Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
Robert Lowell: A Biography (22 page)
On this same day, Fitzgerald wrote to Allen Tate and his wife, Caroline Gordon (herself a devout Catholic):
I think Cal’s exaltation is natural, and that it does not exceed its cause, but I also think that there are other voices besides God’s to be heard from him and that he must have guidance—just as Saint Teresa and others had to have it. This does not mean that I believe Cal to be any more a saint than I am. What I do believe is that God sometimes intervenes directly and unmistakably in our lives and that one effect of this, of the sense of
God’s power and other perfections, is to unbalance the person acted upon. Why should it not? It is a power with which our own are
incommensurable
. All right: that is the essential thing that has happened in this case. Now for the disturbing thing: I’m quite prepared to believe that there are manic or paranoiac or schizophrenic tendencies in Cal (the terminology continues to be vague to me, I’m not a native of that territory; I mean he’s liable to some sort of sickness) and that these tendencies have been awakened and are to be struggled against. We must merely distinguish between what has hit him and what it has induced in him. Now for the third thing: where there is convincing evidence of the intervention I spoke of, we may have a great deal of trust in the purposes that are being served and need not more than dutifully worry about the incidental difficulties. As a Catholic made alive by grace to some realities, I simply know that in these days we are called upon to bear witness perhaps more strenuously than may have been necessary in other days. Cal’s intuitional powers have considerable range and value; what they bring up must stand criticism, but it must not be dismissed.
22
In the three weeks leading up to the second directors’ meeting, “Yaddo had become the favorite topic to discuss while holding a martini. New York was full of slanders, rumors, accusations and counter-accusations.”
23
A second group of former Yaddo guests (Eleanor Clark, Kappo Phelan, John Cheever, Alfred Kazin and Harvey Breit) began circulating a statement supporting Mrs. Ames:
… we reject as preposterous the political charge now being brought against Elizabeth Ames. We reject any insinuation that at any time she deliberately used the facilities of Yaddo for any other purpose than the furthering of the arts in America. Above all, it is a violation of
elementary
justice that such a charge and such insinuations should be deliberately confused with grievances of a purely personal nature, which cannot fairly be dealt with in an atmosphere of political tension.
All of us have often gone on record as opposing the Communist Party. All of us have at one time or another, some of us for long periods, benefited from Elizabeth Ames’s administration of Yaddo. We are
anti-Stalinists
. We feel that the charge currently being brought arises from a frame of mind that represents a grave danger both to civil liberties and to the freedom necessary for the arts. We feel this charge involves a cynical assault not only on Elizabeth Ames’s personal integrity, but also on the whole future of Yaddo.
We have lived at Yaddo; we have worked there; we want others to have the same opportunity. We are outraged, first, to see that
opportunity
jeopardized; and secondly, to see the human and political values we hold being debased through the use of a smear-technique that has so far not been honored in this country.
24
Seventy-five copies of this document were sent out on March 21, and five days later fifty-one endorsements had been received by the organizers. “We also received several letters and telegrams from people acquainted with Yaddo but who had not been guests there.” According to Fitzgerald, Lowell was “not only deeply wounded but incredulous at the kind of prose employed against him by people whom he had considered his friends” (among the pro-Ames signatories were Delmore Schwartz and Katherine Anne Porter):
In the midst of what was becoming an ugly comedy, Lowell behaved gently but with increasing excitement. He had understandable difficulty in sleeping. He needed the reassurance of company. He and his friends made no attempt to counteract the circular letter with one of their own but they visited and remonstrated with one or two of those who had sent it.
25
The petition served its purpose; when the Yaddo board re-met on March 26, they agreed that Lowell’s charges be dismissed. Mrs. Ames’s position as director was confirmed, though not without criticism of her too personal attitude towards inviting guests and extending the length of their visits. Later she would be deprived of those privileges, which were transferred to the Admissions
Committee
. Luckily, during the week before the meeting, Malcolm Cowley had been able to keep the story out of the newspapers: the
Herald
Tribune
had intended to cover the controversy on Wednesday the twenty-third, but Cowley told them that if they held off until the actual meeting, he would see that they got an “exclusive”; as a result, a mild piece appeared in the paper’s Sunday edition, and Cowley was able to write proudly to his friends that he had stumbled upon a first principle of Press Relations:
Now I know how to have a story played down—give it to one morning newspaper as an exclusive to be published on Sunday; then the other papers won’t bother with it on Monday, unless it is very big. If it had come out on a weekday, the World Telegram, Sun and Journal
American
would have had follow-ups.
26
On the day of the Yaddo board meeting, Lowell put in an
appearance
at the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, which was being held at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. The conference aimed to promote a conciliatory, if not craven, attitude to the Soviet Union; a number of Russian writers and artists were on the platform, for example, for the session on writing and publishing, and so too were a handful of American pro-
Communists
, including Agnes Smedley and three professors who had just been dismissed from the University of Washington for “alleged Communist Party membership.”
Partisan
Review
was well
represented
in the audience, and the Russians were thus given a fairly grueling time, with Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy
pressing
them from the floor on matters of state censorship and the present whereabouts of writers like Pasternak and Babel. Lowell’s contribution was rather more oblique. The
New
York
Times
reported
it as follows:
“I am a poet and a Roman Catholic,” Mr. Lowell declared. “I have two questions. The first is addressed to Mr. Pavlenko. What are the laws for conscientious objection in the Soviet Union? The second question is for Mr. Shostakovich. Will he tell us how the criticism of the Soviet
Government
can help an artist?”
Mr. Pavlenko replied that he didn’t know what the Soviet laws on conscientious objection were. “I have had no personal acquaintance with them,” he said. “When my country called, I fought. I hope to be able to fight when I am 100 years old.”
Mr. Shostakovich, pale, determined-looking and a little nervous,
replied
to Mr. Lowell by affirming the criticism he had received for writing formalist music. “The criticism brings me much good,” he said. “It helps me bring my music forward.”
27
Thirty years later, Shostakovich’s memoirs appeared in the West; in them, he gave his account of the Waldorf affair:
I still recall with horror my first trip to the U.S.A. I wouldn’t have gone at all if it hadn’t been for intense pressure from administrative figures of all ranks and colors, from Stalin down. People sometimes say it must have been an interesting trip, look at the way I’m smiling in the
photographs
. That was the smile of a condemned man. I felt like a dead man. I answered all the idiotic questions in a daze, and thought, When I get back it’s over for me.
Stalin liked leading Americans by the nose that way. He would show them a man—here he is, alive and well—and then kill him. Well, why say lead by the nose? That’s too strongly put. He only fooled those who wanted to be fooled. The Americans don’t give a damn about us, and in order to live and sleep soundly, they’ll believe anything.
28
Since leaving Yaddo, Lowell had been planning a missionary trip to Chicago and the Midwest—he would visit Tate at Chicago, Peter Taylor at Bloomington, Ransom at Kenyon. He would recruit allies for his contest against evil. Tate was alarmed at the prospect and much relieved each time Lowell postponed the actual date of his arrival: “We want Cal to come out but it would be better after he cools off a bit.”
29
Tate wrote this to Elizabeth Hardwick while Lowell was in
retreat
at Rhode Island, and he took the opportunity to insert some avuncular but firmly discouraging advice:
[Lowell] has got himself boxed into the corner that he has always wanted to be in; that is, the inescapably celibate corner, (1) he can’t marry again, as a Catholic (2) as a strict Catholic, he can’t commit adultery. He has been trying to get himself in this dilemma. I don’t
predict
that he will become a monk but I do think it highly probable.
30
Immediately after the Waldorf conference Lowell telegrammed Tate to expect him on March 29; the telegram was signed “Uncle Lig.” The following day Tate wrote again to Hardwick:
Cal is here, and in 24 hours has flattened us out. I do not know what we can do. Fundamentally he makes a great deal of sense, but his mental condition is very nearly psychotic. We shall be able to get through the next ten days, till he goes to Kenyon: what worries me is his immediate future. What can he do? He says that God, or God through me, must tell him. I will not let him down, but the best help from others, if it is too much depended on, always lets us down.
Perhaps
a letter from you would help to calm him. He is pathetic. He constantly embraces us, and asks us to stand by him, since he is weak.
31
A day later Tate had second thoughts: Lowell, he felt, was “better—distinctly so: he is quietening down hourly…. more than ever
before he needs to be loved.” Tate also adds that “His humor will save him in the long run.”
32
Two days after this, Tate was taking a less indulgent view of Lowell’s sense of fun—possibly because one of Lowell’s “jests” was to provide Caroline Tate with a list of Allen’s lovers, and then to implore Tate to “repent.” Also, there was much bear-foolery—the bear games that Lowell and Stafford had devised were not just verbal: on this occasion, according to Robie Macauley, Lowell did an “Arms of the Law” impersonation that ended with Tate being lifted into the air and then held at arm’s length out of his
second-floor
apartment window; suspended thus, Tate was forced to listen to a bear’s-voice recitation of his own most celebrated poem, “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” (“Arms of the Law” was always Lowell’s retributive joke-bear: “A Bostonian, an Irish policeman and a bear.”)
33
Macauley’s story is perhaps too good to be true, but
certainly
there was enough violence in those two days for Tate to lose patience and call the police:
Saturday evening he made a scene in a restaurant, from which we extricated him with great difficulty. When we got him home, he raised the window and began to shout profanity and obscenity. This went on about 30 minutes. A crowd gathered and then five policemen appeared. It took four of them ten minutes to subdue and handcuff him…. I finally, with the help of Jim Cunningham, talked the police out of taking him to the station, and instead got them to take him to the University psychiatrist, who diagnosed his case as “Psychotic reaction, paranoid type.” He thought Cal should be taken into custody, but I persuaded him and the police to turn him over to me for the night. We quieted him by three in the morning, and he slept a little. At breakfast, he was agitated, and announced that he had done something wonderful for us all. He then said he was going to Peter Taylor at Bloomington, Indiana. I saw no way to stop him short of calling the police and committing him. We put him on the train in great apprehension.
34
While Lowell was on his way to Bloomington, Tate telephoned Peter Taylor “and explained what had happened”; he also suggested that Taylor meet Lowell’s train with a police escort. Tate then fired off a thoroughly rattled letter to Elizabeth Hardwick in New York. He had heard that Lowell and Hardwick had begun an affair at Yaddo, and—as a former admirer of Hardwick’s—he here takes a perhaps overprotective line:
Now my dear,
you
must
listen
to
what
I
say.
Cal is dangerous; there are definite homicidal implications in his world, particularly toward women and children. He has a purification mania, which frequently takes
homicidal
form. You must not let him in your apartment….
It is not likely that he will get back to N.Y. At present he is quiet, feeling out, of course, the Taylors, but when they do not enter his world with full assent, he will become violent, as he did here. Overtly, we were all sympathy, but he began on Friday to suspect that we were the enemy.
While the police were subduing him, he shouted again and again: “Cut off my testicles.”
You know what is wrong with him as well as I do.
35
Tate then goes on to scold Hardwick, and to criticize Flannery O’Connor for having indulged Lowell in his campaign at Yaddo: “But you are a woman and Miss O’Connor is a woman, and neither of you had the experience or knowledge to evaluate the situation in public terms.”
*
Lowell arrived in Bloomington on April 4 and Peter Taylor met him at the station. Taylor had already arranged to lodge Lowell at the University of Indiana Club—on Tate’s advice; after all, the Taylors had recently had their first child, and from Tate’s account of the upheavals in Chicago, it would be a risk having Lowell in their house. At first, Taylor had been reluctant to accept any such
melodramatic
diagnosis, but almost as soon as Lowell appeared it was evident that this was not just another of his famous “rages”: