Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
Pardon this spate of letters, but for the moment you speak my language, and there’s no telling how long that may continue. Yes, in spite of your Idaho humor, which is hardly the Tuscan of Ovid. Not reading Vergil is your furneral [
sic
],
not his or mine. Imagine you thinking poor Mr. Dryden’s translation had anything to
do
with the original! Sometimes I think you were born in Sioux City instead of Venezia.
Iambics—yes, you are partly right; but a man must sweat with his meters, if he is ever going to be a fabbro, and not just a prophet. Thirty-seven years has been too long for me. You’ve got a point, but I knew that in my cradle—you must have told me.
I can push my own Jambics [
sic
]
where I want to—you can scratch your own back with your own. i.e. jambics.
Here’s a new poem—no iambics—see what your cigar-store wooden Indian solid Kansas humor can do with it. Every syllable is meant to be there.
Con amore
Cal
Also, perhaps with this same letter, he enclosed “Adolf Hitler von Linz (Siegfried)”—it seems possible that
this
was the text of
Lowell’s
so-called Hitler lecture. In fact, in the diary notes of Van Meter Ames, a philosopher at the university, there is complaining about the way Lowell had said of his “last poem” that “no one could follow [it] without coaching—lines from different parts of Juvenal, Dante, some of Hitler’s German and some of Lowell’s make-up German.” The poem is a mischievous parody of Pound, and
although
too fidgety to make much continuous sense, it is quite clearly
not
a celebration of the Nazi “dumkopf.” It reads as follows:
Hitler Adolfus? Shall I weigh him?
Expende
Hannibalem:
quot
libros
in
Duce
summo
Invenies?
Crepat
ingens
Sejanus.
The lungs of Luther burn. You might say
He laid his cards on the table face-up, and called the hands.
Short suits, short suits: a ten year Marathon talker
For ten years talking the State on his talking tongue
To plum-pudding. For what?
For six million Jews?
The salt of the earth has burned like flax
To dirt in the craw of the lime-pits of Auschwitz
Ach,
das
schreklichsten
UnMench
in
diesem
unmenchlicher
Welt!
Vielleicht.
Vielleicht?
Das
schrecklichsten!
He was. You were.
Du!
Du!
Believing in Germany
Enough to break the Prussian spine.
Or the stiff neck of Europe?
Chiropractor, I went to jail
In
my
own
country
to save those German cities
You smashed like racks of clay pigeons,
Gyring through colored glass balls on Christmas trees
And Manchesters of Chicago Gothic—broken windows!
And my gorge stuck in my bowells [
sic
]
When they sent me down the Hudson, through neat Connecticut,
Through an alchemist’s autumn, and hand-cuffed to two two-bit
Porto Ricans for Danbury, for my place of correction.
You nothing, whom we might have called Lucifer,
If only you’d lasted
un
poco
—
una
cosa
picciola,
animula
blandula,
believing in Italy,
Like no other German; no, not the Duce
Dragged for four hours by his bootstraps
Down the Uffizi
a
Firenze
By a thick Linz dumkopf cracked on the paint of Florence,
By a Barbarus Induperator, a German tourist,
Federigo Secondo, Manfredi, Winkelman,
By Freud!
Six million … Ma basta, un poco …
May the bastard rest in peace,
May the burn-out dust rest.
22
On April 8, Lowell was committed to the Jewish Hospital in Cincinnati on a 24-hour warrant, and Hardwick had to go through the further ordeal of a court hearing before the committal was confirmed. Giovanna was contacted by Blair Clark and persuaded to await developments. Clark cabled Hardwick:
GIOVANNA IN NICE
EXPECTING CAL HOTEL LUXEMBOURG STOP SHE KNOWS HE SICK FROM
MAD CABLES AND RETURNS ITALY TOMORROW
.
23
The Jewish Hospital’s first diagnosis was “hypomania,” and it was explained to Hardwick that this latest episode was different in character from the “acute mania” of earlier attacks. In hypomania
the patient has a lot of control, a lot of ability to function, while being at the same [time] extremely unwise, deranged. Dr. Piker says that he always tells his students that such a state is the most difficult one in psychiatry—usually even the family thinks the patient is all right and friends nearly always resent any restraint being put upon a man who has so much of his powers left.
24
After a few days of sedative and warm-bath treatment, Lowell was put on a course of electric shock therapy, and for a month his condition fluctuated: frivolity alternating with reproach, and
Giovanna
still a constant (though increasingly more abstract) obsession. Hardwick wrote:
You see he doesn’t really know her—a curious state—and so he cannot know whether he prefers Giovanna to me! How disarming this wild situation is. Today, much better but still “gay” Cal said, “I’m just crazy about you, but I’ve got to get to Europe as soon as possible to see what Giovanna’s really like. How can I say until I know!”
25
Giovanna, it should be said, was in a somewhat similar position. As she wrote to Blair Clark:
Cal’s love for me is more phissical [
sic
]
than anything else (actually we talked very little, also because it is very hard for me to understand his English …) so I know that he cannot change idea, at least untill [
sic
] this love will be less platonic.
26
For Hardwick the Cincinnati breakdown was even more painful than the episodes that had centered on Chicago and then Salzburg. The Chicago breakdown had not involved hostility to her, and the Salzburg episode had been kept relatively quiet. This latest eruption was a grotesque public judgment of her marriage. At the beginning of April she had written a moving letter to Blair Clark:
I grow more doubtful every day. I am shocked and repelled by what Cal has done to me this time. It is true he doesn’t seem to realize emotionally any of the real nature of his conduct; even, to mention the least, the unnecessary ungentlemanliness of it, the quite gratuitous bad manners. That is the superficial conduct, the rudeness, the meanness, the stinginess—and on a deeper level he has been of course
indescribably
cruel. I simply cannot face a life of this. I suppose I will sound self-righteous but no one has the slightest idea of what I’ve been through with Cal. In 4½ years, counting this present break-up, he has had four collapses! Three manic, and one depression. These things take time to come and long after he is out of the hospital there is a period which can only be called “nursing.” The long, difficult pull back—which does not show always to others. I knew the possibility of this when I married him, and I have always felt that the joy of his “normal” periods, the lovely time we had, all I’ve learned from him, the immeasurable things I’ve derived from our marriage made up for the bad periods. I consider it all a gain of the most precious kind. But he has torn down this time everything we’ve built up—he has
completely
exposed to the world all of our sorrows which should be kept secret; how difficult these break-ups are for both of us. I’ve put on a show to some extent. But he has opened the curtain and let everyone look in. Now everyone knows that Cal goes off, says anything
degrading
he pleases about me, then comes to and I’m to nurse him back to some sort of sanity. There is nothing petty in my resentment of this—things like that cannot be pushed aside by a person of any pride.
27
At the end of April 1954 Lowell’s Cincinnati doctor—Philip Piker—wrote to Merrill Moore advising that Lowell seemed well enough to be moved to a hospital more suited to “convalescent purposes” (and also one that was rather less expensive).
28
Hardwick
approached
Payne Whitney, and although they were reluctant to treat patients who had not “kept up after their last treatment,” they eventually took Lowell back for “extensive psychotherapy.”
29
At the beginning of June—after a relatively calm and lucid interval—there was a new surge of “elation,” of hostility to Hardwick, and a resurrection of the “Giovanna theme.”
30
By mid-June there was a complete relapse:
Poor Cal—I feel nearly reduced to prayer at this point. Blair, isn’t it terrible, this poor creature has acute mania again! I can hardly bear it for him. He’s now cut off from all visitors, letters, calls—on the most
severly [
sic
]
ill floor. I shudder to think how long it may be before he comes within reach again.
31
When Hardwick wrote this letter to Blair Clark (on June 15), Lowell had been cut off from visitors for ten days; and the diagnosis was now leaning towards “acute schizophrenia”: “This is not
necessarily
more serious … but it is very serious and while they expect Cal to pull out of this attack they don’t expect the permanent relief that one gets in less serious cases.”
32
In place of shock treatment, the Payne Whitney doctors were now trying “a new drug”—
chlorpromazine
, or (by its trade name) Thorazine.
As he relapsed, Lowell began writing again to Giovanna
Madonia
, who, according to Hardwick, now had for him the same function that the Catholic Church had served in earlier attacks. Lowell literally wanted to “join” Giovanna—and it was when he threatened to sign himself out of Payne Whitney in order to make tracks for Europe that the hospital had consigned him to one of their “acute” wards. As for Madonia, she knew by this time that Lowell was in a hospital, but she assumed that he had suffered a “nervous breakdown” in response to the stress of his separation from Hardwick. She too was under stress, she wrote, for similar reasons (her husband was refusing an annulment), she too was sick. As she saw it, both she and Lowell were struggling against a common foe; they had to make sure that they became “well and stable…. Before taking decisions we have all to be well—I am not dreaming. I want to spend my life with Cal, that’s all.”
33
On June 26 Madonia cabled Lowell: “I am serene and I am waiting,” and on the same day wrote a letter saying that she would not travel to the United States until Lowell was completely “cured.”
Lowell spent nearly three weeks in the locked ward at Payne Whitney. As with other hospitals he was admitted to, it has not been possible to consult his medical records. In this instance, though, Lowell set down his own—nonmedical—account of the “events” of June and July 1954. It is his most extensive and most richly detailed attempt to recapture the “tone and feel” of a psychotic episode:
When Mother died, I began to feel tireless, madly sanguine, menaced, and menacing. I entered the Payne-Whitney Clinic for “all those afflicted in mind.” One night I sat in the mixed lounge, and enjoyed the
new calm which I had been acquiring with much cunning during the few days since my entrance. I remember coining and pondering for several minutes such phrases as the Art of Detachment, Off-handed Involvement, and Urbanity: a Key to the Tactics of Self-control. But the old menacing hilarity was growing in me. I saw Anna and her nurse walk into our lounge. Anna, a patient from a floor for more extreme cases, was visiting our floor for the evening. I knew that the evening would soon be over, that the visitor would probably not return to us, and that I had but a short time to make my impression on her. Anna towered over the piano, and thundered snatches of Mozart sonatas, which she half-remembered and murdered. Her figure, a Russian
ballerina’s
or Anna Karenina’s, was emphasized, and
illuminated
,
as it were, by an embroidered, middle-European blouse that fitted her with the creaseless, burnished, curved tightness of a medieval breast-plate. I throbbed to the music and the musician. I began to talk aimlessly and loudly to the room at large. I discussed the solution to a problem that had been bothering me about the unmanly smallness of the suits of armor that I had seen “tilting” at the Metropolitan Museum. “Don’t you see?” I said, and pointed to Anna, “the armor was made for
Amazons!”
But no one took up my lead. I began to extol my tone-deafness; it was, I insisted, a providential flaw, an auditory fish-weir that screened out irrelevant sonority. I made defiant adulatory remarks on Anna’s touch. Nobody paid any attention to me. Roger, an Oberlin undergraduate and fellow patient, sat beside Anna on the piano-bench. He was small. His dark hair matched his black flannel Brooks Brothers’ suit; his blue-black eyes matched his blue-black necktie. He wore a light cashmere sweater that had been knitted for him by his mother, and his yellow woolen socks had been imported from the Shetlands. Roger talked to Anna with a persuasive shyness. Occasionally, he would stand up and play little beginners’ pieces for her. He explained that these pieces were taken from an exercise book composed by Bela Bartok in protest against the usual, unintelligibly tasteless examples used by teachers. Anna giggled with incredulous admiration as Roger insisted that the clinic’s music
instructor
could easily teach her to read more skilfully. Suddenly, I felt
compelled
to make a derisive joke, and I announced crypticly [
sic
]
and untruely [
sic
]
that Rubinstein had declared the eye was of course the source of all evil for a virtuoso. “If the eye offends thee, pluck it out.” No one understood my humor. I grew red and confused. The air in the room began to tighten around me. I felt as if I were squatting on the bottom of a huge laboratory bottle and trying to push out the black rubber stopper before I stiffled [
sic
]
.
Suddenly, I knew [corrected in E.H.’s hand to “felt”] I could clear the air by taking hold of Roger’s ankles and pulling him off his chair. By some criss-cross of logic, I
reasoned that my cruel boorishness would be an act of self sacrifice. I would be bowing out of the picture, and throwing Roger into the arms of Anna. Without warning, but without lowering my eyes from Anna’s splendid breast-plate-blouse, I seized Roger’s yellow ankles. I pulled; Roger sat on the floor with tears in his eyes. A sigh of surprised repulsion went round the room. I assumed a hurt, fatherly expression, but all at once I felt eased and sympathetic with everyone.
When the head nurse came gliding into the lounge, I pretended that I was a white-gloved policeman who was directing traffic. I held up my open hands, and said, “No roughage, Madam; just innocent
merriment
!” Roger was getting to his feet; I made a stop-signal in his
direction
. In a purring, pompous James Michael Curley voice, I said, “Later, he will thank me.” The head-nurse, looking bored and tolerant, led me away to watch the Liberace program in the men’s television parlor. I was left unpunished. But next morning, while I was weighing-in and “
purifying
” myself in the cold shower, I sang
Rex tremendae majestatis
qui salvandos salvas gratis
at the top of my lungs and to a melody of my own devising. Like the cat-bird, who will sometimes “interrupt its sweetest song by a perfect imitation of some harsh cry such as that of the Great Crested Flycatcher, the squawl of a hen, the cry of a lost chicken, or the spitting of a cat” I blended the lonely tenor of some fourteenth century Flemish monk to bars of Yankee Doodle, and the
Mmm
Mmm
of the padlocked Papagano [
sic
]
.
I was then transferred to a new floor where the patients were deprived of their belts, pajama-cords and shoe-strings. We were not allowed to carry matches, and had to request the attendants to light our cigarettes. For holding up my trowsers [
sic
]
I invented an inefficient, stringless method which I considered picturesque and called
Malayan.
Each morning before breakfast, I lay naked to the waist in my knotted
Malayan
pajamas and received the first of my round-the-clock injections of Chloropromzene [
sic
]
:
left shoulder, right shoulder, right buttock, left buttock. My blood became like melted lead. I could hardly swallow my breakfast, because I so dread the weighted bending down that would be necessary for making my bed. And the rational exigencies of bed-
making
were more upsetting than the physical. I wallowed through
badminton
doubles, as though I were a diver in the full billowings of his equipment on the bottom of the sea. I sat gaping through
Scrabble
games unable to form the simplest word; I had to be prompted by a nurse, and even then couldn’t make any sense of the words the nurse had formed for me. I watched the Giants play the Brooklyn Dodgers on television. … My head ached, and I couldn’t keep count of the balls and strikes for longer than a single flash on the screen. I went back to my bedroom
and wound the window open to its maximum six inches. Below me, patients circled in twos over the bright gray octagonal paving-stones of the courtyard. I let my glasses drop. How freely they glittered through the air for almost a minute! They shattered on the stones. Then
everyone
in the courtyard came crowding and thrusting their heads forward over my glasses, as though I had been scattering corn for pigeons. I felt my languor lift and then descend again. I already seemed to weigh a thousand pounds because of my drug, and now I blundered about nearly blind from myopia. But my nervous system vibrated joyfully, when I felt the cool air brushing directly on my eye-balls. And I was reborn each time I saw my blurred, now unspectacled, now unprofessorial face in the mirror.
34