by Ian Hamilton
Lowell agreed to go in the ambulance, but when he arrived at the Salzburg military hospital it was found that the six “violent rooms” were filled. After much argument, the army agreed to take Lowell in for one night, provided that someone stayed with him. Brooks’s colleague Jerome Bruner volunteered. The army pedantically refused to take any further responsibility, and refused also to issue an order transferring Lowell to the nearest other military hospital—in Munich: it was somehow bureaucratically impossible for a Salzburg ambulance to cross the German frontier. The following day Brooks and a by now totally exhausted Bruner (Lowell had not slept all night) decided to smuggle their sick charge over the border in a private car. They set off with some nervousness:
On the way Lowell kept talking about how terrible one lot of people were—the Austrians or Germans. I can’t remember. He had categorized everybody in the one country as evil and everybody in the other as good. The good ones had good highways, cars that worked, trees that grew, happy ducks, and the peasants were attractive. The other had the opposite. Anyway, we had this little procession across the frontier—two cars, one with Cal and me and Jerry and the other with Elizabeth and my wife Esmé. And it was important to keep Esmé and Elizabeth’s car out of sight—so Cal wouldn’t notice. Jerry was in the front seat and Cal in the back of this tiny Hillman Minx car. Cal’s shoulders were almost as wide as the seat. I could see his eyes in the rearview mirror—everything he said was exaggerated and he was having fun. He was creating his own reality and then responding to it, and everyone else had to go along with it. It was extraordinary. So—it’s almost 60 miles, the trip. It was pretty alarming. I felt at any moment he might put his arms around my throat, and that would have been the end of us.6
One particularly tricky moment came when Lowell suddenly remembered that the seminar still had three or four days to run and he hadn’t written reports on any of his students. Brooks said, “Why don’t you tell us now and I’ll try to remember and then write it up when I get back to the Schloss.” Lowell looked skeptical, but once he was launched, the day was saved: “He spent the rest of that trip describing the academic and artistic—as he saw them—qualifications of some fifteen or twenty poets and writers. And it was as if he had known each of them intimately.”
When the car reached the hospital, Lowell developed a limp in his right leg; it was partially fractured, he said, and shorter than the other, and this was why he needed hospital attention, this was what the whole trip was about, this was why he had been held overnight at Salzburg, and so on. At first the Munich hospital’s admissions sergeant said that he had no authority to accept a civilian, but Brooks and Bruner pleaded that Lowell was part of “America’s national treasure,” that he was ill and badly needed treatment: “So the sergeant—bless him—in the great American tradition said, ‘O.K., if he’s that important, he’s admitted. We’ll sort out the details later.’”
So he was installed—in a locked ward full of disturbed military personnel. Hardwick took lodgings in a hotel in Munich’s Schiller-strasse and visited the hospital each day. On her first visit she found Lowell rather pathetically trying to “get to know” his fellow patients:
He’s just as preoccupied with the other patients as he was with the students. But this hospital is a terrible, terrible place for him. The other patients are of very low mentality; they don’t like Cal at all and he’s trying to talk to them, tell them what’s what, etc. I’m afraid this terrible environment will cause an increase, if there are too many arguments, etc.7
Whether or not these arguments took place, Lowell’s sojourn in the Munich jail did teach him something about earthy American vernacular—see “A Mad Negro Soldier Confined at Munich”:
“We’re all Americans, except the Doc,
a Kraut DP, who kneels and bathes my eye.
The boys who floored me, two black maniacs, try
to pat my hands. Rounds, rounds! Why punch the clock?
In Munich the zoo’s rubble fumes with cats;
hoydens with air-guns prowl the Koenigsplatz,
and pink the pigeons on the mustard spire.
Who but my girl-friend set the town on fire?
Cat-houses talk cold turkey to my guards;
I found my Fraulein stitching outing shirts
in the black forest of the colored wards—
lieutenants squawked like chickens in her skirts.
Her German language made my arteries harden—
I’ve no annuity from the pay we blew.
I chartered an aluminium canoe,
I had her six times in the English Garden.
Oh mama, mama, like a trolley-pole
sparking at contact, her electric shock—
the power-house! … The doctor calls our roll—
no knives, no forks. We file before the clock,
and fancy minnows, slaves of habit, shoot
like starlight through their air-conditioned bowl.
It’s time for feeding. Each subnormal boot
black heart is pulsing to its ant-egg dole.”8
If the character portrayed here was at all typical, it is clear that Hardwick had good reason to be worried. Lowell’s attitude to Hardwick remained unpredictable: he would try to goad her into argument or enrage her with insults (“Everybody has noticed that you’ve been getting mighty dumb lately”9), but would become anxious and suspicious if his vehemence failed to reduce her to tears: “I can hardly bear it for more than five minutes…. These mixed feelings terrify and oppress me, because I don’t know how to respond for his own good.”10
Inevitably, there were Lowellian moments of high comedy. Hardwick recalls being summoned by the head of the hospital to discuss the “case” and being asked for details of Lowell’s army record:
And I said: “Well, he didn’t have an army record. He was a conscientious objector.” And the lieutenant or whoever he was started screaming: “Get that son of a bitch out of here!” And I said: “But he’s an American citizen. He’s got no place to go.”11
Of another visit, Hardwick wrote at the time to Robie and Anne Macauley:
I can’t resist one funny thing—there are many others, but I’m too gloomy today to remember them. Cal says Hiss is innocent and that his testimony was mostly a joke; full of a peculiar kind of wit like mine! At that point, I gave a strained, ha, ha.12
And the next day, when Hardwick called on Lowell’s doctor for a report on her husband’s progress, she was told: “He’s fine. He’s left the Church and wants to join the Army.” Hardwick commented, “Dear old Cal, a born joiner”; and, at the end of the same letter, added, “I’m much more cheerful now and will keep an eye on Cal to be sure he doesn’t recover and get shipped to the Korean front.”13
Hardwick was able to write these letters to the Macauleys because they had been at Salzburg and witnessed Lowell’s accelerating mania (indeed had been on the receiving end of some of his aggression), but she was anxious that this new episode be kept secret: “Given the tragedy of these attacks, the most important thing is to shield him when he’s recovered.” On August 25 she wrote again to the Macauleys:
I want to impress on you the importance of not saying anything to anyone about this. If it “gets out” then you must minimize it, because he really is going to be well soon. I think I have managed the Seminar part as well as possible, and if there is not too much difficulty from American gossip filtering back from the school I’m sure I can pull Cal through the recovery period without too much pain.14
By October a rumor had reached Boston that Lowell had “suffered another severe mental breakdown,” and Charlotte was writing angrily to Merrill Moore, blaming him—it would seem—for having mishandled the 1949 episode. By then, however, Hardwick had arranged for Lowell to be moved from the army hospital to a sanatorium at Kreuzlingen, in Switzerland:
He still wasn’t very well. But somebody had told us about this hospital in Switzerland. I can’t describe to you the state we were in, with these old beaten-up suitcases—all t
his was travel by train, third class and so forth, no money, nothing, and Cal was in bad shape. He was so knocked out that he couldn’t carry our three years’ worth of suitcases—and I remember lugging them on to the train. But we got to this wonderful place—wonderful. Binswanger Sanatorium in Kreuzlingen.15
Lowell was “utterly beartbroken,” “shattered and ashamed,”16 she said; he knew that he had behaved badly at Salzburg, but “since there are no great events to work through, he tries to recall feeling and tone, but he can’t.”17 Once at Kreuzlingen, though, there was an immediate improvement; the place was spectacularly beautiful, set on a lake, and the amenities were luxurious:
They clearly have the exquisite idea that the only thing wrong with mental patients is that they haven’t enough comfort, service and good hotel management. In our case they were right, because we giggled all day long like a coal miner at the Ritz, in our connecting beautiful rooms, collapsed with sensuality in the deep baths and gasped at the four meals a day. All this for both of us at $15 a day. The horrid Munich cost that much for Cal alone.18
On September 15 Lowell wrote to the Macauleys:
This is how the world looks when a man subsides—i.e. like home. We’re even staying in a house that might have been designed by my grandfather. We’re snugly resting together and doing Sunday crossword puzzles in preparation for Venice, to which we go in two days. Please forgive me for being such a vehement bore all summer. Teaching’s strong medicine for the idle….19
Later, Lowell was to describe the Salzburg episode to his mother: “Due to Elizabeth’s alertness, the attack never went much beyond a state of nervous excitement,” it was “a very mild repetition of the trouble that reached its climax before in Chicago and Bald Pate [sic]”:
in a period of twenty days I went through the three stages of exuberance, confusion and depression, and can now safely say it’s all definitely over, without any likelihood of relapse or return…. I write all this to ease your mind, and perhaps a little out of pride so that you will appreciate my dear and intelligent Elizabeth. P.S. I’m not anxious to build up a reputation for poetic instability, so please reassure the Parkers.20
This was written on October 19; by then Lowell and Hardwick had moved on to Rome. After Kreuzlingen, they traveled with Allen Tate and Stephen Spender to Venice, where there was to be yet another “conference on the artist in the modern world” (this one organized by UNESCO). Lowell wisely kept to the sidelines of this portentous rally, but stayed on in Venice for three weeks—indeed, “did every stone of it”21—and then visited Padua, Verona and Torcello before settling into the “tremendous, quiet, slow tremendousness of Rome”22 for the remainder of the winter; as Hardwick wrote:
Now we are in Rome. Since I sent the postcard we have moved round the corner to the Pensione California. We have two rooms and plan to stay all winter, not looking for an apt. Actually, at least for this period of our lives, we have suddenly found by accident exactly what we want—two rooms in a pensione. It’s just what we need, no household, no puttering about all day, and real privacy for working. Since we’ve been married Cal and I have spent 6 months of every year in a miserable furnished room together while travelling. The other six months were spent furnishing and managing a new apt. and then dismantling it. So far we are thrilled as babies with our new arrangements, and we are both working.23
Lowell was working on a poem for George Santayana, who had died earlier in the year, and in letters about his own work he continually talks of “going into new country,” of not repeating his “old tricks.”24 In November he wrote to Allen Tate, “I’m full of stuff I had no notion of saying before,”25 and a month later to Peter Taylor:
I haven’t been writing at all until the last two months…. It’s hell finding a new style or rather finding that your old style won’t say any of the things that you want to, and that you can’t write it if you try, and yet the petrified flotsam bits of it are always bobbing up where you don’t want them.26
Lowell could now see Rome as a recuperative interlude; after two months there he began to compare its attractions with those of “the Maine countryside,” a comparison farfetched enough to suggest that the city’s fascination was very nearly spent. He began to talk more determinedly about getting back to work, of the need for “solitude and sweat.”27 Salzburg was now in the past, and—in any case—it had been only a mild attack. There was no longer any need to hide or to apologize; nor did he need to “take in” any more of Europe. The requirement now was to consolidate, to do something with whatever it was that he had learned from his two years of exile. By December his letters had become busier and wittier. He had been offered a job at Iowa as “resident lecturer in creative writing,” and although the original intention had been to stay on in Rome until the summer, Lowell now felt:
We’re getting much too poor to be proud, which is no fun and beyond the help of loans. It isn’t just money, though, it’s also a feeling of deracinated idleness, or rather a vision of such feelings increasing in the future—like lying in bed an extra two hours some half hungover morning, and delighting in the first hour and brooding greasily through the second and calling it pleasure or “life” as Cousin Ghormley would say.28
He accepted the Iowa job—which would be February through May—and also wrote to Ransom offering his services for the 1953 School of Letters (to be held that year at Bloomington):
I’d like to give a course called something like Couplet, Blank Verse and Lyric. It would be an unchronological survey of English poetry, in which I’d use the fixed metrical patterns as a jumping-off point for various comparisons of craft and content, and to show what tricks and limitations each poet has to work with.29
Lowell had completed versions of two poems while in Rome—“Epitaph of a Fallen Poet” (later to become “Words for Hart Crane”)30 and “Santayana’s Farewell to His Nurses” (later “For George Santayana, 1863–1952”),31 and even in their earliest forms they showed that the “new country” Lowell was contemplating for his work was to involve some sort of quarrel with the regular iambic line. The School of Letters lectures would, he clearly thought, be part of this same exploration.
In fact, he completed one other work during this period, and this was in traditional meter. Lowell quotes it in a letter to Tate about Eisenhower’s November 1952 election victory:32
Ike is a sort of symbol to me of America’s unintelligent side—all fitness, muscles, smiles and banality. And Stevenson was so terribly better than one had a right to expect. We too feel too hurt to laugh. However, it’s made me break into song. How’s this to the tune of Yankee Doodle:
Came to Boston, gave his speal [sic]
Smart as a buck pheasant:
All those teeth inside his smile—
My god they’re incandescent!
His face is on your TV screen,
Got up with pancake powder,
When he’s scraped the barrel clean,
You’ll see him swim in chowder.
See me like an octopus,
A-hugging up Bill Jenner,
I’d like to bust the bugger’s puss
But Mamie loves a winner.
My ghosts have told me something new
I’m marching to Korea;
I cannot tell you what I’ll do
Crusading’s the idea
Yankee Doodle keep it up etc.
In January 1953 Lowell and Hardwick traveled back to the United States—in a ship carrying five hundred seasick immigrants to Canada—and on arrival in New York made straight for the Plaza bar: “we got a bill for $9 before we had barely eaten a potato chip and at that moment we knew we were at home.”33 From New York, they paid a short visit to Boston before journeying to Iowa. “I think I really needed Europe to see how beautiful New England is,” wrote Lowell;34 and Hardwick was similarly re-beguiled. Boston was, she wrote, “enchanting, a really lovely city.”
At any rate, it seemed so for three days, until they were reminded what living there would act
ually be like—until, that is, “the horrid reality of Mrs. L. battered and crushed us and we got on the train to Iowa in tears.”35 Lowell, Hardwick wrote, would gladly settle in Boston “for life”
if it weren’t for Mrs. Lowell. She is impossible, though; the detail of that judgement is infinite, but what it amounts to in the end is that in her presence all the joy goes out of existence…. there is not even a little corner left which you can fill up with affection or humor or respect or pleasure.36
At Iowa they moved into a comfortable three-room apartment and proceeded “frantically” to catch up on two years’ worth of books and periodicals. Lowell’s teaching duties were not strenuous—he had twenty-three poets in his charge and they would bring him their “life-works” two days a week, and he also undertook a course on French poetry: “a subject in which I have to acquire and give out knowledge almost simultaneously.”37 Visits from Tate and Peter Taylor enlivened the routine, but altogether, Lowell wrote in March, “life in Iowa is a pretty dormant, day to day thing.”
He seems not to have been writing much. He was reworking the poems he had begun in Rome, and had completed “three or four highly-wrought short poems”—probably including “A Mad Negro Soldier” and “The Banker’s Daughter” (he had, by February 1953, already published his first version of “Words for Hart Crane” and a poem for Ike’s “Inauguration Day,” and his Santayana poem came out in the Spring 1953 issue of Perspectives USA). In March 1953 he wrote to Peter Taylor:
I’m at work on a long monologue. It’s against my beliefs though. In this age of mounting populations in print nothing should go over 25 lines. What does War and Peace have that isn’t more pregnantly said in a one-line Japanese—what shall I call it? “Westerly the blossoms of the apricot crumble against the shadow of the bamboo fishing pool.” That’s the way one of my poets writes.38
