Robert Lowell: A Biography (15 page)

When Randall Jarrell died in 1965, Lowell wrote of him: “Randall was the only man I have ever met who could make other writers feel that their work was more important to him than his own.”
1
Twenty years earlier, in October 1945, Lowell sent Jarrell the manuscript of
Lord
Weary
’
s
Castle
;
it carried ten poems from
Land of Unlikeness
, each of these slightly revised, and thirty new poems.

Lowell could not have wished for a more rousing yet judicious mentor. Jarrell wrote back, declaring that
Lord
Weary

And this, presumably, included Eliot, Auden, Frost—as well as the unselfish Jarrell. There were one or two qualifying footnotes:
Lowell
was perhaps too little interested in people and too often “harsh and severe,” and Jarrell was glad to see that he had dropped his efforts at “contemporary satire”—“your weakest sort of poem … not really worth wasting your time on.” Lowell’s worst
tendency
, he thought, was “to do too mannered, mechanical,
wonderfully
-contrived exercise poems.” All this said, though, Jarrell was finally persuaded by new poems like “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” “The Exile’s Return,” the two Black Rock poems and
“Mr. Edwards and the Spider” to declare that “you write more in the great tradition, the grand style, the real middle of English
poetry
, than anybody since Yeats.”

Breathtaking stuff, but the excessive strain in Jarrell’s hymn of praise can be readily forgiven. If the two choices for a modern poet seemed to be, on the one hand, the learned, metrical, ironic line of Eliot and Auden and, on the other, the fiery, bardic line of Dylan Thomas (with the William Carlos Williams free-verse, “
Americanist
” model a kind of permanently “other” possibility), then Lowell’s new poems undoubtedly would have seemed to be getting the best of every world. The Eliot line was sorely in need of some dramatic urgency; the Thomas line was self-evidently short on meter,
scholarly
allusion and, in the case of some of its wartime devotees, short too on elementary intelligence. In this context, Lowell’s voice was arresting simply because it could not be shoved into any of these pigeonholes—it was fiery, yes, but it was also educated:

Many a learned paper has been written on that final line of Lowell’s “Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” yet it is no “clearer,” no less haunting than it ever was: it was lines like this (and there are perhaps thirty of them in
Lord
Weary
’
s
Castle
)
that reduced even a proudly analytical reviewer like Jarrell to using words like “magic.”

Although Lowell had certainly become craftier and more
resonant
since writing
Land
of
Unlikeness
,
in most of the new poems his posture—and, intermittently, his posturing—remained essentially the same: the hectic, crunchingly enjambed iambic line, the welter of grabbed myths and pseudosymbols, the impudent and hortatory prayers, the barely controlled retributive gusto and the linguistic flagellation—both of self (so that the poet’s noble rage will not lazily abate) and of the fallen world (which, if it will not be redeemed, surely deserves further punishment). Like the earlier book,
Lord
Weary
’
s
Castle
is marked throughout by what Gabriel Pearson called Lowell’s “unacknowledged flight into the omnipotence of manic verbal control.”
4

Manic or not, though, the verbal control in
Lord
Weary
is
strikingly
more at ease with its own mannerisms than in
Land
of
Un
likeness
:
the thumping, unstoppable iambic line, the piled-up alliteration, the onomatopoeic consonants—Lowell uses these
devices
as if he now thinks of them as his, as if this is the way he happens to speak rather than a manufactured style. Also, in
Lord
Weary
,
the sillier puns are eliminated, the more hysterical “
political
” gesturing has given way to an elusive, almost taunting irony—and there is a new reliance on the restraining influence of a prose source. It is almost true to say that the most powerful pieces in the book—stretches of “The Quaker Graveyard,” “Mr.
Edwards
and the Spider,” “The Exile’s Return” and “After the
Surprising
Conversions”—are so derived. And these pieces may in turn have led Lowell into the near-naturalistic monologues of the “Between the Porch and the Altar” sequence—a sequence that seems not to belong in the book, pointing forward as it does to Lowell’s Browningesque next phase.

Perhaps more than any other twentieth-century poet, Lowell is now thought of as “autobiographical”; or, as Gabriel Pearson put it, “the materials of his own life are there to be made over to art.” There is an interest, therefore, in reflecting how
little
of his life up to 1945 can be construed from the poems of
Lord
Weary
’
s
Castle.
One can deduce something of his Boston background, his
Mayflower
ancestry
—though nothing in the least precise. There are elegies in the book addressed to dead relatives, but these carry little direct feeling, nor do we get from them any clear sense of who these people were: would it be known, for instance, from “In Memory of Arthur Winslow” that Lowell had revered the old man in his youth, and spent the happiest of his boyhood holidays messing about at his
grandfather’s farm at Mattapoisett? Nostalgia could not, of course, sit easily with Lowell’s vatic zeal.

Similarly,
Lord
Weary’s
Castle
reveals little of the poet’s
adolescent
storms; many of his Boston poems can, it’s true, be seen as acts of vengeance, as suddenly unthwarted fits of youthful venom. Only in “Rebellion,” though, do we get a glimpse of the
circumstances
:

The poem deteriorates into myth and melodrama, but in the first eleven lines there is enough clarity, respect for detail and variety of rhythm to suggest that, for Lowell, personal experience could have the same braking, liberating influence as the prose models of Thoreau or Edwards, which are heavily drawn on in “The Quaker Graveyard” and “Mr. Edwards and the Spider.”
5
Again, though, it would have been impossible for the young Lowell to concede that the archangelic protagonist of these early poems could be trammeled by a mortal life, a single history. Thus, even the symbolically rich gesture of refusing the draft barely gets into a book written shortly after his release from prison. There is one
poem, “In the Cage,” which does seem to have been set in
Danbury
:

And there is a similarly unusual mutedness and factuality in parts of “The Death of the Sheriff”:

But these are isolated clumps of clay in the elemental moonscape of
Lord
Weary.

Even at this early stage, though, it is probable that Lowell would have glimpsed where such low-keyed factuality might lead. And he would certainly have been struck by Ransom’s choice of poems for the
Kenyon
Review:
“Winter in Dunbarton” (with its middle section of fond, plainspoken elegy for a dead family cat), “Mr. Edwards and the Spider” (almost every line a direct quotation from Edwards’s own writing) and “At a Bible House,” a poem which, in spite of its intricate rhyme scheme, is almost Williams-like in its terse observation, its ungenerously short lines:

Ransom wrote:

“Nice” is not a word even the gentle Ransom could have used about “The Drunken Fisherman” or “Christmas in Black Rock”—or
indeed
about the majority of the poems in
Lord
Weary
’
s
Castle.
But he was right to sense that—for the purposes of poetry—Lowell’s saintly rage was almost spent.

*

In December 1945—at Jarrell’s suggestion—Lowell mailed off the manuscript of
Lord
Weary
’
s
Castle
to Philip Rahv, co-editor of
Partisan
Review:
Partisan
was negotiating a co-publishing
contract
with Dial Press and printed, or was about to print, a
number
of Lowell’s new poems in the magazine; there seems to have been some notion of
Partisan
and
Dial
jointly publishing these, and others from
Land
of
Unlikeness
,
as a book. On January 2, 1946, Rahv wrote back: “I have read your manuscript over the weekend and think you did a wonderful job. I liked your
inclusion
of nine poems from your first book.”
7
Rahv, though, went on to say that the arrangement with Dial Press was far from
settled
, and that “there is a possibility of our going over to Henry Holt—if that happens would you mind their publishing your book?” Two weeks later, Rahv wrote again: “Since our
negotiations
with Dial tend to become rather protracted I’ve sent your manuscript off to Lambert Davis.”
8
Davis was an editor at
Harcourt
, Brace, but it was in fact Robert Giroux who read the manuscript and urged its acceptance. Harcourt, Brace agreed to bring the book out in the fall of 1946.

Meanwhile two midwinter weeks at Damariscotta Mills had
persuaded
Lowell that the new house, though splendid, was nowhere near ready to be settled into. In January, Jean wrote exuberantly to Allen Tate:

Even so, in mid-January they decided to accept an invitation from the poet Delmore Schwartz to move in with him at his house on Cambridge’s Ellery Street. Schwartz’s marriage—to a
Partisan
Review
book reviewer called Gertrude Buckman—had not long before come to an end, and he was eager to have others share his domestic chaos. The move meant, of course, a return to the Boston sphere of influence and, in particular, regular lunch visits to the Lowell home on Marlborough Street: a high price to pay, Jean Stafford thought, for the comforts of town living. She writes of one visit: