There was, however, a lot of human wreckage in the aftermath. Girlfriends had to be dismissed, at least once by a cool letter from his lawyers. Those who know of Lowell’s many amours, of his seduction of young women, often enough his students, will find little more than sidelong references in the letters, usually at the back end of a manic episode. It’s hard to believe Lowell did not write more to his lovers, he wrote so often to his wives when they were apart (long-distance phone calls were once prohibitively expensive—in 1952, a three-minute call from Seattle to New York cost $2.50, the equivalent of $20 in 2008). Whether for diplomatic reasons or because letters were unavailable, this collection has numerous missing presences. We sense too infrequently the overwhelming eros that came with Lowell’s madness, like an ill-mannered guest.
Given what he was capable of writing when lovesick, perhaps the omission isn’t to be regretted:
There’s a scene. White sheets. Salt air from the Mediterranean, far below. Sound of waves. Then you in your bridal dress. Nothing very fancy, for such wouldn’t do for us. Maybe some stiff, close-fitting brocaded dress. And I am undressing you. WE are together, our mouths are together, our hair is together. Ah, there! I speak of mysteries, and I kneel now and throw salt, or whatever one throws, over my shoulder to prevent ill omens. All is humbleness and joy.
We do have, fortunately, Lowell’s letters to Elizabeth Bishop, for whom Lowell felt a deep friendship he at times mistook for another of his passions—during his manias he would bemuse her with mad declarations of love. (His poem “Water” took shape in regret over the affair they never consummated.) Bishop had enjoyed flings with men when younger, but by the time she met Lowell her sexual affections were reserved for women. His letters to her are otherwise boyish and relaxed; yet, even in his saner periods, Lowell’s fondness seems slightly inflamed, decent but suspect—she was perhaps fortunate to live in Brazil. Bishop’s poems were influential in the development of his style, possessing a vulnerability and tenderness beyond the brooding intensities of his—she was the poet of his generation of whom he was most in awe. Only near the end of his life did a little testiness leak out. He wrote to Hardwick,
The dog must be sent away because of her asthma but will that be enough? … Then so many things she can criticize, the disheveled garden, the carefree garden man, our care of Sheridan. Should he be sent away too? So many things down to my not writing meter, making errors in description. Of course no one is more wonderful, but so fussy and hazardous now.
Bishop by then was a raging alcoholic—theirs was a generation whose letters bear the sins of too many martinis.
The Lowell of these letters is not the harassed, hounded wreck of the poems, though he was hounded and harassed enough. The poems bear scars of his long-suffered suffering, the madness that recurred like bouts of malaria; but they seem the recognitions of a man slipping toward the maelstrom, or emerging battered from it. The mania seemed to inspire him, yet the poetry Lowell wrote during his episodes proved almost worthless afterward. Only occasionally could he harry it into form. Though he rejected the term, the poems in Life Studies (1959) soon attracted the word “confessional”—the poet seems to know he’s done wrong, the necessary condition for confession and repentance. Like many during the heyday of Freud’s influence, Lowell put his trust in psychotherapy, and in ever more stringent courses of it, a regimen that seemed to do him no good whatever. The lithium treatment developed in the late sixties stabilized his condition for a good while, folding Freud’s complexes into a salt deficiency. This lets his parents off the hook.
The partial and prejudiced record of a writer’s letters proves more valuable than its fly-by-night form—but history often lies in the richness of the ephemeral. Lowell was a chatty, indulgent, fraternal correspondent, turning his eye to domestic mishaps, amusing anecdotes, family matters, more eagerly than to the poems lying on his desk. His comments in passing on a poet’s labors (even when writing fluently, he could make the task sound Sisyphean) rarely give deep or thorough analysis of his intentions. The reader has to work from stray evidence, like a forensic investigator at a crime scene.
This might not be much of a loss, as poets are famously bad at analyzing their work. Lowell, however, could be wittily and painfully insightful about the toils of the workshop. He understood the creepy narcissism poems entailed: “As you overlook the black keyboard of your typewriter, it’s as though you were facing yourself in the mirror and trying to hold the attention of what you see there by what you see there.” When a poet writes letters he’s not doing the one thing he should be, writing poems—yet a poet can’t spend all day on poems, lest the world be overrun with them. He’s lucky to spend a productive hour or two scratching out lines. Lowell knew too well what could happen; he remarked of one book that “none of the poems are the kind of empty thing one writes to write poetry.”
Lowell was no prose writer. There’s something too arch and crabbed about his formal prose, too “poetic,” and he knew it: “Prose is hell. I want to change every two words, but while I toy with revisions, the subject stinks like a dead whale and lies in the mud of the mind’s bottom.” He often made things worse by revising: “I’ve been … trying to write prose—a hell of a job, it starts naked[,] ends as fake velvet.” If his intensities were rarely trained on prose, and rarely repaid there, Lowell’s criticism was nevertheless original, unexpected, mandarin with the touch of a magus. The autobiographical fragments are overrich as French gateaux but brilliant, full of the “magical detail, that at first you mistake for a misprint.” What kept his prose too calculated made his letters fizz with offhand remarks, sly adjectives, the banter of intelligence. His faults made him a letter writer of no common ability, who might have been forgiven the vanities of craft, had he been aware of them.
Lowell lived by revision and knew his poems sometimes withered because of it—revision was the vice of his virtues. Writing the poems in Notebook (1968), he had a trusted young friend, Frank Bidart, to respond to his endless tinkering—this may not have been an advantage: “I think I’ve spent more futile hours trying to perfect something satisfactory—always pressing and invisible, the unimagined perfect lines or ending, for there it usually falls. Often I’ve given up, and wondered why I ever found fault.” The letters, which were never choked into such lifelessness, reveal that teasing, implacable intelligence that so seduced his friends. A reader is grateful merely for his casual, causal opinions, for the flypaper that letters become. Lowell on form:
The intoxicating thing about rhyme and meter is that they have nothing at all to do with truth, just as ballet steps are of no use on a hike. They are puzzles, hurdles, obstacles, expertise—they cry out for invention, and of course in the end for truth, whatever that is.
The loophole glimpses into his workshop are welcome enough; but the letters allow us to eavesdrop on his nervy, indiscreet table talk—it’s for the things unsaid in his poems that we value these letters. A writer may not be expert on the delicate suspensions of his ambiguities, but he’s the only expert on his literary opinions. They fix him in the constellation of his peers while being, in Lowell’s case, an intensive course in practical criticism of the most personal kind. Lowell never styled himself a critic, but the force and character of his remarks are as cunning as Jarrell’s. He sketches other writers with a breezy deftness that isn’t gossip, not exactly, though gossip is the highest form of criticism many writers will venture.
[On Dylan Thomas] Somehow he was kept on beer most of the time … no meals except breakfast. About the best and dirtiest stories I’ve ever heard—dumpy, absurd body, hair combed by a salad spoon, brown-button Welsh eyes always moving suspiciously or fixing on the most modest person in the room … a great explosion of life, and hell to handle.
[On Robert Browning] How he muffed it all! The ingenious, terrific metrics, shaking the heart out of what he was saying; the invented language; the short-cuts; the hurry; and (one must say it) the horrible self-indulgence—the attitudes, the cheapne
ss!
[On an art colony] No use describing Yaddo—run down rose gardens, rotting cantaloupes, fountains, a bust of Dante with a hole in the head, sets called Gems of Ancient Literature, Masterpieces of the World, cracking dried up sets of Shakespeare, Ruskin, Balzac, … pseudo Poussins, pseudo Titians, pseudo Reynolds, pseudo and real English wood, portraits of the patroness, her husband, her lover, her children, lit with tubular lights, like a church, like a museum.
[On T. S. Eliot] He’s maimed somehow, but not dull, not untrustworthy. … There are many layers to be gotten under, when you do there’s something wonderfully warm and human.
[On Amsterdam] Our apartment is right now full of half-filled half open suit-cases, leaves are beginning to hide the canal, the sun is shining, the radio is playing a sort of Indian summer Mozart minuet, and each [of] us knows that if he can only stall long enough the other will do the packing.
[On Delmore Schwartz] Delmore in an unpressed mustard gabardine, a little winded, husky voiced, unhealthy, but with a carton of varied vitamin bottles, the color of oil, quickening with Jewish humor, and in-the-knowness, and his own genius, every person, every book—motives for everything, Freud in his blood, great webs of causation, then suspicion, then rushes of rage. … [I]t was like living with a sluggish, sometimes angry spider.
[On Virgil] It’s comforting to think of Vergil, working all the time, casually and steadily—and turning out a line a day! Comforting till you realize what that line was!
The reader feels at times like that reader of Virgil. Lowell’s portraits betray, like the rapid pencilings in the little albums Rembrandt carried with him on the street, a deft and vital interest with a fondness for foible, the tolerant amusement of a man who knew that all too often he had to be tolerated himself. When he says that Pound’s “voice of anti-semitism is like the voice of a drunkard telling people in cars to drive through the pedestrians” or that Jarrell is like a “fencer who has defeated and scarred all his opponents so that the sport has come to be almost abandoned,” you feel you’ve seen through Lowell’s eyes. Then there are the anecdotes: Pound saying, “Cal, God be with you, if you like the company,” or, after listening to Alice Longworth chatter away (“ending with a synopsis of two 1880 novels she’d read as a girl”), “You like reading more than I do.” Or Allen Tate saying sweetly to Lowell’s daughter, “You will be dear to me when you are older.” She looked at him and slowly replied, “If you are still alive.”
Lowell’s poems, his letters, his criticism, his memoirs, it’s increasingly clear, were all part of one ramshackle enterprise, in some ways forming the most naked and ravaged autobiography, the most artfully artless, the most rational in its embarrassments, since Rousseau’s. It was a life in fractions. The memoirs, thumbed into shape, were fired, then shattered. There are, most consequently, the poems. Even the earliest, read now through the lens of Life Studies, reveal private incidents, coded and forced into the symbolic life of a Noh play. (“I’m a fisherman myself,” he wrote in a letter, “but all my fish become symbols, alas!”) Lowell’s major contribution to poetry was to open it to the privacies that poets for a millennia or two had smuggled in on poetry’s terms. Lowell made poetry accept his life on its own terms—mortifying, myopic all too often, full of familiar sins and a few unfamiliar ones. Philip Rahv, reading some of the poems that became Life Studies, knew exactly what they were: “Diss is da break-through for Cal and for poetry. The one real advance since Eliot.”
The vagrant events of the day became the certain events of poems, while not sacrificing (as the Beats did) the symbols, metaphors, verbal acuteness, ambiguity, and even meter of poems more traditional. In 1954 Lowell remarked about his students, “They write about letting dinner burn while they dream of writing lousy poems.” Only a few years later he made it possible, even attractive, for them to do just that (we have been reading about burnt dinners ever since). There was a cost. A roman a clef offers the decent veil of fiction; Lowell’s poems were less discreet. He felt qualms enough about Life Studies, whose poems did not even seem like poems to Allen Tate. Shown a draft of The Dolphin, which incorporated scraps of Hardwick’s angry letters, Bishop felt Lowell had gone beyond the bounds of decency. He continued to revise, fictionalize, but this only made things worse—the poems violate the fiction of privacy husband and wife usually maintain. It’s one thing for a man to show you his diary, another for him to show you his wife’s—or her lingerie. Hardwick was indomitable, and forgiving past the point of sanity or good sense. That after the divorce, after The Dolphin, after Lowell’s further breakdowns, after everything, she was still ready to take him back tells us much about the “original moment that his presence always was.”
These letters remind us that the career was not without pain to others, nor without pain to Lowell himself. He welcomed the rigors necessary to art, the monastic discipline imposed—he had to work for his inspirations. Hardwick said, “Since he was … not the sort of poet, if there are any, for whom beautiful things come drifting down in a snowfall of gift, the labor was merciless.” (In the sediment of many poems lay a foreign original—“half my pieces come from something,” he wrote.) No sooner had Lowell mastered a style than he grew bored with its limitations and cold to its virtues. The free verse of Life Studies caused a mass stampede of younger poets away from fifties formal poetry, but soon enough Lowell was writing the octosyllabic couplets of Near the Ocean (1967). Like many of the moderns, he drove himself to ever new impositions, to any change as long as it was change, his work the record of artistic restlessness, a “dread of more of the same.”
After the prose and the poems, each inventing a different Lowell, there is now Lowell’s autobiography in letters—this Lowell is fonder and more amused, a man at the center of complex loyalties, one sometimes broken by the tactical skirmishes of his marriages, the endless string of girlfriends. Saskia Hamilton must be congratulated on her painstaking labor and meticulous instincts—she has muscled a large chore into submission. Making a life out of such letters is like trying to rebuild a smashed vase out of half the shards (how much we miss the letters to his first wife, Jean Stafford, which she burned or tore to shreds). A collection of letters gives a skewed view of time, lingering in some years and skimming over others, sometimes at center stage and sometimes—the letters lost or unwritten—missing important events entirely. The editor’s notes are instructive, thorough without being overbearing (having only casual discursive notes, Robert Giroux’s edition of Bishop’s letters is far less useful). In her somewhat unfocused introduction, Hamilton offers impressionistic, amateurish readings of passages of Lowell’s prose (very Eng. Lit. 101); but about his life she is to the point while rarely missing the point. The criticisms I offer are lost among the larger pleasures bestowed.
Though this selection of letters is generous enough, the list of correspondents is top heavy with famous names. (Beginning with the letter to Pound, however dramatic, means suppressing the prep-school letters quoted by Ian Hamilton.) Lowell was at the center of a brilliant circle, admittedly; but letters to former students or editors (fragments published elsewhere suggest these would have been of value) are too rare. The life recorded here is played out for his literary friends—he was a different person to his Cousin Harriet, and the reader deserves to know better the Lowell outside literature.
An editor who believes Lowell’s letters possess the “very thing he revised away in his poems” doesn’t have much sense of the way writers compose. They don’t revise only on the page—they revise before the words reach the page. Lowell once wrote to Bishop, “You seem to have a loose seemingly careless style …; but of course I know all [the] fierce labors you really go through.” About his own work:
The Life Studies poems were meant to be entirely art, yet they are meant to give a sort of notebook effect, an impression of truth and a fragmentary naturalness, that would lose all its point if too worked up.
It was freshness he revised toward—his most graceful touches seem absent from l
etters composed off the cuff. What lies charged on the page may have been third or fourth thought. I believe the editor when she says that Lowell rarely revised his letters (though I don’t see how she knows he “typed as fast as he could think”), but she also says they were “glancingly corrected” and “visually messy” and that the “paper often looks like a worksheet.” That sounds like revision to me.
Lowell was a perfectly miserable speller, one of fantastic principles. The editor has left a few misspellings on purpose (the notes provide corrections to, for example, “electricuted”), but others unnoted call into question her editorial eye: “she can bare to contemplate,” “Prince Metterich,” the “whole caste will turn up,” “somesort,” “promess” (for “promise”), “high-fy,” “Dixi” (for “Dixie”), “Havrd” (for “Harvard”), a “good pare” (for “pair”), and “embassadoress.” (Her own spelling is not beyond criticism when she writes of the “British Navel Reserve.”) Further, it seems unlikely that George Santayana wrote “taking the low into its own hands” or Hannah Arendt, “Your poem … was such a consolated,” or that Paul Valery’s translators rendered his most famous remark as a “work is never complete … but abandonded.” (I don’t know where the editor found the translation she uses, but it is radically different from the one cited.)
Some of the editor’s errors betray an insecure knowledge of twentieth-century literature. It’s only mildly odd to call George Santayana a “Spanish American” or Edmund Wilson a “critical essayist” (rather than a critic—of course he also wore other hats); but who would describe Nathanael West as the “author of A Cool Million” rather than The Day of the Locust or Miss Lonelyhearts? Yaddo is an artists’ colony, not merely a writers’ colony; and the proper spellings are the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and St. Elizabeths Hospital. Death dates should have been provided for Alan Dugan, Mona Van Duyn, Charles Tomlinson, James Ross, and Robert Creeley—other writers of note are given no dates at all, which rather maroons them in literary history. Sometimes figures in the letters go unmentioned in the notes—you don’t know whether the editor missed them or simply couldn’t find out a thing about them.
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