by Ian Hamilton
All of us have often gone on record as opposing the Communist Party. All of us have at one time or another, some of us for long periods, benefited from Elizabeth Ames’s administration of Yaddo. We are anti-Stalinists. We feel that the charge currently being brought arises from a frame of mind that represents a grave danger both to civil liberties and to the freedom necessary for the arts. We feel this charge involves a cynical assault not only on Elizabeth Ames’s personal integrity, but also on the whole future of Yaddo.
We have lived at Yaddo; we have worked there; we want others to have the same opportunity. We are outraged, first, to see that opportunity jeopardized; and secondly, to see the human and political values we hold being debased through the use of a smear-technique that has so far not been honored in this country.24
Seventy-five copies of this document were sent out on March 21, and five days later fifty-one endorsements had been received by the organizers. “We also received several letters and telegrams from people acquainted with Yaddo but who had not been guests there.” According to Fitzgerald, Lowell was “not only deeply wounded but incredulous at the kind of prose employed against him by people whom he had considered his friends” (among the pro-Ames signatories were Delmore Schwartz and Katherine Anne Porter):
In the midst of what was becoming an ugly comedy, Lowell behaved gently but with increasing excitement. He had understandable difficulty in sleeping. He needed the reassurance of company. He and his friends made no attempt to counteract the circular letter with one of their own but they visited and remonstrated with one or two of those who had sent it.25
The petition served its purpose; when the Yaddo board re-met on March 26, they agreed that Lowell’s charges be dismissed. Mrs. Ames’s position as director was confirmed, though not without criticism of her too personal attitude towards inviting guests and extending the length of their visits. Later she would be deprived of those privileges, which were transferred to the Admissions Committee. Luckily, during the week before the meeting, Malcolm Cowley had been able to keep the story out of the newspapers: the Herald Tribune had intended to cover the controversy on Wednesday the twenty-third, but Cowley told them that if they held off until the actual meeting, he would see that they got an “exclusive”; as a result, a mild piece appeared in the paper’s Sunday edition, and Cowley was able to write proudly to his friends that he had stumbled upon a first principle of Press Relations:
Now I know how to have a story played down—give it to one morning newspaper as an exclusive to be published on Sunday; then the other papers won’t bother with it on Monday, unless it is very big. If it had come out on a weekday, the World Telegram, Sun and Journal American would have had follow-ups.26
On the day of the Yaddo board meeting, Lowell put in an appearance at the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, which was being held at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. The conference aimed to promote a conciliatory, if not craven, attitude to the Soviet Union; a number of Russian writers and artists were on the platform, for example, for the session on writing and publishing, and so too were a handful of American pro-Communists, including Agnes Smedley and three professors who had just been dismissed from the University of Washington for “alleged Communist Party membership.” Partisan Review was well represented in the audience, and the Russians were thus given a fairly grueling time, with Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy pressing them from the floor on matters of state censorship and the present whereabouts of writers like Pasternak and Babel. Lowell’s contribution was rather more oblique. The New York Times reported it as follows:
“I am a poet and a Roman Catholic,” Mr. Lowell declared. “I have two questions. The first is addressed to Mr. Pavlenko. What are the laws for conscientious objection in the Soviet Union? The second question is for Mr. Shostakovich. Will he tell us how the criticism of the Soviet Government can help an artist?”
Mr. Pavlenko replied that he didn’t know what the Soviet laws on conscientious objection were. “I have had no personal acquaintance with them,” he said. “When my country called, I fought. I hope to be able to fight when I am 100 years old.”
Mr. Shostakovich, pale, determined-looking and a little nervous, replied to Mr. Lowell by affirming the criticism he had received for writing formalist music. “The criticism brings me much good,” he said. “It helps me bring my music forward.”27
Thirty years later, Shostakovich’s memoirs appeared in the West; in them, he gave his account of the Waldorf affair:
I still recall with horror my first trip to the U.S.A. I wouldn’t have gone at all if it hadn’t been for intense pressure from administrative figures of all ranks and colors, from Stalin down. People sometimes say it must have been an interesting trip, look at the way I’m smiling in the photographs. That was the smile of a condemned man. I felt like a dead man. I answered all the idiotic questions in a daze, and thought, When I get back it’s over for me.
Stalin liked leading Americans by the nose that way. He would show them a man—here he is, alive and well—and then kill him. Well, why say lead by the nose? That’s too strongly put. He only fooled those who wanted to be fooled. The Americans don’t give a damn about us, and in order to live and sleep soundly, they’ll believe anything.28
Since leaving Yaddo, Lowell had been planning a missionary trip to Chicago and the Midwest—he would visit Tate at Chicago, Peter Taylor at Bloomington, Ransom at Kenyon. He would recruit allies for his contest against evil. Tate was alarmed at the prospect and much relieved each time Lowell postponed the actual date of his arrival: “We want Cal to come out but it would be better after he cools off a bit.”29
Tate wrote this to Elizabeth Hardwick while Lowell was in retreat at Rhode Island, and he took the opportunity to insert some avuncular but firmly discouraging advice:
[Lowell] has got himself boxed into the corner that he has always wanted to be in; that is, the inescapably celibate corner, (1) he can’t marry again, as a Catholic (2) as a strict Catholic, he can’t commit adultery. He has been trying to get himself in this dilemma. I don’t predict that he will become a monk but I do think it highly probable.30
Immediately after the Waldorf conference Lowell telegrammed Tate to expect him on March 29; the telegram was signed “Uncle Lig.” The following day Tate wrote again to Hardwick:
Cal is here, and in 24 hours has flattened us out. I do not know what we can do. Fundamentally he makes a great deal of sense, but his mental condition is very nearly psychotic. We shall be able to get through the next ten days, till he goes to Kenyon: what worries me is his immediate future. What can he do? He says that God, or God through me, must tell him. I will not let him down, but the best help from others, if it is too much depended on, always lets us down. Perhaps a letter from you would help to calm him. He is pathetic. He constantly embraces us, and asks us to stand by him, since he is weak.31
A day later Tate had second thoughts: Lowell, he felt, was “better—distinctly so: he is quietening down hourly…. more than ever before he needs to be loved.” Tate also adds that “His humor will save him in the long run.”32
Two days after this, Tate was taking a less indulgent view of Lowell’s sense of fun—possibly because one of Lowell’s “jests” was to provide Caroline Tate with a list of Allen’s lovers, and then to implore Tate to “repent.” Also, there was much bear-foolery—the bear games that Lowell and Stafford had devised were not just verbal: on this occasion, according to Robie Macauley, Lowell did an “Arms of the Law” impersonation that ended with Tate being lifted into the air and then held at arm’s length out of his second-floor apartment window; suspended thus, Tate was forced to listen to a bear’s-voice recitation of his own most celebrated poem, “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” (“Arms of the Law” was always Lowell’s retributive joke-bear: “A Bostonian, an Irish policeman and a bear.”)33 Macauley’s story is perhaps too good to be true, but certainly there was enough violence in those two days for Tate to lose patience and call the police:
<
br /> Saturday evening he made a scene in a restaurant, from which we extricated him with great difficulty. When we got him home, he raised the window and began to shout profanity and obscenity. This went on about 30 minutes. A crowd gathered and then five policemen appeared. It took four of them ten minutes to subdue and handcuff him…. I finally, with the help of Jim Cunningham, talked the police out of taking him to the station, and instead got them to take him to the University psychiatrist, who diagnosed his case as “Psychotic reaction, paranoid type.” He thought Cal should be taken into custody, but I persuaded him and the police to turn him over to me for the night. We quieted him by three in the morning, and he slept a little. At breakfast, he was agitated, and announced that he had done something wonderful for us all. He then said he was going to Peter Taylor at Bloomington, Indiana. I saw no way to stop him short of calling the police and committing him. We put him on the train in great apprehension.34
While Lowell was on his way to Bloomington, Tate telephoned Peter Taylor “and explained what had happened”; he also suggested that Taylor meet Lowell’s train with a police escort. Tate then fired off a thoroughly rattled letter to Elizabeth Hardwick in New York. He had heard that Lowell and Hardwick had begun an affair at Yaddo, and—as a former admirer of Hardwick’s—he here takes a perhaps overprotective line:
Now my dear, you must listen to what I say. Cal is dangerous; there are definite homicidal implications in his world, particularly toward women and children. He has a purification mania, which frequently takes homicidal form. You must not let him in your apartment….
It is not likely that he will get back to N.Y. At present he is quiet, feeling out, of course, the Taylors, but when they do not enter his world with full assent, he will become violent, as he did here. Overtly, we were all sympathy, but he began on Friday to suspect that we were the enemy.
While the police were subduing him, he shouted again and again: “Cut off my testicles.”
You know what is wrong with him as well as I do.35
Tate then goes on to scold Hardwick, and to criticize Flannery O’Connor for having indulged Lowell in his campaign at Yaddo: “But you are a woman and Miss O’Connor is a woman, and neither of you had the experience or knowledge to evaluate the situation in public terms.”
*
Lowell arrived in Bloomington on April 4 and Peter Taylor met him at the station. Taylor had already arranged to lodge Lowell at the University of Indiana Club—on Tate’s advice; after all, the Taylors had recently had their first child, and from Tate’s account of the upheavals in Chicago, it would be a risk having Lowell in their house. At first, Taylor had been reluctant to accept any such melodramatic diagnosis, but almost as soon as Lowell appeared it was evident that this was not just another of his famous “rages”:
We were walking on the campus and talking about literary things, but I could see he was mad, the things he was saying, and I suddenly felt that all of our long conversations about literary things, about what we were going to do with our lives, at Kenyon, I felt they were all nonsense. And I felt that I was about to have a crack-up myself, I was so upset. … You see, I didn’t know anything about psychiatry. I thought Cal was lost forever. He had “gone mad.” I really thought that I had lost this friend forever.36
That same evening, Lowell separated himself from Taylor and set off to “explore” the town, and Taylor took this opportunity to telephone Merrill Moore in Boston and his old Kenyon friend John Thompson in New York; Moore agreed to tell Charlotte, and John Thompson was ready to help in any way he could. Taylor then contacted the police.
Soon afterwards, there was a report that Lowell had stolen a roll of tickets from a theater box office and had come to blows with a policeman who tried to restrain him. A general alert was then put out to the effect that a disturbed poet called Robert Lowell was on the rampage in downtown Bloomington. As it turned out, the alert fitted neatly into Lowell’s sense of his divine vocation. Robert Giroux recalls:
Cal was walking the streets, and after a bit he went and rang a doorbell. And the door was opened by a policeman who was off-duty, in mufti, and he said to Cal, “You must be Robert Lowell.” Cal nearly fainted; he thought this was divine intervention—this stranger knew his name.37
Among Lowell’s drafts for Life Studies there is a fragment in which he tries to describe how it all seemed to him:
Seven years ago I had an attack of pathological enthusiasm. The night before I was locked up I ran about the streets of Bloomington Indiana crying out against devils and homosexuals. I believed I could stop cars and paralyze their forces by merely standing in the middle of the highway with my arms outspread. Each car carried a long rod above its tail-light, and the rods were adorned with diabolic Indian or Voodoo signs. Bloomington stood for Joyce’s hero and Christian regeneration. Indiana stood for the evil, unexorcised, aboriginal Indians. I suspected I was a reincarnation of the Holy Ghost, and had become homicidally hallucinated. To have known the glory, violence and banality of such an experience is corrupting…. 38
When Peter Taylor next got word, Lowell was in a straitjacket at the Bloomington police station. “He’d had a terrible fight with a policeman,” Merrill Moore later reported. “He had beaten up the policeman and the policeman had beaten him up, to the advantage of neither of them.”39 Taylor visited Lowell in his cell and was implored by him to kneel and pray; could Taylor not smell the sulfur and the brimstone? Lowell asked. Taylor prayed, and needless to say the prayers were of considerable length; meanwhile the duty officers at the station had been replaced by the night staff, who, when they checked the cells and saw Lowell and Taylor kneeling side by side, assumed that their daytime colleagues had bagged two religious maniacs. Taylor had difficulty persuading them to let him go.40 He later wrote to Tate: “I suppose I was with him only a few hours, but they were the most truly dreadful hours of my life. It’s still impossible for me to talk about it even to Eleanor.”41
On April 6 Merrill Moore and Charlotte Lowell arrived, and Taylor helped them to get Lowell to the Chicago airport, where John Thompson was waiting to meet them. Lowell, says Thompson, was “foaming at the mouth,” talking nonstop, and seemed likely at any moment to erupt into unmanageable violence:
I remember we got to La Guardia and there wasn’t a plane to Boston for hours. Merrill Moore went away to take a nap and write some sonnets. He didn’t have as much as an aspirin on him. Cal was sitting on the floor at La Guardia. I had to carry him onto the plane to get him to Boston—to a place called Baldpate.42
At Baldpate, a small private hospital near Georgetown, Massachusetts, Lowell was put into a padded cell and, as Moore wrote to Taylor, “continued to be in a somewhat excited and confused state of mind.” Moore’s diagnosis was that Lowell was “having considerable conflict between religion and sexuality” and this had led to “a brainstorm which he will in time ride out.”43 Charlotte seems to have taken a similar approach. She wrote to Taylor thanking him for “Bobby’s clothes, all so nicely washed,” and for behaving “so wisely in a trying situation”:
You’ll be glad to hear that all goes well with Bobby now. He seems to like the hospital and the doctors and he’s eating and sleeping well. The doctors feel that this illness is largely hysterical due to overwork, overstimulation, under-eating and sleeping, lack of exercise and physical care, combined with much mental strain and conflict. We expect him to be quite well again in a few months.44
Lowell was in fact refusing to allow either Merrill Moore or his mother to visit him at Baldpate, and Charlotte eventually had to ask Robert Giroux if he would act as an intermediary. Giroux recalls:
The asylum was really like a prison. I drove out with Mrs. Lowell and Dr. Moore and they waited while I went in, having to pass through a series of locked doors—three or four—before I reached Cal’s cell. The attendant asked through an eye-level window if he wanted to see me, and Cal said “Yes.” I was shocked to see that the room had no other windows, and the leather walls were indeed padd
ed to prevent self-injury.
Cal was terribly pale and drawn, and looked anything but violent. He spoke piteously and very persuasively: “My mother wants to keep me here for the rest of my life. You’ve got to help me.” I might have been convinced if, in an appeal to what he thought were my Catholic prejudices, he hadn’t said: “She won’t let me go to mass.” I did not like Mrs. Lowell but I knew this was untrue and said, “Cal, your mother asked me to come to Boston because she’s very upset at your refusal to see her.” And he said, “No, no, I don’t want to talk to her. I don’t want to see her.” Even people locked up in cells have rights, I thought, and went out and told them he was adamant.45
Meanwhile, in Chicago, Allen Tate had formed the same view of Charlotte’s probable intentions and had written to T. S. Eliot “expressing anxiety lest Cal’s mother should try to get him certified and locked up.” Merrill Moore was enraged by this interference and immediately wrote to Tate that Lowell was, and would remain, a voluntary patient at Baldpate, and that Tate was quite wrong in his attitude to Mrs. Lowell: “she is a good mother, deeply interested in her son and fully aware of his talents and capabilities.” Moore also felt that it was “not helpful to Cal’s reputation here or in England to have rumors of this kind circulating about him.”46
The rumors, though, had by this time already circulated, and invariably Tate was the source: he had told Jean Stafford, and she, he claimed, had spread the word around literary New York; he had also written to Malcolm Cowley, but this he said was because he wanted to protect Lowell against any possible libel suit from Mrs. Ames. Throughout, both Tate and his wife were nervously aware that they might be thought “heartless” in having foisted the sick Lowell on Peter Taylor, and they were anxious to head off any slanders of this sort. Tate’s explanation was that he had not wanted to “engage with” Charlotte Lowell, that Charlotte had blamed him for too many things in the past—Lowell’s marriage, his Catholicism, his conscientious objection, even his poetry—and he wanted no more of it:
