Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
Robert Lowell: A Biography (44 page)
George Kay’s prose translation of Leopardi reads as follows:
Mischievous boy, this flowering age of yours is like a day full of joy, a clear cloudless day which precedes the holiday of your life. Have
enjoyment
of it, my son; a sweet state, a happy season, it is. I do not want to say anything more to you; but may your holiday which still hesitates to come, not be heavy.
59
Lowell’s version could not be accused of irreverent muscularity; its fault rather is to seem insipid and mechanical, the work of an
amateur
poet or an overworked professor.
In spite of spirited defenses by Edmund Wilson (“the only book of its kind in literature”)
60
and A. Alvarez (a “magnificent collection of new poems by Robert Lowell, based on the work of 18 European poets”),
61
Lowell was taken aback by the vehemence of some of his assailants—although the review that seems to have most nettled him, by Dudley Fitts in the
New
York
Times
Book
Review,
was more condescending than fierce. It ended: “The book is fun; but
schoolboys
should read it in a salt mine.”
62
In November, Lowell wrote to A. Alvarez, who was to print his superb Villon over a full page of the London
Observer:
Your remarks on my Villon are very opportune—Time Magazine in a longish panning review says half my poems bear the smudge of
translation
and the other half seem to have been written by some talented foreigner. Dudley Fitts in the New York Times says they should be read in a salt mine, with a grain of salt, and three hysterical Frenchmen writing to Encounter say my Rimbaud is an insane slaughter and
hopeless
trash. On the other hand, every decent judge from Edmund Wilson down like them or some of them. I feel misunderstood, not a bad feeling.
63
And to Randall Jarrell:
I seem to be getting a rain of mangling reviews. Time magazine and now Dudley Fitts who says my poems should be read in a salt mine with grain of salt. I must know something about what I’m doing. I’m sure I do.
64
To this, Jarrell fired back a bracing shaft of poet-to-poet lordliness:
I saw that stupid review in
Tim
e—
Time
’s the cheapest magazine in the world and Dudley Fitts’s the cheapest poetry reviewer; I can imagine what he was like when he had a chance to hurt a real poet in “
his
special field,” translation—as if he had once in his life translated a line of poetry into a line of poetry.
65
Jarrell could not have chosen a better moment to sound this note of solidarity. By November 1961 Lowell had at least two new poems of his own—an elegy for a St. Mark’s schoolmate, “Alfred Corning Clark,” and “Eye and Tooth,” which Lowell described as “my farewell to contact lenses.” By the end of the year he had five more—“Old Flame,” “Water,” “The Scream,” “Middle Age” and “Fall 1961.” These were his first poems in over eighteen months.
1
. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1981).
2
.
For
the
Union
Dead
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964), pp. 36, 37.
3
. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robie and Anne Macauley, March 20, 1959.
4
. R.L. to John Berryman, March 15, 1959 (University of Minnesota Libraries).
5
. Elizabeth Hardwick to Allen Tate, June 1, 1959 (Firestone Library).
6
. R.L. to Randall Jarrell, April 1, 1958 (Berg Collection).
7
. R.L. to Peter Taylor, October 31, 1958.
8
. R.L. to Harriet Winslow, August 9, 1959 (Houghton Library).
9
. R.L. to Randall Jarrell, January 3, 1960 (Berg Collection).
10
. Address of Robert Lowell, National Book Awards, March 23, 1960.
11
. Ms (Houghton Library).
12
. Program, Boston Arts Festival, June 1960.
13
. Title poem of
For
the
Union
Dead,
p. 71.
14
. Ibid., p. 72.
15
. R.L. to Allen Tate, November 18, 1960 (Firestone Library).
16
. R.L. to Randall Jarrell, February 15, 1960 (Berg Collection).
17
. Elizabeth Bishop to R.L., June 29, 1960 (Houghton Library).
18
. William Meredith, interview with I.H. (1981).
19
. R.L. to William Meredith, March 3, 1960.
20
. R.L. to Harriet Winslow, July 31, 1961 (Houghton Library).
21
. R.L., letter to the
Village
Voice,
November 19, 1964, p. 4.
22
. R.L. to William Meredith, March 3, 1960.
23
. William Meredith to R.L., March 28, 1960.
24
. R.L. to William Meredith (summer 1960), n.d.
25
. Ibid., August 25, 1960.
26
. Washington
Star,
November 1, 1960.
27
. R.L. to Peter Taylor, October 12, 1960.
28
. Ibid.
29
. Ibid., December 17, 1960.
30
. William Meredith, interview with I.H. (1981).
31
. R.L. to Peter Taylor, October 12, 1960.
32
. R.L. to Edmund Wilson, December 16, 1960 (Beinecke Library).
33
. Elizabeth Hardwick to Harriet Winslow, January 10, 1961 (Houghton
Library
).
34
. Blair Clark, interview with I.H. (1981).
35
. William Meredith, interview with I.H. (1981).
36
. William Meredith to Adrienne Rich and Philip Booth, March 17, 1961.
37
. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1981).
38
. Ibid.
39
. Ibid.
40
. R.L. to T. S. Eliot, June 30, 1961.
41
. Elizabeth Hardwick to R.L., June 17, 1961 (Houghton Library).
42
. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, June 16, 1961.
43
. Elizabeth Hardwick to R.L., June 17, 1961 (Houghton Library).
44
. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, June 18, 1961.
45
. Ms (Elizabeth Hardwick).
46
. Elizabeth Hardwick to Marcella Winslow, August 19, 1961 (Houghton
Library
).
47
. R.L. to Peter Taylor, August 7, 1961.
48
. R.L. to William Meredith, September 8, 1961.
49
. R.L. to Randall Jarrell, November 7, 1961 (Berg Collection).
50
.
Imitations
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1961), pp. xi–xiii (
Introduction
by R.L.).
51
. T. S. Eliot to R.L., June 1, 1961 (Houghton Library).
52
. Ben Bellitt, “
Imitations:
Translation as Personal Mode,”
Salmagundi
1, no. 4 (Winter 1966–67), 44–56.
53
. R.L., Introduction to
Imitations,
pp. xi–xii.
54
. George Steiner, “Two Translations,”
Kenyon
Review
23 (1961), 714–21.
55
. Louis Simpson, “Matters of Tact,”
Hudson
Review
14 (1961–62), 614–17.
56
. Thom Gunn, “Imitations and Originals,”
Yale
Review
51 (1962), 480–89.
57
. “To the Reader,”
Imitations,
p. 46.
58
. “Saturday Night in the Village,”
Imitations,
p. 28.
59
. George Kay (ed.),
Penguin
Book
of
Italian
Verse
(London, 1958), p. 287.
60
. Edmund Wilson,
New
Yorker,
June 2, 1962, p. 126.
61
. A. Alvarez,
Observer,
May 26, 1962.
62
. Dudley Fitts, “It’s Fidelity to the Spirit That Counts,”
New
York
Times
Book
Review,
November 12, 1961, pp. 5 ff.
63
. R.L. to A. Alvarez, November 7, 1961.
64
. R.L. to Randall Jarrell, November 7, 1961 (Berg Collection).
65
. Randall Jarrell to R.L., n.d. (Houghton Library).
In his November 7 letter to Randall Jarrell bemoaning the reviews of
Imitations,
Lowell recalls the visit he made to Jarrell’s home at Greensboro in the spring of 1959—just before the publication of
Life
Studies:
I remember once, the last time at Greensboro, I think, when you came into my room and began talking out of a blue sky about the ills of our culture, and Mary [Jarrell] said that I worried about personal matters while you were upset about the world. The world is very much under my skin and really seems like a murderous nightmare when one looks outward. I am sick of nations armed to the teeth. It can’t be true we must raise a finger or a whisper.
1
The same apocalyptic note is sounded in other letters Lowell wrote during the fall of 1961. It was the period of the Berlin Wall crisis, and Lowell was not alone in feeling “the chafe and jar of nuclear war.” In October, for example, he wrote to Cousin Harriet:
The world’s really strange isn’t it? I mean the world of the news and the nations and the bomb testings. I feel it this fall and wonder, if it’s just being forty three. Under a certain calm, there seems to be a question that must be answered. If one could think of the question.
2
And, a few days earlier, to William Meredith:
This is a weird year—less than last though. I haven’t had a drink since July. The nuclear air gets on my nerves. It seems a hideous comedy that we should charge the globe with so much ruin. I guess I felt that way
about the bombing in the last war, but somehow it’s now come to a head. I suppose I ought to join the unilateralist group, but I hate that arid, logic-chopping debater’s world of the righteous cause.
3
(Even so, Lowell did testify in a 1962
Partisan
Review
symposium on the “Cold War and the West”: “No nation should possess, use or retaliate with its bombs. I believe we should rather die than drop our own bombs.”)
4
During these months of global tension, phrases from Lowell’s letters keep spilling over into poems—as if, in the prevailing
atmosphere
of menace, there could be only a hairline separation between life and art. The poem “Fall 1961,” Lowell’s most direct response to the nuclear horror, can by itself be “over-heard” as an impassioned letter to a friend:
All autumn, the chafe and jar
of nuclear war;
we have talked our extinction to death.
I swim like a minnow
behind my studio window.
Our end drifts nearer,
the moon lifts,
radiant with terror.
The state
is a diver under a glass bell.
A father’s no shield
for his child.
We are like a lot of wild
spiders crying together,
but without tears.
5
In fact, part of this poem is in Lowell’s November letter to Jarrell:
Elizabeth Bishop has just blown in for a month. I find the talk and companionship here, particularly in little groups more up my alley than Boston. We are right off the Park, and I get a lot of nature taking Harriet to the amusements. The other day, Anton Webern’s music was on the
radio—she heard it and said, “It’s like wild animals through the woods walking” and then “It’s like a lot of spiders crying together but without tears.”
6
And writing on the same day to the British critic A. Alvarez, Lowell spoke of Alvarez’s divorce and his separation from his young son: “It must be hell to be cut off from your child.”
7
In a similar way, the anguished last lines of “Eye and Tooth” (his “farewell to my contact lenses”) echo a letter Lowell wrote to Isabella Gardner on October 10. The poem reads:
Nothing! No oil
for the eye, nothing to pour
on those waters or flames.
I am tired. Everyone’s tired of my turmoil.
8
And to Gardner Lowell writes: “Writing’s hell, isn’t it? I tire of my turmoil and feel everyone else has and long for a Horatian calm.”
9
The poems themselves are “small clear half-anguished things,”
10
obsessed with time, lost experience, blurred vision; they are nearly all poems written as if from the end of life, aching with nostalgia and remorse, and blankly futureless:
At forty-five,
what next, what next?
At every corner,
I meet my Father,
my age, still alive.
Father, forgive me
my injuries,
as I forgive
those I
have injured!
The short, five-or six-syllable, line is as bare as Lowell can make it; the point is
not
to seem craftsmanlike, melodic or composed. And in this sense the poems of fall 1961 and winter 1962 are far more “confessional” than the asylum or domestic poems of
Life
Studies.
They follow on from the tormented soliloquy in “Skunk Hour” rather than from the pained tenderness of “Home After Three Months Away”:
Back and forth!
Back and forth, back and forth—
my one point of rest
is the orange and black
oriole’s swinging nest!
12
There is a lot of counting in these poems—not syllables, but minutes. The poet mutters “one step, two steps, three steps”: to steady himself but also to keep in rhythm with the global
countdown
.
Back and forth, back and forth
goes the tock, tock, tock
of the orange, bland, ambassadorial
face of the moon
on the grandfather clock
14
And when Lowell is not counting, he recounts: “Remember? We sat on a slab of rock.” (“Water”); “My old flame, my wife! /
Remember
our lists of Birds! (“The Old Flame”); “Remember summer? Bubbles filled/the fountain, and we splashed.” (“The Public
Garden
”). The impression is of a man writing what may be last letters to his friends; of memories which, in truth, might turn out to be memorials.
*
Lowell got through the winter of 1961–62 with nothing more serious than “tonsilitis, flu, bronchitis, one little fever giving ailment after
another,” and even did a small stretch of teaching at the New School for Social Research on West 12th Street. In the past four years, though, he had had three breakdowns at around this time (late winter, early spring), and a letter he wrote to John Berryman on March 18, 1962, suggests that the “cycle” had, but in a muffled way, completed its familiar process: an imagined death of the old self, a “rebirth” into the “new”:
All winter I’ve had an uncomfortable feeling of dying into rebirth. Not at all the sick, dizzy allegorized thing such words suggest and which I’ve felt going off my rocker. But the flat prose of coming to an end of one way of life, whittled down and whittled down and picking up nothing new though always about to….
What queer lives we’ve had even for poets! There seems something generic about it, and determined beyond anything we could do. You and I have had so many of the same tumbles and leaps. We must have a green old age. We both have drunk the downward drag as deeply as is perhaps bearable. I feel we have better work and better lives ahead.
15
It seems possible that Lowell believed himself to have experienced the rhythms, as it were, of mania and yet not been thrust into a full-scale collapse. At the end of March he wrote to Edmund Wilson rather as he had written to Berryman two weeks earlier; Lowell had just returned from a short holiday in Puerto Rico and was “sunned and shaken”—
shaken too by nights in a single bedroom, where I could wake up at all hours and read and smoke and speculate, and seem flooded by what is, without being able to define it, and somehow rejuvenated by it. Oh what could be less youthful than youth, mine anyhow, walking in its stiff necessary armor!
16
On May 11, 1962, Lowell attended a dinner at the White House in honor of André Malraux, the French Minister of Culture. It was to be a gracious Kennedy spectacular, and Lowell, it seems, was fairly high on the list of those “artists and intellectuals” whom the White House was anxious to flatter and parade. He had attended Kennedy’s inauguration, and had sent the President an inscribed copy of
Life
Studies;
and had responded to at least some of the “new dawn” glamour that surrounded the first months of the presidency—Kennedy was the same age as Lowell, had been at Harvard in 1936,
was acquainted with Blair Clark. Of the inauguration, Lowell said: “When I was introduced to him he gave me the kind of compliment that indicated he’d really read the book, so I said to him ‘You’re the first President who’s treated your peers as equals.’”
17
But the Bay of Pigs episode and the intensifying of the Cold War during 1961 had made the first year of Kennedy’s government one of the most
frightening
since World War II. After the Malraux dinner, Lowell wrote to Edmund Wilson:
I meant to write you a little fan note after Washington. Except for you, every one there seemed addled with adulation at having been invited. It was all good fun but next morning you read that the President has sent the 7th fleet to Laos, or he might have invaded Cuba again—not that he will. But I feel we intellectuals play a very pompous and frivolous role—we should be windows, not window-dressing. Then, now in our times, of all times, the sword hangs over us and our children, and not a voice is lifted. I thought of all the big names there, only you acted like yourself.
18
And in an interview three years later, when asked if Kennedy had not introduced “some vague, fragile possibility of some kind of connection, even mutual interchange, between the representatives of the cultural life of the country and those of the world of power,” Lowell enlarged on the view he had formed at the Malraux dinner:
I was invited to the White House for Malraux’s dinner there. Kennedy made a rather graceful joke that “the White House was becoming almost a café for intellectuals….” Then we all drank a great deal at the White House, and had to sort of be told not to take our champagne into the concert, and to put our cigarettes out like children—though nicely, it wasn’t peremptory. Then the next morning you read that the Seventh Fleet had been sent somewhere in Asia and you had a funny feeling of how unimportant the artist really was; that this was sort of window dressing and that the real government was somewhere else, and that something much closer to the Pentagon was really ruling the country.
19
Before attending the White House dinner, Lowell accepted
another
small slice of government patronage when he agreed to visit South America under the auspices of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. He had several times half planned a trip to Brazil to visit Elizabeth Bishop; the offer of Congress funds simply jogged him
into action. Bishop wrote asking, “Who pays for the Congress for Cultural Freedom, anyway?”
20
but the matter does not seem to have been pursued with any rigor.
Lowell flew to Brazil—with Hardwick and the five-year-old Harriet—during the first week of June 1962, and they were met in Pará by the Congress’s representative, Keith Botsford. With Botsford, they journeyed down the coast of Brazil via Recife and Bahia to Rio, where the Lowells took up residence at the Copacabana Palace. Lowell’s duties were fairly nebulous; he was expected to give
interviews
and press conferences and to attend dinners. As Botsford recalls:
He was sort of vaguely there to be a famous literary man going through to pick up ideas. From the Congress’s point of view he was an
outstanding
American to counteract, I suppose, Communist people like Neruda—our side’s emissary.
21
After Brazil, Lowell was meant to visit Paraguay and Argentina. Hardwick and Harriet were to return to the United States by ship on September 1, and a few days later Lowell would travel south with Botsford. Before leaving Rio, though, Lowell was beginning to seem “over-wrought,” and he was drinking heavily. Elizabeth Bishop (to whom Lowell was once again declaring his true love) tried to persuade him to give up the remainder of his tour, but she “made no impression on him,”
22
and on September 4 he left for Buenos Aires. Botsford kept a journal of the Argentina visit, and the following account is based on his journal notes:
When we got to Argentina, it was six double vodka martinis before lunch. And he made me drink with him. We went to lunch at the presidential palace, the Casa Rosada, and Cal promptly insulted the general, who was in fact about to be president of Argentina, and started one of the many diplomatic rumpuses he caused on that trip. There was the American cultural attaché, whose name I cannot remember, and Cal was sitting at this lunch in a very loud checked sports coat and open shirt, and all the generals were there, very uptight and distinguished. And there was this wonderful opening scene when Cal was introduced to the cultural attaché and talked to him for about three minutes. The guy was an absolute idiot and asked stupid questions and obviously
didn’t know who Cal was. So Cal turned on him and said, “You’re the cultural attaché?” “Yep, yep, sure am.” And Cal said, “How can you be the cultural attaché? You’re illiterate.” That’s how the lunch started, and it went on from there. After the lunch, Cal started his tour of the equestrian statues, undressing and climbing the statues. He insisted on being taken to every statue in B.A.—well, we didn’t do every one, thank God. And he’d stop the car and start clambering up and sit next to the general on top of the statue.
23