Robert Lowell: A Biography

by Ian Hamilton

  Oh destiny, where is it? I have been thinking of Delmore. You probably heard of his death, a heart-attack, alone, outside a cheap hotel room in New York. I felt frightened to be with him for years—needlessly, in a way, but I was sure it would lead to confusion and pain. Then I think back on his low voice, so intuitive, reasonable, a great jag of my education, from weak hands into weak hands perhaps, more than I could use, but much of it has stayed. Two things had hold of him, when I knew him best, the first dark rays of his paranoia, often lighting up things, but unbearable to friends, and his long effort to write in quiet, underwritten style—maybe a crippling venture, maybe not. I think the later poems have more flow and joy than suited his genius. His destiny seemed the most hopeful of any young poet in 1940, then the downward road, some germ in the mind, the most dismal story of our generation perhaps, and maybe a lot more to the writing than one knew.48

  The notion of there being a sort of generic curse on the poets of his generation was recurring time and again in Lowell’s letters of this time, and it was encouraged on all sides by critical articles that proposed Lowell and John Berryman as victim heroes of the age—“each of them salvaging his work from the edge of some kind of personal abyss” (A. Alvarez). Lowell’s own identification with Berryman as a co-explorer of risky psychological terrain was certainly becoming more and more heartfelt as, one by one, the others of his generation were cut down by early deaths. In 1966 the news of Berryman was persistently of his bad health, his drinking and his breakdowns, and Lowell seems to have followed the reports with a resigned dread. In recent years his regard for Berryman’s poems had deepened. In 1959 he had been undecided about Berryman’s idiosyncratic “new language” as it appeared in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and the very first of the “Dream Songs.” He had written to him then:

  I wonder if you need so much twisting, obscurity, archaisms, strange word orders, & signs for and etc? I guess you do. Surely, here as in the Bradstreet, you have your voice. It vibrates and makes the heart ache.49

  By 1964 he had been won over to the style and he wrote a guardedly favorable review of 77 Dream Songs for the New York Review of Books, but he still had the deepest sort of reservations. After writing his review, he wrote to William Meredith:

  My Berryman piece is perhaps of some value as a record of a man’s struggle with the text, a climbing of the barriers. In this book, he really is a new poet, one whose humor and wildness make other new poets seem tame. I read him with uncertainty and distress and quite likely envy, which is a kind of tribute. I think it’s only here and there that I read him with the all-out enjoying amazement that I feel for Bishop, Plath, Larkin and much of Roethke. A handful of the songs now seem part of what we are proudest of.50

  With the death of Randall Jarrell, though, it was to be expected that Lowell would look towards Berryman as the only truly formidable talent of around his own age—Berryman was three years older than Lowell, as Jarrell had been. Also, Berryman had been an admirer of Jarrell’s. Berryman could never have Jarrell’s “senior” role in Lowell’s life, but it was possible for him to be thought of as an endangered, brilliant equal. In March of 1966 Lowell wrote to him:

  This is really just to say that I love you, and wonder at you, and want you to take care …

  Let me beg you to take care of yourself. You must be physically fragile. If anything happened to you, I’d feel the heart of the scene had gone.51

  In October 1966 Lowell got a group of new Berryman dream songs, to which he responded more warmly than he had to anything that Berryman had done before. They were called “Opus Posthumous” and were really, Lowell thought, “his own elegy and written from the dirt of the grave.”52 He cabled Berryman in Dublin: YOUR POSTHUMOUS POEMS ARE A TREMENDOUS AND LIVING TRIUMPH LOVE CAL, and in reply got “a sad letter”; he wrote to Philip Booth that Berryman “was very very sick, spiritually and physically, I guess”:

  there is personal anguish everywhere. We can’t dodge it, and shouldn’t worry that we are uniquely marked and fretted and must somehow keep even-tempered, amused, and in control. John B. in his mad way keeps talking about something evil stalking us poets. That’s a bad way to talk, but there’s truth in it.53

  Berryman’s “Opus Posthumous” poems are indeed “amused and in control,” but in truth they are suicide notes, and none more explicitly than his elegy for Randall Jarrell. This, certainly, Lowell would have wondered at and envied, and—on behalf of his “marked” generation—been most proud of:

  Let Randall rest, whom your self-torturing

  cannot restore one instant’s good to, rest:

  he’s left us now.

  The panic died, and in the panic’s dying

  so did my old friend. I am headed west

  also, also, somehow.

  In the chambers of the end we’ll meet again

  I will say Randall, he’ll say Pussycat

  and all will be as before

  whenas we sought, among the beloved faces,

  eminence and were dissatisfied with that

  and needed more.54

  From the accounts we have of Lowell’s teaching methods, it seems likely that he would have found Oxford’s insistence on formal lectures something of a burden. There have been a number of essays on “Lowell in the Classroom,” both at Boston University during the 1950s and from 1963 at Harvard. They speak of his mild, myopic manner, his chain-smoking and his Southern accent (acquired from Tate and Ransom, it is usually supposed, although Blair Clark remembers that “he spoke that way when he was at St. Mark’s”).55 Richard Tillinghast has written:

  I picture him at Harvard slouched in a leather chair, a penny loafer dangling from one foot, shoulders scrunched up toward his massive head, his hands framing a point in the air, held up before his face as though to protect it from attack, now and then righting the black-rimmed glasses that kept sliding down the bridge of his thick nose.56

  About his actual teaching, it has been said that he taught “almost by indirection,” “he turned every poet into a version of himself,” “he told stories [about poets’ lives] as if they were the latest news.” The various accounts seem best summarized by Helen Vendler:

  Lowell began his classes on each successive poet with an apparently indolent, speculative, and altogether selective set of remarks on the poet’s life and writing; the poet appeared as a man with a temperament, a set of difficulties, a way of responding, vocation, prejudices. The remarks were indistinguishable from those Lowell might have made about a friend or an acquaintance; the poets were friends or acquaintances; he knew them from their writing better than most of us know others from life. This, in the end, seems to me the best thing Lowell did for his students; he gave them the sense, so absent from textbook headnotes, of a life, a spirit, a mind, and a set of occasions from which writing issues—a real life, a real mind, fixed in historical circumstance and quotidian abrasions.57

  On student poems, Lowell was less attentive to the poet’s quotidian abrasions; he could be “arbitrary, petty and cruel,” said Judith Baumel, one of his Harvard students, “and had very little help to offer in the form of direct, constructive criticism of line, structure, intent, execution of student drafts. He would say, rarely, ‘This line is quite nice’ or ‘I like it, this is my favorite part.’”58 And the poet Anne Sexton, who attended Lowell’s classes at Boston University, wrote in 1961: “He works with a cold chisel with no more mercy than a dentist. He gets out the decay. But if he is never kind to the poem, he is kind to the poet.”59

  In 1966 one of the poets he was “kind to” was Grey Gowrie, an Irish earl who had arrived at Harvard a year earlier and had attended his classes in creative writing. Gowrie was given a job as Lowell’s assistant, and with his wife, Xandra, he seems to have provided Lowell with a kind of “alternative” Cambridge life, or at any rate a social circle younger and merrier than he had in New York. Lowell spent two or three days a week in Cambridge and had a pair of grimly functional rooms in Quincy House; in the evenings
he would tend to welcome company. Some of his contemporaries in Cambridge disapproved of his association with the Gowrie “fast set”—they believed Lowell to have been beguiled by the whiff of British aristocracy, and by what they saw as the “decadence” of the Gowrie ménage. Said one: “He would go around with this rather wild young set; they flattered him and over-excited him—sometimes he would turn up with them all and it would be like Comus and his crew.” Gowrie recalls:

  When I first got to know him, he was absolutely in peak form. He was less bardic than he was later. He was very, very good-looking, and very quiet, rather modest and well dressed, a very elegant figure, rather New England and elegant, with sort of Englishy clothes. And apart from liking and admiring his work, I actually got on with him because he was very funny and ironic and English in his humor, and if you were a young married couple in America, there was a slight shortage of that. He made very much the same sort of jokes as my mates at Oxford or Eton.60

  One of Gowrie’s more eccentric aspects, for Lowell, was his admiration for the poet Charles Olson. Olson was the revered master of Black Mountain poetry, or Objectivism; the theory of Objectivism derived from the Americanist beliefs of William Carlos Williams, but in its more extreme manifestations it was far more liberated from traditional European influences than Williams could ever bring himself to be—it built poems out of what the eye could see, and the only formal rules it would yield to were those dictated by the breathing and the pulse rate of the individual poet. Polemically, it set itself against the so-called academic poetry, of which Lowell was now monarch—and during the mid-sixties the separation between the two camps was almost total. With the death of Williams, Olson became “the” poet of the Americanist avant-garde, and it amused and puzzled Lowell that this British earl should have sympathy for a figure who was notoriously hostile to any Eng. Lit. presence in America. Gowrie’s account of this small corner of his relationship with Lowell has interest both as biography and as a reminder that there were other poetic kingdoms besides Lowell’s:

  He thought of me as someone who liked Black Mountain very much, which I didn’t, but I was a great friend of Charles Olson; he had lived with me when his wife died, and I felt great loyalty to him. There was a lot of rivalry on Olson’s side, because Olson always thought that Cal had sort of popularized and chiced and smarmed up the matter of New England, which was enormously his field of interest and endeavor. It wasn’t as bitchy as English literary backbiting. It was more as if you were a very passionate socialist and someone you admired very much insisted on being a member of the Tory party. It was that kind of feeling, that immense gifts were being used on the wrong approach. I was very fond of Charles, and Cal was a great tease about this. He erected a sort of Olson/Gowrie world and it was very light and funny.61

  Around November 1966, though, Gowrie began to notice that the teasing about Olson was becoming obsessive, “very possessive and detailed … and it reached a stage when the world he had invented had become quite real to him”:

  It was very odd for me because he started to look rather like Charles Olson, who was absolutely enormous and chain-smoking and heavy-breathing, and nuts, but dotty old sea-captain sort of nuts. Whereas Cal was just very funny and quick and not like somebody who’s nuts at all. But then, he would become this huge person drinking vodka and milk and breathing like a bull.62

  As the Olson obsession built up, it would lead into other obsessions: with politics and power. Harvard in the mid-sixties had what Gowrie calls “this intense Washington nexus…. People didn’t think they were making it as professors unless they were constantly on the plane down to advise committees.” Gowrie’s wife, Xandra, worked for the Kennedy Center and was a friend of the then not famous but “altogether astonishing” Henry Kissinger. Lowell would make jokes about Kissinger, and again by November these jokes were becoming darker, more insistent and more tiresome. Jokes about the Harvard Law School and School of Government and their bustling Washington connections gradually turned into not so funny soliloquies on “issues of power … or about his own war experience as a conscientious objector, and about the Lepke poem.” When not manic, Lowell had seemed to Gowrie fairly shrewd and sensible about politics; “that is, he would say, roughly, that democracy is a terrible system until you think of the alternatives, and he had the proper liberal horror of the alternatives. Nothing unusual, the perfectly ordinary civilized person’s approach, with an impatience with the pseud and the over-Americanly intense or ambitious.” But as he began to speed up,

  it would always go very much towards the right, but always on personalities, not policy, never “What this country needs is a strong man” or “Put down the Negroes.” It was about the misunderstanding of the nature of personality. It wasn’t what they did, it was the issue of the will and the personality.63

  Xandra Gowrie was also seeing a lot of Lowell at this time; for her, the worst feature of his mania was when, in the early stages, he would say “awful things about people he was really very fond of. And when Cal said awful things they were always spot-on, so people quailed and got very angry. He’d say it absolutely directly to them. You know, you’re so stupid you never should have taken up writing, or, the pity about you is that your husband never sleeps with you.” The tyrant delusions she found easier to stomach:

  It seemed to me that if you were manically mad, as he was, so that you were on the edge of physical violence all the time, there was a sort of refuge in images of historical tyrants and violent characters which I suppose you could say was in itself a sort of safety valve. It was better to be raving on about Hitler than to be actually murdering people or breaking up the furniture…. the logistics of it were that he woke earlier and earlier, and felt worse and worse about the cruelty he had handed out the night before, and drank earlier and earlier in the day to forget it, so that in the end he was drinking vodka and milk at half past ten in the morning. And then he’d be high again, so that the remorse would turn to a high again, with the next day’s vitriol. And then he couldn’t sleep at all. So it turned into a 24-hour binge. And then it was the historical obsession—Hitler or Napoleon or James IV. And into all this came the Kennedys—you know, where’s Jackie’s telephone number, or where’s Bobby’s, and if only Bobby had been something to do with James IV.64

  On Christmas Eve, 1966, the police were called to Frank Parker’s house in Cambridge. Xandra Gowrie recalls that

  there were eight policemen. God knows why, but there they were, with guns and everything, and Cal sort of leaning back against the sink and looking round. And you knew that the whole history of his violence and vitriol had to be part of this final scene, and he looked around and there was a milk bottle—Cal was terribly strong, he was an embryo footballer, so you knew he could be, and sometimes was during that time, very frightening and violent—but that was just an agonizingly sad gesture, a token of symbolic violence, and that milk bottle was thrown at the policeman, who just moved aside and then walked up to him and took him away. It was just incredibly sad. We were just exhausted by him, like everybody was, and no one else at Harvard at that point would take him on, because they’d all seen it and been through it and they were only too glad that some new acolyte would do it.65

  Lowell was again admitted to McLean’s, although he was still in contact with Dr. Bernard in New York. Elizabeth Hardwick had been ready to let the Gowries handle this latest collapse; indeed, on one occasion Grey Gowrie had flown with Lowell to New York, and Hardwick had made it clear that, in her view, Gowrie should take him back to Cambridge and arrange for treatment there. Gowrie has described the trip:

  It became clear that he should go back to go inside. Lizzie and I had no disagreement personally about it. Lizzie said, “He’s listening to Grey at the moment. Grey’s the person who’s got to get him inside.” I took him in a Fleetwood Cadillac, I remember—an enormous thing, something hired for corporation presidents. I got him to the airport, and on the way I thought he’d died. He went completely out and I really t
hought he was dying. When I got to the airport, I went looking for a stretcher or an ambulance. And then to my amazement, I saw that he’d got out of the car and was at the news stall buying Playboy.66

  Notes

  1. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, February 5, 1965.

  2. R.L., interview, Review, no. 26 (Summer 1971).

  3. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, February 5, 1965.

  4. R.L. to J. F. Powers, February 5, 1948.

  5. Theodore Roethke to Kenneth Burke, September 18, 1947, in Selected Letters of Theodore Roethke, ed. Ralph J. Mills, Jr. (Faber & Faber, 1970), p. 134.

  6. Theodore Roethke to Dylan Thomas, December 1, 1952, in Selected Letters, p. 182.

  7. Theodore Roethke to Isabella Gardner, February 17, 1963, in Selected Letters, p. 258.

  8. R.L. to Theodore Roethke, December 18, 1961 (University of Washington Libraries).

  9. Ibid., April 10, 1957.

  10. Ibid., July 10, 1963.

  11. Ibid., October 10, 1961.

  12. Theodore Roethke, “Four for Sir John Davies,” The Waking (New York: Doubleday, 1953).

  13. R.L. to Theodore Roethke, June 6, 1958 (University of Washington Libraries).

  14. Ibid., March 1958.

  15. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1982).

  16. R.L. to Theodore Roethke, July 10, 1963 (University of Washington Libraries).

  17. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, February 5, 1965 (Houghton Library).

  18. R.L. to Robert Giroux, April 8, 1965.

  19. R.L. to Valerie Eliot, April 12, 1965.