Robert Lowell: A Biography
Page 39
One of the striking aspects was the tremendous expenditure of physical energy. I’d never realized how strong Cal was. He was a very powerful swimmer—very strongly developed shoulders and chest and great long arms. And indefatigable. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t do anything for himself. I had to do everything, pay for everything. He couldn’t order breakfast. And it got very expensive. I kept having to cable for more money. Cal felt the Congress was paying his expenses and that meant he had carte blanche. He insisted on buying everyone expensive presents, leather jackets. I couldn’t control any of it. And as he got higher and higher he began to treat me more and more as a flunky, a position which I resented. And all of a sudden for about a week he insisted I was homosexual. I think this was because he had a suitable component himself and was simply transferring it. But it was extremely burdensome to me and really rather painful. He kept on saying, “You’re saying that because you’re queer.” His whole conversation became very fragmentary and disconnected. I used to think of it as a great knot which would twist and twist and twist and then a sentence would come out of it, pushed by a sort of strange breathy impulsion, and it was always in a totally unexpected direction. Eventually I was reduced to total flunkyism.24
One of Botsford’s tasks was to send cables from Lowell to the Pope and to General Eisenhower: “America as the Roman Empire” was the theme. Just before he left New York, Lowell had read Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore (indeed, he had written to Wilson saying, “I guess I pretty much agree…. The States have become a menace, sea-squids as you say, and I guess they never were too good”25), and Botsford remembers that he spoke of Wilson’s book throughout the trip; although as he got higher he became more thrilled than repelled by the “menace” of American imperialism. He frequently pronounced himself “Caesar of Argentina” and told Botsford: “I want you to travel with me always. You are my lieutenant.”
After five days, Botsford had had enough and returned alone to Rio, nursing a deep hangover. Elizabeth Bishop was furious when, two days later, she found out that Lowell had been left behind; she feared that he would get picked up by the police for drunkenness or, worse still, for his politics:
When I finally got Keith I asked him what the HELL he thought he was doing; didn’t he know Cal’s history? (he did). WHY hadn’t he called me before; what was he doing in Rio anyway, and WHY had he left Cal alone and sick in B.A.26
Under this pressure, Botsford agreed to return immediately to Buenos Aires. He contacted the American embassy there and got the name of a local doctor: Lowell had some days earlier thrown away all the pills he had with him. Botsford also contacted Blair Clark in New York and tried to cable Hardwick’s ship.
The climax of Lowell’s Argentine adventure came at a party given by the exiled Spanish poet Rafael Alberti. While Lowell and Alberti were locked in an arm-wrestling contest on the floor, Botsford went around trying to enlist help from the other guests: Lowell was sick, he explained, and should be persuaded to return to the United States for treatment. The reaction from Alberti’s stoutly left-wing friends was that Lowell should at all costs be protected from this obvious CIA attempt to kidnap him.
When the party ended, Lowell returned to his hotel with an Argentine woman called Luisa: “She wanted none of him, but she was our only hope,” says Botsford. While Luisa distracted Lowell’s attention, an ambulance was called:
And literally it took six very strong men to wrestle him into a straitjacket in the corridor of that hotel. I’d never realized the power of mania, physically. And it really was a close thing.27
Lowell was taken to the Clinica Bethlehem, and when Botsford visited him there next day,
Cal was lying in the clinic bound with leather straps, arms and legs, and he was on, I think, 2,000 milligrams of Thorazine four times a day. And he was still violent underneath it. I was brought up as a composer, and all he wanted me to do was whistle. Sometimes it was “Yankee Doodle Dandy” or “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Or it was Brandenberg concertos, Mozart piano concertos, anything. It was the one thing he craved, the one thing that would calm him. I’d be there two or three hours, just whistling until I was dry in the mouth. I’d whistle all the parts in the Ninth Symphony, or whatever, and he’d say, “Yeah, but do the tympani bit.” He took great pleasure in this, and he was very tender and affectionate about it. I think there was in that strange manic state both love and hate.28
Shortly afterwards, Blair Clark arrived to take Lowell back to the United States. The clinic agreed to discharge him on condition that a doctor and a nurse accompany him to New York, and at huge cost (Clark recalls) this was arranged. There was one slight scare on the journey: by the time the plane reached its first stop—Asunción, Paraguay—Lowell had fallen in love with the stewardess. The stewardess left the plane at Asunción and Lowell demanded that he be allowed to go with her, get married, start a new life in South America. “But we got him back on the plane, and the next nervousness was Miami. He was talking all the way.”29
Lowell’s plane was met in New York by Hardwick and Dr. Bernard, and he was driven to the Institute for Living, a psychiatric hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. Although he was back at West 67th Street by November, it was not until January 1963 that he wrote to Cousin Harriet:
For the last four months I have been writing almost every day. It seemed the best way to live through the slump that usually follows my attacks. Now at last, the last poem I’ve started is finished, and I feel free to look about me and take the air. Out of prison!30
Before leaving for South America, Lowell had accepted a teaching job at Harvard University: “two classes, two days a week, from September thru December, $8,500 for two years. I’ll commute from here [New York] and have the rest of the year to burn.”31 His illness had meant postponing his first classes, but by February 1963 he was writing quite jauntily about his “odd split week between Cambridge and New York.”32 Hardwick was now thoroughly settled in New York; indeed, she was beginning to think that the move from Boston had “saved my life, although I didn’t know it at the time.”33 A turning point for her was the founding, in February 1963, of a new literary periodical, the New York Review of Books. In his January letter to Cousin Harriet, Lowell wrote:
Lizzie is in a big undertaking and is on the masthead of a new book review for the moment being gotten together to fill in the gap left by the New York Times book section during the long newspaper strike. All the most distinguished and lively book reviewers and essayists in the country have been written or phoned for pieces. Now after two weeks they have almost all come through. The idea is to make the first number so dazzling that even after The New York Times returns, people will want to keep the new magazine floating.34
Lowell’s own contribution to the magazine was fairly marginal, although he did guarantee a bank loan that helped to get it started; according to the editor Robert Silvers, he was “proud of the Review and would always talk about ‘we.’ But he didn’t have a great deal to suggest about specific things.”35
By the spring of 1963 Lowell had almost two-thirds of the poems that would go into his next book. To the fall 1961 group he had now added “Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts,” “Hawthorne,” “Those Before Us,” “The Lesson,” “Caligula” and “Night Sweat.” Apart from “Night Sweat,” the group seems listless and academic—exercise poems. The Hawthorne and Jonathan Edwards pieces are ambling and agreeable; “Caligula” shows that Lowell can still turn a brutal couplet; “Those Before Us” and “The Lesson” are close to capturing the old immediacy but, in the end, seem casual and unfocused. “Night Sweat,” however, is remarkable: not only does it resurrect something of the iambic early Lowell, the rhetorical surge, the heavy piled-up rhymes, the unabashed grandiloquence, but it does so without surrendering any of Life Studies’ most important gains. The second stanza, certainly, proves that high rhetoric need not inflate or falsify:
Behind me! You! Again I feel the light
lighten my leaded eyelids, whi
le the gray
skulled horses whinny for the soot of night.
I dabble in the dapple of the day,
a heap of wet clothes, seamy, shivering,
I see my flesh and bedding washed with light,
my child exploding into dynamite,
my wife … your lightness alters everything,
and tears the black web from the spider’s sack,
as your heart hops and flutters like a hare.
Poor turtle, tortoise, if I cannot clear
the surface of these troubled waters here,
absolve me, help me, Dear Heart, as you bear
this world’s dead weight and cycle on your back.36
In May 1963 Lowell was complaining to Randall Jarrell that “each new poem confronts me with the old familiar legions of my old tricks and accents”;37 it is not clear whether he means the old tricks of Lord Weary’s Castle or the by now old tricks of his “new style.” Either way, it seems a pity that he did not choose to build on the possibilities suggested by “Night Sweat.”
In July, Lowell appeared at the Poetry International in London; he ate “Mongol food at the Empsons,”38 had a Cambridge reunion with Frank Parker and William Alfred (both by chance in London at the time) and in two days “turned down about $1000 of drinks.”39 From London he went to Paris, where his “not drinking” hung “like a plague” over the city—but Mary McCarthy, he reported, was also “on the wagon,” so with her he paid a sober visit to the Delacroix Exhibition at the Louvre before moving on to Nice, where he seems to have attended a literary festival. A postcard to Hardwick from Nice on July 24 reads: “In an hour I give first reading. I feel ‘I should be dressed in shorts.’ But I am not.”40
Back in America, he resumed his shuttle between Harvard and New York. In New York he had talks with Jonathan Miller about the staging of his trio of plays, now titled The Old Glory. Miller remembers:
he asked me if I wanted to produce it, direct it. I read it and liked it, although I was slightly puzzled by some of it. Anyway, I was leaving for England in January 1964, and before I left I agreed to do it the following summer.41
There was a plan to hold preliminary readings of the plays before Miller left for London, but these had to be abandoned when, in December 1963, Lowell was once again committed to the Institute at Hartford. On December 7 Hardwick wrote to him there: “Don’t worry about anything. Everything is fine at Harvard. Also talked to Jonathan yesterday. They are of course going ahead with the play as planned and will simply skip the readings.” And a month later (January 9, 1964), with Lowell still in the hospital, she wrote to Allen Tate:
Cal is fine, actually. I expect he’ll be home in a few weeks. This thing just came on him and it is most discouraging because he tried awfully hard to push it away. He hasn’t had a drink for a year; he goes to the doctor and does whatever is suggested. It doesn’t seem to be under the control of the will at all, not even a little bit. This time the doctor sent him to Hartford, which was very sensible. He was noticeably better immediately because he wasn’t surrounded by friends and the telephone. He’s very triste, utterly bewildered. They tell him at the hospital that they think it is an organic affliction and it doesn’t have to do except in the most indirect way, with what one does.42
Lowell had been committed to the hospital some two weeks after the assassination of President Kennedy. William Meredith remembers seeing him probably in late November 1963: “We were with some friends at the Opera Club and they all went into the box and we sat there talking and he said with a smile: ‘Lyndon Johnson has asked me to be in the cabinet.’” It was evident that Lowell was manic, but even so, Meredith was puzzled by the smile:
I saw him again when he came out of the hospital at Hartford, and I remember him saying to me, “This is always a very hard period for me because I have the embarrassment of remembering almost completely what I said and did.” So I brought up the remark about Lyndon Johnson and I said, “What I want to know is why did you smile?” And he said, “I knew it was going to be hard for people to believe, and I thought if I told them these facts without confronting them I could tell them the truth and not be laughed at.” So he hallucinated really successfully. He thought he was in the cabinet, but he didn’t think I’d believe it and he didn’t want to be called a liar. That’s pretty poignant, isn’t it? A terrible insight into madness.43
By February 1964 Lowell was “himself again,” and in March he wrote to T. S. Eliot as follows:
I want to apologize for plaguing you with so many telephone calls last November and December. When the “enthusiasm” is coming on me it is accompanied by a feverish reaching to my friends. After it’s over I wince and wither. Fragments of the true man, such as he is, are in both phases. You are very dear to me always.44
For the next two or three months he was in a state of “dark, post-manic and pathological self-abasement.” He was preparing his book For the Union Dead for publication and, on May 11, wrote to Randall Jarrell (who had evidently seen the manuscript):
It’s awkward thanking you for liking my new book, but this came at a good time. One can judge so ill one’s self, and sometimes I find a mean tameness and sour montony [sic] which I detest. Life Studies gave me an opening, and the problem for the last four or five years has been a hunt for the knack and power to fly.45
And during this same month, the letters he received tend to suggest that he had been writing to others in a similar, self-lashing way. Stephen Spender wrote to assure him:
You are in far too immediate contact with what makes you a poet, for your own happiness and comfort and of course this must worry those who are as grateful to you and as anxious to go on reading you—and that you should go on producing and teaching one so much—as I am.46
And, also in May 1964, there is a touching letter from Jean Stafford, written from New York Hospital:
There’s no possible way of thanking you for your concern, for your lovely letters, for the books, the beautiful unpronounceable blue flowers….
My dear, please never castigate yourself for what you call blindness—how blind we both were, how green we were, how countless were our individual torments we didn’t know the names of. All we can do is forgive ourselves and now be good friends—how I should cherish that.47
The final poems in the Union Dead collection had been written by the summer of 1963. They include the terza rima Tate pastiche “The Severed Head” and two stiff, well-meaning pieces about South America. “Buenos Aires” (published in the first issue of the New York Review of Books in February 1963) is a particularly sad example of Lowell hovering uncertainly between private agony and public obligation. There is also the charming “Soft Wood,” a reflective, unrushed tour of Castine addressed to his cousin Harriet, who “was more to me than my mother”:
I think of you far off in Washington,
breathing in the heat wave
and air-conditioning, knowing
each drug that numbs alerts another nerve to pain.48
In 1963 (two months before the Kennedy assassination) John Berryman had written to Lowell: “Hell of a year, isn’t it? Mr. Frost, Ted [Roethke] and now Louis [MacNeice] whom I loved. Keep well, be good. The devil roams.”49 With Frost’s death, there was a new pressure on Lowell to step up to the rank of “major poet.” Even before the publication of For the Union Dead in the fall of 1964, Irvin Ehrenpreis had expressed what was a fairly widespread expectation: “From a glance at Lowell’s most recent work, coming out in periodicals, one can prophesy that this next book will establish his name as that normally thought of for ‘the’ American poet.”50
And most of the reviews did speak of Lowell in this way. Richard Poirier in the Herald Tribune’s Bookweek announced that “Robert Lowell is, by something like a critical consensus, the greatest American poet of the mid-century, probably the greatest poet writing in English.”51 And Stanley Kunitz, perhaps remembering that Eliot and Auden were still living, was only slightly less fullsome in the New York Times;
for him, Lowell was “without doubt the most celebrated poet in English of his generation.”52 Praise of this sort issued from most sides, and Lowell was not disposed to challenge it: “My book is getting astonishing attention,” he wrote to Allen Tate, “and I suppose I enjoy it all to the limit—a head of uncertainty curdled with vanity.”53 And when Kunitz asked him why he was so esteemed, his answer was: “It may be that some people have turned to my poems because of the very things that are wrong with me. I mean the difficulty I have with ordinary living, the impracticability, the myopia. Seeing less than others can be a great strain.”
This note of faint unease, although it might sound like rehearsed modesty, was genuine. The deaths of near contemporaries like Roethke and MacNeice, and the suicide earlier in that same year of Lowell’s former student Sylvia Plath, might well have made him feel that time shrank as the critics’ expectations soared. Coronations were gratifying, but how do king-poets reign secure? And was there not a dreadful challenge in the conclusion of John Berryman’s “obituary” letter: “But why publish verse anyway? It’s all right for you to do, but why the rest of us?”54
Notes
1. R.L. to Randall Jarrell, November 7, 1961 (Berg Collection).
2. R.L. to Harriet Winslow, October 25, 1961 (Houghton Library).
3. R.L. to William Meredith, October 20, 1961.
4. “The Cold War and the West,” Partisan Review 29 (Winter 1962), p. 47.
5. For the Union Dead (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964), p. 11.