by Ian Hamilton
A further spur to autobiography came that same month, when Peter Taylor published his own autobiographical story, “1939.” For Lowell, the coincidence was disturbing. What was this life that others found so fascinating, that Merrill Moore had wanted to “write up,” that doctors were urging him to “probe,” that his best friend had turned into fiction, and that had now—with his mother’s death—been finally delivered into his own keeping? In response to “1939,” he wrote to Taylor:
At first I was, how shall I put it, surprised and hurt —that’s how the history of St. Mark’s school speaks of my great-grandfather’s novel, in which it was noted with surprise that Dr. Lowell’s gentle humor had used members of the faculty as characters. If you’d used one of my poems instead of one of yours I think I would have sued. So I felt after reading; but since then I have [had] so many compliments—nothing I have ever written myself has ever gotten me such attention…. Well, I stand off, hat in hand, and thank you with grudging bewildered incomprehension. But were we really quite such monsters? Seriously, though the whole thing fascinates me—I have been trying to do the same sort of thing myself with scenes from my childhood with my grandfather, old Aunt Sarah, Cousin Belle etc. I want to invent and forget a lot but at the same time have the historian’s wonderful advantage—the reader must always be forced to say “This is tops, but even if it weren’t it’s true.” I think you’ve done the trick.6
Prose and psychotherapy aside, Lowell’s first “grown-up” Boston spring was an “idle rather sociable” affair.7 In April, Hardwick wrote to Cousin Harriet:
Everyone seems to come here, and so we feel rather more in the literary world than usual. We’ve had the Sitwells, Spender, John Crowe Ransom at Harvard last night, Lillian Hellman, and then magazine writers from Everywhere. T. S. Eliot is expected soon. Here in Boston we are somehow expected to do our part and so we are always giving luncheons and cocktails for the visitors and actually enjoying it all. It is alive here without being pulverizing like New York.8
As well as the cocktails and luncheons there were amateur theatricals and the occasional poetry reading or panel. Of these last, Lowell sardonically told Blair Clark:
poets are still a special species, like the two toed sloth, and a wonder for small audiences. Most of the poets who head discussions are formidably practical men, such as Eberhart and Macleish—they seem driven to insist that poetry is something sky-high, not only on the side of the angels, but at their elbow. My role on these occasions is to debunk. I begin to think that it is only at poetry conferences that I seem a practical man, with several strings to my fiddle.9
And in May he went so far as to attend the twentieth reunion of the St. Mark’s Class of ’35, and even persuaded Frank Parker to go along with him. But this visit could be explained away as “self-discovery”:
I’ve been thinking back on my break with the boys, if I can call it that, for I was never at all close or firm with them. I think I gave myself a perhaps arbitrary dilemma, that of either sitting about inertly or of running blind. Nothing is more tantalizing than re-shaping one’s silly former self, but the voice of middle-age says we are all warped old dogs set on lying in the sun and changing as little as rocks.10
(Lowell was thirty-eight when he wrote this letter; from now on, he would regularly affect a fatigued, world-weary tone of voice and, when “well,” would usually seem older than his years. In depression, of course, he was fatigued, he was world-weary, and very often he was simply feeling the side effects of psychiatric medication; there is something touching, though, in the way he almost welcomed the label “middle-aged” as a means of explaining—to others, if not to himself—any prolonged stretches of enervation or low spirits.)
The summer of 1955 he and Hardwick spent partly in Duxbury and partly at the Castine summer residence of his cousin Harriet Winslow. Earlier in the year, Cousin Harriet had suffered a stroke and was now confined to her home in Washington. Since she herself could no longer make full use of Castine, she had offered it to Lowell as a summer retreat, an offer that would eventually make Duxbury superfluous. At Castine there was a house and a converted barn, which Lowell could use as a workplace. He later wrote of this to William Carlos Williams:
I’m sitting in a little barn my Cousin Harriet made over and painted (against all town advice) with aluminum paint a sort of pewter color inside. It’s right on the bay, which on one side looks like a print of Japan and on the other like a lake in Michigan as the rocky islands with pine trees ease off into birches and meadows.11
Lowell and Hardwick at once decided to buy a house in “proper” Boston. The pastoral life had never quite fulfilled its promise, and, in any case, part of the point of Duxbury had been its “safe” distance from Lowell’s mother. They were now free to live anywhere they pleased.
The house they decided on was 239 Marlborough Street; “just exactly a block from the one I grew up in,” Lowell wrote,12 as if the choice had been weirdly fortuitous, and by the late fall of 1955 they had moved into a residence that was a fair copy of the one in which Lowell had spent much of his childhood. In November he wrote to Peter Taylor:
We’re having a good fall, and feel very lordly and pretentious in our new Boston house…. It’s not really little and not at all unpretentious, and we despise everyone whose nerve for cities has failed, all country people, all suburbanites, and all people who live in apartments, except for the Thompsons who are coming to visit this weekend. And are we priming ourselves to show off!13
And to William Carlos Williams:
It’s a unimpassioned, darkish, bricky, Londonlike street, still the mirror of propriety…. This is the first year since 1940 when I have spent two successive winters in the same city. We’re fearfully relieved to be settled and doubt if we will ever move. We might even become Boston worthies, if it weren’t for the worm of life in us.14
Lowell had, of course, come close to “settling down” before, and on at least two occasions the prospect had induced a lively panic; he had recoiled from Jean Stafford’s nest-building efforts at Damariscotta Mills, and in the early stages of his Cincinnati illness had tried to sabotage the Duxbury move by sending abusive letters to the woman who was handling the interior decoration. But Marlborough Street, it seems, was utterly unthreatening; there is even a genuinely house-proud note in Lowell’s first accounts of his new property:
The house has changed us in every way, but especially in my case: 1, I am about to explode any moment on a book-buying jag; 2, I have decided the only excuse for writing my autobiography is to make money. So I do a page a day, put in all the corn I can think of, then take my page down to Elizabeth and implore her to think of more. The book-buying is due to my not drinking, and to our for once having more unfilled shelves than can be counted.15
Lowell’s “not drinking” had been decided on during a particularly “surly hangover mood” one Sunday in the spring and was yet another attempt to reduce the general level of “excitement.” Also, in a course of drug treatment alcohol would have been “contraindicated.” At first, he found that he was “twice as lazy as previously,”16 but he had persisted throughout the summer—sustained by a bearlike pound of honey every day—and now could boast that he was at least a “harmless” driver. And in November 1955, as if to set a seal on his return to Boston, Lowell applied to rejoin the Episcopalian Church. The Reverend Whitney Hale, of the Church of the Advent on Mount Vernon Street, wrote to him as follows:
I am happy to report that Bishop Nash has formally restored you to communicant status and does not feel it is necessary for you to be “received back” by him with the usual ceremony used for Roman Catholics coming into our church inasmuch as you started out in the Episcopal church, but will do so if you desire it.
Also with your restoration I am now permitted to bless your marriage.17
Lowell’s prose reminiscences had by now become a full-scale autobiography, and his letters throughout 1956 are full of weaving genealogies and dynastic coincidences. In Februa
ry 1956 he wrote to Peter Taylor:
Just spent two days in delirious ancestor-worship, i.e. reading their writings. If my sudden line wasn’t dwarfed by the Winslows, I’d say they were the most talented and charming people in the world. Have you run across any Devereuxs, Lanes, Pollocks, Mackies, Nelsons or Wilkinses?18
And in the same month to Harriet Winslow:
I had a little ancestor worshipping spree the other day and read up all we had in the house written by ancestors, and even worked out on four typewritten pages my family tree. How quickly it runs into the sands of the unknown. What sort of man was my grandfather Lowell, who died in his twenties, leaving only a Phi Beta Kappa key, a photograph, his name on a wall at St. Mark’s school? He had only been married a few months, and Daddy, his first child was not yet born.19
When Ferris Greenslet was preparing The Lowells and Their Seven Worlds (1946), Lowell had refused to cooperate. His own copy of the book, though, is full of underlinings, and it is reasonable to assume that these were done in 1956. With Greenslet’s help, he could track the fine detail of the “Traill-Spence” line and speculate about the Tyngs, the Duanes and the Myers. He could discover in himself a trace of Jewishness, of Scots; he could wistfully identify with the heroic Beau Sabreur (his great-grandfather’s brother Charles, married to the sister of the celebrated Colonel Shaw and killed in the Civil War); he could conjecture about the mental illnesses that had afflicted both his great-grandfather’s mother, Harriet, and her daughter Rebecca. And on the Winslow side there was equal scope for the kind of fanciful connections he delighted in; there were the Pilgrims, the frontiersmen, the Indian killers, the colonial governors, the Revolutionary War hero General Stark, and even a reputed witch—Elizabeth Hutchinson, who married Edward Winslow II (1634–82) was the granddaughter of Anne Hutchinson. And who were the Savages, the Davises, the Chiltons and the Ollyvers? Lowell wrote to his cousin Harriet in March 1956:
A lot is lost and a lot was never seen and understood. We stand in our own characters, of course, and warp our own knowledge. Still, it’s fascinating to see what one can fish up, clear up and write down. … it’s like cleaning my study, like going perhaps to some chiropractor, who leaves me with all my original bones jumbled back in a new and sounder structure.20
The fragments of Lowell’s autobiography which remain, and which are not early versions of “91 Revere Street,” are mostly a series of false starts, the same page retyped, slightly revised and then seemingly abandoned. In one fragment, Lowell writes that he is working on his autobiography “literally to ‘pass the time.’ I almost doubt if the time would pass at all otherwise.” The book, he said, would cover his early life up to 1934, the year of his first summer in Nantucket with Frank Parker. Lowell now viewed that summer as “a period of enthusiasm”; “enthusiasm” is a word he regularly uses to describe his manic episodes (the term probably derives from his reading in theology, where it would denote extreme religious zealotry, but by 1956 he would be more likely to accept the view of William Law, the eighteenth-century writer on Christian ethics and mysticism: “To appropriate Enthusiasm to Religion is the same ignorance of Nature as to appropriate Love to Religion: for Enthusiasm, a kindled inflamed spirit of Life is as common, as universal, as essential to human Nature, as Love is….”).21
Lowell felt that when his autobiography was completed, he would perhaps find that he had “found myself”: “I also hope that the result will supply me with my swaddling clothes, with a sort of immense bandage for my hurt nerves.”22 In other words, this calm, industrious prose period of Lowell’s life was a lot shakier than it seemed; every so often he would falter in his researches and stray off into agonized, present-tense unburdening:
For two years I have been cooling off from three months of pathological enthusiasm. I go to sleep now easily, but sometimes I wake up with a jar. In my dreams I am like one of Michael Angelo’s rugged, ideal statues that can be tumbled down hill without injury. When I wake, it is as though I had been flayed, and had each nerve beaten with a rubber hose.23
And in another account, which in Lowell’s manuscript runs on from his description of breaking his glasses at Payne Whitney:
Yet all this time [in context, the time-placing is a problem—“all this time” could mean the days immediately following the breaking of his glasses, or it could mean the two years’ “cooling off’ period, 1954–56, or, since Lowell is never reluctant to dovetail and amalgamate, it could mean both] I would catch myself asking whining questions. Why don’t I die, die: I quizzed my face of suicide in the mirror; but the body’s warm, unawed breath befogged the face with a dilatory inertia. I said, “My dreams at night are so intoxicating to me that I am willing to put on the nothingness of sleep. My dreams in the morning are so intoxicating to me that I am willing to go on living.” Even now [i.e., in 1956] I can sometimes hear those two sentences repeating themselves over and over and over. I say them with a chant-like yawn, and feel vague, shining, girlish, like Perdita, or one of the many willowy allegoric voices in Blake’s Prophetic Books. “For my dreams, I will endure the day; I will suffer the refreshment of sleep.” In one’s teens these words, perhaps, would have sealed a Faustian compact. Waking, I suspected that my whole soul and its thousands of spiritual fibres, immaterial ganglia, apprehensive antennae, psychic radar etc. had been bruised by a rubber hose. In the presence of persons, I was ajar. But in my dreams, I was like one of Michael Angelo’s burly, ideal statues that can be rolled down hill without injury.24
The bulk of Lowell’s manuscript “autobiography,” however, is in the form of character sketches and anecdotes from childhood—his mother and grandfather are the characters most lovingly worried over, and there are some affectionately remembered minor figures. Lowell’s father—the third principal—is usually made mock of, with his weakness a constant measure of the others’ strength. Throughout there is a kind of double vision: the child’s-eye view judged and interpreted by the ironical narrator, with a good deal of adult invention around the edges. It is a method that is particularly hard on Mr. Lowell. Lowell makes little effort to salvage any childish awe of “Daddy” from his later hostility to the spinelessness of R.T.S. Among the “91 Revere Street” drafts, there is a touching paragraph in which Lowell explicitly confesses an injustice of this sort:
As I try to write my own autobiography, other autobiographies naturally come to mind. The last autobiography I have looked into was a movie about a bull terrier from Brooklyn. The dog’s name was, I think, House on Fire. The district he came from was so tough, that smoking had to be permitted in the last three pews at high mass. House on Fire’s mother had been deserted by his father. House knows that his father is a great dog in the great world, either as a champion fighter or as a champion in exhibitions. House on Fire keeps saying with his Brooklyn accent, “I want to be a champ so that I can kill my father.” In the end there is peace.
My own father was a gentle, faithful and dim man. I don’t know why I was so agin him. I hope there will be peace.25
Almost two-thirds of the material in Lowell’s drafts is worked into “91 Revere Street,” but in addition to the confessional material already quoted, there are two interesting anecdotal pieces that he also chose not to include, possibly because he found both tales so heavy with symbolism that they had become “significant to the point of being meaningless.” In each case, Lowell was fascinated by the tangle of religiosexual suggestiveness, or “black magic,” as he calls it. In the first story Lowell is aged three or four and the setting is Philadelphia, where, apparently, his parents got regular visits from a local Quaker lady, Martha Bent. Bent doted on the child Lowell and also developed coy and bantering relations with his father. Bob Lowell found Martha a “regular fella” because she listened to his naval yarns; Charlotte considered her “flaccid and flirtatious.” As to the child Lowell: “I felt torn in two, and wanted to prove Martha both good and bad. She was an object to be wooed and despised.” Martha wore around her neck “a plain black cord on w
hich she had attached a cracked ivory elephant the color of jaundice and no bigger than a man’s molar” and this modest ornament fascinated Lowell; it resembled rock candy and he wanted to possess it: “She must give me the ivory elephant. I wanted the elephant also because it was small, heavy, precious, useless, animal and the soul of Martha.” Soon he does possess it; indeed, swallows it:
I was looking up and letting the ivory tap on my teeth as though it were a piece of rock candy. And then it went down. Doctors came. Mother kept saying with Gargantuan suavity, “Bobby has swallowed an elephant.” Then it was unmentionably ascertained that the ivory elephant had come out in my chamber-pot. I was told that it was broken in three pieces so that I couldn’t see it again. And even now I have no idea how Mother managed to mention the chamber-pot, my movement and the marvelous elephant all in one pure, smirking breath.26
The other story has similar ingredients: a surrogate maternal presence, a seductively (or so it seemed) sweet-tasting but forbidden token of the mother figure’s “soul,” a token that the child possesses, then destroys, and then a thrilling climax, an unmasking; in each story the child regains his real mother’s attention by his theft of the adopted mother’s “essence.” The second incident in particular would have struck the adult Lowell as having been remarkably prophetic, and thus might be even more highly polished than the first. The setting is Brimmer Street in Boston, and Lowell is—he says—aged two:
