Robert Lowell: A Biography (32 page)

Pardon this spate of letters, but for the moment you speak my language, and there’s no telling how long that may continue. Yes, in spite of your Idaho humor, which is hardly the Tuscan of Ovid. Not reading Vergil is your furneral [
sic
],
not his or mine. Imagine you thinking poor Mr. Dryden’s translation had anything to
do
with the original! Sometimes I think you were born in Sioux City instead of Venezia.

Iambics—yes, you are partly right; but a man must sweat with his meters, if he is ever going to be a fabbro, and not just a prophet. Thirty-seven years has been too long for me. You’ve got a point, but I knew that in my cradle—you must have told me.

I can push my own Jambics [
sic
]
where I want to—you can scratch your own back with your own. i.e. jambics.

Here’s a new poem—no iambics—see what your cigar-store wooden Indian solid Kansas humor can do with it. Every syllable is meant to be there.

Con amore

Cal

the patient has a lot of control, a lot of ability to function, while being at the same [time] extremely unwise, deranged. Dr. Piker says that he always tells his students that such a state is the most difficult one in psychiatry—usually even the family thinks the patient is all right and friends nearly always resent any restraint being put upon a man who has so much of his powers left.
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You see he doesn’t really know her—a curious state—and so he cannot know whether he prefers Giovanna to me! How disarming this wild situation is. Today, much better but still “gay” Cal said, “I’m just crazy about you, but I’ve got to get to Europe as soon as possible to see what Giovanna’s really like. How can I say until I know!”
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Cal’s love for me is more phissical [
sic
]
than anything else (actually we talked very little, also because it is very hard for me to understand his English …) so I know that he cannot change idea, at least untill [
sic
] this love will be less platonic.
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I grow more doubtful every day. I am shocked and repelled by what Cal has done to me this time. It is true he doesn’t seem to realize emotionally any of the real nature of his conduct; even, to mention the least, the unnecessary ungentlemanliness of it, the quite gratuitous bad manners. That is the superficial conduct, the rudeness, the meanness, the stinginess—and on a deeper level he has been of course
indescribably
cruel. I simply cannot face a life of this. I suppose I will sound self-righteous but no one has the slightest idea of what I’ve been through with Cal. In 4½ years, counting this present break-up, he has had four collapses! Three manic, and one depression. These things take time to come and long after he is out of the hospital there is a period which can only be called “nursing.” The long, difficult pull back—which does not show always to others. I knew the possibility of this when I married him, and I have always felt that the joy of his “normal” periods, the lovely time we had, all I’ve learned from him, the immeasurable things I’ve derived from our marriage made up for the bad periods. I consider it all a gain of the most precious kind. But he has torn down this time everything we’ve built up—he has
completely
exposed to the world all of our sorrows which should be kept secret; how difficult these break-ups are for both of us. I’ve put on a show to some extent. But he has opened the curtain and let everyone look in. Now everyone knows that Cal goes off, says anything
degrading
he pleases about me, then comes to and I’m to nurse him back to some sort of sanity. There is nothing petty in my resentment of this—things like that cannot be pushed aside by a person of any pride.
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Poor Cal—I feel nearly reduced to prayer at this point. Blair, isn’t it terrible, this poor creature has acute mania again! I can hardly bear it for him. He’s now cut off from all visitors, letters, calls—on the most
severly [
sic
]
ill floor. I shudder to think how long it may be before he comes within reach again.
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When Mother died, I began to feel tireless, madly sanguine, menaced, and menacing. I entered the Payne-Whitney Clinic for “all those afflicted in mind.” One night I sat in the mixed lounge, and enjoyed the
new calm which I had been acquiring with much cunning during the few days since my entrance. I remember coining and pondering for several minutes such phrases as the Art of Detachment, Off-handed Involvement, and Urbanity: a Key to the Tactics of Self-control. But the old menacing hilarity was growing in me. I saw Anna and her nurse walk into our lounge. Anna, a patient from a floor for more extreme cases, was visiting our floor for the evening. I knew that the evening would soon be over, that the visitor would probably not return to us, and that I had but a short time to make my impression on her. Anna towered over the piano, and thundered snatches of Mozart sonatas, which she half-remembered and murdered. Her figure, a Russian
ballerina’s
or Anna Karenina’s, was emphasized, and
illuminated
,
as it were, by an embroidered, middle-European blouse that fitted her with the creaseless, burnished, curved tightness of a medieval breast-plate. I throbbed to the music and the musician. I began to talk aimlessly and loudly to the room at large. I discussed the solution to a problem that had been bothering me about the unmanly smallness of the suits of armor that I had seen “tilting” at the Metropolitan Museum. “Don’t you see?” I said, and pointed to Anna, “the armor was made for
Amazons!”
But no one took up my lead. I began to extol my tone-deafness; it was, I insisted, a providential flaw, an auditory fish-weir that screened out irrelevant sonority. I made defiant adulatory remarks on Anna’s touch. Nobody paid any attention to me. Roger, an Oberlin undergraduate and fellow patient, sat beside Anna on the piano-bench. He was small. His dark hair matched his black flannel Brooks Brothers’ suit; his blue-black eyes matched his blue-black necktie. He wore a light cashmere sweater that had been knitted for him by his mother, and his yellow woolen socks had been imported from the Shetlands. Roger talked to Anna with a persuasive shyness. Occasionally, he would stand up and play little beginners’ pieces for her. He explained that these pieces were taken from an exercise book composed by Bela Bartok in protest against the usual, unintelligibly tasteless examples used by teachers. Anna giggled with incredulous admiration as Roger insisted that the clinic’s music
instructor
could easily teach her to read more skilfully. Suddenly, I felt
compelled
to make a derisive joke, and I announced crypticly [
sic
]
and untruely [
sic
]
that Rubinstein had declared the eye was of course the source of all evil for a virtuoso. “If the eye offends thee, pluck it out.” No one understood my humor. I grew red and confused. The air in the room began to tighten around me. I felt as if I were squatting on the bottom of a huge laboratory bottle and trying to push out the black rubber stopper before I stiffled [
sic
]
.
Suddenly, I knew [corrected in E.H.’s hand to “felt”] I could clear the air by taking hold of Roger’s ankles and pulling him off his chair. By some criss-cross of logic, I
reasoned that my cruel boorishness would be an act of self sacrifice. I would be bowing out of the picture, and throwing Roger into the arms of Anna. Without warning, but without lowering my eyes from Anna’s splendid breast-plate-blouse, I seized Roger’s yellow ankles. I pulled; Roger sat on the floor with tears in his eyes. A sigh of surprised repulsion went round the room. I assumed a hurt, fatherly expression, but all at once I felt eased and sympathetic with everyone.

When the head nurse came gliding into the lounge, I pretended that I was a white-gloved policeman who was directing traffic. I held up my open hands, and said, “No roughage, Madam; just innocent
merriment
!” Roger was getting to his feet; I made a stop-signal in his
direction
. In a purring, pompous James Michael Curley voice, I said, “Later, he will thank me.” The head-nurse, looking bored and tolerant, led me away to watch the Liberace program in the men’s television parlor. I was left unpunished. But next morning, while I was weighing-in and “
purifying
” myself in the cold shower, I sang

Rex tremendae majestatis

qui salvandos salvas gratis

at the top of my lungs and to a melody of my own devising. Like the cat-bird, who will sometimes “interrupt its sweetest song by a perfect imitation of some harsh cry such as that of the Great Crested Flycatcher, the squawl of a hen, the cry of a lost chicken, or the spitting of a cat” I blended the lonely tenor of some fourteenth century Flemish monk to bars of Yankee Doodle, and the
Mmm
Mmm
of the padlocked Papagano [
sic
]
.
I was then transferred to a new floor where the patients were deprived of their belts, pajama-cords and shoe-strings. We were not allowed to carry matches, and had to request the attendants to light our cigarettes. For holding up my trowsers [
sic
]
I invented an inefficient, stringless method which I considered picturesque and called
Malayan.
Each morning before breakfast, I lay naked to the waist in my knotted
Malayan
pajamas and received the first of my round-the-clock injections of Chloropromzene [
sic
]
:
left shoulder, right shoulder, right buttock, left buttock. My blood became like melted lead. I could hardly swallow my breakfast, because I so dread the weighted bending down that would be necessary for making my bed. And the rational exigencies of bed-
making
were more upsetting than the physical. I wallowed through
badminton
doubles, as though I were a diver in the full billowings of his equipment on the bottom of the sea. I sat gaping through
Scrabble
games unable to form the simplest word; I had to be prompted by a nurse, and even then couldn’t make any sense of the words the nurse had formed for me. I watched the Giants play the Brooklyn Dodgers on television. … My head ached, and I couldn’t keep count of the balls and strikes for longer than a single flash on the screen. I went back to my bedroom
and wound the window open to its maximum six inches. Below me, patients circled in twos over the bright gray octagonal paving-stones of the courtyard. I let my glasses drop. How freely they glittered through the air for almost a minute! They shattered on the stones. Then
everyone
in the courtyard came crowding and thrusting their heads forward over my glasses, as though I had been scattering corn for pigeons. I felt my languor lift and then descend again. I already seemed to weigh a thousand pounds because of my drug, and now I blundered about nearly blind from myopia. But my nervous system vibrated joyfully, when I felt the cool air brushing directly on my eye-balls. And I was reborn each time I saw my blurred, now unspectacled, now unprofessorial face in the mirror.
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