Robert Lowell: A Biography

by Ian Hamilton

  Do you think you might ever come over here? We could give you a wonderful brick ruin and a stocked troutstream about the width of a typewriter ribbon. England has everything you love, safe schools, no negroes, quaint old people, absolutely nutty ones our age, whiskey without ice. You could renew your old academic and ecclesiastical connections…. I miss America, and thought of coming over this spring, but it seemed too complex and jolting. It would be better probably after the baby is born. I’ve just finished another book of poems, after working frantically, sometimes six days a week….

  Caroline and I haven’t quarrelled for four months, an absolute record for me with anyone. We are both slovenly, but essentially sane.12

  The spring visit to America that Lowell planned for May was abandoned, he told Blair Clark: “I sensed the time wasn’t very lucky for visiting Lizzie and Harriet, with my mind over my shoulder back in England. I miss Harriet constantly, and Lizzie too. Perhaps almost stronger than the missing is the feeling of not seeing something through. This isn’t the kind of thing I usually bedevil myself with, but twenty years is like a full life time, one never to be filled.”13 To both Taylor and Clark he speaks of being “reborn” at fifty-four and to Clark that he feels “stunned by my good luck”:

  Caroline is in blooming health, sheer woman humanity. She looks as if we were going to have twins, but I think its just her usual swollen pregnancy…. Forgive this spring fever letter. I detect a smugness peeping through its nostalgia.14

  During the spring of 1971 Lowell had formed a friendship with the young British writer Jonathan Raban. Raban had done a glowing radio review of Notebook, and Lowell had invited him to lunch:

  Lunch was extraordinary. We started off talking about literature and going through the inevitable roster. Then I started talking about fishing, about which Cal got instantly enthusiastic. We started arranging imaginary fishing trips all over England. And then I had to come back to Redcliffe Square to read the draft of The Dolphin—I took it off with me to read in a spare room. Cal expected me to read the entire book and make suggestions in the course of an hour while he sat nervously in the next room opening the door every so often and asking me which poem I’d got to.15

  It was not until two weeks later, Raban says, that he realized Lowell “was on the edge of a manic high.” At first he had thought “he was behaving just as Robert Lowell might be expected to behave—massively enthusiastic, schoolboyish, frantically playful.” They had gone together to the London Dolphinarium on Oxford Street, and Lowell had been thrilled. On May 4 he wrote to Harriet:

  I’ve been to see two performing dolphins, Baby and Brandy, in a tank on Oxford St. They can jump twenty feet, bat a ball back to their trainer, pretend to cry for fish … bigger brained than man and much more peaceful and humorous.

  After this, Raban recalls, “he took to going down the Kings Road and buying incredibly expensive stone dolphins from places like the Antique Hypermarket, where he discovered these things were going for hundreds of pounds.” And at Blackwood’s country house, Milgate (near Bearsted in Kent), he arranged for dolphins to be placed “at either side of the front door, dolphins in the garden, dolphins as hatstands”:

  Dolphins were his high obsession at that time. What was interesting about it was that it was a manic attack which this time he fought off. This was early in his relationship with Caroline; she was two or three months pregnant, I think. Cal was able to hold off the mania by some kind of effort of will—hitting the brink of it and being able to voluntarily draw back, in a way he wasn’t able to later. They were both treating each other with a sense of each other’s fragility. I mean, Cal holding himself back because he saw the panic in Caroline, and Caroline in a way holding herself back from her thing, from her fear of Cal. They treated each other with an almost drunken delicacy, and you could feel a massive amount of self-restraint on both sides, and terror—terror that if one of them flipped, the whole thing would crash. It was a rather remarkable time, because I think it was almost the first manic attack Cal had which he actually fought off—sort of saw through to the end without actually going over the top. So the obsession was with dolphins—it never got into great men. Which was a triumph.16

  In July 1971 Raban accompanied Lowell on a trip to the Orkneys. Blackwood’s cousin, Gareth Browne, owned a recording company that specialized in poets reading their own work, and had arranged a recording session with Orkney poet George Mackay Brown. Lowell and Raban were invited to join Browne’s “entourage”; for Lowell it was an opportunity for a genealogical adventure—he would track down the source of the “Spence negligence,” make contact with a line in his ancestry that had always intrigued and amused him. As soon as he arrived he became “enormously excited”:

  We got a car to take us to Stromness, which is about twenty miles from the airport, and on the way Cal leant over the seat and said to the driver: “I’m Robert Traill Spence Lowell.” The driver just grunted. And Cal said, “Do you know the Traills or the Spences?” And the driver said, “Yes.” Absolutely tightlipped. Cal was terrifically excited: you know, Where are the Spences, where are the Traills? And the driver—he could obviously see a rich American and didn’t want to lose his custom, but, at the same time, clearly, the Spences and the Traills had utterly disgraced themselves, they were the most terrible people to be associated with.17

  When they reached Stromness, Lowell continued his researches; he went into shops and post offices and asked, “Do you know any people around here called Spence or Traill?” The response was always monosyllabic and suspicious:

  I think they’d been rack-rent landlords and had fled the country with money that had properly belonged to Orkney—or something like that. Anyway, it was absolutely clear that the Spences and the Traills had disgraced themselves in Orkney. It was total shame.18

  Lowell might have failed to dig out his own niche in British history, but in July—on his return from the Orkneys—he was rather pleased to find himself equipped with at least the trappings of a social “rank”: he had been promoted to the role of country squire. Blackwood had decided to move from London to her country house, and on July 25 Lowell wrote contentedly to Clark:

  In the last weeks we’ve been moving permanently to the country. We’ll keep part of Redcliffe Square to visit, but all will be here: the younger children’s school (the oldest is off to boarding school) my commuting to Essex. Already one feels reborn. Our child too will be born here. No more weekly full family stampedes from London to Kent, and now it will be possible to put this house in reasonable shape. And so on. Up till now we were really sort of half-camping in two houses. Also it attenuates our uneasy closeness with poor Israel [Citkovitz, still legally married to Blackwood and, of course, the father of the three young girls]. The pregnancy and birth and first months will be worlds easier for Caroline. We are already interviewing couples.19

  Milgate was, he said, fifty miles or so from London, “an hour by train from London and about two hours door to door from Essex”; for Lowell it was a British Castine, with some eccentric old-world extras. He described the surrounding terrain as “a mixture of Connecticut semi-suburban and Pennsylvania professional farming” and the house itself as “early eighteenth-century Palladian and very old-South messy”; the gently crumbling interior and the blithely overgrown fields and gardens in which the house was set presented a comic and endearing challenge to his “New England creed that morality is tidiness.” In August he wrote to Philip Booth, who was still summering in Castine:

  After the first grindings, I think we are all much calmer, much happier than two years ago. But Peter Taylor wrote me (humorously) count no man happy till he’s in his coffin. I think of Lizzie and Harriet hourly, yet the strain of the motor was shaking us all screwloose. Climate here is much like Castine, clouds by day and fires by night; I can see drifting sheep and cattle from my desk; this morning, two grouse on the walk—some of the same visitors, Blair, McCarthy, Bob Silvers—still, no ocean, no many summers-tried neighbours.20
/>   All in all, though, Lowell enjoyed playing squire at Milgate: “He loved the idea,” says Raban, “of being a gentleman with his own estates who lived in a house that had once belonged to the original Rosicrucian [Robert Fludd, 1574–1637], with all this eighteenth-century furniture and a desk looking out over a kind of Kent that Robert Lowell, squire and poet, might well have actually owned, as far as the eye could see. There was a terrific glamour in that for him.”21

  The squire, however, still had to earn his living, and Lowell was beginning to find his weekly trips to Essex University a slightly tiresome chore. In relation to Milgate, geographically, Colchester was nothing like as well placed as he describes it in his letters, although he did have a jokily simplified notion of the map of England:

  He thought of England as totally circular. All places were simply beyond the other place. The starting point was London and then England was a direct straight line and all places were simply spread out on that line. Milgate was 40 miles away from London and Colchester was 60 miles from London—so Colchester must be 20 miles beyond Milgate.22

  In fact, to get to Colchester from Kent by rail meant an hour’s train ride to London, a change of stations, and then another hour’s ride out of London. The trip from door to door could easily take more than four hours, and even by chauffeur-driven car (a method sometimes resorted to by Lowell), it was an irksome journey. His real grumble, though, with the University of Essex was the low caliber of the students; he found most of them “inaudible and polite and sluggish”:

  when I ask an Essex student if he doesn’t think that Act Two Scene Four in Lear has most of the play’s struggles, the students start mutely mumbling their text. How do you teach, if the students don’t do your work? So, in life, in all things.23

  Professor Edwards confesses that “academically, I don’t know that you could call the arrangement a great success. I was very conscious that Essex wasn’t Harvard and embarrassed that half our students hadn’t even heard of him.”24 And Dudley Young, a colleague with whom Lowell often lodged on his one or two nights at Essex, says:

  The students were brash, unbuttoned and street-wise; and though suspicious of anyone as old or as famous as Lowell, they enjoyed telling him [Bob] Dylan’s stuff was more important (an argument he would engage with some ferocity).25

  According to Young, Lowell’s “radical credentials, which would have appeared impeccable in 1967, were by then looking dubious to many”; also, several of Lowell’s admirers on the faculty were uneasy about the Notebook poems. Edwards agrees: “I didn’t much like the poetry he was writing at the time; it wasn’t to my mind anything like as good as the poetry that made us invite him.” Dudley Young, in his own words “a stripling of 30 and unquestionably hippoid,” recalls nightly “blow-outs”:

  Evening festivities in the first year were variously attended, by staff and students, and were not unlike those conducted by Delmore Schwartz, as transcribed by Bellow’s Humboldt. At sub-manic velocity the man was truly amazing, the range dazzling, the anecdotes endless and funny and fine. To bring us back from high talk, or just to silence some bore, he would ask Deg, my sagacious labrador, lying by the fire, what he thought; and there would follow a doggy discourse, regal and hilarious, usually along the line of “What fools these mortals be.” Cal loved the dog, and these bouts of ventriloquism were altogether magical. But often, as the evening progressed the speed increased; and the monomania would sound, the language come unstuck, and we’d all go to pieces. With any luck it would then be bedtime.

  Beneath the fun, never far away, was the seriousness; for they were seriously crazy times. Gradually, a resistance to milord’s monomania developed amongst us, particularly in me, his manservant, more exposed to it than anyone else.26

  There are others at Essex who recall Lowell’s oppressive monologues, his rudeness and egotism; and even those who liked and valued him would not pretend that he had “fitted in.” Gabriel Pearson, one of Lowell’s best critics and a member of the Essex faculty, describes him as “seeming always submarine, as if he was looking out at the world through the windows of a fishtank,”27 and Philip Edwards’s most vivid recollection is of a myopic, displaced figure:

  I can picture him now getting to the top of a flight of stairs in the university, gazing suspiciously to right and left, failing to recognize any landmarks and inevitably taking the wrong direction. We took him down to the saltings on the Colne estuary and he looked about him and said it reminded him of the coast of Maine.28

  In his first term at Essex, in the late fall of 1970, Lowell found he had an extra student in one of his classes: Martha Ritter had indeed followed him to England. “He didn’t know I was coming. I appeared in his class. It was very dramatic. He was wearing a tie I’d given him, but he had a ring on his left finger. It was very impulsive of me, but I’d been given every reason to feel that this was going to be picking up where we left off.” Ritter too remembers Lowell as “out of place” at Essex:

  he said that he had met a woman, and he couldn’t decide whether or not to leave Lizzie. I had become a confidante, a person who he knew loved him deeply and would do anything for him. And I had lunch with him every day and we talked about which woman he should choose. It was a bit masochistic perhaps, but he was in really bad shape. So we would talk and talk and walk about the grounds of this place where nobody gave a damn about his existence, and asked him to analyze Beatle songs. It was horrible. He was aware of the pain that was being caused by this situation in me, and he was in pain himself, but I felt almost that he was dependent on me. I tried to be strong and kind, but I couldn’t handle it and finally left.29

  Sheridan Lowell was born on September 28, 1971. The last few days of Blackwood’s pregnancy were tense; in fact, she was moved by “midnight ambulance” from the local hospital in Maidstone to University College Hospital in London because of possible complications. Throughout all this drama, Lowell had “continual nosebleeds for eight days” and in the end was himself sent to the hospital for tests: “It’s my old wavery blood pressure … the blood goes high then drops—not with inner anguish but mysteriously. I guess it’s not too serious. Like me.”

  During the week of Sheridan’s birth, Lowell had a letter from Hardwick, which suggested that she had by now heard rumors about a “new book of poems” that made use of her letters, cables, and so on: during the summer, Lowell had shown the manuscript of Dolphin to several of his American summer visitors, and had asked advice about the rights and wrongs of publishing such intimate material. On September 29 he wrote back to Hardwick:

  I only partly understand your second paragraph about “recent shocks.” One of course is my book, but it doesn’t have a publication date, need not come out ever. It’s not defamatory, it’s like your Notebook, probably less astringent. My story is both a composition and alas, a rather grinding autobiography, what I lived, though of course one neither does or should tell the literal or ultimate truth. Poetry lies. I’ll send it to you if you wish (when it’s in neater shape), you won’t feel betrayed or exploited but I can’t imagine you’ll want to scrape through the sadness and breakage now.30

  He wrote again, on the same matter, two days later:

  Whatever you do, don’t burn your Notebook!31 I hope to live in it long after I’m dirt. What you showed me was some of your tenderest, and easiest writing. I wrote you that mine need not be published ever. It won’t be published, but kept. I won’t burn all but a few blue parts, so you mustn’t. Maybe in calmer times we can publish the two books in one volume. I think in years to come, if we are still here, my poems will seem less disturbing to you. It’s my best (last) work maybe—isn’t an author always his own best critic? Particularly of a lately finished book.32

  During the next week Lowell added more poems to The Dolphin, and was more and more tempted to at least toy with the possibility of publication. In December he wrote to Frank Bidart:

  Could you come here after Christmas or early January: Here’s the agenda, as Pound would s
ay. My new book, the Dolphin about eighty poems, shorter than when you saw it, but with many new poems (it now ends in a long pregnancy and birth (one poem) sequence) everything endlessly rewritten, and about 40 poems about England statuary, demos, etc. taken out, not because they are bad but because they clog the romance 2. To find something to do with the rejected poems; they can’t be a narrative, but could have a mounting drive of similarity. 3. Here’s where I need you most: I’ve tried to reduce Notebook to personal narrative. Mostly the Historic, the metaphysical and the political go, though it keeps bits of each, then go the personal poems that fit well enough but are inflated, uninspired or redundant. I’ve done a sort of jerrybuilt first draft, and am not sure whether it works (half my new revision will go? etc) You can see how your advice and care would be unique and invaluable. This all began by trying to get round the mounting pressure on me not to publish The Dolphin (for moral reasons) And indeed, it must wait.33

  Bidart arrived at the beginning of January and “ended up staying, I think, six weeks.” By 1972 Lowell literally had more poems than he knew what to do with, and had also massively revised the whole of Notebook; for two years, he had been carrying around his copy of the English edition of Notebook and “he had been writing, in pencil, corrections and revisions and possible changes all over these poems, on every single page.” He had become dissatisfied, according to Bidart, with the “aesthetic” of the book, its “whole desire for immediacy”:

  The aesthetic of Notebook had been very much connected to the whole desire for immediacy. It’s not that [in 1967–68] he was interested in disposable poetry—but there had been that feeling that art can be much more connected to fleeting feelings, insights, perceptions, marginal half-thoughts and how all these bear down on one’s life…. But I think that he was not at all happy with that aesthetic. And also he was simply not happy with the writing.34