Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
Robert Lowell: A Biography (65 page)
Poor Harriet emerges from these passages as one of the most unpleasant child figures in history … her cloying moral virtue. It is therefore difficult to participate in the poet’s vacillation, for Lizzie and Harriet seem to get no more than they deserve. And since these are, after all, real people, recently having lived through the crisis described, one begins to question Lowell’s tone.
17
This piece infuriated Hardwick: now, it seemed, the sixteen-
year-old
Harriet was to be morally examined in the intellectual weeklies. “I never want to hear from you again,” she told Lowell,
18
and she wrote letters to his English and American publishers denouncing them as “contemptible.” Robert Giroux recalls: “She said I should have checked out permissions. I hadn’t, for the simple reason I had no idea they were her letters. It seemed to me a strictly personal matter between him and her. I hadn’t known until after
Life
Studies
was published that “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage” made use of private letters or conversation, and no one objected.”
19
Lowell
wrote her calming, hopeful letters: “Most of the hurting reviews … will look very dim by September…. I’m sorry I brought this on you, the ghastly transient voices, the lights”;
20
“I can’t defend myself too much, or anyway shouldn’t at this moment if I could. Nothing in the books was dishonestly intended…. I think I am living through many of your feelings. I suffer.”
21
Sensibly,
Hardwick
decided to take a vacation at Lake Como. As for Harriet, she had been at Milgate while the worst of the American reviews were coming out, and by the end of July had set off with a friend to bicycle around in Ireland; according to Lowell, she thought “the trouble was over an imaginary real estate dispute—long since settled in Lizzie’s favor.”
22
In Britain, Lowell claimed,
The
Dolphin
was “just another book of poems,” and to Blair Clark he wrote in injured tones:
I have hardly had one real, uninsulting review in America, but many of the English are all that I could ask—comparisons with Yeats’ last poems. Well, that’s secondary—I feel rather like one of the black scorched grasshoppers in Hemingway’s fishing story—burned by notoriety.
23
In the same letter, he discusses his plans for returning to Harvard in September; he had rented a house in Brookline and would resume his old teaching pattern (Elizabeth Bishop had been filling in for him since 1970). On August 31 he wrote to William Alfred:
It does seem strange returning. The summer tho quiet has been
worrying
. I am afraid relations with Lizzie are broken off; at least I haven’t heard from her for about two months. The reviews fanned the fire, but I now think the exposure of publication was bound to do it…. I do think the business is blowing away. Was it Calvin or Harry Levin that said acting is a choice of evils. It so often is in little things (that makes them so irritating) then every so often something big is. I must have been right to publish. How could I know?
24
Even so, there was a certain exhilaration in the idea of reappearing at the scene of his most recent crime; he was looking forward to “students who talk,” he said, to his “long religious and gossipy talks” with Alfred, and to the loyal companionship of Frank Bidart. On September 7 he and his English family would arrive in Boston: “weary, plane-squashed, all ages, hardly able to speak our
language
.”
25
*
In Lowell’s August 31 letter to William Alfred there is a note of both exhaustion and relief, as if a reckless and turbulent chapter of his life had been heroically survived. He had left his country, he had signed away his wealth, he had risked the condemnation of his dearest friends: the worst, he now might think, was over—and literally “the worst.” Even Lowell could not imagine misdemeanors grander or more comprehensive than those already lived through, or inflicted. Now he could count the profit and the loss in the “familiar air” of Harvard:
The summer’s end and the month’s end, and now the English heat wave has so far retired that my hands are still and cold as I write. In a week we will be in Brookline. Harvard seems a recovered universe; if I looked in the mirror, I imagine I would have the white beard of father time.
I don’t know why I am writing you this way. From not having written verse perhaps.
26
For nearly seven years Lowell had written only “sonnets”; between September and December 1973 he wrote nine poems in a relaxed, almost meandering free verse:
27
“single poems in short free verse lines about being 56–57.”
28
They were also about returning from exile (indeed, one of them was a rewriting of a poem from
Lord
Weary
’
s
Castle
called “Exile’s Return”); the poet sees himself as Ulysses “circling” the geography of the life he left behind:
He circles as a shark circles
visibly in the window—
flesh-vain, sore-eyed, scar-vain,
a vocational killer
foretasting the apogee of mayhem,
breaking water to strike his wake.
The colors in these new poems are autumnal: “firm brown and yellow, / the all-weather color for death”; “I cannot read everything I’ve written, / it’s a greenless brown”; “things wrong / clothe
summer
/ in gold leaf.” And in all of them there is an elegiac, penitential note:
Past fifty, we learn
with surprise and a sense
of suicidal absolution
that what we intended and failed
could never have happened—
and must be done better.
He writes to his parents, as if for one last time attempting to resolve their ancient quarrels. In “To Mother” he writes:
I’ve come home a third time to your Boston,
I almost lifted the phone to dial you
forgetting you have no dial….
Your exaggerating humor,
the opposite of deadpan
and so unfunny to a son, is mine now …
It has taken the years since you died to discover
you are as human as I am….
And there are two linked poems: “What We Were” (a monologue spoken by his father) and “Before We Are,” his own middle-aged address to Sheridan—“Three ages are a moment, / the same child in the same picture, / he, I, you, / chockablock, one stamp….” To his old friend Peter Taylor he addresses “The Afterlife,” which, in a letter to Blair Clark, he rightly calls “about the grandest” of the group. In this poem the drastically shortened lines seem, and are probably meant to seem, a symptom of the poet’s shortened breath, his diminished aspirations:
Southcall—
a rival couple
two Tennessee cardinals
in green December outside my window
dart and tag and mate—
young as they want to be.
I’m not;
my second fatherhood
and four years in England
have made my friends and connections
twenty years older.
We are dangerously happy,
our book-fed faces
streak like the red birds,
dart unstably
ears cocked to catch
the first shy whisper of deafness.
This one year killed
Pound, Wilson, Marianne Moore and Auden;
the daughters and nieces lose their bloom,
the inheritors grow
large and red on middle-age,
like red roses
nodding, nodding, nodding.
Peter, in our boyish years,
30 to 45,
when Cupid was still the Christ of love’s religion,
time stood on its hands.
Sleight-of-hand.
Of the deaths that Lowell lists here, the one that mattered most to him was Pound’s, and in January 1973 he had spoken at a Pound memorial gathering in New York:
It’s not my duty as fellow poet, critic and his friend to defend or clear Pound’s record. I can’t see him as a bad man, except in the ways we all are. I do see him as a generous man to other artists, and this in a way none of us will touch. The Broadcast smears seem, if not acts of madness, at least acts of dementia and obsession….
29
In the same speech he recalled his last meeting with Pound in Rapallo, in March 1965 (when he himself had been fleeing to Egypt in the wake of the Vija Vetra upheaval). Pound was “emaciated, neat in blacks and whites, silver beard, he looked like the covers of one of his own books, or like an El Greco, some old mural, aristocratic and flaking.”
He held up his blotched, thinned away hands, and said, as if he were joking at them, “The worms are getting to me.” Later, I must have said something about Hamilton or Pennsylvania College, where he had
studied
. He said “Yes, I started with a swelled head and end with swelled feet.” He was thinking of Oedipus. I said, “You are one of the few living men, who has walked through Purgatory.” Watching me like a cat, and catching my affectation and affection, he answered, “Didn’t Frost say you’d say anything once—for the hell of it?”
30
Pound was almost the last of Lowell’s revered “elders.” A year before, there had been the suicide of John Berryman, certainly the last of Lowell’s “generically” doomed generation. Berryman had jumped to his death (aged fifty-seven) from a bridge over the
Mississippi
near the University of Minnesota. The papers said: “Mr.
Berryman
apparently left no note, and the only identification on his body was his name on a pair of glasses and a blank check.” A malicious joke (said by many to have originated with Auden) was that Berryman
did
leave a note. It read simply: “Your move, Cal.”
If Lowell never heard the joke, he did respond to the spirit of it, and in his elegy for Berryman he wrote:
I used to want to live
to avoid your elegy.
Yet really we had the same life,
the generic one
our generation offered….
We asked to be obsessed with writing,
and we were….
You got there first.
Just the other day,
I discovered how we differ—humor …
even in this last
Dream
Song,
to mock your catlike flight
from home to classes—
to leap from the bridge.
31
In an obituary article in the
New
York
Review
Lowell says of
Berryman
that in recent years “as he became more inspired and famous and drunk, more and more John Berryman, he became less good company and more a happening,” and he describes their last
meeting
in New York:
I met John last a year or so ago at Christmas in New York. He had been phoning poems and invitations to people at three in the morning, and I felt a weariness about seeing him. Since he had let me sleep uncalled, I guess he felt numbness to me. We met one noon during the taxi strike at the Chelsea Hotel, dusty with donated, avant-garde constructs, and dismal with personal recollections, Bohemia, and the death of Thomas. There was no cheerful restaurant within walking distance, and the seven best bad ones were closed. We settled for the huge, varnished
unwelcome
of an empty cafeteria-bar. John addressed me with an awareness of his dignity, as if he were Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth’s, emphatic without pertinence, then brownly inaudible.
His remarks seemed guarded, then softened into sounds that only he could understand or hear. At first John was ascetically hung over, at the end we were high without assurance, and speechless. I said, “When will I see you again?” meaning, in the next few days before I flew to England.
John said, “Cal, I was thinking through lunch that I’ll never see you again.” I wondered how in the murk of our conversation I had hurt him, but he explained that his doctor had told him one more drunken binge would kill him. Choice? It is blighting to know that this fear was the beginning of eleven months of abstinence … half a year of prolific rebirth, then suicide.
32
For four years Lowell had felt himself to be reborn, but by 1974 the persistent obsession is with death. The comparison of
The
Dol
phin
with the last poems of Yeats had been both heartening and chilling. Lowell had grown his white hair long, and friends were disturbed by his willingness to
seem
old: his white mane unkempt, his movements effortful, his clothes those of a man who has stopped caring how he looks. In spite of all this, though, Lowell monitored his own health and the health of his friends with a kind of fatalistic dread: “As we get older,” he wrote to Frank Bidart, “we are incurables.” Peter Taylor had had a heart attack, and in the first months of 1974 there was “a deluge of strokes, Hannah Arendt in Scotland, Lillian Hellman in Paris, Frank [Parker] in Cambridge. I’m afraid the strain of giving up cigarettes is
suicidal
.”
In January 1974 Lowell and his family returned to England, and Lowell revised his new poems for magazine publication in the spring. In April he visited America again, for a reading tour of Southern colleges—“Vanderbilt, Charlottesville, South Carolina, Washington, almost all the south”—and when he returned to
London
, there was yet another death, this time unsettlingly close to home: “When we got back we discovered that Israel [Citkovitz] did not answer his telephone. The fire brigade broke into his flat because the police refused and he was found dead in his bed.”
33
Citkovitz had had a stroke earlier in the year and had been partly
paralyzed
and in the hospital for weeks; Lowell had seen him there and had found him “Ten years older in an hour.” A fond,
low-key
elegy called “In the Ward” has an almost conspiratorial ring: