Robert Lowell: A Biography (46 page)

For the next two or three months he was in a state of “dark,
post-manic
and pathological self-abasement.” He was preparing his book
For
the
Union
Dead
for publication and, on May 11, wrote to Randall Jarrell (who had evidently seen the manuscript):

And during this same month, the letters he received tend to suggest that he had been writing to others in a similar, self-lashing way. Stephen Spender wrote to assure him:

And, also in May 1964, there is a touching letter from Jean Stafford, written from New York Hospital:

The final poems in the
Union
Dead
collection had been written by the summer of 1963. They include the terza rima Tate pastiche “The Severed Head” and two stiff, well-meaning pieces about South America. “Buenos Aires” (published in the first issue of the
New
York
Review
of
Books
in February 1963) is a particularly sad example of Lowell hovering uncertainly between private agony and public obligation. There is also the charming “Soft Wood,” a
reflective
, unrushed tour of Castine addressed to his cousin Harriet, who “was more to me than my mother”:

In 1963 (two months before the Kennedy assassination) John
Berryman
had written to Lowell: “Hell of a year, isn’t it? Mr. Frost, Ted [Roethke] and now Louis [MacNeice] whom I loved. Keep well, be good. The devil roams.”
49
With Frost’s death, there was a new pressure on Lowell to step up to the rank of “major poet.” Even before the publication of
For
the
Union
Dead
in the fall of 1964, Irvin Ehrenpreis had expressed what was a fairly widespread expectation: “From a glance at Lowell’s most recent work, coming out in
periodicals
, one can prophesy that this next book will establish his name as that normally thought of for ‘the’ American poet.”
50

And most of the reviews did speak of Lowell in this way. Richard Poirier in the
Herald
Tribune
’s
Bookweek
announced that “Robert Lowell is, by something like a critical consensus, the greatest
American
poet of the mid-century, probably the greatest poet writing in English.”
51
And Stanley Kunitz, perhaps remembering that Eliot and Auden were still living, was only slightly less fullsome in the
New
York
Times;
for him, Lowell was “without doubt the most celebrated poet in English of his generation.”
52
Praise of this sort issued from most sides, and Lowell was not disposed to challenge it: “My book is getting astonishing attention,” he wrote to Allen Tate, “and I suppose I enjoy it all to the limit—a head of uncertainty curdled with vanity.”
53
And when Kunitz asked him
why
he was
so esteemed, his answer was: “It may be that some people have turned to my poems because of the very things that are wrong with me. I mean the difficulty I have with ordinary living, the
impracticability
, the myopia. Seeing less than others can be a great strain.”

This note of faint unease, although it might sound like rehearsed modesty, was genuine. The deaths of near contemporaries like Roethke and MacNeice, and the suicide earlier in that same year of Lowell’s former student Sylvia Plath, might well have made him feel that time shrank as the critics’ expectations soared. Coronations were gratifying, but how do king-poets reign secure? And was there not a dreadful challenge in the conclusion of John Berryman’s “
obituary
” letter: “But why publish verse anyway? It’s all right for you to do, but why the rest of us?”
54

Thus,
Time
magazine on November 27, 1964. The American Place Theatre was founded in 1963 with the aim of persuading “writers of stature”—and, in particular, novelists and poets—to write plays. For its first year or so it had operated in semiprivate, offering its
members
readings and works in progress. With Lowell’s
The
Old
Glory,
though, it was opening its doors; the 180-seat Church of St.
Clement
’s would, it was proclaimed, become “a center of excitement, of talk, of argument, of ferment, of shared enthusiasm, of renewal of purpose.”

This messianic function was not quite what Lowell had had in mind for his trio of short plays, but he doubtless savored the idea of having them performed in church. Of the plays themselves he had always spoken with some modesty. He had, he said, found
playwriting
“so easy—it’s a crime,” and it is a measure both of his standing as “
the
poet” of the day and also perhaps of the enfeebled state of the American theater in the early 1960s that
The
Old
Glory
should have been greeted as a major cultural event: a “cultural-poetic
masterpiece
,” said Robert Brustein.
1
Comparing Lowell’s texts with his
prose originals—Melville’s “Benito Cereno” and Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman Major Molyneux”—it is hard to see now what the fuss was all about. Lowell’s versions seem threadbare and—in an attempt for current political or social “relevance”—are often crudely
underscored
. And to call them “poetic” is charitable, since they are mostly written in an ambling prose; they don’t elevate or intensify the words of the originals—they merely reorganize them. Thus,
Melville
writes:

And Lowell “versifies”:

This is fairly typical of Lowell’s “adaptation” of the Melville text; it is efficient, almost dutiful, but unadventurous. The creation of the character Perkins is forced on Lowell because most of Melville’s “action” goes on inside Delano’s mind. In the same way, Lowell supplies a brother for Robin to share his fears with in
My
Kinsman
Major
Molyneux
. In both Melville and Hawthorne, of course, the central character is utterly alone—a Perkins or a young brother would have drastically reduced the eeriness.

Lowell’s third play—
Endecott
and
the
Red
Cross
—was not
included
in the American Place Theatre’s presentation of
The
Old
Glory
(it was later expanded and offered separately), and as
Jonathan
Miller admitted, this omission “seriously damaged the grand design.”
3
Certainly,
Endecott
is the most subtle and revealing of the three plays; it too draws on prose sources (Hawthorne’s stories “The Maypole at Merry Mount” and “Endecott and the Red Cross” and Thomas Morton’s “New Canaan”), but at the heart of it is Lowell’s own uneasy meditation on the exercise of power. Endecott the ruthless Puritan experiences a spasm of self-doubt; fleetingly, he is sickened by the emptiness of his own rhetoric, his “hollow,
dishonest
speech, half truth, half bombast”:

In the character of Endecott, Lowell hints at his own indecision in these matters: his lifelong fascination with the “merciless efficiency” of historic generals and tyrants could not, he knew, fit with the correct liberalism required by his own epoch. As he tried to explain in an interview:

And these “two sides” of Lowell’s political character are also in evidence in a letter he wrote to Blair Clark in August 1964 about the Republican party convention, at which Barry Goldwater was
nominated
as presidential candidate:

Both “Benito Cereno” and “My Kinsman Major Molyneux” were attractive tales for Lowell because they evoke dilemmas of this kind. In each of them, an innocent representative of the “old order” strays into the aftermath of a successful uprising; neither at first knows or can bring himself to believe that the established rules no longer work. Each story, and each of Lowell’s plays, is thus a process of unmasking: in “Benito Cereno,” it is revealed that the blacks have taken over their own slave ship; in “My Kinsman Major Molyneux,” it transpires that British rule has been usurped in
Boston
. In both plays the rebels are felt to be sinister, malign and even—in
Molyneux
—repellently disfigured; the ousted rulers, though, carry themselves with an exotic dignity even in ruin and humiliation—they are aristocrats, as if aristocracy were a species, not a rank. Lowell’s versions are careful to expose the wrongs of the dislodged oppressor (indeed, adding to Melville, Lowell makes Delano shoot down the leader of the blacks and say, “This is your future”), but they are in no sense dramas of indignation or of revolutionary zeal.

Jonathan Miller began preparing his production of
The
Old
Glory
in the early fall of 1964. He stayed in a small studio upstairs from
the Lowells’ apartment at West 67th Street and was able to have regular, not always fruitful consultations with his author:

As the date for the production neared, Miller found that Lowell was beginning to wind up: “It was all very subliminal. You only very gradually noticed.” He was becoming “tenacious of schemes and ideas”; he would want Miller to sit up “a little bit later at night, and then later and later” and would become “hectic and slightly
impatient
” if he was refused.

Lowell began writing new acts for his plays, insisting on one
memorable
occasion that, at the end of
Endecott,
Sir Walter Raleigh’s wife should come onto the stage carrying her husband’s severed head. “Blood streams from the severed neck,” he said. “I guess that could be done with ribbons.” But when Miller persuaded him that such
lurid treats might not fit too easily with this drama of Puritan self-scrutiny, Lowell would quite happily submit: “He’d just say, ‘I guess not.’ And abandon it. ‘We might do it on opening night as a special.’”
9

The
Old
Glory
opened on November 1, and in spite of some grumbles from the
New
York
Times
critic (he found
Major
Molyneux
“a pretentious arty trifle” and
Benito
Cereno
“labored”), the
production
was a great success, winning five Obie awards for the 1964–65 season, including the award for Best Play. W. D. Snodgrass declared that he had “never been in a more excited and hopeful audience. We may yet have a theater of our own,”
10
and Randall Jarrell wrote a letter to the
Times:

In January 1965
Benito
Cereno
was transferred to the Theatre de Lys in Greenwich Village for a regular off-Broadway run, and by this time Lowell had, in Miller’s words, “gone over”: