Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
Robert Lowell: A Biography (50 page)
In the hospital at Hartford in February 1965 Lowell learned of the death of the critic R. P. Blackmur. Lowell had not been an intimate of Blackmur’s, although they had over the years visited each other’s country homes in Maine, and Lowell had always been grateful for the acute review Blackmur had written of
Land
of
Unlikeness
. He was, in Lowell’s view, “an awesome critic”
1
and also “a good poet, weird, tortured, derivative, original—and more a poet in his
criticism
.”
2
The news of his death, though, was for Lowell not just a personal blow; it was yet another sign of the unsteadiness of his whole world of literary friends and mentors. Blackmur had died at sixty-one, but Lowell said, “he always seemed to me like a young man, just a little my senior.”
3
A month earlier T. S. Eliot had died; two years earlier it had been Robert Frost and Theodore Roethke. Roethke, again, had not been a close friend. Lowell had first met him at Yaddo in 1947; he had liked him as a drinking and croquet companion, but had not greatly admired his work: “My final judgment on his poetry,” he wrote to J. F. Powers, “is pretty complicated—a fairly small thing done, at its best, with remarkable clarity and freshness.” And he had from the start been both repelled and fascinated by Roethke’s blatant careerism: “if somehow he could forget about renown and arriving and all that … but it’s easy to say this about someone else—hard to practice.”
4
Lowell knew that he was every bit as ambitious as Roethke; he too, in 1947, wanted to arrive, to be “major,” to be “
the
poet,” and he was always to keep a shrewd eye on the fluctuations of rank in the poetry world. But his own professional persona could hardly have been more unlike Roethke’s. Lowell affected (and often
genuinely
felt) humility and tentativeness, and would manifest a shy, disclaiming pleasure in whatever praise might swim his way. Roethke, however, was openly hungry for acclaim, and insatiable: he would quote over and over again from his favorable reviews, and smart terribly if the critics fell even slightly short of downright eulogy. Quite simply, Roethke wanted to be Champ.
This being so, he was forever watchful of contenders, and from the beginning he had Lowell marked out as a threat. “The best of his stuff has a rough power,” he conceded in 1947, but “it’s not all that R. Jarrell says it is.”
5
He would be scathing about “the patty cake Lowell and Jarrell play in print,”
6
and would say of some new poem of his own that it was the “answer” to Lowell’s latest effort. Towards the end of his life, Roethke wrote of the poems that were to be collected in his posthumous book
The
Far
Field:
“I’ve got old Cal beat, but really.”
7
As to Lowell, he was never wholly converted to Roethke’s work, although he would politely name him in any list of his favorite contemporaries. And—in championship terms—he seems never to have felt uneasy about Roethke’s claims. In letters to Roethke there is often a faintly avuncular note; and often he would merely be responding to Roethke’s constant need for reassurance: “There’s nothing wrong with your brain … you are one of the most
intelligent
men in America.”
8
But his praise for Roethke’s actual poems never quite rings true. Often it would be offered in the form of a hurried P.S.: “Yes, I do think you are tops as a poet in your new book,”
9
or, “One of the things I marvel at in your poems is the impression they give of having been worked on an extra half day.”
10
On one occasion, in 1961, Lowell confesses to having “mislaid” a batch of poems that Roethke had sent him: “—before I had read them! Well, I’ve recently read some strong poems of yours in I think The Observer and another in the New Yorker. No diminishment!” Noticeably, Lowell doesn’t ask Roethke to send copies.
11
There were other ways, though, in which Lowell felt a real bond with the older poet (Roethke was born in 1908). There was the coincidence of Roethke’s notion of himself as a sort of dancing bear. He was a big—some might say gross—man and yet at poetry
readings
he would literally dance to his own rhythms:
And I have made a promise to my ears
I’ll sing and whistle dancing with the bears.
12
When he first met Roethke, Lowell was full of his own bear jokes and thought it delightful that there should be a bear-poet more shaggy and ungainly than himself. For a period he addressed Roethke in letters as “Dear Bear.”
A further coincidence was that Roethke, since 1935, had suffered recurrent manic-depressive illnesses. Over the years, Lowell wrote him moving letters about this:
I feel great kinship with you. We are at times almost one another’s shadows passing through the same jungle. Things have lately risen for me considerably. Getting out of the flats after a manic leap is like our old crew races at school. When the course if [
sic
] half-finished, you know and so does everybody else on the boat, that not another stroke can be taken. Yet everyone goes on, and the observer on the wharf notices nothing.
13
Our troubles are a bond. I, too, am just getting over a manic attack. Everything seemed to be going swimmingly, then suddenly I was in the hospital—thorozine [
sic
],
windy utterances, domestic chaos … the old story. Now it’s passed; I’m back in my study; my feet are on the floor. When you come we can spill out to each other.
14
Elizabeth Hardwick comments on this “kinship”: “I think Cal
admired
Roethke’s work, but no room could contain the two of them at the same time. They were competitors in symptoms. I remember that Cal told me that he and Roethke were someplace around
Boston
, traveling in and out of the city on the train. And Cal said, ‘Would you believe it, he expected
me
to get the tickets,
me
to make all the arrangements.’”
15
On July 10,1963—less than a month before Roethke died of a heart attack—Lowell wrote him a letter that was strikingly more candid and searching than any of his earlier communications: closer, at any rate, to what seems to have been the truth of their relationship:
I remember Edwin Muir arguing with me that there is no rivalry in poetry. Well, there is. No matter what one has done or hasn’t done (this sounds like a prayer) one feels each blow, each turning of the wind, each up and down grading of the critics. We’ve both written enough and lived long enough perhaps to find this inescapable. Each week brings some pat on the back or some brisk, righteous slur, till one rather longs for the old oblivion. Well, it would be terrible if there weren’t many
frogs in the pond, and even many toads. It does make me happier that you exist, and can do so many big things that I have no gift for. We couldn’t be more different, and yet how weirdly our lives have often gone the same way. Let’s say we are brothers, have gone the same journey and know far more about each other than we have ever said or will say. There’s a strange fact about the poets of roughly our age, and one that doesn’t exactly seem to have always been true. It’s this, that to write we seem to have to go at it with such single-minded intensity that we are always on the point of drowning. I’ve seen this so many times, and year after year with students, that I feel it’s something almost unavoidable, some flaw in the motor. There must be a kind of glory to it all that people coming later will wonder at. I can see us all being written up in some huge book of the age. But under what title? Anyway, Ted, I do love and honor you.
16
Roethke was fifty-five when he collapsed on a tennis court on
Bainbridge
Island, Washington, on August 1, 1963.
On February 5, 1965, Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Hardwick from the hospital at Hartford:
Mournful thoughts on death: it’s [
sic
]
seems so irrational for Frost, Eliot, Blackmur and Roethke all to have died in about the same twelve months, all different in age and the consummation of their careers. No, everything that is isn’t right!
17
Of Eliot’s death he wrote to Robert Giroux:
I have reached an age when all my elders are disappearing, and can’t reconcile myself to the fact. I must say there was no one who spoke with such authority, and so little played the role of the great man. He was a good and patient friend to both of us.
18
And to Eliot’s widow, Valerie:
Too long a time has passed since Tom’s death. I wept when I heard about it, and for weeks caught myself rather inanely saying, “This is sheer loss, without recompense.” Sheer loss for us. I have reached an age when all my elders are disappearing, and can’t reconcile myself to the fact. Their wit and guidance are irreplaceable and each year one seems to withdraw further from the friendly shade and walk in the noonday glare.
I don’t want to go into a critical tribute now, but I must say that there
was no one else who could both write and tell us how to write, no one who spoke with such authority and so little played his roll [
sic
]
of the great man. There was no doubt of the greatness. Even in the modest silences and the patient courtesy with the boring and humdrum, and least of all in the loud laughter and little phases and whole narrations of wild irony.
He was a good and patient friend. I think we laughed at the same things and hated the same things, and no older man so touched
something
personal in my depths.
19
To Charles Monteith, at Faber and Faber, he summarized: “So many friends of mine have died this year and yet his though long on the verge seems the most impossible and intolerable of all.”
20
The year 1965 was to bring another death, a death even more “impossible and intolerable.” In April, Lowell heard that Randall Jarrell had suffered a bad mental breakdown; Lowell was shocked—for all the passion and nervous edginess of Jarrell’s intellectual style, Lowell had always thought of him as invulnerably rational, somehow protected by his cleverness from any serious psychic upheavals. It is significant that Lowell rarely wrote to Jarrell on personal matters, and through the course of their friendship Jarrell had always managed to avoid direct involvement in the dramas that attended Lowell’s breakdowns. Their mutual friend John
Thompson
believed that Jarrell’s sense of his own precariousness was what made him keep Lowell’s madness at arm’s length;
21
but it is probably also true that for Lowell, Jarrell’s real usefulness was as critic, as poetic conscience almost—and this function would certainly have been imperiled by excessive intimacy:
I have never known anyone who so connected what his friends wrote with their lives, or their lives with what they wrote. This could be trying: whenever we turned out something Randall felt was unworthy or a falling off, there was a coolness in all one’s relations with him. You felt that even your choice in neckties wounded him.
22
And when Lowell came to summarize their friendship, it was as if he were excusing Jarrell for what others might have judged to be lack of human warmth:
Randall had an uncanny clairvoyance for helping friends in subtle
precarious
moments—almost always as only he could help, with something
written: critical sentences in a letter, or an unanticipated published book review. Twice or thrice, I think, he must have thrown me a
life-line
.
23
It was with some tentativeness, then, that Lowell wrote to the suffering Jarrell on April 29, 1965: in a sense, he didn’t know whom he was writing to.
Dear Randall,
I have thought twice about intruding on you, but I must say that I am heart-broken to hear that you have been sick. Your courage,
brilliance
and generosity should have saved you from this, but of course all good qualities are unavailing. I have been through this sort of thing so often myself that I suppose there’s little in your experience that I haven’t had over and over. What’s worst, I think, is the grovelling, low as dirt purgatorial feelings with which one emerges. If you have such feelings, let me promise you that they are temporary, what looks as though it were simply you, and therefore would never pass does turn out to be not you and will pass.
Please let me tell you how much I admire you and your work and thank you for the many times when you have given me the strength to continue. Let me know if there’s anything I can do. And
courage
,
old friend!
24
Six months later, in October 1965, Lowell heard of Jarrell’s death. The newspaper reports said that he had been “struck by an
automobile
as he walked along the heavily traveled Chapel Hill by-pass”; a witness reported that he had “lunged into the side of the car that hit him”;
25
it could have been an accident, but few of Jarrell’s friends believed it was. Lowell for years afterwards was deeply reluctant to admit that this “noble, difficult, and beautiful soul”
26
had died by suicide.
Within weeks of Jarrell’s death, Lowell collapsed again—his ninth episode since 1949. But this time there was a wildly novel twist. A year earlier Lowell had formed a slight friendship with Jacqueline Kennedy. He had sent her copies of his books and she had “read them many times.” In January 1965 she had written to thank him for his poems—not that she had much “enjoyed” them.
27
They saddened her, she said, because they made her think of her dead husband. If Kennedy were still alive, it would now be his inauguration, and Lowell would surely be an honored guest.