A Delicate Aggression

by David O. Dowling

  Instead, they returned to Iowa, which once again beckoned as a retreat for Lowell in 1953, this time from three years of bohemian adventures with Hardwick in Europe, and to recoup his finances and stabilize himself on the solid ground of the Midwest. Iowa offered the “solitude and sweat” he desired.60 “When I am not teaching,” he told Engle, “I miss it and feel worthless.”61 The continent had been for him something like the island of the lotus-eaters in the Odyssey, a place of unimaginable sweetness almost impossible to leave. “It has been tempting to think of remaining in Europe almost forever, though I’ve never thought I would in earnest,” he confided to Allen Tate.62 To Engle, he wrote, “Europe for us is a little like Anteus and the earth: the more one has of it the more one’s appetite for it grows. I could start a eulogy that would go on for pages.”63

  The New England Protestant work ethic he was raised with seemed to guide his decision to abandon his plans to remain in Rome until summer. “We’re getting much too poor to be proud,” he felt, “which is beyond the help of loans.” Economic necessity beckoned, along with “a feeling of deracinated idleness” he compared to “lying in bed an extra two hours some half hungover morning, and delighting in the first hour and brooding greasily through the second and calling it pleasure or ‘life.’ ”64 He began to see through such self-deluding tricks that protracted indulgence into something more like sloth. Returning to Iowa promised not only a new adventure, but also a reconnection with the world’s most reputable creative writing program. He made careful arrangements with Engle “to avoid . . . living in one room and a kitchen—especially without the Bednasek case to occupy my studious and volatile Elizabeth.”65

  Fawning over him from the start, sycophants scrambled for Lowell’s affection during registration. They rushed to carry his bag and bring him coffee, “handing him half a dozen of the wrong kind of cigarettes, someone else lighting them.”66 His needs were already more than accommodated, as Engle had met his prior request, in addition to a salary that “will not be less than $5000,” “to have some steady adult person like Bill Belvin as a part-time student assistant—particularly in the beginning to help with registration, selection etc.” He was clearly receiving star treatment. Lowell’s second teaching stint at Iowa continued to ride on the success of Lord Weary’s Castle, the little volume of angry verse that burst him on to the literary scene in 1946. By 1953, students had an even deeper appreciation of its impact, which was a kind of twentieth-century recalibration of Emersonian antimaterialism. The book exposed capitalism as “the besetting evil” in which “the Egyptian and Babylonian exiles are combined with man’s current self-imposed exile from God.” Those capable of “achieving anagogic Truth” have been made fewer “by the materialism about them which minimizes their ability to contemplate.” In the New England tradition of romantics rooted in Thoreau, and with a New York defiance traceable to Melville, Lord Weary’s Castle expresses that “this materialism, in all of its aspects, gnaws most deeply at the man’s soul and prevents him from achieving the mystical experience he needs for salvation,” as Jerome Mazzaro explains.67 The book gained an almost cultish following among Workshop students, whose well-thumbed and coffee-stained copies could be found in their apartments and dorms beside typewriters and left open on end tables throughout Iowa City. Unlike Mark Twain’s definition of a classic, “a book which people praise and don’t read,” Lord Weary’s Castle was at the heart of Iowa City’s print culture in the early 1950s.68 “By the time I left Iowa,” Robert Dana recalled, “the cover of my copy was dog-eared and the dustjacket in tatters.”69

  In the spring of 1953, a precocious and exuberant freshman named Mary Jane Baker enrolled in Lowell’s Five Poets in Translation course, and then in his Greek poetry workshop the following semester. Lowell’s European escapade had primed him for a return to teaching at the Workshop, as the continental focus of these courses was designed to draw directly on his recent travels. He had saturated his desire to “take in” Europe, and now was focused on bringing what he learned in his two years on the continent into the classroom. Lowell did not come to Iowa with a political agenda so much as an aesthetic one rooted in modern languages.

  Because instructor approval was required for registration in Five Poets in Translation, Lowell found himself inundated by Workshop students vying for a spot in his class. Baker was the only undergraduate seeking enrollment, and thus “was pretty well scared,” especially given how the Workshop students “buzzed around him.” The thirty-seven-year-old professor struck her as “shy and learned, with high hair and thickish glasses,” the most celebrated and talked-about figure on campus. It was with considerable trepidation, then, that the young woman traversed the campus on a dark icy evening to Lowell’s class, held in Union Temporary Building A, listed on her registration card as UTBA. Unlike her, the Workshop students were already quite familiar with “Utbas,” as they called it, since it housed the office of the Western Review literary journal.

  Operating out of his newly rented three-bedroom apartment, Lowell made feverish preparations for the course, “frantically” catching up on two years of books and periodicals he had missed while abroad. Five Poets in Translation, contrary to its title, focused on verse written in the original French, German, Italian, and Latin by such revolutionary romantics as Giacomo Leopardi. The course title, he admitted on the first day of class, was a bait-and-switch designed to increase enrollments. Baker recognized that the use of “tempting course names is a rather profitable advertising game they play at Iowa.”70 The content was thus much more demanding, since it covered “a subject” that challenged Lowell himself, one “in which I have to acquire and give out knowledge simultaneously.”71

  Despite such unrealistic and overly ambitious objectives for the course, Lowell’s bearing in the classroom was cool and collected. Baker was taken by the sheer charisma of the author of Lord Weary’s Castle, which John Berryman lauded for the way it “writhed, crunched, spat against Satan, war, modern Boston, the redcoats, Babel, Leviathan, Babylon, Sodom,” leaving “a stormed impression of originality.” She assumed Lowell would show some of the fire of that work, but she found “it strange that so much anger and contempt should be found in the poetry of a man who never raised his voice in the classroom,” who instead “questioned more than he talked.” His method was associative, expansive, and allusive; his frame of reference was steeped in Sartre, Baudelaire, and Valéry. Philip Levine saw this performance as well, but was not impressed, yet it transfixed Baker, who did not find fault in Lowell’s lack of concern for student comprehension or opinion. Thrilled by the momentum of his unbridled mind, Baker did not begrudge his wanting to “push ahead with rapid talk.” He never pretended to be Socratic, but poured himself into nuanced interpretations of poets like Rilke, which distilled time into “a miracle.”

  Baker later published her reflections on the experience in Mademoiselle in 1954, following a carefully worded “Editor’s Note,” designed as a release of liability distancing the publisher from Lowell’s radicalism, particularly his conscientious objection to fighting in World War II. The note emphasized that Baker’s piece in no way functioned “as a character portrait” endorsing Lowell’s radical politics, but instead belonged to the genre of light-hearted memoir of the sort that “looks back on college days.” Baker’s admiration for Lowell, the editors assured, did not reflect the author’s and, by extension, the magazine’s politics. Their hope instead was that “the writer’s enthusiasm” might simply be a token of a youthful ardor evocative of “their own excitement in the discovery of new knowledge with a good teacher.” Despite their efforts to cast him as just another “good teacher,” Lowell carried a criminal past to match his peerless literary status as America’s premier poet. More than a “good teacher,” he was a charismatic infidel to students like Baker. “Bored and confined by the fame and traditions a New England Lowell is heir to, he struck out from Harvard at the age of nineteen to study at Kenyon with John Crowe Ransom, Randall Jarrell,
and Peter Taylor,” she gushed, championing also “his pacifist convictions” that landed him “in federal prison.”72

  Baker earned what Lowell called “a freshman A” for the course, based on her enthusiasm for French poetry and her status as the only undergraduate in the class. Levine’s bitterness over his B in Lowell’s other course lasted for decades. It did not, however, prevent him from soliciting a recommendation from the powerful poet for a teaching position at the Workshop just two years after graduating. Lowell mustered four uninspired sentences on Levine, describing him as “a clear and steady writer . . . somewhere in the upper half of a very good class.” The best he could report to Engle was, “I know no harm of him,” in his tepid remarks.73 Levine never joined the Workshop faculty. Baker, conversely, never saw Lowell as a means toward a professional end. Instead she found him an animated and entertaining presence, especially when he held forth with his hand aloft cradling a smoldering cigarette, “repeating a curve, as if he were stroking a ball. I cannot think of Lowell explaining something without that gesture of continuity,” she fondly recollected.74

  Unlike Five Poets in Translation, the other course at the Workshop Lowell taught in the spring of 1953 had a direct impact on his next work, Life Studies. In this poetry workshop, his twenty-three students submitted their “life works” to him two times per week. Although he reluctantly promised Engle to adhere to “the same business of mimeographs, discussion groups and interviews with poets,” Lowell managed to circumvent his lack of interest in the students’ writing by handing them his own.75 He assured Engle that it would be effective “to put myself in the harness too and provide examples.”76 But given his celebrity status combined with his magnanimous bearing in the classroom, his disregard for the workshop method was not just tolerated, but embraced. Students were flattered, if not star struck, to receive the manuscript writings of an author of his caliber. It is hard to imagine that he expected anything but fawning and facile remarks from students who had been trained to direct their most critical feedback toward the writings of their own peers. When he solicited their advice for revision, Levine remembered nothing but gratuitous adulation. “Someone, certainly not Lowell, had typed up three and a half single-spaced pages of heroic couplet on ditto masters so that each of us could hold his or her own smeared purple copy of his masterpiece.” Levine’s working-class roots spiked his resentment toward what he took as a fatuous display of self-aggrandizement by a pompous patrician. He listened as Lowell read the poem in “a genteel southern accent,” adopted by virtue of his closeness to Tate’s Tennessee drawl and Hardwick’s Kentucky dialect, which in Lowell’s aloof New England air suggested that “the least display of emotion was déclassé.” Levine’s “horror swelled when several of my classmates leaped to praise every forced rhyme and obscure reference.” Predictably, “no one suggested a single cut, not even when Lowell asked if the piece might be a trifle too extended, a bit soft in places.” This was not an occasion for a workshop bloodletting so much as a coronation. “Perish the thought” of any revision at all; “it was a masterpiece!” was the consensus. Thus praise was heaped on the one person present who needed it the least, to Levine’s mind—the same person “who certainly had the intelligence and insight to know it for what it was: bootlicking.”77

  But if Lowell was only looking for his pupils to worship him, he would not have drawn so much of their influence into the manuscript that was to become his magnum opus, Life Studies, which ended up winning the National Book Award. Interestingly, exposing his own work to students for their feedback, rarely seen among Workshop faculty, came during a turning point in his relationship with his protégé Snodgrass. It was in 1953 that Snodgrass was beginning to exert an influence on Lowell, who later confessed in a private letter that he began drawing more directly from his own personal experience, especially after the bare lyricism of Heart’s Needle. The turnabout for Snodgrass “in one I had nearly worshiped and whose style had so dominated me” was jarring. Unsettled, he “became afraid” that Lowell “might be influenced by some of the destructive elements in my own life and behavior.” His visits to Lowell were increasingly marred by his mentor’s manic depression. Hardwick spurned Snodgrass’s friendly overtures. He felt guilty—perhaps out of an irrational compassion—for the timing of his visits, which coincided either with actual attacks or “just before or shortly after.” Lowell’s deteriorating mental state was painfully human to Snodgrass, who felt “the changes were appalling.”78

  Lowell never maintained a fruitful or lasting relationship with Snodgrass, his most successful student at Iowa. But his movement toward his pupil’s style registered a new sense of comfort on his second teaching stint at the Workshop. Although his students consisted of bright minds among “some very confused ones,” as he wrote Tate, his mixed and often indifferent reaction to their collective writing belies his greater and increasing interest in Snodgrass and the confessional movement in poetry. This time at the Workshop, Lowell and Hardwick did not arrive as they had in 1950, as “the shy and lofty Eastern sea-board strangers,” but instead were more integrated into the community of students and faculty.79 Gerard Else, a classics scholar, teamed with him to teach the Greek poetry workshop in the fall of 1953, his last semester teaching at Iowa. As with the previous semester’s offering, this course was unreasonably ambitious, particularly in its objective of teaching untranslated ancient Greek poetry to students with no training in the language. Despite this daunting challenge—Lowell called it “Greek in a Week,” since it required immediate acquisition of the Greek language—Baker enrolled. To her surprise, Lowell’s wife was in attendance among the sixteen students on the first day of class. Class began with the ritual of the couple’s “borrowing each others’ cigarettes” while they engaged the group in a casual discussion of current events. The first meeting “was a wonderful, open-window day and a breezy classroom” full of hope. The heat increased relentlessly with the demands of the syllabus. “Four of us took the final exam,” a quarter of the original class.80 Two of those four were Hardwick and Baker. One of the casualties was William Dickey, who remembered “sitting, naked because of the heat, in a cockroach-infested garret, a towel over my lap to catch sweat, a volume of Pindar in Greek in front of me, a Greek-Latin lexicon to my left, and a Latin dictionary to my right, trying to figure out what on earth was going on.” When he shared these details with Else, chair of the classics department who was teaching the course with Lowell, the response was anything but sympathetic or helpful: “There, now you’re finding out what scholarship is all about!” he roared with sadistic pleasure.81

  That fall of 1953 was Lowell’s last semester at Iowa. In late spring of 1957, Engle invited him back to teach, but Lowell demurred. He cited a desire to stay in Boston because “we’re really located here,” commenting, “it’s really delightful, mossless creature that I am, to begin successive autumns in one place.” Out of gratitude to Engle, he claimed to regret the decision, since “I do miss my friends and old superb Iowa students.”82

  Lowell’s impact on Iowa City was permanent and profound. This was a time in the Workshop when poetry, rather than fiction, held prominence. He and Hardwick were the talk of the town, the scourge of frustrated talents like Dickey and Levine, and the inspiration for prodigies such as Snodgrass. Not his teaching, but his celebrity presence enriched the cultural cachet of the program while providing a stable point of departure and return for Lowell’s boundless wanderlust and untethered journeys. His return confirmed Iowa City’s prestige and reinforced the culture of poetry, visible on the men’s room wall in Kenney’s Fine Beers, the locus of literary discussion, where Dickey had “written the first line of Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon.” Only in Iowa City in the early 1950s during the reign of Lowell would Dickey find “that a later visitor had amended my work by meticulously marking the scansion and the long vowels” there in the stall.83

  Far from the Atlantic Ocean, Iowa provided Lowell with perspective on places like McLean’s, the psych
iatric hospital where he shared extensive time with “victorious figures of bravado ossified young.” His fellow patients rocked in inner agony, staring blankly and hugging their sides. Others gallivanted about their floor, perhaps none with more panache than “Bobbie,” who, “redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale,” occupies his own world as he “swashbuckles about in his birthday suit and horses at chairs.”84 Another, “flabby, lobotomized” and drifting in “a sheepish calm,” offers no resistance to the brutal round of shock therapy he is about to encounter. “No agonizing reappraisal/ jarred his concentration on the electric chair—/ hanging like an oasis in his air/ of lost connections.”85 In 1950, Lowell arrived at the Workshop after a battery of treatments that left him “cured, I am frizzled stale, and small,” eventually finding the self-possession to assemble a project like Life Studies and circulate drafts to both faculty and students.86 As introspective as it was ambitious, the book came to fruition at Iowa, a place uniquely encouraging to such ruthless stares in the mirror to discover self and culture, as Lowell had in the famous line from this work: “These are the tranquilized Fifties/ and I am forty . . .”87 If he could be true in his own self-assessment, he remained ever cagey when it came to his impression of the Workshop. Sterile, empty, and dormant were his leitmotifs when describing Iowa, yet when meeting his former student Robert Dana decades later, he remarked that the Workshop was “a great place.” In the next breath, the reason for his plaudit unmistakably sounded as if it came directly from the promotional language Paul Engle had been trumpeting during the 1950s. “Most of my students have published books,” he glowed, in a way that, on the surface, appeared to dispel “the general myth of his unhappiness at Iowa.”88

  7 • Mad Poets: Dylan Thomas and John Berryman