Robert Lowell: A Biography (2 page)

The infant Robert Lowell may have come to see his mother as an adversary, a “scolding, rusty hinge,” but he was utterly enthralled by her; even to make small inroads on her appalling power would be to achieve victories that seemed quite beyond his father’s wit or inclination. From a tender age, Lowell became a keen student of enslavement. And from his father he learned that decency and good intentions can be abject.

One of Lowell’s earliest insights into how power within the
family
operates came when a flu epidemic struck the household. Bob caught the bug first, and to protect his wife he improvised a resting place in the corridor outside the still “germ-free” master bedroom:

After a day or two of this disruption, Bob was obliged to declare himself fully recovered; and then it was Charlotte’s turn to show how it was done:

It was for triumphs of this sort that Lowell began to see his mother as a “young Alexander, all gleam and panache.” In Charlotte’s copy of Plutarch, there was a picture of Alexander conferring with his aide-de-camp before the battle of Granicus. Lowell used to study this picture and compare the conqueror’s strong chin with his mother’s. How in the world, the child would wonder, might such a commanding, brilliant presence be undone?

One possible weak point, he noticed, had to do with Charlotte’s “nerves”—
should
the imperial be quite so irritable? Lowell’s
earliest
impressions of his mother invariably remark on her apparently unappeasable discontent. Nothing was ever quite as it should be. Charlotte was expert in haughty bon mots, glacial put-downs; she never stopped playing her “fearfully important game of keeping the world guessing what was on her mind,” but it wasn’t a game she seemed to get much final pleasure out of winning. But then pleasure was not one of her favorite pursuits. She never liked the presents she received; she either exchanged them or had them remodeled: “If you gave her a traveling case she would say with a sigh that she hoped never to see another train or boat as long as she lived.”

At first it seemed that Boston was the key to her headachy, flamboyant petulance. During the first eight years of Lowell’s life there were two enforced two-year stretches out of Boston, the first in Philadelphia, the second in Washington. Charlotte despised both places. Philadelphia society, she announced, was “limp and
peripheral
”; the city itself was “an over-sized and ersatz Boston.” She delighted in patronizing Bob’s naval colleagues and in snubbing their drab wives: she would spend whole afternoons waiting for the doorbell to ring so that her servant could announce that she was not at home. Much the same happened in Washington, although here her chief quarrel was with the steamy climate. She compared
Washington
to “a herd of tepid elephants sinking in seedy mud” and became obsessed with the threat to her son’s health. There were regular medical alarms:

This was the argument Charlotte used when, after his two years in Washington, Bob was in line for his next posting. Strings were pulled, and in 1925 a transfer was arranged to a job as second in command at Boston’s Naval Shipyard. Charlotte was triumphant and quite unabashed by the naval regulation that insisted on the three of them actually living in a house provided by the Yard. Her response was to purchase their own house on Boston’s Revere Street. The commanding officer was furious and accused Bob of “flaunting private fortunes in the face of naval tradition.” So for the next year and a half Charlotte and young Bobby lived in town while poor Bob reported nightly to his assigned quarters at the base:

The “private fortune” that Bob’s commanding officer objected to was a legacy left to Bob by his cousin Cassie: it was to provide him with a regular monthly income—“not grand enough to corrupt us,” Charlotte would explain, “but sufficient to prevent Bob from being at the mercy of his salary.” Cousin Cassie also left vanloads of rather grand furniture, which enabled Charlotte to inject a certain style into a house that was worryingly close to Boston’s North End slums:

Perhaps part of Charlotte’s trouble was that she was always a
tantalizing
fifty yards or so from the Hub. Certainly, as Robert Lowell describes it in his memoir “91 Revere Street,” there was no lessening of tension as a result of the yearned-for move back to Boston. And for the eight-year-old boy Lowell, there was an even fiercer erosion
of his father’s dignity and general substance. The nightly exits to the Navy Yard were a painful embarrassment:

Later still on the same night, a dramatically distraught Charlotte burst into her son’s bedroom, hugged him and declared, “Oh Bobby, it’s such a comfort to have a man in the house.” Bobby replied, “I am not a man. I am a boy.”
3

Although Commander Lowell’s humbling at the hands of
Admiral
de Stahl was consistently difficult to bear, it nonetheless
permitted
some room in which father and son could conspire towards a fantasy accord. For the boy, whatever his private doubts, there were always the glamorous martial trappings—the uniforms, the dress sword, the late-night mariner’s yarns. And having a naval father did win him prestige among his friends at school. There was enough, almost, on which to build a version of the father he would wish to have had—a version that his mother, perhaps in ironic desperation, helped to feed with her constant tales of the exploits of Siegfried and Napoleon, tales told with special fervor during those tranquil
periods
when Bob was away on sea duty in California. For Bob himself, the navy provided a screen to hide behind; the slang gave him a way of talking, the “comradeship” gave him people he could talk to, and the naval hierarchies offered simple, clear “career objectives” as well as an utterly dependable sense of “where he stood.”

The next stage of Charlotte’s discontent was to destroy all this. She set about nagging Bob into retiring from the navy, and when she succeeded—after two years of steady pressure—she came close
to rendering her son fatherless. Bob took a job with Lever Brothers, the soap firm, and when that didn’t work out, he declined from job to job, still smiling but, in his son’s eyes, a ruined man, emasculated: “In his forties, Father’s soul went underground.”

Even in his new civilian job, Bob remained the butt of Charlotte’s not quite witty enough taunts: “Don’t you think Bob looks
peaceful
? They call him the undertaker at Lever Brothers. I think he is in love with his soap vat,” or, “Bob is the only man in America who really believes it is criminal to buy Ivory Soap instead of Lux.” Even in an account as studied and pitying as “91 Revere Street”—written nearly thirty years after the event—Lowell found it hard to suppress an exasperated loathing of his father’s spinelessness. At the time, a child of ten, he could merely look and listen—and wonder
repeatedly
: “Why
doesn
’
t
he fight back?”

Fighting back was one of the few things Robert Lowell got high marks for during his schooldays. He is remembered as dark,
menacing
, belligerent; always bigger, stronger, shaggier than his
contemporaries
—always ready to take his own unpopularity for granted.

From Brimmer kindergarten (which he attended for one “happy” year when he was five), he moved to schools in Washington and Philadelphia. At kindergarten, he had “enjoyed every minute”; he had

In Washington and Philadelphia there were no such sunnily
improving
chores; long division replaced the game of the good deed, and the outsider from Boston elected to sulk his way through the first stages of his education. His mother would try to persuade him that the Potomac School, say, was every bit as congenial as
Brimmer
, but Lowell’s triumph here was
never
to reply, “Washington sure isn’t Boston.” If he had said anything of the sort, “Mother could have explained to herself, my father and above all, me, why all my tortures came from living in Washington.”

Rather than permit any such easy alliance, Lowell remained churlishly stoical, or was needling and argumentative, until the great move back to Boston in 1925 saw him reenrolled at Brimmer. Brimmer, though, was not the haven he remembered. Junior school was rather more demanding than kindergarten; smiles were no longer on the syllabus. Already aware of his unusual size and
strength, Lowell seems at this point to have adopted the persona that was to serve him for most of his early adolescence: “Thick-witted, narcissistic, thuggish” was how he described it. Certainly, he was never thought to flaunt much boyish charm.

He now saw Brimmer as an awesome and perplexing place. Its eight upper grades were all-girl and therefore the “school’s tone, its
ton
,
was a blend of the feminine and the military.” The lower, coeducational grades were incidental to the school’s real spiritual thrust, and the gawky, girl-shy Lowell soon identified the regime of Brimmer with the regime of 91 Revere Street. Both worlds were, unnervingly, worlds ruled by women. “I wished I were an older girl. I wrote Santa Claus for a field hockey stick. To be a boy at Brimmer was to be small, denied and weak.”

To boys of his own age, though, Lowell was neither small nor weak, and he was able to establish his own local tyranny by regularly bloodying the noses of schoolroom rivals like Bulldog Binney and Dopey Dan Parker or by spraying enemy third-graders with wet fertilizer: such deeds were sufficient to win him a reputation for being “difficult,” if not “impossible,” but were of little substance when it came to making an impression on the Amazons who
towered
over him at Brimmer. Mostly he had to take refuge in dark, vengeful fantasies:

Lowell’s educational destiny had, of course, been mapped out for him at birth. His name had been entered for St. Mark’s, the
upper-crust
Episcopalian boarding school in Southborough,
Massachusetts
. He was due to go there at thirteen, but was obliged to quit Brimmer at eleven. In 1928, therefore, a “respectable stop-gap” had to be found, and for several weeks Mr. Lowell was forced to spend his Sunday afternoons inspecting the posher country day schools in the Boston neighborhood. Charlotte was determined to have
nothing
“suburban” or “middle-class,” so on his return from each tour of inspection, Bob was subjected to an exacting quiz. Invariably, he had somehow managed to botch the assignment. He rarely got to see the headmaster in person; at best he would listen to the grumbles of a very junior staff member, at worst he would find himself
soliciting
advice from the school janitor. At each school he visited he learned something unpleasant about all the others, and by the end of the day he was always comfortably undecided. Charlotte
announced
her astonishment that “a wishy-washy desire to be
everything
to everybody had robbed a naval man of any reliable concern for his son’s welfare” and set about fixing things herself.

The chosen school was Rivers, “an open-air, i.e. unheated school where scholarship was low, health was high, manners were hearty.” Lowell’s own recollections of Rivers are all to do with freezing or with fighting. He played a lot of marbles and (reluctantly) some baseball. Academically, he thought he was doing pretty well if he came nineteenth in a class of twenty-seven. But his real triumphs were triumphs of brute strength. In his two years at Rivers he graduated to the status of school tough via a series of spectacular playground victories. Once, with his arm broken from an earlier dust-up, he strode into battle against an enemy gang’s “flying pears” and “stood off multitudes with only my garbage can lid as a shield, a little girl a head shorter than I was, and a boy hardly tall enough to walk on two feet.”

Lowell’s army of course won the day; and this was how he loved to see himself: the one against the many, the victor against daunting odds. He delighted in his battle scars and would fall asleep at night fondling his newly lacerated chin:

For the eleven-year-old warrior, there could have been no sweeter praise.

Lowell’s most intense friendship at Rivers was with a boy we will call W.A.—selected by Lowell, no doubt, because he was “a little less everything than I was,—less strong, less unpopular, less a C-minus student, less a child of fortune, less his mother’s son.” For an exciting period, the two were inseparable, comrades in
delinquency
and “bound
closer
than
life
,
closer
than
breath
,
we used to say.” They bullied and shoplifted together, terrorized the school bus, stole smaller boys’ marbles and made themselves ever more dashingly disliked. W.A. was perhaps the first of the poet’s disciples, and—as with others he recruited in later years—Lowell believed himself to be far more than just a master to his slave. At night now, when he had finished sifting the day’s martial glories, Lowell would murmur to himself, “Every day, in every way, I am becoming a better and better friend to W.A.” What W.A. thought remains (perhaps happily) unknown.

*

Although Lowell accepted the inevitability of his transfer to St. Mark’s, he was unable to go there without putting up a decent fight. As the time approached, he would devise ever more ingenious debater’s points to counter his mother’s plea that St. Mark’s was a “gift,” a “sacrifice,” as well as a revered family tradition (Lowell’s great-grandfather, Robert Traill Spence Lowell I, had been
headmaster
there, and his father was a former student). For example, if Charlotte refused to buy him new fishing tackle, he would argue that she ought not to spend two thousand dollars a year on St. Mark’s if it meant that he had to be denied the things he really wanted: “You ask me to thank you for giving me what I hate.” “Why wear Sunday clothes seven days a week? Why want to be better than everyone else if you aren’t? Why must I owe my parents two thousand dollars when my allowance is twenty-five cents a week?” And finally, when none of these strong arguments could make its mark, he would simply plead, “Mother, wouldn’t it be fun to fish twelve months a year?”

These wrangles were a kind of love-play—“Mother and I loved knocking our heads together until they bled. We couldn’t do
without
it for a day.” And it was from these early jousts that Lowell had his first taste of rhetoric, of argument pursued for the sake of wit and wordplay rather than for any just or true solution. He relished his mother’s “wonderfully detailed and good-humoured
exaggerations
” and strove hard to match her in comic outrageousness. A subject like St. Mark’s was in fact far too “real-life” for them to indulge the full range of their talents—and, in any case, each of them knew that the outcome was unshakably decided. But the teasing had to be kept up. It was a vital, if complicated, bond—and for Lowell an early training that was to have ambiguous rewards.

St. Mark’s itself was not the wittiest of institutions, and still made much of its high-minded origins, its similarity to the British public school, and its annual football match with Groton. In theory, it molded the young spirit to an Episcopalian design; in practice, it provided Boston with an annual supply of clean-limbed bankers, lawyers and junior executives. Founded in 1865, it was an efficient, solemnly benign academy; its buildings were modeled on the
cloisters
and quadrangles of an Oxford or Cambridge college, its
aimed-for
style was effortless, agreeable superiority.

The original devout conception of St. Mark’s was still in
evidence
, though not overemphatically. The headmaster, for example, was permitted to be a layman, but

Lowell had his doubts about the “family” atmosphere when, as a new boy at St. Mark’s, he was introduced to the pettily sadistic rituals of Bloody Monday and Sanguinary Saturday. On these days of “initiation” the prefects would set the new boys silly tests or send them on complicated errands; the punishment for a less than perfect performance was to be thrashed with a paddle or a piece of kindling wood. In October 1930 (after over thirty years’ rule by William Greenough Thayer) St. Mark’s had acquired a new headmaster. A
cautiously liberal historian from Harvard, Francis Parkman was to phase out some of the school’s more barbaric customs, but for most of Lowell’s stay there the British-style monitor system remained intact: big boys beating small boys, with old men watching fondly from the wings.

Lowell’s own bloodthirstiness was maturing with the years. His hobby was collecting toy soldiers; his favorite reading was military history, or, more accurately, the history of solo, high-rank brilliance: he showed little interest in, say, the trench stalemate of World War One—unlike his contemporaries in Britain, his childhood had not been saturated with eyewitness horror stories or marked by the deaths in war of uncles, cousins, family friends.

Aside from history, Lowell was a below-average student. It was only in his last two years at St. Mark’s (1933–35) that he began to see himself as distinctively an “intellectual.” At the end of his first year, for example, he was fifth from the bottom of his class, and his letters at this time are appallingly misspelled, with each block capital carved out as if it had cost, him an excruciating effort (this childlike “printing,” and a good deal of the bad spelling, were to stay with him for the rest of his life—and a number of his friends vaguely thought of him as “dyslexic”).

As at Rivers, Lowell joined forces with the second most
unpopular
boy in the class: Smelly Ben Pitman or “a boy called Everett from Colorado.” He and Everett had to room together “because nobody else would room with them,” and “they did nothing but fight, from the beginning of the day to the end.” In football games, Lowell always contrived to be at the bottom of every scrimmage: “as if he were defying,” the coach remembered, “the combined might of both teams to crush him under.” At football, he was given to a bull-like domination of the mid-field, scattering opponents and teammates alike. An ex-St. Marker has recalled: