Robert Lowell: A Biography

by Ian Hamilton

  Lowell arrived at All Souls on April 24, and wrote to Hardwick: “Here I am … a half lost soul in All Souls.” He had “eaten in gown … and handled a 14th century psalm book.”4 A few days later he was no less bemused: “The second sex doesn’t exist at All Souls. I feel fourteen again. Vacationing at St. Mark’s…. But there’s so much I like here; it’s an education, for what?”5 And later still: “All Souls is elderly and stiff, yet a pleasant seat on the sidelines to watch the storm.”6

  On April 30 there was to be a party at Faber and Faber in Lowell’s honor, and he had been asked to prepare a guest list of his English friends: “Jonathan Miller, the Gowries, the Alvarezes, the Isaiah Berlins, the William Empsons, the Stephen Spenders”—he suggested twenty or so names. And a few days before the party, Lowell invited another London acquaintance—Lady Caroline Blackwood, a close friend for some years of the New York Review’s Robert Silvers, and a friend also of the Gowries: she too was of Irish aristocratic background,7 a member of the wealthy Guinness clan (although, as Lowell later wrote, she “loathes the stout which was fed her as nourishment as a child”).8

  Blackwood was thirty-eight, had been married to the painter Lucien Freud, and her second husband, with whom she had three daughters, was the musician Israel Citkovitz. Her own gifts, though, were literary. She had contributed articles and stories to Encounter and the London Magazine, and Lowell may well have come across her work; for example, in the 1959 issue of Encounter, which published C. P. Snow’s “The Two Cultures,” Philip Larkin’s “The Whitsun Weddings” and Auden on Hannah Arendt, there had been a witty piece by Caroline Freud about “the Beatnik”:

  Supposedly revolutionary, the ‘Beatnik Movement’ is unique in that it enjoys the recognition, support and succour of the very society whose dictates it pretends to flout. It has all the trappings of the subversive, the meeting in the darkened cellar, the conspiratorial whisper behind the candle in the chianti bottle, the nihilistic mutter, without the mildest element of subversion. No one in the future, when filling in an official form, will ever be made to swear that they have never been a Beatnik.9

  She ends with an acid portrayal of Lawrence Lipton, the Beat “Grand Lama,” at his pad in Venice West, Los Angeles: Lipton philosophizes, and Lady Caroline transcribes, and every so often, “we had a long silence” … “Once again we had a silence,” and

  As I was leaving, ‘The Lama’ stood in the doorway of his shack. ‘We have many Artists down here in Venice West’, he said, ‘all of them living in dedicated poverty. Some of them are among the most creative talents in America. I should very much like you to have a look at them. I will telephone you as soon as I have arranged to have you shown round their pads’. Suddenly I became cool, visionary. I saw that ‘The Lama’ had already, mystically, ruthlessly, appointed my future Duties. He had ordained how my life from then on was to be spent. Like a Florence Nightingale. Or a conscientious inspector of an Insane Asylum. Making daily rounds of condemned Artists in padded cells.10

  In October 1959, not long after Lady Caroline completed her appraisal of Beat poetry readings in L.A., Lowell had been awarded an odd prize in London: a prize awarded annually by the brewing family’s own poet, Bryan Guinness, otherwise Lord Moyne, and a cousin of the Blackwoods. Lowell’s response to the Guinness Poetry Prize was almost as sardonic as Lady Caroline’s view of the U.S. avant-garde: “I much admire the Guinness people’s belief in the occasion; they seemed quite surprised that I wouldn’t be there—jetted in perhaps. I feel in touch with some old tradition, such as Ben Jonson’s bottle.”11

  Some seven years later Lowell and Blackwood met for the first time in New York. As with the “Grand Lama,” Blackwood remembers the event chiefly for its “silences”:

  when I was with Bob [Silvers], he used to take me to dinner at West 67th Street. And I couldn’t speak. I’d been told—which was nonsense—that Cal couldn’t speak about anything except poetry. That was the legend about him: everything else bored him. If you know that about anyone, it’s terrifying. So there were these ghastly silences. I thought it was better, if he only wanted to talk about poetry, not to talk at all—better than to say, “Do you like Housman?” or that kind of thing. So I just used to sit absolutely silent. I was always put next to him. And it used to be my dread. To break the silence once, I said I admired the soup. And he said, “I think it’s perfectly disgusting.” And then we had a silence.12

  The dinners were during one of Lowell’s manic periods, and Blackwood remembers that “a day or two after one of these dinners, I nearly ran him over”:

  I was in a taxi in New York, and suddenly there was a frightful swerve and I looked round and there was Cal. He’d stepped right in front of my taxi. He was just weaving through the traffic, looking neither to the right nor the left—cars screaming and screeching. And I felt very concerned for him—it was so dangerous. I remember thinking, He’s not going to last very long, and feeling awfully sad.13

  It was therefore with less than total enthusiasm that she accepted Lowell’s invitation to the Faber party; she went, though, and that night Lowell stayed at her apartment:

  After the Faber party, he moved into Redcliffe Square—I mean instantly, that night. He had this fantasy that Bob Silvers had given him my telephone number because he wanted Cal and me to get married. Of course, that was the last thing Bob wanted. But Cal persisted with that fantasy always—that this was fate, organized by Bob.14

  For much of the next month, Lowell and Lady Caroline conducted their romance in semi-secret. She recalls clandestine visits to All Souls—“this place that was secret to men”—and trips to Ireland and the Lake District. Hardwick meanwhile was waiting in New York for news of the London accommodation that Lowell was meant by now to have arranged. On May 17, he wrote to Blair Clark, from All Souls:

  Time whizzes by here as everyone told me it must—with scarcely time to write letters of refusal to the things I can’t do. We’ve decided to move here for a year or two. I’ll teach at Essex and live in London, Harriet and Lizzie will live in London and I’ll commute. Almost the same salary, subjects, time etc. as Harvard…. Lizzie will come over about the tenth or twelfth to strengthen my dawdling house-hunting.

  Things seem rasped and low in America, and here I sigh gladly into the somewhat different air. I’m thankful to get away for a stretch.15

  On May 26, though, he was writing defensively to Hardwick:

  What’s up? Such boiling messages, all as public as possible on cables and unenclosed postcards. It’s chafing to have the wicked, doddering, genial All Souls porter take down your stinging cable. It matters not: everything must be pressing you this moment in New York.16

  It was the end of June before Hardwick—in Robert Giroux’s words—“learned the worst.” He wrote to Charles Monteith:

  It was the uncertainty and the worry about Harriet that was hardest for her to take. The next day she learned (from friends of theirs in London) the name of the person with whom he is staying. “I had to burst out laughing,” she said. She thinks from this and other evidence that Cal is probably ill, and she is consulting his doctor. She called him [Lowell] next day and described his telephone manner as low-keyed, “not vindictive and even solicitous.”17

  For a week or so, however, she sent further “boiling messages.” Did he realize, she wanted to know, the damage he had done: Harriet, for example, had no school to go to—the “safe” New York City schools were full; and as for her own work:

  I want to add my absolute horror that you two people have taken away something I loved and needed. My job at Barnard, which I tried to get back, but it is filled for this year and the budget is filled.

  … My utter contempt for both of you for the misery you have brought to two people who had never hurt you knows no bounds.18

  By the first week in July it was evident to Blackwood that Lowell was indeed “ill.” At All Souls during May and June there had been scenes that are still vividly recalled by certain Fellows—he made not altog
ether unrequited overtures to one of the dons’ wives, and his high-table conversation was rarely as poised or even coherent as it might have been—but it was still possible then to think of him as simply drunk or rather boorishly “poetic.” To Blackwood, he had seemed “very elated, but I wouldn’t then have known for certain.” The climax for her came in the first week of July:

  He locked me in the flat upstairs [Blackwood’s house in Redcliffe Square is divided into three separate apartments], and he wouldn’t let me telephone—and I had the children downstairs. But I didn’t dare go down to see them, because I knew that he’d come too. And I simply didn’t want him in the same flat as the children in the state that he was in. Neither did I want to be locked in with him. It was the longest three days of my life.19

  On July 9 Lowell was admitted to Greenways Nursing Home in London’s St. John’s Wood. Hardwick was telephoned by Mary McCarthy (from Paris; McCarthy had heard the news from Sonia Orwell). On July 17 Sonia Orwell telephoned Blair Clark: “Dr. says if Caroline will take resp. he can leave nursing home. Caroline in Ireland—confidentially, Caroline is through.”20

  Shortly after Lowell was admitted to Greenways, Blackwood sent a note to the hospital. Lowell later quoted from it in his poem “Marriage?”: “I think of you every minute of the day; / I love you every minute of the day.”21 But she added that it would be better if she did not see Lowell or talk to him again until he had recovered. To this, Lowell replied:

  I love you with my heart and mind, what can I do, if you give me nothing to go on? I can’t crowd in on you. Let’s for God’s sake try again, cool and try. So much love should go on to something.

  P.S. If I were with you I’d do all within my defects. Can you pretend to be the same? O try!22

  Blackwood was horrified by the suggestion that Lowell might be discharged into her care; horrified for her children as well as for herself. She decided that she would simply “disappear.” She wrote to him that she might herself become ill if they remained in contact, and made it clear that before the relationship could move forward, Lowell must get well again. She loved him, certainly, but the future was a blank.

  Over the next week Lowell wrote to Blackwood once, sometimes twice a day; she arranged for him to be told that she too had had a breakdown, and this news seems to have greatly excited him: they were suffering “simultaneous sickness,” they really were meant for each other—“If we can both be well, I’ll walk the ocean. But we will be well,” and “(Sonia says) I must get well completely before you could. I take this.” On one occasion he left Greenways and went to her house in Redcliffe Square: and “so terrified the cleaning lady that she ran off and was never seen again. And that’s what his appearance did!” Throughout this week Blair Clark was recording almost daily phone calls:

  R. Silvers phone conv. with B.C. 21/7/70

  —worrisome situation: Cal was at Caroline’s in London, got cleaning woman to let him in—he was drunk—Car. can’t stand it yet doctors say he can’t be told. They won’t answer for consequences.

  E. Hardwick conv. with B.C. 21/7/70

  —“I talked to Cal about 2:30 and he said she’d had a nervous breakdown just like me and will be in hosp. for 2 weeks.”

  B. Silvers conv. with B.C. 22/7/70

  —Caroline is closing house in London—vanishing concerned that he not track her down

  —Car. quotes “I can’t take responsibility” but “hasn’t thought through what ought to happen ultimately”

  Jonathan Miller—phone conv. with B.C. 23/7/70

  Cal in limbo—no social or therap. nexus—Drs. don’t know history—Car. not going to stay with him—she’s swept along in the energy of his dissolution, not understanding that she’s part of the illness

  —he’s in “mood of curious, penitential, false meekness.”

  E.H. phone conv. with B.C. 26/7/70

  —(Cal) said as if saying he had a cold—“Trouble is that Caroline had had a nervous breakdown too”23

  On July 29 Hardwick decided she would go to London: there were reports that Lowell was able to wander out of the hospital at will, that he was drinking in the local pubs, that the doctors were incompetent, and so on. She telephoned Blair Clark:

  —made up my mind—Bill Alfred going with him [sic]—I won’t have him killed—destroyed

  —allowed to go out—in pyjamas—out to pubs—steals from handbags—(she weeps)—they don’t understand—he drinks—I’ll talk to doctors—brilliant, proud, dignified man, not an ape—

  —Car. thing is secondary: he can marry her if he wants

  —He might keel over dead, with drugs and beer

  —Bill will go to pub, cut his hair, buy him shoes—until they can control him—sit there with him. Cal is really a marvelous person, not this detached idiot—not in emotional contact with his real personality24

  Hardwick was reassured by her visit. She found Lowell heavily drugged, “hardly able to get across the street,” but she felt he was in good hands: the hospital was a real hospital, even though it had the appearance of a rather shabby-genteel private residence. She had lunch with him downtown and took him to the film Patton, which he liked a lot: he was not “saying outrageous things,” but on the other hand, there was “no rapport.” She decided to return to New York and left him a note saying: “If you need me, I’ll always be there, if you don’t, I’ll not be there.”25 And the next day Lowell wrote to her:

  You[r] last not[e] and much else that you said and have said through the yeras [sic] go through my heart. You couldn’t have been more loyal and witty. I can’t give you anything of equal value. Still much happened that we both loved in the long marriage. I feel we had much joy and many other things we had to learn. There is nothing that wasn’t a joy and told us something. Great Joy. Love. Cal.26

  Blackwood returned to London in August. Lowell was calm, she found, but “he wasn’t normal,” and she refused to allow him back to Redcliffe Square. He wrote to her:

  I assume ceteris paribus that when I am in a certain state you are too. I could come out in a week or two, if I could have a place to stay. Do come and see me, it’s the best slow step we could make. Then I’d like to have the bottom rooms. We could be together without meeting till evening.27

  But the risks still seemed too high:

  I told him he must get a flat of his own. Which he minded terribly—he was very wounded. But it was like it always was—he wasn’t all right: he was terrified of being alone. I think that was because he was terrified of being mad alone. He really couldn’t bear a night alone. But Israel [Blackwood’s estranged husband, Israel Citkovitz, who lived in one of the three Redcliffe Square apartments] said rightly, was saying, “I really don’t want a madman with the children.” I had to tell Cal that. Because Israel could have taken the children away from me.28

  Lowell rented an apartment at 33 Pont Street (about five minutes’ taxi ride from Redcliffe Square); his landlord was “a man named the Knight of Glyn, the only title of its kind in England. His mail comes addressed that way and his towels are marked K of G,”29 and on September 11 he wrote to Blair Clark:

  I am settled fairly near Caroline and we do things together, most things. I am well and not depressed. College begins early next month, and I’ll have to rub my eyes to know I’m not leading the old life. Yet I am not at all and it gives food for thought. A new alliance or marriage and a new country.30

  A month later Lowell writes again to Clark; he is planning a Christmas visit to New York but “there’s a problem whether to come with Caroline”:

  it seems callous humanly for me to arrive in New York, in Lizzie’s home city, with Caroline. Or am I being meaninglessly scrupulous? Until the divorce is made, and it looks as though it will, and that I will marry Caroline—it still remains uncertain in my mind. When friends of mine have been in this dilemma, I’ve always thought they should stop torturing themselves and everyone else, and make a quick clean severance. But it’s not easy, unless one becomes some sort of doll only
capable of fast straightforward action.31

  To Hardwick, he had been evasive, writing fond and chatty letters, but no more. On October 15 William Alfred wrote urging him to tell her “something clearcut about what you mean to do. Your letters, written in kindness though they are, only serve to deepen her conviction that you are of two minds about the years ahead. That makes her miss you more.”32 Three days later, Lowell wrote as follows:

  Dearest Lizzie,

  I don’t know whether I’ve said or written I feel like a man walking on two ever more widely splitting roads at once, as if I were pulled apart and thinning into mist, or rather being torn apart and still preferring that state to making a decision. Is there any decision still for me to make? After all I have done, can I go back to you and Harriet? Too many cuts.

  Time has changed things somewhat since we met at Greenways. I am soberer, cooler. More displeasing to myself in many little ways, but mostly about you. A copy of my new book came the other day, and I read through all the new and more heavily revised poems. A sense of the meaning of the whole came to me, and it seemed to be about us and our family, its endurance being the spine which despite many bendings and blows finally held. Just held. Many reviewers saw this, though it was something I thought pretentious and offensive to push in my preface, I saw it too. I have felt as if a governing part of my organism were gone, and as if the familiar grass and air were gone.