by Ian Hamilton
During March, Lowell was allowed to spend weekends at home, and by March 15 he was well enough to begin the now familiar round of repairing and explaining. To Cousin Harriet he wrote apologizing for a “foolish, harsh letter” he had sent her from McLean’s:
It’s funny how the head fills with monstrous determination; all one’s real loves and knowledges fly away; one stands reborn, scheming, lonely, silly. Please accept my brief and simple apology. I am deeply sorry the whole business happened and sorry that you had to hear about it.14
And on the same day, he wrote to Peter Taylor:
It’s not much fun writing about these breakdowns after they themselves have broken and one stands stickily splattered with patches of the momentary bubble. Health; but not of kind which encourages the backward look.15
To both, Lowell was optimistic about his new course of “systematic therapy,” but his assurances had an automatic ring. For the moment, his real need was to lie low, to “get to know” his old life once again:
Life is serene; we go to the movies, and concerts; Harriet takes us for long walks over the Public Gardens grass on Sundays; I’ve been translating some Italian and German poems and have a desk drawer full of fragmentary poems and autobiography. Elizabeth has been terrific, and we’re awfully glad to be together.16
He felt that there were “good times ahead, and little Harriet will never see the shadow that has darkened us and gone. I don’t think this is whistling in the dark.”17
This tentative, “recuperating” mood, though, is most memorably caught in the poem Lowell began working on shortly after—or perhaps during—his first weekend “release” from McLean’s. It was the weekend of his forty-first birthday (March 1, 1958), and on March 2 Hardwick wrote:
I am feeling much better and so at last is Bobby. He was at home Friday afternoon—we went to the Symphony and then had dinner together; yesterday, Saturday, was his birthday and we went to the movies in the afternoon, bathed baby Harriet, had dinner here by the fire listening to Marriage of Figaro before B went back to the hospital. Next weekend he will be out to stay here, but will go back to the hospital on Sunday. He wants to come back to us. Gradually he has been getting better and then, what seems suddenly but really isn’t, he is pretty much himself once more.18
Lowell’s own account is called “Home After Three Months Away,” and the second stanza describes baby Harriet’s bath scene:
Three months, three months!
Is Richard now himself again?
Dimpled with exaltation,
my daughter holds her levee in the tub.
Our noses rub,
each of us pats a stringy lock of hair—
they tell me nothing’s gone.
Though I am forty-one,
not forty now, the time I put away
was child’s-play. After thirteen weeks
my child still dabs her cheeks
to start me shaving. When
we dress her in her sky-blue corduroy
she changes to a boy,
and floats my shaving brush
and washcloth in the flush….
Dearest, I cannot loiter here
in lather like a polar bear.19
Sentimental? Well, almost—and that “almost” is of key importance in understanding what Lowell was now looking for in poetry. “Home After Three Months Away” probably owes something to the example of W. D. Snodgrass’s “Heart’s Needle,” and it is worth remembering Lowell’s response to an interviewer who suggested to him that Snodgrass’s “best poems are all on the verge of being slight and even sentimental.” Lowell said:
I think a lot of the best poetry is. Laforgue—it’s hard to think of a more delightful poet, and his prose is wonderful too. Well, it’s on the verge of being sentimental, and if he hadn’t dared to be sentimental he wouldn’t have been a poet. I mean, his inspiration was that. There’s some way of distinguishing between false sentimentality, which is blowing up a subject and giving emotions that you don’t feel, and using whimsical, minute, tender, small emotions which most people don’t feel but which Laforgue and Snodgrass do. So that I’d say he had pathos and fragility—but then that’s a large subject too.20
“Home After Three Months Away” is redeemed from sentimentality by its sheer technical control: in the lines above, see how the irregularly placed rhymes—“tub” / “rub,” “put away” / “child’s-play”—seem to be struggling towards the regularity, the calm of the ensuing couplets. In his new style, Lowell was becoming masterly in letting a poem’s shape declare its mood. But there are other ways in which the poet here darkens a sweet domestic interlude—the poem is placed (in Life Studies) immediately after “Waking in the Blue” with its metal mirrors and its locked razors—simply to be able to shave freely has become a hard-won luxury for Lowell. And the line “Dearest, I cannot loiter here” is made doubly moving if we know that the poet is not really “home”—his weekend is over, he now has to leave his child and go back to the “house for the mentally ill.” And, of course, it was Lowell’s own “child’s-play,” his bearish foolery, that had required him to be “put away.” The kingly references—“Is Richard now himself again,” “my daughter holds her levee in the tub”—force us back to Stanley in his “long tub” and Bobbie, the “replica of Louis XVI,” Lowell’s McLean’s playmates.
There are other, more secret ways in which “Home After Three Months Away” relates to Lowell’s view of his own mania as “child’s-play.” The first stanza, for example, reads:
Gone now the baby’s nurse,
a lioness who ruled the roost
and made the Mother cry.
She used to tie
gobbets of porkrind in bowknots of gauze—
three months they hung like soggy toast
on our eight foot magnolia tree,
and helped the English sparrows
weather a Boston winter.
In life, the Lowells did have a “terrifying maid who hangs suet bones for the starlings on our poor little magnolia—this last is sober truth, but I don’t ask belief.”21 Lowell had written this to Peter Taylor some two years before. And Hardwick has said:
The fact is that we had a conventional Scotch nurse for a time and I did not like her at all, but was reluctant to let her go and finally got the courage. The “suet” did not really happen to us. We saw it on a tree next door and thought it rather odd and sweet. (I was in a greatly distressed state about the nurse and I did “cry.”)22
But hidden within the first three lines is something more than mere domestic data. For Lowell, Ann Adden had been the “lioness” to his “St. Mark’s winged lion”; she had also been a “nurse”—literally so, when he first met her at the Boston Psychopathic. She too has now “gone,” she will no longer make “the Mother cry.” For a time, Lowell seems to be saying, he himself had been a “baby” and the nurse/lioness Ann Adden had displaced his real “mother,” Elizabeth Hardwick. It was only in the very last versions of the poem that Lowell capitalized Harriet’s “mother” into a “Mother” figure. It could hardly be a more subterranean apology; indeed, it is unlikely that anyone other than Lowell himself would have been able to make the “lioness” connection. Many readers, however, might have been puzzled by the rather too weighty inversion of the opening line, “Gone now the baby’s nurse,” and might therefore agree that the gravitas becomes more understandable if one accepts that Lowell here uses a real-life coincidence (the “terrifying maid” had left Marlborough Street by the time Lowell came out of McLean’s) to smuggle in a very private renunciation of Ann Adden.
In one of his many drafts of “Home After Three Months Away” Lowell ended the poem as follows:
For months
My madness gathered strength
to roll all sweetness to a ball
in color, tropical …
Now I am frizzled, stale and small.
The allusion is to Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”:
Let us roll al
l our Strength and all
Our Sweetness up into one Ball,
And tear our Pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the Iron gates of Life:
Thus, though we cannot make our Sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
A fine description, Lowell would have felt, of the manic resolve that he was now “cured” of; and also of the high energy and reckless idealism which, in theory and in others, he would always prize above timidity or common sense. The diagnosed “manic-depressive” will surely always have a buried yearning for the “tropical” terrain of his affliction; and the pursuit of “health” will in some measure always be more contractual than voluntary. The closing lines of “Home After Three Months Away” can be read as an expression of the cyclical, biochemical onset of “depression”; unscientifically, however, they are pure lament for the surrendered infancy of madness:
Recuperating, I neither spin nor toil.
Three stories down below,
a choreman tends our coffin’s length of soil,
and seven horizontal tulips blow.
Just twelve months ago,
these flowers were pedigreed
imported Dutchmen; now no one need
distinguish them from weed.
Bushed by the late spring snow,
they cannot meet
another year’s snowballing enervation.
I keep no rank nor station.
Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small.
As always, Hardwick marveled at Lowell’s “recuperative powers”; they were “almost as much of a jolt as his breakdowns; that is, knowing him in the chains of illness you could, for a time, not imagine him otherwise.” And yet, she has said, he always managed to return to life “intact”:
… it seemed so miraculous that the old gifts of person and art were still there, as if they had been stored in some serene, safe box somewhere. Then it did not seem possible that the dread assault could return to hammer him into bits once more.
He “came to” sad, worried, always ashamed and fearful; and yet there he was, this unique soul for whom one felt great pity. His fate was like a strange, almost mythical two-engined machine, one running to doom and the other to salvation. Out of the hospital, he returned to his days, which were regular, getting up early in the morning, going to his room or separate place for work. All day long he lay on the bed, propped up on an elbow. And this was his life, reading, studying and writing. The papers piled up on the floor, the books on the bed, the bottles of milk on the window sill, and the ashtray filled.
He looked like one of the great photographs of Whitman, taken by Thomas Eakins—Whitman in carpet slippers, a shawl, surrounded by a surf of papers up to his lap…. Cal was not the sort of poet, if there are any, for whom beautiful things come drifting down in a snowfall of gift, the labor was merciless. The discipline, the dedication, the endless adding to his store, by reading and studying—all of this had, in my view, much that was heroic about it.23
Lowell spent the summer of 1958 completing the manuscript of Life Studies and in October was able to turn it in to Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. (Robert Giroux had moved there from Harcourt, Brace, and Lowell had followed him.) He attended weekly sessions with his new psychotherapist and during July and August shuttled between Boston and Castine—Hardwick had moved to Castine for the summer, but Lowell needed to be near his Boston doctor. So that he wouldn’t be “sitting here idle,” he had taken a summer teaching post at Harvard, and on October 31, 1958, he wrote to Peter Taylor: “I’ve got my book off at last…. I’m in the fine mood of an author with a new style and feel nothing else I’ve ever done counts.” And in the same month Hardwick was able to report to Cousin Harriet that Lowell was “feeling in very good, but not too good spirits”:
He has been hired again by Harvard for next summer, after first being told that he wouldn’t be because certain people opposed it for reasons all too obvious. But then they changed their mind, which was gratifying. The summer teaching is a little bit of a bore, but this next will be the last I think…. financially he needs to do it; also he adores his teaching. It has never, strangely enough, been onerous to him as it is to so many others. He wants to work and this, outside his writing, is the only work he can do. We’ll do the same, I expect, as last summer, which was a great success all round. I think this present doctor must be very good. Cal never talks about it—a good sign that something is going on, beyond useless pep talks. Anyway he’s a delight, a wonderful pleasure to be with.24
A number of the Life Studies poems had appeared in Partisan Review earlier in the year (“Man and Wife,” “Memories of West Street and Lepke” and “Skunk Hour” formed a powerful trio in PR’s issue for Winter 1958—i.e., January 1958), and a further batch was due to appear in January 1959. The finished manuscript offered twenty-four poems and was divided into four sections. Section One has four poems in Lowell’s “old style,” poems written before he had begun work on his prose autobiography. Of these four, “Beyond the Alps” is the only one that seems really to “belong” in the book. It serves to “clear the ground,” not just stylistically but also autobiographically. If Lowell is about to abandon his old tricks, the poem suggests, it is because he no longer feels the fire and venom that sustained the hurtling iambic line; he has exhausted, and has become exhausted by, grand absolutes. In “Beyond the Alps” the old Lowellian ferocity, where it appears at all, is directed against what might be thought of as its source: the Catholic Church, which Lowell now berates for its temporal hypocrisies, its spiritual redundancy:
When the Vatican made Mary’s Assumption dogma,
the crowds at San Pietro screamed Papa.
The Holy Father dropped his shaving glass,
and listened. His electric razor purred,
his pet canary chirped on his left hand.
The lights of science couldn’t hold a candle
to Mary risen—at one miraculous stroke,
angel-wing’d, gorgeous as a jungle bird!
But who believed this? Who could understand?
Pilgrims still kissed Saint Peter’s brazen sandal.
The Duce’s lynched, bare, booted skull still spoke.
God herded his people to the coup de grâce—
the costumed Switzers sloped their pikes to push,
O Pius, through the monstrous human crush.
There is a flicker of yearning in that beautifully placed “O Pius,” but it has little real-life consolatory usefulness.
The poem is about moving on, transition, the surrendering of large energies and aspirations—but a moving on to what? The poem’s final image is one of Lowell’s most perfect and impenetrable:
Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up
Like killer kings on an Etruscan cup.
It is entirely permissible to say of these extraordinary lines that
The black of Paris is in contrast to the pure whiteness of the Alps; it appears pagan, sinister, mysterious. He has returned to the twentieth century, Etruscan in its remoteness—a buried world.25
This is as good an explication as any other, but the image continues to resist simple exegesis. And it can thus be taken as a kind of epigraph for a book which, in its bruised acknowledgment that poetry does indeed make “nothing happen,” will seek to be refreshed by a direct, almost wide-eyed attentiveness to objects, places, personal experience. The only “task” of Lowell’s new style will be to prove its own disconsolate and modest propositions; his one remaining faith, if one can call it that, is in the imaginable moral power of perfect speech. At worst, no one could say of this new book: “But who believed this? Who could understand?”
Part Two of Life Studies is the prose essay “91 Revere Street”—a highly polished slice of Lowell’s autobiography. It centers on the poet’s childhood from 1925 to 1928, and casts Mr. Lowell as the main character: his resignation from the navy, his business humiliations, his sad and amiable willingness to let himself be dominated not only by
his wife, his friends, his employers, but also by his own low-level self-delusion. It is a merciless exercise; sorrowing, resentful, maliciously amused. The unforgiving child now armed, and armored, with grown-up literary poise.
Lowell liked to think of his presentation of his father as “tender,” but only in the elegiac poems that appear in the fourth section of Life Studies does pathos outweigh ridicule. And even here the evidence of Lowell’s drafts suggests that ridicule could as easily have been outweighed by something close to hatred:
“Still doing things the hard way, Feller?”
He’d tease me. Ten years later,
When I came home from Kenyon
College, an arm-chair Agrarian
Quoting in Latin from the Bucolics
And Pound’s ABC of Economics
He used to turn a puking green
Reminding me how at fourteen
He mailed a monthly check from Annapolis to his mother.26
This fourth section is arrived at by way of a group of chatty, affectionate pieces about literary figures: Ford Madox Ford, George Santayana, Delmore Schwartz and Hart Crane—a rather artificial yoking, this, of minor pieces with which Lowell had been tinkering for years. It is Part Four that actually bears the name “Life Studies”; and this is the section in which Lowell’s “new style” is unequivocally on display. The studies open with family portraits and reminiscences—versifications, in the main, of the more powerful of his prose vignettes. There are times when the “poetry” adds nothing to the prose. For example:
Almost immediately he bought a larger and more stylish house; he sold his ascetic stove-black Hudson and bought a plump brown Buick; later the Buick was exchanged for a high-toned, as-good-as-new Packard with a custom-designed royal blue and mahogany body. Without drama, his earnings more or less decreased from year to year.
