Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
Robert Lowell: A Biography (28 page)
After more Mozart and Strauss in Vienna (“the most dramatic show … in the world”
1
), Lowell and Hardwick arrived at Salzburg in July 1952. The Seminar in American Studies was held in an
eighteenth
-century rococo castle called Schloss Leopoldskron—it would have been hard to find a less mundane location for this multilingual gathering of some one hundred poets, artists and musicians from all over Europe. Lowell was entranced. After nearly two years in Europe he was no longer just a “literary man”: his whole disposition now was to seek comparisons, connections, genealogies—painting, music, poetry held common ground, and that ground was
international
. And here was a castleful of European creativity. He had been assigned a group of about twenty poets, but his task was vague enough for him to be able to range as widely and excitedly as he pleased. In a matter of days, Shepherd Brooks, the seminar’s
director
, has recalled, “he developed an extraordinary following. There was a series of very intense seminars. People were almost
passionately
involved with him—with his ideas.”
Hardwick looked on apprehensively, and later wrote to Charlotte Lowell:
Cal was a huge success at the Seminar. I don’t like to pay him empty compliments but as it worked out he was a gift from heaven for the whole session; he probably is, as much as anyone can be, a good
representative
of an intellectual American and he is also in love with Europe and has spent so much time on European literature and history in these last two years. It all paid off wonderfully. But the whole thing was exhausting simply because it was so stimulating, and he responded to nearly every one of the 100 students and worked much too hard,
organizing
poetry readings in nearly every known tongue, studying German poetry with a tutor on the side.
2
By his own account, Lowell presented “all American poetry from Emerson to Jarrell.” He organized readings in French, German and Italian—“which meant studying the stuff pretty intensely myself”—and gave seminars on Chaucer, Pope and Wordsworth:
My triumph and my most pretentious moment was a shot at Achilles’ speech over one of Priam’s sons, prefaced by “Greek quantities are anybody’s guess”: meaning, I think, verve must excuse sloppiness.
3
He met a music student called Giovanna Madonia and, in
Hardwick
’s phrase, “took up” with her. Salzburg was Mozart’s
birthplace
, and Lowell now saw himself as a serious student of music. A real-life Italian with connections at La Scala was not to be viewed lightly. And, as with the Stafford/Buckman interlude, he expected his wife to sympathize with his intense new friendship.
It is probable that Lowell had been on the verge of a second breakdown in September 1951; then he had instinctively sought
refuge
and stability in Amsterdam. This time, though, he couldn’t travel north, and in the souped-up atmosphere of Salzburg there was no possibility that he would simply “stop,” “calm down” or “take it easy.” For Lowell, the enticements of Art were supremely—some would say destructively—“not of this world.” A few days before the end of the seminar—towards the end of August—he was missing for a day. He was eventually found wandering alone near the Austrian/German frontier and brought back to the Schloss. Shepherd Brooks describes what happened next:
Then the next night I came back to the castle about eleven and there were a number of police cars outside. My assistant told me that all the faculty were at one end of the castle and at the other Professor Lowell was on the top floor surrounded by police…. They were Austrian police. I met with John McCormick and Dr. Jerome Bruner and an Austrian psychiatrist who had come from the city hospital to discuss the situation. Cal was barricaded in his room and wouldn’t come out.
4
It was proposed that Lowell be taken to the city hospital, but Brooks and his staff opposed this; it would surely make things worse for
Lowell, “who lived so much in words,” to be confined in a hospital where he couldn’t understand the language. At this time Austria was still under occupation, and the American Army had its headquarters at Salzburg. Brooks contacted the military police, and, in a bizarre scene, the MP’s came out to the castle and replaced the civil police who were standing guard outside Lord Weary’s castle. Brooks recalls:
A message then came through that Cal would not come out for anybody except me. So I went to his room—there was this surprisingly small military policeman standing just outside his door, rather frightened, a Southern boy. I went in, and there was Cal wearing just a pair of shorts, looking wild and terribly strong, and charged with adrenaline. I wasn’t entirely sure what was going to happen next.
5
Lowell agreed to go in the ambulance, but when he arrived at the Salzburg military hospital it was found that the six “violent rooms” were filled. After much argument, the army agreed to take Lowell in for one night, provided that someone stayed with him. Brooks’s colleague Jerome Bruner volunteered. The army pedantically refused to take any further responsibility, and refused also to issue an order transferring Lowell to the nearest other military hospital—in Munich: it was somehow bureaucratically impossible for a Salzburg ambulance to cross the German frontier. The following day Brooks and a by now totally exhausted Bruner (Lowell had not slept all night) decided to smuggle their sick charge over the border in a private car. They set off with some nervousness:
On the way Lowell kept talking about how terrible one lot of people were—the Austrians or Germans. I can’t remember. He had categorized everybody in the one country as evil and everybody in the other as good. The good ones had good highways, cars that worked, trees that grew, happy ducks, and the peasants were attractive. The other had the
opposite
. Anyway, we had this little procession across the frontier—two cars, one with Cal and me and Jerry and the other with Elizabeth and my wife Esmé. And it was important to keep Esmé and Elizabeth’s car out of sight—so Cal wouldn’t notice. Jerry was in the front seat and Cal in the back of this tiny Hillman Minx car. Cal’s shoulders were almost as wide as the seat. I could see his eyes in the rearview mirror—everything he said was exaggerated and he was having
fun.
He was creating his own reality and then responding to it, and everyone else had to go along with
it. It was extraordinary. So—it’s almost 60 miles, the trip. It was pretty alarming. I felt at any moment he might put his arms around my throat, and that would have been the end of us.
6
One particularly tricky moment came when Lowell suddenly remembered that the seminar still had three or four days to run and he hadn’t written reports on any of his students. Brooks said, “Why don’t you tell us now and I’ll try to remember and then write it up when I get back to the Schloss.” Lowell looked skeptical, but once he was launched, the day was saved: “He spent the rest of that trip describing the academic and artistic—as he saw them—
qualifications
of some fifteen or twenty poets and writers. And it was as if he had known each of them intimately.”
When the car reached the hospital, Lowell developed a limp in his right leg; it was partially fractured, he said, and shorter than the other, and
this
was why he needed hospital attention,
this
was what the whole trip was about,
this
was why he had been held overnight at Salzburg, and so on. At first the Munich hospital’s admissions sergeant said that he had no authority to accept a
civilian
, but Brooks and Bruner pleaded that Lowell was part of “America’s national treasure,” that he was ill and badly needed treatment: “So the sergeant—bless him—in the great American tradition said, ‘O.K., if he’s that important, he’s admitted. We’ll sort out the details later.’”
So he was installed—in a locked ward full of disturbed military personnel. Hardwick took lodgings in a hotel in Munich’s
Schiller-strasse
and visited the hospital each day. On her first visit she found Lowell rather pathetically trying to “get to know” his fellow patients:
He’s just as preoccupied with the other patients as he was with the students. But this hospital is a terrible, terrible place for him. The other patients are of very low mentality; they don’t like Cal at all and he’s trying to talk to them, tell them what’s what, etc. I’m afraid this terrible environment will cause an increase, if there are too many arguments, etc.
7
Whether or not these arguments took place, Lowell’s sojourn in the Munich jail did teach him something about earthy American vernacular—see “A Mad Negro Soldier Confined at Munich”:
“We’re all Americans, except the Doc,
a Kraut DP, who kneels and bathes my eye.
The boys who floored me, two black maniacs, try
to pat my hands. Rounds, rounds! Why punch the clock?
In Munich the zoo’s rubble fumes with cats;
hoydens with air-guns prowl the Koenigsplatz,
and pink the pigeons on the mustard spire.
Who but my girl-friend set the town on fire?
Cat-houses talk cold turkey to my guards;
I found my
Fraulein
stitching outing shirts
in the black forest of the colored wards—
lieutenants squawked like chickens in her skirts.
Her German language made my arteries harden—
I’ve no annuity from the pay we blew.
I chartered an aluminium canoe,
I had her six times in the English Garden.
Oh mama, mama, like a trolley-pole
sparking at contact, her electric shock—
the power-house! … The doctor calls our roll—
no knives, no forks. We file before the clock,
and fancy minnows, slaves of habit, shoot
like starlight through their air-conditioned bowl.
It’s time for feeding. Each subnormal boot
black heart is pulsing to its ant-egg dole.”
8
If the character portrayed here was at all typical, it is clear that Hardwick had good reason to be worried. Lowell’s attitude to
Hardwick
remained unpredictable: he would try to goad her into
argument
or enrage her with insults (“Everybody has noticed that you’ve been getting mighty dumb lately”
9
), but would become anxious and suspicious if his vehemence failed to reduce her to tears: “I can hardly bear it for more than five minutes…. These mixed feelings terrify and oppress me, because I don’t know how to
respond
for his own good.”
10
Inevitably, there were Lowellian moments of high comedy. Hardwick recalls being summoned by the head of the hospital to
discuss the “case” and being asked for details of Lowell’s army record:
And I said: “Well, he didn’t have an army record. He was a
conscientious
objector.” And the lieutenant or whoever he was started
screaming
: “Get that son of a bitch out of here!” And I said: “But he’s an American citizen. He’s got no place to go.”
11
Of another visit, Hardwick wrote at the time to Robie and Anne Macauley:
I can’t resist one funny thing—there are many others, but I’m too gloomy today to remember them. Cal says Hiss is innocent and that his testimony was mostly a joke; full of a peculiar kind of wit like
mine!
At that point, I gave a strained, ha, ha.
12
And the next day, when Hardwick called on Lowell’s doctor for a report on her husband’s progress, she was told: “He’s fine. He’s left the Church and wants to join the Army.” Hardwick
commented
, “Dear old Cal, a born joiner”; and, at the end of the same letter, added, “I’m much more cheerful now and will keep an eye on Cal to be sure he doesn’t recover and get shipped to the Korean front.”
13
Hardwick was able to write these letters to the Macauleys because they had been at Salzburg and witnessed Lowell’s accelerating mania (indeed had been on the receiving end of some of his aggression), but she was anxious that this new episode be kept secret: “Given the tragedy of these attacks, the most important thing is to shield him when he’s recovered.” On August 25 she wrote again to the Macauleys:
I want to impress on you the importance of not saying anything to
anyone
about this. If it “gets out” then you must minimize it, because he really is going to be well soon. I think I have managed the Seminar part as well as possible, and if there is not too much difficulty from American gossip filtering back from the school I’m sure I can pull Cal through the recovery period without too much pain.
14
By October a rumor had reached Boston that Lowell had “
suffered
another severe mental breakdown,” and Charlotte was writing
angrily to Merrill Moore, blaming him—it would seem—for having mishandled the 1949 episode. By then, however, Hardwick had arranged for Lowell to be moved from the army hospital to a
sanatorium
at Kreuzlingen, in Switzerland:
He still wasn’t very well. But somebody had told us about this hospital in Switzerland. I can’t describe to you the state we were in, with these old beaten-up suitcases—all this was travel by train, third class and so forth, no money, nothing, and Cal was in bad shape. He was so knocked out that he couldn’t carry our three years’ worth of suitcases—and I remember lugging them on to the train. But we got to this wonderful place—wonderful. Binswanger Sanatorium in
Kreuzlingen
.
15
Lowell was
“utterly
beartbroken,
” “shattered and ashamed,”
16
she said; he knew that he had behaved badly at Salzburg, but “since there are no great events to work through, he tries to recall feeling and tone, but he can’t.”
17
Once at Kreuzlingen, though, there was an immediate improvement; the place was spectacularly beautiful, set on a lake, and the amenities were luxurious: