Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
Lowell’s own manifesto was not fully worked out at this stage, but near the end of 1938 a review he wrote of Ransom’s
The
World’s
Body
gives an idea of what he must have been groping towards around the time of his correspondence with Eberhart. He would certainly have thought that “Popular poetry is as worthless as
popular
science” and (almost certainly) that “Our best and typical poetry is characterized by its strenuous, alexandrian complexity.
Alexandrians
are circuitous; they are needfully so.” In many ways, the review—when it appeared—would have struck Eberhart as a riposte to his “poetry should please” requirement:
Proudly we declare that common and quotidian experience is beneath the grace of art…. Physical poetry is valuable because it is concrete. Two varieties are imagist and pure poetry. Imagist would present the particular in all its contingencies, and actually is, in varying degrees, artificial, filled with submerged intentions of its author. Pure poetry presents fanciful fictions in objective forms, and religiously avoids moral application and generality. Metaphysical poetry makes the miraculous explicit: epically, Christ or heroic actors; lyrically, the agony of
departing
lovers. Christ is not reducible to the good, or to modesty. He is an ejaculation of nature decently vested in an inseparable humanity. If the tears seem to have a cosmic importance, blotting out all else, becoming a flood which destroys the whole world, destroying at last the lovers themselves, such poetry substantiates its hypothesis. It preserves the richness of particulars and can, as in the great religions, make explicit the most supernatural reality, God.
24
The “difficulty” that Lowell prizes is evident in the poems he was sending off to Eberhart, and in those that appeared in
Hika
,
the Kenyon College magazine. Eberhart is not to be mocked for finding them unpalatable—they are awkward, overpacked and rhythmically laborious. In aiming for an exalted tone, they usually end up
sounding
ludicrously stiff and self-important. Classical references and a proudly Latinate vocabulary contribute to the hoped-for “density,” but they always seem forced in for grandiose effect. And often the crushed syntax will make whole stretches of a poem unintelligible. At this stage there is no evidence of anything distinctive or
spontaneous
;
Lowell’s college poems are as artificial and pretentious as most other people’s college poems. Here, as an example, is a poem called “Walking in a Cornfield, After Her Refusing Letter”:
The sun was forward and to him the sky,
pale or at least sooty, wan without cloud
harshly precluded penitrance [
sic
];
its glare
abashed his eyes upon mollases [
sic
]
shocks.
The cold October corn defiling, passed
pedestrian in stepping jolt his eyes,
his eyes diffusely focussed on the ground;
—O felly blank, O general review!
Thus outwardly, this inwardly the view;
loose paper blew about his voided eyes,
his sinewed eyes, wildish elliptic orbs,
compressed intensity in jellied meat,—
a last dismissive crashed his moated eyes;
uncombed hair and his sleavy [
sic
]
coat not neat
or clean sprawled on his sight, and shovel-fuls
of sprawling print and longish finger-nails
such as left humid gloats of jet-black earth
on linnen sheats [
sic
];
the climax having reached
of corn he looked down and a long league down
clearly a cool brook ran on his chafed shoes
A rillet classical since grass implied
the cold rusticity of Maro’s sedge.
25
Eberhart, it should be said, also complained about Lowell’s spelling and received the following reply: “In my defense I might add that mis-spelling seldom obscures meaning.”
26
*
It is not known who sent Lowell a “refusing letter,” but it may well have been Jean Stafford. Lowell had kept in touch with her since their meeting in Boulder, and during 1938 he “wooed her something fierce”
27
—presumably by post. This could account for the nervous overstatement of a letter Lowell wrote to Frank Parker in that year. Parker had evidently met a girl who he thought might be “the real thing” and seems to have applied to Lowell for advice. The reply
from Lowell perfectly combines a flushed adolescent awkwardness with the heavy didacticism of a headmasterly ascetic:
In living maintain morality and coolness. Don’t marry until you’re passed thru puberty. Punning, I would add, until you’ve approached property.
We dangle (actually and vocally) sensualizations after flitting females. “That’s just what I’m looking for, the real thing” etc. Such sensations should be understood as ebullitions of the blood. In reality you must ceaselessly search for regions of artistic florility [
sic
]. Art may be found flourishing in a group, in a single artist stuffed somewhere in your populous city, and always in your own imagination compounded with aesthetic products. But whenever you uncover the growing flowers you must chew and suck them, rembering [
sic
]
that
they
are your staple. Women until you surpass puberty are sweets, not to be ignored, not to be lived on.
28
Peter Taylor’s story “1939” provides a further insight into
Lowell
’s lumpish and lordly view of how to handle the troublesome “ebullitions.” In the story two Kenyon students—the first-person narrator and his friend Jim Prewitt (Lowell)—set off to see their girlfriends in New York. On the way, the two complacently discuss the girls’ “suitability”:
We agreed that the quality we most valued in Nancy and Carol was their “critical” and “objective” view of life, their unwillingness to accept the standards of “the world.” I remember telling Jim that Nancy Gibault could always take a genuinely “disinterested” view of any matter—“disinterested in the best sense of the word.” And Jim assured me that, whatever else I might perceive about Carol, I would sense at once the originality of her mind and “the absence of anything commonplace or banal in her intellectual make-up.”
29
On arrival in New York, things speedily go wrong for the narrator. Nancy is flippant and offhand, she has been seeing a lot of an old boyfriend, she laughs at the proud three days’ growth of fluff on the narrator’s chin. The trouble was: “Nancy had never seen me out of St. Louis before and since she had seen me last, she had seen
Manhattan
.” Even so, things might improve when they meet up for dinner with Jim and his girl. Not so: the conversation is stilted; Jim’s girl
is more interested in the other diners than she is in Nancy; and worst of all, Jim’s verdict—when they discuss the evening afterwards—is that “Nancy’s just another society girl, old man…. I had expected something more than that.” The narrator makes a handsome effort to strike back:
Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of Carol at the newsstand and took in for the first time, in that quick glance, that she was wearing huaraches and a peasant skirt and blouse, and that what she now had thrown around her shoulders was not a topcoat but a long green cape. “At least,” I said aloud to Jim, “Nancy’s not the usual bohemian. She’s not the run-of-the-mill arty type.”
I fully expected Jim to take a swing at me after that. But, instead, a peculiar expression came over his face and he stood for a moment staring at Carol over there by the newstand. I recognized the expression as the same one I had seen on his face sometimes in the classroom when his interpretation of a line of poetry had been questioned. He was
reconsidering
.
30
In the story, Jim decides that Carol, after all, “won’t do”—in spite of her beauty, wit and talent (she is a coming writer, and on the day Jim Prewitt visits her in New York she hears that her first novel has been accepted and that two sections of it are to appear in
Partisan
Review
).
The real-life Carol, though, fares differently. By Christmas, 1938, Lowell’s courtship of Jean Stafford had advanced to the point where he could invite her to Boston for the holidays. It was a fateful, indeed almost fatal, visit. On December 25, Lowell
borrowed
his parents’ car and, with Jean in the passenger seat, crashed it into a wall at the end of a Cambridge cul-de-sac. Jean’s nose was badly crushed. Lowell may or may not have fled the scene; according to Eberhart’s verse play, he does. He may or may not have been drunk; according to Blair Clark, he’d bought a
bottle
of cheap wine, but he was also a notoriously bad driver. The upshot was that Jean was taken to the hospital to begin a long saga of dreadful operations on her nose: “She had months in hospital—she had, as her story “The Interior Castle” very savagely
describes
,
31
bits of bone picked out from near the brain. It was
terri
bl
e
. She had massive head injuries—everything fractured, skull, nose, jaw, everything.”
32
Lowell was fined seventy-five dollars in
the Cambridge District Court for “driving an automobile while under the influence of liquor and driving dangerously.”
33
Lowell returned to Kenyon in January 1939, with Jean still in the hospital and his parents hugely angry and distraught: for them the incident was further evidence of Lowell’s instability (or, worse, in his father’s eyes, his irresponsibility). As for Lowell, his guilt was painful enough; Boston-style recriminations simply goaded him into a deeper fury. Mr. Lowell’s attitude to his son had now hardened into blank hostility; Mrs. Lowell still believed that psychiatric help was what was needed. Both were dreading the further scandal that would soon erupt: it had been agreed by Lowell and Stafford that she should sue him for insurance against her medical expenses. A trial had been scheduled for the summer of 1939. On hearing this, the Lowell parents decided that a summer trip to Europe was necessary in order to soothe their shattered nerves—and Charlotte was able to convince herself that she was “doing something” for her son by persuading Merrill Moore to arrange a consultation with Carl Jung. On May 27 she writes thanking Moore for his assistance: “Your very complete
presentation
of the case to Dr. Jung will be of the greatest help.”
34
Unluckily
, no notes have come to light revealing Dr. Jung’s diagnosis—but years later Lowell wrote:
That year Carl Jung said to mother in Zurich,
“If your son is as you have described him,
he is an incurable schizophrenic.”
35
Lowell struggled through an uneasy spring at Kenyon. His classics professor there was Frederick Santee, and Lowell spent a good deal of time in the Santees’ “open house” across the street from Douglass House. It was a dramatic and chaotic household, and Lowell
recalled
it later on with some affection. Santee, he wrote,
was a child-prodigy, who entered Harvard at thirteen, wrote the best Greek verse by an American in England, and later married another classics-child-prodigy—egregious people but fated for divorce and
tragedy
. They were plain and Socratic yet their divorce was marked with violence and absurdity; a sheet wetted to cause pneumonia, a carving knife left threateningly on a stairpost, a daughter held incommunicado by the Ransoms from both parents, insomnia, evidence, floods of
persuasive
,
contradictory and retold debate. On the much adjourned day of the trial, the presiding judge, the master of sarcasm, was kicked and
incapacitated
by a mule.
36
Stories of this sort surround the figure of Santee, and Lowell must have been attracted by the farce and the melodrama; Santee’s chief usefulness in 1939, though, was that he had medical connections at Johns Hopkins and held views about how Jean’s injuries should be treated. In the early summer, Blair Clark—who had been
appointed
to look after Jean in Boston—received instructions from Kenyon:
I was told to bring Jean from Boston to Baltimore. Santee had
recommended
to Cal that she have another big operation at Johns Hopkins. Jean was of course being taken care of by all sorts of doctors in Boston—but she was simply told by Cal that she should have this operation. Sort of on the spot, without consultation with her regular doctors. I was in the middle. Santee was all for the operation—though I don’t think he knew the nasal passage from the other passages. But Jean said to me, “Don’t let them do this operation to me.” And I said, “They can’t if you don’t want them to.” … So there was a scene then, and she decided to leave Baltimore: a scene on the railroad platform, when I was taking Jean away. There was no fight about it. Cal had to give in. But Cal and Santee felt that they had lost a battle.
37
It is clear from this and other evidence that Lowell’s feelings of guilt about the accident ran fairly deep. Jean was not one to make light of her injuries—indeed, according to some who knew her she was a chronic exaggerator; nonetheless, she
had
suffered
considerably
and, Clark says, “There was about a 25 percent reduction in the aesthetic value of her face.”
38
At times during the summer, Lowell considered leaving Kenyon to marry Jean (they had become “
engaged
” at Easter). Not only did he feel himself to have an obligation to her, but he also knew that his parents strongly disapproved of the association. Jean could not even boast the “society” advantages of an Anne Dick; and she came from Colorado: the source of
grandfather
Winslow’s wealth but—or maybe “therefore”—impossibly nonsmart.