by Ian Hamilton
6. R.L. to Randall Jarrell, November 7, 1961 (Berg Collection).
7. R.L. to A. Alvarez, November 7, 1961.
8. “Eye and Tooth,” For the Union Dead, p. 11.
9. R.L. to Isabella Gardner, October 10, 1961; quoted in Steven Gould Axelrod, Robert Lowell: Life and Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978).
10. R.L. to John Berryman, March 18, 1962 (University of Minnesota Libraries).
11. “Middle Age,” For the Union Dead p. 7
12. “Fall 1961,” For the Union Dead, p. 12.
13. “Myopia: a Night,” For the Union Dead, p. 33.
14. “Fall 1961,” For the Union Dead, p. 11.
15. R.L. to John Berryman, March 18, 1962.
16. R.L. to Edmund Wilson, March 31, 1962 (Beinecke Library).
17. R.L., interview with Richard Gilman, New York Times, May 5, 1968, pp. D1 ff.
18. R.L. to Edmund Wilson, May 31, 1962 (Beinecke Library).
19. R.L., interview with A. Alvarez, in Under Pressure (London: Penguin, 1965).
20. Elizabeth Bishop to R.L., April 4, 1962 (Houghton Library).
21. Keith Botsford, interview with I.H. (1981).
22. Elizabeth Bishop to Elizabeth Hardwick, September 13, 1962 (Houghton Library).
23. Keith Botsford, interview with I.H. (1981).
24. Ibid.
25. R.L. to Edmund Wilson, March 31, 1962 (Beinecke Library).
26. Elizabeth Bishop to Elizabeth Hardwick, September 13, 1962 (Houghton Library).
27. Keith Botsford, interview with I.H. (1981).
28. Ibid.
29. Blair Clark, interview with I.H. (1979).
30. R.L. to Harriet Winslow, January 23, 1963 (Houghton Library).
31. R.L. to Philip Booth, January 15, 1962.
32. R.L. to Allen Tate, February 15, 1963 (Houghton Library).
33. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1981).
34. R.L. to Harriet Winslow, January 23, 1963 (Houghton Library).
35. Robert Silvers, interview with I.H. (1981).
36. “Night Sweat,” For the Union Dead, p. 69.
37. R.L. to Randall Jarrell, May 7, 1963 (Berg Collection).
38. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, July 24, 1963.
39. Ibid., n.d.
40. Ibid., July 24, 1963.
41. Jonathan Miller, interview with I.H. (1980).
42. Elizabeth Hardwick to Allen Tate, January 9, 1964 (Firestone Library).
43. William Meredith, interview with I.H. (1981).
44. R.L. to T. S. Eliot, March 4, 1964.
45. R.L. to Randall Jarrell, May 11, 1964 (Berg Collection).
46. Stephen Spender to R.L., May 1964 (Houghton Library).
47. Jean Stafford to R.L., May 8, 1964 (Houghton Library).
48. “Soft Wood,” For the Union Dead, p. 64.
49. John Berryman to R.L., September 13, 1963 (Houghton Library).
50. Irvin Ehrenpreis, “The Age of Lowell,” Stratford upon Avon Studies 7, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London: Edward Arnold, 1965).
51. Richard Poirier, “Our Truest Historian,” New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, October 11, 1964, p. 1.
52. Stanley Kunitz, “Talk with Robert Lowell,” New York Times Book Review, October 4, 1964, pp. 34–39.
53. R.L. to Allen Tate, October 9, 1964 (Firestone Library).
54. John Berryman to R.L., September 13, 1963 (Houghton Library).
18
Every evening at 8, at a drab brick building in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen, the stage is set for the American Place Theatre production of Poet Robert Lowell’s The Old Glory. Every Sunday at noon, with the addition of an altar, the same building is ready for the Holy Communion services of St. Clement’s Episcopal Church, an off-Broadway mission parish serving the theatre community. Running both shows is the Rev. Sidney Lanier, 41, a lively, loquacious priest who as president of the theatre and vicar of St. Clement’s is trying to bridge the gap between church and stage.
Thus, Time magazine on November 27, 1964. The American Place Theatre was founded in 1963 with the aim of persuading “writers of stature”—and, in particular, novelists and poets—to write plays. For its first year or so it had operated in semiprivate, offering its members readings and works in progress. With Lowell’s The Old Glory, though, it was opening its doors; the 180-seat Church of St. Clement’s would, it was proclaimed, become “a center of excitement, of talk, of argument, of ferment, of shared enthusiasm, of renewal of purpose.”
This messianic function was not quite what Lowell had had in mind for his trio of short plays, but he doubtless savored the idea of having them performed in church. Of the plays themselves he had always spoken with some modesty. He had, he said, found playwriting “so easy—it’s a crime,” and it is a measure both of his standing as “the poet” of the day and also perhaps of the enfeebled state of the American theater in the early 1960s that The Old Glory should have been greeted as a major cultural event: a “cultural-poetic masterpiece,” said Robert Brustein.1 Comparing Lowell’s texts with his prose originals—Melville’s “Benito Cereno” and Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman Major Molyneux”—it is hard to see now what the fuss was all about. Lowell’s versions seem threadbare and—in an attempt for current political or social “relevance”—are often crudely underscored. And to call them “poetic” is charitable, since they are mostly written in an ambling prose; they don’t elevate or intensify the words of the originals—they merely reorganize them. Thus, Melville writes:
What, I, Amasa Delano—Jack of the Beach, as they called me when a lad—I, Amasa, the same that, duck-satchel in hand, used to paddle along the waterside to the schoolhouse made from the old hulk—I, little Jack of the Beach, that used to go berrying with cousin Nat and the rest—I to be murdered here at the ends of the earth on board a haunted pirate ship by a horrible Spaniard? Too nonsensical to think of. Who would murder Amasa Delano? His conscience is clean. There is someone above. Fie, fie, Jack of the Beach! you are a child indeed; a child of the second childhood, old boy; you are beginning to dote and drool, I’m afraid.
And Lowell “versifies”:
DELANO This ship is nothing, Perkins!
I dreamed someone was trying to kill me!
How could he? Jack-of-the-beach,
they used to call me on the Duxbury shore.
Carrying a duck-satchel in my hand, I used to paddle
along the waterfront from a hulk to school.
I didn’t learn much there. I was always shooting duck
or gathering huckleberries along the marsh with Cousin Nat!
I like nothing better than breaking myself on the surf.
I used to track the seagulls down the five-mile stretch of beach for eggs.
How can I be killed now at the ends of the earth
by this insane Spaniard?
Who would want to murder Amasa Delano?
My conscience is clean. God is good.
What am I doing on board this nigger-pirate ship?
PERKINS You’re not talking like a skipper, sir.
Our boat’s a larger spot now.
DELANO I am childish.
I am doddering and drooling into my second childhood.
God help me, nothing’s solid!2
This is fairly typical of Lowell’s “adaptation” of the Melville text; it is efficient, almost dutiful, but unadventurous. The creation of the character Perkins is forced on Lowell because most of Melville’s “action” goes on inside Delano’s mind. In the same way, Lowell supplies a brother for Robin to share his fears with in My Kinsman Major Molyneux. In both Melville and Hawthorne, of course, the central character is utterly alone—a Perkins or a young brother would have drastically reduced the eeriness.
Lowell’s third play—Endecott and the Red Cross—was not included in the American Place Theatre’s presentation of The Old Glory (it was later expanded and offered separately), and as Jonathan Miller admitted, this omis
sion “seriously damaged the grand design.”3 Certainly, Endecott is the most subtle and revealing of the three plays; it too draws on prose sources (Hawthorne’s stories “The Maypole at Merry Mount” and “Endecott and the Red Cross” and Thomas Morton’s “New Canaan”), but at the heart of it is Lowell’s own uneasy meditation on the exercise of power. Endecott the ruthless Puritan experiences a spasm of self-doubt; fleetingly, he is sickened by the emptiness of his own rhetoric, his “hollow, dishonest speech, half truth, half bombast”:
I now understand statecraft:
a statesman can either work with merciless efficiency
and leave a desert;
or he can work in a hit-and-miss fashion,
and leave a cesspool.4
In the character of Endecott, Lowell hints at his own indecision in these matters: his lifelong fascination with the “merciless efficiency” of historic generals and tyrants could not, he knew, fit with the correct liberalism required by his own epoch. As he tried to explain in an interview:
One side of me … is a conventional liberal, concerned with causes, agitated about peace and justice and equality, as so many people are. My other side is deeply conservative, wanting to get at the roots of things, wanting to slow down the whole modern process of mechanization and dehumanization, knowing that liberalism can be a form of death too.5
And these “two sides” of Lowell’s political character are also in evidence in a letter he wrote to Blair Clark in August 1964 about the Republican party convention, at which Barry Goldwater was nominated as presidential candidate:
We watched the convention of course and much roused by the night of turned down amendments. Goldwater’s speech was ominously alive. I had a feeling that I was watching a dark little forlorn movement, the black splinter of an already shrunken party. But who knows? What you say about his possible election is true and dire. We would soon have a fascist state, for I think the Goldwater people would soon find themselves lurching into further extremes to keep going, and our country would be fearful to ourselves and the world. Sometimes now you get a little innocent gleam, innocent though dirtied with much brutality, jobbing and falseness, of someone genuinely wanting to move back to the old simpler times.6
Both “Benito Cereno” and “My Kinsman Major Molyneux” were attractive tales for Lowell because they evoke dilemmas of this kind. In each of them, an innocent representative of the “old order” strays into the aftermath of a successful uprising; neither at first knows or can bring himself to believe that the established rules no longer work. Each story, and each of Lowell’s plays, is thus a process of unmasking: in “Benito Cereno,” it is revealed that the blacks have taken over their own slave ship; in “My Kinsman Major Molyneux,” it transpires that British rule has been usurped in Boston. In both plays the rebels are felt to be sinister, malign and even—in Molyneux—repellently disfigured; the ousted rulers, though, carry themselves with an exotic dignity even in ruin and humiliation—they are aristocrats, as if aristocracy were a species, not a rank. Lowell’s versions are careful to expose the wrongs of the dislodged oppressor (indeed, adding to Melville, Lowell makes Delano shoot down the leader of the blacks and say, “This is your future”), but they are in no sense dramas of indignation or of revolutionary zeal.
Jonathan Miller began preparing his production of The Old Glory in the early fall of 1964. He stayed in a small studio upstairs from the Lowells’ apartment at West 67th Street and was able to have regular, not always fruitful consultations with his author:
I don’t think Lowell had a really intrinsic sense of the theater. I don’t think he had a good visual sense either, of how things might look. He was tremendously open to suggestion, totally humble about that. If you said, “I don’t think these pages work,” he’d say, “I guess not. We can print them later in the book.” And he was always amused and entertained by bits of business. He’d laugh a lot and be very amused by seeing how things were staged. It was Elizabeth who would say, “That young man is so vulgar. Cal, you must tell him.” And Cal would then say, “I guess he is. I guess … could you get him to wear his hat a little bit less cockily.” She was more interested in the theater anyway, and she also had what I think a lot of New York intellectuals have, which is a very sharp, Variety-reading, Broadway sense of what’s going to work and how you’re going to make a fool of yourselves in front of the critics. He was not so socially fastidious about how something would look on the stage.7
As the date for the production neared, Miller found that Lowell was beginning to wind up: “It was all very subliminal. You only very gradually noticed.” He was becoming “tenacious of schemes and ideas”; he would want Miller to sit up “a little bit later at night, and then later and later” and would become “hectic and slightly impatient” if he was refused.
He talked a lot about literature and about poetry and about art, and invented a lot of games and would arrange hypothetical weekends and say, “How would it be if you had a weekend with Joinville and Lionel Trilling? Who’d be the best chess player?” All history became a simultaneous event where it was possible for everyone to meet everyone. Famous, important, great people would encounter one another. I think that in his full-blown lunacy all the distinctions of time vanished altogether, and the world was populated by a series of tyrants and geniuses all jostling with one another, competing with one another in knowledge or in sexual skill.8
Lowell began writing new acts for his plays, insisting on one memorable occasion that, at the end of Endecott, Sir Walter Raleigh’s wife should come onto the stage carrying her husband’s severed head. “Blood streams from the severed neck,” he said. “I guess that could be done with ribbons.” But when Miller persuaded him that such lurid treats might not fit too easily with this drama of Puritan self-scrutiny, Lowell would quite happily submit: “He’d just say, ‘I guess not.’ And abandon it. ‘We might do it on opening night as a special.’”9
The Old Glory opened on November 1, and in spite of some grumbles from the New York Times critic (he found Major Molyneux “a pretentious arty trifle” and Benito Cereno “labored”), the production was a great success, winning five Obie awards for the 1964–65 season, including the award for Best Play. W. D. Snodgrass declared that he had “never been in a more excited and hopeful audience. We may yet have a theater of our own,”10 and Randall Jarrell wrote a letter to the Times:
I have never seen a better American play than “Benito Cereno,” the major play in Robert Lowell’s “The Old Glory.” The humor and terror of the writing are no greater than those of the acting and directing; the play is a masterpiece of imaginative knowledge.11
In January 1965 Benito Cereno was transferred to the Theatre de Lys in Greenwich Village for a regular off-Broadway run, and by this time Lowell had, in Miller’s words, “gone over”:
He tended to go into these things when there was something in the offing, where fame, a great deal of attention, or notoriety was probable. I used to see on his bookshelf what seemed a rather fat copy of Les Fleurs du Mal. I never took it off the shelf, but it seemed much larger than it ought to be, and I wondered if it was an annotated edition or something. And then I suddenly noticed one day in the same place on the bookshelf a book of identical size without a dust jacket and it was Mein Kampf. And I remember him meeting me at the airport and I could see him on the mezzanine, sort of sweating, and his spectacles seemed steamed over, and he came down to greet me and he was wearing an open-necked shirt and there was a huge medallion of Alexander bouncing on his chest. And as he greeted me there were three or four Hasidic rabbis coming off the plane and a sort of mischievous look came into his eyes, and he said, “Oh, Jonathan, the Germans were not responsible for World War Two.”12
Even after The Old Glory had completed its run at St. Clement’s church, Lowell continued to attend services there—and on one occasion was allowed to preach a sermon. It was at St. Clement’s that he met the Latvian dancer Vija Vetra. Her program of Indian sacred dances was to be featured in
one of Sidney Lanier’s church services; Lanier wished to “bring dance for the first time into his church.” Vetra describes her first meeting with the famous poet:
I arrived early to get everything ready. And Robert also came early. I had never heard of Robert Lowell. I had never even heard of the Lowell family. So I was absolutely ignorant, which was delicious. And he sees me in my Indian costume—very unusual to see something like that in his church, of course. So he comes straight along, stretches out his hand and introduces himself: “I am Robert Lowell.” Thinking I would crumble with being so impressed, or squeak with delight. I think he expected that, you know—at least make big eyes. So we talked a bit, but the others wanted to get on with the preparations and they pushed him away. But he came always back and wanted to talk more and more. Then he found out I am born in Latvia and he started putting questions about the Russians and Communism. He was very political also.13
Lowell invited Vija Vetra to the off-Broadway opening of his play; indeed, invited her to pretheater drinks at West 67th Street:
And I knew I couldn’t disappoint him. So he picked me up and he said, “We’re having a gathering first at my home of some friends and all of us together will go to the theater.” So fine. I had no bad conscience towards his wife because nothing had yet happened that I should be afraid of her spurn. So we went there, and he introduced me to his friends and to his wife, of course, and she greeted me coldly as ice. And I thought, Oh, I should not have come. What he had told her, in his naiveté, I don’t know.…14
After the performance, Lowell took Vetra backstage to meet the actors, and Hardwick went home. Lowell decided he was going to stay the night with his new friend:
So he took me home, and he said, “I am going to stay here. I’m not going to go home.” And I said, “No, Robert, please don’t complicate things further. Don’t do that to me—and to her.” So he blackmailed me then. “All right, then, would you like me to run under a bus? I have all this sedation. Anything can happen.” He could always take a taxi, of course. But he used it more or less as an excuse. And luckily I did have two couches, in a sort of triangle, so I made a bed for him. And I thought, if he uses that kind of blackmail, all right, I’ll give in, but next day he’ll go. He stayed there for a week or two. That was Robert.15
