by Ian Hamilton
“Point taken,” Lowell answered. He continued talking about “Ulysses and Circe”: “It’s wonderful to write about a myth especially if what you write isn’t wholly about yourself.”
“You’re treating us like a classroom,” the young man now called.
“That’s nice,” said Lowell, “because I am a teacher.” He continued reading, but not for long.
“Please don’t talk to me while I’m trying to read,” Lowell begged, peering over his glasses at the young man.
“Near the end of ‘Ulysses and Circe’ I believe when the old hero and Penelope were sitting down naked at table …” “I’ll applaud that,” the young hero shouted, shuttling his baby to his wife.
Several called shut up.
“Don’t tell me to shut up,” the young man said.
“Lord, this is not good,” Lowell muttered, and the mike caught mild consternation in his voice.
Looking like an extremely good-natured if brown-bearded Santa Claus, Allen Ginsberg said, “Perhaps we should all tell him to shut up.”
The crowd yelled: “Shut up.”
The baby cried.
“It was quiet,” the father said. “It woke the baby.”
Lowell said, “We’re having a happening.”
The baby cried, but not very hard.
“My son is happy, my son is laughing,” the father said. Someone persuaded the little family to leave. First Dad held his boots up to an amused and friendly crowd. He needed time to put them back on.
When Lowell finished “Ulysses and Circe” he was given a long standing ovation. Afterwards scores of young people crowded round him and Allen Ginsberg holding up their books, letters, fragments of paper for their autographs. Lowell, sweating, his eyes tired and even wild, enclosed by a mob of eager faces and hands, protested.
“I’m afraid this will have to be the last. My fingers are giving out.”31
The “young man” who heckled Lowell was in fact Gregory Corso, the renowned Beat poet, who in the early 1960s was often mentioned as an “alternative” to Lowell. All in all, the evening sealed an amiable truce between the Palefaces and the Redskins, the cooked and the raw. Before returning to Cambridge, Lowell had a premature birthday party with Hardwick and Harriet at West 67th Street. They gave him a laurel wreath. On March 1 he would be sixty.
*
Lowell’s sixtieth birthday coincided with news from Blackwood that Milgate had been sold, and that she had taken an apartment in a huge Georgian stately home at Castletown, near Dublin. The house was the headquarters of the Irish Georgian Society, and most parts of it were open to the public. Desmond Guinness, Lady Caroline’s cousin and the Society’s president, had suggested that she rent one of the house’s small private apartments; for tax purposes, it was sensible for her (and perhaps for Lowell also) to establish residence in Ireland—and for Blackwood, certainly Castletown offered a convenient interim arrangement. According to friends, Lowell complained that the sale of Milgate had gone through without any consultation: “After all, it had been their home together. But she just sold it, and said she was moving to Castletown for reasons of taxes and all that.” To Blackwood, though, he wrote:
What strikes me in this order is the teenager flat, the likeness to the Louvre (a vague feeling that we will live there as old royal Louvre pensioners, and the nearness of the Liffey)….
But it has taken away a huge, undefined vagueness, my only way since I left of imagining our future—an infinite stairway of Dunster House cafeteria dining halls.32
He agreed to join Blackwood and the children at Castletown for Easter (March 31 to April 10), and on March 18 he wrote to her again:
I love you so much and I wish I could do everything for you. What did you mean on the phone that I had nearly lost you? I am excited about the house. But do you really want me back? Sometimes, you sound indifferent. I’m not, though my voice may sound low and subdued coming from so far.33
But the Easter visit was not a success, and on his return to Cambridge, Lowell told friends that he had decided that the marriage should be ended. Castletown he had found isolated and overpowering; too large-scale for any sort of convincing domesticity (although the apartment itself was, in relation to the whole, distinctly poky) and too far from Dublin to promise even a rudimentary social life: “It meant making sort of state arrangements to, say, meet the Heaneys for lunch. It wasn’t a viable life at all, he didn’t feel.” And of his marriage, he believed now that it couldn’t work. Helen Vendler saw Lowell often after his return from Ireland and she says:
he was in great distress about it, in that he represented himself as being still in love with her—a state he certainly gave a very good imitation of. He had a picture of her in his room, the one in a gondola, and would stop very often, looking at it and saying, “Isn’t she beautiful? Have you ever seen anyone more beautiful? Doesn’t she have a wonderful face?” But he simply said that life with her was impossible, because of what they were like together. He didn’t blame her. There wasn’t any recrimination or ill-speaking of her. He almost spoke of her as though she were a child, haplessly gone wrong, almost, and that there was no way he could live in the turbulence of their mutual life. But he had obviously never fallen out of love with her. Lizzie was talking to him every day. She called up when I was there one day, and he said, “Helen Vendler’s here, I’m showing her my new poem,” and talked to her in the most affectionate and old-shoe sort of terms. He was extremely grateful to her for being willing to take him back. He said that.34
Lowell’s poem “Last Walk?”—with its “Liffey, torrential, wild, accelerated to murder,” its “Explosion is growing common here”—tells something of Lowell’s Easter dramas. A more direct and powerful statement, though, is made in “Seesaw”:
The night dark before its hour—
heavily, steadily,
the rain lashes and sprinkles
to complete its task—
as if assisting
the encroachments of our bodies
we occupy but cannot cure.
Sufferer, how can you help me,
if I use your sickness
to increase my own?
Will we always be one up, the other down,
one hitting bottom, the other
flying through the trees—
seesaw inseparables?35
Certainly this is close in tone and substance to the letters Lowell wrote to Blackwood after his return from Ireland:
I don’t know what to say, our problems have become so many-headed and insuperable. Nothing like the sunshine of the years we had together—when it shone, as so often—so blindingly.
(April 14)
Us? Aren’t we too heady and dangerous for each other? I love you, am more dazzled by you, than anyone I’ve known, but can’t I be a constant visitor? Then there will be no wrinkles to steam-iron out. Ireland seems so far from home and help … who and what I know, though a kind of paradise to come to with you and Sheridan and all the girls there, and the big winey dinner in big rotting house.
(April 19)
And us? I really feel too weak and battered by it all. I fear I do you more harm than good. I think your blackness would pass if you didn’t live in fear of manic attacks. And they don’t seem curable—almost thirty years. How’s that for persistence? I miss you sorely.
(April 22)
[In Ireland] … in a way you are nearer to your neighbours and a part of your past. But how lonely and dark it might become. But of course I know nothing about what is going on in your heart.
(April 30)
Shortly after writing this last letter, Lowell spoke on the telephone with Blackwood, and she suggested joining him in Cambridge. On May 3 he wrote:
Dearest—
I’m writing about three or four hours after your call—in great confusion, not knowing how or what to say. I am afraid of your visit, because I am afraid nothing will be done except causing pain. How many lovely moments, weeks, months, we had. Sunday I sat
by the Charles River watching the strollers, the joggers, the sunners—and the river. And I seemed to follow it back through our seven years, the great multitude of restaurants, the moment when everyone was in the bathroom when I bathed, the long summer of your swelling pregnancy, the rush to London, the little red man’s appearance—or earlier trapped in All Souls, and a thousand things more. But the last two years have been terrifying for us both—and neither of us have made it any better for the other. It hasn’t been a quarrel, but two eruptions, two earthquakes crashing.
Well, we should talk … always. I really can’t do anything till June in New York or the end of May here, or I could visit Ireland mid-or later summer. I feel you ended things during my Irish visit, ended them wisely and we can’t go back. I have had so much dread—the worst in my life—that I would do something, by my mere presence I would do something to hurt you, to drive you to despair. Who knows cause….
Five days later, Blair Clark set down some “notes for a never-to-be-written ‘memoir’”:
About three weeks ago I had lunch with Cal at the Italian Pavilion. He was back a couple of weeks from an Easter-break visit to Ireland and was down from Harvard for a day or two. He soon said that he guessed his marriage was over. He had gone to the two apartments in a castly place that Caroline had moved to, apparently (according to Eliz.) without asking him, after the Bearstone [sic] place was sold. They seem still to have a kind of access to the London flat though there are complications about the occupancy; there is nothing as straight as a lease, as usual for tax reasons. Cal’s description of the Irish place was that it was near lots of Guinness relatives and that there was much visiting back and forth and parties for the children, and thus pleasant for them though not his kind of life.
About Caroline he said that she could not take his manic periods, that they frightened and exhausted her. I had the impression that she was at least as much for the end of the marriage as he was. He rather quickly said that he was sort of moving back with Lizzie, and could he have the apartment on the third floor back, the one I’ve been renting since last Sept. from Eliz. I said of course he could and when did he want it. Soon, he said, and he was going to Maine this summer with Lizzie and Harriet.
We talked about children and he said that now Harriet was someone he could talk with, that he never had been much interested in children when they were young. I tried my notions of why even small children are fascinating, as I have before, but he doesn’t see it that way. It isn’t rejection, he just finds them boring, totally incomprehensible beings.
In all this Cal’s tone was quite flat, as if he were talking of someone else’s life. Something he said gave the impression that he still had romantic-erotic feelings about Caroline. About Eliz. he talked of what they had in common, mainly literature but also Harriet. He did not talk as if he were formally “going back to her”; it was some other kind of arrangement, looser, vaguer.36
Since his April lunch with Lowell, Clark had talked with him again about Blackwood’s suggested visit; he “had done everything to discourage her from coming, telling her on the phone that the marriage couldn’t be ‘mended.’”
In May, Lowell was to receive a $10,000 award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Lady Caroline told him that she wanted to attend the ceremony with him. Lowell was reluctant, but according to a friend,
Caroline insisted on coming over for that. She spent about a week in New York and insisted he stay with her in a hotel. It was absolute hell on earth, because she was doing everything to get him back and he was not saying yes. He was really quite afraid that she would kill herself. But she didn’t and she went back to England.
By this time, it seems, the “impossibility” was clear to both of them. Blackwood’s fear of Lowell’s mania was such that she could barely distinguish “health” from “sickness”; any sign of excitement, high-spiritedness, was now a possible symptom. For example, in several letters to Blackwood, Lowell referred to an incident in which Sheridan had corked a moustache onto his upper lip in imitation of a Hitler he had seen on television. Jestingly—in cheery one-line throwaways—Lowell would say, “I am trying to find a genuine Mein Kampf with a young photograph of Hitler to checkmate Sheridan,” or—with reference to a postcard he had sent his son—“Hitler cards are unattainable.” For Blackwood, the mere mention of Hitler was a danger sign; thus, an otherwise quite sensible letter would take on a threatening glow. The constraint that this imposed on Lowell was intolerable; on the other hand, Blackwood could not simply unlearn the traumas of the last two years. Lowell wrote to her in July 1977:
a voice inside me says all might be well if I could be with you. And another voice says all would be ruin, and that I would be drowned in the confusion I made worse. If I were to get sick in Ireland? But here it can all be handled. But it’s the effect my troubles have on you. It’s like a nightmare we all have in which each motion of foot or hand troubles the turmoil it tries to calm.37
Lowell wrote this letter after returning from a ten-day visit to Russia as a member of an American delegation to the Union of Soviet Writers in Moscow; Elizabeth Hardwick was also in the delegation, along with Edward Albee, William Styron, Norman Cousins (editor of the Saturday Review), Vera Dunham, a professor of Slavic languages, and Leo Gruliow, editor of Current Digest of the Soviet Press. A bizarre way for Lowell and Hardwick to be reunited, remembering the circumstances at Yaddo in 1948, but neither of them took seriously the proposal that they were now furthering Soviet-American relations; the discussions mainly would be about copyright laws, Lowell thought, and therefore of not much interest to a poet. William Styron recalls:
Cal (and, I think, Lizzie) seemed as skeptical as I about the fruitfulness of the trip but it could be regarded as a nice all-expenses-paid-for junket to a new and fascinating country, so we set off in fairly good spirits. Before we got to Moscow I enjoyed seeing two examples of Cal’s disregard for convention—a nonconformity which I had seen him display before and which I really admired. Cal chain-smoked … and on the Boeing 747 we were seated in a nonsmoking section. Cal smoked anyway, much to the annoyance and finally the fury of a nonsmoker whose protests to the stewardesses were of no avail. Cal referred to this man contemptuously as an “environmentalist,” and kept smoking the entire way to Frankfurt, despite all efforts on the part of the staff to make him stop. I was rather tickled by his obstinacy; after all, it was Pan American which had made the mistake in seating, and he was standing by his rights.38
Lowell’s other small rebellion was against a “rather fussy bureaucrat” from the Kettering Foundation (which was paying for the trip); the bureaucrat had told the writers that the hotel they were staying at in Frankfurt was very expensive and that they “should display caution and discretion in ordering, especially meals”:
no one was more insulted by the edict than Cal. To my great delight, Cal led a revolt in the restaurant and, in clear sight of the man in question, ordered four of the most sumptuous and expensive bottles of white German wine that any of us had ever tasted. It was a clear victory of individual choice over bureaucracy.39
In Moscow, however, Styron remembers Lowell as “tired and melancholy”; and to another delegate—Nathan Scott, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia—he seemed “utterly spent and exhausted.” At the discussion sessions he said little; according to Scott, Lowell made one short speech in which “having been more than a little tried by some harangue that we’d been listening to, he reminded our Russian hosts of Auden’s word about poetry not making anything happen.”40 For Styron, Lowell did not need to say anything:
I’ll never forget how touched I was at the boring writers’ sessions when I would glance over and let my eyes rest on the brooding, sorrowing Beethovenesque head. I don’t know why that head and face so often touched me through sheer presence—so much suffering contained there, I suppose.41
From Moscow, Lowell and Hardwick made their way back to Castine, with some days in New York and Cambrid
ge, where Lowell had further heart tests at McLean’s. Frank Bidart remembers:
The doctor told him that his heart was in very good shape and that he was in very good shape and that he was much better. He was going to spend the rest of the summer working on a prose essay on New England writers.42
From Castine, Lowell wrote to Caroline Blackwood: “I talked to Bingo [Gowrie] who said you were fine; but Natalia [Blackwood’s eldest daughter] didn’t say you were fine but were on the verge of tears all day, and needed a rest. You are always with me—deep and in rapid images.”43 He would visit her in Ireland in September, he said.
Lowell stayed at Castine with Hardwick throughout the summer, and in the last week of August Frank Bidart visited him there.
I was there for, I believe, two nights. Lizzie had sold the house they had lived in together, that she had inherited from Cousin Harriet, and had redone the barn into a house. They were quite nice to each other—extremely warm and comfortable—but at the same time he seemed, emotionally, in a kind of suspended animation. I had never seen him like this. He was working in a little sort of boathouse he had rented, and he was carrying Caroline’s letters around with him in an envelope. He showed me some of them, and they were not full of vituperation and anger. They were very sort of ironic and full of jokes, and she was very much wanting him to come back. The plan was that he was going to spend a week in Ireland seeing Sheridan and Caroline, but there was absolutely no explicit purpose of going back to Caroline. He took great pleasure in the view of the harbor from the boathouse. He was, as always, working hard.44
