by Ian Hamilton
Goldman’s other worry concerned John Hersey, who, on the day of Lowell’s letter to the Times, had said that he would make his protest by reading to the President some extracts from his book on Hiroshima. Hearing this, Johnson once again saw red: he and his wife did not want “this man to read these passages in the White House.” Goldman retorted that it “would be White House censorship” if they tried to prevent Hersey from reading his own work, and Johnson eventually compromised by ordering a “blackout” of all press and television coverage of the festival; a one-hour television special was canceled and photographers were banned. He also ordered an FBI check on all the invitees. Hersey, meanwhile, had decided that he wished to read a preface to his extracts from Hiroshima; this preface would point out, he said, that “The step from one degree of violence to the next is imperceptibly taken and cannot easily be taken back…. Wars have a way of getting out of hand.” With some nervousness, Goldman concurred, and on the night of the festival, Hersey not only read his admonitory preface but also made a point of “occasionally lifting his eyes to look straight at Mrs. Johnson, who sat in the front row. When he finished, there were a few seconds of silence, then vigorous applause. The First Lady, who clapped for all other readings, sat motionless.”44
The harassed Goldman was relieved that his remaining poet guest was the light versifier Phyllis McGinley. But even she was determined to contribute to The Lowell Problem. She added a new verse to her poem “In Praise of Diversity”:
And while the pot of culture’s
bubblesome,
Praise poets even when
they’re troublesome.
As Goldman describes it, the Lowell letter hung challengingly over the entire event. Even those writers, such as Saul Bellow, who believed that Lowell’s gesture had been inappropriate, became “decidedly unsettled”—he was, he said, “under pressure from the New York crowd” to withdraw or to make some form of protest; he had been accused of “turncoating for publicity and preferment.” There were similar complaints from Ralph Ellison. Almost everyone who turned up, it seemed, felt the need to explain what he was doing there; and so far as Johnson was concerned, the White House had been taken over for the night by a gang of conspirators and traitors. All in all—and largely thanks to Lowell—the event was “an unmitigated disaster”:
Almost everything that happened after Lowell’s letter and President Johnson’s reaction to it had added bricks to a wall between the President and these groups. Mercifully, much of the story was unknown. But enough had become public to make the wall seem as impassable as the barbed concrete between East and West Berlin.45
Six weeks after the festival, President Johnson increased still further the U.S. “presence” in Vietnam, and asked Congress for a further billion dollars so that “all that we have built” would not be “swept away on the flood of conquest.” And on August 4 he added his own comic postscript to the Lowell letter. Addressing thousands of students on the lawn of the White House, he told them that he was as “restless” as they were, and as young in spirit. He went on:
Robert Lowell, the poet, doesn’t like everything around here. But I like one of his lines where he wrote: “For the world which seems to lie out before us like a land of dreams.” Well, in this great age—and it is a great age—the world does seem to lie before us like a land of dreams.46
The line he quotes is, of course, from Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” Lowell, however, had used it as an epigraph for his book The Mills of the Kavanaughs, and clearly Johnson’s speech writer, in a hurry to supply an upbeat Lowell quote, had not adventured past the title page. LBJ was once again a laughingstock in the smart intellectual circles which his festival had at first been meant to woo. Lowell’s own comment on Johnson’s speech was appropriately laconic; he told the New York Times: “I think I like things as much as the President.”47
Lowell emerged from his skirmish with the President feeling both “miscast” and yet “burdened to write on the great theme, private, and almost ‘global.’”48 His difficulty was that his image of America was not too sharply different from his image of himself. America he thought of in terms of Moby Dick: “the fanatical idealist who brings the world down in ruins through some sort of simplicity of mind.” Such a tendency, he said, was “in our character and in my own personal character.”49 In other words, Lowell knew that in his own life an excess of idealism had often issued in destruction. From what seat of virtue, therefore, could he now chastise the President? He felt there to be a hollowness, a fraudulence in the wise-prophet stance he was now being tempted to adopt. And yet he was tempted.
In Castine during the summer of 1965 Lowell worked on a group of poems in a meter borrowed from Andrew Marvell’s equivocal “Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland.” In their final versions, at least two of these poems seem more “public,” more addressed to an audience, than anything that Lowell had done before. Indeed, “Waking Early Sunday Morning” is now thought of as a key “political poem” of the 1960s:
O to break loose. All life’s grandeur
is something with a girl in summer …
elated as the President
girdled by his establishment
this Sunday morning, free to chaff
his own thoughts with his bear-cuffed staff,
swimming nude, unbuttoned, sick
of his ghost-written rhetoric!
No weekends for the gods now. Wars
flicker, earth licks its open sores,
fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chance
assassinations, no advance.
Only man thinning out his kind
sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind
swipe of the primer and his knife
busy about the tree of life …
Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war—until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime.50
The first three lines here do, almost explicitly, equate the poet’s manic elation—his “something with a girl in summer”—with the excited self-belief of the military establishment, but the shift into “global” elegy in the last stanza is also a shift away from any risk that the poem might be read as holier-than-thou polemic.
“Waking Early Sunday Morning” went through several versions before its publication, and—as Alan Williamson has valuably pointed out51—there is much to be learned from the stanzas Lowell eventually left out. Many of them express a distaste for the type of “ambition” that Lowell’s admirers were now expecting from him; the wish to “break loose” into the “criminal leisure of a boy” is far purer and more powerful than the impulse to pretend that poetry can save the world:
Time to dig up and junk the year’s
dotage and output of tame verse:
cast-iron whimsy, limp indignation,
liftings, listless self-imitation,
whole days when I could hardly speak,
came barging home unshaven, weak
and willing to show anyone
things done before and better done
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
For days now, or is it a week,
I run away from busywork
to lie in my far barn apart,
and when I look into my heart,
I discover none of the great
subjects, death, friendship, love or fate,
I look for doorknobs, marbles, sad,
slight, useless things that calm the mad.
Now on the radio the wars
blare on, earth licks its open sores,
fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chance
assassinations, no advance!
Only man thinning out his kind
sounds through the Sunday noon, the bli
nd
swipe of the pruner and his knife
busy to strip the tree of life.
I cannot take it. One grows sick
of stretching for this rhetoric,
this hammering allegoric splendor,
top-heavy Goliath in full armor
toddling between two hosts, all brass,
except its breast-plate, lump and mass,
propped on its Brobdignagian staff
bull-throated bombast stuffed with chaff.52
In an even earlier version, Lowell portrays himself as “running from crisis into crisis—/Prufrock in love with Dionysus.” As he rewrote the poem, though, he depersonalized it; the directly self-lacerating elements are pruned away and President Johnson becomes the empty rhetorician. Similarly, the wars that are here “on the radio” get moved to the very center of the poem. In the end, it could be said that Lowell aims for just that tone of millennial gravitas which in these early drafts he is “sick of stretching for.” But is this any different from saying that because of his distrust of easy rhetoric he finally—indeed triumphantly—achieves a rhetoric that we can trust; a rhetoric of painful and profound “unease”?
Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war—53
The other poems that Lowell wrote during the summer of 1965 are less “burdened” with political “unrest.” None of them, however, moves with great assurance, or even clarity, and the Marvellian couplet often encourages a tripping, near-doggerel effect:
Behind a dripping rock, I found
a one-day kitten on the ground—
deprived, weak, ignorant and blind,
squeaking, tubular, left behind—
dying with its deserter’s rich
Welfare lying out of reach:
milk cartons, kidney heaped to spoil,
two plates sheathed with silver foil.54
This is from a poem called “Central Park,” in which Lowell tries to manifest compassion for those trapped in “fear and poverty”; all that comes over is a generalized revulsion, and the poem’s last lines—sometimes cited as a memorable evocation of urban violence—are almost offensively facile and complacent:
We beg delinquents for our life.
Behind each bush, perhaps a knife;
each landscaped crag, each flowering shrub,
hides a policeman with a club.55
“Fourth of July in Maine” is a chatty, reverent verse letter to Cousin Harriet; it is light, sentimental and well-mannered, and has some nice Lowellian guinea pigs, but it barely gets beyond the family circle. “Near the Ocean” is a nightmarish, obscure reverie on marriage, both vengeful and apologetic: it seems to review earlier points of crisis in Lowell’s relationship with Hardwick, and to offer, in the end, a scarred, exhausted truce:
Sleep, sleep. The ocean, grinding stones,
can only speak the present tense;
nothing will age, nothing will last,
or take corruption from the past.
A hand, your hand then! I’m afraid
to touch the crisp hair on your head—
Monster loved for what you are,
till time, that buries us, lay bare.56
Both poems in their very different ways speak of marital conflict, of “energies that never tire / of piling fuel on the fire,” of “wild spirits and old sores in league / with inexhaustible fatigue,” and the conclusion of “Fourth of July in Maine”—although its yearning for lost “gentleness” is rather pat—again suggests a gutted, stoic compromise:
Far off that time of gentleness,
when man, still licensed to increase,
unfallen and unmated, heard
only the uncreated Word—
when God the Logos still had wit
to hide his bloody hands, and sit
in silence, while his peace was sung.
Then the universe was young.
We watch the logs fall. Fire once gone,
we’re done for: we escape the sun,
rising and setting, a red coal,
until it cinders like the soul.
Great ash and sun of freedom, give
us this day the warmth to live,
and face the household fire. We turn
our backs, and feel the whiskey burn.57
The episode with Vija Vetra had been galling for Hardwick, not because she considered Vetra a formidable rival (she says now that this was “the only affair I know Cal to have been truly, honestly ashamed of; there was regret sometimes, but not shame of choice”). Her real fury was with the “enlightened” line that had been taken by Lowell’s doctor. As with Sandra Hochman, Hardwick had received little backing from Dr. Bernard; “the great thing in this ‘event’ was my fury with Dr. Bernard, my feeling of helplessness with regard to her; her idea of living out these ‘test cases’ as if tying yourself up for life, or years, was a little workout in the gym to get yourself in shape.”58 Shortly before Lowell was hospitalized, Hardwick wrote as follows to Blair Clark:
I have been thinking it all over. If Cal seems all right except for V.V. and if he doesn’t want to go to the hospital, I begin to feel that I at least ought not to insist. It is only his own welfare that matters. If it is all right for him to set up a new life, I don’t think my feelings against it are very much to the point. I begin to think perhaps Cal should make one last effort to cure himself or at least to be happier, if only temporarily, than he is with me. And maybe that will ultimately cure him. For myself I do not want him to be violently treated with drugs and then sent back home in a depression—back to a home he probably doesn’t want to come to. I feel that isn’t good for either of us. If he is not doing harm to himself; if perhaps gradually with a smaller dose of the drugs he can get back to some routine and work in his new situation, then he must do that.
You can send this letter to Dr. Bernard. I am all right. And I begin to think Harriet is now old enough to be able to make the break from Cal if she has to. I know it would be hard for her, but I might gradually put her in a slightly happier situation than apartment life here. I won’t stay absolutely the same forever and neither will she.
I say all this to you, darling friend, in good faith. I do not want to force Cal back. I don’t feel any longer that he loves me. And I always felt before that he did, or I would not have fought so hard. You and Dr. Bernard do what you think is best.59
Both Clark and Bernard thought it “best” for Lowell to be treated in the hospital, and for the Vija Vetra involvement (which even Bernard seems to have thought somewhat outlandish) to be distanced until Lowell was able to make a sane judgment of its possibilities. But what is a “sane judgment”; how much of the penitential depression that followed each of Lowell’s manic “seizures” was caused by the lowering effect of his drug therapy? Lowell’s renunciation of Vetra, his genuinely remorseful (and in this case, it seems, embarrassed) feelings about the havoc he had caused: were these more “true” than his exhausted, sheepish pleas to Hardwick—for forgiveness, for another chance? And how could Hardwick simply pretend that she had not been abused and humiliated; how could she take him back without some lingering rancor, and without wondering what horrors his next “test case” would bring? When, from Hartford, in February 1965, he told her that he had given Vetra up and wanted to come home again, Hardwick wrote back to him:
Dear one: I got your Friday note today. Cal my heart bleeds for you, but remember what greatness you have made of your life, what joy you have given to all of us. My purpose, beloved, is to try to see what can be done to help us all. I hate for you to get sick. I would kill myself, if it would cure you. There must be something more we can lean on—medical, psychiatric, personal, the dearest love goes out to you from your apartment here on 67th St.
I long to talk to you again.60
Notes
1. R.L., The Old Glory, rev. ed.
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968), p. 217 (Introduction by Robert Brustein).
2. “Benito Cereno,” The Old Glory, pp. 180–81.
3. Jonathan Miller, “Director’s Note,” The Old Glory, p. 221.
4. “Endecott and the Red Cross,” The Old Glory, p. 48.
5. R.L. interview with Stanley Kunitz, New York Times Book Review, October 4, 1964.
6. R.L. to Blair Clark, August 1, 1964.
7. Jonathan Miller, interview with I.H. (1980).
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. W. D. Snodgrass, “In Praise of Robert Lowell,” New York Review of Books 3 (December 3, 1964).
11. Randall Jarrell, “A Masterpiece,” New York Times, November 29, 1964, II, P. 3.
12. Jonathan Miller, interview with I.H. (1980).
13. Vija Vetra, interview with I.H. (1981).
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. R.L. to Vija Vetra, January 30, 1965.
21. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, February 5, 1965.
22. Ibid., February 9, 1965.
23. Vija Vetra, interview with I.H. (1981).
24. Migdal, Low and Tenny to Vija Vetra, February 24, 1965.
25. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1982).
26. Blair Clark, interview with I.H. (1979).
27. R.L., interview with Richard Gilman, New York Times, May 5, 1968.
28. Blair Clark, interview with I.H. (1979).
29. Eric F. Goldman, The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Knopf, 1969), p. 421.
30. Ibid.
31. Robert Silvers, interview with I.H. (1981).
32. New York Times, June 3, 1965, p. 1.
33. Goldman, Lyndon Johnson, p. 429.
