A Delicate Aggression

by David O. Dowling

  6 • The Turncoat: Robert Lowell

  One muggy afternoon during a workshop session on campus at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, James B. Hall received a particularly thorough savaging at the hands of his instructor and peers that left him a beaten and broken man. “I went home limp, with a headache,” through the sponge-humid late August heat. “It’s a terrible thing to be twenty-five, to have survived other things for so long,” including five years of live combat in World War II, “and not be able to hold back the tears when your poems and stories got what they deserved.”1 Receiving criticism from literary lions on the Workshop faculty like Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Robert Lowell could reduce even the most grizzled of veterans to tears. Lowell “was both aggravating and helpful,” according to his former student Robert Dana. “In conferences, his strategy seemed to be to give with the right hand and take away with the left.” Had he been uniformly cruel, Lowell might have been easier to handle. But his chameleonic nature meant “if he complimented one aspect of your poem, he was sure, in the next breath, to comment adversely on another.”2 While he found hope in “a spiral notebook full of failed drafts” by Dana, proclaiming, “I expect you will be publishing soon,” he frowned upon other students with great promise like Philip Levine. Detecting Lowell’s Boston Brahmin bias against his Detroit Jewish immigrant background—his father sold used auto parts for a living—Levine knew “I could write nothing that pleased Lowell, and when at the end of the semester he awarded me a B, I was not surprised.” He confronted him, demanding an explanation. “ ‘You have come the farthest,’ Lowell drawled, which no doubt meant I had started from nowhere.” Levine, a future poet laureate of the United States, pressed him, asking “Then why the B?” Lowell averted his eyes and muttered absurdly, “I’ve already given the A’s out.”3

  Workshop students faced profound difficulty reading the mercurial Lowell, who taught at Iowa for three semesters on two separate faculty appointments in the early 1950s. Even harder to decipher was precisely where Lowell stood on Iowa and its famous writing program. Today’s Workshop public relations materials even admit, “it is almost impossible to pinpoint exactly how the poet [Lowell] regarded the early literary hub.”4 Workshop members have been obsessed with the question of Lowell’s estimation of the program, due to his stature as “the unofficial poet-laureate of post-World War II America,” on the path to becoming, “by something like a critical consensus, the greatest American poet of the mid-century, probably the greatest poet now writing in English,” according to critic Richard Poirier.5

  Since he had received only lukewarm treatment as Lowell’s protégé, W. D. Snodgrass found himself the victim of backhanded—if not entirely disingenuous—praise for his masterpiece, Heart’s Needle, written under his mentor’s guidance. Lowell had already slighted Iowa in one of the most public ways imaginable, by calling it sterile in the dust jacket blurb of his own best student’s book, which he was instrumental in creating. Heart’s Needle, Lowell later acknowledged, inspired him to utilize “the keyboard as a mirror” in his intensely introspective Life Studies, the work that won the National Book Award in 1960.6 Confessing that his pupil “did these things” with self-disclosure in lyric verse “before I did,” decades later Lowell allowed for the possibility that “he may have influenced me though people suggested the opposite.”7

  The locus of Lowell’s vacillating judgment of the Workshop extended from its surrounding rural Midwest culture to the program’s preferred instructional method and the students’ writing itself. Did Lowell find fault specifically in the Workshop model for creative writing, one that placed faculty and students in the role of the exacting editors questioning every detail of their diction and syntax? Or was he a turncoat by nature and temperament, chronically attacking those who loved him? Was his venom toward Iowa an expression of an older version of the bully he had been as a schoolboy, a terror who as a Harvard undergraduate physically assaulted his own father and later abused his first wife? Did his nickname “Cal,” short for Caliban of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the Roman emperor Caligula, represent the impulsive base dark half of his personality? Or was he the genteel Boston Brahmin, carrying the most refined literary lineage in Workshop history, one tracing back to his great granduncle James Russell Lowell and cousin once removed Amy Lowell? Was this a brute or an elite man of letters?

  A Virtue of Negation

  For most of his life, Robert Lowell was planning on leaving. His dizzying array of thirty-nine addresses over the course of his lifetime attests to the nomadic existence he led, from the moment he first renounced his New England roots to flee for the South to his transatlantic crossings that led him to Iowa in early 1950. Lowell left his first two wives (the second after twenty-three years), vacillated wildly between university teaching posts, and swore off a fifty-cigarette-a-day addiction with steely resolve, only to return to it with new zeal. He staunchly resisted the United States government’s role in World War II at a time when conscientious objection was almost unheard of and certainly lacked any of the cultural cachet of the Vietnam War protests he would famously back with Norman Mailer in the late 1960s. His principled resistance earned him a federal prison sentence of a year and a day (reduced to five months for good behavior), much harder time than his New England forerunner Henry Thoreau, who endured a nominal night at the local Concord jail for his world-famous civil disobedience over the Mexican-American War. Lowell turned his back on his Protestant upbringing to join the Catholic Church, which he later abandoned. After faithfully backing the presidential bid of Senator Eugene McCarthy, he recanted, withdrawing his support.

  Lowell’s three productive semesters at Iowa—which profoundly shaped his career by bringing him in closer contact with Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and W. D. Snodgrass—somehow were not enough to sweeten his distaste for the place. “We’re both sick of Iowa City,” he reported on January 1, 1954, to Elizabeth Bishop, describing his and his wife Elizabeth Hardwick’s attitude toward the Workshop’s literary scene. But, he claimed, “I’m sick of explaining to Elizabeth why she shouldn’t be” sick of Iowa City, amending what appeared to be his firm dismissal of the Workshop and its culture with a humorous negation of their consensual negative judgment of the place.8

  Saying no was in Lowell’s nature. He made precisely such “a virtue of negation” when he received Paul Engle’s first offer to join the faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.9 It came in 1947, close on the heels of his Pulitzer Prize for Lord Weary’s Castle. Engle received a courteous yet definitive rejection. “I’m afraid I have decided to take the Library of Congress job,” a consultant position with light duties. Further, “the pay is $5700 and the work is nominal,” an offer he could not refuse. “I feel sorry to do this after our pleasant correspondence, and all the trouble that you have taken in making these arrangements.”10 Engle was crestfallen that he could not cinch this rising star. “It was inevitable that Lowell would bite that hand that fed him,” a former student of Lowell’s from Harvard noted.11

  Engle, however, would not be denied the opportunity to enlist Lowell among the ranks of his faculty. Karl Shapiro, who had been attempting to teach at the Workshop while also holding down editorial duties in Chicago and commuting by train to Iowa City, 220 miles away, left the Workshop faculty in 1950 to take over as editor of Poetry. To replace him, Engle made a second try at hiring Lowell, and the deal this time struck Lowell as irresistible. “It’s $2,000 for one course, supposedly for two hours a week; I want to get it lifted [to] $2,500 or $3,000 for two courses,” he proudly announced to his mentor, Allen Tate.12 Engle, intent on reeling in his prize this time, found the resources to accommodate his bid.

  Through the assistance of Allen Tate, then acting in the role of his unofficial literary agent, Lowell secured his position at Iowa, set to begin spring semester 1950. Tate’s negotiation on his behalf was among the greatest gifts he received from his mentor. “You are a wonderfully generous friend,” Lowell wrote, overflowing
with gratitude. He vowed that this gesture of kindness, especially given its professional ramifications, was one “I shall never forget.”13 Tate had backed him since the early days of his apprenticeship in the sultry Tennessee heat of 1937. The mentorship began when Lowell dropped out of Harvard after two years of undergraduate study to make the pilgrimage south to the poet’s home in Benfolly, Tennessee, forty miles west of Nashville. He had expected a hero’s welcome, but instead was told there was no room in the house, unless he would like to pitch a tent on the lawn. Taking the quip literally, Lowell promptly drove to Sears Roebuck to purchase an umbrella tent. He carefully unpacked and assembled the olive green shelter, where he spent the next three months experimenting with free verse and rhymed meter. The determined youth’s resourcefulness had an endearing effect. Lowell would periodically burst in on Tate, clutching his ink-smeared drafts in breathless anticipation of his reaction. Tate chuckled to himself at the sight of his protégé preoccupied with his manuscript and totally oblivious to the herd of cows that had converged on the tent. The apprenticeship signaled his undying devotion to Tate, one of few commitments Lowell did not recant. When he was not working with Tate, Lowell attended classes taught by the poet John Crowe Ransom at nearby Vanderbilt University.14 As the spring and summer of 1937 wore on, Tate increasingly took on the role of second father to Lowell, filling the void left by Lowell’s violent break from his real father.

  During his sophomore year at Harvard, a pivotal altercation forever changed Lowell’s relationship with his father. Lowell senior had written to the father of his son’s college sweetheart Anne Tuckerman Dick, asking “that you and Mrs. Dick not allow Ann [sic] to go to Bobby’s rooms at college without proper chaperonage.” After Anne showed him the letter, Lowell immediately sped home to demand an explanation and an apology. While Anne waited in the idling station wagon in the driveway, Lowell, uncontrollably furious, stormed in. His father rose from his chair to meet the oncoming assault, which began as a hail of shouts at close range. The row quickly escalated, as Lowell unleashed a flurry of blows that sent the old man sprawling helplessly to the floor of their family home.15 The guilt and shame he carried with him from the incident had profound effects on both his creativity and his personal life. Lowell’s later engagement to Anne eventually broke off under the strain of ongoing animosity between the families.

  During the fifteen years before his arrival in Iowa, Lowell seemed to have lived a lifetime of harrowing experiences. His manic-depressive bouts drove him to violence during his first marriage, to the novelist Jean Stafford, a turbulent relationship that lasted from 1940 to 1948. Three years into their marriage, Lowell was sentenced to prison, on October 13, 1943, for his refusal to comply with the draft. The saturation bombing and other wartime tactics used by the Allies that resulted in massive civilian casualties were the main reasons he cited for his action.16 The extra day tacked on to his one-year sentence made him a felon. After ten days in the West Street Jail in New York City, Lowell was transferred to Danbury, Connecticut, where he was incarcerated in federal prison for five months. Ironically, his time behind bars was perhaps the most tranquil of his tumultuous life. There, he “blissfully slept among eighty men, a foot apart, and grew congenial among other idealist felons” in an environment he found “gentler than [St. Mark’s] boarding school or [Harvard] college.” Ensconced in this “adult fraternity,” Lowell “found life lulling. I corrected proofs . . . I queued for hours for cigarettes and chocolate bars . . . I read Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh . . . two thousand pages of Proust.”17 He was all of twenty-six years old at the time, a quintessential angry young man defiantly refusing to comply with his punishment’s intent to make him suffer.

  The fraught marriage that coincided with Lowell’s prison sentence seemed doomed from the start. Even the courtship leading up to their wedding was marred with violence, the wreckage of which Stafford wore on her face in permanent scars. Lowell was behind the wheel in a horrendous car accident that shattered Stafford’s face, causing extensive injuries that required major reconstructive surgery. Lowell himself walked away from the crash unscathed. According to David Laskin, Stafford not only “hid from him and told friends he was mad and murderous,” but she bore “lifelong scars” from the “car accident he caused, perhaps deliberately.”18 Lowell’s own father admonished him for tarnishing their exalted Boston name. To the shock of those who knew Stafford, she married him the next year, in yet another telling instance of his capacity to pivot on the fulcrum between destruction and love.19

  Ruthlessly Serious

  At thirty-five years old and surging at the height of his powers, Lowell made his highly anticipated entrance into Iowa City to assume his teaching position in the ice-hard chill of January 1950. His protégé Snodgrass recalled that his literary influence “had overwhelmed young readers, much as Swinburne’s had an earlier generation in England,” and as Emerson had the previous century in New England. Lowell radiated creative energy, transfixing the Workshop community with his irresistible allure.20

  Integral to Lowell’s powerful literary persona was the checkered past he carried with him to Iowa City. His reputation preceded him as “the one topic of conversation: the time he had done as a conscientious objector, his periods of madness, his past violence.” Just nine months earlier, Lowell had been committed to a psychiatric hospital for a manic-depressive mental disturbance. Regarding his personal bearing, Snodgrass never forgot how “we were surprised to find” that although he was “tall and powerfully built, he seemed the gentlest of mortals, clumsily anxious to please.”21 His arrival “was marked by a sense among us that the ante had definitely been upped, that the workshop was moving onto a higher level,” according to his student Robert Dana.22 His patrician manner belied his raw sensibility. “In a central way, Robert Lowell was not quite civilized,” Frank Bidart observed.23 “However courtly or charming, casual or playful he was by turns, in his art and his personal relationships, Lowell was unfashionably—even, at times ruthlessly—serious.” His signature rhetorical move in conversation and in his poetry was visible in how, “from his shaggy, renegade vantage point Lowell tended, sometimes in the most shocking way, to view our institutions in terms of one another, as though they were interchangeable. The West Street jail, for example, becomes a microcosm for American society” in much of his work.24

  Just as Workshop members had built up Lowell into something of a messiah, he too had grandiose expectations of the institution and its students. Excited that he and his second wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick, would be taking on this new adventure, he readied himself for the challenge. He confided in Tate that he feared his Iowa students would be so “frightfully brilliant” that he committed himself to a rigorous regimen of preparation for his classes, “as if for one of those nightmare Ph.D. examinations.”25 Less than a year earlier he had unleashed one of the most bizarre manic displays exhibited by a literary figure of his stature. Iowa and the seriousness it entailed was for Lowell an opportunity to recommit himself to the profession, and reestablish his credentials as the nation’s premier poet. In addition, he saw the Workshop position as an opportunity to establish his teaching credentials so he could return and teach there again. In this way, Engle’s Workshop offered a secure and reliable source of income to fund a trip to Italy he had planned with Hardwick. He was also highly aware that the prestige of Iowa would counteract the damage his image had suffered from his recent manic-depressive episode.

  The Iowa position was a country idyll for Lowell, a tonic for the utter bedlam of an incident that saw him brawling with police, straitjacketed and thrown into a padded cell. On a series of campus visits in the Midwest, Lowell rendezvoused with Tate at the University of Chicago, where his behavior became erratic. That evening at a restaurant, Lowell’s wild antics created such a stir that management was forced to hustle him off the premises. He returned to his room, but his condition worsened into a fit of violent paranoia, prompting him to open his window on the b
usy Chicago street and shout obscenities at passersby, taunting and berating them. Four Chicago police officers needed more than ten minutes to subdue and handcuff a wildly ferocious Lowell. Psychiatrists at Billing Hospital diagnosed him with a “psychotic reaction, paranoid type,” and placed him in custody. Tate talked authorities into allowing him to be placed on a train to Bloomington, the next stop on his journey.

  Once in Bloomington, Lowell’s mania erupted again, this time with twice the intensity. On campus at the Indiana University Faculty Club, Lowell “had run through the kitchen terrorizing the cooks and then run out into the streets.” Once there, he meandered through traffic in a dazed stagger, as cars screeched and honked around him. He then darted into a movie theater, where he filched a giant roll of tickets. He stalked back out to the street with the ticket roll tucked under his arm, aimlessly knifing through downtown Bloomington, gathering speed with each step. His progress abruptly stopped when a group of police officers converged on him, forming a half circle. Trapped with his back to a plate glass storefront window, Lowell reflexively exploded with a torrent of blows at the officer who was in the process of handcuffing him. Taken by surprise, the badly beaten cop lay on the sidewalk, bloodied by the volatile cocktail of Lowell’s strength, size, and alcohol-fueled rage. As more officers came to the scene, they returned the favor. A gang of Bloomington’s finest surrounded the famous poet, roundly kicking and pummeling him into submission. Bypassing handcuffs, the police opted to place him immediately into a straitjacket for easier handling. Lowell later recalled of the incident that he was overwhelmed with “pathological enthusiasm” for the eradication of evil in Bloomington, “a place that stood for evil, unexorcised, aboriginal Indians.” With messianic delusions, he believed he “could stop cars and paralyze their forces by merely standing in the middle of the highway with my arms outspread,” a crucifix to behold in the banal broad daylight of downtown Bloomington in 1949, an otherwise staid and decorous midwestern college town.26