Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
Robert Lowell: A Biography (47 page)
Even after
The
Old
Glory
had completed its run at St. Clement’s church, Lowell continued to attend services there—and on one occasion was allowed to preach a sermon. It was at St. Clement’s
that he met the Latvian dancer Vija Vetra. Her program of Indian sacred dances was to be featured in one of Sidney Lanier’s church services; Lanier wished to “bring dance for the first time into his church.” Vetra describes her first meeting with the famous poet:
I arrived early to get everything ready. And Robert also came early. I had never heard of Robert Lowell. I had never even heard of the Lowell family. So I was absolutely ignorant, which was delicious. And he sees me in my Indian costume—very unusual to see something like that in his church, of course. So he comes straight along, stretches out his hand and introduces himself: “I am Robert Lowell.” Thinking I would
crumble
with being so impressed, or squeak with delight. I think he expected that, you know—at least make big eyes. So we talked a bit, but the others wanted to get on with the preparations and they pushed him away. But he came always back and wanted to talk more and more. Then he found out I am born in Latvia and he started putting questions about the Russians and Communism. He was very political also.
13
Lowell invited Vija Vetra to the off-Broadway opening of his play; indeed, invited her to pretheater drinks at West 67th Street:
And I knew I couldn’t disappoint him. So he picked me up and he said, “We’re having a gathering first at my home of some friends and all of us together will go to the theater.” So fine. I had no bad conscience towards his wife because nothing had yet happened that I should be afraid of her spurn. So we went there, and he introduced me to his friends and to his wife, of course, and she greeted me coldly as ice. And I thought, Oh, I should not have come. What he had told her, in his naiveté, I don’t know.…
14
After the performance, Lowell took Vetra backstage to meet the actors, and Hardwick went home. Lowell decided he was going to stay the night with his new friend:
So he took me home, and he said, “I am going to stay here. I’m not going to go home.” And I said, “No, Robert, please don’t complicate things further. Don’t do that to me—and to her.” So he blackmailed me then. “All right, then, would you like me to run under a bus? I have all this sedation. Anything can happen.” He could always take a taxi, of course. But he used it more or less as an excuse. And luckily I did have two couches, in a sort of triangle, so I made a bed for him. And I thought,
if he uses that kind of blackmail, all right, I’ll give in, but next day he’ll go. He stayed there for a week or two. That was Robert.
15
During that “week or two,” Lowell began introducing Vetra as his future wife; he leased an apartment at 16 West 16th Street in their joint names (they signed “Robert and Vija—Mrs. Robert—Lowell”) and began buying furniture. Vetra could see that he was “a bit overexcited … But I have dealt with artists all my life and I didn’t think it was anything special.” And in any case: “He was excited like anybody normally would be in having a prospect, a new beginning.” As for Vetra, she too had become “enthusiastic”:
Of course I got more and more close to him, more and more enmeshed with him, and I can really say that I began to fall in love with him. And I got caught up in his enthusiasm to go further, to solidify it. I felt that having come here, to America, it would be wonderful to have a new life with someone I could really love and cherish. I felt very lonely at that time too.
16
Before Lowell and Vetra could move into their home, Blair Clark intervened. He arranged for Vetra to meet Dr. Bernard:
Bernard told me, surely, don’t I see that he’s in this condition—as if saying that someone could love me only if he’s crazy, or in a depressed mood. Saying wouldn’t it be better if for a while he was separated from me and put into a rest home. But he didn’t want to go.
17
Lowell’s new scheme was that he and Vetra should “go and live in Maine, because he absolutely adored Maine, and Lizzie can stay where she is, and that station car we will take and the other car she can have.” But Clark and Dr. Bernard continued to put pressure on Vetra—in her words, “to do their damnedest to get rid of me.” And in the end,
they rather convinced me that it might after all be best for him, and if it is so, then I thought I’ll give it a try, knowing that I’m risking losing him altogether. I knew that, but I thought maybe by some chance it will work well. So I thought if I could help, maybe I should do it. Because I was the only one whose word he would follow. I knew that and he knew it and everybody else knew it. So I told him what they had told me and we talked it over. And he said, “I really don’t want to go, but
if you think … And of course as soon as I come out we will marry then.”
18
On January 25 Blair Clark accompanied Lowell and Vetra to the Institute for Living in Hartford; he had hired a limousine, and the three of them sat in the back seat: “Blair on one side, Robert in the middle, me on the other, holding hands all the way. Poor thing. He just felt he was sent to the slaughtering house, you know, like a lamb.”
Vetra returned to New York and moved into the West 16th Street apartment, and for two weeks heard nothing: “I thought I would take my life, that’s how down I was.” Lowell was not allowed to make telephone calls, nor—at first—to receive visitors. He wrote daily letters to Vetra, but these were sent to West 67th Street: “They were sending the whole bunch to his wife.”
then one day he rang me: “Now I am allowed to make one call to you. Why don’t you send me letters? Why don’t you answer?” So then we found out that they had all been sent to Lizzie. He was furious and rang her, or wrote to her, and demanded that my letters be sent to me. So one day they arrived, the whole stack at once.
19
For the first ten days of his hospitalization, Lowell continued to be adamant about his new life with Vija Vetra. His letters to her are, in the main, desperate entreaties:
Please don’t change your mind, mine only grows more set in
determination
to marry you.
Dearest Love, Love, Love you wanted letters, but I only want to return to you as soon as possible.
20
But by February 5 he is beginning to have doubts; indeed, some kind of climax seems to have been reached with his anger over the
side-tracking
of his Vetra letters. He writes to Hardwick:
Thanks for the wire. I was really very upset about the letters business. If I am irrational, then I’m full of irrational turbulence. So, that’s over. How do I feel? Really, it’s complicated, and there’ll be a melancholy to any possible decision. Surely, there’s some terrible flaw in my life that blows a bubble into my head every year or so. It mustn’t continue,
though I suppose that’s only partly up to me and partly of [
sic
]
to fate, nature, God and whatever.
21
By February 9 he had made up his mind. He had been reading Elizabeth Hardwick’s edition of
Persuasion:
And now I feel like Sir Walter Elliot, as a [
sic
]
read your many notes, and try to feel important and dignified to hide what a mess I’ve made of my human ties. If you and Harriet want me, I am yours. Vija is coming up here tomorrow, and I ought, I suppose, make no decision till after then. Still I know now for certain that I can’t avoid returning to my two girls, if they’ll have me. I am sorry from my heart for having put us all through the hoops.
22
The following day, Vetra traveled up to Hartford, her first visit there since Lowell had been admitted two weeks earlier:
So I saw him, and he felt as if he had been walked on, so unsure of himself. “Well, I guess it will be best if I went back home.” Like a vegetable. I don’t know what they did. More drugs, of course, maybe even shock treatment, I don’t know. He felt so guilty he had to tell me this, but it had been decided that it would be best to call it off for a while and go back home and see what happens. He was so happy to see me and we had a talk, and before I left, he was wearing this striped shirt, and I said, “Give me a souvenir. Give me the shirt that you are
wearing
.” And he said, “But I have a new one.” “I don’t want that. I want the one you wore.” So he took it off and gave it to me. I still have it.
23
A fortnight later, Vija Vetra received another souvenir in the shape of a letter from Lowell’s attorneys, Migdal Low and Tenny:
In order to terminate any responsibility Mr. Lowell may have with respect to the apartment at 16 W. 16th St, without undue hardship to you or additional expense to him, it is advisable that we meet as soon as possible.
24
At this meeting, Vetra was given two days to vacate the apartment: “Heartless, absolutely heartless. That’s the American way. Very ugly.” She retaliated, Hardwick recalls, by sending Lowell “a lot of
bills with demanding notes. He dropped them on the floor and I picked them up and paid them.”
25
Shortly after his discharge from the hospital, Lowell and Hardwick left for a two-week visit to Egypt, at the invitation of the American University of Cairo. He gave two lectures in Cairo and then they took a short tourist’s trip to Upper Egypt. By the time he returned to New York, Blair Clark had “tidied up … the Vija Vetra problem.”
26
*
“When your private experience converges on the nation’s
experience
you feel you have to do something.”
27
Lowell had already “done something,” in response to the nuclear threat, in a handful of poems in
For
the
Union
Dead,
but it was not until 1965 that he began to present himself as an authoritative public figure, someone whose prose voice would carry weight in matters of political debate. As Blair Clark remembers it, Lowell’s concern about American activity in Vietnam began to show itself in the spring of 1965:
The first time I realized that there was going to be a big revulsion against Vietnam was ’65, when I had an argument with Cal. Spring of 1965, when we were already slightly involved. I say “slightly”—we had about 75,000 to 100,000 troops there. But Cal was already outraged by it, and I—a much more “political” person than Cal—I pooh-poohed it, and said to Cal I didn’t think Johnson would get caught in that trap. Of course, he was right.
28
American bombing raids on Communist targets in Vietnam had begun in February 1965, and during March Johnson stepped up the dispatch of combat troops. In April and May the first antiwar demonstrations were held, both in Washington and in colleges across the country. In April, also, Johnson had sent over twenty thousand marines into the Dominican Republic “to protect the lives and property of United States citizens.”
It was in this atmosphere that the President gave his blessing to a White House Festival of the Arts, to be held on June 14. The organizer, Eric F. Goldman (a “special consultant” to the
President
), concedes that the festival was in some measure “a tool to quiet opposition to the war,” but doubts that Johnson took the event very seriously: “Overall, LBJ appeared to think of it as a pleasant day, the
sort of thing a President ought to do in view of all the interest in art around the country, one that would particularly please the ladies, and that was that.”
29
Goldman drew up an invitation list, which included figures from the worlds of “painting, sculpture, literature, music (serious and jazz), the cinema, and photography.” For “
literature
” he chose Mark Van Doren, Saul Bellow, John Hersey,
Edmund
Wilson and Robert Lowell. Wilson immediately refused “with a brusqueness that I have never experienced before or after in the case of an invitation in the name of the President and First Lady.”
30
Lowell, telephoned by the White House at the end of May, agreed to attend and give a poetry reading.
But a few days later Lowell changed his mind. The circumstances are not entirely clear, but Robert Silvers, editor of the
New
York
Review,
remembers the weekend in question:
It’s very hard to remember exactly, but I remember it was a Saturday morning and I was down in the Village and Philip Roth was living there and I happened to meet him in the street. And he said, “It would be very sad if Cal turned up at that,” and I agreed, and he said, “Well, I hope you’ll talk to him about it.” I tried to ring Cal but he wasn’t there, so I wrote him a note about it and dropped it off at the house.
31
When Silvers called round later that day, Lowell had already written a letter to Johnson and planned to release it to the
New
York
Times.
32
The letter read:
DEAR PRESIDENT JOHNSON
When I was telephoned last week and asked to read at the White House Festival of the Arts on June fourteenth, I am afraid I accepted somewhat rapidly and greedily. I thought of such an occasion as a purely artistic flourish, even though every serious artist knows that he cannot enjoy public celebration without making subtle public commitments. After a week’s wondering, I have decided that I am conscience-bound to refuse your courteous invitation. I do so now in a public letter because my acceptance has been announced in the newspapers and because of the strangeness of the Administration’s recent actions.
Although I am very enthusiastic about most of your domestic legislation and intentions, I nevertheless can only follow our present foreign policy with the greatest dismay and distrust. What we will do and what we ought to do as a sovereign nation facing other sovereign nations seem now to hang in the balance between the better and the worse possibili
ties. We are in danger of imperceptibly becoming an explosive and suddenly chauvinistic nation, and may even be drifting on our way to the last nuclear ruin. I know it is hard for the responsible man to act; it is also painful for the private and irresolute man to dare criticism. At this anguished, delicate and perhaps determining moment, I feel I am serving you and our country best by not taking part in the White House Festival of the Arts.
Respectfully yours,
Robert Lowell