Robert Lowell: A Biography Page 6

  I want to formally thank you for being so kind to both Anne and myself during this awkward “interregnum.” It has meant a great deal to both of us.23

  And on the same day he wrote to his grandmother Winslow:

  I have apologized to my father, and believe myself to be back in the family. I do not know how things will work out but chances are rosy. A small amount of experience has taught me to be less intolerant, less headstrong, a state of cooperation is above all necessary.

  I have been trying out for the Harvard Advocate and have every chance of making it…. If I make it you will have the doubtful pleasure of seeing me in print.24

  With the temperature thus reduced, Moore suggested that Lowell be put in touch with Ford Madox Ford, who was at Harvard on his way to visit Moore’s friend Allen Tate in Tennessee. The idea was that Lowell should meet a “real writer,” and if Ford agreed to help, perhaps some arrangement could be arrived at by which Lowell could be separated from his parents without abandoning either his academic prospects or his ambitions as a poet. Such an arrangement would also entail a separation from Anne Dick. The Lowells agreed, and a cocktail party was held at the Dicks’ house. Frank Parker and Blair Clark were detailed to round up the local poets and to make themselves agreeable to Ford. As a social event the party was a flop. When Clark introduced himself to Ford, he was told that Ford spoke only in French; and Parker committed the supreme faux pas by dismissing the work of Gaudier-Brzeska as “admirable but trivial.” But Lowell fared rather better. After the party, Ford announced that Lowell was “the most intelligent person he’d met in Boston.” In later years Lowell modestly added, “I think that was more his low opinion of Boston than his high opinion of me.”25 In any event, Ford agreed to give assurances to A. Lawrence Lowell that the young malcontent had enough seriousness to warrant the kind of apprenticeship Moore had in mind. It was agreed that Lowell travel South with Moore in the spring of 1937.

  En route, Lowell wrote to Anne Dick from a hotel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: he told her that Merrill Moore might be willing to “take her on” as “a voluntary patient.” Moore also intended to improve the quality of her social life:

  He has several “voluntary” jobs up his sleeve and is going to pass on all his literary invitations to you, i.e. going to parties, not giving them. Keep on the point of marriage! Perhaps you’ll get an invitation to dinner with Robert Frost in a few days.

  Reading over the “Fugitive” poets on the train I decided Allen Tate is very topnotch, a painstaking tecnician [sic] and an ardent advocate of Ezra Pound. Three things I want to do. I doubt if Moore is in sympathy with any: Reach Ezra, keep up my organization, and have you prepare for our marriage.26

  Notes

  1. Revised and printed as The Mad Musician, in Collected Verse Plays of Richard Eberhart (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), pp. 131–66. Eberhart, in a letter to I.H., November 26, 1981, writes: “What you ought to do is reprint my entire play about him … wherein I try to tell the truth way back then.”

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

  3. R.L. to Arthur Winslow, May 18, 1935 (Houghton Library).

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

  5. This and subsequent quotations from Anne Dick are from an interview with I.H. (1979).

  6. Charlotte Lowell to R.L., August 1936 (Houghton Library).

  7. Anne Dick to Charlotte Lowell, July 1936 (Houghton Library).

  8. R.L. to Frank Parker, n.d.

  9. R.L. to Richard Eberhart, August 23, 1936 (Dartmouth College Library).

  10. R.L., “Visiting the Tates,” Sewanee Review 67 (1959), pp. 557–58.

  11. Ms in Richard Eberhart collection (Dartmouth College Library).

  12. Robert Lowell Papers (Houghton Library).

  13. Anne Dick, interview with I.H.

  14. R.L. to Richard Eberhart, n.d. (Dartmouth College Library).

  15. Charlotte Lowell to Anne Dick, 1936 (Houghton Library).

  16. R. T. S. Lowell to Mrs. Evans Dick, December 22, 1936 (Houghton Library).

  17. R. T. S. Lowell to Evans Dick, December 23, 1936 (Houghton Library).

  18. Evans Dick to R. T. S. Lowell, December 23, 1936 (Houghton Library).

  19. Robert Lowell, Notebook 1967–68 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), p.37.

  20. R.L. ms, c. 1956 (Houghton Library).

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

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

  23. R.L. to Sarah Cotting, March 24, 1937 (Houghton Library).

  24. R.L. to Mrs. Arthur Winslow, March 24, 1937 (Houghton Library).

  25. R.L., BBC radio portrait of Ford Madox Ford, c. 1960.

  26. R.L. to Anne Dick, n.d. (Houghton Library).

  4

  I was wearing the last summer’s mothballish, already soiled white linens, and mocassins, knotted so that they never had to be tied or untied. What I missed along the road from Nashville to Clarksville was the eastern seaboard’s thin fields, chopped by stone walls and useless wildernesses of scrub. Instead, plains of treeless farmland, and an unnatural, unseasonable heat. Gushers of it seemed to spout over the bumpy, sectioned concrete highway, and bombard the horizon. Midway, a set of orientally shapely and conical hills. It was like watching a Western and waiting for a wayside steer’s skull and the bleaching ribs of a covered wagon.

  My head was full of Miltonic, vaguely piratical ambitions. My only anchor was a suitcase, heavy with bad poetry. I was brought to earth by my bumper mashing the Tates’ frail agrarian mailbox post. Getting out to disguise the damage, I turned my back on their peeling, pillared house. I had crashed the civilization of the South.1

  The sneakily whimsical but condescending tone adopted here was to become familiar to Lowell’s Southern friends throughout his later life. It is unlikely, though, that he was feeling specially satirical when he first arrived at Allen Tate’s “Benfolly,” in Clarksville, in April 1937. A fugitive from the victorious North, he was seeking refuge with the Fugitives; and Allen Tate was perhaps the most lordly and dogmatic of that heavily embattled group. Tate had helped found the Fugitive magazine (with John Crowe Ransom, his professor at Vanderbilt, and Robert Penn Warren, his room-mate at the same university); he had contributed to Agrarian manifestos, such as I’ll Take My Stand and Who Owns America; he had written biographies of Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis. If Ransom was the Southern writers’ spiritual chief, Tate was their unflagging, impetuous polemicist. For Tate, to have captured a Lowell from Boston was almost a political victory. Lowell viewed such postures as mere “themes” or “foibles”;2 for him the pilgrimage was wholly literary: it was not Tate’s secessionist fervor that had drawn him down to Tennessee, it was his status as an international man of letters. Tate and Ransom, in Lowell’s mind, connected America with the exhilaratingly convinced narrowness of European modernism. Ransom had studied at Cambridge, was admired by T. S. Eliot. Tate had served his time in Greenwich Village in the mid-twenties, and then in Paris and London from 1928 to 1930:

  He felt that all the culture and tradition of the East, the South and Europe stood behind Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Yeats and Rimbaud. I found myself despising the rootless appetites of middle-class meliorism.3

  As to the Southernism, Ransom and Tate’s regional self-consciousness simply had the effect of intensifying Lowell’s sense of his own significance; it led him to “discover what I had never known. I too was part of a legend. I was Northern, disembodied, a Platonist, a Puritan, an abolitionist.”4

  Evidence of this legendary status was provided shortly after Lowell’s arrival in Tennessee. Part of Merrill Moore’s plan for Lowell had been that if his trip South was a success, he might switch from Harvard to Vanderbilt to study under Ransom. With this possibility in mind, Lowell attended some of Ransom’s poetry classes at Vanderbilt during what was left of the academic year. In May, though, Ransom was offered a handsomely paid job as head of the English Department at
Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio. Vanderbilt refused to match Kenyon’s offer, and Ransom, perhaps piqued by this, was publicly toying with the idea of abandoning the South. To Tate, this was unthinkable, and he at once fired off an open letter to the local newspaper—a letter which, in the end, had the effect of making it impossible for Vanderbilt to keep its negotiations with Ransom on a discreet and friendly basis. In the short term, though, it stirred a merry row. And for Lowell the letter flatteringly implied that in the eyes of the South he was more than just “a torn cat, [who] was taken in when I needed help.”5 His presence in Tennessee was offered as a significant measure of Ransom’s national renown:

  It is now common knowledge that Mr. John Crowe Ransom is about to leave Vanderbilt to join the faculty of a college in Ohio. I know nothing of the reasons that may prompt Mr. Ransom to go, after twenty-five years at his Alma Mater, to another institution. If he goes, it will be a calamity from which Vanderbilt will not soon recover.

  Mr. Ransom is, I fear, a little more famous internationally than locally. He is one of the most distinguished men of letters in the world today. Where Vanderbilt is known outside her Alumni Associations and similar groups of persons whose enlightenment of interest is not quite perfect, she is known as the institution where John Crowe Ransom profoundly influences, through his teaching and writing, the course of modern literature. I need not cite any of his more brilliant achievements, but I should like to bring to your attention two recent incidents that illustrate the far-reaching character of his reputation. The Lowell family of Boston and Harvard University has just sent one of its sons to Nashville to study poetry with Mr. Ransom—I do not say Vanderbilt, because young Mr. Lowell will follow Mr. Ransom to Ohio. In the past few months a correspondent of mine at Cambridge, England, has informed me that his fellow students repeatedly express a wish to study under John Crowe Ransom.6

  The following week, Lowell did in fact travel to Kenyon with Ransom. Ransom had proposed that should he take the job, then Lowell should enroll at Kenyon in the fall. Lowell wrote to his mother that “the conditions would be almost ideal.”7

  During the first month after his break with Boston, Lowell returned home twice. “The atmosphere seemed less strained and more sympathetic” than before.8 Both parents adopted a cautiously polite approach, taking pains not to seem either interfering or indifferent. Evidently, they were resigned to whatever prospects Lowell might eventually decide on. Mr. Lowell still had hopes that his son would graduate from Harvard, but for the moment he was keeping these hopes to himself. Lowell may have extended the olive branch to his family, but he could as easily snatch it back. This much is clear from the letter he wrote to Charlotte just before setting off on his trip to Kenyon:

  It is poor strategy but good ethics to call to your attention that charity begins in the home, and that the finest thing you could do would be to be kind to Anne, who I know would greatly appreciate it. Nothing could make me happier or love you more. The hardest and only things that matter in life demand relinquisment [sic], development or sacrifice. I am under the impression Dr. Moore would agree with me.

  I have always believed that people must to remain healthy speak those things they feel most otherwise relationships become an arid frosting of useless courtesies. I enjoyed both book and maple sugar. In fact the book is one of the five or six unselected presents given me by anyone that I have really wanted. I really appreciate actions of that sort and am only unresponsive when no kindness is shown where it matters most.

  To go back to my last two visits home. For the first time I really felt that your [sic] interested in my wellfare [sic] and happiness as such unconnected with whether you directed it or not. If you can only go on with what you have started everyone will be much the happier. I wish that both you and Daddy in writing would write what is in your minds. You are both prone to allowing an ambiguous state of affairs to exist. I am afraid this letter sounds like a sermon, but I have never been good at proprieties and concealments, if my feelings are right I cannot lose by expressing them.

  Much love,

  Bobby

  P.S. See if you can’t get Daddy to write a real letter of his [own] accord.9

  Aside from being exasperated by the letter’s pompous tone, the Lowells would certainly have noticed that Bobby still could not prevent himself from balancing each tentative compliment with a solemn admonition. Even so, a wobbly truce had been achieved, and the parents were not going to be the first to wreck it.

  And in this, Merrill Moore continued to be the sturdy go-between, not only in his repeated praise of Tate and Ransom, but in offering to handle all the small but potentially disruptive practicalities. Moore, for instance, arranged for his friend Milton Starr to act as Lowell’s Southern banker. Mr. Lowell could thus grumblingly hand over his son’s allowance to Moore; Moore could then mail it to Starr, and Lowell would remain protected from any direct money transactions with his family. As Lowell later remarked, “For my Father money was the oxygen he survived on. Spending and even using money made him tired.”10

  Moore’s other charitable gesture may well have been less selfless than it seemed. He invited Charlotte to take a part-time job in his office; her tasks were mainly secretarial, but after a time Moore allowed her to “take on” a few of his milder “cases.” Apparently, her brisk approach to mental illness could now and then jolt self-pitying society ladies into health. Lowell snootily approved of his mother’s new career, feeling it to be “more lasting than needles and lampshades”—though here again he felt he should remind her “that any occupation in order to be sustaining requires hard work and discipline.”11

  *

  In spite of Tate’s politicking, and in spite of a student petition organized by Randall Jarrell (who was just completing his final year at Vanderbilt), Ransom finally decided for Kenyon. It wasn’t simply the money or Kenyon’s offer of a rent-free campus house. Ransom had fought one or two losing battles against the gradual liberalization of the Vanderbilt curriculum, and he had no taste for the fairly heavy administrative load that his professorship entailed. Kenyon would give him time to write, and a teaching brief vague enough for him to do more or less what he wanted. He also knew that Jarrell, along with a few of his brighter undergraduates, would follow him to Kenyon.

  As soon as Ransom had made the decision, Lowell set about organizing his summer. In July and August he would follow Ford and Tate to two writers’ conferences that they had signed up for, and he would enroll at Kenyon in the fall. In the meantime he would stay in Tennessee. Ford—together with his mistress, Janice Biala, and his secretary, who was in fact Biala’s sister-in-law—was now installed at the Tates’ house for a two-month stay, and it seemed only sensible to Lowell that he should be as close as possible to his new mentors. He asked Tate if he could lodge at Benfolly until the writers’ conferences began. Tate gave him a polite brush-off; the house was so crowded, he said, that any new visitor would have to pitch a tent on the lawn. Lowell, with “keen, idealistic, adolescent heedlessness,” took this as a command: “A few days later, I returned with an olive Sears-Roebuck-Nashville umbrella tent. I stayed three months.”12

  Lowell parked his tent under a lotus tree, and with barnyard stock meandering around him—“occasionally scratching the tent side or pawing the mosquito net”13—could not have felt more thoroughly agrarian. There were occasions too when he was glad not to be a full member of the household. Ford was in a grumpy mood most of the time, and there was a running dispute over Tate’s fierce guardianship of the water supply. It was a brutally hot summer, and when the cistern ran dry, Tate blamed Ford and his entourage for their too profligate flushing of the toilets. Ford retaliated by attempting to build a dew pond. He sank a bathtub in a nearby meadow, filled it up with twigs, and was baffled and outraged when it failed to produce a drop of liquid. There were also grumbles about the Southern cooking, which Ford loathed, and intermittent squabbles about politics; both Biala and her sister-in-law had left-wing attachments and didn’t ta
ke kindly to Tate’s magisterial pronouncements on behalf of the old Southern aristocracy: “The South of course should have seceded, it would have been better for the North. Communism is just a ruse to maintain the New York supremacy.”14

  Despite all this, work did get done. “It’s awful here,” wrote Janice Biala to a friend in New York:

  In every room in the house there’s a typewriter and at every typewriter there sits a genius. Each genius is wilted and says that he or she can do no more but the typewritten sheets keep on mounting.15

  Allen Tate was writing The Fathers, Mrs. Tate (Caroline Gordon) was working on The Garden of Adonis, and Lowell was experimenting, on the Tate model, with “grimly unromantic poems—organized hard and classical.” He had sent a few of these to periodicals and had them rejected, but “I’m in no hurry for recognition. I have no doubt of my ability to produce in the end.”16 The obsessed and frantic industry of Benfolly did not admit of failure or self-doubt and was a perfect match for Lowell’s own rather self-consciously ferocious dedication. He wrote to his mother at the beginning of July:

  I feel convinced that I have never worked so hard or reaped such favourable results before. This interim between Harvard and the writers schools has convinced me more than ever that my vocation is writing and that if I should fail at that I should certainly fail in anything else: fail to make good and fail to gain happiness.17

  Lowell’s hopes of “happiness” no longer seemed to include marriage to Anne Dick. Frank Parker had organized an expedition to the South, bringing with him Anne and “the boys,” Harry Brown, Blair and Bill Clark. The trip was not a success. Lowell was unresponsive, and Anne had to content herself with the attentions of Parker and Bill Clark. Without any explicit declarations, the message from the master’s tent was that the master was now living in a different world. Blair Clark recalls: “I still don’t understand the theory of the trip. Part of it was to wind up the Anne Dick affair, but not in any neat and orderly way.”18 Whatever the theory, the effect certainly was that the affair became wound up. Anne was quietly acquiescent; after all, she barely knew what she had lost: “I guess Cal cared for me—loved me, as he would say—for about 10 days, the first 10 days of our engagement.”19