Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
1
. Peter Taylor, interview with I.H. (1980).
2
. Ibid.
3
. R.L. to Robie Macauley, 1940.
4
. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, April 22, 1940 (Houghton Library).
5
. R.L. to Mrs. Arthur Winslow, n.d. (Houghton Library).
6
. R.L. to Robie Macauley, 1940.
7
. Typescript, n.d. (Houghton Library). Parts of this poem are incorporated in “Park Street Cemetery” (
Land
of
Unlikeness
)
and “At the Indian Killer’s Grave” (
Lord
Weary
’s
Castle
).
8
. R.L. to Robie Macauley, n.d.
9
. Peter Taylor, interview with I.H. (1980).
10
. Jean Stafford, “An Influx of Poets,”
New
Yorker,
November 6, 1978, p. 49.
11
. Jean Stafford to Robie Macauley, n.d.
12
. Jean Stafford, “An Influx of Poets,” p. 49.
13
. Ibid.
14
. Patrick Quinn, interview with I.H. (1981).
15
. Peter Taylor, interview with I.H. (1980).
16
. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, November 1942.
17
. Robert Giroux, interview with I.H. (1980).
18
. Frank Parker, interview with I.H. (1980).
19
. Jean Stafford, unpublished interview with Joan (Cuyler) Stillman, Westport, Conn., October 16–17, 1952.
20
. Jean Stafford, “An Influx of Poets,” p. 49.
21
. R.L. to Robie Macauley, 1943.
22
. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, October 1941.
23
. R.L. diary (1974).
24
. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, August 1943 (Houghton Library).
25
. R.L., “Sublime Feriam Sidera Vertice,”
Hika,
February 1940, p. 17.
26
. “On the Eve of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception 1942,”
Land
of
Unlikeness
(Cummington, Mass.: Cummington Press, 1943), p. 12.
27
. Transcript of talk, undated but c. 1960 (Houghton Library).
28
. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, August 1943.
29
. Ibid., November 1942.
30
. Ibid., March 30, 1943.
31
. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, August 1943 (Houghton Library).
32
. Ibid.
33
. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, July 20, 1943.
34
. Ibid., August 3, 1943.
35
. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, August 1943 (Houghton Library).
36
. Typescript in Houghton Library.
37
. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, September 7, 1943 (Houghton Library).
38
. R.L. to Mrs. Arthur Winslow, n.d. (Houghton Library).
39
. Ms in Houghton Library.
40
. R.L. to Mrs. Arthur Winslow, October 12, 1943 (Houghton Library).
41
. R.L. to Peter Taylor, October 13, 1943.
42
. Jim Peck, interview with I.H. (1980).
After ten days at West Street Jail, Lowell was driven up to
Connecticut
, “handcuffed to two Porto Rican draft-dodgers”:
The Porto Ricans scratched their crotches
with handcuffed hands, snatched matches
and photos of children from their trouser-cuffs.
Near Tarrytown, we passed a sand-red sow,
grubbing acorns by a cinder pile,
and line of women’s trousers.
Then some miles of artificial lakes,
a canoe as scarlet as a maple leaf,
finally, Danbury and “the country club”
our model prison.
Glassbricks biased over fields of blue denim men
Smashing rocks with pneumatic drills.
The cement building was as functional
as my fishing tackle box.
1
Danbury specialized in housing CO’s and first offenders—
bootleggers
and black marketeers—and it prided itself on being correctional as well as punitive. The cell blocks were reassuringly named after the New England states, and the rules on visiting hours and letter writing were far more relaxed than they had been at West Street, where Jean Stafford had been allowed to see her husband only once, and then through a plate-glass wall.
At first, Lowell was viewed with suspicion by the other Danbury inmates: he had been given a comparatively light sentence (the usual term was three years), and Jim Peck, a CO jailed at around the same time, was in no doubt that the judge had been lenient simply “
because
he was a Lowell”:
We got three years. He got a year and a day—it had to be a year and a day to be a felony. He got parole after four months. They didn’t usually grant parole to objectors—he got it because he was a Lowell. I did three years minus seven months’ remission.
2
Peck and others tried to involve Lowell in a strike against the segregation of black and white prisoners, and Peck also berated him for A. Lawrence Lowell’s part in the conviction of Sacco and
Vanzetti
(Lowell had served on the review commission that decided they had had a fair trial and should be executed), but Lowell made it clear that he had larger matters to attend to: “He was ‘spaced out’—he was only interested in one thing, Catholic communities.” Even so, Peck—along with most of the others—gradually warmed to this abstracted, shabby “man of God”; he may not have been
their
kind of protesting pacifist, but he was manifestly not a fraud:
Lowell was on one of those pick-and-shovel gangs. Dig up a hole, fill it in again, you know. Usually, these privileged characters got the best jobs. I mean rich men who were in there for defrauding the government on war contracts. There were several of them. They were the only men who got out at the earliest parole eligible. Others, they’d maybe get out three months after. But these, they never failed. But Lowell was
definitely
not an organization person. He didn’t play it uppity at all. You see, I mean, like a lot of these guys who played big shot, they get pressed pants and connection pants and all that. He just dressed sloppy like all of us, ill-fitting clothes, shoes.
3
Ten years later, Lowell reminisced about his fellow inmates:
I belonged to a gang that walked outside the prison gates each
morning
, and worked on building a barn. The work was mild: the workers were slow and absent-minded. There were long pauses, and we would sit around barrels filled with burning coke and roast wheat-seeds. All the prisoner[s] were sentenced for a cause, all liked nothing better than talking the world to rights. Among the many eccentrics one group took the prize. They were negroes who called themselves Israelites. Their ritual compelled them to shave their heads and let their beards grow. But the prison regulations forced them to shave their beards. So with unnaturally smooth and shining faces and naked heads wrapped in Turkish towels, they shivered around the coke barrels, and talked wisdom and non-sense. Their non-sense was that they were the
chosen
people. They had found a text in the Bible which [said,] “But I am black though my brother is white”. This convinced them that the
people
of the old testament were negroes. The Israelites believed that modern Jews were imposters. Their wisdom was a deep ancestral knowledge of herbs and nature. They were always curing themselves with queer herbal remedies that they gathered from the fields. Once as we sat by the coke the most venerable and mild of the Israelites stretched out his hand. Below him lay the town of Danbury, which consisted of what might be called
filling-station
architecture
;
the
country
was the fine, small rolling land of Connecticut. One expected to see the flash of a deer’s white scut as it jumped a boulder wall by a patch of unmelted snow. My friend stretched out his arm, and said, “Only man is miserable.”
4
Lowell commented that “this summed up my morals and
aesthetics
.”
Jean Stafford was able to visit Danbury for an hour each Saturday. During the week she stayed in a small apartment in New York and spent much of her time warding off the recriminations that were now flowing freely down from Boston (“If we had only known how Bobby felt before he sent that declaration all this trouble could have been avoided”).
5
Charlotte was convinced that Lowell had suffered another of his mental seizures and even talked of asking for him to be transferred to the psychopathic ward at Danbury. Jean, she felt, should have noticed the symptoms and alerted her earlier, but she reserved her bitterest ill-feeling for the Tates: she deplored their general influence on Lowell and blamed them for persuading him to give up his steady job at Sheed and Ward in order to encourage him “in the emotional excitement of poetry.” Tate later
commented
: “I will never forget the phrase.”
6
Stafford was receiving $100 a month from Lowell’s trust fund and was having a hard time surviving in New York. Her rent was $50, she sent $10 to Lowell and spent another $10 on her own medical expenses. This left $30 for “food, cigarettes, electricity, etc.” In November she wrote to Mrs. Lowell about her difficulties and got an icily Bostonian reply:
I am glad to hear you say that you can, and are willing to support yourself while Bobby is in prison. I have just heard of a woman whose husband was recently sent to prison for 3 years, after first losing her entire fortune. Although this woman, having always had a great deal of money of her own, was completely untrained to work, she obtained a job in New York, suported [
sic
]
herself, and her children, for 3 years,
and when her husband was released from prison, she had managed to save quite a sum of money with which to help him to get started: Such conduct is certainly both admirable and heroic.
We think that Bobby has been extremely generous in wishing you to have all of the income from his trust fund while he is in prison. This is all the money that he has in the world, and he will be completely penniless when he is released from prison, if you care to impose upon his generosity.
I hope, Jean, for your own sake, as well as for Bobby’s that you will see in the present situation an opportunity for courage, selfdevelopment, and integrity of purpose.
7
Sharing a taxi to the prison with “two flashy looking articles … so opulent in their fur coats and highheeled shoes,” Jean is perhaps to be forgiven for having felt “envious that their husbands had left them well provided for while they were off being castigated for their ideals.”
8
In addition to her money worries, Stafford was also running into trouble on the New York cocktail circuit. In one letter she describes a typical literary gathering at which Sidney Hook mockingly put it to her that Lowell could not—logically—be both a Catholic and a conscientious objector. Were not Catholics supposed to follow the Pope’s lead? Taking up Hook’s cue, “three quarters of the men there said that Cal was a fool or hysterical,” and Stafford was soon reduced to tears. The next day she wrote to Peter Taylor:
I wish I could talk to you long and completely about literary people in New York. They are such cutthroats, such ambitious and bourgeois frights and yet I, in my stupid lack of integrity, continue to see them.
9
With this same letter, she included quotations from the sermon she had just received from “Charlotte Hideous.”
Although Stafford felt constrained to defend her “intrepid husband” against the skeptics in New York, she had her own doubts about the rationality of his position. At first, she had found his stand thrilling and admirable, but as the weeks passed she was getting more and more alarmed by his Catholic fanaticism; conversations with him, she said, had become so “insanely illogical” that they could be written into a case history of religious mania. She consulted a Jesuit
priest in New York who had known and corresponded with Lowell and was relieved to have it officially confirmed that Lowell had indeed become “more Catholic than the church.” But although this meant that
she
was not being a bad Catholic in her response to his religious fervor, it was of little help in reconciling her to what she saw as a drastic alteration in her husband’s entire personality. The Lowell she visited at Danbury was, she says, “nothing like” the Lowell she had known at Kenyon. In February 1944 she writes a desperate letter to Peter Taylor:
It is not right for me to burden you with this, just before you go overseas, but you are probably Cal’s closest friend. I see I have given you no facts. Roughly this is it: after the war what Cal wants to do (he cries: “this is to be my life and I will not be hindered”) is to be a sort of soapbox preacher with an organization called the Catholic Evidence Guilds which operate in city parks, etc, preach and answer the posers of
hecklers
. I cannot write this down without seeing you smile…. And when I inquire of him how we will live, he points to the Gospels and says that we must not worry about that, that God will take care of us, that one cannot be a wage slave but must have leisure in which to serve the Church….
I am frightened, feel that it will be three years before Cal has recovered from the pleasurable monasticism of the penitentiary….
10
In March 1944, Lowell emerged from the “closed order” of
Danbury
to face the more flexible requirements of parole. He was sent to Bridgeport, Connecticut, and given a job as a cleaner in the nurses’ quarters of Bridgeport’s St. Vincent’s hospital. He was paid fifteen dollars a week and had to start work at 7
A.M
. each day. Jean reported to Taylor that “he feels like Nancy Tate’s valet [and] speaks distastefully of the ‘pink things’ hung out to dry in his work vicinity.”
11
But the job was not entirely frivolous: as might be expected, Lowell managed to detect in it “a harsh somehow moral monotony.”
12
In Bridgeport, Lowell lived at first in a single room, sharing a bathroom with five others, and suffered the supervision of a fierce landlady who was convinced that he was a “draft-dodger.” Jean had given up her apartment in New York, and while Lowell swabbed the nurses’ floors she toured the Connecticut countryside in search of decent lodgings. Eventually she settled on Harbor View, Ocean
Avenue, Black Rock, Connecticut—an address that thoroughly
delighted
Lowell when he heard of it:
We have a large room with a bay window and a fireplace, a smaller room and a bath. The harbor we view brings tears to Cal’s eyes. He’d expected the ocean from the address and when he saw the pitiful little drop of water visible from our windows, he behaved as if he’d been deliberately cheated. We can however on a clear day see the Sound far far off and we have the illusion at least of being in the country.
13
The house itself, which provides the location for two of Lowell’s most celebrated poems (“Colloquy in Black Rock” and “Christmas in Black Rock”), is also brought to literary life in a story by Jean Stafford called “The Home Front.” The doctor in the story is quite clearly Lowell:
It was large, shapeless and built of yellow stone. It stood behind a high brick wall, its back windows overlooking an arm of the sea which, at low tide, was a black and stinking mud-flat. A dump had been made at the end of the water and here was heaped all the frightful refuse of the city, the high-heeled shoes and the rotten carrots and the abused insides of automobiles; when the wind blew, the odor from the dump was so putrid in so individual a way that it was quite impossible to describe. But on a clear day, the doctor could look the other way and see, far off, the live blue Sound and the silhouettes of white sailboats and gray
battleships
.
14
Fortuitously, though, the house was owned by a Roman Catholic priest, and from the front steps it was possible to see the spires of both St. Stephen’s and St. Peter’s. Jean Stafford was also gratified to learn that the priest had bought it from a rum-runner who had used its location to good effect during Prohibition.
Although Lowell’s release from his jail sentence was to become final in October 1944, there was still the possibility that he could again be inducted and, if he refused to serve, given a further spell in prison: quite likely, a far longer spell this time. In June, therefore, Lowell applied to join the army medical corps or some similar noncombatant branch of the forces: eventually he was classified 4F, “which means that save in the case of a great emergency, like the
bombing of New York, he won’t have to go into anything, neither prison nor the medical corps.”
15
During his term at Danbury, Lowell wrote no poems. He read Proust, and corrected the galleys of
Land
of
Unlikeness
. The book had been delayed several times, not least because of Lowell’s
inability
(and this lasted all his life) to read a page of his own work without rewriting it. It had still not appeared by July, when Lowell, after almost a year’s silence, began to write again; indeed, Jean Stafford writes to Peter Taylor on July 26 that “Cal … is working with the same intensity he did in that great period of fertility in Monteagle” and to Eleanor Taylor on the thirty-first: “Cal started writing
poetry
again and his intensity and industry make me feel completely worthless. I’ve done nothing at all this summer.” By the time
Land
of
Unlikeness
appeared in the fall of 1944 Lowell had already
completed
seven poems in what he called “a new style, more lyrical and lucid” and rewritten several of the poems in his first volume.
16