Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
Robert Lowell: A Biography (43 page)
It was Lowell himself who ensured that the pattern was restored. Not long after Hardwick had returned to Boston, Lowell walked out on Hochman: “He left her. He called up Dr. Bernard and said, ‘I want to go home.’ He came home very low and sad. Just
shattered
.”
39
On June 30 he wrote to T. S. Eliot:
We drive to Maine tomorrow. Our troubles are over and Lizzie and I are together again. The whole business has been very bruising, and it is fierce facing the pain I have caused, and humiliating [to] think that it has all happened before and that control and self-knowledge come so slowly, if at all. I have a very good doctor though and have unravelled many things. Life still has blood in it, and love has come back to our small family.
40
In June 1961 Hardwick and Harriet had left Boston for Castine; Marlborough Street was sold, but the future still seemed shaky. On June 17 Hardwick had written to Lowell:
I am thinking about the winter and trying to see how I can learn to manage it—a very odd, ironical trick of fate that finds me worrying about New York. But I fear my own disintegration there, and I also fear the estrangement in our feelings—something the manifold necessities of life had not brought about until that terrible last winter…. At least I am determined to save myself, somehow, even if I don’t know just how. And it means a lot to me to know that you’ll be where you most want to be, leading the life and with the people you trust the most.
41
When Marlborough Street was being sold, Lowell was at the Beverly Hills Hotel; he had gone to California to take part in a CBS film about Boris Pasternak, who had died the year before. He felt “dull and grieved,” he wrote to Hardwick, that the Boston house had gone: “All that life! It haunted me during the long, whizzing, ten miles a minute jet flight. How I miss you, and how alone I feel here!”
42
From California he returned to New York and stayed there until the furniture arrived from Boston. An anxious letter from Hardwick suggests that for each of them the move still seemed provisional and hazardous:
I hope you won’t become so vexed with the horrors of settling into our new life that you’ll want to flee it. By the way, do you think you would be happy with a little apartment of your own? I don’t see how we could ever afford it and yet several things you said on the way to the airplane haunt me. I really want to make the effort to give you—or allow you—the life that is most healthy for you and am going to make a really superhuman effort to improve as a wife so that your home and daily life won’t make you sick again.
43
As this letter hints, the intention was for Lowell to continue his sessions with Dr. Bernard, even though, his irony restored, Lowell was again treating these as necessary chores. Bernard, he wrote from California,
has decided my dreams are more rewarding than my actuality. This adds great plot, color and imagery to our sessions and seems to remove them to the for me safe and detached world of fiction—my disease in life is something like this.
44
And, on the hotel stationery, he had even jotted down some of his Beverly Hills dreams; dreams almost too healthily Freudian to be believed:
1. Aunt Sarah’s old maid complaining Cal has been rude to her and to Aunt S.
2. Surrounded by a wing or line of people, problem as in a game to meet or manipulate moves.
1.
Images
—a girl’s legs said to have nothing on under her dress. But this merely meant no slip. Not particularly sexy image.
2. A girl in flamingo-red dress, beautiful. California tan and figure.
3. Small cannon, hand-sized, a toy but acquiring the strong hard
materials
and precise mechanism of a real cannon (modern).
45
By July, Lowell was back with his family for the summer in Castine, calm and industrious again. In mid-August, Hardwick wrote that “this has been the best summer of all”:
Bobby goes to the barn [his regular workplace in Castine] at 9:30 with his lunch and writes … until 3:30. He comes back, we play tennis 4 to 6 and then have a bath, make a few dinner preparations, I have a drink; we dine at 7:30 or a quarter to eight. Play music or read and then in bed and asleep by ten. I don’t think of this schedule as exciting reading and only put it in to show what a wonderful peaceful summer it has been.
46
Between July and September, Lowell completed his play,
Benito
Cereno.
It was, he said, “thunderously effective, though thin…. I feel like Randall, playwriting is so easy it’s a crime.”
47
As if to prove this, he had also done two other short plays—both based on short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Lowell wrote to William
Meredith
on September 8:
There are now three, Governor Endicott and the Puritans cutting down the May-pole at Merrymount, Hawthorn’s [
sic
] My Kinsman Major Molineux and Benito. All told, they come to an evening and a hundred and ten or twenty pages. God knows if they are any good, but change is fascinating after short poems. One feels stuck with writing yet every so often, it becomes a wall, impossible to climb and unlikely to crumble. Plays seem an opening, if I can work them. I’ve always wondered why people like Eliot wrote them, but I see there’s a sea of energy inside one that can’t come out in poems and will come out this way.
48
To this letter, Lowell added the postscript: “We’ve really had a wonderfully and much needed summer.” He had been reading
himself
asleep over Dickens and had not had a drink since July: “I feel
pretty used to not drinking now though a little grudging and
unsociable
around six o’clock as I swig my bottle of concentrated Walsh’s [
sic
] grape juice. Our family is as calm as such nervous people can be.”
*
By October 1961 the Lowells were settled at West 67th Street.
Lowell
spent October and November “in an aweful [
sic
] wrestle trying to get my play reworked so it will act,”
49
and also waiting for the reviews of his book
Imitations
, a collection of the sixty or so
translations
he had done since 1958. Lowell called the book a “small
anthology
of European poetry”; it ranged from Homer to Pasternak and “Lowellized” from originals in Greek, French, Italian, German and Russian. The verb “to Lowell” might usefully have been invented for this book; certainly, there was much hesitation about what
exactly
these “translations” should be called. For Lowell, they had simply been a way of moving “into a new air”; there had been nothing programmatic or even methodical about their making. At the outset, certainly, they had been speculative exercises: what would Rilke or Baudelaire be like if they “were writing their poems now and in America”?
50
But by 1961 they had become a book, and they had to be presented with some measure of solemnity. At first, Lowell had thought of following Allen Tate’s suggestion and calling the book
Versions.
T. S. Eliot, however, had written to Lowell in June, with his firm verdict on the title:
I think that the right title for this is Imitations and I don’t agree with Allen if he thinks that Versions would be better. I think also that a subtitle is a mistake: your translations are indeed imitations, and if you use the word translation in the subtitle it will attract all those meticulous little critics who delight in finding what seem to them mis-translations. You will remember all the fuss about Ezra Pound’s
Propertius.
Keep the word translation out of it.
51
Imitations
was published in the United States in November 1961, and although it carried no subtitle, it did have a modest and
challenging
introduction by the author. In this, Lowell admits to
recklessness
with “literal meaning”—he had been more concerned, he said, to “get the tone” of the originals, to make “live English” out
of them. Such a disclaimer might have mollified the “meticulous little critics” Eliot warned against, had Lowell shyly left it there. But, as Ben Bellitt later commented, there is a further paragraph in which “Mr. Lowell … delivers himself up to would-be assassins with the resolute fatalism of Caesar in the Roman Senate.”
52
Lowell writes:
Most poetic translations come to grief and are less enjoyable than modest photographic prose translations, such as George Kay has offered in his
Penguin
Book
of
Italian
Verse.
Strict metrical translators still exist. They seem to live in a pure world untouched by contemporary poetry. Their difficulties are bold and honest, but they are taxidermists, not poets, and their poems are likely to be stuffed birds. A better strategy would seem to be the now fashionable translations into free or irregular verse. Yet this method commonly turns out a sprawl of language, neither faithful nor distinguished, now on stilts, now low, as Dryden would say. It seems self-evident that no professor or amateur poet, or even good poet writing hastily, can by miracle transform himself into a fine metricist. I believe that poetic translation—I would call it an imitation—must be expert and inspired, and needs at least as much technique, luck and rightness of hand as an original poem.
53
Having thus thoroughly failed to “keep the word translation out of it,” Lowell goes on to list some of his many “licenses”: Villon was “somewhat stripped,” Victor Hugo “cut in half,” Mallarmé “
unclotted
,” and so on. In places, he said, he had even added verses of his own or shuffled stanzas from one poem to another: “And so forth! I have dropped lines, moved lines, moved stanzas and altered meter and intent.”
The book version of Lowell’s
Phaedra
—
A
Verse
Translation
of
Racine
’
s
Phèdre
was also published in 1961, and it was equipped with an introduction not dissimilar in tone to that of
Imitations:
“My version is free … I have translated as a poet.” In many reviews it was coupled with
Imitations
as further evidence of Lowell’s cultural imperialism. George Steiner’s careful response in the
Kenyon
Re
view
is perhaps the best summary of the prosecution case:
I submit that
Phaedra
has an unsteady and capricious bearing on the matter of Racine. Far too often it strives against the grain of Racine’s style and against the conventions of feeling on which the miraculous concision of that style depends. … what Lowell has produced is a
variation on the theme of Phaedra, in the manner of Seneca and the Elizabethan classicists. To link this version with Racine implies a certain abeyance of modesty. But modesty is the very essence of translation. The greater the poet, the more loyal should be his servitude to the original; Rilke is servant to Louis Labe, Roy Campbell to Baudelaire. Without modesty translation will traduce; where modesty is constant, it can transfigure.
54
And modesty did turn out to be the theme of the several hostile notices that greeted
Imitations:
Lowell had presumptuously turned Rilke into Lowell, and the result was neither good Lowell nor recognizable Rilke. His howlers were itemized, his overburly
modernizing
was shown to be thuggish, disrespectful: respect for the original was spoken of as if it were something like respect for a parent, or grown-up. At least part of Lowell’s crime was to have treated these great poets as his equals—as his playmates, almost. “I suppose,” wrote Louis Simpson in the
Hudson
Review,
“Imitations
will interest some people as a mirror of Lowell’s mind.”
55
And Thorn Gunn in the
Yale
Review
complained that
Hugo’s suave gestures similarly become spasmodic jerks, Villon takes on the flat clinical sound of the “confessional” poems in
Life
Studies,
and others I am not able to read in the original, Homer and Pasternak for example, all speak with the unmistakable voice of Robert Lowell.
Preserving
the tone of most of these poets is, in fact, the last thing he has done.
56
Gunn also suggests that when Lowell doesn’t make his originals sound like Lowell, as with Baudelaire, he turns them into Allen Ginsberg. A number of reviewers took the following comparison as a crushing indictment of the Lowell method:
| | BAUDELAIRE : | Ainsi qu’un débauché pauvre qui baise et mange | |
| | | Le sein martyrisé d’une antique catin, | |
| | | Nous volons au passage un plaisir clandestin | |
| | | Que nous pressons bien fort comme une vielle orange. | |
| | LOWELL : | Like the poor lush who cannot satisfy, | |
| | | we try to force our sex with counterfeits, | |
| | | die drooling on the deliquescent tits, | |
| | | mouthing the rotten orange we suck dry. 57 |
In fact, the critics might more damagingly have quoted the limp translatorese that crops up throughout
Imitations:
the stale
archaisms
, the mechanical poeticizing—lines and stanzas, that is to say, that Lowell would never have wished to call his own:
Lively boy,
the only age you are alive
is like this day of joy,
a clear and breathless Saturday
that heralds life’s holiday.
Rejoice, my child,
this is the untroubled instant.
Why should I undeceive you?
Let it not grieve you,
if the following day is slow to arrive.
58