January 1983 the Legacy of Robert Lowell by Donald Petersen
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January 1983 The legacy of Robert Lowell by Donald Petersen In these days of voyeurism and the pursuit of vicarious kicks Ian Hamilton’s Robert Lowell: a Biography[1] is bound to be a much-thumbed book. Because the poet himself made a public record of his private life—mess after mess after mess detailed in the later poems—scholars will be at work for a long time, not only with the incidental felicities of phrase but with the questions of the poems’ “truths”: to what extent does this or that passage reflect or falsify the poet’s life, especially his amorous relationships. Here are possibilities for endless gossip, endless soap opera. It is easy to predict that the Lowell biography machine will keep going well into the next century, with Mr. Hamilton’s thick, well-documented biography as a primary text. Lowell himself practically ordained this by living the sort of life that he did and by writing it into his poems. It was as though, sensing our fondness for gossip, our penchant for meanness, he deliberately left us, in those late “confessional” books, poems in which biographical matters —the agonies of the heart and the mind—greatly outweigh any literary merit. Indeed, during the last twenty years of his life he stepped up his amorous activities and complicated his marital difficulties, recording them in poem after poem, almost with the design of titillating and confounding us. He has left us his literary legacy, and it is a can of worms. How we deal with it will be a fair reflection on us. Not that any of this was easy. Mr. Hamilton is at pains to show us—year by year, month by month, almost day by day—the stew and sweat of Lowell’s life. The presentation is mainly chronological. The documentation is plentiful, employing poems, letters, news clippings, critical works, unpublished memoirs and manuscripts (especially from the Lowell collection in the Harvard library), and many personal interviews between Hamilton and Lowell’s heirs and friends. He also tells us how Lowell, always a worrier of his poems, went through a fever of composition and revision. Even in the books of the Seventies—Notebook, History, For Lizzie and Harriet, The Dolphin, and Day by Day—though the poems may have the look of casual construction, little more than diary entries or snippets of letters conveying hot-off-the-griddle experience dumped still steaming into unrhymed “sonnets” or free-verse stanzas, the casual look, we are told, is deceiving. Often the poet’s labors are augmented by the helpful hand of his friend, the poet Frank Bidart. The revision of a line might produce a reversal of its meaning, for the effect sometimes outweighed the truth. And, in any case, the truth of poetry may be above mere biographical facts. No wonder, then, that some of Lowell’s heirs and friends, through Hamilton’s doggedly heroic recital of his life, wish to disclose the straight unsentimentalized facts. But this is not all they wish. For by and large, Mr. Hamilton, an English poet and critic, also has a fine sense of Lowell’s poems. Again and again in this Byzantine book he returns to the poems. Though his judgments will be challenged, he does not forget that Lowell’s chief importance to us is as a poet who wrote some poems that will stand. Not that the poet was very often at the peak of his powers. This is the tale of a poet who was, for all of his adult life, a mental patient. As often as two or three times a year he had recourse to 1 psychiatric hospitals, often locked wards, where in the beginning he underwent shock therapy and, later, treatment by drugs. It is also the tale of his three marriages—to Jean Stafford from 1940 to 1948, to Elizabeth Hardwick from 1949 to 1972, and to Caroline Blackwood, of Britain’s Guinness family, from 1972 until his death in 1977. Each of these marriages was literary, each wife a writer possessed of keen insight and a fine literary style. Two of the marriages were enhanced and further complicated by the birth of children. With Hardwick he fathered a daughter and, with Blackwood, a son. One might say, following Mr. Hamilton, that these wives companioned him as well as they could as he journeyed through his manic- depressive Scylla and Charybdis, lured by many a dewy-eyed siren. But principally this is the tale of his marriage to Elizabeth Hardwick, who lived with him, learned from him, and bore the brunt of caring for him for the longest time, while carrying on her own career as a novelist and essayist. To her Mr. Hamilton’s book is largely indebted. And finally, most tellingly and most terribly, this is the tale of Thorazine, the drug that alternately sustained and depressed him from 1954 to 1967, and the tale of lithium, the drug that then took him over and released him into being the neo-Roman poet that a piece of him wanted to be. The present life also gives us a detailed account of Lowell’s early years, his home, and upbringing. Here is the domineering mother, Charlotte, a chip off her proud father Arthur Winslow, who traced his line back even farther than the Lowells could, to the Mayflower. Though she had read Napoleon’s life admiringly, several of her stronger suitors were rejected, and she finally settled, with her father’s approval, on the “oafish and compliant” Bob Lowell, a career navy man with a fixed oval smile and no future, his money smaller than Charlotte’s, his major assets his family name and a stiff sort of bearing, like that of a wedding-cake doll. We learn of the birth of their only child, Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV (“Bobby”) in Arthur Winslow’s town house on Boston’s Beacon Hill, in 1917. Of their subsequent homes and neighborhoods. Of the lonely boy’s schools and his few chums. Of the sadomasochistic teasing, particularly with respect to his gifts, allowances, and expectations (very possibly reflecting the husband-wife interplay), that developed between Charlotte and Bobby. He early acquired a hulking size and became a playground bully. Put into St. Mark’s prep school at thirteen, he began by scrapping with the boys and was a below-average student. But in his last two years (1933-35), gradually beginning to see himself as “intellectual,” he organized a self-improvement group consisting of himself, Blair Clark, and Frank Parker. He took the nickname Cal—after Caliban or Caligula— to signify either his brute or demonic nature. He dominated the group with “a brutal, childish tyranny,” prescribing reading programs, rules of conduct, roles—Parker would be a painter, Clark a musician or philosopher, himself a poet. For the summer of 1935, a trip to Nantucket was planned. In a cottage he had rented, while reading Wordsworth’s Prelude and Amy Lowell’s Keats, Lowell prescribed for his group a daily diet including cereal with raw honey, cooked eels, and cocoa. On one occasion they mixed rum with cocoa, for “experience required the trio to know what it felt like to be drunk.” Parker and Clark remained Lowell’s lifelong friends, Parker was to make prints for jackets and frontispieces of Lowell’s books, and Clark was very often the good angel who assisted during Lowell’s many mental breakdowns and convalescences. Clark remembers Cal’s mother (in an interview with Ian Hamilton—this book is a treasure trove of such interviews): “She was very 2 uncomfortable about him—he was so clumsy, so sloppy, so ill-mannered. She would say things like ‘See what nice manners Blair has.’ . 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?” At St. Mark’s he studies with Richard Eberhart, and writes his first stumbling poems. In his senior year he writes an essay: “War: A Justification.” While admitting the depravity of war, he maintains that in peacetime there is a “spirit of listlessness and decay.” War “radiates life, energy, and enthusiasm,” unity and a spirit of cooperation. His parents have destined him for Harvard, where cousin A. Lawrence Lowell is president. His courses leave him numb, he feels snubbed by the student literati. Robert Frost, the Norton Lecturer that year, belittles a poem on the Crusades that he is trying to write. He threatens to drop out. To which Charlotte responds: “. if you choose to be independent you must also be responsible and self-supporting . we will not help you to do things of which we do not approve.” These strictures also extend to Bobby’s wish to become engaged to a Boston debutante, Anne Tuckerman Dick. The senior Lowell ineptly intervenes with Anne’s father, writing of alleged improprieties on her part. Anne shows Mr. Lowell’s note to Bobby, who instructs her to drive him to Marlborough Street and then wait in the car. He enters his home, hands the note back to his father, strikes him down, and storms out leaving his father “half prostrate on the floor.” Charlotte contacts Merrill Moore, the Boston psychiatrist-poet with whom she seems to have had a long relationship. (She had been in his care and, at the very least, was for some time later in his part-time employ.) Moore suggests that his friend Allen Tate, at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, might be willing to receive Bobby, thus distancing him from both his parents and Anne Dick.