Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
It is not clear who issued the invitations that produced this summer “influx,” but the upshot must surely have been easy to predict. Jean stepped up the drinking, and her quarrels with Lowell became more vicious and determined. Her fevers returned; she was also plagued with daily headaches—caused not just by large quantities of rum, nor, she says, by a diet of “too many iambs.” As to Lowell, he very rarely unburdened himself in letters, and it is therefore hard to know how frenetic
he
’
d
become during these weeks. By August, though, he was sufficiently worn down to write to Peter Taylor:
I don’t care for confessions, but I suppose I must tell you that everything is chaos between us. Jean is driving like a cyclone and we both have had about all we can stand and more. Right now I think I’ll go to New York sometime in September and stay with the Jarrells and Lytle and then get a room and pick up some sort of temporary work. Jean has a lot of plans, none of them too good, including going to Hollywood. Anyway, we have got to
leave
each
other
alone
and the future to time. Please just be an ear for this letter, and don’t say anything to me or anyone else.
26
The running conflict had taken a new and drastic turn. Shortly before Lowell wrote this letter, the “eighteenth guest since
Memorial
Day” had been flown into Damariscotta in a private plane that had been laid on by the last of her many summer hosts. Gertrude Buckman, the former Mrs. Delmore Schwartz, had come to stay. Jean was not on hand to welcome her; she had gone to see her doctor in Cambridge. In “An Influx of Poets,” though, she makes
it clear that many hours were later to be spent imagining this grand arrival:
She came to us, quixotically and at the expense of her last host, in a Piper Cub, landing on an island in Hawthorne Lake, behind us, flown there by a Seabee so stricken with her that he loitered in the village several days afterward. If I had been there when she came, the outcome of my marriage would, I daresay, have been the same, but the end of it would probably not have come so soon. Certainly it would not have been so humiliating, so banal, so sandy to my teeth. But I was not there on that beautiful afternoon when her blithe plane banked and came bobbing to rest on Loon Islet and she came swimming to our landing.
27
1
. Robert Lowell, “Randall Jarrell, 1914–1965,” in
The
Lost
World
(New York: Collier, 1965). Reprinted in
Randall
Jarrell,
1914–
1965,
ed. Robert Lowell, Peter Taylor and Robert Penn Warren (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967), pp. 101–12.
2
. Randall Jarrell to R.L., October 1945 (?) (Houghton Library).
3
. “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,”
Lord
Weary
’s
Castle
(Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1946).
4
. Gabriel Pearson, “Robert Lowell,”
Review,
no. 20 (March 1969), 3–36.
5
. See Hugh B. Staples,
Robert
Lowell:
The
First
Twenty
Years
(London: Faber & Faber, 1962) for a study of Lowell’s use of his prose sources.
6
. John Crowe Ransom to R.L., October 5, 1945 (Houghton Library).
7
. Philip Rahv to R.L., January 2, 1946 (Houghton Library).
8
. Ibid., January 16, 1946 (Houghton Library).
9
. Jean Stafford to Allen Tate, January 4, 1946 (Firestone Library).
10
. Jean Stafford to Cecile Starr, February 1946.
11
. Robert Lowell, “To Delmore Schwartz,”
Life
Studies
(Farrar, Straus &
Giroux
, 1959), pp. 53–54.
12
. James Atlas,
Delmore
Schwartz
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977), Also, Eileen Simpson in
Poets
in
Their
Youth
(New York: Random House, 1982), pp. 123–24, writes: “Delmore, the intriguer, had hinted … that [Jean] was interested in another man (himself perhaps?). He had even insinuated this to Cal, whereupon Cal had socked him. The fistfight that ensued brought the Ellery Street winter to a dramatic close.”
13
. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, n.d.
14
. Ibid., March 24, 1946.
15
. Ibid., June 29, 1944.
16
. Ibid., April 15, 1946.
17
. R.L. to Peter and Eleanor Taylor, May 23, 1946.
18
. Ibid.
19
. Jean Stafford, “An Influx of Poets,”
New
Yorker,
November 6, 1978, pp. 46, 51, 52, 55.
20
. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, December 19, 1946.
21
. Cecile Starr, in a letter to I.H. (September 30, 1981), writes: “I think her love of household was at the center of her marriage to Cal.”
22
. R.L., “Current Poetry,”
Sewanee
Review
54 (Winter 1946), 340–41.
23
. R.L. to Peter Taylor, August 19, 1946.
24
. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, July 15, 1946.
25
. Jean Stafford, “An Influx of Poets,” p. 43.
26
. R.L. to Peter Taylor, August 13, 1946.
27
. Jean Stafford, “An Influx of Poets,” p. 43.
In “An Influx of Poets,” Gertrude is portrayed as Minnie
Zumwalt
, raven-tressed and damask-skinned; having acquired a divorce from her murderously moody husband, the poet Jered Zumwalt, she is charming her way from house to house along the coast of Maine. She writes sharp little book reviews for
The
Divergent
,
but in life she is always ready to turn moon-eyed in the presence of a poet, and is therefore a hugely popular house guest. Poets’ wives have no fear of her because Jered has unchivalrously—“in
disgraceful
and convincing detail”—told the world that she is frigid.
This may have been the rumor (and Delmore Schwartz’s
notebooks
would seem to confirm it), but after Gertrude had been at Damariscotta for a few days, Jean Stafford began to have her doubts. She wrote to Peter Taylor:
She lingered on and on. All day she read Cal’s poetry and exclaimed over it or, when he mentioned something, she cried in her quite lovely voice: “read it aloud to me.” And he would read to her from Boswell or Ben Jonson or Shakespeare (and you know how well he loved it! Ah, what a foolish woman I have been!) They would go to the lake early in the morning to swim and then in the afternoon, and then before dinner, and then late when the moon was full (one of Cal’s chief and most bitter charges against me was that I did not know how to swim). They would walk to the village together, telling me that I was much too tired to go. They sat facing each other in the big chairs listening to records in the light of the fire. Gertrude told me things I had done wrong in my house, and Cal agreed with her, and she told me what I had done wrong in
The
Mountain
Lion
[Stafford’s second novel] and Cal agreed with her. I was wormwood.
1
And so it appears to have continued for the three weeks of
Gertrude
Buckman’s stay. Later, Stafford was to accuse Buckman of deliberately “fouling my nest,” of cold-bloodedly setting out to steal her husband: she “horribly flattered Cal, caused him to fall in love with her and caused herself to fall in love with him.” She claimed that on returning to New York, Buckman wrote to
Lowell
and “all but said that she was in love.” It was this letter, said Stafford, that encouraged Lowell to announce, in mid-September, that the marriage was over and that he wanted an immediate
separation
.
Buckman, on the other hand, recalls that throughout her visit to Damariscotta, Jean Stafford “was drinking herself into a stupor. … Most of the time she was just drinking—madly, madly, staying up all night and drinking,” and that any closeness that developed between her and Lowell was more or less forced on them by
Stafford
’s impossible behavior. She also claims that it was Lowell who made the first move to see her in New York: “He’d asked if he could come to see me. And I said, ‘Certainly you can come and see me, with Jean, not by yourself.’ And he said, ‘But we’re separating.’” Had Lowell then fallen for her at Damariscotta? “I don’t know what his feelings were. How could I tell that? I suppose we were drawn to each other. He was so beautiful then. But I did think he was a very odd character, I must say. Unlike anyone else I’ve ever known.”
2
In September 1946 Lowell and Stafford traveled together to New York and said good-bye on the platform at Penn Station, Lowell rented a bug-infested room on Third Avenue and Jean Stafford stayed with friends. Over the next three weeks there were attempts at a reconciliation, but none of them lasted for more than
twenty-four
hours. Lowell had begun to see a lot of Buckman, using her apartment to work in during the day and moving in with her for a period when he caught influenza:
He would spend days in my flat working, and I would feed him. He was living in this ghastly rooming house on Third Avenue. I mean, he would get lice and crabs and everything, and he had no money. I really think he preferred that kind of thing. It was a haunt of pimps and prostitutes and God knows what.
3
At times, Lowell was uncertain about what Buckman really meant to him, but any pressure from Stafford invariably drove him into a rage; he would tell her “over and over again in the indefatigable way only Cal can repeat, that I was possessive like his mother in not approving of so intimate a relationship with her.”
4
In October, therefore, Jean changed her strategy and attempted to create a
harmonious
triangular arrangement. She agreed, for instance, that the three of them should make a Sunday trip to the Bronx Zoo—as doomed a project as could be imagined:
I managed to get a hotel and that evening I telephoned G to say that I’d meet them the next morning to go to the zoo. The next morning Cal called me and blew up rhetorically and forbade me categorically to go (oh how can I shame myself further by telling you this juvenile tale. It is the want of dignity in the whole thing that most maddens me. The zoo, indeed). They came back and had dinner with me at my hotel and left very soon afterwards, very much like two married people obliged to dine with a boring relative. It was that evening that they began attacking people who were possessive and would not let other people alone.
5
By this time, Stafford’s control was visibly disintegrating, and the doctor she was seeing in New York arranged for her to go to a Catholic sanatorium in Detroit. She stayed there for eight hours (“I knew somehow that, if I let night fall I would be there for good”) and then took a train to Chicago; from there she traveled on to Denver: “I was trying,” she later wrote to Lowell, “to put as many miles between myself and you as I could do.” She stayed with her sister in Denver for five days and swiftly “commenced to hate her because she judged me morally: ‘Quit drinking for my sake.’” On her way back to New York she stopped over in Chicago:
And then I did a pitiful thing…. I had not been able to read anything for weeks and so, in the station, when I still had some hours to wait, I bought a dollar edition of Boston Adventure and I tried to read it. I went into the women’s room and tried to read it there and when I could not, the tears poured out and in a perfect rage I threw it in the trash
container
. It was, in its way, a little suicide.
6
Soon after her return to New York, Jean Stafford was admitted to the Payne Whitney Clinic to undergo a “psycho-alcoholic cure”;
she was to stay there for several months, and during that time she bombarded Lowell and Peter Taylor with a series of extraordinary letters. At first, she simply refused to accept that the marriage was over and confined herself to brilliant denunciations of the “stunted cowbird” Buckman. Lowell, she conceded, might have found the playmate he was always looking for (he had once told Stafford: “I don’t want a wife. I want a playmate”), but she said:
She is a child and if she wishes to eat the last piece of candy in the box, she will consult only her own desire…. [but] if you marry her, you will not be marrying a woman. Nor will you be any closer to the knowledge of what marriage is than you were with me. I knew more than you did, I think, and God knows I knew little enough.
7
The trouble all along, she says, was that Lowell, with his “powerful alchemy,” had turned her into a version of his mother and that subconsciously she had assented to this role “until [she] terrifyingly resembled her.” And she, Stafford, had similarly confused Lowell with her dominating father. She wrote to Peter Taylor in
November
1946:
There was something wrong in me to marry him for he was so much like my father, whom first I worshipped and by whom I later felt betrayed. This is not psychiatric cant, even though the psychiatrists have told me that this is just what I did, married my father, just as the same perverseness made Cal marry his mother. But only in the past year did these people really emerge in us, and I suppose they emerged because we dug them out. We probably wanted it to be like this. I disobeyed him as I disobeyed my father. He was economically and domestically
irresponsible
as my father had always been. He read his poems aloud to me, as my father had read his stories for the pulp magazines. His manners were courtly or they were uncouth, and he was slovenly, as my father was. My father didn’t have his wit, nor his brilliance. They were both violent men in every way.
8
With this knowledge established, she would plead, surely she and Lowell could try again:
I feel that somehow we will save one another and that our salvation will be unusual, for having suffered so much and having yet endured, we must have, both of us, extraordinary strength. I cannot help, with all this
lovely love of mine, wishing that we could live our lives together and feeling that we have a chance that no-one we have ever known has had.
9
In the face of these pleas, Lowell remained stonily discouraging. He had shocked Jean by demanding a divorce and by announcing that he was no longer a Catholic; the Church, he said, had “served its purpose” (Jean commented on this that he probably meant that it had “served its
literary
purpose”). He would marry Gertrude Buckman, he told Peter Taylor, and when Taylor offered to act as an intermediary between him and Stafford, he refused. Taylor had suggested that they delay any final decisions for a year: “I feel like a parent whose two favorite children have had a bitter quarrel and are making a complete break and that’s a pretty terrible feeling.”
10
Lowell replied:
The time for considering and re-considering is long past. I’ll only be counting the days.
Your letter was an honorable and warm-hearted one for you to have written. But what you imagine is not the same as my remembrance. You mustn’t idealize what other people have to live. You mustn’t.
11
And, it must be said, Stafford’s response to Taylor’s plan does seem to bear out Lowell’s view:
Peter, by this plan he will only be free to reject me in his brutal fashion over a longer period of time than he has done already. Mind you, I would take him back now, and I would forgive him, because I love him.
12
Nearly all Stafford’s letters waver agonizingly between savage recrimination on the one hand and pathetic pleading on the other. One day she will write in fury accusing Lowell of “Yankee trading” because he refuses to sign a quit claim on the house in Maine (Jean had put the house in their joint names and now wished to raise a mortgage on it to pay her medical expenses); on another, she will announce that she has stopped drinking, that her love has been purified of all selfish jealousies, and that she is now, at last, spiritually ready to make him a good wife: “Remember that I do love you and that I love you without reproach and that in wanting you, I realize that I am issuing a rather remarkable invitation, but one which will
give me unmodified joy if it is accepted.” They make harrowing reading, and although Jean persistently complains that Lowell,
during
these months, remained “so immovable, so utterly, so absolutely, utterly unaware of what I might be suffering,” it is evident that with each letter she was—almost systematically—ruining her own cause. Lowell’s plea throughout had been at least consistent: “Why can’t we leave each other alone?” In her eyes, of course, this very
consistency
was nothing less than “calm, olympian brutality”:
It is Cal’s doing, all of it. With serene greatness, he will be unsmirched. He will always be a Lowell. Forgive me for this deep bitterness…. If Cal had said, I am sorry, I could have borne it. If he had said, I am suffering too and the reason I am doing it this way is that I must end my suffering and yours. Perhaps he feels that, but he has never
said
it, he has never shown me anything in any of his letters but cold,
self-justified
hatred. He has even stooped to literal Yankee trading, and all I can feel now is, pray God that the day I can forget my Boston adventure will not be long in coming.
13
Lord
Weary
’s
Castle
had appeared in December 1946, but most of the reviews didn’t start coming in until the following spring. With one or two fairly trifling exceptions, they added up to a chorus of acclaim. Randall Jarrell set the tone with a long piece in
The
Nation:
When I reviewed Lowell’s first book I finished by saying “Some of the best poems of the next years ought to be written by him.” The
appearance
of
Lord
Weary
’
s
Castle
makes me feel … like a rain-maker who predicts rain, and gets a flood which drowns everyone in the country. A few of these poems, I believe, will be read as long as men remember English.
14
Selden Rodman in the
New
York
Times
Book
Review
attempted to go even further:
One would have to go back as far as 1914, the year that saw the
publication
of Robert Frost’s
North
of
Boston
or to T. S. Eliot’s
The
Love
Song
of
J.
Alfred
Prufrock
to find a poet whose first public speech has had the invention and authority of Robert Lowell’s…. The voice is vibrant enough to be heard, learned enough to speak with authority, and savage enough to wake the dead.
15
And Anne Fremantle waxed mixed-metaphorical in
The
Common
weal
:
Robert Lowell … is a young, new poet of tremendous importance, who is both Catholic and classical. He writes in tight, tapestried meters, hierarchic in form and feeling. His verse, though full and rich, is trim as a yew quincunx, tailored as a box edging: he seems to have pared and whittled away every excrescence, every unessential, till the taut lines, clean as a whistle, dovetail effortlessly, polished like old, warm ivory. And always, at all levels, there is that continual awareness of his Maker….
16