by Ian Hamilton
The same note of “What next?” speechlessness is sounded in Lowell’s address on receiving the National Book Award for Life Studies.10 He talks in this of two “competing” types of poetry—“a cooked and a raw”—and clearly has in mind the challenge that Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti were then offering to the traditional or “academic” poets (of whom he, before Life Studies, would have been seen as a leading light). An anthology edited by Donald M. Allen called The New American Poetry 1945–60 had, for example, presented a clamorous riposte to the authority of the New Poets of England and America collection put together two years earlier by Donald Hall, Robert Pack and Louis Simpson. By 1960 the battle lines were clearly drawn, and Lowell found himself in no-man’s-land: “There is a poetry that can only be studied, and a poetry that can only be declaimed, a poetry of pedantry and a poetry of scandal.” Lowell’s “cooked” and “raw” definition became famous; this is how he elaborated it in a draft for his acceptance speech: “The cooked, marvellously expert and remote, seems constructed as a sort of mechanical or catnip mouse for graduate seminars; the raw, jerry-built and forensically deadly, seems often like an unscored libretto by some bearded but vegetarian Castro.”11 And as for his own poetry: “When I finished Life Studies I was left hanging on a question mark. I am still hanging there. I don’t know whether it is a death-rope or a life-line.”12
Ironically, this bleak curriculum is printed in the program for the Boston Arts Festival, which was held in June 1960, in Boston’s Public Garden. Lowell had been asked to read a new poem at the festival, and since—as he said later—he could hardly have offered them “The Drinker” or even a version of Montale, he worked from January to June on a piece that is now thought of as a wholly triumphant answer to that “question mark.” “For the Union Dead” can be both studied and declaimed; it is learned (and has provoked more reams of exegesis than perhaps any other poem by Lowell), but it also has vivid and personal ingredients—in the manner of Life Studies. And without doubt it provided a life-line, or at any rate a way forward to the next phase of Lowell’s work.
The poem was the outcome of a cluster of coincidences: the coincidence of Lowell’s sense of his own barrenness and the arrival of a “commission” from the Boston Festival. The subject of Colonel Shaw and his Negro regiment had long fascinated Lowell: Shaw was linked by marriage to Lowell’s favorite ancestor, Beau Sabreur, and his suicidal mission had been celebrated in several poems, including one by James Russell Lowell. There was an additional prompting in the work Elizabeth Hardwick was doing at the time: she was preparing an edition of William James’s letters, and it was James who had delivered the oration at the unveiling of Saint-Gaudens’s memorial to Colonel Shaw:
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.
Their monument sticks like a fishbone
In the city’s throat.13
Also, in October 1959 Lowell had become a member of the Tavern Club in Boston, and had dug out in the library there the text of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “Harvard College in the War.” Both James and Holmes spoke resoundingly of duty, self-sacrifice, heroic action: the formula for what John Thompson called a “glory of the past, misery of the present” study of the Boston spirit was readily to hand. Civil War heroism is set beside the threat of nuclear war; municipal barbarism (the ruining of Boston Common to build underground garages) is set against the natural barbarism of “the dark downward and vegetating kingdom / of the fish and reptile”; the Abolitionist struggle is mocked by television images of “the drained faces of Negro school-children.” When he was a child, Lowell used to watch real fish in the Aquarium: but today
The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.14
A melodramatic image, which recalls—in tone if not in meter—the poet-prophet of Lord Weary’s Castle, the exalted punisher of Boston’s ills. The difference is that Lowell now deals not in destruction but in decline, and he no longer pretends that God is on his side. “For the Union Dead” is an intricately organized poem, its chain of associated images seems fashioned with high cunning, and there is much subtlety in its manipulation of historical, personal and current political elements. If, in itself, it seems overdeliberate and without the energy and rhythmic grace of the best of the Life Studies poems (Lowell called it “the most composed poem I’ve ever written”),15 it is nonetheless his first step towards extending the possibilities of his self-centeredness: towards treating his own torments as metaphors of public, even global, ills. It also marks a sorrowing and sour final truce with Boston.
For a year or more, Lowell had been writing in letters: “We are awfully sick of Boston. The only unconventional people here are charming screwballs, who never finish a picture or publish a line. Then there are Cousins and Harvard professors. All very pleasant, but …”16 And Hardwick, in the December 1959 issue of Harper’s, had published an article on “Boston: A Lost Ideal,” which makes Lowell’s scorn seem almost wistful and genteel. On “proper Bostonians” she writes that “the town has always attracted men of quiet and timid and tasteful opinion, men interested in old families and things, in the charms of times recently past”:
The importance of Boston was intellectual and as its intellectual donations to the country have diminished, so it has declined from its lofty symbolic meaning, to become a more lowly image, a sort of farce of conservative exclusiveness.
But in any case the Boston New Englander—i.e., the Anglo-Saxon—is now pure anomaly: the town is governed by Irish and Italians, and governed rather badly. Hardwick writes of Boston’s “municipal civil backwardness,” its “feckless, ugly, municipal neglect.” The city has no night life—“In Boston the night comes down with an incredibly heavy, small-town finality”—no Bohemian or café life. It does have the “brilliantly exciting Boston Arts Festival held in the Public Garden for two weeks in June,” it has Symphony Hall, lectures in nearby Cambridge, and so on; but the real action is “cozy, Victorian and gossipy”: “The “nice little dinner party”—for this the Bostonian would sell his soul”:
In Boston there is an utter absence of that wild electric beauty of New York, of the marvellous excited rush of people in taxicabs at twilight, of the great avenues and streets, the restaurants, theaters, bars, hotels, delicatessen shops.
By the time Lowell read his poem at the Boston Festival—to “an audience of thousands and encore after encore if that’s what they’re called when they’re poems”17 —he had already accepted a Ford Foundation grant to “study opera” in New York; the poet William Meredith had been given a similar grant, and he recalls:
The Ford Foundation decided it would be interesting to take a group of established writers who had not written plays and attach them to repertory companies and see if they turn out to be good dramatists. More poets than fiction writers, I think. Anthony Hecht was attached to one of the repertory theaters in Manhattan, Richard Wilbur to the one in Houston. Lowell and I expressed an interest in opera and we were accredited to the New York City Opera Company and the Metropolitan for a season.18
The “study” would begin in September 1960, but as early as March, Lowell was writing to Meredith with the suggestion that they collaborate on a libretto based on Melville’s story “Benito Cereno”; other possibles were Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica and Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death—“the best modern political play I know of’19—but it was the Melville that excited Lowell, connecting as it did with his study of the Colonel Shaw exploit and with his own uneasy, ambiguous feelings about “the razor’s edge of Boston’s negro culture.” As he paraphrased it for Cousin Harriet:
Benito Cereno [is] the story of an honest but rather thick-skulled American sea-captain from Dunbury, Mass., who spends a day on board a Spanish slave ship in 1799, unaware that the slaves have seized the ship and kill
ed most of the Spaniards. The hero is a sort of Henry Jamesian innocent abroad.20
“For the Union Dead” is, to be sure, an “abolitionist poem,” and Lowell was later to say that in it “I lament the loss of the old Abolitionist spirit: the terrible injustice, in the past and in the present, of the American treatment of the Negro is of the greatest urgency to me as a man and as a writer.”21 But this correct thinking did not prevent him from responding to Melville’s tale of a Jamesian innocent confronted with the realities of a successful black rebellion. On this subject, Lowell wrote to William Meredith:
how can we handle the whole plot so as not to make it rather shockingly anti-negro: What I’d hope for would be something neutral, rather what’s happening now, wrong blazing into a holocaust, no one innicent [sic]. But the action—in Melville the negroes with their bloodthirsty servility are symbolic drama—on the stage will be much more unbearable than read, or even worse, likely to seem a sadistic unfelt farce.22
(The phrase here, “bloodthirsty servility,” forces one to look back to the final stanza of “For the Union Dead”—is the poem’s vision of “savage servility” in truth Lowell’s vision of wrong blazing into a black-against-white holocaust?)
Meredith was not enticed by the challenge of Benito Cereno; he thought it “full of problems. Quite possibly it is not the work we could best collaborate on.”23 His proposal was that they wait until September and then “hang around the City Center and the Met for the first four months” and try to “define our concept of the opera.” Lowell, however, was not to be restrained, and during the summer of 1960, at Castine, he finished a draft of “the whole of Benito”—
47 pages, a sort of iambic free verse with a lot of show and charade and horror, more action than language. It went so quickly I am stunned and don’t know whether it works or how it can work in with what you’ve done. I am eager to compare notes. My version is a play, not an opera, if it is anything.24
He also completed his heroic-couplet translation of Racine’s Phèdr—prodded here by a commission for Eric Bentley’s Classic Drama series—and started work on a group of Baudelaire “versions.” Since the spring of 1959 he had published almost a dozen translations in magazines—his Montale and Rilke, as well as poems by Pasternak and Heine—and was beginning to think seriously of a collection. Although still “hanging on a question mark,” Lowell was able to write to Meredith in August 1960:
[I feel] wonderfully athletic, hackish and ready for opera, though I haven’t done anything yet. I wonder if Phèdre or something like it could be given in a singing version, though I’m still keen on Benito.25
In September the Lowells moved from Boston to New York—the move was to be for the year of Lowell’s Ford Foundation grant, and they had exchanged their Marlborough Street house for Eric Bentley’s apartment at 194 Riverside Drive. Lowell and Meredith began to “hang around the Met,” watching rehearsals and—Lowell boasted—attending “four Puccinis in a week.”26 In October, Lowell wrote to Peter Taylor, who was now in London working as a resident playwright at the Royal Court Theatre:
We feel the same way as you about London about New York, very engagé and anonymous. There’s a difference about my work, i.e. my total ignorance of music and opera. However, the rehearsals are great fun—full of things like Stokowski walking out and Christopher West walking out.27
Lowell’s “theatrical” mood was sustained also by negotiations for a London and perhaps a Broadway production of his Phaedra; Lincoln Kirstein had shown Lowell’s translation to the British producer George Devine, and the early signs seemed promising. “All very fantastic and unbelievable,” Lowell wrote to Taylor, and was soon busy speculating about the members of his “ideal cast”:
Would Laurence Olivier really do for Theseus? etc … There’s a terrific role for a young aging woman. The problem is whether any actor could deliver and any audience hear reams of heroic couplets of a rather pseudo 17th century grandiosity.28
Even the three-year-old Harriet, Lowell now spoke of as “very bossy and Broadwayish,” and his letters to Taylor and Allen Tate in London were for a month or two full of rather boyish drama talk—the prospects for Phaedra, plans for future Brechtian spectaculars that would be “fierce and noble and indecent”29 and jests about the Met tenors who looked “like goons in the comic strip criminals.”
Lowell and Meredith, it should be said, might be forgiven for not treating their visits to the Met too earnestly. Meredith gives an example of the way the Met viewed them:
We sat in Rudolf Bing’s office only once. When Bing found out that we were not members of the Ford Foundation staff but only grantees, he began to lose interest and be busy, and he suggested to Cal and me that as a beginning we might go up to Columbia University where there was an introductory course on the opera. I was about ready to bluster, but Cal said very sweetly, “You must understand, Mr. Bing, that Mr. Meredith and I are already professionals. We’ve come for some help in seeing how the opera company works.” It was so much gentler than need be, the way he said it, but it was exactly the right thing to say. So we were allowed to go to live rehearsals and hang around backstage and were given house passes. By the end Bing was calling me Mr. Lowell.30
Lowell’s excitement with the theater was really, Meredith believed, an aspect of his excitement with New York—he felt himself to be in the “capital of intellectual life,” and of course “he could hold a larger court in New York” than he ever could in Boston. As early as October 1960 Lowell wrote to Peter Taylor:
In a way we like New York better than Boston (though Boston has pleasant memories for me, is physically more human, is easier to get out of and other things) and we are thinking of moving permanently.31
By the end of the year the decision seems to have been made. In December, Lowell had written to Boston University that he wouldn’t be able to teach either term next year: what he hadn’t “yet written them” was that he intended living in New York. “Lizzie’s even now roaming about town looking at houses.”32 In January 1961 an apartment on West 67th Street became available at a good price; both its location (no more than a hundred yards from Central Park) and its rather dramatically eccentric interior design seemed to Hardwick perfect, and on January 10 she wrote to Cousin Harriet:
Our new apartment is absolutely definite now, more than that—irrevocable. I had some misgivings and clung a bit to Boston just because we were there. On the other hand, there was no profound reason why we shouldn’t make the move. Bobby has wanted to even before this year and we came here on the Ford grant to make certain and to look around. He never wavered and so there didn’t seem to be any turning back….
The apartment has “features” to say the least. It is a wonderful building, one of the few left here, built in the 1900’s for artists. Many interesting people have lived here, and still do. It is very well-run, very cozy, very old-fashioned. We have had to have all sorts of meetings and inspections with the others of the 9 owners and Bobby said it was worse than the Tavern Club initiation. We have a two-floor in height, skylighted living room, dining room, kitchen and little room on the first—very large, strange and baronial. Then you go upstairs, to the balcony for the bedrooms.33
But the Marlborough Street house could not be sold until the summer, so Hardwick was in a sense still balanced between Boston and New York when, in February 1961, Lowell again began to show signs of speeding up. This time there was “a girl”—in the shape of a young New York poet called Sandra Hochman; and Lowell’s protestations soon manifested what could now be thought of as “the usual pattern”: the move to New York, he began saying, was a renunciation of Boston, and along with Boston, of Hardwick and the whole of his “old life.” Hochman and New York offered him rebirth; it was all going to be wonderful. The difference this time, though, from Hardwick’s point of view, was that the psychiatrist Lowell had been referred to in New York was adopting a quite different line from that of his doctors at McLean’s: that is to say, she was not convinced that Lowell
’s “old life” was more “real” or more worthwhile than possible other lives that he might wish to change it for. Dr. Viola Bernard, whom Lowell had been seeing since his arrival in New York, was far more analytically inclined than any of his earlier “therapists” had been and more disposed therefore to seek existential “causes” for his sickness; she did not, in other words, assume him to be the victim merely of some metabolic imbalance that could be chemically set right. For Hardwick, understandably, this seemed like the last twist of the knife. In earlier episodes, when Lowell had turned on her, she had at least had the support of his physicians; now, it appeared, he had found a doctor who was prepared to encourage him in his delusions.
It was on March 3, 1961, that Lowell’s new bout of “elation” reached its climax. Blair Clark recalls the circumstances:
It happened at my house. The middle of the night before he went in. I didn’t know Sandra Hochman existed before then. Cal was in terrible physical shape, shaking, panicky, God knows what he was taking in the way of drugs. He was sweating, lighting cigarettes, talking nonstop. They both stayed overnight at my house. I locked my door and in the middle of the night she started beating on it; I think it was not so much that he was attacking her but that she was worried about him, because he was breathing badly, and drinking. So I spent the rest of the night trying to calm everything down, trying to get him to sleep. And I think the next day I took him to the hospital.34
On Viola Bernard’s instructions, Lowell was taken to the Neurological Institute at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. Meredith recalls that he was in a locked ward on the twelfth floor; to visit him, “you had to be let through two sets of locked doors”:
