Robert Lowell: A Biography (7 page)

Lowell’s hopes of “happiness” no longer seemed to include
marriage
to Anne Dick. Frank Parker had organized an expedition to the South, bringing with him Anne and “the boys,” Harry Brown, Blair and Bill Clark. The trip was not a success. Lowell was
unresponsive
, and Anne had to content herself with the attentions of Parker and Bill Clark. Without any explicit declarations, the
message
from the master’s tent was that the master was now living in
a different world. Blair Clark recalls: “I still don’t understand the theory of the trip. Part of it was to wind up the Anne Dick affair, but not in any neat and orderly way.”
18
Whatever the theory, the effect certainly was that the affair became wound up. Anne was quietly acquiescent; after all, she barely knew what she had lost: “I guess Cal cared for me—loved me, as he would say—for about 10 days, the first 10 days of our engagement.”
19

*

In July 1937 the Tate ménage transferred itself to Olivet College in Michigan. The Tates, Ford, Janice and Lowell squeezed into the Tates’ car, but at the end of the first day’s drive Ford was so
exhausted
that he and Janice continued the journey by train. By this stage, Ford had had enough of the Tates’ argumentative intensity: “consorting with the Tates is like living with intellectual
desperadoes
in the Sargoza [
sic
]
sea.”
20
He was also nervous of Lowell; Lowell had written to Richard Eberhart earlier in the summer: “I am not on speaking terms with Mr. Ford, the explanation given being that he is afraid I will write memoirs 30 or 40 years from now in which I will describe him as an over-stout, gouty old gentleman deluded by the poetry of Christina Rossetti and potentialities of the ideogram.”
21
Ford’s own version was: “That boy will write
something
terrible about me one day.”
22

At Olivet, Lowell listened admiringly to lectures by Ford, Tate and Katherine Anne Porter—“all of whom,” wrote Lowell to his mother, “I think would be numbered among the score of living writers worth reading”—and he showed around his poems: “
Everyone
I have seen here appears to be convinced that should I keep on as I have been doing I should be a really good poet, and good poets are rare.”
23

The “rarity” of the good poet was one theme on which Ford and Tate could be depended to agree. Ford’s lectures at Olivet, for example, were rambling, anecdotal, and now and then inaudible, but invariably they communicated “Ford’s conviction of the sacred character of the writer’s function, the unqualified dedication it
required
of anyone committed to it.” Robie Macauley, a student at Olivet in 1937 (and another who was to follow Ransom to Kenyon), commented: “This is a very subversive idea and, if it were taught clearly enough, it would probably … reduce all creative writing classes … to a couple of students here and there.”
24
Of all possible
subversive notions, none could have been more congenial to Robert Lowell.

From Olivet, Lowell followed Ford to the University of Colorado at Boulder, where the conference starred John Peale Bishop,
Sherwood
Anderson and Ransom. The main attraction, though, was to be Ford’s formal lecture on “The Literary Life”; and this proved to be a symbolic enactment, almost, of the truly serious man’s
separateness
from the uncomprehending mass. Lowell certainly saw it in this way:

Ford’s biographer, Arthur Mizener, has modified this description by pointing out that the Boulder auditorium held only six hundred and fifty, that Ford refused to use a microphone even though his voice had been weakened by a recent illness, and that much of the lecture was a description of his relations with Jozef Korzeniowski, whom most people failed to identify as Joseph Conrad. As to the mass walkout, Mizener says:

For Lowell, however, Boulder did boast some local seriousness; among the assembled literary hopefuls he was particularly struck by Jean Stafford, a graduate student who had taken her master’s degree there, and who had been delegated by the college to act as receptionist for the visitors. She herself had not yet published, but she was the daughter of a well-known writer of Western yarns (he called himself Jack Wonder but was sometimes known as Ben
Delight
), and she had been born and brought up in cowboy country. “As soon as I could,” though, “I hotfooted it across the Rocky Mountains and across the Atlantic Ocean,”
27
so that by the time Lowell met her she had spent two years at a German university and was sparklingly eloquent on the “European scene.” She knew the latest on Auden and Isherwood; she was witty and attractive. Lowell was impressed, and although nothing developed between
them during his eleven days at Boulder, Jean promised to write to him at Kenyon in the fall.

Ford’s fear of future biographical barbs did not prevent him from taking Lowell back to Olivet at the end of August to serve “as a sort of conscripted secretary … taking dictation in the mornings, and typing it out afternoons.”
28
Ford was desperately trying to meet a deadline for
The
March
of
Literature
and did not mind if a few lines of the manuscript were refashioned by his young admirer; he did briefly panic, though, when he heard a (Stafford-inspired) rumor from Boulder that Lowell was planning to be on the boat when he and Biala eventually returned to Europe. His Boulder informant, Natalie Davison, tried to calm him with some commonsense advice: “If I were in your boots, and he succeeded in his little plan, I am sure I would push him off the rail before we reached Cherbourg.”
29
Lowell seems to have been unaware of the small dramas of
discomfiture
that tended to erupt around him; so far as he was concerned, his work for Ford was all part of the essential apprenticeship he had embarked on: “As he is a very great master of English prose the training is very valuable and I would not want to miss the
opportunity
.”
30

On September 12, Lowell returned to Nashville to prepare himself for enrollment at Kenyon on the fourteenth. As he saw it, the initiation stage was over; he had found his true masters and the way ahead was finally uncluttered:

The bemused response from Boston simply underscored the victory Lowell knew he had already won:

Ransom’s arrival at Kenyon was viewed with some resentment by a proportion of the forty-strong and fairly close-knit faculty: rumors of his inflated salary had been “confirmed” by a story about the Vanderbilt controversy that had appeared in
Time
magazine, and also a popular junior instructor had been removed in order to make room for this Southern interloper. The Agrarians were thought of by some Kenyon Northerners as a somewhat cranky, perhaps even near-fascist Southern sect, and it was some time before Ransom’s courtly and benign manner, and his immense conscientiousness, persuaded his new colleagues that he was no reactionary firebrand, nor even a grand poet come to exploit the idealism of the college’s new president.

At first, though, he did feel isolated and was glad to have “his” students to support him. He arranged for Lowell and Jarrell to share a second-floor bedroom in the large campus house he had been given and was grateful for their company. They are, he wrote to Tate, “both good fellows in extremely different ways. Randall has gone physical and collegiate with a rush: tennis is the occasion…. Cal is sawing wood and getting out to all his college engagements in a businesslike but surly manner.”
1

Ransom’s isolation at Kenyon didn’t last too long; any personal opposition gradually fell away as people got to know him, and his own involvement with the college became instantly more deep and durable with the founding—in 1938—of the
Kenyon
Review.
A
literary
magazine of international pretensions (it aimed to fill the gap left by the demise of
The
Criterion
), the
Review
enabled Ransom to transform Kenyon from a sleepy Midwest backwater into an
acknowledged
center of high-powered literary bustle.

At first, however, his separateness from the faculty was thoroughly congenial to his disciples. For Lowell, certainly, it meant that he could legitimately keep himself to one side of the college-boy routine. He was still noticeably the wild man: “
loud-humoured
, dirty and frayed, I needed to be encouraged to comb my hair, tie my shoe-laces and say goodbye when leaving a house.”
2
His tactics on the football field were as before: “the man of the Kenyon squad who played sideways into his own team-mates, but strong as a bull, spilling them over, [he] never won a game.”
3
And the room he shared with Jarrell was soon reduced to such chaos that it was only a matter of time before “alternative accommodation” had to be sought.
4

The “alternative accommodation” turned out in fact to be the perfect move for Lowell. Douglass House, a “carpenter-Gothic” construction in the center of the Kenyon campus, was earmarked as the ideal “isolation block” for Ransom’s studious, eccentric
followers
. In 1938 Lowell moved in (after an interlude lodging in the house of another Kenyon professor: “There was a certain
unpleasantness
and Cal was asked to leave”
5
) and shared a room with Peter Taylor, a student of Ransom’s whom Lowell had briefly met between classes at Vanderbilt. As Taylor has recalled, Douglass House proved to be “the ideal thing…. Kenyon was a very small school and a rich boys’ school, and we were rather out of things. People lived in fraternities and dormitories and we didn’t want to do that.”
6

The eleven residents of Douglass House—with Jarrell also living in as a chaperon or “housemother”—had a common interest in Kenyon. Each of them wanted to be a writer, and each considered himself to be a “Ransom man.” John Thompson, Robie Macauley, David Macdowell—and, of course, Jarrell and Taylor—were to become Lowell’s lifelong friends; others—and conveniently
Douglass
House provided Lowell with the essential raw material for his compulsive teasing—remained figures of fun in his automythology for years to come. Douglass House offered Lowell what he had never really had: a small, manageable community inhabited by gods, fools and equals—and set at a superior distance from the dull,
conforming
herd:

And even in the bohemian set Lowell was considered to be
something
special: “he was usually the most slovenly and ragged looking of us all. He really went about in tatters, sometimes even with the soles hanging loose from his shoes.”
8
Peter Taylor, his room-mate at Douglass House, noticed that in his closet Lowell always kept his “good” set of clothes—a suit, a hat, a pair of shoes. These had been bought from Brooks Brothers by his mother, and Lowell made sure that they were kept in mint condition.

Taylor’s accounts of rooming with Lowell are a mixture of affection and recalled exhaustion (not unlike Clark’s and Parker’s recollections of him at Nantucket). Lowell would read aloud to Taylor late into the night, and at one point recruited him as a rather passive co-editor of an anthology of English poetry. There were occasional quarrels, usually about when to put the lights out, but only one real fight. Lowell now and then teased Taylor about his interest in Catholicism; he called it “a religion for Irish servant girls”—remembering here his mother’s advice to an Irish maid who wanted to become Episcopalian: “No, you have your church and we have ours and it’s better to keep it that way.” And now and then Taylor would get exasperated by his friend’s grand-scale untidiness. Lowell’s bed was surrounded by a tumbledown but ever-mounting wall of books, dirty socks, letters from Boston, football boots and drafts of poems; when he’d read a book, he would simply toss it onto the pile and grab another. It could not be long, surely, before Taylor’s own side of the room became
engulfed
by stray Lowelliana.
9

There was also the business of the bears. Lowell had dreamed up a world peopled by “bear-characters”—or “berts,” as he called them—and his favorite off-duty sport was to invent bear-dramas or
bear-parables
, which incorporated caricatures of friends and relatives. Each friend would be given a bear-name and an appropriate
bear-voice
. Lowell himself seems to have been the chief bear, known as Arms of the Law (the hero of his “horrid” childhood “spoof”). John Thompson remembers that Lowell

Peter Taylor—whose bear-name was “Sub”—takes a more
charitable
view, simply pleading that “There are things which can be funny between friends at a particular time, and Cal’s bears were that way.”
11
Lowell seems not to have been nervous that his bear-game might be boring for his friends; being made into a bear was, after all, a mark of his friendship and regard. It would have been a sour companion who didn’t even pretend to go along with it. For Taylor, as his room-mate, there was consolation in reminding himself that he “never felt Eliot’s Practical Cats were very funny.”
12

But these were details. Taylor was, in his own way, as intent on self-improvement as his more overtly fierce and dedicated
roommate
. Taylor wrote fiction; Lowell wrote poetry. There was no rivalry, and no leader-disciple arrangement as with Clark and Parker. The two of them were allies in a huge, world-altering
adventure
:

“And how sad and serious we were,” wrote Taylor. “We didn’t hesitate to say what we wanted to be and what we felt we must have in order to become that. We wanted to be writers….”
14

*

Robert Lowell had come to Kenyon knowing “more about Dryden and Milton than any other student,”
15
but such accomplishment soon seemed narrow and too recent. On Ransom’s advice, he
decided
to take classics as his major, and of all the bits of advice that Lowell was bombarded with throughout his adolescence, this may well have been the bit that mattered. Certainly, he was always to be grateful to Ransom for setting him tasks large enough to match his energy and (at least some of) his youthful arrogance:

Lowell wrote this to Ransom in 1961. And at Ransom’s death in 1974 Lowell again named him as the most decisive of all guiding hands:

Lowell’s tributes to Mr. Ransom (as Ransom continued to be called by his students long after they had left the college) were always to a rather remote, avuncular presence. They had little of the nervous edge, the intimacy, that went into his relationship with Tate or Jarrell. If Ransom was the wise and kindly uncle, and Tate the revered but comically exasperating father figure, then Jarrell was the exciting older brother: possibly the first person of more or less his own generation that Lowell genuinely held in awe. Not all the late-night chat at Douglass House was about Henry James or Homer; a good deal of it was about Jarrell—his tennis, the girlfriend he had in town, his sometimes scathing view of Ransom, and also his conceit, his intransigence, his primness: “Randall never in his life used a four-letter word. He couldn’t stand a joke about sex. He wouldn’t have it.”
18

The tough guys in Douglass House found Jarrell hard to take—two of them even wrecked his newly done-up room one night—but everyone was agreed about his talents. “He was very bright—
preternaturally
bright. He knew everything,” recalls John Thompson (who found Jarrell
very
hard to take). Lowell, though, never
wholeheartedly
joined in the Jarrell-baiting. He could see what the others
meant and was prepared to gossip and to tease, but he never lost sight of Jarrell’s worth—or usefulness. Peter Taylor remembers:

Lowell published half a dozen poems in the college magazine during his two and a half years at Kenyon, but the first one of these did not appear until December 1938. In his first year he continued to solicit the good opinion of Richard Eberhart, although his regard for Eberhart’s homely pieties was beginning to crumble in the shadow of the New Criticism’s care for detail. In November 1937 Eberhart sent Lowell a group of his own poems and was shocked to find that his ex-pupil had become confident enough to issue a few lessons of his own: “Your generalities are commonplace … If you want to write poems that will outlast the age you must condense.”
20
Eberhart, much piqued, attempts in his reply to outpatronize the upstart. Only the immature, he says, have ambitions to “outlast the age”; wise types like himself simply aim “to get through life without pain.” Lowell, he suggests, has been spoiled by Tate’s good opinion and will probably “peter out by 25”—but that need not worry anyone: “You’ll always be able to relapse into the soft arms of your Harvard background. Your name will probably get you down
before
it will set you up.”
21
Lowell wrote back in icy terms:

Lowell continued to send poems to Eberhart over the next three months (in January 1938 he sent “Elegy,” “Epitaph,” “Maternal Disorder,” “Refusal,” “Narcissus” and “The Flame Coloured Satin of Lust”). At best, Eberhart found them “so-so”; at worst,
repugnant
: “You have a hard lesson to learn,” he wrote, “that poetry is
supposed to please.”
23
For Lowell, this kind of cozy motto was opposed to everything he was beginning to believe about what poetry is “supposed to be.” It was clear to him that he had already outgrown Eberhart.