Robert Lowell: A Biography (16 page)

At first, though, the arrangement with Schwartz worked out fairly well—a repeat version of Benfolly and Monteagle, with typewriters clattering in every room and arguments about the plumbing:

The visit Lowell writes of here had been maneuvered so that Henry Ware Eliot could arrange a Briggs-Copeland lectureship for him at Harvard, but the scheme eventually came to nothing. Schwartz was fond of inaugurating stratagems like this, and he enjoyed playing the senior literary figure to the youthful Lowells. But according to
Schwartz’s biographer, James Atlas, the domestic balance soon became precarious:

In fact the visit lasted nearly three months, and as late as March 3 Stafford was writing to Peter Taylor: “We are having a splendid time with Delmore, but we must get back to Maine soon, because a house doesn’t like to be left alone too long.”
13
On March 24 she writes: “I am going home on Monday but Cal is going to the Trappists for eight days.”
14

These “Trappists” may have been the same Rhode Island monks who had entertained both Lowell and Stafford in June 1944: on that occasion they had had, according to Jean, “the most wonderful time imaginable … we went to all the services, to vespers, to Benediction and to Compline,”
15
but in 1946 Stafford’s obsession was with
homemaking
at Damariscotta Mills, and it is hardly a surprise that her intensified activity on this score should have encouraged the
contemplative
in Lowell. During the next three months, however, he seems to have escaped from Maine as often as he could. In April “Cal went off to New York today, to be gone a week or more and I am again left here alone with the mice.”
16
In May, Lowell writes to Peter Taylor: “I’ll probably be passing through New York in a week or so and will see you.”
17
And for those weeks when he did stay at Damariscotta he had devised an ingenious new means of stepping to one side of Jean’s hectic refurbishing:

But Lowell was not always in the mood to sidestep. Since
Christmas
, he and Stafford had been edgy and at odds. She, he would say, was drinking heavily, and so he attempted to ration her intake: this would produce the sort of quarrel Stafford later, and perhaps
exaggeratingly
, recalls in her short story:

This urbane, sneering Lowell figure doesn’t quite fit with the
accounts
she was giving in letters at the time. In one of these she describes him returning from his April trip to New York: “When he came back and found the house fresh with all this wallpaper and this new paint, he exploded and said that it was cheap, that it was immoral, and that I had done the whole thing out of a sadistic desire to stifle him.”
20
In “An Influx of Poets,” she analyzes the incident more coolly:

As the “Swiss-organdie glass curtains” were followed by “red velvet drapes” for the living room, and then the moss-green carpeting from Boston, the Theron-Lowell figure seethes with fury: “and all day and all night my God-fearing yokemate burned me at the stake in Salem.” And it is overwritten lines like this that should encourage
caution when it comes to construing real-life agonies from Stafford’s fictional reconstructions.

Certainly, though, her nest-building obsessions
21
had come at almost precisely the wrong time for Lowell. His literary career was opening up at high speed, he was enjoying his trips to New York: Jarrell was there and so too—at this time—was Peter Taylor. Jean Stafford may have seen Damariscotta as a “temple” built in honor of her marriage; Lowell was beginning to see it as an overfurnished jail. And it should not be supposed that Stafford was silently
long-suffering
; in one of the very few moments in “An Influx of Poets” when she is moved to judge her own conduct, she confesses: “I make no plea for myself, for I had the tongue of an adder and my heart was black with rage and hate.”

*

In spite of all this melodrama, Lowell seems to have kept busy through the spring of 1946, mostly writing book reviews for the quarterlies. The most noteworthy of these was a roundup of current poetry that eventually appeared in the Winter 1946 issue of the
Sewanee
Review
;
22
it covered no fewer than nineteen newly
published
books of verse. Lowell is now thought of as having been shrewd and cautious in his public pronouncements on the work of his contemporaries—self-servingly so, it is implied, and certainly in his later years he became guardedly benevolent in his statements about other poets’ work. It is therefore worth remarking that, at the age of twenty-nine, he was prepared to be almost Jarrell-like in his strictness. The first four books on his list are, he says, too awful even to be quoted from:

He then moves on to take fierce issue with C. Day Lewis (“verbal without craftsmanship; abstract without profundity”), Edmund Blunden (once a “small Hardy” but now “heavy, clumsy, careless, academic and sentimental”) and Oscar Williams (“He never knows
when to stop and can seldom write more than two or three lines that hang together”).

Lowell spends rather more time on two dominating figures from his Harvard past: Robert Frost, who had once told him that he should “condense,” is now scolded for having made
A
Masque
of
Reason
“too long, random and willful”; and on his bygone mentor Richard Eberhart:

It should be said that Lowell does exempt “about five poems” from all this, including “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment”—still
perhaps
Eberhart’s most memorable poem.

The meager rations of praise in Lowell’s piece are reserved for Louis MacNeice (“perhaps the most observant eye in England”) and Norman Nicholson (“readable and accomplished”). But throughout there is only one really charitable spasm. Lowell singles out Ralph Gustafson as “one of the best poets reviewed here,” and it is easy to see why; there are clear hints of fellow feeling in his verdict that

Of Lowell’s own poems in
Lord
Weary
’
s
Castle
,
two had appeared in magazines in 1945 (the first version of “The Quaker Graveyard”—lacking parts III and VII—in
Partisan
Review
and “Colloquy in Black Rock” in the
Sewanee
).
During the spring and summer of 1946 he was to have acceptances in all the leading magazines. In February
a batch of three poems appeared in
The
Nation
(where Jarrell was now the poetry editor) and Lowell made a further eight appearances in that magazine during the year—a total of twelve poems,
including
“The Exile’s Return,” “At the Indian Killer’s Grave,” “The Holy Innocents” and “Between the Porch and the Altar.” Most of the other poems in the book appeared in
Partisan
Review
(four poems, including “Christmas in Black Rock” and “After the
Surprising
Conversions”) and
Kenyon
Review
(“Mr. Edwards and the Spider,” “At a Bible House” and “Mary Winslow”). He also made appearances in
Poetry
(“The Ghost”),
Commonwealth
(“The Dead in Europe”) and in the first issue of a new periodical called
Fore
ground
(“In the Cage”). During 1946 it was barely possible to open a literary magazine without coming across Lowell’s name;
anticipation
of the finished book was thus mounting for several months before it actually appeared.

The quarterlies, however, paid no more handsomely in the 1940s than they do today, and Lowell seems to have accepted that, along with Taylor, Jarrell and most of his other poet friends, he would sooner or later have to start looking out for teaching jobs. In May he was offered an instructorship at what he called “the Catholic University” in Boston ($2,500 a year for twelve hours’ teaching per week), but negotiations foundered when Lowell requested shorter hours: he was interested, he said, in a job that left him free to write but not in “a lot of freshman composition courses.”
23
In July, Jean Stafford wrote to Peter Taylor: “Our plans for the future remain vague…. We think now that we will stay on here as long as the weather allows and since that will be anyhow until November, we needn’t worry for a bit yet.”
24

Towards the end of July the summer visitors began to arrive—the poet John Berryman and his wife, Philip and Natalie Rahv, and the critic R. P. Blackmur; the Parkers and the Clarks; also Robert Giroux, Lowell’s editor at Harcourt, Brace, and a number of
nonliterary
friends—neighbors from Westport, the landlord from
Boothbay
Harbor, together with his wife and his wife’s parents. As soon as one collection of guests moved on, another lot arrived. Jean had completed the shrine; now it was time to greet the worshipers. Needless to say, it didn’t work that way: