Robert Lowell: A Biography Read online

  Our aims have narrowed down to an expression of God which I feel as an infinite and ever-present power, always working objectively on man for what is good. That he always forgives, suffers when we suffer, and that he seeks only to serve, and never punishes. This is the highest, and only duty of art, for here only is truth. My only doubt is in myself not in what I am trying to do. Of course God is not a physical being with likes and dislikes, but rather a force striving to perfect man. Personifying him is not however so foolish as it sounds. For man is the highest thing we know of and what can be greater than the highest virtues in man infinitely expanded. I hope you follow me, for I realise the inability of expression.

  What I have done this summer has been to begin understand [sic] God, and I have grown to love my art, and those who were great in it.14

  Two months earlier, Robert T. S. Lowell, Jr., ’35, had celebrated his first verse publication; called “Madonna,” it shows him to be more at ease with God than with his art:

  Celestial were her robes;

  Her hands were made divine;

  But the Virgin’s face was silvery bright,

  Like the holy light

  Which from God’s throne

  Is said to shine,

  Giving the angels sight.

  Sleep on in thy serenity;

  Breathe on thy constant joy.

  When I look on thee,

  A vision meets my eyes,

  A maiden calmly singing,

  The Savior’s message bringing.

  Her song will never cloy;

  She will not mar the quietness

  Which in eternal Paradise

  Is through the silence ringing.15

  Notes

  1. See Chapter One, note 1.

  2. Edward Tuck Hall, St. Mark’s School: A Centennial History (Stinehour Press, 1967), p. 82. Tuck Hall quotes from St. Mark’s 1926 Report as published in St. Mark’s Bulletin, December 1926.

  3. John P. Marquand, letter to I.H., June 10, 1981.

  4. Frank Parker, interview for BBC TV (1978).

  5. Blair Clark, interview with I.H. (1979).

  6. Ibid.

  7. Ibid.

  8. R.L., “Moulding the Golden Spoon.” Orations in the state contest of the Ohio Inter-Collegiate Oratory Association, February 16, 1940.

  9. Blair Clark, interview with I.H. (1979).

  10. Vindex 59 (1935), pp. 156–58.

  11. Frank Parker, interview with I.H. (1980).

  12. Blair Clark, interview with I.H. (1979).

  13. R.L. to Richard Eberhart, July 10, 1935 (Dartmouth College Library).

  14. Ibid., August 1935 (Dartmouth College Library).

  15. Vindex 59 (1935), p. 215.

  3

  Some years after Lowell left St. Mark’s, Richard Eberhart composed a verse play called The Crystal Sepulcher;1 a strikingly inept work, it featured as its hero a tormented schoolboy poet, for whom Lowell was the model. The “action” of the play involves the anguished hero-figure being examined and pronounced upon by a succession of baffled but well-meaning adults: the parents, the schoolmaster, the school psychiatrist and then a second professional psychiatrist. The “facts” the play deals in must be seen as questionable, but there is a value in its general view of the adolescent Lowell: for those grown-ups who took an interest in him he was clearly thought to be more than just ordinarily odd or mixed-up. The character portrayed by Eberhart is demonic and possessed, not really human.

  Eberhart’s personal view is (presumably) stated in the advice offered by the schoolmaster:

  I am for you but I am also against you.

  The cost is too great, the prize you seek too high.

  The world is rough. Torn too, I give my advice:

  Keep your feet on the ground, renounce the sky.

  The college psychiatrist is even less sympathetic; to him the Lowell figure is quite simply “mad,” he “eats toenails,” is “rude, vain, cruel, gloomy” and “talks with bitter cryptic wit”: “Furthermore, I must point out that he is unclean.”

  Small wonder that the playwright enlists more specialized assistance. The professional psychiatrist is called in and delivers the following summary of symptoms to the boy’s mother:

  I note here especially the trauma at his birth,

  That he growled when young, with stance of an animal

  Much too long, that as a little fellow he was vicious,

  Delighted in sharp instruments, was like a cannibal

  In being violently able to get his way;

  That early he developed the solitary and lonely, the surly.

  And that with the others he did not choose to play.

  He refused you as nurse, and that was early.

  All this fits rather too neatly with the Caliban cartoon of Lowell as half-man, half-beast, but what does seem certain is that before Lowell left St. Mark’s, his mother had had consultations with a Boston psychiatrist called Merrill Moore and that Moore had talked to Eberhart. The Crystal Sepulcher amalgamates all the prevailing anxieties and prejudices and suggests that by 1935 Lowell had indeed become a “case.”

  Merrill Moore was thought to be the right man to opine on Lowell because he was himself a poet of some reputation. He had been a fringe member of the Southern “Fugitive” group led by John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate and was famous for writing only—but voluminously—in sonnet form. One of his books was called simply M because it contained one thousand sonnets, and a current story was that Moore kept a note pad on the dashboard of his car and could scrawl out fourteen-liners while waiting for the lights to change. At any rate, the sheer bulk of his output was usually sufficient to quell any very severe critical objections, and from Charlotte’s point of view he offered a perhaps unique combination of medical and literary know-how. She herself had been seeing him about her own “nerves” and had left Moore in little doubt that her mental balance depended largely on the balance of her errant son.

  The consultations with Moore were all part of Charlotte’s continuing campaign to “tidy up” her no longer small Napoleon. Her efforts had intensified as they had become more self-evidently hopeless. Both Frank Parker and Blair Clark have memories of her incessant, fruitless nagging:

  She was very uncomfortable about him—he was so clumsy, so sloppy, so ill-mannered. She would say things to him like “See what nice manners Blair has.” And I played that role because it was helpful to him. I really think there was a psychological fixation on dominating Cal by that woman. And what does an only child do—with an obsessed mother and a weak father who goes along with that obsession?2

  Inevitably, one of Charlotte’s chief obsessions was that—after St. Mark’s—Lowell should take his rightful place at Harvard. Cousin A. Lawrence Lowell was president of the college, and while still at St. Mark’s, Lowell had spent evenings with him rather as he spent evenings with Eberhart. In both cases, the extramural guidance Lowell sought was in the interests of poetry, not of academic scholarship, but for Charlotte both mentors seemed reassuringly solid and conventional. Her hope was that Harvard orderliness would eventually tame Lowell, and in the fall of 1935 she was relieved to find her son actually enrolled and attending classes. His grades at St. Mark’s had improved during his last year, and on leaving school he had been able to muster enough courtesy to write a “proper”—if slightly ambiguous—letter to his grandfather:

  I have had five very pleasant years at school and I will be sorry to leave. I have at last found myself and now feel confident that I can and shall accomplish what I set out to do. College in spite of certain objections will on the whole I think prove very profitable.3

  This was written before Lowell’s summer at Nantucket. By the time he actually entered Harvard, his self-educating impulse had hardened to a state of near rebellion. And, as always, the rebellion would be all the more enticing if it could be directed at his mother. Charlotte believed in Harvard; it was to be expected that Lowell would therefore decide to treat Harvard with contempt. He enrolled in
an all-English course, a clear declaration of his intention merely to use the university, and, after dabbling in this for a while, simply gave up going to classes.

  There were higher matters to attend to. He announced to Frank Parker and Blair Clark that the trio’s energies should henceforth be directed exclusively towards the arts. Parker, he declared, would be a painter; Clark would be a musician—or, failing that, a philosopher. He, Lowell, was the poet. Parker’s obedience was so complete that he left Harvard during his first year in order to devote himself to his new calling:

  I thought myself that I’d never amount to much, perhaps no more than a cartoonist, even. But Cal thought there was no limit to what one could do. We were reading the commentary on Dante where a man can put himself into heaven or hell, and Cal sort of believed that, and made me believe it: that I was going to paint and he was going to write. It was like that—the splendours, the terrors.4

  Blair Clark was less easily swayed; or maybe it was just that Lowell did not press him so hard as he pressed Parker. It is possible that he had already discerned a different role for this competent lieutenant: Clark would provide a link with the world of practical affairs and serve as a buffer between Lowell and the Lowells. As it turned out, Clark spent most of Lowell’s freshman year in California, recovering from illness.

  *

  In May 1936 Lowell was introduced to Anne Tuckerman Dick, a distant cousin of Frank Parker’s. A slightly over-age (at twenty-four) ex-debutante, Anne was viewed with suspicion by the smart-stuffy Boston set in which her family moved. She was thought to be too vehement and “driven,” not at all a safe marriage bet for any of the grander Boston sons. Sitting out at a ball one evening, Anne had been told by Charles Francis Adams III: “You know, none of us would marry you because we’ve heard you’ve been to a psychiatrist.”5 And she had taken this to summarize her plight. By the time she met Lowell, Anne felt herself to be drifting towards a mildly wayward spinsterhood; certainly, she was ready enough to be intrigued by the overtures of a nineteen-year-old poet:

  The first time we met I said the only thing I knew how to say. “Do you like dances?” And he said, “I’ve never been to one.” Well, I’d been to maybe a thousand. I’d never spoken to anyone who hadn’t been to one. It was different.

  In their first meetings, it was almost as if Lowell was weighing Anne up as a possible recruit to his exclusive tribe. Girls had not so far featured in the Lowell curriculum (not even, as with drunkenness, under the heading of “Experience”): the fear—as Lowell later described it—was that sex might enervate the group’s elevated purposes. But what if Anne was “serious” as well as pretty? At his second meeting with her, Lowell showed her a poem he had written “about sitting in a rowing boat waiting for a bite,” and she was somewhat scornful of it (indeed, she claimed much later to have found it “the most pathetic, wretched thing”). Afterwards, the poet regretfully reported back to Parker: “She won’t do.” And Anne (on hearing this from Parker) remembers wondering: “Is this some new kind of meatball?” As for Parker, he was not at all dismayed—he had originally thought of Anne as his girl.

  It seems, however, that Anne was pretty enough to be given one more chance, and serious enough to accept it. An invitation was sent, via Parker, for her to have supper with “the boys.” Lowell had by this time extended his group to include Blair Clark’s brother, Bill, and a promising young Harvard poet, Harry Brown. All five of them were present for supper in a Cambridge restaurant, with Anne the only female guest: the idea was to see how Lowell’s candidate would stand up to a feast of brilliant chat. This time, Anne was willing to be dazzled:

  The talk was all about the kings and queens of England. And they were talking about them as if they were so-and-so at the Porcellian Club. If I hadn’t had such a terrible background, it would have just seemed regular. But to someone who’d been with such gross people, that Social Register grossity, to have this light conversation. There was nothing pedantic about it. It was completely spontaneous and humorful and yet learned in the right way…. I felt the happiest I think I’ve ever felt in my entire life.

  The following weekend Lowell visited Anne at her grandmother’s house at Appleton Farms near Ipswich, and during the course of an early evening walk in the garden he asked her—with much gravitas—if he could become one of her “suitors.”

  And I said “Yes.” And then we walked back to the house. And it was still light. It was June. We sat downstairs for a while. I thought I was in a dream, a very gentle dream. We went upstairs to the landing outside my room and there was a sofa there. And I think it was then he kissed me, maybe before—probably downstairs. I don’t know if it was then or not that he told me he didn’t like kissing. I guess he’d never kissed anyone before. But that was very disturbing because kissing was all I was interested in, with anybody. It was my main thing. But it’s true, there was very little kissing after that.

  For Lowell, though, this first kiss was of almost ceremonial significance; it meant, quite simply, that he had “become thoroughly and firmly engaged, almost married.” He gave Anne his grandfather’s watch to mark their (at this stage) secret pact. And immediately he made a start on her reeducation. With Parker or Clark in tow, he began to pay nightly visits to Anne’s house and would there stage readings of Milton, Donne and Shakespeare—and consume a hearty dinner. “My father hated their guts because they didn’t even say ‘Good evening, Mr. Dick.’ They sat at his table and acted as if he didn’t exist.” But Anne was still in her “gentle dream”:

  I kept thinking, “I’m engaged. I’m engaged.” It seemed very unreal. “I’m engaged.” Hardly thinking who to, because who was he? What did I know except that he could talk about kings and queens?

  She resolved to study, because her fiancé wanted her to study, and if being a good fiancée meant nightly readings from Samson Agonistes, then she was happy to put up with it. Lowell had indeed acquired a new, and utterly devout, disciple.

  *

  For Lowell, Anne’s house was more than just a night school or a place to eat; it was also a sanctuary from his steadily deteriorating relations with his parents. His year at Harvard had not been a success; he was contemptuous of most of the English faculty, he had had poems rejected by the Harvard Advocate, and he had been patronized by Robert Frost. The Advocate rejection was particularly wounding: Lowell was an applicant for a position on the magazine’s literary board, but when he went for an interview “he was asked to tack down a carpet in the sanctum and, when he was finished, told that he needn’t come round anymore.” Frost seems to have been more subtle. Lowell had sought him out (Frost was the Norton Lecturer that year) and asked for his opinion on an epic he was writing on the subject of the Crusades. Frost read a few lines and commented that it “goes on rather a bit,” then recited Collins’s “How sleep the brave,” as a model of conciseness.

  Both rebuffs were to be recalled by Lowell in later years and no doubt hurt him at the time. By the end of his first year he was in a mood to reject Harvard rather than give it another chance to reject him, and most of his quarrels with his parents seem to have centered on his future at the university. Lowell wanted to drop out at the end of his freshman year; Charlotte made it clear that if he did drop out he would have to survive without help from the family:

  Neither Daddy nor I wish in any way to force you into our way of life or behavior. You are now practically a man and free to do largely as you choose, only if you choose to be independent you must also be responsible and self-supporting…. We have thought this all over very carefully and this is a final decision. We will help you when we approve of what you do but we will not help you to do things of which we do not approve.6

  Lowell already planned to spend a second summer in Nantucket, and his mother and father had arranged to go to Europe. Each side sensed that the other ought to be avoided for a time, and Lowell was now holding an important card. There could be no doubt that Charlotte would share Boston society’s opinion of Anne Dick. Eve
n so, just before Lowell set off for Nantucket, Anne wrote hopefully to Mrs. Lowell:

  Bobby has decided to go back to college—he is leaving here Monday and spending that night with the Swifts on his way to Nantucket. We are happy about this final decision as I am sure you are….

  Bobby and I are planning to announce the engagement—Saturday. This seems best considering all things—unless for some reason you do not wish it.7

  At the end of June 1936 Lowell left for Nantucket with Blair Clark, knowing that he had constructed the beginnings of what might turn out to be a complete break with his parents. In the meantime he was anxious to consolidate the gains of the previous summer. This summer’s reading program was to include Elizabethan drama, and Clark and Parker (Parker joined them later) were given seventy-five plays to read before the end of “term.” Anne Dick was instructed to read Troilus and Cressida and to mail him her comments, which he would then return with his tart annotations (“I loved being mocked so wittily. I adored it. The more he criticized me, the more I adored it”). Lowell’s “campaign” style is well captured in this letter to Frank Parker:

  Dear Frank:

  I suppose I am the goat and write first. Of course I don’t dare to affirm positively that you have not written. Perhaps you wrote a letter and forgot to mail, perhaps you mailed and forgot to stamp, perhaps you stamped and forgot to envelope, perhaps you dreamt your epistle ect. ect. ad infitum. With this off my chest I can begin.