by Ian Hamilton
Finney [Thomas Finney, McCarthy’s chief adviser in California] was trying to brief him à la Kennedy, with little cards that let him know things that were important and would come up, and how he felt McCarthy should respond. And McCarthy was very, very good. He was going through all this and taking pieces of paper from Finney, looking at them and dropping those on the floor that he’d studied carefully. You’re never sure about McCarthy. It looked like he was attentive and interested. But then, of course, Lowell got to him fifteen minutes beforehand, and they started to drink, the two of them, and went downstairs….
McCarthy and Lowell got into the same limousine. On the way to the studio, McCarthy wanted to see Alcatraz. And so they took a detour, and McCarthy looked at the prison. He and Lowell composed, I think, a twentieth-century version of “Ode to St. Cecilia’s Day” in the backseat. So, by the time he got to the studio, yes, he was then like Henry V at Agincourt.43
McCarthy himself is dismissive of the theory that Lowell was responsible for his poor showing in the TV debate: “There was no point in preparing for that debate because you couldn’t anticipate what lies Kennedy would come up with.”44 And Blair Clark, who by a strange chance (“Cal had nothing to do with it”) had become McCarthy’s campaign manager, would also absolve Lowell from the blame:
A lot of people say that McCarthy lost the debate with Bobby Kennedy in San Francisco in May 1968 because he spent the morning joking with Cal, Mary McGrory and me in the hotel room instead of boning up on Kennedy’s record on housing. But that’s not why he lost the debate. He lost the debate out of not wanting to win it, and out of some contorted resentment of the Kennedys. That’s why he lost the debate. And it cost him California.45
Lowell had left California by June 5, the day of Robert Kennedy’s assassination, and although he continued to speak for McCarthy right through to the Democratic Convention in Chicago at the end of August, his heart does not seem to have been in it. In July, he wrote, in a speech called “For McCarthy”:
One longs for our old opponent, Senator Kennedy; Robert Kennedy had his scrappy, abrasive qualities but it was hard not to honor him, and even feel something close to ardor: he had feelings of his own, fire, the spirit of vertigo. Little of this remains in many of Kennedy’s chief lieutenants; solemnly, woodenly, they troop to Humphrey. Mr. Humphrey rubs no one the wrong way, at least personally: he goes down easily, as if he himself were one of the products of the druggist he once aspired to become.46
Four days before the Democratic Convention the Russians occupied Czechoslovakia, and McCarthy’s faint hopes were thus effectively killed off. At the convention itself, the bloody showdown between demonstrators and police was for Lowell the final, numbing irony—the “five nights of Chicago: police and mob” left him feeling “tired and had”:
The police weren’t baby-sitting at 5 a.m.:
in our staff headquarters, three heads smashed, one club;
Five days the Hilton was liberated with troops and cars—
a fallen government. The youth for McCarthy
knew and blew too much: their children’s crusade!47
And in September, with Humphrey now lined up against Nixon, and with George Wallace rather sinisterly in the wings, Lowell wrote to his Castine friend, the poet Philip Booth:
New York is insufferable, the election, the talk about the election, the depression, the frustration, the moisture,—and there’s noise twenty hours a day. Such the insight of my jaundiced eye, my jaundiced ear. Strange moods of testiness; very productive, but not sociable….
…Yet quite likely the future will be desultory, depressed and moist, and maybe peaceful. Luckily our only completely dangerous “leader” is Wallace, a man of perhaps too little articulation to win power.48
Lowell continued to speak against the war when asked, and in November 1968 was stung to engage in an acrimonious dispute with Diana Trilling in the pages of Commentary: she believed him to be “soft” on student violence (she was writing on the Columbia riots of April 1968), and he believed her to be evasive on the Vietnam war. To the “soft on students” charge, Lowell made the following reply:
I answer that I might wish to be a hundred percent pro-student, but the other morning, or some morning, I saw a newspaper photograph of students marching through Rome with banners showing a young Clark-Gable-style Stalin and a very fat old Mao—that was a salute to the glacier. No cause is pure enough to support these faces. We are fond of saying that our students have more generosity, idealism and freshness than any other group. Even granting this, still they are only us younger, and the violence that has betrayed our desires will also betray theirs if they trust to it.
I would like to tell Mrs. Trilling one thing very clearly. I had nothing to do with the student strike at Columbia. I was at Columbia just once two or three weeks before the troubles. I spoke for four or five minutes against President Johnson’s Vietnam War. I received tame applause. Also, I want to explain to her, finally I hope, that I have never been new left, old left or liberal. I wish to turn the clock back with every breath I draw, but I hope I have the courage to occasionally cry out against those who wrongly rule us, and wrongly lecture us.49
And the end of Lowell’s political adventure is tersely marked by the sonnet he calls “November 6th”: on the previous day Richard Nixon had narrowly defeated Humphrey at the polls:
Election Night, the last Election Night,
without drink, television or a friend—
wearing my dark blue knitted tie to classes …
No one had recognized that blue meant black.
My daughter telephones me from New York,
she talks New Statesman, ‘Then we’re cop-outs! Isn’t
not voting Humphrey a vote for Nixon and Wallace?’
And I, ‘Not voting Nixon is my vote for Humphrey.’
It’s funny-awkward; I don’t come off too well;
‘You mustn’t tease me, we were clubbed in Chicago.’
We must rouse our broken forces and save the country:
we often said this, now the fallen angels
open old wounds and hunger for the blood-feud
hidden like contraband and loved like whisky.50
Notes
1. R.L. to Peter Taylor, June 4, 1967.
2. R.L., interview with John Gale, Observer, March 12, 1967.
3. Robert Brustein, Making Scenes (New York: Random House, 1981), pp. 31–32.
4. Ibid. p. 31.
5. R. W. B. Lewis, Yale Daily News, May 24, 1967.
6. R.L., interview with John Gale, Observer, March 12, 1970.
7. New York Times, May 18, 1967.
8. Ibid., June 14, 1967.
9. R.L. to Peter Taylor, June 4, 1967.
10. Esther Brooks, “Remembering Cal,” in Robert Lowell: A Tribute, ed. Rolando Anzilotti (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi Editori, 1979), pp. 37–44.
11. Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night (New York: New American Library, 1968). All quoted matter concerning the event is from Mailer’s book.
12. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1982).
13. Notebook 1967–68 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), p. 27.
14. R.L., “The Poetry of John Berryman,” New York Review of Books, May 28, 1964.
15. Allen Tate to R.L., February 7, 1968 (Houghton Library).
16. Richard Stern, Tri-Quarterly 5 (Winter 1981), 270–71.
17. Ivan Illich, Celebration of Awareness (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 21.
18. Robert Silvers, interview with I.H. (1981).
19. Notebook 1967–68, “Mexico” sequence, pp. 58–63.
20. Mary to R.L., January 9, 1968 (Houghton Library).
21. Notebook 1967–68, p. 8.
22. Anonymous, interview with I.H. (1980).
23. R.L., “Day of Mourning,” New York Review of Books, February 29, 1968.
24. R.L. to Peter Taylor, March 16, 1968.
25. Jeremy Lamer, Nobody Knows (New York: Macmillan, 1969), p. 187.
26. Max Hastings, America 1968, The Fire This Time (London: Gollancz, 1969).
27. R.L. to Peter Taylor, March 16, 1968.
28. Eugene McCarthy, interview with I.H. (1980).
29. Blair Clark, interview with I.H. (1979).
30. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1978). R.L. quoted.
31. Robert Kennedy to R.L., February 18, 1966 (Houghton Library).
32. R.L. to Robert Kennedy, February 25, 1966. R.F.K. papers, in Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times.
33. Grey Gowrie, interview with I.H. (1980).
34. Jean Stein and George Plimpton (eds.), American Journey: The Times of Robert F. Kennedy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), p. 193.
35. R.L. to Peter Taylor, March 16, 1968.
36. Stein and Plimpton (eds.), American Journey.
37. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, March 22, 1968.
38. E. W. Kenworthy, “Poet and Politician Orchestrate McCarthy Overtures to Voters,” New York Times, March 29, 1968.
39. Andreas Teuber, special assistant, McCarthy campaign, quoted in Stein and Plimpton (eds.), American Journey, pp. 311–12.
40. Eugene McCarthy, interview with I.H. (1980).
41. Ibid.
42. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, pp. 910–11.
43. Andreas Teuber, quoted in Stein and Plimpton (eds.), American Journey, pp. 311–12.
44. Eugene McCarthy, interview with I.H. (1980).
45. Blair Clark, interview with I.H. (1979).
46. Ms (Houghton Library).
47. Notebook 1967–68, p. 138.
48. R.L. to Philip Booth, September 30, 1968.
49. R.L., Commentary, April 1969, p. 19.
50. Notebook 1967–68, p. 140.
21
For almost a year Lowell had been writing his fourteen-line poems at the rate of three or even four a week. By July 1968 he was talking of the “long poem” he had almost finished—“I want this book to hit with a single impact: the parts are not meant to stand by themselves”1—but it was in October 1968 that he decided that the movement of his Notebook’s plot should be from summer 1967 through the fall of 1968:
It is not a chronicle or almanac: many events turn up, many others of equal or greater reality do not. This is not my diary, my confession, not a puritan’s too literal pornographic honesty, glad to share private embarrassment, or triumph.2
Although Notebook makes much of its framework of public events—Lowell lists the year’s principal upheavals in a note at the end of the published text—and although Lowell’s own year had been hectically political, there are few poems that are explicitly “about” the headline sensations of 1967–68. Indeed, anyone reading the book now, without aid from any of the histories, would find it hard to recall even the main outlines of what happened. As Lowell notes, in explanation of his list of dates: “Dates fade faster than we do. Many in the last two years are already gone; in a year or two, most of the rest will slip.”3
The book’s real scope, of course, is the scope of Lowell’s consciousness: and here he does not provide us with a list of dates, nor does he offer many footnotes. The assumption throughout is that we will somehow know as much about his life as he does: a necessary assumption, he implies, for the purposes both of reticence and of tone. In poem after poem, there is an unbending intimacy between the poet and his addressee; Lowell uses snatches of conversation, secret jokes, idly resurrected incidents from youth and childhood, quotations from books, private letters, gossip, and “much more that I idly spoke to myself.” Having chosen his structure, Lowell gives it freedom to ingest at random. His themes—Power, Middle Age, and Art—are huge enough to seem consistently pursued; his plot—the passage of the year fitted to the chronology of his own life—is loose enough to be lost track of and picked up again at will.
It would take a whole book to annotate Notebook, and the labor would not always be worthwhile. Now and again, though, there are poems that gain hugely from some knowledge of their “background.” Here, for instance, is a sonnet called “The Next Dream”:
‘After my marriage, I found myself in constant
companionship with this almost stranger I found
neither agreeable, interesting, nor admirable,
though he was always kind and irresponsible.
The first years after our first child was born,
the daddy was out at sea; that helped, I could bask
in the rest and stimulation of my dreams,
but the courtship was too swift, the disembarkment
dangerously abrupt. I was animal,
healthy, easily tired: I adored luxury,
and should have been an extrovert: I usually
managed to make myself pretty comfortable….
Well,’ she laughed, ‘we both were glad to dazzle.
A genius temperament should be handled with care.’4
And here, from a draft of Lowell’s autobiography, is its remarkable prose source:
A few months after Mother’s death in 1954, I went through her papers and discovered a note-book written in 1937, when she had just begun to have interviews with a psychiatrist. The spelling is a miracle of inaccuracy due to ignorance, but also due to impatience. The notes soon became mere quotations from psychiatry books that Mother was reading. However, the first five or six pages are personal: they are an autobiographical sketch disguised as a third person description of Miss B.
Mother’s account shows courage and self-knowledge, and refuses to evade. Here are excerpts exactly as she wrote:
“Miss B’s father was a conscientious disciplinarian, so busy in uprooting what was bad that he destroyed and damaged much that was good. Her mother was suppressed and unhappy, rather superficial, but was completely dominated by her husband, who insisted on running everything, with constant criticism and direction.” As a child Miss B was “self-conscious, introverted, aggressive and rather deceitful.” Her Father’s discipline was “erratic but severe.” “Being a rather lonely and maladjusted child, retreated into a world of dreams and unreality, and spent an increasing amount of time in this way (Began at about 10 years, encreased [sic] till about 26, and lasted until over 40).” She was “absolutely powerful and perfect in this and resisted exeration [sic] of any kind.”
Miss B married, because she thought it was time to. She was not at all in love with the man, nor did she really admire him. But he seemed the best that was offered. She rather enjoyed his admiration, and thought she might improve him, and would be free herself, and away from the constant family frictions and quarrels, which she thought degrading.
But she also thought she was doing a very wrong thing in marrying this man whom she did not love, and often felt that she would be punished for it, as she was always punished for doing what was wrong.
After this marriage … having to live in constant companionship with this comparative stranger, whom she found neither agreeable, interesting, nor admirable, was a terrible nervous strain. She became increasingly critical and unappreciative. She wished to do nothing and see no one. She was utterly hysterical, and would have liked to die, but the idea of (Playing the game) kept her from doing it. So to the world, her family, and her friends she appeared happy and serine [sic]. She was determined not to whine and be a Coward; but what a lot of care she made for herself.
Her husband “could not understand at all, was always kind, though irresponsible; and thought her half crazy.5
For Lowell, few documents could have held more fascination; in the poem, he turns Miss B back into the first person and adds to his mother’s self-description quotations from his own memories of childhood. (For example, again in his draft autobiography, he tells that “When visitors praised Mother’s house, she would smile and answer in a cosy, humorous removed voice: ‘I usually manage to make myself pretty comfortable.’”)6 Readers without access to Lowell’s papers could hardly fathom the full weight or even rightly gauge th
e direction of this poem: who, or what, they might wonder, is the poet quoting from, and to what purpose? Although much of Notebook thrives on the neglect of such considerations, there are large stretches of it that can be altered into a new forcefulness by “biographical” support.
And there are other stretches that cannot. For example, a poem like “The Misanthrope and the Painter”—one of many that recount gnomic dialogues between we-know-not-whom—will tend to leave most readers wondering, So what? It goes like this:
‘The misanthrope: a woman who hates men.
Women are stronger, but man is smarter.’ ‘Mostly
woman hates his drinking and his women,
hates this in all men; she will not permit
Cassio to escape tragedy.’
‘Hear the artist on her fellow artist,
woman on woman?’ ‘The only way she can
repaint this one is for her to lie under a truck.’
‘I pick up lines from nothing.’ ‘I’m not nothing, Baby.
When I am in a room, Wyeth is invisible.’
‘When Rembrandt had painted the last spot of red
on his clown’s nose, he disappeared in paint.
I pick lines from trash.’ ‘I’m not garbage, Baby.
You may have joie de vivre, but you’re not twenty.’7
There is, admittedly, a comic near motto for Notebook in the exchange: “‘I pick lines from trash.’ ‘I’m not garbage, Baby.’”; but all in all what can be made of this? Who are these two people; where are they; is one of them meant to be Lowell? And so on. The “key” is provided by Sidney Nolan:
I was with Cal and this girlfriend of his in Boston, and at one point she said, “When I’m in the room, the Rothko disappears.” That’s what she said. So I said, “That isn’t fair to Rothko.” So we changed it to that realist, the famous chap who did Saturday Evening Post covers—not Rockwell. It then says, “You may have joie de vivre, but you’re not twenty-one.” That was her talking to me. The point is, she wanted me to get out of the way.8
