Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
In Moscow, however, Styron remembers Lowell as “tired and
melancholy
”; and to another delegate—Nathan Scott, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia—he seemed “utterly spent and exhausted.” At the discussion sessions he said little;
according
to Scott, Lowell made one short speech in which “having been more than a little tried by some harangue that we’d been listening to, he reminded our Russian hosts of Auden’s word about poetry not making anything happen.”
40
For Styron, Lowell did not need to say anything:
I’ll never forget how touched I was at the boring writers’ sessions when I would glance over and let my eyes rest on the brooding, sorrowing Beethovenesque head. I don’t know why that head and face so often
touched me through sheer presence—so much suffering contained there, I suppose.
41
From Moscow, Lowell and Hardwick made their way back to Castine, with some days in New York and Cambridge, where
Lowell
had further heart tests at McLean’s. Frank Bidart remembers:
The doctor told him that his heart was in very good shape and that he was in very good shape and that he was much better. He was going to spend the rest of the summer working on a prose essay on New England writers.
42
From Castine, Lowell wrote to Caroline Blackwood: “I talked to Bingo [Gowrie] who said you were fine; but Natalia [Blackwood’s eldest daughter] didn’t say you were fine but were on the verge of tears all day, and needed a rest. You are always with me—deep and in rapid images.”
43
He would visit her in Ireland in September, he said.
Lowell stayed at Castine with Hardwick throughout the
summer
, and in the last week of August Frank Bidart visited him there.
I was there for, I believe, two nights. Lizzie had sold the house they had lived in together, that she had inherited from Cousin Harriet, and had redone the barn into a house. They were quite nice to each other—extremely warm and comfortable—but at the same time he seemed, emotionally, in a kind of suspended animation. I had never seen him like this. He was working in a little sort of boathouse he had rented, and he was carrying Caroline’s letters around with him in an envelope. He showed me some of them, and they were not full of vituperation and anger. They were very sort of ironic and full of jokes, and she was very much wanting him to come back. The plan was that he was going to spend a week in Ireland seeing Sheridan and Caroline, but there was absolutely no explicit purpose of going back to Caroline. He took great pleasure in the view of the harbor from the boathouse. He was, as always, working hard.
44
Before leaving Castine, Lowell wrote to Blackwood: “I haven’t quite lost my muse.” He tells her that he has been working on “an old piece of prose … a series of vignettes”:
Cotton Mather, Ben Franklin, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Lincoln, Wallace Stevens, Santayana—almost all New England, and worthies. I’ve got 19 pages and at worst as many again to write. Because I’m working on it, I think it my best critical prose.
45
Of these essays, Hardwick says: “The work he was writing stunned me by its brilliance, the memory—for he wrote these American portraits almost without any books to go on—was a phenomenon, I thought. But then, I should not have been surprised because the saturation in the texts had been his life and the originality of his thoughts about American literature—well, that was just his
beautiful
, free independent intelligence still hourly, daily, there for him to call upon.”
46
He had also written two poems, and he showed these to Bidart in Boston on the night before he left for Ireland. They had dinner with Helen Vendler in Lowell’s favorite Athens Olympia Greek restaurant, on the edge of Boston’s “combat zone” (or red-light district). Both Bidart and Vendler thought that Lowell was “dreading” his visit to Ireland because “he knew Caroline would be wanting him to come back. He wanted to see her and he wanted to see Sheridan, but he was very scared.” Vendler recalls seeing him off at the airport:
Frank and I put him on the plane that night. We took him to Logan Airport, and the last I saw of him he was going down the entry way to the plane clutching a big ship model. And that night, before we went out to dinner, Frank and I started talking about Dunbarton, and Cal said, “It’s in Dunbarton, but you know it’s not the same place I talk about in the poem. The cemetery has been moved because they put a dam in and the Army Corps of Engineers had to come in and move the whole private graveyard to a place that wasn’t going to be flooded” … And Frank said to me, “Let’s go up there sometime in the fall,” and Lowell said, “That’s where I’m going to be buried.” So I said, “You mean you’ve arranged it already?” And he said, “Yes, I’ve arranged
everything
, it’s in my will. I’ll be buried with a solemn high mass at the Church of the Advent.” I was really shocked that he would do that, and he was immensely amused at my anticlericalism, so to speak, and he said: “That’s how we’re buried.” Meaning the family.
47
The two poems Lowell showed Bidart were called “Loneliness” and “Summer Tides.” Bidart typed fair copies of each of them; “and Cal gave me things to keep for him, because he was coming back
in a week. So I had that packet of Caroline’s letters, for example.” “Summer Tides” mixes in Lowell’s Castine harbor view with his favorite photograph of Blackwood in a gondola; and the poem’s final image Bidart could identify from “the week before when I saw him in Castine”:
That line about “trembles on a loosened rail”—literally, the front part of the lawn gave onto a precipice and there was a railing there and this was being eaten away and the whole thing was about to fall down. So this was a real thing—there was a lot of talk of it costing $10,000 to rebuild. To make that into a metaphor of something happening in his life was amazing.
48
Tonight
I watch the incoming moon swim
under three agate veins of cloud,
casting crisps of false silver-plate
to the thirsty granite fringe of the shore.
Yesterday, the sun’s gregarious sparklings;
tonight, the moon has no satellite.
All this spendthrift, in-the-house summer,
our yacht-jammed harbor
lay unattempted—
pictorial to me like your portrait.
I wonder who posed you so artfully
for it in the prow of his Italian skiff,
like a maiden figurehead without legs to fly.
Time lent its wings. Last year
our drunken quarrels had no explanation,
except everything, except everything.
Did the oak provoke the lightning,
when we heard its boughs and foliage fall? …
My wooden beach-ladder swings by one bolt,
and repeats its single creaking rhythm—
I cannot go down to the sea.
After so much logical interrogation,
I can do nothing that matters.
The east wind carries disturbance for leagues—
I think of my son and daughter,
and three stepdaughters
on far-out ledges
washed by the dreaded clock-clock of the waves …
gradually rotting the bulwark where I stand.
Their father’s unmotherly touch
trembles on a loosened rail.
49
Before he left, Lowell’s new book,
Day
by
Day
,
was published in America, and Helen Vendler reviewed it in the
New
York
Times
Book
Review
for August 14 under the heading “The Poetry of
Autobiography
”; “this new collection,” she said, recounted the “
attrition
” of his marriage:
There is no use denying that these poems … need footnoting. One has to know (from previous work) his reading, his past and his present and one has to re-construct the scenario behind this book—Lowell’s life in Kent, his hospitalization in England, his wife’s sickness, their temporary stay in Boston, their separation, a reconciliation, a further rupture, a parting in Ireland, Lowell’s return to America.
50
Day
by
Day
not only chronicles Lowell’s most recent dramas. It also seems intent on some final settlement with the obsessions of a lifetime. Key chapters of the “Lowell life” are resurrected: his
parents
, the schoolmates at St. Mark’s who mocked him for his
Caliban
-like savagery (they would say “my face / was pearl-gray like toe-jam— / that I was foul / as the gymsocks I wore a week? / A boy next to me breathed my shoes, / and lay choking on the bench”); his early treatment at the hands of Merrill Moore: Lowell remembers Moore telling him when he was in college that “You know, you were an unwanted child,” and wonders still, “Did he become mother’s lover?” Moore is mocked for the “million /
sonnets
he rhymed into his dictaphone,” but his “Tennessee rattling saved my life.” In other poems there are the years at Kenyon with Peter Taylor, at Baton Rouge with Robert Penn Warren; a “
Letter
” to Jean Stafford with talk of her “novels more salable than my poems” and “Our days of the great books, scraping and Roman mass”; and fond addresses to Cousin Harriet, William Meredith (“Morning After Dining with a Friend”), Frank Parker. It is
almost
as if Lowell was anxious not to leave anybody out.
Many of these poems are loose, chatty, confidentially
verbatim
,
and there are moments throughout the book when Lowell calls into question his whole “way of writing”; he envies the imaginers, the mythmakers, the fabulists, or even those “like Mallarmé who had the good fortune / to find a style that made writing
impossible
.” “Alas, I can only tell my own story,” he writes in “Unwanted,” and the suggestion throughout
Day
by
Day
is that perhaps the last chapter of the story has been told. The “Day by Day” sequence in the book ends with a poem called “
Epilogue
”:
Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The
painter’s
vision
is
not
a
lens,
it
trembles
to
caress
the
light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
51
And among the drafts for Lowell’s Castine essays on New England writers, there is a moving local footnote to the poem. Lowell is writing about George Santayana:
He had spent a lifetime trying to drive back the New England he had been born to, its fashions, its morals, its reigning minds. They were too hateful, and in a way too cherished, for him to quite deny their
existence. He said “I have enjoyed writing about my life more than living it.”
52
Lowell arrived at Castletown on September 2, and stayed there for ten days. Blackwood recalls that “He was fine at the beginning when he came. He was just totally happy to be home. Like a little boy. And then there was this thing that he’d committed himself to going back to Harvard. And then it started.” Lowell became
increasingly
agitated, she says, “he never stopped moving from room to room. He couldn’t make up his mind—he was changing his mind every five minutes.” She believed that this restlessness signified impending mania.
He said, “Will you come with me?” And I said, “But I don’t have a house. I can’t come with Sheridan and be in a motel.” And as he was getting madder, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to. I thought, perhaps if he can make the crossing, I’ll make up my mind then…. But I also thought—he’ll have to have an attack because he’d made such a fool of himself. He’d gone back to Lizzie, publicly. He’d made a mess. Would there be more letters, another
Dolphin?
It was too awful. And he knew that.
53
After ten days of turbulence, Lowell telephoned Elizabeth
Hardwick
in New York. He was coming home early, he said, because things had become “sheer torture” at Castletown. Lady Caroline, he said, had left for London, and he would get a flight to New York on the following day—Monday, September 12. (His original
intention
had been to fly to Boston on the fifteenth.) On the Sunday night, Lowell was alone in Castletown, and as he wrote to Blackwood, he freakishly became “immured” in the vast mansion: first the telephone failed, then the electricity.
54
He tried to leave the house to make calls from the nearby village of Celbridge but, in the dark, was unable to locate a latch on the one door (a side door in the basement) that could be opened from inside without a key. It could not have been easy even to find his way back to his top-floor
apartment
; when the cleaning woman “released” him in the morning, he complained that Castletown “was a very bad place; it needs an elevator”; then, she says:
he went down with one lot of suitcases and then he came back up again and gave me three dollars and shook hands and said he’d see me again.
He was a bit fussed about being locked in and that but otherwise he seemed in very good form. He left a letter for Lady Caroline in there under the lamp and asked me would I see that she got it….
55