Robert Lowell: A Biography (6 page)

In Charlotte’s mind, it was not entirely a question of Lowell’s tender age. It was, she thought, his general instability that had led him into the relationship in the first place, and his stubbornness that obliged him to hold on to it. She was still attending her sessions with Merrill Moore and had picked up enough psychoanalytic jargon to enable her to see Anne as just another symptom of her son’s
disorderly
attachment to his mother. But, like the writing of poetry, Anne was also a source of “over-excitement” and therefore to be warned against until she too was happily outgrown.

A marriage, though, would be disastrous, and it was perhaps Charlotte’s mounting nervousness on this score that prompted the events of Christmas, 1936. On December 22, Lowell’s father had written to Anne’s mother, again warning against the consequences of an official engagement: “We feel we cannot co-operate in an engagement which would not be for Bobby’s good at present.”
16
On the following day, Anne’s father, Evans Dick, received a call from Mr. Lowell’s lawyer cousin Alfred: could he meet with Alfred and with Mr. Lowell at the Gourmet Club “on a matter of vital importance.” Evans Dick turned up and was lectured by both Lowells on his daughter’s immodesty; she had, it was charged, been visiting Lowell in his rooms at Harvard, without a
chaperone
. That same evening Mr. Lowell followed up his lecture with a note:

On December 27 Anne’s father wrote back to Mr. Lowell, denying that there had been any impropriety: “Cal and Anne both tell me this, and I believe them…. [I] wonder whether there is not some person trying to make a situation already bad enough—even worse.”
18

Next day, Anne gave Mr. Lowell’s note to her “fiancé.” Thirty years later, Lowell recollected his response as follows:

In Anne Dick’s account, Lowell instructed her to drive to
Marl-borough
Street and then wait in the car “for a minute.” Fifteen minutes later he reappeared and told her that he had handed the note back to his father and then struck him to the ground. He had stormed out of the house with Mr. Lowell still half prostrate on the floor: 

For Charlotte, who had witnessed the beating from the top of the stairs, this was
the
crisis: her son had finally gone mad. Frank Parker, who called at Marlborough Street the next day, found Mrs. Lowell “raging like a tiger”:

Charlotte’s first outraged reaction was to contact Merrill Moore in order to have Lowell committed to an institution. It is impossible to know how serious she was in this, but Moore is to be given credit for taking a placatory line. His first move was to persuade Lowell to apologize to his father. This wasn’t difficult. Lowell was already remorseful and had told Frank Parker that the blow had been
provoked
by Mr. Lowell’s description of Anne Dick as “no better than
a whore.” He hadn’t “meant” to do it.
22
By March 24 he was able to write to Aunt Sarah Cotting:

And on the same day he wrote to his grandmother Winslow:

With the temperature thus reduced, Moore suggested that Lowell be put in touch with Ford Madox Ford, who was at Harvard on his way to visit Moore’s friend Allen Tate in Tennessee. The idea was that Lowell should meet a “real writer,” and if Ford agreed to help, perhaps some arrangement could be arrived at by which Lowell could be separated from his parents without abandoning either his academic prospects or his ambitions as a poet. Such an arrangement would also entail a separation from Anne Dick. The Lowells agreed, and a cocktail party was held at the Dicks’ house. Frank Parker and Blair Clark were detailed to round up the local poets and to make themselves agreeable to Ford. As a social event the party was a flop. When Clark introduced himself to Ford, he was told that Ford spoke only in French; and Parker committed the supreme faux pas by dismissing the work of Gaudier-Brzeska as “admirable but
trivial
.” But Lowell fared rather better. After the party, Ford
announced
that Lowell was “the most intelligent person he’d met in Boston.” In later years Lowell modestly added, “I think that was more his low opinion of Boston than his high opinion of me.”
25
In any event, Ford agreed to give assurances to A. Lawrence Lowell that the young malcontent had enough seriousness to warrant the kind of apprenticeship Moore had in mind. It was agreed that
Lowell
travel South with Moore in the spring of 1937.

En route, Lowell wrote to Anne Dick from a hotel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: he told her that Merrill Moore might be willing to “take her on” as “a voluntary patient.” Moore also intended to improve the quality of her social life:

The sneakily whimsical but condescending tone adopted here was to become familiar to Lowell’s Southern friends throughout his later life. It is unlikely, though, that he was feeling specially satirical when he first arrived at Allen Tate’s “Benfolly,” in Clarksville, in April 1937. A fugitive from the victorious North, he was seeking refuge with the Fugitives; and Allen Tate was perhaps the most lordly and dogmatic of that heavily embattled group. Tate had helped found the
Fugitive
magazine (with John Crowe Ransom, his professor at Vanderbilt, and Robert Penn Warren, his room-mate at the same university); he had contributed to Agrarian manifestos, such as
I
’
ll
Take
My
Stand
and
Who
Owns
America
;
he had written biographies of Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis. If Ransom was the Southern writers’ spiritual chief, Tate was their unflagging, impetuous polemicist. For Tate, to have captured a Lowell from
Boston was almost a political victory. Lowell viewed such postures as mere “themes” or “foibles”;
2
for him the pilgrimage was wholly literary: it was not Tate’s secessionist fervor that had drawn him down to Tennessee, it was his status as an international man of letters. Tate and Ransom, in Lowell’s mind, connected America with the exhilaratingly convinced narrowness of European
modernism
. Ransom had studied at Cambridge, was admired by T. S. Eliot. Tate had served his time in Greenwich Village in the mid-twenties, and then in Paris and London from 1928 to 1930:

As to the Southernism, Ransom and Tate’s regional self-
consciousness
simply had the effect of intensifying Lowell’s sense of his own significance; it led him to “discover what I had never known. I too was part of a legend. I was Northern, disembodied, a Platonist, a Puritan, an abolitionist.”
4

Evidence of this legendary status was provided shortly after
Lowell
’s arrival in Tennessee. Part of Merrill Moore’s plan for Lowell had been that if his trip South was a success, he might switch from Harvard to Vanderbilt to study under Ransom. With this possibility in mind, Lowell attended some of Ransom’s poetry classes at
Vanderbilt
during what was left of the academic year. In May, though, Ransom was offered a handsomely paid job as head of the English Department at Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio. Vanderbilt refused to match Kenyon’s offer, and Ransom, perhaps piqued by this, was publicly toying with the idea of abandoning the South. To Tate, this was unthinkable, and he at once fired off an open letter to the local newspaper—a letter which, in the end, had the effect of making it impossible for Vanderbilt to keep its negotiations with Ransom on a discreet and friendly basis. In the short term, though, it stirred a merry row. And for Lowell the letter flatteringly implied that in the eyes of the South he was more than just “a torn cat, [who] was taken in when I needed help.”
5
His presence in Tennessee was offered as a significant measure of Ransom’s national renown:

The following week, Lowell did in fact travel to Kenyon with Ransom. Ransom had proposed that should he take the job, then Lowell should enroll at Kenyon in the fall. Lowell wrote to his mother that “the conditions would be almost ideal.”
7

During the first month after his break with Boston, Lowell
returned
home twice. “The atmosphere seemed less strained and more sympathetic” than before.
8
Both parents adopted a cautiously polite approach, taking pains not to seem either interfering or indifferent. Evidently, they were resigned to whatever prospects Lowell might eventually decide on. Mr. Lowell still had hopes that his son would graduate from Harvard, but for the moment he was keeping these hopes to himself. Lowell may have extended the olive branch to his family, but he could as easily snatch it back. This much is clear from the letter he wrote to Charlotte just before setting off on his trip to Kenyon:

Aside from being exasperated by the letter’s pompous tone, the Lowells would certainly have noticed that Bobby still could not prevent himself from balancing each tentative compliment with a solemn admonition. Even so, a wobbly truce had been achieved, and the parents were not going to be the first to wreck it.

And in this, Merrill Moore continued to be the sturdy
go-between
, not only in his repeated praise of Tate and Ransom, but in offering to handle all the small but potentially disruptive
practicalities
. Moore, for instance, arranged for his friend Milton Starr to act as Lowell’s Southern banker. Mr. Lowell could thus
grumblingly
hand over his son’s allowance to Moore; Moore could then mail it to Starr, and Lowell would remain protected from any direct money transactions with his family. As Lowell later remarked, “For my Father money was the oxygen he survived on. Spending and even using money made him tired.”
10

Moore’s other charitable gesture may well have been less selfless than it seemed. He invited Charlotte to take a part-time job in his office; her tasks were mainly secretarial, but after a time Moore allowed her to “take on” a few of his milder “cases.” Apparently, her brisk approach to mental illness could now and then jolt
self-pitying
society ladies into health. Lowell snootily approved of his mother’s new career, feeling it to be “more lasting than needles and
lampshades”—though here again he felt he should remind her “that any occupation in order to be sustaining requires hard work and discipline.”
11

*

In spite of Tate’s politicking, and in spite of a student petition organized by Randall Jarrell (who was just completing his final year at Vanderbilt), Ransom finally decided for Kenyon. It wasn’t simply the money or Kenyon’s offer of a rent-free campus house. Ransom had fought one or two losing battles against the gradual
liberalization
of the Vanderbilt curriculum, and he had no taste for the fairly heavy administrative load that his professorship entailed. Kenyon would give him time to write, and a teaching brief vague enough for him to do more or less what he wanted. He also knew that Jarrell, along with a few of his brighter undergraduates, would follow him to Kenyon.

As soon as Ransom had made the decision, Lowell set about organizing his summer. In July and August he would follow Ford and Tate to two writers’ conferences that they had signed up for, and he would enroll at Kenyon in the fall. In the meantime he would stay in Tennessee. Ford—together with his mistress, Janice Biala, and his secretary, who was in fact Biala’s sister-in-law—was now installed at the Tates’ house for a two-month stay, and it seemed only sensible to Lowell that he should be as close as possible to his new mentors. He asked Tate if he could lodge at Benfolly until the writers’ conferences began. Tate gave him a polite brush-off; the house was so crowded, he said, that any new visitor would have to pitch a tent on the lawn. Lowell, with “keen, idealistic, adolescent heedlessness,” took this as a command: “A few days later, I returned with an olive Sears-Roebuck-Nashville umbrella tent. I stayed three months.”
12

Lowell parked his tent under a lotus tree, and with barnyard stock meandering around him—“occasionally scratching the tent side or pawing the mosquito net”
13
—could not have felt more thoroughly agrarian. There were occasions too when he was glad not to be a full member of the household. Ford was in a grumpy mood most of the time, and there was a running dispute over Tate’s fierce guardianship of the water supply. It was a brutally hot summer, and when the cistern ran dry, Tate blamed Ford and his entourage for their too profligate flushing of the toilets. Ford retaliated by
attempting 
to build a dew pond. He sank a bathtub in a nearby meadow, filled it up with twigs, and was baffled and outraged when it failed to produce a drop of liquid. There were also grumbles about the Southern cooking, which Ford loathed, and intermittent squabbles about politics; both Biala and her sister-in-law had left-wing
attachments
and didn’t take kindly to Tate’s magisterial pronouncements on behalf of the old Southern aristocracy: “The South of course should have seceded, it would have been better for the North.
Communism
is just a ruse to maintain the New York supremacy.”
14

Despite all this, work did get done. “It’s awful here,” wrote Janice Biala to a friend in New York:

Allen Tate was writing
The
Fathers
,
Mrs. Tate (Caroline Gordon) was working on
The
Garden
of
Adonis
, and Lowell was
experimenting
, on the Tate model, with “grimly unromantic poems—
organized
hard and classical.” He had sent a few of these to periodicals and had them rejected, but “I’m in no hurry for recognition. I have no doubt of my ability to produce in the end.”
16
The obsessed and frantic industry of Benfolly did not admit of failure or self-doubt and was a perfect match for Lowell’s own rather self-consciously ferocious dedication. He wrote to his mother at the beginning of July: