Authors: Ian Hamilton

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Robert Lowell: A Biography (36 page)

BOOK: Robert Lowell: A Biography

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To others, Tate was putting his objections even more
forthrightly
: these loose, self-centered poems made him wonder if Lowell wasn’t on the brink of another manic episode. Elizabeth Hardwick was indignant when she heard that Tate was originating rumors of this sort. There had, she might have admitted, been a short spell during the summer when both she and Elizabeth Bishop had been worried that Lowell was getting dangerously “high,” but by early December Bishop was able to congratulate her friend on somehow having averted a full-scale attack—“the whole phenomena [
sic
]
of
your quick recovery and simultaneous productivity seems to me in looking back to be the real marvel of my summer.”
50
Later Bishop recalled that “one reason she left Castine—with her friend Lota—after a few days was that she felt Cal was getting sick and part of it was getting very amorous with her. There was this
reawakened
interest in her as someone he was in love with.”
51
And it was almost at this point that Lowell wrote his poem “The Two Weeks’ Vacation,” which recalls his 1947 visit to Bishop and his rejection of Carley Dawson. The poem’s final stanza reads, in part:

And now ten years later, I see you to your plane in Bangor.

You are thirty pounds lighter,

Your uncertain fingers that float to your lips.

And you kiss them to me, and our fellowship

Resumes its old transcendence like a star.
52

After Bishop’s departure, Hardwick had reported to Cousin Harriet that “Bobby is fine. The happiest, healthiest couple are always
writing
the most brooding, neurasthenic works! This has indeed been one of our best times—this last year or so.”
53
And as to the poems, Hardwick knew just how many hours of revision had gone into them (indeed she had herself helped with a good deal of the
rewriting
, and the manuscripts of Lowell’s prose pieces bear extensive evidence of her editorial advice). She told Tate that the three and a half months in which Lowell had been working on
Life
Studies
had in fact been “marvellously quiet ones with us”: “he was not sick when he worked over and over those poems and I don’t agree with you in the least about them.”
54

By the time Hardwick had got around to scolding Tate, however, his diagnosis, or prediction, had been “uncannily” proved right. In early December, after a reading trip to Washington and New York, Lowell was unignorably beginning to speed up. For Hardwick, it was the familiar dilemma: these excitements
could
burn themselves out, she would tell herself, they didn’t
always
carry him “right off the track.” For the moment, she would wait and see. Unhappily, she didn’t have to wait for long. Dido Merwin, then married to the poet W. S. Merwin, recalls the day when Lowell decided to invite “le tout Boston” to an impromptu party—so impromptu that Hardwick
learned about it only a few hours before the McGeorge Bundys actually arrived at her front door:

And up the stairs they streamed. Ivor and Dorothea Richards, Frost, Edmund Wilson, Mrs. Edmund Wilson … I think Adrienne Rich was there. And Arthur Schlesinger—but everybody. Gertrude Buckman was in the kitchen crying. And Cal got Frost up into Harriet’s night nursery. Edmund Wilson fell down, or someone knocked him down. There was a table covered in glasses and Cal came up to this corner where a number of us were circulating, including Lizzie, and he sat down in a chair and dashed the glasses off the table with his feet and sat there, with his feet on the drinks table, surrounded by broken glass, and shouted, “Lizzie, Bill [Merwin] says Hiss wasn’t guilty.” Dorothea and Ivor Richards were sitting on the sofa and Dorothea said to me, “What a lovely party. Everybody’s having such fun!” There were punch-ups. There were insults. And Cal was just going round like the devil putting people against each other. It was the most extraordinary party—an absolute triumph for Cal…. The extraordinary thing was that nobody seemed to realize he was mad.
55

In fact, probably everyone realized, but was too drunk to care. William Alfred, the Harvard medievalist who had recently become a close friend of the Lowells’, remembers that his role at the party (agreed beforehand with Hardwick) was to see that all drinks were regularly stiffened: by this means, perhaps no one would
hear
when Lowell announced that celebrity X was indeed “the best second-rate poet in the city of Boston.” The strategy proved an incomplete success.

Some seventy-two sleepless hours after the party, the police were called. Lowell’s own psychiatrist had visited but had swiftly been sent packing. “It was terrible,” Hardwick remembers. “
Everybody
was milling around and we couldn’t do anything with him … he was just totally out of his mind.”
56
In the end, Lowell was persuaded to accept treatment but insisted on being
committed
to one of the city’s public hospitals; his preference was for the fearsomely named Boston Psychopathic. William Alfred describes what happened:

Cal agreed to be admitted to the Boston Psychopathic, but only if he was accompanied by an old school friend of his, whom I would rather not identify. This friend was now an extremely elegant Boston swell
and when the circumstances were explained to him, he agreed to meet Cal at the police station. So the police arrived at Marlborough Street to take him away. Before he left, he wanted to sit for a few moments in Harriet’s room and watch her sleep. He did this, with me telling the cops: “He won’t be long.” Then we left in the police wagon. And I remember the look on Cal’s face—it was as if the real Cal, the Cal I knew, were looking out at me from within the mania. It was very moving. I’d never seen him crazy. Then when we got to the police station they treated him very roughly—they wouldn’t even give him a glass of water. But his school friend arrived then, and he told the cop: “You will give Mr. Lowell a glass of water and you will keep a civil tongue in your head!” It was a bit better after that. Then we took him to the hospital. It was like taking a kid to a boarding school and then having to walk away, having to leave him there. They took his clothes away. When I left, he was standing there in his underclothes.
57

During Lowell’s brief stay at the Boston Psychopathic, he met a girl called Ann Adden, a “psychiatric fieldworker” from
Bennington
College, and almost immediately began to announce plans for a “new life.” He was going to change his will and leave everything to his new love, he said; the source of his turmoil was his bad marriage, and so on. As for Ann Adden, she seems to have been thoroughly beguiled, and on more than one occasion helped Lowell play truant from the hospital; he would be found wandering on Boston Common or sitting in his lawyer’s office hammering out the legal niceties of his rebirth.
58

After a week or so the hospital discharged him; he had quieted down, the doctors said, and they thought that letting him out would be a “bold therapeutic measure.”
59
It is hard not to suspect that they simply wanted to be rid of him. Certainly, he was far from well and for the next month seemed to be thoroughly adrift; he shuttled between Marlborough Street and a room on Harvard Square, some days protesting his love for Ann Adden and on others imploring Hardwick not to abandon the Marlborough Street house. A letter written on January 20, 1958, from Elizabeth Hardwick to Cousin Harriet, gives an idea of the almost tedious bewilderment that
prevailed
throughout these weeks:

Well, he’s back, but even when I was talking to Bobby about the time you called I felt how unwise I was to have him here now. He is very, very far from well. On the telephone he sounds all right, calm and
considerate, but in person the excitement, the unreal plans and demands, the unpredictability have hardly altered basically. There is a superficial alteration because of the drugs. But the deep underlying unreality is there, the fact that no one else’s feelings really exist, wild projects, etc. I have not
taken
him
back
—awful phrase.
60

But she would not refuse him refuge, and he could not bear to abandon his study, his books, his family furniture: “the most
stabilizing
factor has been the house! The last thing I would have thought for a person like Bobby.” It was as if, at some level, Lowell knew very well that his adventure would not last; even as he grandly declared to Hardwick that “I promise nothing,” he was ensuring that there would still be an old life to come back to. On the subject of Ann Adden, he seems to have been anxious to maintain at least a thin fog of uncertainty.

after completely dropping the poor girl I wrote you about, not eventelephoning her when he got out of the hospital, not answering her calls—all of this seemed good when I heard it even though the girl, who had told everyone Bobby was in love with her and only needed to be rid of me to be well and happy, was described by a friend as in a “basket case condition” due to all the disappointment—now—hold your hats!—he had another girl! He said he spent the weekend with her, while he was away, and of course he is going to keep on. “This will make everything so much better with us. It’s a wonderful thing for both of us,” he said, us being myself and Bobby. By this time I felt so bored, so numb that I couldn’t have cared less about the girl, but I did care about the deep derangement which such a conversation with me shows.
61

It is probable that there was no other girl, that even the novelty of Ann Adden had had to be reinvented for the sake of a more stunning metaphor. As one friend of Lowell’s has described it:

Cal had to be “in love.” Poets were always in love. He adored the metaphor of these situations—him in hospital and some girl waiting for him in a ski-lodge in Vermont. But he’d quickly get bored—they wouldn’t understand what he was talking about.
62

For a few days at the end of January 1958 it seemed that this “boredom” had indeed begun to settle in. Lowell returned to
Marlborough
Street, and on January 24 Hardwick felt confident enough
to announce that “Things are really much better!” He seemed “more himself,” had begun teaching again and correcting student papers: “He seems to be settling down, quieting down gradually. I suppose underneath it had been harder for him to come back to the world than we know.”
63
Lowell also began to focus once again on the new poems and, in particular, on Tate’s scathing view of them. Also on the twenty-fourth he wrote to Tate:

Let’s not have a fight about my poems. I like them, and people as different as my Washington Winslow relation, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Rahv and T.S. Eliot liked them and thought they topped my work. But you don’t have to and I want us to stay as good friends as ever.

You
were
uncannily right about my getting sick again. I had a bout of about a month in the Boston Psychopathic and am now back—in fact, I’ve been back teaching now for three weeks.
64

On January 31 Tate replied, and his air of caution suggests that he still suspected Lowell to be worryingly high:

I am a little baffled by your letter. I had no intention of having a “fight” with you or anybody else. I just don’t feel angry. What I thought was quite simple, and it had nothing to do with thinking you had “betrayed the persona” I had of you. I simply thought that the poems contained intractable material, and that you were probably in a transition period from your early style to a new one. You have certainly reached the age when this is likely to happen. Nor did I think the poems
all
bad. It seemed to me that the personal poems were a little morbid, private and unorganized; and I was not put off because they were not
like
your old work; rather because they lacked the concentration and power, lacking as they seemed to lack, the highly formalistic organization of the old. Won’t you just put down my dissenting opinion as the one negative vote, and let the opinions of others count? We can’t expect
all
our friends to like what we do all the time.
65

Tate also thanked Lowell for having praised
his
last group of poems, but pointed out, “There is a good deal of time between me and them, and they are beginning to look like old poems”; and, again, he tried to reassure his old friend that there
could
be criticism without
quarrels
. “Why should I ‘cut’ you in March? Come to, Cal. This is greatly beside the point.”

But before Tate’s letter arrived in Boston, Lowell had relapsed.
The brief lull seems merely to have recharged him, and before the end of January he was once again “active as electricity.”
66
Hardwick arranged for him to be admitted to McLean Hospital outside
Boston
, and the doctors there pronounced him “truly under the
complete
domination of childhood fantasies.”
67

Notes

1
. Elizabeth Hardwick to Peter Taylor, February 10, 1955.

2
. R.L. to John Crowe Ransom, February 24, 1955 (Chalmers Memorial Library).

3
. Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair and Holly Clark, November 29, 1954.

4
. R.L., draft autobiography, 1955–57 (Houghton Library).

5
. R.L. to Ezra Pound, April 17, 1955 (Beinecke Library).

6
. R.L. to Peter Taylor, April 11, 1955.

7
. R.L. to Blair Clark, May 7, 1955.

8
. Elizabeth Hardwick to Harriet Winslow, April 22, 1955 (Houghton Library).

9
. R.L. to Blair Clark, May 7, 1955.

10
. Ibid.

11
. R.L. to William Carlos Williams, June 24, 1957 (Beinecke Library).

12
. R.L. to Peter Taylor, November 6, 1955.

13
. Ibid.

14
. R.L. to William Carlos Williams, December 2, 1955 (Beinecke Library).

15
. R.L. to Peter Taylor, November 6, 1955.

16
. R.L. to Blair Clark, May 7, 1955.

17
. Rev. Whitney Hale to R.L., November 12, 1955 (Houghton Library).

18
. R.L. to Peter Taylor, February 12, 1956.

19
. R.L. to Harriet Winslow, February 13, 1956 (Houghton Library).

20
. Ibid., March 8, 1956 (Houghton Library).

21
. Quoted in Christopher Dawson, “Religious Enthusiasm,”
The
Month
(1951).

22
. R.L., draft autobiography.

23
. Ibid.

24
. Ibid.

25
. Ibid.

26
. Ibid.

27
. Ibid.

28
. R.L. to Harriet Winslow, April 10, 1957 (Houghton Library).

29
. R.L. to J. F. Powers, May 16, 1956.

30
. Ibid., February 6, 1957.

31
. Elizabeth Bishop to R.L., September 4, 1956 (Houghton Library).

32
. Robert Lowell, Interview,
Review,
no. 26 (Summer 1971).

33
. Robert Lowell, interview with Frederick Seidel,
Paris
Review
25 (
Winter-Spring
1961), 56–95.

34
. In
Encounter
11 (April 1954), 32.

35
. Robert Lowell, “William Carlos Williams,”
Hudson
Review
14 (1961–62).

36
. Ibid.

37
. R.L. to Randall Jarrell, October 24, 1957 (Berg Collection).

38
. R.L., “After Enjoying Six or Seven Essays on Me,”
Salmagundi,
no. 37 (Spring 1977), 112–15.

39
. Ibid.

40
. Elizabeth Bishop to R.L., December 14, 1957 (Houghton Library).

41
. R.L. to William Carlos Williams, September 30, 1957 (Beinecke Library).

42
. R.L. to Randall Jarrell, October 11, 1957 (Berg Collection).

43
. Ibid., October 24, 1957.

44
. Ibid. In 1951, Jarrell had written to Lowell from Princeton: “I had a boy at Colorado last summer who was good (an excellent Rilke translation) and most of his poems were excellent though unconscious imitations of you. You’d had him in a class. De Witt Snodgrass, poor ill-named one! When you influence people, when your poems influence theirs, that is—you really mow them down ….” (Houghton Library).

45
. Seidel,
Paris
Review
interview.

46
. Elizabeth Bishop, “The Man-Moth,”
The
Complete
Poems
(New York:
Farrar
, Straus & Giroux, 1969), p. 15.

47
. R.L. to Randall Jarrell, October 24, 1957.

48
. Elizabeth Bishop to R.L., December 14, 1957 (Houghton Library).

49
. Allen Tate to R.L., December 3, 1957 (Houghton Library).

50
. Elizabeth Bishop to R.L., December 11, 1957 (Houghton Library).

51
. Friend of R.L. and Bishop to I.H. (1982).

52
. Ms (Houghton Library).

53
. Elizabeth Hardwick to Harriet Winslow, November 22, 1957 (Houghton Library).

54
. Elizabeth Hardwick to Allen Tate, December 16, 1957 (Firestone Library).

55
. Dido Merwin, interview with I.H. (1980).

56
. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1981).