Robert Lowell: A Biography Read online

  will be the best first book of poems since Auden’s Poems…. the best nine or ten of your new poems are better than any poem in Land of Unlikeness; not only that, I think they are some of the best poems anyone has written in our time and are sure to be read for hundreds of years. I am sure of this: I would bet hundreds of dollars on it. You know how little contemporary poetry I like—if I’m affected this way—unless I’ve gone crazy—it must be the real thing. I think you’re potentially a better poet than anybody writing in English.2

  And this, presumably, included Eliot, Auden, Frost—as well as the unselfish Jarrell. There were one or two qualifying footnotes: Lowell was perhaps too little interested in people and too often “harsh and severe,” and Jarrell was glad to see that he had dropped his efforts at “contemporary satire”—“your weakest sort of poem … not really worth wasting your time on.” Lowell’s worst tendency, he thought, was “to do too mannered, mechanical, wonderfully-contrived exercise poems.” All this said, though, Jarrell was finally persuaded by new poems like “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” “The Exile’s Return,” the two Black Rock poems and “Mr. Edwards and the Spider” to declare that “you write more in the great tradition, the grand style, the real middle of English poetry, than anybody since Yeats.”

  Breathtaking stuff, but the excessive strain in Jarrell’s hymn of praise can be readily forgiven. If the two choices for a modern poet seemed to be, on the one hand, the learned, metrical, ironic line of Eliot and Auden and, on the other, the fiery, bardic line of Dylan Thomas (with the William Carlos Williams free-verse, “Americanist” model a kind of permanently “other” possibility), then Lowell’s new poems undoubtedly would have seemed to be getting the best of every world. The Eliot line was sorely in need of some dramatic urgency; the Thomas line was self-evidently short on meter, scholarly allusion and, in the case of some of its wartime devotees, short too on elementary intelligence. In this context, Lowell’s voice was arresting simply because it could not be shoved into any of these pigeonholes—it was fiery, yes, but it was also educated:

  The empty winds are creaking and the oak

  Splatters and splatters on the cenotaph,

  The boughs are trembling and a gaff

  Bobs on the untimely stroke

  Of the greased wash exploding on a shoal-bell

  In the old mouth of the Atlantic: It’s well;

  Atlantic, you are fouled with the blue sailors,

  Sea-monsters, upward angel, downward fish:

  Unmarried and corroding, spare of flesh

  Mart once of supercilious, wing’d clippers,

  Atlantic, where your bell-trap guts its spoil

  You could cut the brackish winds with a knife

  Here in Nantucket, and cast up the time

  When the Lord God formed man from the sea’s slime

  And breathed into his face the breath of life,

  And blue-lung’d combers lumbered to the kill.

  The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.3

  Many a learned paper has been written on that final line of Lowell’s “Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” yet it is no “clearer,” no less haunting than it ever was: it was lines like this (and there are perhaps thirty of them in Lord Weary’s Castle) that reduced even a proudly analytical reviewer like Jarrell to using words like “magic.”

  Although Lowell had certainly become craftier and more resonant since writing Land of Unlikeness, in most of the new poems his posture—and, intermittently, his posturing—remained essentially the same: the hectic, crunchingly enjambed iambic line, the welter of grabbed myths and pseudosymbols, the impudent and hortatory prayers, the barely controlled retributive gusto and the linguistic flagellation—both of self (so that the poet’s noble rage will not lazily abate) and of the fallen world (which, if it will not be redeemed, surely deserves further punishment). Like the earlier book, Lord Weary’s Castle is marked throughout by what Gabriel Pearson called Lowell’s “unacknowledged flight into the omnipotence of manic verbal control.”4

  Manic or not, though, the verbal control in Lord Weary is strikingly more at ease with its own mannerisms than in Land of Unlikeness: the thumping, unstoppable iambic line, the piled-up alliteration, the onomatopoeic consonants—Lowell uses these devices as if he now thinks of them as his, as if this is the way he happens to speak rather than a manufactured style. Also, in Lord Weary, the sillier puns are eliminated, the more hysterical “political” gesturing has given way to an elusive, almost taunting irony—and there is a new reliance on the restraining influence of a prose source. It is almost true to say that the most powerful pieces in the book—stretches of “The Quaker Graveyard,” “Mr. Edwards and the Spider,” “The Exile’s Return” and “After the Surprising Conversions”—are so derived. And these pieces may in turn have led Lowell into the near-naturalistic monologues of the “Between the Porch and the Altar” sequence—a sequence that seems not to belong in the book, pointing forward as it does to Lowell’s Browningesque next phase.

  Perhaps more than any other twentieth-century poet, Lowell is now thought of as “autobiographical”; or, as Gabriel Pearson put it, “the materials of his own life are there to be made over to art.” There is an interest, therefore, in reflecting how little of his life up to 1945 can be construed from the poems of Lord Weary’s Castle. One can deduce something of his Boston background, his Mayflower ancestry—though nothing in the least precise. There are elegies in the book addressed to dead relatives, but these carry little direct feeling, nor do we get from them any clear sense of who these people were: would it be known, for instance, from “In Memory of Arthur Winslow” that Lowell had revered the old man in his youth, and spent the happiest of his boyhood holidays messing about at his grandfather’s farm at Mattapoisett? Nostalgia could not, of course, sit easily with Lowell’s vatic zeal.

  Similarly, Lord Weary’s Castle reveals little of the poet’s adolescent storms; many of his Boston poems can, it’s true, be seen as acts of vengeance, as suddenly unthwarted fits of youthful venom. Only in “Rebellion,” though, do we get a glimpse of the circumstances:

  There was rebellion, father, when the mock

  French windows slammed and you hove backward, rammed

  Into your heirlooms, screens, a glass-cased clock,

  The highboy quaking to its toes. You damned

  My arm that cast your house upon your head

  And broke the chimney flintlock on your skull.

  Last night the moon was full:

  I dreamed the dead

  Caught at my knees and fell:

  And it was well

  With me, my father. Then

  Behemoth and Leviathan

  Devoured our mighty merchants. None could arm

  Or put to sea. O father, on my farm

  I added field to field

  And I have sealed

  An everlasting pact

  With Dives to contract

  The world that spreads in pain;

  But the world spread

  When the clubbed flintlock broke my father’s brain.

  The poem deteriorates into myth and melodrama, but in the first eleven lines there is enough clarity, respect for detail and variety of rhythm to suggest that, for Lowell, personal experience could have the same braking, liberating influence as the prose models of Thoreau or Edwards, which are heavily drawn on in “The Quaker Graveyard” and “Mr. Edwards and the Spider.”5 Again, though, it would have been impossible for the young Lowell to concede that the archangelic protagonist of these early poems could be trammeled by a mortal life, a single history. Thus, even the symbolically rich gesture of refusing the draft barely gets into a book written shortly after his release from prison. There is one poem, “In the Cage,” which does seem to have been set in Danbury:

  The lifers file into the hall,

  According to their houses—twos

  Of laundered denim. On the wall

  A colored fairy tinkles blues

  And
titters by the balustrade;

  Canaries beat their bars and scream.

  And there is a similarly unusual mutedness and factuality in parts of “The Death of the Sheriff”:

  We kiss. The State had reasons: on the whole,

  It acted out of kindness when it locked

  Its servant in this place and had him watched

  Until an ordered darkness left his soul

  A tabula rasa; …

  But these are isolated clumps of clay in the elemental moonscape of Lord Weary.

  Even at this early stage, though, it is probable that Lowell would have glimpsed where such low-keyed factuality might lead. And he would certainly have been struck by Ransom’s choice of poems for the Kenyon Review: “Winter in Dunbarton” (with its middle section of fond, plainspoken elegy for a dead family cat), “Mr. Edwards and the Spider” (almost every line a direct quotation from Edwards’s own writing) and “At a Bible House,” a poem which, in spite of its intricate rhyme scheme, is almost Williams-like in its terse observation, its ungenerously short lines:

  At a Bible House

  Where smoking is forbidden

  By the Prophet’s law,

  I saw you wiry, bed-ridden,

  Gone in the kidneys; raw

  Onions and a louse

  Twitched on the sheet before

  The palsy of your white

  Stubble …

  Ransom wrote:

  I don’t know who has grown up in verse more than you, these last few years; mostly, I think, by way of giving up the effort to communicate more than was communicable, and by consulting the gentle reader’s traditional range of intelligence rather than your own private article. These are nice.6

  “Nice” is not a word even the gentle Ransom could have used about “The Drunken Fisherman” or “Christmas in Black Rock”—or indeed about the majority of the poems in Lord Weary’s Castle. But he was right to sense that—for the purposes of poetry—Lowell’s saintly rage was almost spent.

  *

  In December 1945—at Jarrell’s suggestion—Lowell mailed off the manuscript of Lord Weary’s Castle to Philip Rahv, co-editor of Partisan Review: Partisan was negotiating a co-publishing contract with Dial Press and printed, or was about to print, a number of Lowell’s new poems in the magazine; there seems to have been some notion of Partisan and Dial jointly publishing these, and others from Land of Unlikeness, as a book. On January 2, 1946, Rahv wrote back: “I have read your manuscript over the weekend and think you did a wonderful job. I liked your inclusion of nine poems from your first book.”7 Rahv, though, went on to say that the arrangement with Dial Press was far from settled, and that “there is a possibility of our going over to Henry Holt—if that happens would you mind their publishing your book?” Two weeks later, Rahv wrote again: “Since our negotiations with Dial tend to become rather protracted I’ve sent your manuscript off to Lambert Davis.”8 Davis was an editor at Harcourt, Brace, but it was in fact Robert Giroux who read the manuscript and urged its acceptance. Harcourt, Brace agreed to bring the book out in the fall of 1946.

  Meanwhile two midwinter weeks at Damariscotta Mills had persuaded Lowell that the new house, though splendid, was nowhere near ready to be settled into. In January, Jean wrote exuberantly to Allen Tate:

  We have had a taste of really rigorous country life: our pipes freeze and burst in the most heart-rending fashion and we were without water for two weeks until an ingenious plumber came and moved overy vital organ in the house. It has been 17 and 20 below several times. But I have never been in such top-notch shape in my life and do not even complain of the cold, a transformation in myself I do not altogether understand.9

  Even so, in mid-January they decided to accept an invitation from the poet Delmore Schwartz to move in with him at his house on Cambridge’s Ellery Street. Schwartz’s marriage—to a Partisan Review book reviewer called Gertrude Buckman—had not long before come to an end, and he was eager to have others share his domestic chaos. The move meant, of course, a return to the Boston sphere of influence and, in particular, regular lunch visits to the Lowell home on Marlborough Street: a high price to pay, Jean Stafford thought, for the comforts of town living. She writes of one visit:

  [it] left me in a state of traumatism from which I have not yet fully emerged. I have not been so persistently needled since before we were married: Your family is just a myth to me, Jean. In our little community here, we all marry our third cousins and know everyone; you are looking well, Jean, and putting on weight, but Bobby looks terribly thin and not at all well; is it that you don’t like us that you didn’t stay with us instead of with Mr. Schwartz? Three hours of it.10

  At first, though, the arrangement with Schwartz worked out fairly well—a repeat version of Benfolly and Monteagle, with typewriters clattering in every room and arguments about the plumbing:

  We couldn’t even keep the furnace lit!

  Even when we had disconnected it,

  the antiquated

  refrigerator gurgled mustard gas

  through your mustard-yellow house,

  and spoiled our long-maneuvered visit

  from T. S. Eliot’s brother, Henry Ware …11

  The visit Lowell writes of here had been maneuvered so that Henry Ware Eliot could arrange a Briggs-Copeland lectureship for him at Harvard, but the scheme eventually came to nothing. Schwartz was fond of inaugurating stratagems like this, and he enjoyed playing the senior literary figure to the youthful Lowells. But according to Schwartz’s biographer, James Atlas, the domestic balance soon became precarious:

  Delmore was envious of Lowell’s Brahmin background, and his envy sharpened after Lowell took him to dinner at his parents’ house on Marlborough Street. They weren’t “that grand” Jean Stafford recalled [in an interview with Atlas in 1976] but Delmore was intimidated by the servants, heirlooms, and a certain reserve on the part of the Lowells. The elder Lowell’s attitude towards Delmore can be guessed from his habit of telling his literary son that he “talked like a Jew.” Delmore resented the way Robert Lowell kept bringing up a Jewish relative remote in time, Mordecai Myers, the grandfather of Lowell’s grandmother. Lowell insisted that he himself was ⅛ Jewish, and made much of a portrait of Myers that hung in the drawing room on Marlborough Street.

  Things were never the same after that evening. Delmore baited Lowell mercilessly, made fun of his parents’ home, and tried to destroy his marriage by circulating malicious rumors. Finally Lowell swung at Delmore, Jean Stafford had to separate them, and soon afterwards the Lowells left for Maine.12

  In fact the visit lasted nearly three months, and as late as March 3 Stafford was writing to Peter Taylor: “We are having a splendid time with Delmore, but we must get back to Maine soon, because a house doesn’t like to be left alone too long.”13 On March 24 she writes: “I am going home on Monday but Cal is going to the Trappists for eight days.”14

  These “Trappists” may have been the same Rhode Island monks who had entertained both Lowell and Stafford in June 1944: on that occasion they had had, according to Jean, “the most wonderful time imaginable … we went to all the services, to vespers, to Benediction and to Compline,”15 but in 1946 Stafford’s obsession was with homemaking at Damariscotta Mills, and it is hardly a surprise that her intensified activity on this score should have encouraged the contemplative in Lowell. During the next three months, however, he seems to have escaped from Maine as often as he could. In April “Cal went off to New York today, to be gone a week or more and I am again left here alone with the mice.”16 In May, Lowell writes to Peter Taylor: “I’ll probably be passing through New York in a week or so and will see you.”17 And for those weeks when he did stay at Damariscotta he had devised an ingenious new means of stepping to one side of Jean’s hectic refurbishing:

  I go birding with field glasses every day and read a set of books called Birds of New England by a Mr. Forbrush who is the most eccentric writer of our times. His running attack on the “pernicious activities”
of cats sets Jean’s teeth on edge.18

  But Lowell was not always in the mood to sidestep. Since Christmas, he and Stafford had been edgy and at odds. She, he would say, was drinking heavily, and so he attempted to ration her intake: this would produce the sort of quarrel Stafford later, and perhaps exaggeratingly, recalls in her short story:

  “What the bleeding hell?,” I’d yell at him. “You drink as much as I do. You drink more!” and he’d reply, “A difference of upbringing, dear—no more than that. I learned to drink at home in the drawing room, so I know how. No fault of yours—just bad luck. You don’t drink well, dear. Not well at all.”19

  This urbane, sneering Lowell figure doesn’t quite fit with the accounts she was giving in letters at the time. In one of these she describes him returning from his April trip to New York: “When he came back and found the house fresh with all this wallpaper and this new paint, he exploded and said that it was cheap, that it was immoral, and that I had done the whole thing out of a sadistic desire to stifle him.”20 In “An Influx of Poets,” she analyzes the incident more coolly:

  My nesting and my neatening were compulsions in me that Theron looked on as plebeian, anti-intellectual, lace-curtain Irish; he said I wanted to spend my life in a tub of warm water, forswearing adventure but, worse, forswearing commitment. My pride of house was the sin of pride. I took no stock in this, I knew it to be nonsense, but I did not know how to defend myself against his barbs, the cruellest of which was that I could not sin with style; as my dreams were wanting in vitality, so was my decoration of houses wanting in taste.

  As the “Swiss-organdie glass curtains” were followed by “red velvet drapes” for the living room, and then the moss-green carpeting from Boston, the Theron-Lowell figure seethes with fury: “and all day and all night my God-fearing yokemate burned me at the stake in Salem.” And it is overwritten lines like this that should encourage caution when it comes to construing real-life agonies from Stafford’s fictional reconstructions.