a letter, which, again, he was later to put into a poem (“With Caroline at the Air Terminal”): “If I have had hysterical drunken seizures, / it’s from loving you too much….” This is, almost word for word, the opening of
Blackwood’s
letter. She went on to say that she was uncertain whether they would ever meet again; unsure, even, that they should. Whatever happened, though, she wanted Lowell to know that the
happiness
he had given her was unique, that if there was misery ahead, she would never regret having known him, and so on. Lowell responded to all this with a terse cable from New York:
I AM NOT
A CRIPPLE LOVE CAL.