Robert Lowell: A Biography (4 page)

Two months earlier, Robert T. S. Lowell, Jr., ’35, had celebrated his first verse publication; called “Madonna,” it shows him to be more at ease with God than with his art:

Some years after Lowell left St. Mark’s, Richard Eberhart
composed
a verse play called
The
Crystal
Sepulcher;
1
a strikingly inept work, it featured as its hero a tormented schoolboy poet, for whom Lowell was the model. The “action” of the play involves the anguished hero-figure being examined and pronounced upon by a succession of baffled but well-meaning adults: the parents, the schoolmaster, the school psychiatrist and then a second
professional
psychiatrist. The “facts” the play deals in must be seen as questionable, but there is a value in its general view of the
adolescent
Lowell: for those grown-ups who took an interest in him he was clearly thought to be more than just ordinarily odd or
mixed-up
. The character portrayed by Eberhart is demonic and
possessed
, not really human.

Eberhart’s personal view is (presumably) stated in the advice offered by the schoolmaster:

The college psychiatrist is even less sympathetic; to him the Lowell figure is quite simply “mad,” he “eats toenails,” is “rude, vain, cruel, gloomy” and “talks with bitter cryptic wit”: “Furthermore, I must point out that he is unclean.”

Small wonder that the playwright enlists more specialized
assistance
. The professional psychiatrist is called in and delivers the
following
summary of symptoms to the boy’s mother:

All this fits rather too neatly with the Caliban cartoon of Lowell as half-man, half-beast, but what does seem certain is that before
Lowell
left St. Mark’s, his mother had had consultations with a Boston psychiatrist called Merrill Moore and that Moore had talked to Eberhart.
The
Crystal
Sepulcher
amalgamates all the prevailing
anxieties
and prejudices and suggests that by 1935 Lowell had indeed become a “case.”

Merrill Moore was thought to be the right man to opine on Lowell because he was himself a poet of some reputation. He had been a fringe member of the Southern “Fugitive” group led by John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate and was famous for writing only—but voluminously—in sonnet form. One of his books was called simply
M
because it contained one thousand sonnets, and a current story was that Moore kept a note pad on the dashboard of his car and could scrawl out fourteen-liners while waiting for the lights to change. At any rate, the sheer bulk of his output was usually
sufficient
to quell any very severe critical objections, and from
Charlotte
’s point of view he offered a perhaps unique combination of medical and literary know-how. She herself had been seeing him about her own “nerves” and had left Moore in little doubt that
her
mental balance depended largely on the balance of her errant son.

The consultations with Moore were all part of Charlotte’s
continuing
campaign to “tidy up” her no longer small Napoleon. Her efforts had intensified as they had become more self-evidently
hopeless
. Both Frank Parker and Blair Clark have memories of her
incessant
, fruitless nagging:

Inevitably, one of Charlotte’s chief obsessions was that—after St. Mark’s—Lowell should take his rightful place at Harvard. Cousin A. Lawrence Lowell was president of the college, and while still at St. Mark’s, Lowell had spent evenings with him rather as he spent evenings with Eberhart. In both cases, the extramural guidance Lowell sought was in the interests of poetry, not of academic
scholarship
, but for Charlotte both mentors seemed reassuringly solid and conventional. Her hope was that Harvard orderliness would
eventually
tame Lowell, and in the fall of 1935 she was relieved to find her son actually enrolled and attending classes. His grades at St. Mark’s had improved during his last year, and on leaving school he had been able to muster enough courtesy to write a “proper”—if slightly ambiguous—letter to his grandfather:

This was written before Lowell’s summer at Nantucket. By the time he actually entered Harvard, his self-educating impulse had
hardened
to a state of near rebellion. And, as always, the rebellion would be all the more enticing if it could be directed at his mother.
Charlotte
believed in Harvard; it was to be expected that Lowell would therefore decide to treat Harvard with contempt. He enrolled in an all-English course, a clear declaration of his intention merely to
use
the university, and, after dabbling in this for a while, simply gave up going to classes.

There were higher matters to attend to. He announced to Frank Parker and Blair Clark that the trio’s energies should henceforth be directed exclusively towards the arts. Parker, he declared, would be a painter; Clark would be a musician—or, failing that, a philosopher. He, Lowell, was the poet. Parker’s obedience was so complete that he left Harvard during his first year in order to devote himself to his new calling:

Blair Clark was less easily swayed; or maybe it was just that Lowell did not press him so hard as he pressed Parker. It is possible that he had already discerned a different role for this competent lieutenant: Clark would provide a link with the world of practical affairs and serve as a buffer between Lowell and the Lowells. As it turned out, Clark spent most of Lowell’s freshman year in California,
recovering
from illness.

*

In May 1936 Lowell was introduced to Anne Tuckerman Dick, a distant cousin of Frank Parker’s. A slightly over-age (at
twenty-four
) ex-debutante, Anne was viewed with suspicion by the
smart-stuffy
Boston set in which her family moved. She was thought to be too vehement and “driven,” not at all a safe marriage bet for any of the grander Boston sons. Sitting out at a ball one evening, Anne had been told by Charles Francis Adams III: “You know, none of
us
would marry you because we’ve heard you’ve been to a
psychiatrist
.”
5
And she had taken this to summarize her plight. By the time she met Lowell, Anne felt herself to be drifting towards a mildly wayward spinsterhood; certainly, she was ready enough to be
intrigued
by the overtures of a nineteen-year-old poet:

In their first meetings, it was almost as if Lowell was weighing Anne up as a possible recruit to his exclusive tribe. Girls had not so far featured in the Lowell curriculum (not even, as with
drunkenness
, under the heading of “Experience”): the fear—as Lowell later described it—was that sex might enervate the group’s elevated
purposes
. But what if Anne was “serious” as well as pretty? At his
second meeting with her, Lowell showed her a poem he had written “about sitting in a rowing boat waiting for a bite,” and she was somewhat scornful of it (indeed, she claimed much later to have found it “the most pathetic, wretched thing”). Afterwards, the poet regretfully reported back to Parker: “She won’t do.” And Anne (on hearing this from Parker) remembers wondering: “Is this some new kind of meatball?” As for Parker, he was not at all dismayed—he had originally thought of Anne as
his
girl.

It seems, however, that Anne was pretty enough to be given one more chance, and serious enough to accept it. An invitation was sent, via Parker, for her to have supper with “the boys.” Lowell had by this time extended his group to include Blair Clark’s brother, Bill, and a promising young Harvard poet, Harry Brown. All five of them were present for supper in a Cambridge restaurant, with Anne the only female guest: the idea was to see how Lowell’s candidate would stand up to a feast of brilliant chat. This time, Anne was willing to be dazzled:

The following weekend Lowell visited Anne at her grandmother’s house at Appleton Farms near Ipswich, and during the course of an early evening walk in the garden he asked her—with much
gravitas
—if he could become one of her “suitors.”

For Lowell, though, this first kiss was of almost ceremonial
significance
; it meant, quite simply, that he had “become thoroughly and firmly engaged, almost married.” He gave Anne his grandfather’s watch to mark their (at this stage) secret pact. And immediately he made a start on her reeducation. With Parker or Clark in tow, he began to pay nightly visits to Anne’s house and would there stage readings of Milton, Donne and Shakespeare—and consume a hearty dinner. “My father hated their guts because they didn’t even say ‘Good evening, Mr. Dick.’ They sat at his table and acted as if he didn’t exist.” But Anne was still in her “gentle dream”:

She resolved to study, because her fiancé wanted her to study, and if being a good fiancée meant nightly readings from
Samson
Ago
nistes
,
then she was happy to put up with it. Lowell had indeed acquired a new, and utterly devout, disciple.

*

For Lowell, Anne’s house was more than just a night school or a place to eat; it was also a sanctuary from his steadily deteriorating relations with his parents. His year at Harvard had not been a success; he was contemptuous of most of the English faculty, he had had poems rejected by the
Harvard
Advocate
,
and he had been patronized by Robert Frost. The
Advocate
rejection was particularly wounding: Lowell was an applicant for a position on the magazine’s literary board, but when he went for an interview “he was asked to tack down a carpet in the sanctum and, when he was finished, told that he needn’t come round anymore.” Frost seems to have been more subtle. Lowell had sought him out (Frost was the Norton Lecturer that year) and asked for his opinion on an epic he was writing on the subject of the Crusades. Frost read a few lines and commented that it “goes on rather a bit,” then recited Collins’s “How sleep the brave,” as a model of conciseness.

Both rebuffs were to be recalled by Lowell in later years and no doubt hurt him at the time. By the end of his first year he was in a mood to reject Harvard rather than give it another chance to reject
him, and most of his quarrels with his parents seem to have centered on his future at the university. Lowell wanted to drop out at the end of his freshman year; Charlotte made it clear that if he did drop out he would have to survive without help from the family: