Robert Lowell: A Biography (10 page)

Lawrence Lowell was jauntily off-putting—“for you, not yet! not yet!”—but he made it clear that in some large part he was acting here on Merrill Moore’s advice: “Dr. Moore thinks you had better not come back to Harvard at present, and I suspect that in this he is wise.”
54
A letter to Lowell from Moore later in the same month suggests that Moore’s objections had been fairly vehement:

Quite what Lowell’s objectionable “plans” were at this point it is hard to say. His father was an essentially amenable figure; for
example
, although he had opposed Lowell’s abandonment of a Harvard education, he had—in the spring of 1937—taken pains to assure his son that “No two people think alike and you and I are very different, though each striving for a worthy end. We must each try to accept the other as he is. I want to help you in every way that I can.”
56
He was gratified by Lowell’s progress at Kenyon, and even took pride in his small successes as a poet. In December 1938—five days before the car crash—Mr. Lowell sent a copy of the first issue of the
Kenyon
Review
to Richard Eberhart: “As you were the one to start Robert writing poetry, I thought that you might like to have a copy of the
Kenyon
Review
,
which is the first to print two of his poems.” In the same letter—and rather touchingly, since both his son and his wife were in the habit of mocking his passionate interest in radios—he writes:

It is likely, therefore, that the “plans” were marriage plans.
Lowell
’s first serious breach with his father had been over the Anne Dick affair; the second had centered on the Stafford car crash and its aftermath. In both cases, Mr. Lowell had been obliged to adopt the kind of censorious posture that it was not in his nature to carry off with any subtlety or style. Lowell’s response to this heavy-
handedness 
had in the past been crushing and contemptuous, even violent: and it was here that his father’s tolerance was always likely to give way. A typical example of the at-one-remove dialogue between them can be seen in a letter Lowell wrote to Charlotte in July 1939—just before his parents left for Europe:

To this, Charlotte took the trouble to append a simple note: “This made Bob see red.” In the same letter, it should be said, Lowell complains about the financial arrangements that have been made for him during their absence in Europe: “both Merrill and I,” he writes, “are distressed with the secrecy with which it was done.”

Poor Mr. Lowell must have been baffled by the reference to “secrecy”; had not Moore assured him that he was “only too happy” to concur in the arrangements? He might have been even more baffled, perhaps, if he had overheard Moore’s conversation with A. Lawrence Lowell on the subject of the Harvard fellowship. So far as Mr. Lowell was concerned, the obstacle to the fellowship was simple: if Lowell married Jean Stafford, he would not be able to support her; why—as with Anne Dick—could he not wait until his studies were concluded? So far as is known, no stiff notes were sent to Colorado, nor did Lowell and his father come to blows, but there were clear echoes of the Anne Dick confrontation. And it should not, of course, be thought that Charlotte was indifferent to the outcome.

In April 1940 Lowell married Jean Stafford at a church in New York with the entirely happy name of St. Mark’s—although
this
St. Mark’s was in the Bowery; he graduated from Kenyon “summa cum laude, phi beta kappa, highest honors in classics, first man in my class, and valedictorian”;
59
and he accepted a junior fellowship at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge. He was going South again; this time to study under Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, and with a letter of recommendation from Ransom that sent many a pang of envy through his Kenyon classmates: “Lowell is more than a student, he’s more like a son to me.”
60

As to his real parents—their view of all this can, as usual, be measured by the grandeur of their son’s defiance: 

For the first time, Lowell doesn’t sign the letter “Bobby.” He is now “affectionately, Cal.”

When Lowell’s train pulled into Memphis in the summer of 1940, he peered out of the carriage window at the ugly, run-down
Southern
freightyard and proclaimed: “All this must change. All this must go.” His companions, Peter Taylor and Jean Stafford, put it down to overtiredness, though Taylor was privately “outraged”—fond as he was of Lowell, he didn’t feel that the South was in need of any messiahs from New England.
1

But with Taylor, the fondness usually prevailed and Lowell was always susceptible to his deflating banter: the standing joke between them was that—in Lowell’s mock opinion—the Southerner lacked “intellectual power.” Taylor was prepared to play the whimsical buffoon, provided the play remained a play; Lowell had sufficient sense of Taylor’s actual strength to keep his tyrannical impulses carefully in check. It was hard for the two friends to have a lasting quarrel—between them there was a mutual, unshakable respect, a balance of both style and temperament that Lowell found almost impossible to catch with other friends. He was never in any doubt, it seems, that Taylor really liked him.

The plan was that Lowell and Stafford would stay with Taylor’s family in Memphis before moving on to Baton Rouge, and in spite of the unpromising beginning these were relaxed and pleasant weeks:

And for the first few weeks at Baton Rouge, Lowell and Stafford found themselves “unexpectedly normal and happy.” Lowell was intrigued by the exotic appearance of the place—“a mushroom fake Mexican set-up, very relieving after the Gothic-heavy North”
3
—and he enjoyed watching Stafford fix up their new three-room apartment, even though at first the “fixing up” seems to have
involved
puzzling over where to put the “23 chairs and 22 imitation Navajo carpets” that had been “sent down” from Boston. Stafford took a secretarial job at the
Southern
Review
(based at Baton Rouge and co-edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren), and Lowell began attending classes: “The climate here,” he wrote his mother, “is humid, the people are affable, the architecture parvenue, and the work is tough but useful.”
4
And to his grandmother (Mrs. Arthur Winslow):

To his old Kenyon classmate Robie Macauley, he wrote in a more sardonic vein:

As to poems, Lowell seems at this point to have run into a trough. He had been writing a long, blank-verse “hell and damnation poem against England”; he was to continue to rework and revise this piece for several years but never seemed really to take it very seriously. It was almost certainly clear to him that his Kenyon poems were stiff and manufactured: Ransom, for example, after printing two poems in the
Kenyon
Review
’s first issue, had turned down all subsequent submissions as “forbidding,” “clotting,” “too ambiguous.” It was to be five years before Lowell appeared again in Ransom’s pages. A poem called “The Protestant Dead in Boston”
7
reveals something of Lowell’s predicament in 1941. Knowing what we do about his later development, we can see that Lowell already has his subject, the subject that was to become thought of as peculiarly
his
,
but is a long way from having any confident, let alone individual poetic, voice:

The movement is leaden and disgruntled; the onslaught, willed, gratuitous. Boston-style Calvinism may have become the enemy, but Lowell’s old New England sensibility continued to crave Order—rules and tests; ideally, he required for himself the sort of regime that he imposed on others, a regime whose disciplines could be seen as different from those of Boston in their antiquity, their opulence, their intellectual distinction: rules for a better life, not rules made to protect the mediocre, rules that would engender art, not view it with suspicion. He would have seen that in a poem like “The
Protestant Dead in Boston” he was attacking Boston in a Boston voice: bleak, crabbed and vengeful. And the heavy prose rhythms were the rhythms of a sour utilitarianism, whatever the avowed meaning.

After a couple of months at Baton Rouge, Lowell began to extend his reading of “English theology” to include the work of the French theologian Etienne Gilson: in particular, his
Spirit
of
Medieval
Philo
sophical
Experience
—shortly afterwards described by Lowell as
the
key book during this period—and his
Philosophy
of
Thomas
Aquinas.
From there he moved into Newman, Maritain, and E. I. Watkin: “the best English philosopher, a bit off the Thomist line.”
8
He was also reading Hopkins and Pascal, and had formed a friendship with a Catholic student of philosophy called Patrick Quinn. As Peter Taylor commented, “In Louisiana, very French, Catholicism was in the air.”
9

Jean Stafford had been converted to Roman Catholicism a few years earlier but had soon lapsed—“my mission had not been
accomplished
, despite my fervor and my need”
10
—and she watched with a mild horror as Lowell buried himself in ever more weighty and more hallowed texts: “Except for meals and two games of chess after dinner he does nothing but read. I think he’ll die soon and die blind.”
11
In a short story called “An Influx of Poets” (published in 1978) Stafford has a nakedly autobiographical narrator describe the first months of her marriage to the poet Theron:

Lowell’s instructor at Louisiana State University was in fact called Father Shexnayder, and he may or may not have chosen Baton
Rouge as his parish “because it afforded him so excellent a chance to chasten his chaste flesh,” but what does seem to have been
accurate
is that “his austerity was right up Theron’s alley, and before I knew what had happened to me I had been dragged into that alley which was blind.”
13

*

Patrick Quinn remembers that it was in the spring of 1941 that he received a call from Shexnayder asking him to act as sponsor for Lowell’s baptism into the Roman Catholic Church:

A week later, at his own insistence, Lowell remarried Jean Stafford in a Catholic church; the previous year’s marriage had been, he said, invalid. And from this point on, according to Stafford, their life together went into a decline. Her own view of Catholicism was “lighthearted … though she had serious moments about it,” but for Lowell it had become a round-the-clock obsession: “Once Cal went for Romanism, he was all Roman.”
15

Jean started drinking heavily and also began falling victim to a series of minor illnesses—six-week flu, kidney infections, lung
conditions
, strange fevers that came and went for no diagnosable reason. Lowell imposed a stern domestic regimen: mass in the morning, benediction in the evening, two rosaries a day. Reading matter was vetted for its “seriousness”—“no newspapers, no novels except
Dostoevsky
, Proust, James and Tolstoy.”
16
Food was similarly
scrutinized
: “Jean said that she once tried to serve him soup on a Friday, and he tasted meat stock, or thought he tasted meat stock, so he took the soup and dumped it in the sink.”
17
There were frequent quarrels
about Stafford’s smoking and drinking, or about her minor lapses from full piety, and Lowell’s rages were no less intimidating than they had been at St. Mark’s or Kenyon. On one occasion, in a hotel in New Orleans, Lowell hit her in the face and broke her nose for the second time. The incident was witnessed by Frank Parker and Blair Clark—they were on a trip to Mexico and had met up with Lowell and Stafford for a “night out” in New Orleans. I quote from my interview with Parker: