by Ian Hamilton
early typing; or is he needing paregoric?
Poor Child, you were kissed so much you thought you were walked on;
yet you wait in my doorway with bluebells in your hair.
and there is one fine, summarizing poem—certainly one of the most sharp-edged, most tenderly “composed” pieces in the “notebook” which Lowell was busily adding to each day:
No artist perhaps, you go beyond their phrases,
a girl too simple for this measured cunning….
Take that day of baking on the marble veranda,
the roasting brown rock, the roasting brown grass, the breath
of the world risen like the ripe smoke of chestnuts,
a cleavage dropping miles to the valley’s body:
and the following sick and thoughtful day
of the red flower, the hills, the valley, the Volcano—
this not the greatest thing, though great; the hours
of shivering, ache and burning, when we’d charged
so far beyond our courage—altitudes,
then the falling … falling back on honest speech:
infirmity, a food the flesh must swallow,
feeding our minds … the mind which is also flesh.
The girl was called Mary, was probably Irish—one poem speaks of the two lovers as “Potato-famine Irish-Puritan, and Puritan”—and she seems to have been working at Cuernavaca as one of Illich’s assistants. Lowell left Cuernavaca on January 9, and the following day Mary wrote to him:
yesterday I waited till after your plan [sic] lifted … did you fly safely? I hope you slept, you seemed tired, but also a little happy, and so I was happy.
I wanted to run over and give you the blue flower I was wearing. But then I thought how it would begin to die and wither on the way home, and I didn’t want you to have anything but a sense of life, not withering….20
It was, of course, the “time of the year” for Lowell to have “something with a girl,” but in January 1968 he appears to have been able to judge the liaison’s real-life possibilities, to have restrained himself from any wild commitment, from fantasies of rejuvenation and rebirth. To have been able to do so makes him all the more fretfully “feel his age”—and throughout the “notebook” poems (they were to be published under the name Notebook) there is every so often a flicker of nostalgia for the majestic lunacies of his pre-lithium winters. And there is much caricaturing of himself as weary, middle-aged voyeur—“O my repose, the goat’s diminishing day,” “I stand between tides”:
The cattle get through living, but to live:
Kokoshka at eighty, saying, ‘If you last,
you’ll see your reputation die three times,
and even three cultures; young girls are always here.’
They were there … two fray-winged dragonflies,
clinging to a thistle, too clean to mate.21
In Lowell’s world at Harvard there were also girls, and during 1967 there had been a “serious” involvement with a young Cambridge poet; she asks not to be named, but agrees that her presence can be felt in Notebook. She, like Mary, was a non-manic attachment; she was not led to suppose that Lowell wished to abandon his marriage; she was aware that he looked to her for “renewal” and companionship. And another Cambridge girlfriend from around this time has said of him:
I never got the overpowering tyrannical side of him. Exactly the opposite. If he’d wanted to be tyrannical and overpowering I would have been the perfect subject. One of the things I really miss in Cal—you know, it’s incredibly seldom you ever know anyone who has that extremely strong instinct for focusing on you and what you’re about and what you’re trying to do. He did that more than anyone I’ve ever known. He may have been more like that with girls, I don’t know. I think he found a tremendous solace in women. I think he had what I think of as a rather corny simplistic and too easily categorized view of women as being less contrived and closer to the truth of behavior. He talked an awful lot about Ophelia as someone who had failed his idea of women. She’d copped out, yes, but he thought she knew what she was getting into with Hamlet and that she was quite a smart little come-on girl. He was very cozily physical. He liked to hold your hand, or if he walked with you, he liked your arm linked in his. The times I slept with Cal he wasn’t crazily sort of sexy at all. He was very huggy. He’d hug you all night, and the minute he woke up he’d hug you. But I think he was quite panicked by thoughts of impotence.22
During 1968 Lowell’s public persona achieved its remarkable apotheosis. He was already as well known to nonliterary Americans as a poet could reasonably hope to be: he had refused Johnson’s White House invitation, he had marched on the Pentagon, he had—in February 1968—called for “a national day of mourning” … “for our own soldiers, for the pro-American Vietnamese, and for the anti-American Vietnamese,” for all those people “we have sent out of life.”23 These were acts of witness and verbal protest, and they issued from the sidelines: Lowell was cast as spokesman for the angry and impotent intellectual community, and was addressing himself to a President notoriously indifferent to the responses of his “sort of people.” In the fall of 1967, though, an odd accident propelled him to the center, or to very near the center, of “real politics.” Eugene McCarthy, the senator from Minnesota and a friend both of Allen Tate and of Lowell’s novelist friend J. F. Powers, announced that he intended to challenge Johnson in some of the forthcoming primary elections for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination: McCarthy’s simple platform was opposition to the Vietnam war. Not only did McCarthy know Tate and Powers, he was also an admirer of Lowell’s poems; indeed, in his spare time, he was himself a poet.
In the early days of McCarthy’s campaign, Lowell agreed to speak for the senator at New York fund-raisers. The two became friends, each flattered by the attention of the other: Lowell was astonished that this real if idealistic politician should also be stylish and ironic (“it’s hard to imagine anyone less like a great statesman … and more like a good writer”),24 and McCarthy enjoyed both the weight of Lowell’s prestige and the light relief of his company. They formed an odd, teasing partnership: righteous yet disdainful of self-righteousness, heroically altruistic and yet sardonic about the mechanics of power-seeking. Jeremy Larner, one of McCarthy’s speech writers, has captured rather well—though sneeringly—the spirit of the “campaign” in its early stages:
I got my first glimpse of McCarthy fifteen days before New Hampshire, when some wealthy backers arranged a cocktail party at a posh town house in Manhattan. There were carefully collected show-business people, arts and writing people, rich people: come with curiosity and a bit of trepidation….
McCarthy looked grave and weary. Eventually, he made a little talk with allusions to poets, expressing his sense of the country’s divisions. The President could not travel openly, he commented. But one’s mind wandered….
Before that, Robert Lowell had supplied a rambling introduction. “You’re supposed to be artists,” he said to the beautiful people, “I don’t see any artists here.” But his audience knew better—they had signed the artists and writers petition against the war. Finally, Lowell turned to the candidate, who sat beside him, in an antique chair. “You haven’t got a chance, you know that, don’t you?”
McCarthy sat motionless, his face set, his eyes to Lowell with no expression, no acknowledgment. The room was silent. No one spoke, not even the official backers. Lowell resumed his introduction with grim satisfaction. What on earth were we doing there?25
In spite of this elegant inertia at the top, McCarthy attracted huge support among the young; indeed, he was the sole “legitimate” rallying point for the diverse groups and factions that opposed the Vietnam war. Pundits wrote condescendingly about the “McCarthy kids,” “the Children’s Crusade,” and it was casually prophesied that in McCarthy’s first real test—the New Hampshire primary on March 12, 1968—he would be lucky to get 10 percent of the vote, even though Johnson had done no camp
aigning in the state. Of McCarthy himself, one commentator wrote: “His obvious dislike of campaigning, his low-key style, his virtual political obscurity at a national level—all this put him, if not beyond the pale, at least crawling on the fringes.”26 On March 12, though, came what this same writer called “the most sensational political upheaval in recent American history.” McCarthy captured a stunning 42 percent of the vote to Johnson’s 49 percent. The Children’s Crusade had turned out to be a grown-up electoral reality. Four days after New Hampshire, Lowell wrote to Peter Taylor:
I’ve been all over the place and followed McCarthy three days in New Hampshire going through two sweater factories, one shoe factory and one wood factory, one Lions and Kiwanis club, and two ladies clubs. My line was that if I spoke he’d lose the few votes he had. It’s a miracle how such a quiet and in many ways soporific campaign worked.27
(McCarthy himself recalls that Lowell almost did lose him votes by telling the owners of the sweater factories that the workers in the shoe factory seemed so much happier than their own employees: “But we’ve got very good industrial relations!” “Yeah, but they just seemed happier somehow, maybe it’s something to do with the shape of the shoes, or the leather….”)28
Within days of McCarthy’s triumph in New Hampshire, Robert Kennedy announced that he would enter the presidential race. Up to this point, he had been careful neither to back McCarthy nor to deplore him. For Lowell, Kennedy’s intervention presented a small challenge to his loyalty. Since 1965 he had been playfully intrigued by Bobby—or, at any rate, by the idea of him as a driven, fated prince. He would ask people which character in Shakespeare Bobby could most aptly be compared with. Also, according to Blair Clark, Jackie Kennedy “was busy educating Bobby. Cal was one of the educators—upgrading the savage Bobby into the cultural hero that he became.”29 Lowell had, for instance, given Jackie Kennedy a marked copy of Plutarch’s Lives and was much excited when he later learned that Bobby had borrowed it and read it: “Bobby was very conscious of the nobility and danger of pride and fate.”30 After Plutarch, Kennedy and Lowell met a few times and exchanged letters. On February 18, 1966, Kennedy wrote to Lowell:
You have probably read it as I understand you have read everything but when I found the following in Edmund Wilson’s book “The Bit Between My Teeth” I thought of you.
“That hour is blessed when we meet a poet. The poet is brother to the dervish. He has no country nor is he blessed with the things of this world; and while we poor creatures that we are, are worrying about fame, about power, about riches, he stands on a basis of equality with the powerful of the earth and the people bow down before him.”
Pushkin
When are they going to write those kind of things about those of us in politics.
See if you can start a trend in that direction.31
And Lowell, not long out of McLean’s and in a “down” period, answered on February 25:
I have always been fascinated by poets like Wyatt and Ralegh, who were also statesmen and showed a double inspiration … the biggest of these must be Dante, who ruled Florence for a moment, and would never have written about Farinata and Manfred, without this experience. Large parts of the Commedia are almost a Ghibelline epic. Then there are those wonderful statesmen, like Lincoln and Edmund Burke, who were also great writers.
Well, I do think you are putting into practice that kind of courage and ability that your brother so subtly praised in his Profiles, and know how to be brave without becoming simple-minded. What more could one ask for in my slothful, wondering profession?32
Kennedy, however, was no docile student, and he could easily become impatient with Lowell’s grand historical perspectives. Grey Gowrie, who sometimes dined with Lowell and the Kennedys (Jackie and Bobby), believed that “Bobby was rather funny about Cal. He sort of admired him but at the same time he thought his politics were absolutely bananas. But that was in late ’66 and Cal was reasonably bananas at that time.”33 He also thought that Lowell was slightly envious of Bobby’s effortless charisma. And an anecdote related by William Vanden Heuvel, a Kennedy campaign aide in 1968, does rather comically ring true:
[Bobby] and Lowell discussed The Education of Henry Adams. Bobby said he found it a boring book and pulled it off a bookshelf. Robert Lowell took it and proceeded to read the part of it that describes the funeral of John Quincy Adams—which is a very moving and eloquent chapter of the book. Bobby suddenly got up and excused himself. Lowell followed him right to the door of the bathroom, still reading. Bobby shut the door and said “If you don’t mind.” Lowell said: “If you were Louis XIV you wouldn’t mind.”34
It was perhaps because of such lapses of grandeur that Lowell decided to stick with McCarthy even after Kennedy had made his declaration. He wrote to Peter Taylor:
My heart, such as it is, will have to be with McCarthy to the end, personally and because he is much the better candidate as far as I can judge and then (this almost means most) because he hoped and dared when no other politician in the whole country hoped or dared, when there was no hope.35
And two months later, speaking for McCarthy in Oregon, Lowell—after first admitting that he personally liked and admired Kennedy—was uncharacteristically bitter about Kennedy’s “shy, calculating delay in declaring himself” and “the shaggy rudeness of his final entrance”:
And who can look forward to the return of the old new frontiersmen? They don’t look as good as they once did, after eight years. These men, tarnished with power and thirsting to return to that power. We cannot forgive Senator Kennedy for trying to bury us under a pile of gold.36
The next primary after New Hampshire was Wisconsin, and on March 22 Lowell set off for Milwaukee “with somehow a heavy heart … the odds seem set against our getting any but the two worst candidates. What a nightmare to be in all this.”37 It is not surprising that the New York Times detected a certain failure of enthusiasm in both Lowell and his candidate:
Senator McCarthy, a reader of poetry and a secret poet himself, not only feeds somewhat bemused audiences of Rotarians and dairy farmers quotations ranging from Walt Whitman to an ancient Irish bard named Caduc the Wise, but also has traveling with him an authentic poet, the distinguished Robert Lowell of Harvard.
When candidates speed from town to town, they usually spend their time in close conversation with aides about the peculiar characteristics and problems of the next stop, rehearsing the names and sensitivities of the important local politicians.
But not Gene McCarthy. He rides with Robert Lowell, whose knowledge of politics extends no further than the Guelphs and Ghibellines in 14th-century Florence and whose total interest in the campaign is embraced by his statement: “I am for peace.”
Arcadians both, Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Lowell discuss poetry and divert themselves with a kind of “in” conversation, of which the following is a sample:
LOWELL: Can they draft monks?
McCARTHY: No.
LOWELL: Well, that’s a loophole.
McCARTHY: Do you suppose we could get some bishop to give all our student supporters minor orders?38
This kind of levity was, of course, thoroughly disquieting to McCarthy’s fervent aides: “We tried to keep Lowell from McCarthy at very crucial times because we always thought he took the edge off. Every time Lowell and McCarthy would get together, Lowell, or so we thought, would convince McCarthy that really he was above all this.” At times, they would book McCarthy into hotels under a false name, “to hide him, not from the press but from people … like Robert Lowell.” But Lowell “had a very good nose” and would invariably track him down.39 McCarthy himself still chucklingly recalls the day he kept James Reston waiting for an interview: he was deep in literature and jokes with Lowell “and could not be disturbed”;40 for the aides, he remembers, this was almost the unforgivable last straw. Lowell might later have been blamed for distracting McCarthy from his duties, but it is evident that the senator was a more than willing collaborator in these truancies.
Several accounts picture the two of them as chortling naughty boys, and Lowell’s most convinced tribute to McCarthy later on was to the “brilliance” of his jokes. As for McCarthy, his fondest memory is of Lowell inventing the slogan “Porky Pig is for Lyndon”; “and everywhere we went he kept pointing out these empty lots and saying: ‘That would be a great place for one of my Porky Pig billboards.’”41
On March 31, 1968, Lyndon Johnson threw the whole contest into magnificent confusion by announcing that he would not be seeking reelection. It was now McCarthy versus Kennedy—and the winner would almost certainly face Hubert Humphrey in August. McCarthy had a walkover in Wisconsin, and defeated Kennedy in Oregon, but the key confrontation, it was generally believed, would come in California in June. Lowell joined the McCarthy entourage at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, having already—it seems—formed the view that if McCarthy lost in California, “his people should support Kennedy and vice versa.” Without consulting McCarthy, Lowell arranged a meeting with Kennedy, who was staying in the same hotel. Arthur Schlesinger, in his biography of Kennedy, records:
They had a fairly unsatisfactory talk. Kennedy, in Lowell’s view, was making debater’s points. Lowell said: “You mustn’t talk to me this way.” Kennedy said mildly that he guessed there was not much more to say. Lowell said: “I wish I could think up some joke that would cheer you up, but it won’t do any good.” Afterward, he told McCarthy: “I felt like Rudolf Hess parachuting into Scotland.”42
McCarthy and Kennedy were about to face each other in a televised debate; the McCarthy camp believed this to be the crucial test and were anxious that their candidate should at least seem to take it seriously. Again, though, the memoirists recall that Lowell’s presence was disruptive:
