Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
Robert Lowell: A Biography (23 page)
We were walking on the campus and talking about literary things, but I could see he was mad, the things he was saying, and I suddenly felt that all of our long conversations about literary things, about what we were going to do with our lives, at Kenyon, I felt they were all nonsense. And I felt that I was about to have a crack-up myself, I was so upset. … You see, I didn’t know anything about psychiatry. I thought Cal was lost forever. He had “gone mad.” I really thought that I had lost this friend forever.
36
That same evening, Lowell separated himself from Taylor and set off to “explore” the town, and Taylor took this opportunity to telephone Merrill Moore in Boston and his old Kenyon friend John Thompson in New York; Moore agreed to tell Charlotte, and John
Thompson was ready to help in any way he could. Taylor then contacted the police.
Soon afterwards, there was a report that Lowell had stolen a roll of tickets from a theater box office and had come to blows with a policeman who tried to restrain him. A general alert was then put out to the effect that a disturbed poet called Robert Lowell was on the rampage in downtown Bloomington. As it turned out, the alert fitted neatly into Lowell’s sense of his divine vocation. Robert
Giroux
recalls:
Cal was walking the streets, and after a bit he went and rang a doorbell. And the door was opened by a policeman who was off-duty, in mufti, and he said to Cal, “You must be Robert Lowell.” Cal nearly fainted; he thought this was divine intervention—this stranger knew his name.
37
Among Lowell’s drafts for
Life
Studies
there is a fragment in which he tries to describe how it all seemed to him:
Seven years ago I had an attack of pathological enthusiasm. The night before I was locked up I ran about the streets of Bloomington Indiana crying out against devils and homosexuals. I believed I could stop cars and paralyze their forces by merely standing in the middle of the
highway
with my arms outspread. Each car carried a long rod above its tail-light, and the rods were adorned with diabolic Indian or Voodoo signs. Bloomington stood for Joyce’s hero and Christian regeneration. Indiana stood for the evil, unexorcised, aboriginal Indians. I suspected I was a reincarnation of the Holy Ghost, and had become homicidally hallucinated. To have known the glory, violence and banality of such an experience is corrupting….
38
When Peter Taylor next got word, Lowell was in a straitjacket at the Bloomington police station. “He’d had a terrible fight with a policeman,” Merrill Moore later reported. “He had beaten up the policeman and the policeman had beaten him up, to the advantage of neither of them.”
39
Taylor visited Lowell in his cell and was implored by him to kneel and pray; could Taylor not
smell
the sulfur and the brimstone? Lowell asked. Taylor prayed, and needless to say the prayers were of considerable length; meanwhile the duty officers at the station had been replaced by the night staff, who, when they checked the cells and saw Lowell and Taylor kneeling side by side, assumed that their daytime colleagues had bagged
two
religious
maniacs. Taylor had difficulty persuading them to let him go.
40
He later wrote to Tate: “I suppose I was with him only a few hours, but they were the most truly dreadful hours of my life. It’s still impossible for me to talk about it even to Eleanor.”
41
On April 6 Merrill Moore and Charlotte Lowell arrived, and Taylor helped them to get Lowell to the Chicago airport, where John Thompson was waiting to meet them. Lowell, says
Thompson
, was “foaming at the mouth,” talking nonstop, and seemed likely at any moment to erupt into unmanageable violence:
I remember we got to La Guardia and there wasn’t a plane to Boston for hours. Merrill Moore went away to take a nap and write some sonnets. He didn’t have as much as an aspirin on him. Cal was sitting on the floor at La Guardia. I had to carry him onto the plane to get him to Boston—to a place called Baldpate.
42
At Baldpate, a small private hospital near Georgetown,
Massachusetts
, Lowell was put into a padded cell and, as Moore wrote to Taylor, “continued to be in a somewhat excited and confused state of mind.” Moore’s diagnosis was that Lowell was “having
considerable
conflict between religion and sexuality” and this had led to “a brainstorm which he will in time ride out.”
43
Charlotte seems to have taken a similar approach. She wrote to Taylor thanking him for “Bobby’s clothes, all so nicely washed,” and for behaving “so wisely in a trying situation”:
You’ll be glad to hear that all goes well with Bobby now. He seems to like the hospital and the doctors and he’s eating and sleeping well. The doctors feel that this illness is largely hysterical due to overwork,
overstimulation
, under-eating and sleeping, lack of exercise and physical care, combined with much mental strain and conflict. We expect him to be quite well again in a few months.
44
Lowell was in fact refusing to allow either Merrill Moore or his mother to visit him at Baldpate, and Charlotte eventually had to ask Robert Giroux if he would act as an intermediary. Giroux recalls:
The asylum was really like a prison. I drove out with Mrs. Lowell and Dr. Moore and they waited while I went in, having to pass through a series of locked doors—three or four—before I reached Cal’s cell. The
attendant asked through an eye-level window if he wanted to see me, and Cal said “Yes.” I was shocked to see that the room had no other windows, and the leather walls were indeed padded to prevent
self-injury
.
Cal was terribly pale and drawn, and looked anything but violent. He spoke piteously and very persuasively: “My mother wants to keep me here for the rest of my life. You’ve got to help me.” I might have been convinced if, in an appeal to what he thought were my Catholic
prejudices
, he hadn’t said: “She won’t let me go to mass.” I did not like Mrs. Lowell but I knew this was untrue and said, “Cal, your mother asked me to come to Boston because she’s very upset at your refusal to see her.” And he said, “No, no, I don’t want to talk to her. I don’t want to see her.” Even people locked up in cells have rights, I thought, and went out and told them he was adamant.
45
Meanwhile, in Chicago, Allen Tate had formed the same view of Charlotte’s probable intentions and had written to T. S. Eliot “
expressing
anxiety lest Cal’s mother should try to get him certified and locked up.” Merrill Moore was enraged by this interference and immediately wrote to Tate that Lowell was, and would remain, a voluntary patient at Baldpate, and that Tate was quite wrong in his attitude to Mrs. Lowell: “she is a good mother, deeply interested in her son and fully aware of his talents and capabilities.” Moore also felt that it was “not helpful to Cal’s reputation here or in England to have rumors of this kind circulating about him.”
46
The rumors, though, had by this time already circulated, and invariably Tate was the source: he had told Jean Stafford, and she, he claimed, had spread the word around literary New York; he had also written to Malcolm Cowley, but this he said was because he wanted to protect Lowell against any possible libel suit from Mrs. Ames. Throughout, both Tate and his wife were nervously aware that they might be thought “heartless” in having foisted the sick Lowell on Peter Taylor, and they were anxious to head off any slanders of this sort. Tate’s explanation was that he had not wanted to “engage with” Charlotte Lowell, that Charlotte had blamed him for too many things in the past—Lowell’s marriage, his Catholicism, his conscientious objection, even his poetry—and he wanted no more of it:
… in the very nature of things, we cannot function as his parents. Cal, in his emotional dependence, has caused us more anxiety in the
past twelve years than our own child has caused us in all her
twenty-four
. This has been particularly trying because he feels towards us something of the ambivalence of a child towards his real parents: love and hate, docility and disloyalty, etc. In view of this we had not sought his company since 1943; he had sought us.
47
Charlotte, he said, “should be satisfied now”; and to establish this, Tate resurrected his earlier, pre-breakdown diagnosis of the “Lowell problem”:
Cal gave up Jean, he has given up the Church (the recent reconversion was not real—he merely used the Church for a few weeks to establish his mania in religious terms), and he has given up poetry. I don’t know whether he told you that he left the manuscript of his unfinished poem at Yaddo, in the hands of a virtual stranger. I am told that everything that paranoiacs do is symbolic action, and an objectivization of the delusion. In giving up these three things Cal has given up the three defenses against disintegration: but his mother will feel that he has given up all those wicked influences.
48
At around the same time, Tate was also writing to Elizabeth
Hardwick
, urging her to acknowledge that Lowell “is homicidal, deeply and subtly…. You were in danger as long as you had him with you.”
49
Even so, Hardwick was one of the first to visit Lowell at Baldpate and one of the very few visitors he welcomed.
During May, Lowell’s letters were confused and ecstatic. He wrote to Tate that “I’m in wonderful shape in all ways but the days are long, long, long!!!”;
50
to Jean Stafford, pleading that their Catholic marriage was still valid;
51
and to Randall Jarrell,
instructing
him to reread Paul and the Gospels: “you’ll see that the truth is both with the Jews and the R.C. Church; or so God said.” He also told Jarrell:
I’ve been thinking that you’re perhaps the best poet in America (where are there better poets)—unless I am—I’m poor, helpless and conceited here—so bear (Arms) with me.
I’ve read Vanzetti’s letter to Sacco’s son for the first time. Their case is mine—I’m sure the pro-Russian traitors are secretely [
sic
]
supported by
certain
rich men—those who have sold us (the poor—who’s worse paid than the poet—even carpenters get more and work less) sold us for “a pair of shoes.”
When I get out I’m going to do everything in my power to get the Sacco case re-opened, so that those responsible are imprisoned and
electrocuted
.
Mother of God, old Randible, there’s no
man
I love more than you.
52
Jarrell later described this letter as “
pathetic
.”
53
By the middle of June, Lowell had been given electric shock treatment and seemed well enough for Hardwick to spend two weeks near the hospital (at Frank Parker’s house in Ipswich) and regularly visit him. When she returned to New York, she was wholly reassured and wrote to Lowell: “I feel so happy about you that I’m suspiciously dizzy and in fact it may be true, as the rumor goes much to my chagrin, that I’ve had a nervous breakdown.”
54
He replied, “Gosh, your visit was wonderful and
SANING
.
Hope you can stand me still,”
55
and then five days later wrote (on July 6):
How would you care to be engaged? Like a debutant. WILL YOU?
How happy we’ll be together writing the world’s masterpieces,
swimming
and washing dishes.
P.S. Reading
The
Idiot
again.
56
Hardwick agreed to “be engaged,” and a few days later Lowell was discharged from Baldpate. The announcement of his engagement produced the by now almost ritual letter from his father:
I understand that you and Miss Hardwick plan to get married and live in Boston…. I think that it is much too soon to marry anybody—just after you have been discharged from a mental hospital, after shock treatment.
He had “nothing personal” to say against Elizabeth Hardwick, but:
I do feel that both you and she, should clearly understand, that if she does marry you, that
she
is responsible for you.
If, instead of marrying, you would like to come down here and convalesce here slowly, while working on your Guggenheim, we would, of course, be glad to have you.
At the present time, I do not feel that you are in any position to take care of yourself, let alone look out and provide for a wife, and we cannot approve.
57
Mr. Lowell added that the fees at Baldpate had been deducted from money that Lowell had left with his parents for safekeeping, and that apart from the small income from his trust fund, he now had only $600 of his own. Elizabeth Hardwick had a one-room
apartment
in New York, but otherwise, as she recalls, “he literally had no place to go. He couldn’t go home. And he’d never taught, he’d just written.” Also, soon after leaving Baldpate, Lowell began to slide into a depression: “No one can care for me,” he’d say to Hardwick. “I’ve ruined my life. I’ll always be mad.”
So we got married, in his parents’ house. He wanted to do it, and I wanted to do it. I don’t think it was a very happy occasion for
anybody
else. He had just come out of an illness and here he was taking on something else. One doctor at the hospital said: “He certainly needs someone, but if I were you I wouldn’t do it.” Well, we did….
58
Frank Parker was Lowell’s best man, and his wife, Lesley, a mildly appalled guest:
Cal and Lizzie were staying with us in Ipswich, and also Mary McCarthy and Bowden Broadwater. Lizzie appeared in peacock-blue silk and a hat, and Mary McCarthy gave one look at her and said, “You cannot be married looking like that. No, you are going to wear my Balenciaga.” So Lizzie went off in this very unaccustomed,
perfectly
beautiful black lace hat which belonged to Mary. Frank was best man, and he had, as I realized when we got there and all knelt down, two odd socks, one white and one black. The pastor’s opening remarks were: “Dear friends, we are here for a wedding, not a funeral …”—looking around at everyone’s glum faces.
59