Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
When the Lowells left for Europe, Merrill Moore was asked to serve as Lowell’s acting guardian and he seems to have played a
skillful double role. In June 1939, for example, shortly after a visit to Boston by Ransom, he wrote to Lowell’s father:
Please do not worry about him or his problems. I am only too happy to do this and act in loco parentis. Apparently Ransom’s visit did a lot to calm them all down and keep them busy. I wrote Charlotte some notes about Ransom and what he told me, particularly about Cal’s plans. I think all will go smoothly. Ransom expects Cal to come right back to Kenyon and tells me that Jean will not be welcome there of course. He said it in a polite way.
39
In July, though, he writes to Lowell:
I resent your father’s putting me in the role of holding the purse strings. I would not want this position and had he not surreptitiously done it on the eve of his departure to Europe I would have refused. As it so happens the information about it came to me in a letter the day after he left Boston. I did not have an opportunity to suggest other
arrangements
.
40
Moore goes on to describe Mr. Lowell as “relatively hopeless … problem child no. 1”; he feels that the “flight to Europe” is a mistake, a “running away from things,” and he fears too that Lowell’s father is heading for serious financial trouble: “It is possible that you and your mother can do something to prevent further dissipation of his property.”
Lowell was responsive to Moore’s man-to-man approach and
particularly
liked the suggestion that it was the parents who needed guidance and mature goodwill:
My family are still a triffle [
sic
]
difficult, but I think with your aid and good will everything will go on amicably…. the past year has been the most enlightning [
sic
]
I have ever spent, so I am confident that given anything like an even break, I shall in the future achieve things of considerable value. By an even break I mean chiefly to be able to act without the autocratic guidance of friends and parents.
My carreer [
sic
],
I hope, will be exceptional rather than queer. That is I have become more and more aware of the need for an at least surface conformity, dressing inconspicuously and neatly, living by a stable economy, flaunting [
sic
]
convention by penetration rather than by
eccentricity
.
Poetry depends on beauty, passion and comprehension, but even here the above remarks on conduct have a preliminary
appropriateness
.
41
As a postscript, Lowell asks Moore for the address of Milton Starr, the friend who had handled his finances in 1937; he wants to thank Starr for a summer invitation; but as if further to persuade Moore of his unremitting seriousness, he adds, “Also I feel that in this era of accumulating inhumanity every artist and thinker should do all he can to preserve and maintain the rights of the Jews.” Moore was suitably respectful: “I appreciate your attitude toward
economy
and dealing with conventions. After all, it does have to be dealt with,” and “I have the same feeling about the Jews as you have.”
42
Moore’s main interest, though, seems to have been to impress Charlotte Lowell with his astute handling of a tricky situation: thus to Charlotte he represents Lowell as volatile and in need of sensitive manipulation. Towards the end of July he writes to her that Lowell has returned to Boston and is lodging as his guest at the Harvard Club; the letter reads like a medical report:
Yesterday, Wednesday, July 19, Cal spent the day rather quietly. He dropped into the office once or twice. I had lunch with him and
continued
to make suggestions about interesting and constructive things to do. When he is in a friendly attitude he accepts suggestions readily and easily. I told him about some interesting poetry magazines in the library and he went down in the afternoon to see them.
43
Moore also describes a lunch he has had with Lowell and Blair Clark, at which his two guests spent most of the time vigorously attacking the medical profession (possibly in relation to Jean’s
treatment
). Moore realized, or thought he realized, that “they were being unconsciously aggressive towards me.” But, he boasts, the wise physician refuses to be drawn into the trap:
In other words I accepted their aggressions and turned it [
sic
]
back to them, with sweetness and like [
sic
]
and with insight on my part. I think my insight saved the situation…. At times I see how much Cal has developed and at others I see how far he has to go…. Of course I realize that Cal is coming up for trial and that latent guilt reactions are working. That is why I am treating him with so much consideration.
44
Both Frank Parker and Blair Clark recall that there was some speculation at the time about Moore’s relationship with Charlotte Lowell, and there is evidence that over the years some intimacy did develop. In 1939, though, the letters between them focus either on “Cal’s problems” or on Charlotte’s growingly confident sense of her own psychiatric skills. Her job with Moore involved two afternoons a week “taking case records, doing therapy and prehaps [
sic
]
the Rorahach [
sic
]
teat [
sic
],” but she was always ready to lecture her employer on basic principles:
1. To make the patient feel that he can be helped, but to throw the responsibility for the case as much as possible upon the patient himself. Trying to show him the great benefits he will derive from earnest and faithful work towards this end.
2. To find the most constructive way of escape, for each particular patient and to induce him to use this way in preference to his former destructive methods.
45
Charlotte’s son might have read this with a familiar thrill of horror, but Moore was ponderously titillated. He later praised Charlotte for being marvelously unspoiled by any medical-school training:
I think you have a strength in your own character, a healthy balance in your own personality and a vigorous ego and a charming exterior
personality
that cannot be anything else but psycho-therapeutic.
46
By 1941 the exchange of letters had become more coy and whimsical—she sends him rose petals, and he sends her seashells, “for you to give away to patients whom you think might be interested in
conchology
as a hobby or as vocational therapy.”
47
By 1951 (after a visit to
The
King
and
I
), Charlotte had become Moore’s strong-willed “Anna”; and Moore himself was bizarrely self-promoted to “Yul Brynner alias the King.”
48
*
Lowell resumed at Kenyon in the fall of 1939, and one of his first tasks there was to master the art of public speaking. Kenyon made two requirements of its graduates: whatever their academic prowess, they would not be permitted a degree unless they passed tests in swimming and oratory. Swimming presented no difficulty for
Lowell
,
but—along with the other Douglass House verbalizers—he had a dread of making speeches. Peter Taylor has amusingly described what happened:
We were all shy of public speaking. So we signed up together for Mr. Black’s public-speaking course. And we were all terrible. But Cal was the worst. You had to make speeches and so we talked about everything under the sun. I remember talking about popular dances like the Bunny Hug and the Bear Trot and that sort of thing. But Cal would get up, and behind there was a blackboard, and all the time he was speaking he’d be rubbing his bottom against the blackboard. He couldn’t keep still. So he was the worst. And of course it was a delight to all of us to see each other do it.
49
According to Taylor, Lowell was so stung by these humbling
sessions
that he set about turning himself into a speaker—and not just a competent speaker, but the best: “that old New England grit and drive.” Sure enough, Lowell came out first in the class, won a twenty-five-dollar prize, and with it the right to give the valedictory address on graduation. The address itself was taken to be Lowell’s revenge on those who had made him so exert himself: it was a densely worded attack on St. Mark’s and similar schools for rich young athletes. Many of the Kenyon trustees were convinced that it was really aimed at them:
… customs are not a culture, Boston is no longer Athens. I am
emphasizing
a glaring problem, our aristocracy … has special advantages but no superior way of life. Its manners are the automatic accident of wealth.
Think of the motto of St. Mark’s:
Age
Quod
Agis.
Unlike most mottoes, Do What You Do, is insanely accurate.
Do
in our American idiom means to do one’s job and more to plug and sweat at one’s job. Do What You Do, this is a fine utilitarian prescription for man and master. A scholar before a scholarly audience, I hesitate to invoke as my symbol our great, ox-eyed Statue of Liberty, Liberty brandishing her cyclopean incandescent torch; but as runners in a great race, it is our pleasant and devout ambition—not merely to Do What We Do, not run with a painted stick—but to hand on a torch. And so it is with
aristocracies
, they must have aspirations. For all of you know that as the
Philistines
and Goths proceed in their spiritless way to dismember civilization, they will come to all the golden palaces of learning, they will come at last to Milton, Groton, St. Paul’s and St. Mark’s [all fashionable East Coast
boarding schools] and there, the students who are neither efficient nor humane nor cultured will be doing what they are doing. And the
indignant
Goths and Philistines will turn these poor drones out of the hive and there will be no old limbs, for the new blood, and the world will revert to its unwearied cycles of retrogression, advance and repetition.
50
In Boston, the Lowells were less concerned with “golden palaces of learning” than they were with the problem of What to Do About Jean Stafford. There were rumors (which reached Lowell at
Kenyon
) that Jean was being “got at” by his parents, or by
intermediaries
: that attempts were being made to persuade her to give Lowell up on the grounds that he would “go insane” if he married. Lowell was incensed:
Kenyon has an unfortunate location. Everything said in Boston blows in my ears. I might as well be sitting in Dr. Moore’s office or dining at the Chilton Club…. I beseech you to observe the negative virtues of keeping quiet.
51
Letters of this sort (written to his mother) particularly irked Mr. Lowell, whose temper was shortening as his business affairs
continued
to decline. For a brief period at the beginning of 1940, Lowell toyed with the idea of seeking a Harvard fellowship; during his Kenyon examinations he wrote to his mother asking her to “confer
right
away
with Cousin Lawrence,”
52
and in February he followed this up with a penciled note to Lawrence Lowell setting out a plan of studies:
53
Dear Cousin Lawrence:
I appear to be embarked on the turbid waters of poetry and
scholarship
. And a career of poetry and knowledge is as hard to guide as Plato’s horses. On the one hand I must range about discovering the
fundamentals
of knowledge, dipping into science, politics and other arcana, forever seeking an education that is both profound and practical; on the other, I must keep spiritually alive and brilliantly alive, for poetry is, as the moral Milton conceded in practice and precept, a sensuous,
passionate
, brutal thing. I put in the last adjective because I am modern and angry and puritanical.
So much for my rhetoric, but something such as the above must be stated. My qualifications are a wide reading in English and an ability to read poetry extremely closely; a knowledge of the classics which should
enable me, in say three or four years, to read fluently not only Greek and Latin but all the Romance Languages. I have need of a thorough acquaintance with history, particularly with American history (I use the term
history
widely and vaguely but mean cultural history: and again I use
cultural
widely and mean the varieties of life man has been through). I have need of a knowledge of sciences and mathematics, and here I am totaly [
sic
] ignorant.
The relevance of such schedule to poetry is obvious. I cannot think it pedantry that a man desiring to speak (or sing) something important should also desire to speak with certainty. Also if he lack scope, such as an acquaintance with science and an acquaintance with other languages, he will be romantic and an anachronism.
This letter is written principally for general advice. I also wanted to ask you about “Harvard Fellowships.” I remember, when I was a
freshman
or a sophomore at Harvard, that you mentioned such. I think their advantages are that they pay well, demand no thesis, suggest a variety of fields along with men with various proficiencies. Then, as you said last vacation Caesar was probably wrong about being “second in Rome”; success in a big place counts for more than in a small. There is some question as to whether I am qualified for a Harvard Fellowship.
This letter might pleasantly be re-written in English and with
something
less disgusting than a soft lead pencil; that would be much better but I am not sure of the gain.
I was distressed that you were unwell when I left, and I would say much more that I really feel; but there is something gross and mercenary about concluding a letter of rant with amenities.
Affectionately,
Robert