Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
Robert Lowell: A Biography (56 page)
Other influencing factors can be thought of. The death of Randall Jarrell had removed the one critical voice that Lowell was in fear of—What will Randall think of
this?
had always been one of his first worries. It is possible that Jarrell might have found most of these new fourteen-liners slack, near-journalistic, or too much like casual diary jottings; they might have seemed to him too mumblingly unrhetorical, too self-indulgent. This is guessing; but there
is
a sense in which Lowell’s new surge of eloquence is also a surge of truancy from the idea of some absolute critical authority, a “breaking loose” from the requirement
never
to write badly.
Another element—but to be thought of with the utmost caution—was the effect of the drug lithium, which Lowell had begun taking in the spring of 1967. There is evidence that Lowell believed he had finally been “cured” by lithium. Certainly, by Christmas, 1967, he knew that he had escaped his annual breakdown and was writing to friends praising his new medication. Allen Tate wrote to him in
February 1968: “The best news in your letter is the new pill you are taking. It’s not at all
so
late!
You have twenty years ahead, if not more. That you missed this last December is a wonderful thing.”
15
And the novelist Richard Stern has a journal entry dated
December
27, 1968, in which he describes a visit to Lowell in Chicago:
He is sitting in bed in socks, a blue pocket-buttoned shirt, loose tie. Poems, the new “fourteen-liners” are spread and piled on the red quilt. Cal reads ten or twelve of them aloud. The last is about an odd Christmas tree of artificial roses which his daughter was “too unconventional to buy.” There were many “annotations”; Harriet calls these “footmarks.” He’d written the Christmas tree poem the night before. Since June, he’s written seventy-four of them. It was after he’d started the lithium
treatments
. He went in to shave and came out every now and then, face half-mooned with cream. He showed me the bottle of lithium capsules. Another medical gift from Copenhagen. Had I heard what his trouble was? “Salt deficiency.” This had been the first year in eighteen he hadn’t had an attack. There’d been fourteen or fifteen of them over the past eighteen years. Frightful humiliation and waste. He’d been all set to taxi up to Riverdale five times a week at $50 a session, plus (of course) taxi fare. Now it was a capsule a day and once-a-week therapy. His face seemed smoother, the weight of distress-attacks and anticipation both gone.
16
Certainly, there is a low-keyed agreeableness in most of the new sonnets: a passivity, or receptivity. There is also a slackening of grandeur and ferocity in the way he views his own obsessions, a new willingness to accord near-equal status to whatever happens to have happened. Many of the sonnets are recognizably by Robert Lowell; they employ his verbal tricks—his triple adjectives, his gnomic oxymorons—and they are frequently dense with obscure details from his autobiography. And yet there is something glazed and foreign in their manner of address, as if they sense an audience too far-off, too blurred to be worth striving for. Or is this fanciful? It would be safer, maybe, to conjecture that the important “side effect” of Lowell’s lithium treatment was in how it seemed to him: in that sense of “it is all so
late
” which Tate replies to in his letter. Lowell’s fourteen-liners are, without doubt, hungry for content, as if they had been starved for years. As Lowell later said, “Accident threw up subjects, and the plot swallowed them—famished for human chances.”
In December 1967 Lowell and Hardwick visited Caracas, Venezuela, to attend a Congress for Cultural Freedom conference along with Jason Epstein, Jules Feiffer and Lillian Hellman, and in January 1968 Lowell visited the Jesuit priest Ivan Illich’s Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico. It was around this time that Illich was lecturing America on the dire consequences of her “innate … compulsion to do good.” “I was speaking mainly,” he said, “to resisters engaged in organizing the March on the
Pentagon
. I wanted to share with them a profound fear: the fear that the end of the war in Vietnam would permit hawks and doves to unite in a destructive war on poverty in the Third World.”
17
As Robert Silvers recalls, Lowell had been much impressed by Illich, whose essays had been appearing regularly in the
New
York
Review:
Cal seemed fascinated by his vision of a society that would be stripped of the unnecessary, where a lot of the professional institutions that dominate life—in education, in medicine—would be demystified and their functions taken over by austere communities in which people would cooperate in devising more rational arrangements. At
Cuernavaca
Illich had a language school, where people were said to learn Spanish quickly by using tapes, and a “center for documentation.” He described training local people who would collect information on a host of subjects such as development, technology and medicine and publish it in booklets sold to libraries all over the world. He was a tall, thin, cosmopolitan Yugoslav with an intense energy and charm—practically cinematic; a priest who would say he was theologically conservative but set against the false priesthood of modern secular professionalism in the advanced countries, whether communist or capitalist. Cal seemed
delighted
, in his skeptical way, by the man’s unexpected ideas and
qualities
.
18
Lowell’s sequence of sonnets “Mexico”
19
suggests that he found others in Cuernavaca rather less impressive; one sonnet describes a visit to “the monastery of Emmaus” at Cuernavaca, where the monks seem to have gone “into” psychoanalysis:
A Papal Commission camped on them two years,
ruling analysis cannot be compulsory,
their cool Belgian prior was heretical, a fairy….
We couldn’t find the corpse removed by helicopter;
the cells were empty, but the art still sold;
lay-neurotics peeped out at you like deer,
barbwired in spotless whitewashed cabins, named
Sigmund
and
Karl
…. They live the life of monks,
one revelation healing the ravage of the other.
Most of the “Mexico” sonnets, however, are love poems—and these have a candor and clear-sightedness which Lowell has never before allowed himself when writing of his “affairs”; for the first time, the “girl” has a real dramatic presence:
The difficulties, the impossibilities,
stand out: I, fifty, humbled with the years’ gold garbage,
dead laurel grizzling my back like spines of hay;
you, some sweet, uncertain age, say twenty-seven,
unballasted by honor or deception….
The insisted-on “impossibility” of the relationship provides the theme; he, middle-aged, the famous poet, the husband and father with a complicated life back home; she the innocent, the creature of nature, the near-child: “—how can I love you more, / short of
turning
into a criminal?”
Sounds of a popping bonfire; no, a colleague’s
early typing; or is he needing paregoric?
Poor Child, you were kissed so much you thought you were walked on;
yet you wait in my doorway with bluebells in your hair.
and there is one fine, summarizing poem—certainly one of the most sharp-edged, most tenderly “composed” pieces in the “notebook” which Lowell was busily adding to each day:
No artist perhaps, you go beyond their phrases,
a girl too simple for this measured cunning….
Take that day of baking on the marble veranda,
the roasting brown rock, the roasting brown grass, the breath
of the world risen like the ripe smoke of chestnuts,
a cleavage dropping miles to the valley’s body:
and the following sick and thoughtful day
of the red flower, the hills, the valley, the Volcano—
this not the greatest thing, though great; the hours
of shivering, ache and burning, when we’d charged
so far beyond our courage—altitudes,
then the falling … falling back on honest speech:
infirmity, a food the flesh must swallow,
feeding our minds … the mind which is also flesh.
The girl was called Mary, was probably Irish—one poem speaks of the two lovers as “Potato-famine Irish-Puritan, and Puritan”—and she seems to have been working at Cuernavaca as one of Illich’s assistants. Lowell left Cuernavaca on January 9, and the following day Mary wrote to him:
yesterday I waited till after your plan [
sic
]
lifted … did you fly safely? I hope you slept, you seemed tired, but also a little happy, and so I was happy.
I wanted to run over and give you the blue flower I was wearing. But then I thought how it would begin to die and wither on the way home, and I didn’t want you to have anything but a sense of life, not
withering
….
20
It was, of course, the “time of the year” for Lowell to have “something with a girl,” but in January 1968 he appears to have been able to judge the liaison’s real-life possibilities, to have restrained himself from any wild commitment, from fantasies of rejuvenation and rebirth. To have been able to do so makes him all the more fretfully “feel his age”—and throughout the “notebook” poems (they were to be published under the name
Notebook
) there is every so often a flicker of nostalgia for the majestic lunacies of his
pre-lithium
winters. And there is much caricaturing of himself as weary, middle-aged voyeur—“O my repose, the goat’s diminishing day,” “I stand between tides”:
The cattle get through living, but to
live:
Kokoshka at eighty, saying, ‘If you last,
you’ll see your reputation die three times,
and even three cultures; young girls are always here.’
They
were
there … two fray-winged dragonflies,
clinging to a thistle, too clean to mate.
21
In Lowell’s world at Harvard there were also girls, and during 1967 there had been a “serious” involvement with a young Cambridge poet; she asks not to be named, but agrees that her presence can be
felt in
Notebook.
She, like Mary, was a non-manic attachment; she was not led to suppose that Lowell wished to abandon his marriage; she was aware that he looked to her for “renewal” and
companionship
. And another Cambridge girlfriend from around this time has said of him:
I never got the overpowering tyrannical side of him. Exactly the
opposite
. If he’d wanted to be tyrannical and overpowering I would have been the perfect subject. One of the things I really miss in Cal—you know, it’s incredibly seldom you ever know anyone who has that
extremely
strong instinct for focusing on you and what you’re about and what you’re trying to do. He did that more than anyone I’ve ever known. He may have been more like that with girls, I don’t know. I think he found a tremendous solace in women. I think he had what I think of as a rather corny simplistic and too easily categorized view of women as being less contrived and closer to the truth of behavior. He talked an awful lot about Ophelia as someone who had failed his idea of women. She’d copped out, yes, but he thought she knew what she was getting into with Hamlet and that she was quite a smart little come-on girl. He was very cozily physical. He liked to hold your hand, or if he walked with you, he liked your arm linked in his. The times I slept with Cal he wasn’t crazily sort of sexy at all. He was very huggy. He’d hug you all night, and the minute he woke up he’d hug you. But I think he was quite panicked by thoughts of
impotence
.
22
During 1968 Lowell’s public persona achieved its remarkable apotheosis. He was already as well known to nonliterary Americans as a poet could reasonably hope to be: he had refused Johnson’s White House invitation, he had marched on the Pentagon, he had—in February 1968—called for “a national day of mourning” … “for our own soldiers, for the pro-American Vietnamese, and for the anti-American Vietnamese,” for all those people “we have sent out of life.”
23
These were acts of witness and verbal protest, and they issued from the sidelines: Lowell was cast as spokesman for the angry and impotent intellectual community, and was addressing himself to a President notoriously indifferent to the responses of his “sort of people.” In the fall of 1967, though, an odd accident
propelled
him to the center, or to very near the center, of “real politics.”
Eugene McCarthy, the senator from Minnesota and a friend both of Allen Tate and of Lowell’s novelist friend J. F. Powers,
announced
that he intended to challenge Johnson in some of the forthcoming primary elections for the Democratic party’s
presidential
nomination: McCarthy’s simple platform was opposition to the Vietnam war. Not only did McCarthy know Tate and Powers, he was also an admirer of Lowell’s poems; indeed, in his spare time, he was himself a poet.
In the early days of McCarthy’s campaign, Lowell agreed to speak for the senator at New York fund-raisers. The two became friends, each flattered by the attention of the other: Lowell was astonished that this real if idealistic politician should also be stylish and ironic (“it’s hard to imagine anyone less like a great statesman … and more like a good writer”),
24
and McCarthy enjoyed both the weight of Lowell’s prestige and the light relief of his company. They formed an odd, teasing partnership: righteous yet disdainful of self-
righteousness
, heroically altruistic and yet sardonic about the mechanics of power-seeking. Jeremy Larner, one of McCarthy’s speech
writers
, has captured rather well—though sneeringly—the spirit of the “campaign” in its early stages: