Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
Robert Lowell: A Biography (61 page)
1
. David Caute, “Crisis in All Souls,”
Encounter
26, 3 (March 1966).
2
. Philip Edwards to R.L., April 2, 1970 (Houghton Library).
3
. Donald Davie to R.L., April 4, 1970 (Houghton Library).
4
. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, April 25, 1970.
5
. Ibid., April 27, 1970.
6
. Ibid., June 1, 1970.
7
. The eldest child of Maureen Guinness, marchioness of Dufferin and Ava; her father, whose full name was Basil Sheridan Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, fourth marquess of Dufferin and Ava, had been killed in Burma in 1945.
8
. R.L. to J. F. Powers, February 18, 1973.
9
. Caroline Freud, “The Beatnik,”
Encounter
12, no. 6 (June 1959).
10
. Ibid.
11
. R.L. to Charles Monteith, October 1, 1959.
12
. Caroline Blackwood, interview with I.H. (1979).
13
. Ibid.
14
. Ibid.
15
. R.L. to Blair Clark, May 17, 1970.
16
. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, May 26, 1970.
17
. Robert Giroux to Charles Monteith, June 29, 1970.
18
. Elizabeth Hardwick to R.L., June 26, 1970.
19
. Caroline Blackwood, interview with I.H. (1979).
20
. Blair Clark’s notes, July 17, 1970.
21
. “Marriage?”
The
Dolphin
(London: Faber & Faber, 1973), P. 26.
22
. R.L. to Caroline Blackwood, n.d.
23
. Blair Clark’s notes, July 21–26, 1970.
24
. Ibid., July 29, 1970.
25
. Ibid., August 9, 1970.
26
. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, August 6, 1970.
27
. R.L. to Caroline Blackwood, n.d.
28
. Caroline Blackwood, interview with I.H. (1979).
29
. R.L. to Peter Taylor, November 1, 1970.
30
. R.L. to Blair Clark, September 11, 1970.
31
. Ibid., October 9, 1970.
32
. William Alfred to R.L., October 15, 1970 (Houghton Library).
33
. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, October 18, 1970.
34
. Ibid., October 22, 1970.
35
. R.L. to Peter Taylor, November 1, 1970.
36
. R.L. to Blair Clark, November 7, 1970.
37
. Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair Clark, October 23, 1970.
38
. R.L. to Blair Clark, November 7, 1970.
39
. Ibid., November 21, 1970.
40
. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, November 16, 1970.
41
. Ibid., November 28, 1970.
42
. Ibid., November 30, 1970.
“If I have had hysterical drunken seizures,
it’s from loving you too much. It makes me wild,
I fear … We’ve made the dining room his bedroom—
I feel unsafe, uncertain you’ll get back.
I know I am happier with you than before.
Safer….” The go-sign blazes and my plane’s
great white umbilical ingress bangs in place.
The flight is certain … Surely it’s a strange joy
blaming ourselves and willing what we will.
Everything is real until it’s published.
1
Since July in Greenways, Lowell had again been “turning out poems at a great rate,”
2
and like this one, they were transcriptions of the day-to-day shifts and swells of his dilemma. When he wrote to Blair Clark that he had been “through baffling vacillation, and letters would have been like a jerky graph of the heart,” he might easily have said the same of this new spate of fourteen-liners, or “belles lettres,” as—with some irony—he called them. In September he had “thirty or so new poems in the old meter”;
3
by the end of November he had ninety: “Poems at a great rate, even scribbling lines down during a dinner. I suppose I may have a book, a little notebook, ready by next fall. Then a new tune, a new meter, a new me. The last never I suppose.”
4
Throughout October and
November
, he said, he had done “nothing but bury my indecisions in many many poems.”
5
Before flying to New York, he had asked Frank Bidart to meet him there: he wanted Bidart to help him sort out the “tall house of draft and discard” which, along with the ninety or so “finished” poems, he had accumulated since July.
In mid-December I got a letter or telegram asking if I could meet him in New York. He was going to be in New York for Christmas. That’s the Christmas that’s in
The
Dolphin
[the book title Lowell was to give to these 1970 sonnets]. It’s certainly the case that before he came, there was a sense that the thing with Caroline might be over. But Lizzie, when she met him at the airport, was terribly upset because she knew right away—I think he announced immediately that he was going back. So the whole trip, which he had been very much looking forward to, was right away poisoned for her. He was staying at Blair Clark’s apartment, not with her.
6
Lowell’s New York visit, in Bidart’s view, was not just “to see Harriet” or to sort out his affairs: “I think he wanted to see what it felt like, and to talk to old friends—just to touch base…. I don’t think he really knew exactly what was going to happen”:
I think I went to see him around December 28—though it may have been before Christmas. I flew to New York, and it seems to me it was early in the day…. Maybe I stayed over at Blair Clark’s that night, I’m not sure. Anyway, we talked a little bit about his personal
situation
, but he had the beginning of
The
Dolphin
. At that time there was no image of the dolphin in it, so the whole controlling symbolic scheme was not there. It was more nakedly a ninety-odd-sonnet
narrative
, but very much without an ending. He’d already begun writing the Christmas stuff—he was absolutely writing it as he was living through it. I was there long enough to read some ninety-odd sonnets. Then I went back to Cambridge and after a few days he went back to England. I didn’t hear from him for a long time and didn’t know what was happening.
7
Lowell returned to London in January with matters still
unsettled
. He was committed, he felt, to at least one more term at Essex and he had rented the Pont Street apartment until spring: these, he pleaded, were two concrete reasons for not lingering in New York. Shortly after his return, though, he was still vacillating. He wrote to Hardwick (in a letter from Pont Street dated simply 1971):
What shall I say? That I miss your old guiding and even chiding hand. Not having you is like learning to walk. I suppose though one thing is worse than stumbling and vacillating, is to depend on someone who does these things. I do think achingly about you and Harriet.
In February 1971 Caroline Blackwood learned that she was pregnant. As Frank Bidart recalls:
He told me later that it was when he got back that Caroline said she was pregnant. I guess the point of this is that at this time [December 1970] he was intending to stay with Caroline regardless of the pregnancy. It wasn’t the pregnancy that precipitated that. It may have sealed it, that spring, I don’t know, but it certainly wasn’t any simple cause and effect. He said to me, later, that he would not have been upset if girlfriends he had had earlier had got pregnant, but there was no sense he would have left Lizzie for them.
8
Certainly, Lowell welcomed the pregnancy; from March 1971 his “vacillating” stops. On March 14 he wrote to Harriet telling her that he and Caroline were going to have a child:
There can’t ever be a second you in my heart, not even a second little girl, to say nothing of a boy.
You are always with me, you and your mother. I want you to visit us whenever you wish and can. We’re not ogres and bears. I think you may find that you will love Caroline. She has never been harsh to her own girls.
Hardwick’s first response to the news was angry and self-protective, or rather protective of her own and Harriet’s future, although
Lowell
had offered her the whole of his “unearned income.” Blair Clark, who saw Lowell in London in March 1971, wrote to him on
returning
to New York:
your relations with Harriet depend almost entirely on what
you
do about them. You absolutely cannot count on any help from Eliz. That well is poisoned, whatever the formal position of Eliz. is. As we agreed, no campaign for Harriet can now be undertaken, but I think you must gently keep in touch with her, not expecting much response…. you can count on no good will from Eliz. in any of this. I would say that any chance of that disappeared when you got off the plane in Dec. wearing that ring, and now, with the child in prospect, it has receded into unimaginable distance. I think she is and will remain extremely bitter, Cal, and I repeat that the most foolish thing I ever heard said was Lady Jean Mailer’s “I always love everyone I’ve ever loved.” In any case, Eliz. not being an upper-class swinger, such friendliness is
inconceivable
.
So, in my strong view, you’re on your own in an uphill battle for the affections of Harriet.
9
Lowell wrote back to Clark that he thought Hardwick “a little puts on her demonic … mask with you,” that he had just had “the most friendly [letter] I’ve ever gotten from Lizzie speaking of my lovely letter to H.” and that “I’m very hopeful, with forebodings of course.”
10
Indeed, hopefulness surges through every letter Lowell writes throughout this spring and summer. In March, to Bill Alfred, he announces:
Caroline and I are having a child. It will be born early in October, and most people we’ve met know by now. Many problems, but somehow a calm has come for the last month and a half that is quite surprising. Like walking through some gauze screen that allowed one to see real things without touching them, but what we see is different. Anyway, for me and Caroline a peace we haven’t known, perhaps ever. Ah well who knows … what’s around the corner? It’s easier to face.
11
And in May he writes to Peter Taylor:
Caroline’s almost five months pregnant and looks nine. Fearful dread of twins and indeed Allen [Tate] who behaved very badly about us to Lizzie, has already offered himself as a godfather. Even so, if there is only one child we might call him, until after the divorce, Lowell Guinness. It’s a great comfort, soothes us, and somehow takes away from the wilfulness of my action. I feel that I have more than half lost Harriet, not through anyone’s fault but through distance. It’s more than I can bear sometimes, but this will make up. We have three other children, lovely little girls, so “Lowell” will have a nest waiting. One child is already knitting him mittens. Everything in our house is a girl except me—two rabbits, two kittens, a small guineapig named Gertrude
Buckman
etc.
Do you think you might ever come over here? We could give you a wonderful brick ruin and a stocked troutstream about the width of a typewriter ribbon. England has everything you love, safe schools, no negroes, quaint old people, absolutely nutty ones our age, whiskey without ice. You could renew your old academic and ecclesiastical
connections
…. I miss America, and thought of coming over this spring, but it seemed too complex and jolting. It would be better probably after the baby is born. I’ve just finished another book of poems, after working frantically, sometimes six days a week….
Caroline and I haven’t quarrelled for four months, an absolute record for me with anyone. We are both slovenly, but essentially sane.
12
The spring visit to America that Lowell planned for May was abandoned, he told Blair Clark: “I sensed the time wasn’t very lucky for visiting Lizzie and Harriet, with my mind over my shoulder back in England. I miss Harriet constantly, and Lizzie too. Perhaps almost stronger than the missing is the feeling of not seeing something through. This isn’t the kind of thing I usually bedevil myself with, but twenty years is like a full life time, one never to be filled.”
13
To both Taylor and Clark he speaks of being “reborn” at fifty-four and to Clark that he feels “stunned by my good luck”:
Caroline is in blooming health, sheer woman humanity. She looks as if we were going to have twins, but I think its just her usual swollen pregnancy…. Forgive this spring fever letter. I detect a smugness peeping through its nostalgia.
14
During the spring of 1971 Lowell had formed a friendship with the young British writer Jonathan Raban. Raban had done a glowing radio review of
Notebook
, and Lowell had invited him to lunch:
Lunch was extraordinary. We started off talking about literature and going through the inevitable roster. Then I started talking about fishing, about which Cal got instantly enthusiastic. We started arranging
imaginary
fishing trips all over England. And then I had to come back to Redcliffe Square to read the draft of
The
Dolphin
—I took it off with me to read in a spare room. Cal expected me to read the entire book and make suggestions in the course of an hour while he sat nervously in the next room opening the door every so often and asking me which poem I’d got to.
15
It was not until two weeks later, Raban says, that he realized Lowell “was on the edge of a manic high.” At first he had thought “he was behaving just as Robert Lowell might be expected to behave—massively enthusiastic, schoolboyish, frantically playful.” They had gone together to the London Dolphinarium on Oxford Street, and Lowell had been thrilled. On May 4 he wrote to Harriet:
I’ve been to see two performing dolphins, Baby and Brandy, in a tank on Oxford St. They can jump twenty feet, bat a ball back to their trainer, pretend to cry for fish … bigger brained than man and much more peaceful and humorous.
After this, Raban recalls, “he took to going down the Kings Road and buying incredibly expensive stone dolphins from places like the Antique Hypermarket, where he discovered these things were going for hundreds of pounds.” And at Blackwood’s country house, Milgate (near Bearsted in Kent), he arranged for dolphins to be placed “at either side of the front door, dolphins in the garden, dolphins as hatstands”:
Dolphins were his high obsession at that time. What was interesting about it was that it was a manic attack which this time he fought off. This was early in his relationship with Caroline; she was two or three months pregnant, I think. Cal was able to hold off the mania by some kind of effort of will—hitting the brink of it and being able to
voluntarily
draw back, in a way he wasn’t able to later. They were both treating each other with a sense of each other’s fragility. I mean, Cal holding himself back because he saw the panic in Caroline, and
Caroline
in a way holding herself back from her thing, from her fear of Cal. They treated each other with an almost drunken delicacy, and you could feel a massive amount of self-restraint on both sides, and terror—terror that if one of them flipped, the whole thing would crash. It was a rather remarkable time, because I think it was almost the first manic attack Cal had which he actually fought off—sort of saw through to the end without actually going over the top. So the
obsession
was with dolphins—it never got into great men. Which was a triumph.
16
In July 1971 Raban accompanied Lowell on a trip to the Orkneys. Blackwood’s cousin, Gareth Browne, owned a recording company that specialized in poets reading their own work, and had
arranged
a recording session with Orkney poet George Mackay Brown. Lowell and Raban were invited to join Browne’s “
entourage
”; for Lowell it was an opportunity for a genealogical adventure—he would track down the source of the “Spence negligence,” make contact with a line in his ancestry that had always intrigued and amused him. As soon as he arrived he became “enormously excited”:
We got a car to take us to Stromness, which is about twenty miles from the airport, and on the way Cal leant over the seat and said to the driver: “I’m Robert Traill Spence Lowell.” The driver just grunted. And Cal said, “Do you know the Traills or the Spences?” And the driver said, “Yes.” Absolutely tightlipped. Cal was terrifically excited: you know,
Where
are
the
Spences
,
where
are
the
Traills?
And the driver—he could obviously see a rich American and didn’t want to lose his custom, but, at the same time, clearly, the Spences and the Traills had utterly disgraced themselves, they were the most terrible people to be associated with.
17