by Ian Hamilton
I have a world of things to do—preparing to leave hospital, my course at Kenyon, a lecture on Browning to be delivered at Kenyon, readings at St. Johns and here and the Commencement poem to be read at Harvard on the 19th of June—like James Russell Lowell, but I guess our poems will have little in common.12
The Kenyon course he mentions here was to take place in the summer at the newly instituted Kenyon School of Letters—an event organized by Ransom but not officially tied in with Kenyon College. Lowell’s immediate hope was that Tate would be able to persuade Paul Engle, director of the writers’ workshop, to offer him a job at Iowa similar to the one he had turned down in 1947. On January 1, 1950, he heard that Tate had been successful (“You are a wonderfully generous friend,” Lowell wrote to him, “and I shall never forget”),13 and that he was expected to arrive at Iowa by the end of the month. Lowell was discharged from Payne Whitney, having agreed to make contact with a psychiatrist in Iowa, and by January 25 he and Hardwick were installed in a one-and-a-half-room apartment in Iowa City: “a strange place … it’s so flat and ugly and somehow has the air and look of a temporary town. Actually, anything over fifty years old is a landmark.”14
Even so, within a week of their arrival, Lowell had got back to work; Elizabeth Hardwick wrote to Charlotte Lowell:
Cal has started writing poetry again and has been steadily at it for the past week with his old inspiration and fantastic concentration. Even he must admit that what he has done is brilliant as ever and so he’s fine and busy.15
And when classes started a week later, Lowell found them surprisingly agreeable. “There are no fireworks, nothing of the icy lucidity of the professional,” but of the twenty-five poets in his class he thought that five or six were “really trying to do something” and that the atmosphere was “tame and friendly”—like almost everything else in Iowa City:
Every afternoon a pack of very harmless and sorry-looking stray dogs settles on our pathway. This is one of the marks of Iowa City; the others are high-brow movies, the new criticism, and the Benalek murder trial, which Elizabeth is moving heaven and earth to enter as an accredited reporter.16
Lowell was making weekly visits to an Iowa psychiatrist, and in March he wrote to his mother: “… I am well out of my extreme troubles. There is a stiffness, many old scars, the toil of building up new habits. I definitely feel out of the old perverse dark maze.”17
A new plan had been devised for 1950: after Iowa, there would be the visit to Kenyon, and after that “a frugal year abroad.” With money saved from Iowa, the fee from Kenyon and the remainder of the 1947 Guggenheim, Lowell and Hardwick calculated that if they set off in September, they would be able to survive in Europe—“in Italy mostly”—until the following June. Lowell now felt that teaching would always be there to come back to; indeed, Iowa had assured him that there would be a position for him there on his return. And the European trip would, he thought, give him “the time, freedom and stimulation to finish his new book of poems.”18
The Kenyon course was a success. Delmore Schwartz and Ransom were teaching there, and Lowell was able to show them the first draft of his long poem “The Mills of the Kavanaughs”; he gave lectures on Browning and on Frost and was applauded by Ransom for doing “a fine job for us here.”19
After a short spell back in New York and a visit to Lowell’s parents, Lowell and Hardwick were ready to leave. They had arranged to take a Norwegian freighter to Genoa—“it was all this youth stuff,” Hardwick has recalled, although, in their early thirties, “we were not so young”—and in preparation they installed themselves and their luggage in a hotel. On August 26 Lowell’s parents wrote to wish them “Bon voyage.” Charlotte was anxious that they should always remember to contact the naval attaché at the appropriate American embassy, “and say that your father was a naval officer. That was helpful to us and gave us especial attention.”20 And, unusually, there was a note from Mr. Lowell;21 he had enjoyed their visit to Boston, he said, and would handle Lowell’s mail while he was away:
We think it is nice to do well in your poems, but it is equally advisable to do well in a wife, and we think that you did.
Hope you have a fine trip. Best love to you both.
Affectionately,
Your Dad
Four days later a telegram arrived: DADDY DIED VERY SUDDENLY AT THE BEVERLY HOSPITAL.22
Lowell and Hardwick left their luggage at their New York hotel and returned to Boston, where Lowell helped to organize his father’s funeral. He later wrote:
I was the only person Mother permitted to lift the lid of the casket. Father was there. He wore his best sport-coat—pink, at ease, obedient! Not a twist or a grimace recalled those unprecedented last words to Mother as he died, “I feel awful.” And it was right that he should still have the slight over-ruddiness so characteristic of his last summer. He looked entirely alive, or as he used to say: W & H: Well and Happy. Impossible to believe that if I had pressed a hand to his brow to see if it were hectic, I would have touched the cold thing!23
And Elizabeth Hardwick has recalled:
Cal was upset and there were some rather distressing things that had happened. He asked his mother, at Beverly Farms, about his father’s will. His father didn’t mention him in his will at all. And Cal said, “Didn’t he even leave me his watch, or something?” And she said, “Oh, Bobby.” And he said he wanted to talk to his mother about how much money she had and what she was going to do with her life. She wouldn’t discuss it. Instead she fell over and fainted, and crumpled down on the stairs. She would do rather dramatic things like that occasionally. But he was quite hurt that his father didn’t mention him in his will.
But how could that have happened?
What had happened was that Cal came into a small trust that went by will to him on his father’s death. I mean, it was out of Mr. Lowell’s jurisdiction, and so I suppose he thought that since Cal had that, there was no special reason to mention him in the will.24
Lowell and Hardwick stayed on at Beverly Farms for a month, and on September 29 they finally embarked for Europe. From the boat, Lowell wrote to his mother:
Just a note to say goodbye and remind you must tell us anything that comes up and call on us for any help we can give. The last month has been a hard one and an instructive one—an education or its beginnings for us all. I’ll miss you deeply.25
After a “rainless, sea-sickless”26 voyage via Tangier, Lowell and Hardwick reached Genoa on October 10,1950, and from there they made for Florence, intending to stay for a week before moving on to Rome. But Florence was not to be passed through so casually:
We came here for a week, after we landed, and decided to stay permanently, goodness knows what influencing the decision besides the fact that Florence is interesting beyond limits—the churches, the galleries, etc. But I’m sure the suitcases made us decide upon it before even so much as visiting Rome. We rented the apartment the first week….27
The five-room apartment they had found was “wonderfully furnished, beautiful dishes, sheets, silver, furniture and in a chic location,” and $200 a month covered rent, food, heating and a maid. For Hardwick it was perfect: the maid meant that she could do her own work (she was writing a novel based on the Iowa City murder trial) and not be swamped by “the torture of the laundry, the cooking and the cleaning.” As for Lowell, he had immediately launched himself into historic Florence, and was soon “in a daze about Italy.”28
It became Lowell’s habit over the next few months to search for an American parallel to each new European marvel; part of this was homesickness, but mainly it was an attempt to impose limits on his own excitement. Thus, Florence was Boston, Rome was New York, and Italy was “like America—a slightly older America, such as that of my childhood in the twenties.”29 Constantly, and not too convincingly, he would attempt to place each bewildering new place: “Even the greyest houses are attractive and you might think you were living in the glorious Victorian age in the poor Italian section of Boston
, except for the posters and motor-bikes.”30
The posters in Communist Florence mostly said things like “Death to the criminal MacArthur,” but that didn’t worry Lowell. The Korean War had broken out in the summer of 1950, but in Florence “the people are divided every which way, and seem to be marking time—waiting for the giants, Russia and America, to act.”31 On the whole, he felt, the city was relaxed and slow, and in any case it was not modern political Florence he had come to see: “We’d get up at seven, and we’d walk all day and come back to wherever we were at 5—seeing everything.”32 And when Lowell was not looking, he was reading “grammars and art books” and Florentine histories. And his classical education gave him the pleasing illusion of being able to communicate with the natives:
I have a theory that I can learn Italian simply by tossing about bizarre words and phrases—a new language is a joy as soon as you can be incomprehensible to your friends. Already, helped by Latin, I can say things to our maid that no one can understand; Elizabeth says things that I can’t understand, and the maid says things that everyone in Italy can understand except us.33
During his first two months in Florence he was also “fussing with my Kavanaughs”:34 in other words, massively rewriting the whole book in galley proofs. Robert Giroux would write reminding him that printers charged real money for this kind of thing, and Lowell would take no notice. The book was now “much improved,” he wrote to Peter Taylor.35 It would be called The Mills of the Kavanaughs and would include the title poem along with the six other pieces he had completed since Lord Weary’s Castle. It was scheduled to appear in the spring of 1951.
Lowell and Hardwick lingered in Florence from October 1950 until May 1951, with only intermittent excursions. There was a three-day trip to Monte Carlo—“no gambling, just sight-seeing”36—and further visits to Rome. For one luxurious ten-day spell they were entertained in the country villa of Princess Caetani, the publisher of an international literary magazine called Botteghe Oscure, and in Rome itself Lowell paid regular visits to George Santayana. A Boston Catholic, Santayana had been impressed by Lord Weary’s Castle and had spoken of “the flames of piety that appear repeatedly, contrasting with the Bostonian and Cape Cod atmosphere of the background.”37
Rome was the glittering metropolis—“much more lively socially and intellectually than Florence,” Hardwick thought, but both she and Lowell were usually pleased to return to a city where “you can walk everywhere and learn your way about in a day.”38 In Florence they had met the poet Montale, “and had several sweaty, mute evenings of language difficulty and great displays of blundering affection. We walked up the Arno, I remember, and Montale, since we couldn’t talk, sang into the night ‘In Questa Tomba Oscura’ and other songs.”39 In Florence, too, there was Bernard Berenson, the celebrated connoisseur of Italian painting and another self-exiled Bostonian. Berenson’s villa was an “attraction” for visiting American intellectuals, and the old man himself was a dependable host figure, an “inn-keeper” almost: “He was too old,” Hardwick wrote, “had been viewed and consulted far too much; you had the belated feeling you were seeing the matinee of a play that had been running for eight decades.” In this same essay, Hardwick muses on the notion of expatriatism—and it seems that if she and Lowell ever thought of moving permanently to Europe, the example of Berenson was enough to give them pause:
When we mailed a letter of introduction to him, he accepted it as a bizarre formality because, of course, he who saw everyone was willing and happy to see yet another. One was never tempted to think it was ennui or triviality that produced this state of addiction; the absorbing inclination seemed to be a simple fear of missing someone, almost as if these countless visitors and travelers had a secret the exile pitifully wished to discover.40
She felt the same about other, less renowned Americans who had tried to settle into the “dream-like timelessness of Italy”:
Everywhere in Italy, among the American colony, one’s envy is cut short time and again by a sudden feeling of sadness in the air, as of something still alive with the joys of an Italian day and yet somehow faintly withered, languishing. Unhappiness, disappointment support the exile in his choice.41
For the mere traveler, though, there was still so much to see, and during the summer Lowell and Hardwick set off to “discover” Europe. They traveled in France with the Macauleys and to Greece and Turkey with the art critic Anthony Bower. Hardwick remembers it all as a period of
gorgeous absorption and infinite passion for Italy and Europe, which both of us were taking in for the first time. We had the feeling that no life would be long enough. We shed tears when we opened the door of the Athens Museum and saw the Charioteer, standing serenely. Our plan was to take the boat from Bari to Piraeus, and then change to the boat for Turkey (we visited Greece on the way back). But while we were waiting for a change of boats, Cal got into a thrifty mood as a reaction to Tony’s spendthrift nature and insisted on going to the Acropolis by subway. He managed to arrive there before we did and felt thereby very cunning and native.42
In October, Lowell wrote excitedly to Randall Jarrell:
I feel and talk like a guide book—full of gaps, irrelevencies [sic] and amnesia. But it’s overwhelmingly astonishing—so much that is harmonious, unbelievably wonderful, odd, unforeseen, varied—all one’s European history to learn over, at least in sense that all one’s facts and theories are hung onto new images.
It’s like going to school again—I fill up on everything indiscrimently [sic], and hope it will settle—a lot of French and Italian poetry, even some German and Latin, thousands of paintings, a lot of history, plays, opera, ballet—one feels so ignorant, so conscious that one won’t have forever, that it’s hard to stop.43
As it turned out, Lowell wasn’t able to “stop” until late that autumn. The climax of his soaring and intense summer came in August with the arrival in Paris of the almost equally energetic Charlotte Lowell. Unfortunately, Charlotte’s energies were not the kind that drove her into churches and art galleries; they were more to do with the shortcomings of bureaucrats and flunkies—wherever she went, Lowell wrote, she would leave “a wake of shattered chefs, ships-captains, hotel managers, Cook’s agents etc. etc…. truly, and I’m not exaggerating.”44 And for Hardwick,
it was sheer torture. It was the routine: “You don’t want another coffee, you don’t want a cigarette, do you?” And I’d say, “Well, I think I do.” It was like that. Little domestic things. I didn’t find it pleasant. One thing I didn’t like about Mrs. Lowell was that although she was very protected and rather spoiled, she took a tough attitude towards other people’s indulgences. That got rather tiresome.45
After a month of this, tension was running fairly high; as Mrs. Lowell later diagnosed: “It was a great adjustment for us all.”46 And it was in this atmosphere that Lowell suddenly announced his winter plans: he had decided they would go to Holland. Hardwick was appalled; she had expected that they would return to Italy as soon as Charlotte’s visit had been coped with—after all, most of their luggage was still stored in Florence. Lowell would not be dissuaded; he wanted Hardwick to go ahead of him to Amsterdam to find somewhere to live; meanwhile he would escort Charlotte to the next bit of her holiday, at Pau. Hardwick, in the end, complied, but, she says:
I was scared and miserable … I found it absolutely terrifying—I didn’t know anyone there, I didn’t know what to look for and so on. I was full of complaints—it all seemed so dour and hard to manage.47
Even though Lowell knew that Hardwick felt stranded and desperate in Amsterdam—she wrote to him of her “paralyzing anxiety”—he continued to argue that Amsterdam was where he needed to be:
I am at the end of my road. I want to be located as soon as possible, and preferably in Holland. I have good reasons for this choice! The Anglo-Saxon’s encounter with the Latin cultures has been worn to exaustion [sic]. Holland draws me because of the novelty, the freedom to pick and choose and the privacy which is so ne
cessary for reactions that are at all personal or profound…. I feel I can make something out of Holland—one can never know, but the hunch seems crucially worth following.48
He wanted “sunlit rooms, a busy, perceptive, productive day and calm and joy between us.”49 He had been reading Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic (which had given him “nightmares” when “still in short trousers”;50 he now describes it as a “magnificent, rather obtusely and fiercely Macaulayish anti-Catholic affair”51), and he had learned from it that “Catholic apologetics are more a splendid lawyer’s harangue than the story of what happens.”52 He was anxious to see Dutch paintings; Rembrandt’s Syndics in the Rijksmuseum had, he said, once been his “cause,” and he badly wanted to see it:
Surreptitiously throughout my sixth form year at St. Mark’s School, I had studied painting in Elie Faure’s five volume Histoire de l’Art, copied its photographs on tracing paper, penetrated the mysteries of “dynamic symmetry” and finally spent twenty dollars, an entire term’s allowance, on a copious, bake-finish Medici print of the Syndics which was hung in my alcove. This act, a very typical one, was unintelligible to my class mates. The Syndics had nothing manly or athletic about it; nor on the other hand was it at all arty, sophisticated, advanced. I was pitied by the class aesthetes, and nearly mobbed by its football players.53
Chiefly, though, he wanted to rest for a time in a culture that was in accord with “my own Protestant New England background.”
There was a note of desperation in all this, and Hardwick wrote urging him:
take it easy, calm down before things get any more absurd and destructive. Living side by side as we do, without friends to advise and help, I get caught up in the whirl, utterly worn, bewildered and irritable and so I can’t help you because my life becomes a nightmare, timeless, driven and irrational. You’ve been moving at a tremendous pace for half a year and it’s time to stop physically and mentally.
