Robert Lowell: A Biography Read online

  ROBERT LOWELL

  A Biography

  IAN HAMILTON

  Contents

  Title Page

  List of Photographs

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  INDEX

  Special Acknowledgments

  Photographs

  About the Author

  Copyright

  List of Photographs

  Childhood and up to 1940

  1941–1949

  1950–1955

  1957–1961

  1962–1969

  1970–1977

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks to the following: William Alfred, A. Alvarez, Betty B. Ames, Rolando Anzilotti, Alison Armstrong, James Atlas, Steven Gould Axelrod, Elizabeth Bettman, Frank Bidart, Caroline Blackwood, Philip Booth, Keith Botsford, Christina Brazelton, Cecile Boyajian, Cleanth Brooks, Esther Brooks, Peter Brooks, Shepherd Brooks, Alan Brownjohn, Gertrude Buckman, Alistair Cameron, Brainard Cheney, Frances Neel Cheney, Blair Clark, Alexander Cockburn, Malcolm Cowley, Carley Dawson, Richard Demenocal, Liberty Dick, Harry Duncan, Richard Eberhart, Philip Edwards, Holly Eley, Valerie Eliot, Barbara Epstein, Richard J. Fein, Robert Fitzgerald, Sally Fitzgerald, George Ford, Jonathan Galassi, Robert Giroux, Grey Gowrie, Simon Gray, Matthew Hamilton, Stuart Hamilton, Xandra Hardie, Elizabeth Hardwick, Lillian Hellman, Dan Jacobson, Mary Jarrell, James Laughlin, Andrew Lytle, Robie Macauley, Giovanna Madonia, John P. Marquand, Eugene McCarthy, William Meredith, Dido Merwin, Jonathan Miller, Karl Miller, Charles Monteith, Sidney Nolan, Jacqueline Onassis, Frank Parker, Lesley Parker, Jim Peck, J. F. Powers, Patrick Quinn, Jonathan Raban, Craig Raine, Christopher Ricks, Martha Ritter, Frederick Seidel, Robert Silvers, Eileen Simpson, Natasha Spender, Stephen Spender, Donald Stanford, Hugh Staples, Richard Stern, Joan Stillman, William Styron, Peter Taylor, John Thompson, Helen Vendler, Vija Vetra, Robert Penn Warren, Peter White, Richard Wilbur, Marcella Winslow, Dudley Young, Thomas Daniel Young.

  I am also indebted to the following librarians and libraries: Rodney Dennis and the staff of the Houghton Library, Harvard University; Walter W. Wright, Dartmouth College Library; Thomas B. Greenslade, Chalmers Memorial Library, Kenyon College; Jean F. Preston, Firestone Library, Princeton University; Eve Lebo, University of Washington, Seattle; Paul T. Heffron, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress; Alan M. Lathrop, Manuscripts Division, University of Minnesota Libraries; Diana Haskell, Special Collections, Newberry Library, Chicago; Saundra Taylor, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington; Mary Long, St. Mark’s School Library, St. Mark’s School, Southborough, Mass.; the Curator, Beinecke Library, Yale University; the Curator, Berg Collection, New York Public Library; the Librarian, Columbia University Library; Mary Rider, Vanderbilt University Library, Nashville, Tenn.

  I am grateful to Jason Epstein of Random House for commissioning the book and for helping me to get it written, and to my agent, Gillon Aitken, for three years of friendship and encouragement. And finally, a special—yet still inadequate—note of thanks to Charis Ryder: her research assistance has been patient and resourceful, her editorial vigilance often unnervingly precise. In the actual making of this book, my chief debt is to her.

  ROBERT LOWELL

  1

  Like Henry Adams, I was born under the shadow of the Dome of the Boston State House, and under Pisces, the Fish, on the first of March, 1917. America was entering the First World War and was about to play her part in the downfall of five empires.1

  The setting for this ominous nativity was a brownstone high on Boston’s Beacon Hill, the town house of Arthur Winslow, Robert Lowell’s maternal grandfather. The house was fronted by two pillars copied from the Temple of Kings at Memphis, and every afternoon Grandfather Winslow, “a stiff-necked, luxurious ramrod of a man,” would station himself between these “loutish” props and survey his social gains. On the afternoon of March 1, 1917, he was probably well pleased. This new child—first son of the union between two celebrated Boston names—would surely prove another asset. Certainly, it was hard to see how such a flawless pedigree could engender positive embarrassment.

  And this would have mattered quite a lot to Arthur. A Boston boy who had made his middle-sized pile as a mining engineer in Colorado, he was almost ridiculously proud of his descent from the New England Winslows who had supported George III. He wrote a history of the family that traced the Winslows back to Worcestershire. With manly lack of detail, he established that in 1620 Edward Winslow had come to America on the Mayflower; a year later, his brother John had followed, on the Fortune. John married Mary Chilton, who was “credited with having been the first woman from the Mayflower to have stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock.” And in 1817 Arthur’s grandfather had married Sarah Stark of Dunbarton in New Hampshire. Sarah was a daughter of John Stark, a renowned general in the Revolutionary War. Arthur thus had both sides of the conflict in his blood.

  Secretly, though, Arthur would have preferred all his neighbors to have been prerevolutionary. But he also had a taste for the celebrity conferred by guidebooks, and on this reckoning Chestnut Street already rated several stars. If a neighbor was of faulty stock, the chances were that he would make up for this by being famous. All in all, it wasn’t the wrong street for a Winslow/Lowell to be born on.

  Edwin Booth, for instance, had lived just across the street, and nearby Julia Ward Howe was still in residence (by this time so old and distinguished that “one could forget she was a woman”). So too was the neo-Gothic architect Ralph Adams Cram. Arthur had his doubts about Cram, but still made sure that he kept several of his drawings on display, “thus continually enjoying the exalted ceremonial of seeing his own just derision continually defeated by his good nature.”

  Farther along Chestnut Street there were still richer pickings. Twenty buildings down the street, Francis Parkman had once lived, Oliver Wendell Holmes had just died, and on a clear day you didn’t need a telescope to sight the late residence of Percival Lowell, the celebrated Boston astronomer who believed that there was also life on Mars.

  The Winslows and the Lowells: on paper it was a spectacularly correct match. Perhaps because he was married to a whimsical Southerner from North Carolina and had spent five years at school in Stuttgart as a youth, Arthur Winslow espoused a brand of New England integrity that even hard-line Bostonians considered somewhat over-rhetorical and Prussian. Few, therefore, were surprised when, after having famously discouraged several of his daughter Charlotte’s suitors (Arthur would always place himself prominently within earshot when they came to visit her), he decided to smile upon the overtures of Robert Traill Spence Lowell. The Somerset Lowles [sic] may not have come over on the Mayflower, but they had been New Englanders since 1639, and were now firmly on the list of Massachusetts’ “first families.” The historical appropriateness comfortably overshadowed any judgment of the young naval lieutenant’s personality—which, even at this early stage, was widely thought to be oafish and compliant. In the words of R.T.S.L.’s aunt Beatrice: “Bob hasn’t a mean bone, an original bone, a funny bone in his body! That’s why I can’t get a word he says. If he were mine, I’d lobotomize him and stuff his brain with green peppers.”

&nbs
p; Most people seem to have felt this way about Bob Lowell, but Arthur Winslow was not looking to be replaced as the dominant figure in his favorite daughter’s life. Nor was Charlotte herself in need of any extra restraints upon her own natural bossiness. She had a man she worshiped; now she wanted one who would unquestioningly worship her. For both father and daughter, Bob’s combination of weak character and strong lineage was indeed perfectly correct.

  The union had been easily arranged. Charlotte’s best friend, Kitty Bowles, had become engaged to Alfred Putnam Lowell in the winter of 1915. It was at the engagement party that Charlotte first met Alfred’s cousin Bob. Afterwards she said to Kitty: “A Lowell and a naval officer. He must be a genius and a buccaneer.” And Kitty replied, “Bob is the most gentle, the most cheerful, the most modest, the most Euclidian man I have ever met.” And Charlotte and Kitty’s friends in the Reading Club soon reported that the one sentence everyone used about R.T.S. was: “Can’t say much about Bob. I hear he got straight A’s at Columbia for his work in radio.”

  Well before the couple’s engagement, and almost certainly before Bob knew what was being planned for him, Charlotte had done her homework on the Lowells. At the Reading Club, she mounted a charade called “The Lowells: have they tails or have they wings?” It was a slightly hysterical afternoon, and years later her son reconstructed it from the recollections of friends:

  A few of Mother’s skits have been remembered. There was her A. Lawrence Lowell, the genial President of Harvard, awarding Alfred his A.B. and saying lugubriously: “Go west, young man, avoid Miss Bowles.” There was Percival Lowell, the brilliant but unsociable astronomer, who looked through the wrong end of my Grandfather Winslow’s telescope and said, “I have discovered Percival, the minutest living planet.” Then there was Mother all padded out with pillows and laundry bags, and with a clothes-pin in her mouth: pretending to be Amy Lowell, and exclaiming: “Hold me, John Keats, I am as light as the Lusitania.” There was Judge James Lowell, himself a charader, for Mother made him talk with a Jewish accent and play the role of King Solomon giving judgment. “Oi yoi, scut de kiddo in pieces.” There was Cornelius Lowell, the historian of the French Revolution, writing an article for the Atlantic Monthly entitled “Notes on the Monetary Background of Charlotte Corday.” There was Guy Lowell, the architect, being consuited on a building for the Boston Fine Arts Museum. He was holding up photographs of St. Peter’s, the Pitti Palace, the Taj Mahal, the Parthenon and the Eiffel Tower, and saying: “Take your pick.”

  And so it went on. The Reading Club politely “almost died laughing”; and on the way home, Connie Codman said, “Well I must admit Charlotte is an uproarious sport.” Kitty agreed that, yes, Charlotte was “emphatic.” But Fanny Kittredge supplied the final words: “Sometimes I worry.”

  *

  The potency of the Lowell name was such that Charlotte Winslow was prepared to overlook not just Bob’s less than forceful personality but also (more surprisingly) his relatively humble station in the Lowell clan. Bob was from the poor (i.e., the merely comfortably off) branch of the Lowells—priests and poets figured prominently among his immediate forebears. James Russell Lowell was a great-great-uncle and Robert Traill Spence Lowell I, James Russell’s elder brother, was moderately well known for his verses and for a novel, The New Priest in Conception Bay. The Lowell millions, though, were elsewhere, with the bankers and the lawyers and the cotton magnates: cousins all, but hardly intimates, and in a quite separate financial league. From the late eighteenth century, the Traill/-Spence line of Lowells had been the pious poor relations, admired for their good (and even for their mediocre) works, but viewed as somehow quirkily irrelevant to the main thrust of the Lowell enterprise. Bob’s feebleness, for instance, would have been seen by “real” Lowells as the to-be-expected outcome of four generations of worship and word-spinning. The view was: remove the vocation or the talent from the Traill/Spence line and you are likely to be left with a wispy, agreeable abstractedness; the Traills and the Spences had, after all, originated in the Orkneys—being a bit out of things was in their blood.

  Bob Lowell’s father had died before he was born, and his mother was left to languish on Staten Island. She lived on there with her mother, and had no thought of ever marrying again. Her terrible early bereavement (after only five months of marriage) had left her in a state of transfixed bewilderment, and over the years her son had grown expert in not asking unanswerable questions, not challenging the unjust fates. His marriage to Charlotte Winslow might thus, for all he knew, have been externally decreed; certainly, it would not have occurred to him to challenge its inevitability. Bob’s response to any daunting situation was to smile, and on his wedding day in the spring of 1916, he is remembered as having particularly “smiled and smiled”:

  He smiled and smiled in his photographs, just as he smiled and smiled in life. He would look into the faces of others as if he expected to find himself reflected in their eyes. He was a man who treated even himself with the caution and uncertainty of one who has forgotten a name, in this case his own.

  Even in his wedding photographs, and in spite of the smile, Bob contrived to recede into the background, as if all too anxious to surrender the stage to Charlotte from the very start. And Charlotte showed no signs of being ruffled by his self-effacement:

  I see her strong, firmly modeled chin, her pulled-in tiny waist, her beaver muff, and her neck, which was like a swan’s neck crowned with an armful of pyramided hair and an ostrich feather.

  The Lowells spent their honeymoon at the Grand Canyon, a choice that baffled everyone who knew them, or knew Charlotte: “The choice was so heroic and unoriginal that it left them forever with a feeling of gaping vacuity. The Canyon’s hollow hugeness was a sort of bad start for us all.”

  After the Canyon, it dawned on Charlotte that she had somehow become a married woman. The engagement was over. And, worse than that, she saw that far from having married into the heart of Boston’s social whirl, she had committed herself to the nomadic drudgery of the low-rank “naval wife.” The one thing everybody knew about Bob’s work was that it kept him “on the move.” Thus, immediately after the honeymoon, Charlotte found herself transferred to Jamestown, near Newport, Rhode Island, a pointless backwater where she learned that naval wives were expected to order their own groceries. Her stylishly incompetent housekeeping quite failed to irritate her agreeable new husband, and she was soon chafing for Boston, for the drawing rooms, the Reading Club, and—most of all—for “the urgent domination” of her father. Bob thought that things were going rather well.

  By the fall of 1916, though, Charlotte was pregnant, and Bob’s bungling response was to find himself posted to California. Charlotte went into retreat on Staten Island and there fretted through the winter. The Lowell household she found sapless and depressed, a household with no men, no arguments or explosions; and most irritating of all, Bob’s mother so evidently looked to her to bring some long-awaited spark into the home. After a month or two of fidgety resentment “the only thing she enjoyed was taking brisk walks and grieving over the fact that she was pregnant. She took pride in looking into the great Atlantic Ocean and saying, without a trace of fear or illusion: I wish I could die.”

  *

  By the time Robert (Traill Spence) Lowell IV was ready to be born, Charlotte had engineered a move back to Boston, the first of many intense returns from wherever her husband’s work had ludicrously landed her. Out of Boston, she would say, she wilted: she needed the iron in the air for her will. And she needed her father. Although she had married a naval lieutenant, all her notions of military glamour were invested in Arthur—she saw him as a Prussian, tidied-up version of Napoleon.

  Six years before her marriage, Charlotte had read the Duchesse d’Abrantès’ Memoirs of Napoleon, and had fallen for the conqueror’s majestic slovenliness. For a period she insisted on sleeping on an army cot, taking cold dips in the morning, bolting her food. Worst of all, she actually began calling her father “Napol
eon.” Small wonder that her meek husband’s martial anecdotes, his uniform and his ceremonial sword came to seem neither enticing nor intimidating. When Bob tried to resist the move back to Boston, she simply took no notice, but cajoled her father into some nifty mortgage-juggling which eventually produced the house on Brimmer Street where Robert Lowell was to spend the first and—by his account—perhaps the least precarious years of his life:

  When I was three or four years old I first began to think about the time before I was born. Until then Mother had been everything; at three or four she began abruptly to change into a human being. I wanted to recapture the mother I remembered and so I began to fabricate. In my memory, she was a lady preserved in silhouettes, outlines and photographs, she sat on a blue bench; she smiled at my father, a naval lieutenant in a collarless blue uniform. Blue meant the sea, the navy and manhood. Blue was the ideal defining color Mother had described to Father as his “Wagnerian theme,” the absolute he was required to live up to. I was a little doll in a white sailor suit with blue anchors on the pockets, a doll who smiled impartially upon his mother and father and in his approbation thus made them husband and wife. But when I was at last three years old all that began to change. I could no longer see Mother as that rarely present, transfigured, Sunday-best version of my nurse. I saw her as my mother, as a rod, or a scolding, rusty hinge—as a human being. More and more I tried to remember Mother when she was happier, when she had been merely her father’s daughter, when she was engaged but unmarried. Perhaps I had been happiest then too, because I hadn’t existed and lived only as an imagined future.