Robert Lowell: A Biography
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During that “week or two,” Lowell began introducing Vetra as his future wife; he leased an apartment at 16 West 16th Street in their joint names (they signed “Robert and Vija—Mrs. Robert—Lowell”) and began buying furniture. Vetra could see that he was “a bit overexcited … But I have dealt with artists all my life and I didn’t think it was anything special.” And in any case: “He was excited like anybody normally would be in having a prospect, a new beginning.” As for Vetra, she too had become “enthusiastic”:
Of course I got more and more close to him, more and more enmeshed with him, and I can really say that I began to fall in love with him. And I got caught up in his enthusiasm to go further, to solidify it. I felt that having come here, to America, it would be wonderful to have a new life with someone I could really love and cherish. I felt very lonely at that time too.16
Before Lowell and Vetra could move into their home, Blair Clark intervened. He arranged for Vetra to meet Dr. Bernard:
Bernard told me, surely, don’t I see that he’s in this condition—as if saying that someone could love me only if he’s crazy, or in a depressed mood. Saying wouldn’t it be better if for a while he was separated from me and put into a rest home. But he didn’t want to go.17
Lowell’s new scheme was that he and Vetra should “go and live in Maine, because he absolutely adored Maine, and Lizzie can stay where she is, and that station car we will take and the other car she can have.” But Clark and Dr. Bernard continued to put pressure on Vetra—in her words, “to do their damnedest to get rid of me.” And in the end,
they rather convinced me that it might after all be best for him, and if it is so, then I thought I’ll give it a try, knowing that I’m risking losing him altogether. I knew that, but I thought maybe by some chance it will work well. So I thought if I could help, maybe I should do it. Because I was the only one whose word he would follow. I knew that and he knew it and everybody else knew it. So I told him what they had told me and we talked it over. And he said, “I really don’t want to go, but if you think … And of course as soon as I come out we will marry then.”18
On January 25 Blair Clark accompanied Lowell and Vetra to the Institute for Living in Hartford; he had hired a limousine, and the three of them sat in the back seat: “Blair on one side, Robert in the middle, me on the other, holding hands all the way. Poor thing. He just felt he was sent to the slaughtering house, you know, like a lamb.”
Vetra returned to New York and moved into the West 16th Street apartment, and for two weeks heard nothing: “I thought I would take my life, that’s how down I was.” Lowell was not allowed to make telephone calls, nor—at first—to receive visitors. He wrote daily letters to Vetra, but these were sent to West 67th Street: “They were sending the whole bunch to his wife.”
then one day he rang me: “Now I am allowed to make one call to you. Why don’t you send me letters? Why don’t you answer?” So then we found out that they had all been sent to Lizzie. He was furious and rang her, or wrote to her, and demanded that my letters be sent to me. So one day they arrived, the whole stack at once.19
For the first ten days of his hospitalization, Lowell continued to be adamant about his new life with Vija Vetra. His letters to her are, in the main, desperate entreaties:
Please don’t change your mind, mine only grows more set in determination to marry you.
Dearest Love, Love, Love you wanted letters, but I only want to return to you as soon as possible.20
But by February 5 he is beginning to have doubts; indeed, some kind of climax seems to have been reached with his anger over the side-tracking of his Vetra letters. He writes to Hardwick:
Thanks for the wire. I was really very upset about the letters business. If I am irrational, then I’m full of irrational turbulence. So, that’s over. How do I feel? Really, it’s complicated, and there’ll be a melancholy to any possible decision. Surely, there’s some terrible flaw in my life that blows a bubble into my head every year or so. It mustn’t continue, though I suppose that’s only partly up to me and partly of [sic] to fate, nature, God and whatever.21
By February 9 he had made up his mind. He had been reading Elizabeth Hardwick’s edition of Persuasion:
And now I feel like Sir Walter Elliot, as a [sic] read your many notes, and try to feel important and dignified to hide what a mess I’ve made of my human ties. If you and Harriet want me, I am yours. Vija is coming up here tomorrow, and I ought, I suppose, make no decision till after then. Still I know now for certain that I can’t avoid returning to my two girls, if they’ll have me. I am sorry from my heart for having put us all through the hoops.22
The following day, Vetra traveled up to Hartford, her first visit there since Lowell had been admitted two weeks earlier:
So I saw him, and he felt as if he had been walked on, so unsure of himself. “Well, I guess it will be best if I went back home.” Like a vegetable. I don’t know what they did. More drugs, of course, maybe even shock treatment, I don’t know. He felt so guilty he had to tell me this, but it had been decided that it would be best to call it off for a while and go back home and see what happens. He was so happy to see me and we had a talk, and before I left, he was wearing this striped shirt, and I said, “Give me a souvenir. Give me the shirt that you are wearing.” And he said, “But I have a new one.” “I don’t want that. I want the one you wore.” So he took it off and gave it to me. I still have it.23
A fortnight later, Vija Vetra received another souvenir in the shape of a letter from Lowell’s attorneys, Migdal Low and Tenny:
In order to terminate any responsibility Mr. Lowell may have with respect to the apartment at 16 W. 16th St, without undue hardship to you or additional expense to him, it is advisable that we meet as soon as possible.24
At this meeting, Vetra was given two days to vacate the apartment: “Heartless, absolutely heartless. That’s the American way. Very ugly.” She retaliated, Hardwick recalls, by sending Lowell “a lot of bills with demanding notes. He dropped them on the floor and I picked them up and paid them.”25
Shortly after his discharge from the hospital, Lowell and Hardwick left for a two-week visit to Egypt, at the invitation of the American University of Cairo. He gave two lectures in Cairo and then they took a short tourist’s trip to Upper Egypt. By the time he returned to New York, Blair Clark had “tidied up … the Vija Vetra problem.”26
*
“When your private experience converges on the nation’s experience you feel you have to do something.”27 Lowell had already “done something,” in response to the nuclear threat, in a handful of poems in For the Union Dead, but it was not until 1965 that he began to present himself as an authoritative public figure, someone whose prose voice would carry weight in matters of political debate. As Blair Clark remembers it, Lowell’s concern about American activity in Vietnam began to show itself in the spring of 1965:
The first time I realized that there was going to be a big revulsion against Vietnam was ’65, when I had an argument with Cal. Spring of 1965, when we were already slightly involved. I say “slightly”—we had about 75,000 to 100,000 troops there. But Cal was already outraged by it, and I—a much more “political” person than Cal—I pooh-poohed it, and said to Cal I didn’t think Johnson would get caught in that trap. Of course, he was right.28
American bombing raids on Communist targets in Vietnam had begun in February 1965, and during March Johnson stepped up the dispatch of combat troops. In April and May the first antiwar demonstrations were held, both in Washington and in colleges across the country. In April, also, Johnson had sent over twenty thousand marines into the Dominican Republic “to protect the lives and property of United States citizens.”
It was in this atmosphere that the President gave his blessing to a White House Festival of the Arts, to be held on June 14. The organizer, Eric F. Goldman (a “special consultant” to the President), concedes that the festival was in some measure “a tool to quiet opposition to the war,” but doubt
s that Johnson took the event very seriously: “Overall, LBJ appeared to think of it as a pleasant day, the sort of thing a President ought to do in view of all the interest in art around the country, one that would particularly please the ladies, and that was that.”29 Goldman drew up an invitation list, which included figures from the worlds of “painting, sculpture, literature, music (serious and jazz), the cinema, and photography.” For “literature” he chose Mark Van Doren, Saul Bellow, John Hersey, Edmund Wilson and Robert Lowell. Wilson immediately refused “with a brusqueness that I have never experienced before or after in the case of an invitation in the name of the President and First Lady.”30 Lowell, telephoned by the White House at the end of May, agreed to attend and give a poetry reading.
But a few days later Lowell changed his mind. The circumstances are not entirely clear, but Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review, remembers the weekend in question:
It’s very hard to remember exactly, but I remember it was a Saturday morning and I was down in the Village and Philip Roth was living there and I happened to meet him in the street. And he said, “It would be very sad if Cal turned up at that,” and I agreed, and he said, “Well, I hope you’ll talk to him about it.” I tried to ring Cal but he wasn’t there, so I wrote him a note about it and dropped it off at the house.31
When Silvers called round later that day, Lowell had already written a letter to Johnson and planned to release it to the New York Times.32 The letter read:
DEAR PRESIDENT JOHNSON
When I was telephoned last week and asked to read at the White House Festival of the Arts on June fourteenth, I am afraid I accepted somewhat rapidly and greedily. I thought of such an occasion as a purely artistic flourish, even though every serious artist knows that he cannot enjoy public celebration without making subtle public commitments. After a week’s wondering, I have decided that I am conscience-bound to refuse your courteous invitation. I do so now in a public letter because my acceptance has been announced in the newspapers and because of the strangeness of the Administration’s recent actions.
Although I am very enthusiastic about most of your domestic legislation and intentions, I nevertheless can only follow our present foreign policy with the greatest dismay and distrust. What we will do and what we ought to do as a sovereign nation facing other sovereign nations seem now to hang in the balance between the better and the worse possibilities. We are in danger of imperceptibly becoming an explosive and suddenly chauvinistic nation, and may even be drifting on our way to the last nuclear ruin. I know it is hard for the responsible man to act; it is also painful for the private and irresolute man to dare criticism. At this anguished, delicate and perhaps determining moment, I feel I am serving you and our country best by not taking part in the White House Festival of the Arts.
Respectfully yours,
Robert Lowell
As Goldman records, his first reaction to this letter was “fury. This, I told myself, was arrant troublemaking and publicity-seeking.” On reflection, though, he decided that Lowell was a “sincere and troubled man” and therefore might be persuaded to change his mind about publishing his letter in the Times; he telephoned Lowell and argued that since his acceptance of the invitation had not been widely publicized, it would surely be proper for him to withdraw now “for personal reasons”:
No, Lowell replied, he wanted to go ahead.
Throughout the conversation, the poet was gracious, free of self-righteousness about the position he was taking, and thoroughly understanding of the complications he was causing. I hung up the telephone with the impression of a fine human being. I also hung up with the feeling that all hell was about to break loose.33
Goldman drafted a reply to Lowell and sent it to Johnson for his signature; it spoke of Johnson’s full and deep respect for Lowell’s disagreement with “certain phases of the Administration’s foreign policy.”34
The roar in the Oval Office could be heard all the way into the East Wing. The instruction came back. Answer the letter under my own name and make it “just an acknowledgement.” I decided that “just an acknowledgment” could include this much:
Dear Mr. Lowell,
As you requested, I have sent your letter on to President Johnson.
Needless to say, I regret very much that the White House Festival of the Arts will be deprived of your distinction and talents.
Sincerely yours,
Eric F. Goldman
The next morning the New York Times carried the story on its front page, and swiftly followed it with another report under the headline: “Twenty Writers and Artists Endorse Poet’s Rebuff of President.”35 Robert Silvers and the poet Stanley Kunitz had organized a telegram to Johnson expressing support for Lowell and “dismay at recent American foreign policy decisions.” The signatories were: Hannah Arendt, John Berryman, Alan Dugan, Jules Feiffer, Philip Guston, Lillian Hellman, Alfred Kazin, Stanley Kunitz, Dwight Macdonald, Bernard Malamud, Mary McCarthy, Larry Rivers, Philip Roth, Mark Rothko, Louis Simpson, W. D. Snodgrass, William Styron, Peter Taylor, Edgar Varese and Robert Penn Warren. “An impressive array of talent,” even Goldman had to admit, but for Johnson the telegram was more infuriating than the letter; it smacked of organization, of a conspiracy between “these people” to insult him and his office, and “to hurt their country at a time of crisis”:
They were not only “sonsofbitches” but they were “fools” and they were close to traitors. A minor event, a mere ceremonial festival of the arts, was blowing up into a situation which could have anything but minor significance.36
Silvers and Kunitz had arranged the telegram “so that Cal wouldn’t be alone in what he did but would have the support of a group of people who felt concerned about the war and the bombing. There was the Dominican intervention too, which was highly controversial. But that the American B-52S were bombing was a source of consternation.”37 Certainly, for Lowell the “bombing” was the issue. As Blair Clark has commented: “Boy, Cal’s politics—they’re a study. He was so anti-Communist in one way, and yet he had this moral thing about the bombing.”38
Clark also perceived that Lowell had a “shrewdness” in handling his public persona, and that the “LBJ letter” was an example of his “brilliant timing”:
You have to say that that was a very successful operation of high-level cultural publicism. Cal the public figure—he knew what he was doing. I’m sure there were people who were terribly envious of his ability to manipulate himself as a public figure. He did it without any pomposity—but he definitely believed that he was a public figure.39
It is true enough that the reverberations of Lowell’s grand gesture were felt for some weeks afterwards—at any rate, in the columns of the New York Times. Arthur Schlesinger, speaking to the American Booksellers Association, was reported to have “gently ridiculed” the Lowell stand. To this, Philip Roth protested, “to me it does not seem nearly so ironic for a poet of stature to protest American foreign policy as for an Administration so insensitive to human values in its dealings with other nations to sponsor ‘a festival of the arts.’ But then each man to his own sense of the ridiculous.”40 Schlesinger replied that he had not ridiculed Lowell—whom he “cherished” as a friend and “admired” as a poet—but had merely said that he preferred the methods of Dr. Linus Pauling, who, when invited to dinner by President Kennedy, had picketed the White House for a day and then gone in to eat his food.41
This hint was perhaps on Dwight Macdonald’s mind when, after having signed the telegram supporting Lowell, he received his invitation to the festival: it had been held up in the mail. Macdonald promptly accepted, but arrived at the White House bearing a petition that read: “We should like to make it clear that in accepting the President’s kind invitation to attend the White House Arts Festival, we do not mean either to repudiate the courageous position taken by Robert Lowell, or to endorse the Administration’s foreign policy.” By the end of the evening he had collected nine signatures, and had almost come to blows with C
harlton Heston, who felt Macdonald to be short of “elementary manners”: “Are you really accustomed to signing petitions against your host in his home?” Macdonald later wrote an amusing account of his escapade for the New York Review of Books.42
President Johnson put in a brief and extremely reluctant appearance at the festival, but he left it to Lady Bird to attend the actual readings. Each of these, Goldman writes, was a possible source of embarrassment. Mark Van Doren, for instance, had been invited to introduce the writers’ section of the festival, and the speech he had prepared was almost exclusively in praise of Lowell; in its first version it “included no word of appreciation for the sponsorship [of the Festival] by the President and the First Lady.” Goldman pleaded with him to rewrite the speech, and eventually Van Doren agreed to do so; in his revised version he merely noted Lowell’s absence “with regret”:
He may or may not have been correct … nor do I commit any of the writers present here to agreement or disagreement…. I have been troubled as to whether I should speak of it at all; I do so now, after several previous attempts merely as honoring the scruple of a fine poet who, in his own terms, was “conscience-bound” to stay away.43
and then went on to thank his hosts for “their magnificent and gracious hospitality” and to pronounce that “we are all proud and happy to participate.”