Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
And, in the same envelope:
My dearest, adored Lizzie
My hand almost shakes too much to write. I’ll see a doctor in a few minutes. I only pray to God that I see you and Harriet again, dearest!
Not surprisingly, when this letter reached Hardwick three days later, it “hit [her] like a bomb”:
After a few attempts to get Dr. Platman, unavailing, a few wondering fears of how I could get to you, I just collapsed in tears and called Barbara [Epstein], and put to good experience her executive years on the phone at the NYR by getting my loved one on the phone. I’m utterly relieved that you were there, thankful. And of course ecstatic to find you better…. Darling, I won’t let you go so far away ever again.
12
By the time Hardwick wrote this letter Lowell had recovered
sufficiently
to move on to the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. From there he wrote to her on the tenth:
Dear Heart: I guess this has time to arrive before you depart. So loved to hear your voice—4 days ago I went thru a trauma and daze of thinking it couldn’t be possible I’d never meet you again. Not so much trouble, just high blood pressure, trembling of foot and hand—remedy don’t climb high places, overdrink, stay up too late (all the old things), and take pressure pills.
Lowell’s attack was never satisfactorily explained, although
Hardwick
thinks it was caused by thyroid medication prescribed by Lowell’s doctors to combat a possible side effect of lithium. Later on, Lowell wrote about his “trauma” to John Berryman:
I thought I’d had a stroke, but it turned out to be largely a wrong prescription. These wretched little black splinters mortality hits us with. Well, we both know it. I’d like to scorn it, not quite a Yeats. It seems silly to triumph that much. He too knew he couldn’t.
13
Lowell spent the summer of 1969 in Castine with Hardwick and Harriet—“very cozy times here with hot weather and cold”—and in September resumed his split life, shuttling between Harvard and New York. His view of New York was as “jaundiced” as it had been a year earlier: “I’ve come back to New York for some reason with feet of stone … this place hammered together with stone, dirt and bad sounds! Anyway I feel autumnal, my feet drag.”
14
And
Cambridge
offered only “riches of solitary speculation”:
Most of my close friends are gone from Harvard…. Is there anything more last man alive than a dinner with one’s self: One resolves to stop doing what one doesn’t enjoy. But of course it’s not that easy. It’s not that easy to say one now knows better what one wants than in earlier days. Still, it’s all pretty good, if we could only slow and hurry time at will.
15
The Gowries had by this time left Harvard, and Lowell’s two closest Cambridge friends were William Alfred and the poet Frank Bidart. Bidart had joined Lowell’s writing class in 1966:
I was auditing it as a graduate student, and I was showing him poems of mine in his office hours. I’ve never known anyone else who did anything like this. He had what amounted to an open workshop once a week for two, two and a half hours, from, say, eight-thirty or nine in the morning to about eleven or twelve. He had this instead of having individual conferences with his students. People would bring their poems and sit around a desk and pass them around and everybody would talk about them. You didn’t have to be connected to Harvard at all. He welcomed anybody. That was what was so extraordinary. Obviously, if your poems were liked you were a little more encouraged to come back, but a lot of people came again and again who had nothing to do with Harvard.
16
Towards the end of the fall semester, 1966, Lowell had begun to speed up: “It was so painful in class,” Bidart recalls, “because this very brilliant person would start reading a student poem aloud and he couldn’t get through a line. He would read half of one line and his eye would skip down to the next line” Bidart visited Lowell at McLean’s in January 1967 and their friendship had developed from this point; but it was not until the fall term of 1969 that they formed what Bidart calls their “working relationship”:
When Grey Gowrie left for England and Richard Tillinghast left for Berkeley, Cal was a lot lonelier and I got to know him much better partly because he didn’t have his closest friends anymore—his closest friends among the students, I mean, because he would of course see Bill Alfred a lot. He had a real sense of loss that the people he felt most comfortable with were gone. Cal was always eager to hear criticism. He wanted you to like his poems, obviously, but he didn’t want you just to be a yes man. He once said the best reader of your work was someone who was crazy about your work but didn’t like all of it—and that’s certainly the way I felt. I can remember one afternoon in his rooms at Quincy House—I said I didn’t think this line was quite right, or something, and he changed it right in front of me, and it was
unnerving
, it was scary. It was a little like going into a museum and you say, “I’m not crazy about that arm,” and the statue moves. It was really unnerving. In a way, one didn’t want to have that much effect.
17
By fall, 1969, Lowell was already at work on revisions to
Notebook
1967
–68
, and he enlisted Bidart as a kind of chief adviser or
assistant
:
He started making lists of revisions, and we started going through these revisions and really talking about them. And that was really the
beginning
of our working relationship. I liked the poems very much, but I thought they were often too hard, too obscure. He often did not know when something was unclear. It’s not that he was trying to write
something
that opaque. So at that point I started seeing everything, I think, and particularly these two-and three-line revisions that he was making lists of.
18
In December 1969 Lowell was back in New York, and he asked Bidart to join him there to continue the
Notebook
revisions. Bidart stayed in the studio at West 67th Street for a week in January 1970 and “we worked all day for about a week”:
These pages of revisions were very complicated and Farrar Straus wanted cleaner copy, so he asked me to help him put it together. That was the first time I ever stayed with him. He was making more revisions, but we were also typing these one-and two-line revisions into copies of the poems so the printer would be able to decipher all this. He was typing in one room and I was typing in the other. He just never stopped. He couldn’t type a poem without making a change.
19
During the same fall semester that Lowell began working with Bidart, he formed another friendship with one of his students.
Martha
Ritter, at twenty-one, had joined Lowell’s class that fall and was writing a thesis on
Notebook:
He said I could come and sit in on sessions he had with Frank Bidart. Every week the poems he had written that week were gone over by Frank and Cal. He told me, in that funny way he had of being sardonic and friendly at the same: “If you keep quiet in the corner, you can listen and take notes.”
20
Ritter would occasionally be allowed to contribute one or two revisions of her own: “And I’d feel terrific, as if I’d become one of the guys.”
It was quite soon that I started seeing him alone—probably about
October
. He had a lot of invitations—to publishing parties, all kinds of readings, that kind of stuff. But he did feel quite alone. I would go to his rooms at Quincy House and spend quite a lot of time with him. Yes, I fell in love with him: gradually, during that fall. We developed these very secret kind of domestic interstices. I would go and cook things and type up poems and make typographical errors and invent new words.
21
Lowell made it clear to Ritter that he “was very proud of the fact that he was one of the very few people he knew who’d had such a long marriage.” Unless he got sick, he said, he would never think of leaving Hardwick:
I think one of the attractions was that I was quite untouched; I was a virgin, and this fascinated him. He told me he had never slept with a woman who was a virgin. I think for him women were somehow distant, mythological, as if they were to be studied—as if he was watching them, like a child. Yes, he was conscious he was treading on dangerous ground. He would talk about it and was upset about it—almost ashamed. But we couldn’t keep away from each other. He said something to me,
acknowledging
that my love was greater than his. He said that most people can say that they love, but very few people can say they have been loved. And the fact that I loved him so deeply was an incredible thing to him.
22
Towards the end of the fall semester, Lowell accepted a visiting professorship at All Souls, Oxford, for the spring of 1970. Ritter suggested that she abandon her thesis and join him in Oxford; Lowell persuaded her that she should complete her academic work: “Even though the effort was to keep his marriage together, this didn’t rule out the far future.” Ritter determined that she would graduate and
then
follow Lowell to All Souls; or, indeed, to
wherever
he might be.
23
Lowell’s All Souls appointment would begin in April 1970, and he planned first to holiday in Italy with Hardwick. Between January and March he saw Ritter a few times in New York; looking back, Ritter now thinks that by this time he was “trying to distance, to change things.” But there had been no explicit break before he left for Europe, and he was aware that Ritter’s intention was to follow him.
Lowell’s own intention was to have his wife and daughter join him for a year in England. Arrangements had been made for Harriet to take time off from her New York school and for West 67th Street to be let to the novelist Carlos Fuentes. Hardwick also gave up her teaching job at Barnard College for one year. After Italy, Lowell would travel on to Oxford and shortly afterwards Hardwick would return to New York to settle the last details of their move.
1
. R.L. to A. Alvarez, July 30, 1968.
2
.
Notebook
1967
–68
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), p. 159.
3
. Ibid.
4
.
Notebook
1967
–68,
p. 17.
5
. R.L., draft autobiography, 1955–57 (Houghton Library).
6
. Ibid.
7
.
Notebook
1967
–68,
p. 92.
8
. Sidney Nolan, interview with I.H. (1980).
9
. Donald Hall,
Review,
29–30 (Spring-Summer 1972). See also review by I.H. in
Times
Literary
Supplement,
December 25, 1970, reprinted in
A
Poetry
Chronicle
(London: Faber & Faber, 1973).
10
. R.L. to Peter Taylor, February 6, 1969.
11
. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, January 9, 1969.
12
. Elizabeth Hardwick to R.L., March 9, 1969 (Houghton Library).
13
. R.L. to John Berryman, September 9, 1969 (University of Minnesota
Libraries
).
14
. Ibid.
15
. Ibid., September 25, 1969 (University of Minnesota Libraries).
16
. Frank Bidart, interview with I.H. (1981).
17
. Ibid.
18
. Ibid.
19
. Ibid.
20
. Martha Ritter, interview with I.H. (1981).
21
. Ibid.
22
. Ibid.
23
. Ibid.
Before his arrival at All Souls, Lowell received another English offer: a teaching appointment at the University of Essex, to begin in October 1970. The two jobs could hardly have been less alike. All Souls was unique among Oxford colleges: it had no students, either graduate or undergraduate, and a number of its fellows had no academic function. They might be politicians, clergymen, bankers; selected in the first place for their intellectual distinction, they might use the college as a retreat from their momentous lives in London. From time to time, it is contended, Britain’s political destiny has been decided over claret at All Souls—in the late 1930s Lord Halifax discussed Hitler’s “limited intentions” with the editor of
The
Times
, and as one disaffected Fellow wrote in 1966:
in the common room beneath the high towers some of the most
catastrophic
decisions of the age were contested in vain—the refusal to bring down Mussolini, the refusal to help Republican Spain, the refusal to collaborate with Russia, the refusal to defend Czechoslovakia.
1
By the time Lowell got there, All Souls’ reputation for “truly
epoch-making
political blunders” had largely been forgotten, but—in a period of “student power” and rattled academic self-questioning—the college was now being jeered at as a magnificent anomaly: one of Oxford’s oldest, richest and most beautiful but, to the “radical” observer, provocatively pointless.
Essex, on the other hand, was purposeful, ill-favored and
postwar
. Built in parkland outside Colchester, this “new university” (as the new universities were called) had been the scene of some of the most fiery student riots of the 1960s. The poet Donald Davie
had recently resigned his professorship of literature on the grounds that Essex was overrun by Trotskyists and sociologists, and had indeed decided to abandon not just Essex but the whole of Britain in favor of what he called the “luxury of expatriatism.” Professor Philip Edwards, in his letter offering the job to Lowell, said that after Davie left, “the morale of the department went right down, and tempers were very short. Our well-publicized student riots of May, 1968 made things worse, since Davie found himself on one side of the fence and most of his colleagues on the other.”
2
And Davie, when he heard that Lowell was thinking of accepting the Essex post, wrote from Stanford, California, in commiserating terms: “I have despaired of my country, as perhaps you have
despaired
of yours.”
3
Lowell wrote to tell Hardwick of the Essex offer, suggesting that when she came over to England they could inspect the place before finally deciding.
Lowell arrived at All Souls on April 24, and wrote to Hardwick: “Here I am … a half lost soul in All Souls.” He had “eaten in gown … and handled a 14th century psalm book.”
4
A few days later he was no less bemused: “The second sex doesn’t exist at All Souls. I feel fourteen again. Vacationing at St. Mark’s…. But there’s so much I like here; it’s an education, for what?”
5
And later still: “All Souls is elderly and stiff, yet a pleasant seat on the sidelines to watch the storm.”
6
On April 30 there was to be a party at Faber and Faber in Lowell’s honor, and he had been asked to prepare a guest list of his English friends: “Jonathan Miller, the Gowries, the Alvarezes, the Isaiah Berlins, the William Empsons, the Stephen Spenders”—he
suggested
twenty or so names. And a few days before the party, Lowell invited another London acquaintance—Lady Caroline Blackwood, a close friend for some years of the
New
York
Review
’s
Robert Silvers, and a friend also of the Gowries: she too was of Irish aristocratic background,
7
a member of the wealthy Guinness clan (although, as Lowell later wrote, she “loathes the stout which was fed her as nourishment as a child”).
8
Blackwood was thirty-eight, had been married to the painter Lucien Freud, and her second husband, with whom she had three daughters, was the musician Israel Citkovitz. Her own gifts, though, were literary. She had contributed articles and stories to
Encounter
and the
London
Magazine
,
and Lowell may well have come across her work; for example, in the 1959 issue of
Encounter
,
which
published
C. P. Snow’s “The Two Cultures,” Philip Larkin’s “The Whitsun Weddings” and Auden on Hannah Arendt, there had been a witty piece by Caroline Freud about “the Beatnik”:
Supposedly revolutionary, the ‘Beatnik Movement’ is unique in that it enjoys the recognition, support and succour of the very society whose dictates it pretends to flout. It has all the trappings of the subversive, the meeting in the darkened cellar, the conspiratorial whisper behind the candle in the chianti bottle, the nihilistic mutter, without the mildest element of subversion. No one in the future, when filling in an official form, will ever be made to swear that they have never been a Beatnik.
9
She ends with an acid portrayal of Lawrence Lipton, the Beat “Grand Lama,” at his pad in Venice West, Los Angeles: Lipton philosophizes, and Lady Caroline transcribes, and every so often, “we had a long silence” … “Once again we had a silence,” and
As I was leaving, ‘The Lama’ stood in the doorway of his shack. ‘We have many Artists down here in Venice West’, he said, ‘all of them living in dedicated poverty. Some of them are among the most creative talents in America. I should very much like you to have a look at them. I will telephone you as soon as I have arranged to have you shown round their pads’. Suddenly I became cool, visionary. I saw that ‘The Lama’ had already, mystically, ruthlessly, appointed my future Duties. He had ordained how my life from then on was to be spent. Like a Florence Nightingale. Or a conscientious inspector of an Insane Asylum. Making daily rounds of condemned Artists in padded cells.
10
In October 1959, not long after Lady Caroline completed her
appraisal
of Beat poetry readings in L.A., Lowell had been awarded an odd prize in London: a prize awarded annually by the brewing family’s own poet, Bryan Guinness, otherwise Lord Moyne, and a cousin of the Blackwoods. Lowell’s response to the Guinness Poetry Prize was almost as sardonic as Lady Caroline’s view of the U.S. avant-garde: “I much admire the Guinness people’s belief in the occasion; they seemed quite surprised that I wouldn’t be there—jetted in perhaps. I feel in touch with some old tradition, such as Ben Jonson’s bottle.”
11
Some seven years later Lowell and Blackwood met for the first time in New York. As with the “Grand Lama,” Blackwood
remembers
the event chiefly for its “silences”:
when I was with Bob [Silvers], he used to take me to dinner at West 67th Street. And I couldn’t speak. I’d been told—which was nonsense—that Cal couldn’t speak about anything except poetry. That was the legend about him: everything else bored him. If you know that about anyone, it’s terrifying. So there were these ghastly silences. I thought it was better, if he only wanted to talk about poetry, not to talk at all—better than to say, “Do you like Housman?” or that kind of thing. So I just used to sit absolutely silent. I was always put next to him. And it used to be my dread. To break the silence once, I said I admired the soup. And he said, “I think it’s perfectly disgusting.” And then we had a silence.
12
The dinners were during one of Lowell’s manic periods, and
Blackwood
remembers that “a day or two after one of these dinners, I nearly ran him over”:
I was in a taxi in New York, and suddenly there was a frightful swerve and I looked round and there was Cal. He’d stepped right in front of my taxi. He was just weaving through the traffic, looking neither to the right nor the left—cars screaming and screeching. And I felt very
concerned
for him—it was
so
dangerous. I remember thinking, He’s not going to last very long, and feeling awfully sad.
13
It was therefore with less than total enthusiasm that she accepted Lowell’s invitation to the Faber party; she went, though, and that night Lowell stayed at her apartment:
After the Faber party, he moved into Redcliffe Square—I mean
instantly
, that night. He had this fantasy that Bob Silvers had given him my telephone number because he wanted Cal and me to get married. Of course, that was the last thing Bob wanted. But Cal persisted with that fantasy always—that this was fate, organized by Bob.
14
For much of the next month, Lowell and Lady Caroline
conducted
their romance in semi-secret. She recalls clandestine visits to All Souls—“this place that was secret to men”—and trips to Ireland and the Lake District. Hardwick meanwhile was waiting in New York for news of the London accommodation that Lowell was meant by now to have arranged. On May 17, he wrote to Blair Clark, from All Souls:
Time whizzes by here as everyone told me it must—with scarcely time to write letters of refusal to the things I can’t do. We’ve decided to move here for a year or two. I’ll teach at Essex and live in London, Harriet and Lizzie will live in London and I’ll commute. Almost the same salary, subjects, time etc. as Harvard…. Lizzie will come over about the tenth or twelfth to strengthen my dawdling house-hunting.
Things seem rasped and low in America, and here I sigh gladly into the somewhat different air. I’m thankful to get away for a stretch.
15
On May 26, though, he was writing defensively to Hardwick:
What’s up? Such boiling messages, all as public as possible on cables and unenclosed postcards. It’s chafing to have the wicked, doddering, genial All Souls porter take down your stinging cable. It matters not:
everything
must be pressing you this moment in New York.
16
It was the end of June before Hardwick—in Robert Giroux’s words—“learned the worst.” He wrote to Charles Monteith:
It was the uncertainty and the worry about Harriet that was hardest for her to take. The next day she learned (from friends of theirs in London) the name of the person with whom he is staying. “I had to burst out laughing,” she said. She thinks from this and other evidence that Cal is probably ill, and she is consulting his doctor. She called him [Lowell] next day and described his telephone manner as low-keyed, “not
vindictive
and even solicitous.”
17
For a week or so, however, she sent further “boiling messages.” Did he
realize
,
she wanted to know, the damage he had done: Harriet, for example, had no school to go to—the “safe” New York City schools were full; and as for her own work:
I want to add my absolute horror that you two people have taken away something I loved and needed. My job at Barnard, which I tried to get back, but it is filled for this year and the budget is filled.
… My utter contempt for both of you for the misery you have brought to two people who had never hurt you knows no bounds.
18
By the first week in July it was evident to Blackwood that
Lowell
was indeed “ill.” At All Souls during May and June there had
been scenes that are still vividly recalled by certain Fellows—he made not altogether unrequited overtures to one of the dons’ wives, and his high-table conversation was rarely as poised or even coherent as it might have been—but it was still possible then to think of him as simply drunk or rather boorishly “poetic.” To Blackwood, he had seemed “very elated, but I wouldn’t then have known for certain.” The climax for her came in the first week of July:
He locked me in the flat upstairs [Blackwood’s house in Redcliffe Square is divided into three separate apartments], and he wouldn’t let me
telephone
—and I had the children downstairs. But I didn’t dare go down to see them, because I knew that he’d come too. And I simply didn’t want him in the same flat as the children in the state that he was in. Neither did I want to be locked in with him. It was the longest three days of my life.
19
On July 9 Lowell was admitted to Greenways Nursing Home in London’s St. John’s Wood. Hardwick was telephoned by Mary McCarthy (from Paris; McCarthy had heard the news from Sonia Orwell). On July 17 Sonia Orwell telephoned Blair Clark: “Dr. says if Caroline will take resp. he can leave nursing home. Caroline in Ireland—confidentially, Caroline is through.”
20
Shortly after Lowell was admitted to Greenways, Blackwood sent a note to the hospital. Lowell later quoted from it in his poem “Marriage?”: “I think of you every minute of the day; / I love you every minute of the day.”
21
But she added that it would be better if she did not see Lowell or talk to him again until he had recovered. To this, Lowell replied:
I love you with my heart and mind, what can I do, if you give me nothing to go on? I can’t crowd in on you. Let’s for God’s sake try again, cool and try. So much love should go on to something.
P.S. If I were with you I’d do all within my defects. Can you pretend to be the same? O try!
22
Blackwood was horrified by the suggestion that Lowell might be discharged into her care; horrified for her children as well as for herself. She decided that she would simply “disappear.” She wrote to him that she might herself become ill if they remained in contact,
and made it clear that before the relationship could move forward, Lowell must get well again. She loved him, certainly, but the future was a blank.
Over the next week Lowell wrote to Blackwood once, sometimes twice a day; she arranged for him to be told that she too had had a breakdown, and this news seems to have greatly excited him: they were suffering “simultaneous sickness,” they really were meant for each other—“If we can both be well, I’ll walk the ocean. But we will be well,” and “(Sonia says) I must get well completely before you could. I take this.” On one occasion he left Greenways and went to her house in Redcliffe Square: and “so terrified the cleaning lady that she ran off and was never seen again. And that’s what his
appearance
did!” Throughout this week Blair Clark was recording almost daily phone calls: