by Ian Hamilton
Soon after her return to New York, Jean Stafford was admitted to the Payne Whitney Clinic to undergo a “psycho-alcoholic cure”; she was to stay there for several months, and during that time she bombarded Lowell and Peter Taylor with a series of extraordinary letters. At first, she simply refused to accept that the marriage was over and confined herself to brilliant denunciations of the “stunted cowbird” Buckman. Lowell, she conceded, might have found the playmate he was always looking for (he had once told Stafford: “I don’t want a wife. I want a playmate”), but she said:
She is a child and if she wishes to eat the last piece of candy in the box, she will consult only her own desire…. [but] if you marry her, you will not be marrying a woman. Nor will you be any closer to the knowledge of what marriage is than you were with me. I knew more than you did, I think, and God knows I knew little enough.7
The trouble all along, she says, was that Lowell, with his “powerful alchemy,” had turned her into a version of his mother and that subconsciously she had assented to this role “until [she] terrifyingly resembled her.” And she, Stafford, had similarly confused Lowell with her dominating father. She wrote to Peter Taylor in November 1946:
There was something wrong in me to marry him for he was so much like my father, whom first I worshipped and by whom I later felt betrayed. This is not psychiatric cant, even though the psychiatrists have told me that this is just what I did, married my father, just as the same perverseness made Cal marry his mother. But only in the past year did these people really emerge in us, and I suppose they emerged because we dug them out. We probably wanted it to be like this. I disobeyed him as I disobeyed my father. He was economically and domestically irresponsible as my father had always been. He read his poems aloud to me, as my father had read his stories for the pulp magazines. His manners were courtly or they were uncouth, and he was slovenly, as my father was. My father didn’t have his wit, nor his brilliance. They were both violent men in every way.8
With this knowledge established, she would plead, surely she and Lowell could try again:
I feel that somehow we will save one another and that our salvation will be unusual, for having suffered so much and having yet endured, we must have, both of us, extraordinary strength. I cannot help, with all this lovely love of mine, wishing that we could live our lives together and feeling that we have a chance that no-one we have ever known has had.9
In the face of these pleas, Lowell remained stonily discouraging. He had shocked Jean by demanding a divorce and by announcing that he was no longer a Catholic; the Church, he said, had “served its purpose” (Jean commented on this that he probably meant that it had “served its literary purpose”). He would marry Gertrude Buckman, he told Peter Taylor, and when Taylor offered to act as an intermediary between him and Stafford, he refused. Taylor had suggested that they delay any final decisions for a year: “I feel like a parent whose two favorite children have had a bitter quarrel and are making a complete break and that’s a pretty terrible feeling.”10 Lowell replied:
The time for considering and re-considering is long past. I’ll only be counting the days.
Your letter was an honorable and warm-hearted one for you to have written. But what you imagine is not the same as my remembrance. You mustn’t idealize what other people have to live. You mustn’t.11
And, it must be said, Stafford’s response to Taylor’s plan does seem to bear out Lowell’s view:
Peter, by this plan he will only be free to reject me in his brutal fashion over a longer period of time than he has done already. Mind you, I would take him back now, and I would forgive him, because I love him.12
Nearly all Stafford’s letters waver agonizingly between savage recrimination on the one hand and pathetic pleading on the other. One day she will write in fury accusing Lowell of “Yankee trading” because he refuses to sign a quit claim on the house in Maine (Jean had put the house in their joint names and now wished to raise a mortgage on it to pay her medical expenses); on another, she will announce that she has stopped drinking, that her love has been purified of all selfish jealousies, and that she is now, at last, spiritually ready to make him a good wife: “Remember that I do love you and that I love you without reproach and that in wanting you, I realize that I am issuing a rather remarkable invitation, but one which will give me unmodified joy if it is accepted.” They make harrowing reading, and although Jean persistently complains that Lowell, during these months, remained “so immovable, so utterly, so absolutely, utterly unaware of what I might be suffering,” it is evident that with each letter she was—almost systematically—ruining her own cause. Lowell’s plea throughout had been at least consistent: “Why can’t we leave each other alone?” In her eyes, of course, this very consistency was nothing less than “calm, olympian brutality”:
It is Cal’s doing, all of it. With serene greatness, he will be unsmirched. He will always be a Lowell. Forgive me for this deep bitterness…. If Cal had said, I am sorry, I could have borne it. If he had said, I am suffering too and the reason I am doing it this way is that I must end my suffering and yours. Perhaps he feels that, but he has never said it, he has never shown me anything in any of his letters but cold, self-justified hatred. He has even stooped to literal Yankee trading, and all I can feel now is, pray God that the day I can forget my Boston adventure will not be long in coming.13
Lord Weary’s Castle had appeared in December 1946, but most of the reviews didn’t start coming in until the following spring. With one or two fairly trifling exceptions, they added up to a chorus of acclaim. Randall Jarrell set the tone with a long piece in The Nation:
When I reviewed Lowell’s first book I finished by saying “Some of the best poems of the next years ought to be written by him.” The appearance of Lord Weary’s Castle makes me feel … like a rain-maker who predicts rain, and gets a flood which drowns everyone in the country. A few of these poems, I believe, will be read as long as men remember English.14
Selden Rodman in the New York Times Book Review attempted to go even further:
One would have to go back as far as 1914, the year that saw the publication of Robert Frost’s North of Boston or to T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock to find a poet whose first public speech has had the invention and authority of Robert Lowell’s…. The voice is vibrant enough to be heard, learned enough to speak with authority, and savage enough to wake the dead.15
And Anne Fremantle waxed mixed-metaphorical in The Commonweal:
Robert Lowell … is a young, new poet of tremendous importance, who is both Catholic and classical. He writes in tight, tapestried meters, hierarchic in form and feeling. His verse, though full and rich, is trim as a yew quincunx, tailored as a box edging: he seems to have pared and whittled away every excrescence, every unessential, till the taut lines, clean as a whistle, dovetail effortlessly, polished like old, warm ivory. And always, at all levels, there is that continual awareness of his Maker….16
The quarterlies were rather less ecstatic. Austin Warren in Poetry was cautious and exegetical, but aware that here was something new: “Lowell never sounds much like anyone else—and never like Eliot or Auden.” He suggests a comparison with Hopkins, Dylan Thomas and John Wheelwright, but concludes: “Probably Lowell can’t imitate docilely even when he wishes.”17 Louise Bogan in The American Scholar praised Lowell’s “moral earnestness … it is extraordinary to find it at present in so pure a form,”18 and Howard Moss in the Kenyon Review greets him as “that surprising phenomenon, a religious poet who writes like a revolutionary,” and confidently ventures that “with this new book, Lowell can easily take his place beside the few excellent contemporary poets America has produced.”19
The most eccentric review of the book was by Richard Eberhart in the Sewanee Review.20 Eberhart devoted the majority of his piece to a rumination on the very earliest of Lowell’s poems, those that he had been privileged to view in manuscript twelve years before. He even goes so far as to quote, approvingly, a p
articularly embarrassing lyric from those days: “A sight of something after death / Bright angels dropping from the sky.” Eberhart is at pains to point out, not without a hint of mystery, that “experience” has darkened the young poet’s view since then: with Land of Unlikeness, “The years had matured the wild early strains; much reading had been assumed; much experience had taken its toll.” The book had had much “spiritual power,” though, and also a “rugged, harsh New England quality”: “It was a manacle-forged mind I heard.” He then devotes a page and a half to itemizing the revisions Lowell has made to the Land of Unlikeness poems that are reprinted in Lord Weary’s Castle. Eberhart does not approve of these: “in my opinion the cold-hearted tampering has in many cases dimmed the heat and originality of the prime utterance.” There is an almost plaintive note in all this: as if Eberhart is letting Lowell know that he would have done far better to have consulted his old teacher. As to the new poems in Lord Weary’s Castle—i.e., three-quarters of the book—Eberhart has a single paragraph on these. They are “passionate, forceful, sometimes choking and bursting from the rigorous moulds” and, on the whole, are “excellent.”
April 1947 completed Lowell’s extraordinary triumph. In that month he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship of $2,500, and an award of $1,000 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was also sounded out for various teaching jobs—at Iowa and Chapel Hill, North Carolina—and was invited to spend two months at Yaddo, the writers’ colony. To add a comic twist to all these solemn tributes, Life magazine produced a large photofeature on America’s new great poet and this provoked an excited call from Hollywood. Robert Giroux, Lowell’s editor at Harcourt, Brace, remembers:
I got a call from a movie producer, who asked if Cal had ever been in the movies. I said, “What do you mean, writing scripts?” And he said, “No, has he ever acted?” “No, he certainly hasn’t.” “Well, we’d be interested in discussing this with him.” Cal was very amused, very pleased. He was very handsome, in a masculine and classic very Roman way. Berryman called them “Cal’s matinee-idol looks.”21
During May, Lowell toyed with these various offers (although Hollywood seems never to have followed up its interest), and after a good deal of haggling over money he wrote off to Iowa on May 30 accepting $3,000 a year for “two or three hours classwork, just teaching writing.” In June, though, he withdrew his acceptance, having been offered the prestigious post of Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress at a salary of $5,000 a year. This appointment would start in October 1947 and run for a year, and so Lowell decided to spend July and August at Yaddo before moving to Washington in September. In the space of a few months he had become unmarried, non-Catholic, the most promising young poet in America, and perhaps the first World War II CO to be offered a job in the government. Back in Boston, the Sunday Globe proclaimed him MOST PROMISING POET IN 100 YEARS … MAY BE GREATER THAN JAMES AND AMY. And the paper carried a comment from “Robert Traill Spence Lowell, Annapolis graduate, retired navy officer and stockbroker”; “Poets,” Lowell’s father said, “seem to see more in his work than most other people.”
*
During these months of triumph Lowell had been living mainly in New York. His only lengthy trip had been to Greensboro, North Carolina, where Peter Taylor had organized a Writers’ Forum (really a kind of Kenyon reunion, with old classmates Robie Macauley and John Thompson there, as well as Taylor and Jarrell). Throughout this time, though, he had been getting weekly, sometimes twice-weekly, communications from Jean Stafford. Stafford stayed at Payne Whitney until summer 1947, and remained bitter and despairing: “I do not know what monstrous crime I did when I was a child to merit this punishment. These ghastly months in this ghastly asylum, this ghastly future which I face without money.”22
Money was very often the topic of her letters. One week, Jean would be renouncing all alimony claims; another, she would file some impossibly huge “minimum requirement.” One week, she would be arranging to dismantle and sell the house in Maine; another, she would be determined to hang on to it. In March, Lowell wrote to Peter Taylor: “Things have been going very badly for Jean and I feel so depressed I almost dread seeing anyone.”23 At various times he did make financial offers—his first offer was $5,000 payable over ten years—but it was not always easy to talk business:
If there were tears, really, when you read my letter, if you really re-read it, there would have been love, there would have been love and longing and the desire to return with gifts of understanding. Grief for me, unable to die although I live here in a tomb, would have never allowed your pencil to write down the word “alimony.” You would have come to claim your presents that gather dust and you would have found them set with pearls of great price.24
And when Jean was prepared to talk, she would talk fairly tough:
Your offer of $5,000 payable over a period of ten years shows remarkable business acumen but does not somehow really take me in. If this was meant as a gesture of generosity, it falls rather short of the mark, I’m afraid. To be rather blunt about it, forty dollars a month, paid over a period of ten years, is not quite the same thing as what you got in six.25
After the announcement of Lowell’s prizes and awards, it was perhaps to be expected that Jean would adopt an even harder line. Certainly as the year progressed, her demands did escalate. By September she was asking for $7,000 payable over five years, $800 for life and one-third of his trust fund, also for life. Lowell refused and was denounced as “Bostonian,” “intransigent” and “shrewd.”
The style of the negotiations, though, would always depend on Stafford’s mood and on what she guessed to be the state of Lowell’s relationship with Gertrude Buckman. Lowell was writing to friends throughout 1947 saying that his “remarriage” would be postponed until possibly a year after his divorce became final, and Gertrude Buckman would now say that marriage between them was never a serious possibility: “marriage with him would have been a crazy thing, really crazy. He wasn’t husband material.”26 It is by no means certain that she thought this at the time; but it must be said that there was not much weight of feeling in a spoof verse review Buckman printed in Partisan Review in March 1947:
So the symbolic wedding ring
Often does not mean a thing
And infidelity runs rife While everyday is simply strife
And everyone loves another’s mate
And looks upon his own with hate.
It must have taken a certain impish bravery to publish this, under all the circumstances, and if Stafford saw it she could perhaps be forgiven for immediately adding a few hundred dollars to her alimony claim.
With matters still unsettled, Lowell left for Yaddo in June 1947 and hoped to “work like a steam engine” until Washington. He was translating Phèdre and planning a “symbolic monologue by an insane woman”; it would be a thousand lines long, he said, and made him feel like Homer or Robert Browning. Yaddo, he found, was “a marvellous place to work,” but much of the fun was in observing his co-workers: mostly “goons,” but “friendly and harmless.” There was Theodore Roethke: “a ponderous, coarse, fattish, fortyish man—well read, likes the same things I do, and is quite a competent poet”; there was Mary McCarthy and her husband, Bowden Broadwater; and there was Marguerite Young—“really rather crucifyingly odd and garrulous.”27
And Yaddo itself was a bizarre establishment, near Saratoga Springs. According to its brochure, it is built in “late Victorian eclectic style” and is modeled on an English country house—although it prides itself on touches of Gothic, Moorish and Italian Renaissance. Inside, the mansion is luxuriously furnished with “carpets, carved wood, ecclesiastical furniture from Europe, and period pieces”; its grounds are extensive and elaborately formal, and the Rose Garden is its special pride and joy. The original owner was a New York financier called Spencer Trask, and his wife, Katrina, had been particularly fond of roses: “Images of roses are evident throughout Yaddo in the stained glass windows, the
furniture, paintings, woodwork, china and linen, for this flower was the motif of Katrina Trask.”28 It had been Katrina’s idea that Yaddo should be turned into a “retreat” for artists, writers and composers; when Mr. Trask died before these plans were finalized, she married his close (and equally rich) friend George Foster Peabody; between them they opened the colony in 1926, with Elizabeth Ames as director—Mrs. Ames was an adopted relative of Mr. Peabody and, according to Lowell, you could “cut her liberalism with a knife.”29
The faint absurdity of the place delighted Lowell, just as it had delighted Jean Stafford in 1943. She had written of it then:
This place surpasses the Biltmore for luxury. The Mansion is full of three cornered Spanish chairs and tremendous gold plush sofas. The grounds are vast and perfectly beautiful. Full of innumerable lakes and pools and gardens and woodland walks…. The food is superb. The only trouble is the people.30
So, nothing much had changed. But Lowell liked the place well enough to ask for his stay to be extended and to write letters to his friends begging them to join him; and the “people” improved with the arrival of the short-story writer J. F. Powers, “a fine person” and admired by Jarrell. The wily, altogether worldly Catholic priests who populate his work would have had a timely appeal for Lowell; certainly, Powers became one of his very few favorite American prose writers.
During July and August, Lowell continued to fiddle with his long poem—“but I must get down to things I’ll really do”—and as early as July 3 he had completed three shorter pieces and “drafted a fourth.” Just before leaving Yaddo, on September 2, he wrote to Gertrude Buckman: “I’ve finished another long poem of 127 lines and part of another of same length. This will make ½ of a book—not too bad for a summer.”
