by Ian Hamilton
In April 1953 Lowell was offered the Chair of Poetry at the University of Cincinnati, an appointment that would run from January through June 1954. He was tempted but a trifle daunted; the job, he thought, would demand “written, publishable lectures, in fact a critical book. The prospect makes me feel squint-eyed, home-made and illiterate.”39 But the money was good, and since their brief visit to Boston in January Lowell and Hardwick had been spending a lot of time talking about money. In spite of Mrs. Lowell, they had decided that New England, if not Boston itself, was where they would eventually wish to settle. They had also decided that they were weary of apartment living. In April, Lowell was writing to his cousin Harriet in Washington that he and Hardwick hoped to buy a house “somewhere in New England.”40 The prospect of the Cincinnati job would make it possible for Lowell to borrow against his trust fund, and Iowa would always be prepared to have him for one term a year:
I feel increasingly that Boston itself—the living twentieth century Boston at least as much as the old colonial Boston—is what I was born in and that only a sort of blind (O and I think necessary rebellion made me turn from it. That is I think I am now adult enough to be fairly conventional if not “proper” outwardly, and not shock (or be shocked by) people. One doesn’t want to change too much though.41
Lowell accepted the Cincinnati job, spent the summer teaching at the School of Letters at Bloomington, and from there (feeling “seedy and subdued”42) he and Hardwick traveled to Gambier to spend August with the Taylors, Ransoms and Macauleys. Throughout, though, they had been searching and then negotiating for their New England home, and by September they had bought it: a house in Duxbury, Massachusetts, near Plymouth and an agreeable forty miles from Boston:
It’s a section heavy with Pilgrim history and monuments and immortalized by Longfellow; but charming, with a three mile beach…. the house was built in 1740 and has a 1950 oil furnace.43
It also had three acres of land, and Lowell looked forward to being “Mr. Lowell of Duxbury.” Roof repairs were needed, though, and the house would not be ready for living in until the spring of 1954; but even Charlotte Lowell considered it had “possibilities” (although, according to Hardwick, “she seems in doubt that we, two middle-aged infants, will realize them”44).
*
Charlotte herself had spent a restless, irritable year in Boston, and had decided to go on a winter holiday in Europe. She had taken Italian lessons during the summer, and had rejected Merrill Moore’s offer of a full-time job. Moore was concerned about her and, in July, had written an odd letter to Elizabeth Hardwick, suggesting that he and Charlotte might collaborate in writing “a book about Bobby, titled background of a poet, dealing with his early life up to the day he left Boston to go south and meet Ransom. This would cover the Boston period, St. Mark’s and the fling at Harvard.” Moore seemed to think that such a task would be good therapy for Charlotte, but when he proposed it to her he was given “a brush off”:
What worries me about Mrs. Lowell is that she is going off alone and really with no goal. She is studying Italian and is having a good time this summer, but I think it is tragic when women who are intelligent reach her age and are what I call disorganized. That is to say they slip; they spend a good deal of time in petty intrigue; they think mainly about themselves and on the whole, I can’t think of it as a truly satisfactory life….
… I still wish she could be encouraged to collect or try to get together material for such a biographical sketch.
Such a book was done was done [sic] about Rimbaud. I have a copy of it. Another was done about D. H. Lawrence recently. I think Bobby’s life is as interesting (to me it is more so) as either of these men, so I wonder if you would explain it to Bobby and ask him what he thinks.45
Perhaps regrettably, nothing came of this enterprise, but Lowell did share Moore’s unease about his mother’s journey. In the month before she set off, he spent two weeks in Boston completing the purchase of the Duxbury house and was laid low with mysterious abdominal pains (eventually diagnosed as constipation). But it was the first time he had been alone with his mother for any length of time since 1951: “We were alone,” he later said, “and talked over almost everything. That’s how it was.”46 Also, perhaps prompted by these talks and by Moore’s biographical suggestion, Lowell had been reading—rather, “gulping”—Freud: “I am a slavish convert,” he wrote to Hardwick. “Every fault is a goldmine of discoveries. I am a walking goldmine…. It’s all too much (especially while staying with mother). I long to be back.”47 Hardwick replied that she too had been doing some self-analysis (“mostly it’s that baffling question of why one tortures the person he most loves and upon whom his happiness depends”) and had just as instructively been studying a life of Browning:
It seems that famous marriage was not at all propitious for writing in his case—he did most of his work before and after! And their relationship, intense as it was, was very peculiar; he kept saying “I put myself entirely in your hands.” And she kept replying in horror, “Oh, no, you’ve got it all wrong. I want to put myself in yours.” … But one should not draw private lessons from public history.48
Whatever small crisis was simmering here, it seems to have cooled down with Charlotte’s departure for Europe on October 17. Charlotte telephoned Lowell in Iowa the night before she left, sounding terrified. “The poor old soul doesn’t really want to go to Europe,” Hardwick thought; it was even possible that the whole trip was a reproof to Boston, to those who she felt were neglecting her in her widowhood.49
For Lowell, there were almost too many coincidences in the air: Freud, his mother’s trip, another house to be fixed up and settled into. And he was genuinely anxious about the Cincinnati lectures. Back at Iowa, he began teaching Homer in the original (with Hardwick as one of his students), supported the Iowa football team and joined a music club. The winter passed without incident, and by February 1954 he and Hardwick were safely installed in suburban Cincinnati. Some two weeks after their arrival, a cable reached them from Italy (four days late, having been sent to the wrong address in Boston): Charlotte had suffered a stroke and was in the hospital in Rapallo. Lowell took a plane from Cincinnati to Boston to New York to London to Paris. In Paris he contacted Blair Clark, who was working there as a CBS correspondent. Clark recalls:
He stayed the night with me in Neuilly on his way to his mother. I had the feeling that he should immediately have gone to Rapallo if he wanted to see his mother alive. But he didn’t. He was in the early stages. I knew the symptoms by that time—he couldn’t sleep, sat up all night talking and drinking and so on. Everything was racing. I would have gone down with him the next day but I just couldn’t. I went down two days later—by this time his mother had died. She’d died that night—while he stayed with me.50
Lowell arrived at Rapallo (via Milan) at twelve-thirty on the night of Sunday, February 14. Charlotte had died an hour earlier, having had a second stroke. She had not known that her son was on his way, and in any case “she never really knew where she was.” The doctors told Lowell that she had high blood pressure and arteriosclerosis and “couldn’t have lasted long even if she had stayed at home.”51 To Hardwick he wrote: “Pretty rough. I spent the morning with her nurse who only speaks Italian, both of us weeping and weeping. I mean I spent it in the room with her body!”52Lowell describes this same morning in an unpublished prose piece he wrote some months after the event:
I arrived at Rapallo half an hour after Mother’s death. On the next morning, the hospital where she died was a firm and tropical scene from Cezanne: sunlight rustled through watery, plucked pines, and streaked the verticals of a Riviera villa above the Mare Ligure. Mother lay looking through the blacks and greens and tans and flashings from her window. Her face was too formed and fresh to seem asleep. There was a bruise the size of an ear-lobe over her right eye. The nurse who had tended Mother during her ten days dying, stood at the bed’s head. She was a great gray woman and wore glasses whose diaphanous blue fr
ames were held together with a hair-pin. With a flourish, she had just pulled aside the sheet that covered Mother’s face, and now, she looked daggers at the body, as if death were some sulky animal or child who only needed to be frightened. We stood with tears running down our faces, and the nurse talked to me for an hour and a half in a patois that even Italians would have had difficulty in understanding. She was telling me everything she could remember about Mother. For ten minutes she might just as well have been imitating water breaking on the beach, but Mother was alive in the Italian words. I heard how Mother thought she was still at her hotel, and wanted to go walking, and said she was only suffering from a little indigestion, and wanted to open both French windows and thoroughly air her bedroom each morning while the bed was still unmade and how she kept trying to heal the haemorrhage in her brain by calling for her little jars and bottles with pink plastic covers, and kept dabbing her temples with creams and washes and always, her quick cold bath in the morning and her hot aromatic bath before dinner. She kept asking about Bob and Bobby. “I have never been sick in my life.” Nulla malettia mai! Nulla malettia mai! And the nurse went out. Qua insieme per sempre. She closed the door, and left me in the room.
That afternoon I sat drinking a cinzano with Mother’s doctor. He showed me a copy of Ezra Pound’s Jefferson and/or Mussolini, which the author had personally signed with an ideogram, and the quotations, “Non … como bruti …”53
On the Tuesday following his mother’s death, Lowell went to Florence to pick up luggage she had left there, returning to Rapallo on the following day. He then helped to organize a small Episcopalian service in Rapallo’s red-brick English chapel; for this he had purchased “a black and gold baroque casket that would have [been] suitable for burying her hero, Napoleon at Les Invalides”:
And it wasn’t disrespect or even impatience that allowed me to permit the undertakers to take advantage of my faulty knowledge of Italian and Italian values, and to overcharge me, and to make an ugly and tasteless error. They mis-spelled Mother’s name on her coffin as Lowel. While alive Mother had made a point of spelling out her name letter by letter for identification. I could almost hear her voice correcting the workmen. “I am Mrs. Robert Lowell of One Seventy Marlborough St. Boston, L,O,W,E, double L.”54
(In a letter to Blair Clark dated March 11, 1954, Lowell has the misspelling as “Charlotte Winslon,” and in the poem “Sailing Home from Rapallo” as “Lovel.”)
Arrangements had been made for Charlotte’s body to be taken back to America by sea; the ship would leave from Genoa two days after the Rapallo service, and Lowell would accompany the coffin. Blair Clark traveled with him by train to Genoa and recalls:
on the way down Cal gave me an absolutely fascinating account of the Nuremberg trials. He’d spent a good deal of the winter of ’51 reading it all up: the characters, Speer versus X and Y, the characters of the prosecutors, the witnesses. Spectacularly brilliant. I think it’s accurate to say that an absolutely infallible indication of an impending manic episode was an interest in Hitler. Hitler was not a figure—but he was in the background of this two-hour monologue on the Nuremberg trials.55
Lowell has movingly described the ship journey to the States in “Sailing Home from Rapallo”;56 there is an almost equally powerful account of it in prose:
On the Sunday morning when we sailed, the whole shoreline of the Golfo di Genova was breaking into fiery flower. A crazy Piedmontese Baron raced about us in a parti-colored sea-sled, whose outboard motor was, of course, unmuffled. Our little liner was already doing twenty knots an hour, but the sea-sled cut figure-eights across our bows. Mother, permanently sealed in her coffin, lay in the hold. She was solitary, just as formerly, when she took her long walks by the Atlantic at Mattapoisett in September, which she called “the best season of the year” after the summer people had gone. She shone in her bridal tinfoil, and hurried homeward with open arms to her husband lying under the White Mountains.56
Charlotte was buried in the family cemetery at Dunbarton, New Hampshire, and by March 11 Lowell and Hardwick were back in Cincinnati. During the Dunbarton funeral, Lowell had “in a funny way … felt close to Mother’s friends…. I guess I am a black sheep forever, but it’s calming not to be for a moment.”57
Notes
1. R.L. to Peter Taylor, n.d.
2. Elizabeth Hardwick to Charlotte Lowell, August 26, 1952 (Houghton Library).
3. R.L. to Blair Clark, September 15, 1952.
4. Shepherd Brooks, interview with I.H. (1980).
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robie and Anne Macauley, August 24, 1952.
8. “A Mad Negro Soldier Confined at Munich,” Life Studies (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964), p. 8.
9. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robie and Anne Macauley, August 25, 1952.
10. Ibid., August 24, 1952.
11. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1979).
12. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robie and Anne Macauley, August 24, 1952.
13. Ibid., August 25, 1952.
14. Ibid.
15. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1979).
16. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robie and Anne Macauley, September 2, 1952.
17. Ibid., September 5, 1952.
18. Ibid., October 19, 1952.
19. R.L. to Robie and Anne Macauley, September 15, 1952.
20. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, October 19, 1952 (Houghton Library).
21. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robie and Anne Macauley, October 19, 1952.
22. R.L. to Blair Clark, September 15, 1952.
23. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robie and Anne Macauley, October 19, 1952.
24. R.L. to Allen Tate, November 5, 1952 (Firestone Library).
25. Ibid.
26. R.L. to Peter Taylor, December 7, 1952.
27. Ibid.
28. R.L. to Blair Clark, December 3, 1952.
29. R.L. to John Crowe Ransom, November 24, 1952 (Chalmers Memorial Library).
30. Life Studies (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964), p. 55.
31. Ibid., pp. 51–52.
32. R.L. to Allen Tate, November 5, 1952 (Firestone Library).
33. Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair and Holly Clark, February 3, 1953.
34. R.L. to Harriet Winslow, September 26, 1953 (Houghton Library).
35. Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair and Holly Clark, February 3, 1953.
36. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robie and Anne Macauley, n.d.
37. R.L. to Charlotte Lowell, March 3, 1953.
38. R.L. to Peter Taylor, March 25, 1953.
39. Ibid., April 29, 1953.
40. R.L. to Harriet Winslow, April 29, 1953 (Houghton Library).
41. Ibid., September 26, 1953 (Houghton Library).
42. R.L. to Peter Taylor, October 11, 1953.
43. R.L. to Allen Tate, December 2, 1953 (Firestone Library).
44. Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair Clark, October 16, 1953.
45. Merrill Moore to Elizabeth Hardwick, July 22, 1953 (Houghton Library).
46. R.L. to Peter Taylor, March 11, 1954.
47. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, September 10, 1953.
48. Elizabeth Hardwick to R.L., September 12, 1953 (Houghton Library).
49. Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair Clark, October 16, 1953.
50. Blair Clark, interview with I.H. (1980).
51. R.L. to Blair and Holly Clark, n.d.
52. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, n.d.
53. R.L., draft autobiography, 1955–57 (Houghton Library).
54. Ibid.
55. Blair Clark, interview with I.H. (1980).
56. Life Studies, pp. 77–78. In an early draft of the poem “Sailing from Rapallo,” Lowell writes:
The young, very au courant hospital doctor
Owned a presentation copy
Of Ezra Pound’s Cantos.
Worried by my hypo-mania
He gave me a bottle of chlorpromazene [sic].
56. Autobiography,
draft ms, 1955–57 (Houghton Library).
57. R.L. to Blair Clark, March 11, 1954.
13
I had a friend who had a formidable mother and he said he used sometimes to stop in the street and say “Is Mama really dead?” Not out of any sentimentality but from a genuine wonder that such a strange force could suddenly vanish. In my heart I do four times a day pay Mrs. Lowell the compliment of profound disbelief in this latest event. There is plenty of evidence to show that she seriously believed she’d outlive Cal and I thought so too and so did he! I am really sorry. She wouldn’t have liked it at all! Think how furious this death would have made her and you can’t help but feel it’s a dirty trick.
I don’t mean to be flippant about this. Mrs. Lowell’s death is really a very interesting and amazing thing! I’m sure you know what I mean. And she had such a real death too! On far-away, sunny shores struck down at noon.1
This was Elizabeth Hardwick’s candid response to news of Charlotte Lowell’s death (she wrote this letter to Blair Clark while Lowell was still in Rapallo), and she was probably in part echoing what she imagined would be Lowell’s own deepest reactions. For the moment, though, Lowell was not ready to engage in self-examination. His first response had been determinedly present tense: the drama of the death, the Napoleonic casket, the symbolic sea crossing, the ancestral burial at Dunbarton. The sheer metaphoric power of the whole episode was awesome. As to mourning, Lowell simply repeated that Charlotte’s trip to Europe had been an appropriate “last fling,” that staying in Boston would not have saved her life.
On his return to Cincinnati, though, a new voice is to be heard in Lowell’s letters. There are, for instance, callously brisk accounts of his new financial gains: “Mother’s death … has about doubled my income and given some fifty thousand dollars in cash. All very handy at this point.”2 He had become rich, he declared; he had been orphaned into a new and heady self-determination; he was starting a new life. Within ten days of returning to Ohio, he began issuing bulletins to friends:
