Robert Lowell: A Biography

by Ian Hamilton

  How is Truman? How is the French Ambassador, and Charles Luckman, and Senator Vandenberg? How is J. Edgar Hoover, and John L. Lewis? And Arthur Krock? Have you been asked to write a poem for Food Conservation? Have you learned the Dewey Decimal System?31

  This, from John Thompson, was the typical response of Lowell’s friends to his Washington appointment: delighted as they were, it was hard not to find something ribald in the idea of this notoriously ungainly and disheveled figure attempting to master an 8:30-to-5:00 office job.

  The post of Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress had been established in 1937, and the required duties were in fact attractively vague and flexible. The consultant was meant to keep an eye on the library’s poetry shelves, to “survey” the existing collections and to recommend additions; he was also to solicit gifts of books and manuscripts from authors and collectors, answer “reference questions” that came in by mail and “confer with scholars and poets using the library’s collections and facilities.” By December, Lowell was writing to J. F. Powers:

  Paper and chaos pile up and I’m out of stamps and every day a retired major calls me and asks me to identify obscure quotations which may help him to win a radio contest, whose answer last week was Clara Bow. … Across the hall, a Senate Committee has been moved into the Division for the Adult Blind. No one sees the joke.32

  Lowell’s 1947 appointment happily coincided with the inauguration of a new scheme. The library wished to build up a collection of recordings of poets reading their own work, and it was to be the new consultant’s responsibility to organize these recording sessions: to pick the poets, persuade them to take part and entertain them when they came to Washington. For Lowell, this was a thoroughly appealing chore: it would mean a steady stream of mostly congenial visitors, and also an opportunity to get to know poets he admired but hadn’t met. He immediately sent off invitations to William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop—whose book North and South he had just admiringly reviewed, along with Williams’s Paterson Book 1, in the Sewanee Review (Summer 1947)—and Randall Jarrell. He also invited Robert Frost, who wrote to him:

  Isn’t it fine that the young promise I began to entertain hopes of when it visited me on Fayerweather Street Cambridge in 1936, should have come to so much and to so much more promise for the future.33

  In Lowell’s file at the Library of Congress there is a newspaper cutting—seemingly from the gossip column of a local paper. It praises his appearance—“Lowell looks the part of the poet. Dark-eyed, soulful-looking, esthetic and stuff”—but the writer is clearly piqued that he has refused to grant an interview. Hence some heavy innuendo about his marital status—although married, Lowell is living in Washington’s men-only Cosmos Club—and a lightly ironical description of his World War II imprisonment: “he insisted that the danger to the U.S. was no longer imminent and that his services, perforce, were not necessary.” Attached to the cutting is a memo dated October 27, 1947, from the Librarian to Personnel: “I’m concerned that normal personnel procedures didn’t bring this out—this is the first time I’ve heard of this.”

  Nonetheless, Lowell was allowed to keep his job and he seems to have enjoyed it. Washington was full of distant and close Winslow relatives, and he wrote to his mother that, altogether,

  it’s a nice combination of cousins and passing writers, and much as I hate to admit it, physically a pleasant city to live in. I’ve become very fond of Harriet and Mary and the Meades. Harriet’s really a lot like you—tells the same kind of story. But I doubt if either of you would see the likeness.34

  Harriet was the daughter of Arthur Winslow’s brother Francis, and she was the Washington relative Lowell always felt closest to. “She was born to be a maiden lady and had certain classical aspects of the type,” but she was also witty, generous, unshockable. She liked Lowell because he was so interesting—as she used to say, “there have been too many afternoon naps in the Winslow line.”35 In her “refined, not very ambitious way,” Cousin Harriet was a figure in Washington society—“a true lady”36—but also roguish and worldly enough for Lowell to feel thoroughly at home with her.

  Another Washington attraction was the presence in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital of the imprisoned Ezra Pound. Lowell had long been fascinated by Pound: both by his poetry (although he thought the Cantos the “most self-indulgent long poem in English”) and by his predicament. In their different ways they had both “betrayed” the American war effort; both had been arrested and locked up—and Pound’s support of Mussolini’s Italy might not have been so abhorrent to Lowell as it was to the Partisan Review crowd. He began regularly visiting Pound at St. Elizabeth’s and as often as possible took visiting poets along with him. His letters of this time are full of Ezra Pound stories: Pound, he writes to Gertrude Buckman, is

  like his later prose and absolutely the most naive and simple man I ever met, sure that the world would be all right if people only read the right books. Pathetic and touching. He told about snatching up Confucius when the communists came for him with their tommy guns. This was all that saved him in the ensuing months.37

  Pound was not the easiest person to visit, constantly inveighing against the “snakepit” of St. Elizabeth’s and complaining that he was surrounded by “imbecilic mad niggers.” Lowell’s poet friends had varying reactions: Elizabeth Bishop said she was “really endlessly grateful for that experience”;38 Jarrell found him surprisingly mild-mannered but “obviously insane, and just childish about a lot of things,”39 and John Berryman, who had “somehow expected him to be more normal,” was disconcerted by Pound’s aggressiveness. When Berryman—no doubt to keep the conversation going—said that “It would be interesting to know at what point piety becomes a vice,” Pound had replied, “That sounds like a survival from the time when you believed in saying things that were clever.”40

  Most of these Pound anecdotes are in letters Lowell wrote to Gertrude Buckman. He also seems to have kept her informed on the divorce negotiations, and to have stressed the obstacles to their eventual marriage. In September, Buckman writes to him:

  I am baffled—I have never thought to come up against such determined wickedness, such abandon of scruples, such calculated and unabashed gold-digging; and cashing in on the Lowell name. Our persecutors, darling, are too strong for us. I don’t know what to say to cheer you, except I don’t think it’s patience, as much as faith that will save us for a good and meaningful life together, which I want more than anything in the world.41

  This is in response to Jean Stafford’s demand for $7,000 plus extras; a demand described by Lowell as “the works.”42 But Buckman had also detected a cooling in Lowell’s attitude since his arrival in Washington:

  My good dear, would you rather we didn’t write? It does keep one keyed up too much, and perhaps we shouldn’t. Why do you think we communicate badly by letter? Do you mean because I write emotional things that make you uneasy? I couldn’t write you cold letters; that would be false. Tell my why. You didn’t, you know. And I won’t write if you don’t enjoy getting letters from me—my vanity would be too hurt.43

  Lowell spent Christmas, 1947, in Greensboro, North Carolina, with the Taylors and Jarrells, who were sharing a house there. In February he gave poetry readings at Harvard and Wellesley but seems to have paid only a brief visit to New York, and by the eighteenth of that month was back in Washington. It was around this time that he attended a dinner party given by Caresse Crosby (widow of the poet Harry Crosby) for the French poet St.-John Perse and was there introduced to a wealthy Georgetown neighbor, Mrs. Carley Dawson:

  I remember that later Robert said he’d noticed me because I’d had on dark stockings. This rather intrigued him. I don’t remember what happened next—I may have invited him to dinner. And then we went to movies and so on and one thing led to another until we were engaged to be married.44

  Carley Dawson’s recollections of her six-month affair with Lowell are singularly joyless. “He was very handsome. I was very much in love wit
h him,” she says, but the relationship was for her a series of tests—most of which she failed:

  I met Jarrell at a luncheon with a lot of other people who I think were passing judgment on whether I was adequate for Robert. I’m sure I failed completely. I’d just been to the National Gallery and they kept asking me which pictures I liked. And I was quite nervous, because I knew why they were asking, that I was being needled. So I couldn’t remember any of the things I really liked. I was absolutely terrified.45

  The Washington Winslows cut her in public, she recalls, and when she visited the Lowells in Boston, Charlotte made a point of pouring her a large neat whisky; she couldn’t finish it, she says, but she had the feeling that Mrs. Lowell thought she was acting a part: “Later Mrs. Lowell said that I was … something to the effect that I was a very knowing person, not a wise person but a knowing person. They thought I was acting.”

  Her most severe test, though, came with Lowell himself; she describes an evening when she and Lowell were sitting side by side on a sofa in her house. They were discussing” Shakespeare’s plays:

  And I had argued something—just really for the sake of discussion, because I don’t really know anything about Shakespeare’s plays particularly. And all of a sudden Robert—who was sitting on my right—swung around and took my neck in his hands and swung me down onto the floor. And I looked at his face and it was completely white, completely blank. I can’t describe it. The person inside was not there. And I have marvelous guardian angels. I think that if I had struggled at that time I wouldn’t be here. But I said, “Robert, it’s rather uncomfortable like this. Do you mind if I get back on the sofa?” And then he came back to himself, he was back in his body, and we sat down and continued our conversation. I didn’t argue anymore.46

  Although Carley Dawson knew from the start that there was “a Jewish girl in New York,” it was not until May 1948 that Lowell wrote to Gertrude Buckman telling her that he had met someone else and, according to Buckman, “lashing himself for no reason at all.” In April his divorce from Jean Stafford had come through, with Stafford finally settling for a single payment of $6,000. It was a Virgin Islands divorce and to get it Stafford had to fulfill a resident’s requirement; she seems to have enjoyed the holiday:

  My lawyer … says everything is going as smoothly as cream and if there are no mail delays and if you really do behave like the Top Flight Gentleman Bert you seem to be, I should be on my way home Saturday, 12th. This is my last week of residence and there are only four days left in it and not to put too fine a point on it, I will be happy as a clam when this whole thing is over.

  I am sorry you are turning into a polar bert and think I should make a trip to Washington especially to show you how brown I am. I would be so proud to be browner than you.

  A small, black, low-class Virgin Island bee stung me on the tip of my index finger and writing this letter hurts, but I wanted to tell you how nearly it’s done and how I’ll never stop thanking you if you do get your part of it done in record time. I am the only divorcee-to-be on the island who is married to a civilized man; or alas, perhaps I should state it another way and should say I am the only one whose husband wants to get rid of her as quickly as possible. But seeing them all, I cannot help feeling that in spite of all my hideous behavior in the first year of our separation, we have behaved better on the whole than most people know.

  I want us both to marry again, don’t you? We’ll be so much wiser and so much calmer. It is my ambition to live the rest of my life at a low pitch.47

  An ambition that was hardly likely to be fulfilled; but when she wrote this letter, Jean had already met Oliver Jensen, an editor at Life magazine, and had declared herself to be “in love.” She married him shortly after the divorce. In June, back in New York, she met Lowell briefly, and told Peter Taylor:

  At that moment I felt still married to him, but memory stayed my hand. He is an altogether magnificent creature and I am so glad that I never have to see him again that I could dance. He has got a new girl in Washington (very much older than he, natch).48

  Carley Dawson had already had two troubled marriages. but she was finding it increasingly hard to fathom Robert Lowell. “It was amazing that a man of Robert’s intellect should always be talking about bears … I think he really thought of himself as a bear.” Her ten-year-old son used to watch Lowell doing his “Arms of the Law” act and one day proclaimed: “That man is mad, he’s absolutely bonkers.”49

  In the summer of 1948, Lowell and Mrs. Dawson traveled to Maine to stay with the poet Elizabeth Bishop, who had borrowed Dawson’s house at Stonington. And it was here that the end came:

  There was a question of going swimming, and we drove along the shore—but it was icy cold water, that Maine water. And I noticed that Robert was very different, he was different towards me, and I was extremely uneasy. He didn’t seem to be himself at all. And that evening, or some evenings later, there was a question of him going to a group of poets somewhere, near Boston. And I was anticipating going with him, but he said no. And I remember that we talked all night long about this, and I realized something was very wrong with Robert. And so in the morning I went in as soon as I dared and woke up Elizabeth and told her that I thought Robert and I were finished. And she arranged to have a friend of hers drive me to the station, which was some way away from Stonington. And that was it. I never saw Robert again.

  He didn’t try to stop you going?

  No, he was obviously determined that I would not go to this meeting. And the reason was that I wasn’t intellectual enough, and also that he was going round the bend.50

  Lowell has recorded his ungracious view of the matter in an unpublished poem called “The Two Weeks’ Vacation.” The poem is addressed to Elizabeth Bishop:

  “You and I, I and you,”

  The old stuck ballad record repeated—

  My Darling Elizabeth, we were alone

  And together—at last

  More or less hand in hand

  On the rocks at Stonington;

  For thirteen days we had been three …

  My old flame, Mrs. X—never left us,

  Each morning she met us with another

  Crashing ensemble,

  Her British voice, her Madame du Barry

  Black and gold eyebrows.

  She survived a whole day of handline

  Deep sea fishing for polock [sic], skate and skulpin [sic],

  Making me bait her hooks.

  And wearing a blue silk “ski-suit,”

  Blouse, trousers, cape and even her gloves matched.

  All this, for me! …

  … on my next to last night, the thirteenth

  I came down the corridor in pajamas,

  No doubt arousing false hopes

  And said … Well, who cares, my old flame left,

  And I never heard from her ever after.51

  Over the next few weeks, Lowell announced to several of his friends that he was going to marry Elizabeth Bishop. A friend of both Lowell and Bishop has recalled:

  He never asked her. It did represent something he felt very strongly about, but at a certain level he knew that it was not possible. He knew perfectly well that she was homosexual. But that was a complicated issue in Elizabeth’s life. She did have affairs with men when she was younger—she was about six years older than Cal. It was only when she moved to Brazil in about 1950 that she lived with a woman permanently. Cal and Elizabeth never made love—Elizabeth was very explicit about that. She would joke and say that she never wanted to marry Cal but she would have liked to have a child with him. And I think that was partly a joke and partly serious.52

  “The Two Weeks’ Vacation,” begun some ten years after the event, seems to have been unfinished, but the second stanza reads (in part) as follows:

  So we sat, you talked of Marianne Moore

  Taking her water cress sandwiches to

  Tomfeed the Bronx Zoo “denizens.”

  How she stopped by a steel-point
of Robert Burns

  Saying, “But he couldn’t have been that handsome!”

  Dear Elizabeth,

  Half New-Englander, half fugitive

  Nova Scotian, wholly Atlantic sea-board—

  Unable to settle anywhere, or live

  Our usual roaring sublime….53

  Shortly after his Maine vacation—in August 1948—Lowell wrote a strange letter to his mother, announcing that he had made a will “which gives you everything I have during your lifetime and then splits the trust between Randall Jarrell and Peter Taylor, the most needy of my friends.”54 Relations with his parents had been going through a placid phase since the success of Lord Weary’s Castle, and Charlotte had been writing enthusiastically about his spreading fame: “wherever we go we are showered with congratulations on your achievements.”55 She had not taken to Carley Dawson and shortly after meeting her had told Lowell that she wished he could find a “nice” wife: “but until you do, remember that you have much more than most people to show for your 31 years even if it is not a wife and children.”56

  Lowell’s drafting of a will may have been the result of anxiety about his father’s health. Mr. Lowell had had a stroke earlier in the year and was no longer able to work. He had become “rather ashamed of himself, mastered by mother—and not knowing what to do with himself—and mother dreading the years of amusing him.”57 Around the time of Lowell’s letter they were planning to move out of Boston for the sake of Mr. Lowell’s health:

  Mother had bought the Beverly Farms house as a compensation for Father, whose ten years’ dream of moving from Boston to Puget Sound had been destroyed by a second heart-attack. Fearfully, she had looked out of her windows at Beverly Farms, as though she were looking from the windows of a train that was drawing into the station; one station beyond her destination. From the beginning she … lived with one eye cocked toward Boston. She wanted to be in Boston, and she dreaded Boston’s invasion and mockery of this new house, which was so transparently a sheepish toy-house for Father. Organizing and tidying with prodigal animosity, she kept her rooms alerted—not to be judged by visitors, but to judge them.58