Robert Lowell: A Biography Page 5

  I have written two fairly long poems and a mass of scrap work. Extracts are hardly worth while, you will see what I have done when you arrive here. When do you think you can join us? I am looking forward to seeing you tremendously.

  Anne wrote me about the 25th and her day with you, and your bewitching. I swear Ipswich has the weirdest power: sorcery and death. I think “Cousin Annie” deserves a sound spanking. I don’t know how much Anne has told you, but we are engaged. Reality and time crawl on us fast before we know it. 2 months ago marriage, working for a living ect. seemed far away at least 3 or 4 years in the future and now the curtain appears to have fallen almost overnight. I love her and know her as deeply and as much as anyone could in a few weeks, but must admit that she has not yet the same reality to me as you have and that the trial and tempering of the blade all lie in the future. The realities and problems are extremely powerful perhaps glorious, but at the same time infinitely sober. Can she or should she burn thru her neurosis? My indirect work with her this summer will partially answer the question perhaps. Will we be able to float our feather against the winds. All I should like to consider definite about the future is that you and I and Anne (Bobo? More?) will live and fight thru life together always working toward realizing our ideals. We have got to think about living conditions, making money; we must not compromise and sink into school teaching, we must break away from our relations and throw aside all convention that we cannot believe in. I want you to think on these things, to be a friend of Anne’s just as you are mine, to help her and tell me what is happening and to realise that you are and always will be a definite and imperative factor. I am afraid this letter has the tone of a campaign speech, but after all that’s just what we are beginning.

  Could buy a cheap one volume Shakespeare for Bobo [Blair Clark]. The Oxford (Cambridge) at Grolier also Marlow complete you can get one of those green volumes in Cambridge for a dollar or two. Let me hear from you in a day or two.

  Cal.

  P.S. Try and persuade Anne to come down to Nantucket with you.8 [All misspellings are in the original]

  Lowell himself intended to spend the summer “wrestling with technique” and would try his hand at “satire and prose.” He was also dabbling in the fashionable moderns: Aldous Huxley he was to find “so insipid and dull that I could endure but sixty pages,” but Wyndham Lewis’s Snooty Baronet won marks for “rough-hewn craftsmanship.” There is no evidence that he was reading Auden at this time, but who else might have caused him to “wonder if the Old Anglo-Saxon alliterative poetry isn’t coming back, loosened up a bit and strengthened by assonances and off-rhymes”?9

  What is certain is that Lowell had been deep in Eliot and Pound during his year at Harvard (and also William Carlos Williams, under the encouragement of James Laughlin), and a comparison between the work he was sending to Richard Eberhart in the summer of 1935 and his work in 1936 shows an immense gain in directness and self-confidence. In 1935 he was blusteringly Miltonic, and most of his verse was, as he later called it, “grand, ungrammatical and had a timeless, hackneyed quality”:10

  Turn back, look down, then turn thy face away

  Look up, away, thy eyelids to the ground

  See! God is shining forth in midst of day

  There see! He stands on yonder sloping mound

  The air is vibrant, swollen with the sound;

  His voice is sung by birds, the song of mirth,

  Of Eden lost and now forever found,

  Of love immortal, Spring, and mercy’s birth

  Of Lord and Savior wandering on the earth.

  All the 1935 poems are in this vein: awesome revelations of the deity (“a gleaming face is bursting through the clouds,” “a mighty soul was sailing out to sea”) or prostrated hymns to the potency of Art (“O Art, I am a beggar at thy shrine”). The voice is always mechanically grandiloquent; archaisms and inversions abound and the meter has a textbook regularity. By the following year all this has changed, and there is a pervading caution in Lowell’s poems, as if he genuinely has become humble about the difficulties of his art: his modest aim now is for accuracy of observation, for natural—if not neutral—speech rhythms, and for some sparing exercise of the ironic intelligence. He had begun to grope towards the idea of himself as a “modern” poet, and in 1936 one way of being modern was to play it safe. This typical poem from the 1936 summer is possibly a reworking of the poem he showed to Anne Dick:

  I pulled up anchor well after mid-day

  Swishing the prongs back and forth in the water

  To shake off the mud:

  Washed the entrails and fish scales

  From my fingers

  And rowed thru the lily pads to shore

  My rods, a waving tuft of grass

  In the bow,

  Little perch with white-holes

  Between their back-fins

  Flapping against the sides of the bait-pail

  Cool water, loggy faded fish

  Prospect of picnic lunch ahead

  The shadow of tall trees above me.11

  And a prose piece called “Grass Stroke,” which seems to date from this year—it is headed “Robert T. S. Lowell, Lowell A.41, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.”—has a sharp, surrealistic power; its transformations issue from feverishly intent scrutiny—if you look hard enough, and fiercely enough, it seems to say, you might injure your brain, but you will be rewarded by strange visions and elisions:

  Sometimes, when we are in disorder, every pinprick and scraping blade of grass magnifies. A pebble rolls into the Rock of Gibraltar. I got a sunstroke regarding the gardener mow the lawn. He dumped matted green grass into a canvas bag and emptied the bag into a rut pond behind a clump of shrubbery. People had emptied ashes into the pond; which otherwise might have been wild and unsullied with turtles flopping from rotten logs. I watched him dunp grass on the surface where there ought to have been frogs. I smelled the odor of dried verdure in my sleep; tons of it, wet and lifeless, floating and stifling. At morning the grass tide rose up gruesome.

  The sea lay grass green and ever so serene. Sharks’ fins ripped the ripe slick. The fish rythmically approximated each others’ courses and crossed at intervals. The water was toothed with their tusks. Oil dripped from the tusks. Short cropped grass drooped over their round eyes. Whales spouted, and their flat tails flopped and towered, making me conscious of umbrageous trunks surrounding the sea; a Nether World or antideluvian scene; shimmer of shiners, floating logs and submerged shadows.

  The grass adjoining the garden house on a golf links was grisled, bleached to hay, and piled in heaps. As I handled it the grass came off in layers. The underneath was damp. Maggots crawled and crawled, searching after a putrifying rat, buried under grass. Fermentation and stagnation had set in. The grass was a sieve for their seething. They had bright colors; orange with black spots (bees fly in front of the blazing sun); grayish-white with pale gray spots on a soft sloat torso; sheeny brittle beetle shells, unbreakable with a sledge. And the maggots seethed and seethed, searching for the rats, with eyes that could not see in terrible grass smell.

  I perceived a golf ball, hidden among weathered boards, near-by the hay pile. The ball was imbedded in a rut and had perhaps hibernated out the winder frozen. Rubber wrapping was visible through a dent. The cover was discolored and already undergoing the process of return. The earth devours her offspring: I am observing the earth-process, a huge globe masticating a little ball. I am addressing the earth; I have been addressing the earth some time. Earth, I am able to momentarily retard your dinner. I have not time to wait until you have finished your meal. I have leisure because I have a pain in my head; but you are tortoise-paced beyond reason, only tortoises are numbered among the rapid. I could swallow your golf ball; or, if I were profound, I could place it in a glass case with crossed brassies and a little white card inscribed “Preserved”; or I could throw it into the rut pond behind the clump of shrubbery, where the gardener deposite mown grass. I observed the golf
ball sinking through water; and the grass settles in layers in the rut pond. I have seen grass settling and descending for days, blade by blade. Gravitation is very grave in her demeanor, gravitation is the grave of grass blades. At noontide her odor increases as a rat putrifying, and at evening decreases as cobwebs crumbling. Gravitation is as the growth of a rose deified.

  When I woke up and lay for months in bed, the membranes of my brain sprained, I wondered if the coincidence existed between noon, the putrifying rat, and my sunstroke.12 [All misspellings are in the original.]

  On July 4, 1936, Lowell permitted himself a brief holiday from Nantucket. It was Anne’s twenty-fifth birthday and he decided to visit her at Appleton Farms. He had barely seen her since the engagement, and his letters had been more concerned with her instruction than with any sentimental small talk. Anne’s memory of his visit (recorded some forty years after the event) may have to be treated cautiously, although both Parker and Clark have said that it rings true:

  The night he arrived, or the next night, he comes into my bedroom. I’m glad to say this now, because I want to. And he got into my bed. There were two twin beds in his room, with straw matting everywhere.… and I was a virgin, in the sense … well, I was a virgin, but a lot of necking. But I was engaged. I somehow felt I wanted it to be a complete rounded experience. Now this is the irony, and this is the sour part. He got into my bed, and said in a very unCal-ish, very unloving way, “You know, I’ve been to a whorehouse, twice.” And that was awfully depressing. He didn’t say anything about love, anything about me personally—he just said: “I’ve been to a whorehouse, twice. And I can tell you what the whores do. I can tell you and you can try and do it.” That was that. I guess I did try a little bit, but that was the only time we ever … we went downhill from then on.13

  Nonetheless, they persisted with their engagement, and on his return from Nantucket, Lowell took Anne to meet his parents at Marlborough Street. The effect was as he might have wished:

  There they were, at the door. Mr. Lowell had the most inane smile on his face. He was in the background. He was like some kind of flabby Halloween pumpkin, long after Halloween, long after it had any point. And it had started to smell a little. And she wore a mask, hiding nothing, hiding not the power of zero, but zero simply. They didn’t know what to say. They were speechless.

  This is Anne Dick’s account, told with the vindictiveness that the Lowell parents managed to arouse in most of their son’s women, but there seems no reason to question the outline of her recollection.

  A liaison with an older, manifestly unsuitable woman seems to have been rebellion enough for Lowell at this point. He agreed to return to the university for another year, although in a letter to Eberhart about Frank Parker he made it clear that his view of Harvard was unchanged, “College, and especially the life it forces on one became a lid squashing down all [Parker’s] energies and sufferings, so that he got into a neurotic condition, confusion piling up inside and nothing able to gain an outlet.”14 For the moment, though, Charlotte had the problem of Anne Dick to grapple with, and Lowell could content himself with now and then threatening to elope with Anne to Europe and with adopting an even more offhand attitude to his Harvard classes.

  Charlotte was not moved to oppose the Anne Dick affair openly until it was proposed that the couple’s engagement be made official. She then wrote to Anne saying that Lowell “cannot possibly marry with our consent until he is at least 21 and self-supporting.” Why could not Anne be patient and postpone any formal announcement for a year or so? “Continue to consider yourself engaged if you want to, and give him an inspiration to work for.”15

  In Charlotte’s mind, it was not entirely a question of Lowell’s tender age. It was, she thought, his general instability that had led him into the relationship in the first place, and his stubbornness that obliged him to hold on to it. She was still attending her sessions with Merrill Moore and had picked up enough psychoanalytic jargon to enable her to see Anne as just another symptom of her son’s disorderly attachment to his mother. But, like the writing of poetry, Anne was also a source of “over-excitement” and therefore to be warned against until she too was happily outgrown.

  A marriage, though, would be disastrous, and it was perhaps Charlotte’s mounting nervousness on this score that prompted the events of Christmas, 1936. On December 22, Lowell’s father had written to Anne’s mother, again warning against the consequences of an official engagement: “We feel we cannot co-operate in an engagement which would not be for Bobby’s good at present.”16 On the following day, Anne’s father, Evans Dick, received a call from Mr. Lowell’s lawyer cousin Alfred: could he meet with Alfred and with Mr. Lowell at the Gourmet Club “on a matter of vital importance.” Evans Dick turned up and was lectured by both Lowells on his daughter’s immodesty; she had, it was charged, been visiting Lowell in his rooms at Harvard, without a chaperone. That same evening Mr. Lowell followed up his lecture with a note:

  In continuation of our conversation this evening, I wish to ask that you and Mrs. Dick do not allow Ann [sic] to go to Bobby’s rooms at college without proper chaperonage. We know that she has been there once, and rather think that she is in the habit of doing so. Such behavior is contrary to all college rules, and most improper for a girl of good repute.17

  On December 27 Anne’s father wrote back to Mr. Lowell, denying that there had been any impropriety: “Cal and Anne both tell me this, and I believe them…. [I] wonder whether there is not some person trying to make a situation already bad enough—even worse.”18

  Next day, Anne gave Mr. Lowell’s note to her “fiancé.” Thirty years later, Lowell recollected his response as follows:

  My father’s letter to your father, saying

  tersely and much too stiffly that he knew

  you’d been going to my college rooms alone—

  I can still almost crackle that slight note in my hand.

  I see your outraged father; you, his outraged daughter;

  myself brooding in fire and a dark quiet on

  the abandoned steps of the Harvard Fieldhouse,

  calming my hot nerves and enflaming my mind’s

  nomad quicksilver by saying Lycidas—19

  In Anne Dick’s account, Lowell instructed her to drive to Marl-borough Street and then wait in the car “for a minute.” Fifteen minutes later he reappeared and told her that he had handed the note back to his father and then struck him to the ground. He had stormed out of the house with Mr. Lowell still half prostrate on the floor:

  FROM THE STEPS OF THE HARVARD GYM

  Crossing a new

  hour’s athletic credit from my debit card,

  I blanked on the steps of the gym at Harvard;

  furies muscled in on me from the blue,

  from my paranoia’s Hawawiian azure—

  their mission was to reasure.

  In my velvety polo coat’s pocket

  was my allowance’s last dollar,

  Father’s letter to my “fiancee’s” father:

  “We have heard your daughter has made a habit

  of visiting our son

  in his rooms at Lowell House without a chaperon.”

  I hummed the adamantine

  ore rotundo of Lycidas to cool love’s quarrels,

  and clear my honor

  from Father’s branding Scarlet Letter….

  “Yet once more, O ye laurels”—

  I was nineteen!

  In the Marlborough Street Parlor,

  where oat meal roughened

  the ceiling blue as the ocean,

  I torpedoed my Father to the floor—

  How could he stand

  without Mother’s helmsman hand?

  With the white lipped masochistic

  coolness of Billy the Kid or a stoic,

  I streaked for my borrowed station wagon—

  and girl! I could hear

  Mother in slippers at the bannister:

  “Bobby? Oh Bobby!” This h
append.20

  [All misspellings are in the original.]

  For Charlotte, who had witnessed the beating from the top of the stairs, this was the crisis: her son had finally gone mad. Frank Parker, who called at Marlborough Street the next day, found Mrs. Lowell “raging like a tiger”:

  If you had a German shepherd, taking care of it and getting the best food and care and so on, and then it bit you, wouldn’t you shoot it? Or wouldn’t you have it shut out—that’s what she said to me. Anger, fear, you know. Mr. Lowell was nowhere to be seen. He was nursing his jaw.21

  Charlotte’s first outraged reaction was to contact Merrill Moore in order to have Lowell committed to an institution. It is impossible to know how serious she was in this, but Moore is to be given credit for taking a placatory line. His first move was to persuade Lowell to apologize to his father. This wasn’t difficult. Lowell was already remorseful and had told Frank Parker that the blow had been provoked by Mr. Lowell’s description of Anne Dick as “no better than a whore.” He hadn’t “meant” to do it.22 By March 24 he was able to write to Aunt Sarah Cotting:

  You probably know that I am back in the family. Daddy could not have been more reasonable, and I think everyone realizes that a great deal of the friction was needless and merely the result of misunderstanding. Nevertheless I sometimes feel rather uncertain about the future, the atmosphere is strained. My father is leaning over backwards too much, more than he can enjoy. Intercourse creaks: I have been home once. I haven’t spoken with my mother, set times are made for meetings. All this is inevitable after a wide rupture. I hope above all that a mutual sympathy can be reached. Individual demands are relatively trivial.