by Ian Hamilton
Before leaving Castine, Lowell wrote to Blackwood: “I haven’t quite lost my muse.” He tells her that he has been working on “an old piece of prose … a series of vignettes”:
Cotton Mather, Ben Franklin, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Lincoln, Wallace Stevens, Santayana—almost all New England, and worthies. I’ve got 19 pages and at worst as many again to write. Because I’m working on it, I think it my best critical prose.45
Of these essays, Hardwick says: “The work he was writing stunned me by its brilliance, the memory—for he wrote these American portraits almost without any books to go on—was a phenomenon, I thought. But then, I should not have been surprised because the saturation in the texts had been his life and the originality of his thoughts about American literature—well, that was just his beautiful, free independent intelligence still hourly, daily, there for him to call upon.”46 He had also written two poems, and he showed these to Bidart in Boston on the night before he left for Ireland. They had dinner with Helen Vendler in Lowell’s favorite Athens Olympia Greek restaurant, on the edge of Boston’s “combat zone” (or red-light district). Both Bidart and Vendler thought that Lowell was “dreading” his visit to Ireland because “he knew Caroline would be wanting him to come back. He wanted to see her and he wanted to see Sheridan, but he was very scared.” Vendler recalls seeing him off at the airport:
Frank and I put him on the plane that night. We took him to Logan Airport, and the last I saw of him he was going down the entry way to the plane clutching a big ship model. And that night, before we went out to dinner, Frank and I started talking about Dunbarton, and Cal said, “It’s in Dunbarton, but you know it’s not the same place I talk about in the poem. The cemetery has been moved because they put a dam in and the Army Corps of Engineers had to come in and move the whole private graveyard to a place that wasn’t going to be flooded” … And Frank said to me, “Let’s go up there sometime in the fall,” and Lowell said, “That’s where I’m going to be buried.” So I said, “You mean you’ve arranged it already?” And he said, “Yes, I’ve arranged everything, it’s in my will. I’ll be buried with a solemn high mass at the Church of the Advent.” I was really shocked that he would do that, and he was immensely amused at my anticlericalism, so to speak, and he said: “That’s how we’re buried.” Meaning the family.47
The two poems Lowell showed Bidart were called “Loneliness” and “Summer Tides.” Bidart typed fair copies of each of them; “and Cal gave me things to keep for him, because he was coming back in a week. So I had that packet of Caroline’s letters, for example.” “Summer Tides” mixes in Lowell’s Castine harbor view with his favorite photograph of Blackwood in a gondola; and the poem’s final image Bidart could identify from “the week before when I saw him in Castine”:
That line about “trembles on a loosened rail”—literally, the front part of the lawn gave onto a precipice and there was a railing there and this was being eaten away and the whole thing was about to fall down. So this was a real thing—there was a lot of talk of it costing $10,000 to rebuild. To make that into a metaphor of something happening in his life was amazing.48
SUMMER TIDES
Tonight
I watch the incoming moon swim
under three agate veins of cloud,
casting crisps of false silver-plate
to the thirsty granite fringe of the shore.
Yesterday, the sun’s gregarious sparklings;
tonight, the moon has no satellite.
All this spendthrift, in-the-house summer,
our yacht-jammed harbor
lay unattempted—
pictorial to me like your portrait.
I wonder who posed you so artfully
for it in the prow of his Italian skiff,
like a maiden figurehead without legs to fly.
Time lent its wings. Last year
our drunken quarrels had no explanation,
except everything, except everything.
Did the oak provoke the lightning,
when we heard its boughs and foliage fall? …
My wooden beach-ladder swings by one bolt,
and repeats its single creaking rhythm—
I cannot go down to the sea.
After so much logical interrogation,
I can do nothing that matters.
The east wind carries disturbance for leagues—
I think of my son and daughter,
and three stepdaughters
on far-out ledges
washed by the dreaded clock-clock of the waves …
gradually rotting the bulwark where I stand.
Their father’s unmotherly touch
trembles on a loosened rail.49
Before he left, Lowell’s new book, Day by Day, was published in America, and Helen Vendler reviewed it in the New York Times Book Review for August 14 under the heading “The Poetry of Autobiography”; “this new collection,” she said, recounted the “attrition” of his marriage:
There is no use denying that these poems … need footnoting. One has to know (from previous work) his reading, his past and his present and one has to re-construct the scenario behind this book—Lowell’s life in Kent, his hospitalization in England, his wife’s sickness, their temporary stay in Boston, their separation, a reconciliation, a further rupture, a parting in Ireland, Lowell’s return to America.50
Day by Day not only chronicles Lowell’s most recent dramas. It also seems intent on some final settlement with the obsessions of a lifetime. Key chapters of the “Lowell life” are resurrected: his parents, the schoolmates at St. Mark’s who mocked him for his Caliban-like savagery (they would say “my face / was pearl-gray like toe-jam— / that I was foul / as the gymsocks I wore a week? / A boy next to me breathed my shoes, / and lay choking on the bench”); his early treatment at the hands of Merrill Moore: Lowell remembers Moore telling him when he was in college that “You know, you were an unwanted child,” and wonders still, “Did he become mother’s lover?” Moore is mocked for the “million / sonnets he rhymed into his dictaphone,” but his “Tennessee rattling saved my life.” In other poems there are the years at Kenyon with Peter Taylor, at Baton Rouge with Robert Penn Warren; a “Letter” to Jean Stafford with talk of her “novels more salable than my poems” and “Our days of the great books, scraping and Roman mass”; and fond addresses to Cousin Harriet, William Meredith (“Morning After Dining with a Friend”), Frank Parker. It is almost as if Lowell was anxious not to leave anybody out.
Many of these poems are loose, chatty, confidentially verbatim, and there are moments throughout the book when Lowell calls into question his whole “way of writing”; he envies the imaginers, the mythmakers, the fabulists, or even those “like Mallarmé who had the good fortune / to find a style that made writing impossible.” “Alas, I can only tell my own story,” he writes in “Unwanted,” and the suggestion throughout Day by Day is that perhaps the last chapter of the story has been told. The “Day by Day” sequence in the book ends with a poem called “Epilogue”:
Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the ph
otograph
his living name.51
And among the drafts for Lowell’s Castine essays on New England writers, there is a moving local footnote to the poem. Lowell is writing about George Santayana:
He had spent a lifetime trying to drive back the New England he had been born to, its fashions, its morals, its reigning minds. They were too hateful, and in a way too cherished, for him to quite deny their existence. He said “I have enjoyed writing about my life more than living it.”52
Lowell arrived at Castletown on September 2, and stayed there for ten days. Blackwood recalls that “He was fine at the beginning when he came. He was just totally happy to be home. Like a little boy. And then there was this thing that he’d committed himself to going back to Harvard. And then it started.” Lowell became increasingly agitated, she says, “he never stopped moving from room to room. He couldn’t make up his mind—he was changing his mind every five minutes.” She believed that this restlessness signified impending mania.
He said, “Will you come with me?” And I said, “But I don’t have a house. I can’t come with Sheridan and be in a motel.” And as he was getting madder, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to. I thought, perhaps if he can make the crossing, I’ll make up my mind then…. But I also thought—he’ll have to have an attack because he’d made such a fool of himself. He’d gone back to Lizzie, publicly. He’d made a mess. Would there be more letters, another Dolphin? It was too awful. And he knew that.53
After ten days of turbulence, Lowell telephoned Elizabeth Hardwick in New York. He was coming home early, he said, because things had become “sheer torture” at Castletown. Lady Caroline, he said, had left for London, and he would get a flight to New York on the following day—Monday, September 12. (His original intention had been to fly to Boston on the fifteenth.) On the Sunday night, Lowell was alone in Castletown, and as he wrote to Blackwood, he freakishly became “immured” in the vast mansion: first the telephone failed, then the electricity.54 He tried to leave the house to make calls from the nearby village of Celbridge but, in the dark, was unable to locate a latch on the one door (a side door in the basement) that could be opened from inside without a key. It could not have been easy even to find his way back to his top-floor apartment; when the cleaning woman “released” him in the morning, he complained that Castletown “was a very bad place; it needs an elevator”; then, she says:
he went down with one lot of suitcases and then he came back up again and gave me three dollars and shook hands and said he’d see me again. He was a bit fussed about being locked in and that but otherwise he seemed in very good form. He left a letter for Lady Caroline in there under the lamp and asked me would I see that she got it….55
Lowell arrived in New York on the afternoon of September 12, and took a taxi from Kennedy Airport. When the driver reached West 67th Street, he saw that Lowell had slumped over in his seat; he was holding a large brown-paper parcel and he seemed to be asleep. Elizabeth Hardwick was called from the house and rode in the taxi to Roosevelt Hospital: “But I knew that he was dead.”56 Hours afterwards Hardwick opened the parcel Lowell had been carrying—it was a portrait of Lady Caroline. He had brought it over to be “valued” in New York.57
Lowell’s death was described in the newspapers the next day as the result of a heart attack, and the obituaries unanimously mourned him as “perhaps the best English language poet of his generation.” At his funeral on Beacon Hill there were six hundred mourners; the pallbearers included friends from five chapters of his life: Blair Clark, Frank Parker, John Thompson, Peter Taylor, Robert Fitzgerald, Grey Gowrie, Robert Giroux and Frank Bidart. After the requiem mass there was a private burial at Dunbarton, and ten days later a memorial tribute in the American Place Theatre in New York.
“He was resigned to dying. He knew he was going to die,” says Lowell’s Cambridge friend Bill Alfred, and there are other friends who would agree. Lowell had often said that he did not expect to live beyond sixty; both his parents had died at sixty, he would point out (although they didn’t), “and it was as if he felt that he should too.” Caroline Blackwood calls his death a “suicide of wish”: there were “various things he said” at Castletown during his last week which made her think that he did not expect to live. And in Frank Bidart’s view: “There was an intense sense that spring and summer that things were building up to some crunch, that something had to give. I didn’t think it was going to be Cal that gave, but it was.” Peter Taylor simply felt “angry with Cal,” as if Lowell had voluntarily elected to walk out on his old friend.58
Certainly, in many of the formal tributes that appeared just after Robert Lowell’s death, there was just this sense of both grief and grievance: a feeling that the world had been robbed of a phenomenon. But there was also an acknowledgment that Lowell had perhaps properly completed both his life and his life’s work. Bidart, in a Harvard Advocate issue in honor of Lowell, wrote that “Valéry’s words about Mallarmé come irresistibly to mind: ‘Near him while he was still alive, I thought of his destiny as already realized.’”59 And Christopher Ricks quotes words that I myself was privileged to read out at Lowell’s memorial evening in New York on September 25, 1977. On Lowell’s death, Ricks says, “there came to me the words of Empson on King Lear”:
The scapegoat who has collected all this wisdom for us is viewed at the end with a sort of hushed envy, not I think really because he has become wise but because the general human desire for experience has been so glutted in him; he has been through everything.
We that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
Notes
1. Caroline Blackwood, interview with I.H. (1979).
2. Jonathan Raban, interview with I.H. (1979).
3. Ibid.
4. Caroline Blackwood, interview with I.H. (1979).
5. This and the ensuing quotations are from the nurse’s day book, January 1976.
6. Day by Day (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977), p. 114.
7. R.L. to Frank Bidart, February 15, 1976 (Houghton Library).
8. R.L. to Peter Taylor, March 4, 1976.
9. R.L. to Blair Clark, March 4, 1976.
10. “The Downlook,” Day by Day, p. 125.
11. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, April 29, 1976.
12. Day by Day, pp. 44–45.
13. R.L. to Frank Bidart, April 15, 1975 (Houghton Library).
14. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, July 2, 1976.
15. Ibid., September 4, 1976.
16. R.L. to Blair Clark, March 4, 1976.
17. R.L. to Peter Taylor, September 4, 1976.
18. R.L. to Frank Bidart, September 4, 1976 (Houghton Library).
19. Caroline Blackwood, interview with I.H. (1979).
20. Blair Clark’s notes, October 21, 1976.
21. R.L. to William Alfred, October 30, 1976.
22. Day by Day, p. 103.
23. Blair Clark’s notes, November 25, 1976.
24. Frank Bidart, interview with I.H. (1981).
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. R.L. to Caroline Blackwood, February 28, 1977.
28. Frank Bidart, interview with I.H. (1981).
29. Helen Vendler, interview with I.H. (1981).
30. R.L. to Caroline Blackwood, January 31, 1977.
31. Edgar Stillman, “Robert Lowell Revisiting,” Soho Weekly News, March 3, 1977, p. 53.
32. R.L. to Caroline Blackwood, March 2, 1977.
33. Ibid., March 18, 1977.
34. Helen Vendler, interview with I.H. (1981).
35. Day by Day, p. 107.
36. Blair Clark, “The Lowells … notes for a never-to-be-written ‘memoir,’” May 8, 1977.
37. R.L. to Caroline Blackwood, July 17, 1977.
38. William Styron, letter to I.H., July 1, 1981.
39. Ibid.
40. Nathan Scott, letter to I.H., March 27, 1981.
41. William Styron, letter to I.H., July 1, 1981.
42. Frank
Bidart, interview with I.H. (1981).
43. R.L. to Caroline Blackwood, n.d.
44. Frank Bidart, interview with I.H. (1981).
45. R.L. to Caroline Blackwood, n.d.
46. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1982).
47. Helen Vendler, interview with I.H. (1981).
48. Frank Bidart, interview with I.H. (1981).
49. Uncollected. New Review 4, no. 43 (October 1977).
50. Helen Vendler, “The Poetry of Autobiography,” New York Times Book Review, August 14, 1977.
51. Day by Day, p. 127.
52. Ms (Houghton Library).
53. Caroline Blackwood, interview with I.H. (1979).
54. R.L. to Caroline Blackwood, n.d.
55. Mrs. Dignam, interview with I.H. (1979).
56. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1979).
57. The painting of Caroline Blackwood is by her first husband, Lucien Freud.
58. Quotations in foregoing paragraphs from interviews with I.H. (1970–81).
59. Harvard Advocate, November 1979, p. 18.
INDEX
Abrantès, Laure Junot, Duchesse d’, 1
Accent, 98
Adams, Charles Francis, III, 1
