Robert Lowell: A Biography

by Ian Hamilton

  Certainly, though, her nest-building obsessions21 had come at almost precisely the wrong time for Lowell. His literary career was opening up at high speed, he was enjoying his trips to New York: Jarrell was there and so too—at this time—was Peter Taylor. Jean Stafford may have seen Damariscotta as a “temple” built in honor of her marriage; Lowell was beginning to see it as an overfurnished jail. And it should not be supposed that Stafford was silently long-suffering; in one of the very few moments in “An Influx of Poets” when she is moved to judge her own conduct, she confesses: “I make no plea for myself, for I had the tongue of an adder and my heart was black with rage and hate.”

  *

  In spite of all this melodrama, Lowell seems to have kept busy through the spring of 1946, mostly writing book reviews for the quarterlies. The most noteworthy of these was a roundup of current poetry that eventually appeared in the Winter 1946 issue of the Sewanee Review;22 it covered no fewer than nineteen newly published books of verse. Lowell is now thought of as having been shrewd and cautious in his public pronouncements on the work of his contemporaries—self-servingly so, it is implied, and certainly in his later years he became guardedly benevolent in his statements about other poets’ work. It is therefore worth remarking that, at the age of twenty-nine, he was prepared to be almost Jarrell-like in his strictness. The first four books on his list are, he says, too awful even to be quoted from:

  I have nothing to say about the absurd phony-Lindsay clatter of Mr. Alan Baer Rothenberg, the ungrammatical pilfering of Mr. George J. Cox, the slick and sounding oratory of Mr. Carl Cramer or the harmless devotions of Mr. Lloyd Haberley. A few quotations would ruin these writers more effectively than any criticism, but I see no excuse for the exposure.

  He then moves on to take fierce issue with C. Day Lewis (“verbal without craftsmanship; abstract without profundity”), Edmund Blunden (once a “small Hardy” but now “heavy, clumsy, careless, academic and sentimental”) and Oscar Williams (“He never knows when to stop and can seldom write more than two or three lines that hang together”).

  Lowell spends rather more time on two dominating figures from his Harvard past: Robert Frost, who had once told him that he should “condense,” is now scolded for having made A Masque of Reason “too long, random and willful”; and on his bygone mentor Richard Eberhart:

  Mr. Richard Eberhart writes a rough iambic line with subtle shifts in speed and tone. His best poems are entirely his own and masterful. Elsewhere his lines drag in a rhetorical doggerel, often relieved by strong lines and phrases. He has a paralyzing fascination for the mannerisms of Hopkins and likes to echo very famous lines from other poets. Sometimes his idealistic reflections on himself and the universe are remarkably foolish.

  It should be said that Lowell does exempt “about five poems” from all this, including “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment”—still perhaps Eberhart’s most memorable poem.

  The meager rations of praise in Lowell’s piece are reserved for Louis MacNeice (“perhaps the most observant eye in England”) and Norman Nicholson (“readable and accomplished”). But throughout there is only one really charitable spasm. Lowell singles out Ralph Gustafson as “one of the best poets reviewed here,” and it is easy to see why; there are clear hints of fellow feeling in his verdict that

  [Gustafson’s] faults are never entirely overcome: they can be summed up by the word jerky. Monotonous alliteration, unidiomatic and ungrammatical sentences, jumps in subject-matter from one sentence to another, and monstrous mixed metaphors … but all his faults are present in all his poems and are inseparable from his virtues. No poem is a whole, but the most ambitious are the best. He has the ear and the power to become much better than he is.

  Of Lowell’s own poems in Lord Weary’s Castle, two had appeared in magazines in 1945 (the first version of “The Quaker Graveyard”—lacking parts III and VII—in Partisan Review and “Colloquy in Black Rock” in the Sewanee). During the spring and summer of 1946 he was to have acceptances in all the leading magazines. In February a batch of three poems appeared in The Nation (where Jarrell was now the poetry editor) and Lowell made a further eight appearances in that magazine during the year—a total of twelve poems, including “The Exile’s Return,” “At the Indian Killer’s Grave,” “The Holy Innocents” and “Between the Porch and the Altar.” Most of the other poems in the book appeared in Partisan Review (four poems, including “Christmas in Black Rock” and “After the Surprising Conversions”) and Kenyon Review (“Mr. Edwards and the Spider,” “At a Bible House” and “Mary Winslow”). He also made appearances in Poetry (“The Ghost”), Commonwealth (“The Dead in Europe”) and in the first issue of a new periodical called Foreground (“In the Cage”). During 1946 it was barely possible to open a literary magazine without coming across Lowell’s name; anticipation of the finished book was thus mounting for several months before it actually appeared.

  The quarterlies, however, paid no more handsomely in the 1940s than they do today, and Lowell seems to have accepted that, along with Taylor, Jarrell and most of his other poet friends, he would sooner or later have to start looking out for teaching jobs. In May he was offered an instructorship at what he called “the Catholic University” in Boston ($2,500 a year for twelve hours’ teaching per week), but negotiations foundered when Lowell requested shorter hours: he was interested, he said, in a job that left him free to write but not in “a lot of freshman composition courses.”23 In July, Jean Stafford wrote to Peter Taylor: “Our plans for the future remain vague…. We think now that we will stay on here as long as the weather allows and since that will be anyhow until November, we needn’t worry for a bit yet.”24

  Towards the end of July the summer visitors began to arrive—the poet John Berryman and his wife, Philip and Natalie Rahv, and the critic R. P. Blackmur; the Parkers and the Clarks; also Robert Giroux, Lowell’s editor at Harcourt, Brace, and a number of nonliterary friends—neighbors from Westport, the landlord from Boothbay Harbor, together with his wife and his wife’s parents. As soon as one collection of guests moved on, another lot arrived. Jean had completed the shrine; now it was time to greet the worshipers. Needless to say, it didn’t work that way:

  That awful summer! Every poet in America came to stay with us. It was the first summer after the war, when people once again had gasoline and could go where they liked, and all those poets came to our house in Maine and stayed for weeks at a stretch, bringing wives or mistresses with whom they’d quarreled, and complaining so vividly about the wives and mistresses they’d left, or had been left by, that the discards were real presences, swelling the ranks, stretching the house, my house (my very own, my first and very own), to its seams. At night, after supper, they’d read from their own works until four o’clock in the morning…. They never listened to one another; they were preoccupied with waiting for their turn. And I’d have to stay up and clear out the living room after they went soddenly to bed—sodden but not too far gone to lose their conceit. And then all day I’d cook and wash the dishes and chop the ice and weed the garden and type my husband’s poems and quarrel with him.25

  It is not clear who issued the invitations that produced this summer “influx,” but the upshot must surely have been easy to predict. Jean stepped up the drinking, and her quarrels with Lowell became more vicious and determined. Her fevers returned; she was also plagued with daily headaches—caused not just by large quantities of rum, nor, she says, by a diet of “too many iambs.” As to Lowell, he very rarely unburdened himself in letters, and it is therefore hard to know how frenetic he’d become during these weeks. By August, though, he was sufficiently worn down to write to Peter Taylor:

  I don’t care for confessions, but I suppose I must tell you that everything is chaos between us. Jean is driving like a cyclone and we both have had about all we can stand and more. Right now I think I’ll go to New York sometime in September and stay with the Jarrells and Lytle and then get a room and pick up some sort of temporary work. Jean has a
lot of plans, none of them too good, including going to Hollywood. Anyway, we have got to leave each other alone and the future to time. Please just be an ear for this letter, and don’t say anything to me or anyone else.26

  The running conflict had taken a new and drastic turn. Shortly before Lowell wrote this letter, the “eighteenth guest since Memorial Day” had been flown into Damariscotta in a private plane that had been laid on by the last of her many summer hosts. Gertrude Buckman, the former Mrs. Delmore Schwartz, had come to stay. Jean was not on hand to welcome her; she had gone to see her doctor in Cambridge. In “An Influx of Poets,” though, she makes it clear that many hours were later to be spent imagining this grand arrival:

  She came to us, quixotically and at the expense of her last host, in a Piper Cub, landing on an island in Hawthorne Lake, behind us, flown there by a Seabee so stricken with her that he loitered in the village several days afterward. If I had been there when she came, the outcome of my marriage would, I daresay, have been the same, but the end of it would probably not have come so soon. Certainly it would not have been so humiliating, so banal, so sandy to my teeth. But I was not there on that beautiful afternoon when her blithe plane banked and came bobbing to rest on Loon Islet and she came swimming to our landing.27

  Notes

  1. Robert Lowell, “Randall Jarrell, 1914–1965,” in The Lost World (New York: Collier, 1965). Reprinted in Randall Jarrell, 1914–1965, ed. Robert Lowell, Peter Taylor and Robert Penn Warren (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967), pp. 101–12.

  2. Randall Jarrell to R.L., October 1945 (?) (Houghton Library).

  3. “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” Lord Weary’s Castle (Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1946).

  4. Gabriel Pearson, “Robert Lowell,” Review, no. 20 (March 1969), 3–36.

  5. See Hugh B. Staples, Robert Lowell: The First Twenty Years (London: Faber & Faber, 1962) for a study of Lowell’s use of his prose sources.

  6. John Crowe Ransom to R.L., October 5, 1945 (Houghton Library).

  7. Philip Rahv to R.L., January 2, 1946 (Houghton Library).

  8. Ibid., January 16, 1946 (Houghton Library).

  9. Jean Stafford to Allen Tate, January 4, 1946 (Firestone Library).

  10. Jean Stafford to Cecile Starr, February 1946.

  11. Robert Lowell, “To Delmore Schwartz,” Life Studies (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1959), pp. 53–54.

  12. James Atlas, Delmore Schwartz (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977), Also, Eileen Simpson in Poets in Their Youth (New York: Random House, 1982), pp. 123–24, writes: “Delmore, the intriguer, had hinted … that [Jean] was interested in another man (himself perhaps?). He had even insinuated this to Cal, whereupon Cal had socked him. The fistfight that ensued brought the Ellery Street winter to a dramatic close.”

  13. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, n.d.

  14. Ibid., March 24, 1946.

  15. Ibid., June 29, 1944.

  16. Ibid., April 15, 1946.

  17. R.L. to Peter and Eleanor Taylor, May 23, 1946.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Jean Stafford, “An Influx of Poets,” New Yorker, November 6, 1978, pp. 46, 51, 52, 55.

  20. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, December 19, 1946.

  21. Cecile Starr, in a letter to I.H. (September 30, 1981), writes: “I think her love of household was at the center of her marriage to Cal.”

  22. R.L., “Current Poetry,” Sewanee Review 54 (Winter 1946), 340–41.

  23. R.L. to Peter Taylor, August 19, 1946.

  24. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, July 15, 1946.

  25. Jean Stafford, “An Influx of Poets,” p. 43.

  26. R.L. to Peter Taylor, August 13, 1946.

  27. Jean Stafford, “An Influx of Poets,” p. 43.

  9

  In “An Influx of Poets,” Gertrude is portrayed as Minnie Zumwalt, raven-tressed and damask-skinned; having acquired a divorce from her murderously moody husband, the poet Jered Zumwalt, she is charming her way from house to house along the coast of Maine. She writes sharp little book reviews for The Divergent, but in life she is always ready to turn moon-eyed in the presence of a poet, and is therefore a hugely popular house guest. Poets’ wives have no fear of her because Jered has unchivalrously—“in disgraceful and convincing detail”—told the world that she is frigid.

  This may have been the rumor (and Delmore Schwartz’s notebooks would seem to confirm it), but after Gertrude had been at Damariscotta for a few days, Jean Stafford began to have her doubts. She wrote to Peter Taylor:

  She lingered on and on. All day she read Cal’s poetry and exclaimed over it or, when he mentioned something, she cried in her quite lovely voice: “read it aloud to me.” And he would read to her from Boswell or Ben Jonson or Shakespeare (and you know how well he loved it! Ah, what a foolish woman I have been!) They would go to the lake early in the morning to swim and then in the afternoon, and then before dinner, and then late when the moon was full (one of Cal’s chief and most bitter charges against me was that I did not know how to swim). They would walk to the village together, telling me that I was much too tired to go. They sat facing each other in the big chairs listening to records in the light of the fire. Gertrude told me things I had done wrong in my house, and Cal agreed with her, and she told me what I had done wrong in The Mountain Lion [Stafford’s second novel] and Cal agreed with her. I was wormwood.1

  And so it appears to have continued for the three weeks of Gertrude Buckman’s stay. Later, Stafford was to accuse Buckman of deliberately “fouling my nest,” of cold-bloodedly setting out to steal her husband: she “horribly flattered Cal, caused him to fall in love with her and caused herself to fall in love with him.” She claimed that on returning to New York, Buckman wrote to Lowell and “all but said that she was in love.” It was this letter, said Stafford, that encouraged Lowell to announce, in mid-September, that the marriage was over and that he wanted an immediate separation.

  Buckman, on the other hand, recalls that throughout her visit to Damariscotta, Jean Stafford “was drinking herself into a stupor. … Most of the time she was just drinking—madly, madly, staying up all night and drinking,” and that any closeness that developed between her and Lowell was more or less forced on them by Stafford’s impossible behavior. She also claims that it was Lowell who made the first move to see her in New York: “He’d asked if he could come to see me. And I said, ‘Certainly you can come and see me, with Jean, not by yourself.’ And he said, ‘But we’re separating.’” Had Lowell then fallen for her at Damariscotta? “I don’t know what his feelings were. How could I tell that? I suppose we were drawn to each other. He was so beautiful then. But I did think he was a very odd character, I must say. Unlike anyone else I’ve ever known.”2

  In September 1946 Lowell and Stafford traveled together to New York and said good-bye on the platform at Penn Station, Lowell rented a bug-infested room on Third Avenue and Jean Stafford stayed with friends. Over the next three weeks there were attempts at a reconciliation, but none of them lasted for more than twenty-four hours. Lowell had begun to see a lot of Buckman, using her apartment to work in during the day and moving in with her for a period when he caught influenza:

  He would spend days in my flat working, and I would feed him. He was living in this ghastly rooming house on Third Avenue. I mean, he would get lice and crabs and everything, and he had no money. I really think he preferred that kind of thing. It was a haunt of pimps and prostitutes and God knows what.3

  At times, Lowell was uncertain about what Buckman really meant to him, but any pressure from Stafford invariably drove him into a rage; he would tell her “over and over again in the indefatigable way only Cal can repeat, that I was possessive like his mother in not approving of so intimate a relationship with her.”4 In October, therefore, Jean changed her strategy and attempted to create a harmonious triangular arrangement. She agreed, for instance, that the three of them should make a Sunday trip to the Bronx Zoo—as doomed a project as could be imagined:

  I m
anaged to get a hotel and that evening I telephoned G to say that I’d meet them the next morning to go to the zoo. The next morning Cal called me and blew up rhetorically and forbade me categorically to go (oh how can I shame myself further by telling you this juvenile tale. It is the want of dignity in the whole thing that most maddens me. The zoo, indeed). They came back and had dinner with me at my hotel and left very soon afterwards, very much like two married people obliged to dine with a boring relative. It was that evening that they began attacking people who were possessive and would not let other people alone.5

  By this time, Stafford’s control was visibly disintegrating, and the doctor she was seeing in New York arranged for her to go to a Catholic sanatorium in Detroit. She stayed there for eight hours (“I knew somehow that, if I let night fall I would be there for good”) and then took a train to Chicago; from there she traveled on to Denver: “I was trying,” she later wrote to Lowell, “to put as many miles between myself and you as I could do.” She stayed with her sister in Denver for five days and swiftly “commenced to hate her because she judged me morally: ‘Quit drinking for my sake.’” On her way back to New York she stopped over in Chicago:

  And then I did a pitiful thing…. I had not been able to read anything for weeks and so, in the station, when I still had some hours to wait, I bought a dollar edition of Boston Adventure and I tried to read it. I went into the women’s room and tried to read it there and when I could not, the tears poured out and in a perfect rage I threw it in the trash container. It was, in its way, a little suicide.6