Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
Robert Lowell: A Biography (29 page)
They clearly have the exquisite idea that the only thing wrong with mental patients is that they haven’t enough comfort, service and good hotel management. In our case they were right, because we giggled all day long like a coal miner at the Ritz, in our connecting beautiful rooms, collapsed with sensuality in the deep baths and gasped at the four meals a day. All this for both of us at $15 a day. The horrid Munich cost that much for Cal alone.
18
On September 15 Lowell wrote to the Macauleys:
This is how the world looks when a man subsides—i.e. like home. We’re even staying in a house that might have been designed by my
grandfather
. We’re snugly resting together and doing Sunday crossword puzzles in preparation for Venice, to which we go in two days. Please forgive me for being such a vehement bore all summer. Teaching’s strong medicine for the idle….
19
Later, Lowell was to describe the Salzburg episode to his mother: “Due to Elizabeth’s alertness, the attack never went much beyond a state of nervous excitement,” it was “a very mild repetition of
the trouble that reached its climax before in Chicago and Bald Pate [
sic
]”:
in a period of twenty days I went through the three stages of
exuberance
, confusion and depression, and can now safely say it’s all
definitely
over, without any likelihood of relapse or return…. I write all this to ease your mind, and perhaps a little out of pride so that you will appreciate my dear and intelligent Elizabeth. P.S. I’m not anxious to build up a reputation for poetic instability, so please reassure the
Parkers
.
20
This was written on October 19; by then Lowell and Hardwick had moved on to Rome. After Kreuzlingen, they traveled with Allen Tate and Stephen Spender to Venice, where there was to be yet another “conference on the artist in the modern world” (this one organized by UNESCO). Lowell wisely kept to the sidelines of this portentous rally, but stayed on in Venice for three weeks—indeed, “did every stone of it”
21
—and then visited Padua, Verona and
Torcello
before settling into the “tremendous, quiet, slow
tremendousness
of Rome”
22
for the remainder of the winter; as Hardwick wrote:
Now we are in Rome. Since I sent the postcard we have moved round the corner to the Pensione California. We have two rooms and plan to stay all winter, not looking for an apt. Actually, at least for this period of our lives, we have suddenly found by accident exactly what we want—two rooms in a pensione. It’s just what we need, no household, no puttering about all day, and real privacy for working. Since we’ve been married Cal and I have spent 6 months of every year in a miserable furnished room together while travelling. The other six months were spent furnishing and managing a new apt. and then dismantling it. So far we are thrilled as babies with our new arrangements, and we are both working.
23
Lowell was working on a poem for George Santayana, who had died earlier in the year, and in letters about his own work he
continually
talks of “going into new country,” of not repeating his “old tricks.”
24
In November he wrote to Allen Tate, “I’m full of stuff I had no notion of saying before,”
25
and a month later to Peter Taylor:
I haven’t been writing at all until the last two months…. It’s hell finding a new style or rather finding that your old style won’t say any of the things that you want to, and that you can’t write it if you try, and yet the petrified flotsam bits of it are always bobbing up where you don’t want them.
26
Lowell could now see Rome as a recuperative interlude; after two months there he began to compare its attractions with those of “the Maine countryside,” a comparison farfetched enough to suggest that the city’s fascination was very nearly spent. He began to talk more determinedly about getting back to work, of the need for “solitude and sweat.”
27
Salzburg was now in the past, and—in any case—it had been only a mild attack. There was no longer any need to hide or to apologize; nor did he need to “take in” any more of Europe. The requirement now was to consolidate, to do something with whatever it was that he had learned from his two years of exile. By December his letters had become busier and wittier. He had been offered a job at Iowa as “resident lecturer in creative writing,” and although the original intention had been to stay on in Rome until the summer, Lowell now felt:
We’re getting much too poor to be proud, which is no fun and beyond the help of loans. It isn’t just money, though, it’s also a feeling of deracinated idleness, or rather a vision of such feelings increasing in the future—like lying in bed an extra two hours some half hungover
morning,
and delighting in the first hour and brooding greasily through the second and calling it pleasure or “life” as Cousin Ghormley would say.
28
He accepted the Iowa job—which would be February through May—and also wrote to Ransom offering his services for the 1953 School of Letters (to be held that year at Bloomington):
I’d like to give a course called something like
Couplet,
Blank
Verse
and
Lyric.
It would be an unchronological survey of English poetry, in which I’d use the fixed metrical patterns as a jumping-off point for various comparisons of craft and content, and to show what tricks and limitations each poet has to work with.
29
Lowell had completed versions of two poems while in Rome—“Epitaph of a Fallen Poet” (later to become “Words for Hart Crane”)
30
and “Santayana’s Farewell to His Nurses” (later “For
George Santayana, 1863–1952”),
31
and even in their earliest forms they showed that the “new country” Lowell was contemplating for his work was to involve some sort of quarrel with the regular iambic line. The School of Letters lectures would, he clearly thought, be part of this same exploration.
In fact, he completed one other work during this period, and this was in traditional meter. Lowell quotes it in a letter to Tate about Eisenhower’s November 1952 election victory:
32
Ike is a sort of symbol to me of America’s unintelligent side—all fitness, muscles, smiles and banality. And Stevenson was so terribly better than one had a right to expect. We too feel too hurt to laugh. However, it’s made me break into song. How’s this to the tune of Yankee Doodle:
Came to Boston, gave his speal [
sic
]
Smart as a buck pheasant:
All those teeth inside his smile—
My god they’re incandescent!
His face is on your TV screen,
Got up with pancake powder,
When he’s scraped the barrel clean,
You’ll see him swim in chowder.
See me like an octopus,
A-hugging up Bill Jenner,
I’d like to bust the bugger’s puss
But Mamie loves a winner.
My ghosts have told me something new
I’m marching to Korea;
I cannot tell you what I’ll do
Crusading’s the idea
Yankee Doodle keep it up etc.
In January 1953 Lowell and Hardwick traveled back to the United States—in a ship carrying five hundred seasick immigrants to
Canada
—and on arrival in New York made straight for the Plaza bar: “we got a bill for $9 before we had barely eaten a potato chip and at that moment we knew we were at home.”
33
From New York, they paid a short visit to Boston before journeying to Iowa. “I think
I really needed Europe to see how beautiful New England is,” wrote Lowell;
34
and Hardwick was similarly re-beguiled. Boston was, she wrote, “enchanting, a really lovely city.”
At any rate, it seemed so for three days, until they were reminded what living there would actually be like—until, that is, “the horrid reality of Mrs. L. battered and crushed us and we got on the train to Iowa in tears.”
35
Lowell, Hardwick wrote, would gladly settle in Boston “for life”
if it weren’t for Mrs. Lowell. She is impossible, though; the detail of that judgement is infinite, but what it amounts to in the end is that in her presence all the joy goes out of existence…. there is not even a little corner left which you can fill up with affection or humor or respect or pleasure.
36
At Iowa they moved into a comfortable three-room apartment and proceeded “frantically” to catch up on two years’ worth of books and periodicals. Lowell’s teaching duties were not strenuous—he had twenty-three poets in his charge and they would bring him their “life-works” two days a week, and he also undertook a course on French poetry: “a subject in which I have to acquire and give out knowledge almost simultaneously.”
37
Visits from Tate and Peter Taylor enlivened the routine, but altogether, Lowell wrote in March, “life in Iowa is a pretty dormant, day to day thing.”
He seems not to have been writing much. He was reworking the poems he had begun in Rome, and had completed “three or four highly-wrought short poems”—probably including “A Mad Negro Soldier” and “The Banker’s Daughter” (he had, by February 1953, already published his first version of “Words for Hart Crane” and a poem for Ike’s “Inauguration Day,” and his Santayana poem came out in the Spring 1953 issue of
Perspectives
USA
). In March 1953 he wrote to Peter Taylor:
I’m at work on a long monologue. It’s against my beliefs though. In this age of mounting populations in print nothing should go over 25 lines. What does War and Peace have that isn’t more pregnantly said in a one-line Japanese—what shall I call it? “Westerly the blossoms of the apricot crumble against the shadow of the bamboo fishing pool.” That’s the way one of my poets writes.
38
In April 1953 Lowell was offered the Chair of Poetry at the
University
of Cincinnati, an appointment that would run from January through June 1954. He was tempted but a trifle daunted; the job, he thought, would demand “written, publishable lectures, in fact a critical book. The prospect makes me feel squint-eyed, home-made and illiterate.”
39
But the money was good, and since their brief visit to Boston in January Lowell and Hardwick had been spending a lot of time talking about money. In spite of Mrs. Lowell, they had decided that New England, if not Boston itself, was where they would eventually wish to settle. They had also decided that they were weary of apartment living. In April, Lowell was writing to his cousin Harriet in Washington that he and Hardwick hoped to buy a house “somewhere in New England.”
40
The prospect of the
Cincinnati
job would make it possible for Lowell to borrow against his trust fund, and Iowa would always be prepared to have him for one term a year:
I feel increasingly that Boston itself—the living twentieth century Boston at least as much as the old colonial Boston—is what I was born in and that only a sort of blind (O and I think necessary
rebellion
made me turn from it. That is I think I am now adult enough to be fairly conventional if not “proper” outwardly, and not shock (or be shocked by) people. One doesn’t want to change too much though.
41
Lowell accepted the Cincinnati job, spent the summer teaching at the School of Letters at Bloomington, and from there (feeling “seedy and subdued”
42
) he and Hardwick traveled to Gambier to spend August with the Taylors, Ransoms and Macauleys.
Throughout
, though, they had been searching and then negotiating for their New England home, and by September they had bought it: a house in Duxbury, Massachusetts, near Plymouth and an agreeable forty miles from Boston:
It’s a section heavy with Pilgrim history and monuments and
immortalized
by Longfellow; but charming, with a three mile beach…. the house was built in 1740 and has a 1950 oil furnace.
43
It also had three acres of land, and Lowell looked forward to being “Mr. Lowell of Duxbury.” Roof repairs were needed, though, and
the house would not be ready for living in until the spring of 1954; but even Charlotte Lowell considered it had “possibilities” (
although
, according to Hardwick, “she seems in doubt that we, two middle-aged
infants
,
will realize them”
44
).
*
Charlotte herself had spent a restless, irritable year in Boston, and had decided to go on a winter holiday in Europe. She had taken Italian lessons during the summer, and had rejected Merrill Moore’s offer of a full-time job. Moore was concerned about her and, in July, had written an odd letter to Elizabeth Hardwick, suggesting that he and Charlotte might collaborate in writing “a book about Bobby, titled background of a poet, dealing with his early life up to the day he left Boston to go south and meet Ransom. This would cover the Boston period, St. Mark’s and the fling at Harvard.” Moore seemed to think that such a task would be good therapy for Charlotte, but when he proposed it to her he was given “a brush off”:
What worries me about Mrs. Lowell is that she is going off alone and really with no goal. She is studying Italian and is having a good time this summer, but I think it is tragic when women who are intelligent reach her age and are what I call disorganized. That is to say they slip; they spend a good deal of time in petty intrigue; they think mainly about themselves and on the whole, I can’t think of it as a truly satisfactory life….
… I still wish she could be encouraged to collect or try to get together material for such a biographical sketch.
Such a book was done was done [
sic
]
about Rimbaud. I have a copy of it. Another was done about D. H. Lawrence recently. I think Bobby’s life is as interesting (to me it is more so) as either of these men, so I wonder if you would explain it to Bobby and ask him what he thinks.
45