Robert Lowell: A Biography Page 11
What had become of the joking lad I’d married? He’d run hellbent for election into that blind alley—that’s what had become of him—and he yanked me along with him, and there we snarled like hungry, scurvy cats. If I had stubbornly withstood him from the beginning, or if I had left him when he left me for the seraphim and the saints—but I had tried to withstand and had got for myself only wrath and disdain. Leaving him had not really occurred to me, for I had married within my tribe, and we were sternly monogamous till death.20
In September 1941—his year at Louisiana State completed—Lowell took a job in New York with the Catholic publishers Sheed and Ward. For Lowell, Catholicism had three prongs: reason, faith and practice. Since he was a good Thomist, the first two presented him with no difficulties:
Reason permeates faith…. The Incarnation is only a probability, under examination it becomes more probable, after a while you believe…. the point is the religious coincidences are all in favor of the Incarnation. Science, medical practice, psychology etc. These are ultimately irrelevant.21
Thus, faith stands to reason. As to practice, Lowell concedes in this same letter that the Church’s social achievements have been far from satisfactory: “Incompetence, stupidity, cruelty, conservatism, compromise and dogmatism all abound.” In personal terms, though, he believes that every Catholic should “work for a corporate state, guild systems etc.” His work with Sheed and Ward, although it involved only modest copy-editing, would provide the chance for a necessary extension to his Catholic reading: it qualified as practice under the heading of “self-preparation.”
And in New York there were opportunities also for Stafford to do her bit, as she amusingly relates in a letter to Peter Taylor—a letter that does something to lighten the blacker presentations of their marriage. Even as Stafford was most bitterly complaining about her life with Lowell, she still would boast that he was “terribly beautiful,” “brilliant,” “I was fascinated by him,” and so on. “I should tell you about the Catholic Worker,” she writes Taylor:
Cal insisted that I do Catholic work so finally I went down to the offices of the newspaper which is run, as I suppose you know (or ought to) by a woman who … has written her autobiography which is called “From Union Square to Rome.” The first time I went down I was terrified just by the approach to the place. It is a block from Pell St. and two from the Bowery, just off Canal. I had to walk seven blocks through the kind of slums you do not believe exist when you see them in the movies, in an atmosphere that was nearly asphyxiating. The Worker office was full of the kind of camaraderie which frightens me to death and I was immediately put at a long table between a Negro and a Chinese to fold papers, a tiring and filthy job. The second time it was about the same except that Mott St. seemed even more depressing and that time I typed. After I had described the place to Cal, he immediately wanted to go down and live there. I vainly argued against it. Finally a priest whom he admires told him his work should be intellectual. And now we are quite happy here in a respectable neighborhood and henceforth I do not have to go to the Worker but instead I have to go to work in a friendship house in Harlem under a Baroness de something.22
Jean had by this time completed a large section of her first novel, Boston Adventure, and had had an interested response to this from Robert Giroux, a newly appointed editor at Harcourt, Brace. It did not ease the domestic atmosphere that this success of hers coincided with a period when Lowell seems to have been writing no poetry at all. After eight months in New York it was decided that they would move back to the South to share the Tates’ house at Monteagle, Tennessee—an attempt, perhaps, to recapture the spirit of Lowell’s first, crucial Southern summer. Jean had received an advance from Harcourt, Brace, and Lowell had his modest income from the family trust fund; they would be able to live cheaply at Monteagle, and Tate’s presence would be a guarantee against idleness—at any rate, against literary idleness.
Lowell later described the winter of 1942–43 as “the winter of four books: Allen’s novel; C’s [Caroline Gordon’s] novel; J’s novel—Allen and I write poems—all of Land of Unlikeness, most of Winter Sea.”23 By March 1943 Lowell had completed sixteen poems, and they were different from anything he’d done before. They had none of the withheld, stiffly censorious tone of his adolescent work, none of the heavy-handed literary artifice. The air of willed composition is no longer there. Instead, there is a high fever, a driven, almost deranged belligerence in both the voice and the vocabulary, as if poems had become hurled thunderbolts, instruments of grisly retribution. These Monteagle poems are unreachable, irresponsibly obscure much of the time; they flail around in a perplexing mix of local, mythological and Catholic reference. But what marks them is a blind faith in their own headlong momentum; whatever anyone else might make of them, the author believes himself to be both urgent and authoritative:
All of them are cries for us to recover our ancient freedom and dignity, to be Christians and build a Christian society. I think of Blake’s hymn:
I shall not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.24
This warriorlike stance is certainly evident in almost every poem, but it is never very clear how Lowell thinks the good fight should be fought—except in the most general or apocalyptic terms. And he finds it impossible to eliminate a tinge of relish from his evocations of the current European horrors:
… the ship
Of state has learned Christ how to
sail on blood.
Great Commonwealth, sail on and on and roll
On blood, on my free blood …25
Most of these poems were to be rewritten at least twice over the next two years and should be evaluated in their final shape. In 1943, though, it was evident to Tate and others that Lowell, for all his bombast and confusion, was surely on to something, and the periodicals began publishing his work. During the summer of ’43, he had poems appearing in Sewanee Review (“On the Eve of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, 1942,” “In Memory of Arthur Winslow,” “Leviathan” and “Dea Roma”), Partisan Review (“Song of the Boston Nativity,” “Christmas Eve in Time of War,” “Salem” and “Concord”) and Kenyon Review (“Satan’s Confession”). At Allen Tate’s prompting he sent the sixteen poems to the Cummington Press, a small hand-setting outfit run by Harry Duncan and Katherine Frazier in Cummington, Massachusetts. There was an enthusiastic response, and Duncan suggested that Lowell send him a few more to make up a book, and also perhaps a preface by Tate. The manuscript had been sent to Duncan on March 18; by April 2 Lowell was able to send six more poems—a rate of output entirely new for him: even before his barren stretch in Louisiana and New York he had sometimes spent a year laboring over two shortish pieces. Tate agreed to supply the preface, and the book—to be called Land of Unlikeness—was optimistically scheduled for publication in September 1943.
Not only do Lowell’s poems of this period suggest inner turmoil, they are victimized by it. But three elements in the turmoil can be thought of as consistent: Boston, Catholicism, War. The essential drift is that if the worst of Boston could learn from the best of Rome, then wars would at least have dignity and noble purpose. This is crudely put, but the poems don’t put it much more subtly: how could they, since Lowell in the spring of 1943 was irritably unsure of his own principles? Most of his childhood heroes had been military heroes, and he had shown himself to have a rare appetite for both tyranny and violence; but he could see little that was splendid in the way modern wars were fought. Could the “good fight” ever be fought with bombs? Lowell had, it is said by Frank Parker, supported the Franco side during the Spanish Civil War, and his conversion to Catholicism had engendered an even fiercer hostility to Communism. Thus, America’s alliance with the Soviet Union would have seemed to him a repugnantly high price to pay for the defeat of Hitler. Much of this is conjecture: Lowell’s letters of the period are strik
ingly free of any comment on the war, and in poems the nearest he comes to revealing the direction of his sympathies is in thoroughly ambiguous passages like this:
Freedom and Eisenhower have won
Significant laurels where the Hun
And Roman kneel
To lick the dust from Mars’ bootheel
Like foppish bloodhounds; yet you sleep
O’er our distemper’s evil day
And hear no sheep
Or hangdog bay!26
Many years later, Lowell was to summarize the development of his poetry up to around this stage of his biography:
When I was growing up in the twenties, moving into the thirties, it was a very peculiar period, it seems to me, particularly in America. It was a time of enormous optimism. The kind of argument that the world was getting better and better, and there would be no more wars, and so forth, that seemed very much in the air, I think more here than in Europe. Yet there was the huge jar of the first world war behind us, that hit us, of course, less hard than Europe, but yet was there, and soon you had a feeling that the violence was arising, the left and the right, in Hitler and Stalin, these two currents were going on at the same time, that maybe things were getting better, or that they were headed for disaster. And it seems to me at quite an early age that I felt it couldn’t be anything but disaster, that one lived in that time, and someone writing poetry perhaps had three choices. One, which was hardly a choice, was the kind of poetry the public wanted, which was a rather watered-down imitation of 19th century poetry, that really had gone completely dead. The other was an engagé poetry, and the only kind that really seemed to inspire that kind of conviction was the Marxist, usually quite pro-Russian. And the third group, which I more or less belonged to, I think it derives somewhat from Yeats and from Eliot, and in this country friends of mine, Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom. And a rather strange position was built up. There were great arguments that poetry was a form of knowledge, at least as valid as scientific knowledge, and in certain ways more so, because it didn’t abstract from experience. We claimed any—the whole man would be represented in the poem. I think that was a sort of aggressive stance, that we felt at a disadvantage, and my friend and teacher John Crowe Ransom wrote a book of critical essays which might illustrate this, which he called, the book, The World’s Body, that poetry was the world’s body, it took the whole man. I don’t think one would say that now exactly. And we believed in form, that that was very important, and for some reason we were very much against the Romantics. We would say that the ideal poet is Shakespeare, who is not a poet of ideology but a poet of experience, and tragedy, and the sort of villains to us were people like Shelley—that he used much too much ideology—and Whitman, the prophet, who also seemed formless. And one felt that what poetry could do was have nothing to do with causes, that if you—that might get into what you wrote but you couldn’t do it at all directly; and something like Aristotle’s purging by pity and terror, that of going through a catharsis, that that is what was suitable, rather than to persuade people to do anything better or to make the world better. And I think that is the position that is perhaps only intelligible in the thirties, when the danger of being swept into a cause was so great.27
In September 1943, though, came the event that Lowell describes in this same speech as “the most decisive thing I ever did, just as a writer”—although, at the time, “it was not intended to have anything to do with that.”
*
America had entered the war in December 1941. Lowell in that year had registered for the draft and throughout 1942 had attempted to enlist: “so that he can go to officer’s school.”28 During his time in Louisiana and with Sheed and Ward he had never known for certain if he would be called up: at one moment, there is talk of his being permanently deferred because of his eyesight; at another (November 1942), Jean Stafford resolves to give up drink because she doesn’t want him “to worry about me when he goes into the army.”29
By March 1943 Lowell was still assuming that he would be accepted for military service. He filled out “an employment questionnaire” for the army and it was probably genuine absentmindedness that led him to list himself as having “one dependent under 18, and one not living with him but deriving its whole support from him.” Lowell also claimed “that he was a graduate of a trade school to which he had gone for four years, that his surname was Robert and that he could read ‘forig’ languages.”30 (Stafford corrected this testimony before mailing it.) And in July 1943 he wrote to his mother:
The other day I got a notice from my draft board and expect to be examined (the 7th time) some time in the next ten days. The chances are that I will be rejected on account of vision. However there is no telling.31
Shortly after this, Lowell was given a date for his induction: September 8, 1943.
During July and August, Lowell took lodgings in New York and idly looked for jobs (“there are plenty of jobs but the problem is to get the right one”)32 while Jean Stafford went off to Yaddo, the writers’ colony at Saratoga Springs, to complete Boston Adventure. For some weeks before, Jean had been suffering from a recurrence of her mysterious low fevers, and at Yaddo these seem to have suddenly got higher and more worrying. In July she writes to Peter Taylor that she has “either a tubercular or a streptococchic infection of the kidneys” and that she has lost “13 pounds in a month.”33 A fortnight later, the symptoms were diagnosed as “nervous exhaustion,” but the diagnosis didn’t stop them:
I continued to lose weight and I grew weaker and weaker…. I suppose I’m on the verge of some kind of nervous crack-up which the fever isn’t helping any…. I’ll be in bed somewhere within a week. This time, Peter, you’ll be glad to know that I am really and truly scared to death. Write to me and think of me and pray for me.34
It is noticeable that Lowell receives no mention in these outcries: Stafford doesn’t appear to expect his help or even his concern. In August, though, Caroline Tate approached Lowell’s mother for money to arrange a thorough diagnosis. Lowell was “taken aback” by this intrusion, but it does seem to have shocked him into a more active interest in the matter. He writes to his mother agreeing to the expenditure:
Jean has been having these fevers off and on for three years. No one has been able to cure her or tell her what the matter is. I worry about this night and day and can’t resign myself to the army with her illness still unsettled.35
During the first week of September, Jean Stafford—her illness still “unsettled”—joined Lowell in New York. On September 7, Lowell wrote a letter to President Roosevelt:
Dear Mr. President:
I very much regret that I must refuse the opportunity you offer me in your communication of August 6, 1943, for service in the Armed Forces.
I am enclosing with this letter a copy of the declaration which, in accordance with military regulations, I am presenting on September 7 to Federal District Attorney in New York, Mr. Matthias F. Correa. Of this declaration I am sending copies also to my parents, to a select number of friends and relatives, to the heads of the Washington press bureaus, and to a few responsible citizens who, no more than yourself, can be suspected of subversive activities.
You will understand how painful such a decision is for an American whose family traditions, like your own, have always found their fulfillment in maintaining, through responsible participation in both the civil and the military services, our country’s freedom and honor.
I have the honor, Sir,’ to inscribe myself, with sincerest loyalty and respect, your fellow-citizen,
Robert Traill Spence Lowell, Jr.
Attached was the DECLARATION OF PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY, which read as follows:
ORDERS FOR MY INDUCTION INTO THE ARMED FORCES ON SEPTEMBER EIGHTH 1943 have just arrived. Because we glory in the conviction that our wars are won not by irrational valor but through the exercise of moral responsibility, it is fitting for me to make the following declaration which is also a decision.
Like the major
ity of our people I watched the approach of this war with foreboding. Modern wars had proved subversive to the Democracies and history had shown them to be the iron gates to totalitarian slavery. On the other hand, members of my family had served in all our wars since the Declaration of Independence: I thought—our tradition of service is sensible and noble; if its occasional exploitation by Money, Politics and Imperialism is allowed to seriously discredit it, we are doomed.
When Pearl Harbor was attacked, I imagined that my country was in intense peril and come what might, unprecedented sacrifices were necessary for our national survival. In March and August of 1942 I volunteered, first for the Navy and then for the Army. And when I heard reports of what would formerly have been termed atrocities, I was not disturbed: for I judged that savagery was unavoidable in our nation’s struggle for its life against diabolic adversaries.
Today these adversaries are being rolled back on all fronts and the crisis of war is past. But there are no indications of peace. In June we heard rumors of the staggering civilian casualties that had resulted from the mining of the Ruhr Dams. Three weeks ago we read of the razing of Hamburg, where 200,000 non-combatants are reported dead, after an almost apocalyptic series of all-out air-raids.
This, in a world still nominally Christian, is news. And now the Quebec Conference confirms our growing suspicions that the bombings of the Dams and of Hamburg were not mere isolated acts of military expediency, but marked the inauguration of a new long-term strategy, indorsed and co-ordinated by our Chief Executive.