Robert Lowell: A Biography (52 page)

By the time Auden’s reply arrived, Lowell was of course already in “the bin.” News had reached Monteith of his performance at the opera, and there was an uneasy period when it seemed likely that
Lowell might make an appearance in London (he had agreed to do a BBC interview with Malcolm Muggeridge). But the visit was canceled; Monteith wrote back in reassuring terms to Auden, and the campaign continued to build strong support.

The Lowell lobby in Oxford, however, had already made a vital tactical mistake. They had neglected to solicit the support of Enid Starkie, the reader in French literature at Somerville College. Miss Starkie had organized the campaigns of Day Lewis in 1951 and Auden in 1956, and was indeed celebrated for her labors in this field (as well as for wearing red underwear and a French sailor’s hat, though not, so far as anybody knew, “a turtle-necked French sailor’s jersey”). Starkie was piqued by the oversight, and set about
organizing
a campaign of her own; her candidate was the very English, indeed very Oxford, poet Edmund Blunden (well known for his writings on the First World War, but associated also with the
pre-modernist
Georgian poets: a critic in the thirties had nicknamed him “the Merton fieldmouse,” and Lowell in 1946 had called him “heavy, clumsy, careless, academic and sentimental”). It was, Monteith
concedes
, “an inspired choice”:

A week before the election (to be held on February 5,1966) Starkie had collected over three hundred signatures to support Blunden’s candidacy, and although Lowell was evidently backed by the
students
and by the London literary magazines, his nomination was endorsed by a mere forty names. Lowell’s men would contend that theirs were “quality names,” and that only a handful of Starkie’s
three hundred were in the same league. Starkie, even so, toiled on right up to polling day, and Lowell’s chief Oxford backer, Maurice Bowra, was soon reduced to blustering protests about her vulgar methods:

On February 6 the
New
York
Times
announced:

The report in the
New
Statesman
was headed “Someone Has
Blundened
,” and Stephen Spender wrote a letter to the London
Times
suggesting that, next time round, the undergraduates should be allowed to vote. Lowell himself may well have been more irked by the result than he pretended. It was a month after the event that he wrote to Charles Monteith:

Throughout the summer of 1966, Lowell worked on an adaptation of Aeschylus’
Prometheus
Bound
—this in response to a commission from Peter Brook of London’s Royal Shakespeare Company—and prepared his volume
Near
the
Ocean
for the press. The book was to be illustrated with drawings by Sidney Nolan, and would
include
his “Near the Ocean” sequence, two other short poems (an
elegy for Roethke and the poem “1958,” much of which he had salvaged from the first draft of “Waking in the Blue”). He also included a number of imitations—of Dante, Juvenal and Horace, as well as the two seventeenth-century Spanish poets Góngora and Quevedo. These had been written during the summer of 1962 and could therefore have been included in
For
the
Union
Dead;
it is probable, though, that Lowell had not then thought them worthy of book publication. The Dante and the Juvenal are painstakingly closer to their originals than anything in
Imitations
—“Maybe I felt ragged by people telling me I wasn’t close enough”
41
—and these take up eighteen of the book’s forty or so pages. Lowell’s prefatory note to
Near
the
Ocean
has a rather strained and hopeful ring: “The theme that connects my translations is Rome, the greatness and horror of her Empire…. How one jumps from Rome to the America of my own poems is something of a mystery to me.”

Lowell seems to have written no poems of his own throughout 1966; indeed, not since the summer of 1965. His decision to put together a new volume at this stage suggests either that he felt himself to be at something of a dead end, or that the public or occasional aspect of poems like “Waking Early Sunday Morning” made him see the book as his timely contribution to the
intensifying
antiwar campaign. But there was no suggestion of haste in the book’s actual production. When it appeared in the spring of 1967, its lavish appearance was derided by most of the reviewers:

Or, as David Kalstone put it, more equably, in
Partisan
Review:
“the slick coffee-table design of the volume entirely misrepresents the poems, which, at their best, challenge things that are shiny and bright.”
43
Perhaps, sensing a strain of vulgarity in his wish to get a book out quickly, Lowell had been anxious that its physical
appearance
should seem leisured and aloof. According to Hayden Carruth in the
Hudson
Review
,
the book’s publication “had been postponed several times, and … the price had been announced progressively at $4.95, $5.50 and $6.00. Why?”

There were moments during the summer at Castine when Lowell would confess that his retreat into the “prosing” of Aeschylus might simply be a way of “escaping my destiny.” He could, he said, “bury” himself in
Prometheus:
“Often three or four hours would go by before I looked up, and saw low tide changed to high.” But on the other hand, “Oh destiny, where is it?”
44
He wrote this on July 16, 1966, two days after learning of yet another death. On July 11 Delmore Schwartz’s body had been found in a corridor of the Columbia Hotel in New York; he had suffered a heart attack. Lowell had not been close to Schwartz since those months in 1946 when he had shared a house with him in Cambridge; they had quarreled then over Schwartz’s supposed flirtation with Jean
Stafford
, and a year later Schwartz had been none too pleased to hear of Lowell’s association with his ex-wife, Gertrude Buckman. In 1959, though, Schwartz had responded warmly to the poem Lowell addressed to him in
Life
Studies
and had lavishly praised the “new style” poems in that book: “an intensity so moving it is heartbreaking.” In the same letter, he also thanked Lowell “for the money and for the very nice things you say about my own work.”
45

Lowell, in fact, had for some time been nervous of the
idea
of Delmore Schwartz, of his decline from early promise, of the ways in which he had wasted his real talent, and towards the end he had avoided Schwartz because of “his suspiciousness, his paranoia, his setting of people against each other.”
46
In 1966, though, Lowell remembered the Schwartz of “humorous early days—all good sense and promess [
sic
]!” Some of this, he felt, had lasted, but “in flashes, and mostly with young acquaintances in bars.”
47
On hearing of his death, Lowell wrote to William Meredith:

The notion of there being a sort of generic curse on the poets of his generation was recurring time and again in Lowell’s letters of this time, and it was encouraged on all sides by critical articles that proposed Lowell and John Berryman as victim heroes of the age—“each of them salvaging his work from the edge of some kind of personal abyss” (A. Alvarez). Lowell’s own identification with
Berryman
as a co-explorer of risky psychological terrain was certainly becoming more and more heartfelt as, one by one, the others of his generation were cut down by early deaths. In 1966 the news of Berryman was persistently of his bad health, his drinking and his breakdowns, and Lowell seems to have followed the reports with a resigned dread. In recent years his regard for Berryman’s poems had deepened. In 1959 he had been undecided about Berryman’s
idiosyncratic
“new language” as it appeared in
Homage
to
Mistress
Bradstreet
and the very first of the “Dream Songs.” He had written to him then:

By 1964 he had been won over to the style and he wrote a guardedly favorable review of 77
Dream
Songs
for the
New
York
Review
of
Books
,
but he still had the deepest sort of reservations. After writing his review, he wrote to William Meredith:

With the death of Randall Jarrell, though, it was to be expected that Lowell would look towards Berryman as the only truly
formidable
talent of around his own age—Berryman was three years older than Lowell, as Jarrell had been. Also, Berryman had been an
admirer
of Jarrell’s. Berryman could never have Jarrell’s “senior” role in Lowell’s life, but it
was
possible for him to be thought of as an endangered, brilliant equal. In March of 1966 Lowell wrote to him:

In October 1966 Lowell got a group of new Berryman dream songs, to which he responded more warmly than he had to anything that Berryman had done before. They were called “Opus Posthumous” and were really, Lowell thought, “his own elegy and written from the dirt of the grave.”
52
He cabled Berryman in Dublin:
YOUR
POSTHUMOUS POEMS ARE A TREMENDOUS AND LIVING TRIUMPH LOVE
CAL
, and in reply got “a sad letter”; he wrote to Philip Booth that Berryman “was very very sick, spiritually and physically, I guess”: