Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
Robert Lowell: A Biography (55 page)
As Mailer vigorously rambles on, Lowell continues to sit “in a mournful hunch on the floor, his eyes peering over his glasses to scrutinize the metaphysical substance of his boot, now hide? now
machine? now, where the joining and to what? foot to foot, boot to earth—cease all speculation as to what was in Lowell’s head.” But there is little need for speculation:
Lowell looked most unhappy. Mailer, minor poet, had often observed that Lowell had the most disconcerting mixture of strength and
weakness
in his presence, a blending so dramatic in its visible sign of conflict that one had to assume he would be sensationally attractive to women. He had something untouchable, all insane in its force: one felt
immediately
that there were any number of causes for which the man would be ready to die, and for some he would fight, with an axe in his hand and a Cromwellian light in his eye. It was even possible that physically he was very strong—one couldn’t tell at all—he might be fragile, he might have the sort of farm mechanic’s strength which could manhandle the rear axle and differential off a car and into the back of a pickup. But physical strength or no, his nerves were all too apparently delicate. Obviously spoiled by everyone for years, he seemed nonetheless to need the spoiling. These nerves—the nerves of a consummate poet—were not tuned to any battering.
Mailer then turns on Lowell with some imagined invective: What right have “you, Lowell, beloved poet of so many” to condemn me, Mailer, the ruffian whose element is “dirt and the dark deliveries of the necessary”; “How dare you scorn the explosive I employ.” This was Lowell’s reward for having, at one moment, looked up from his shoe and given Mailer a “withering glance, saying much, saying ‘Every single bad thing I have ever heard about you is not
exaggerated
.’” And now, with the meeting reduced to near disarray by Mailer’s boorish clowning:
Lowell with a look of the greatest sorrow as if all this
mess
were finally too shapeless for the hard Protestant smith of his own brain … fell backward, his head striking the floor with no last instant hesitation to cushion the blow, but like a baby, downright sudden, savagely to
himself
, as if from the height of a foot he had taken a pumpkin and dropped it splat on the floor. “There, much-regarded, much-protected brain, you have finally taken a blow” Lowell might have said to himself for he proceeded to lie there, resting quietly….
Earlier on the same evening Mailer had had an exchange with Lowell at a cocktail party; they had sought each other’s company
as the only fit company available and Lowell had praised Mailer: “You know, Norman … Elizabeth and I really think you’re the finest journalist in America.” Mailer knew that Lowell thought this, because the poet had written him a postcard once using almost the same words: but Mailer distrusted Lowell’s praise—he remembered that Lowell had told him privately how much he admired his, Mailer’s, first and only book of poems, but had never voiced the opinion in public when the book received a mauling from the critics. He had also noted that Lowell’s postcard calling him America’s best journalist had been timed to coincide with a review by Elizabeth Hardwick of
An
American
Dream
—a review, Mailer remembered, that had “done its best to disembowel the novel”:
Lowell’s card might have arrived with the best of motives, but its
timing
suggested to Mailer an exercise in neutralsmanship—neutralize the maximum of possible future risks. Mailer was not critically equipped for the task but there was always the distant danger that some bright and not unauthoritative voice, irked at Lowell’s enduring hegemony, might come along with a long lance and presume to tell America that posterity would judge Allen Ginsberg the greater poet.
Back at the meeting, though, Mailer found himself stirred into true admiration by Lowell’s reading of “Waking Early Sunday
Morning
” and also by his stylish handling of the audience: “We can’t hear you,” they shouted, “speak louder,” to which Lowell replied, “I’ll bellow, but it won’t do any good.”
He was not a splendid reader, merely decent to his own lines, and he read from that slouch, that personification of ivy climbing a column, he was even diffident, he looked a trifle helpless under the lights. Still, he made no effort to win the audience, seduce them, dominate them, bully them, amuse them, no, they were there for him, to please
him
,
a sounding board for the plucked string of his poetic line, and so he endeared himself to them. They adored him—for his talent, his
modesty
, his superiority, his petulance, his weakness, his painful, almost stammering shyness, his noble strength—
there
was the string behind other strings…. Mailer discovered he was jealous. Not of the talent. Lowell’s talent was very large, but then Mailer was a bulldog about the value of his own talent. No, Mailer was jealous because he had worked for this audience, and Lowell without effort seemed to have stolen them.
On the day after the reading, Mailer and Lowell, together with other notables like Dr. Spock and Noam Chomsky, led a march of about five hundred draft-resisters, sympathizers and media men to the steps of the Department of Justice. The idea had originally been for each of the notables to accompany a resister up the steps and stand beside him as he deposited his draft card in a bag. Lowell in particular had been repelled by this suggestion and had said to Mailer, “It seems … that they want us to be
big
buddy.
” In the end it was decided that each of the notables would make a short speech in support of the demonstration. And here again Mailer was
captivated
by Lowell’s diffident, dignified performance:
In the middle of these speakers, Robert Lowell was called up. He had been leaning against a wall in his habitual slumped-over position, deep in revery at the side of the steps—and of course had been
photographed
as a figure of dejection—the call for him to say a few words caught him partly by surprise. He now held the portable hand
microphone
with a delicate lack of intimacy as if it were some valuable, huge, and rare tropical spider which he was obliged to examine but did not have to enjoy. “I was asked earlier today” he began in his fine stammering voice which gave the impression that life rushed at him like a series of hurdles and some he succeeded in jumping and some he did not, “I was asked earlier this afternoon by a reporter why I was not turning in my draft card,” Lowell said with the beginnings of a pilgrim’s passion, “and I did not tell him it was a stupid question, although I was tempted to. I thought he should have known that I am now too old to have a draft card, but that it makes no difference. When some of us pledge to counsel and aid and abet any young men who wish to turn in their cards, why then you may be certain we are aware of the possible consequences and do not try to hide behind the technicality of whether we literally have a draft card or not. So I’m now saying to the gentlemen of the press that unlike the authorities who are running this country, we are not searching for tricks, we try to think of ourselves as serious men, if the press, that is, can
comprehend
such an effort, and we will protest this war by every means
available
to our conscience and therefore not try to avoid whatever may arise in the way of retribution.”
It was said softly, on a current of intense indignation and Lowell had never looked more dignified nor more admirable. Each word seemed to come on a separate journey from the poet’s mind to his voice, along a winding route or through an exorbitant gate. Each word cost him much—Lowell’s fine grace was in the value words had for him, he seemed to
emit a horror at the possibility of squandering them or leaving them abused, and political speeches had never seemed more difficult for him, and on the consequence, more necessary for statement.
So Mailer applauded when Lowell was done. And suddenly liked him enormously for his speech, and decided he liked him truly. Beneath all snobbery, affectations of weariness, literary logrollermanship,
neutralsmanship
, and whatever other fatal snob-infested baggage of the literary world was by now willy-nilly in the poet’s system, worked down
intimately
close to all his best and most careful traditions and standards, all flaws considered, Lowell was still a fine, good and admirable man, and Norman Mailer was happy to be linked in a cause with him.
Shortly after Lowell’s speech, Mailer was arrested for trying to cross the police line. Lowell and Macdonald allowed themselves to be turned back by the MP’s and later joined in a sit-down
demonstration
outside the West Wall of the Pentagon. There, Chomsky was seized by the police, but Lowell and Macdonald were ignored. “They left, unhurt,” writes Mailer, “and eventually went home, Lowell to begin a long poem a few days later (when next Mailer saw him a month later, 800 lines had already been written!).” When Lowell first read Mailer’s account of him, he was visiting his aunt Sarah in Manchester, Massachusetts. Hardwick
remembers
: “There we were, in the scenery, very proper Bostonian and so on, and Cal said to me, ‘You know, in Boston they think I’m Norman Mailer, and in New York they think I’m Robert
Lowell
.’”
12
Where two or three were heaped together, or fifty,
mostly white-haired, or bald, or women … sadly
unfit to follow their dream, I sat in the sunset
shade of their Bastille, the Pentagon,
nursing leg-and arch-cramps, my cowardly
foolhardy heart; and heard, alas, more speeches,
though the words took heart now to show how weak
we were, and right. An MP sergeant kept
repeating, ‘March slowly through them. Don’t even brush
anyone sitting down.’ They tiptoed through us
in single file, and then their second wave
trampled us flat and back. Health to those who held,
health to the green steel head … to the kind hands
that helped me stagger to my feet, and flee.
13
The “800 lines” that Mailer refers to were not, as he seems to have supposed, lines inspired by events outside the Pentagon. The mild, debunking piece above is one of two poems on the subject; in the other, Lowell also presents himself as rather comically inept and timid: “lovely to lock arms, to march absurdly locked / (unlocking to keep my wet glasses from slipping).” But it is certainly true that Lowell
was
producing lines at an extraordinary rate, and had been doing so since June of 1967. And they were all, like this one on the Pentagon sit-in, slack fourteen-liners—unrhymed, unmetrical,
uneven
. By Christmas, 1967, he had written over seventy such pieces and, during the following year, was composing at the average rate of four “sonnets” every week. After nearly two years of silence (if one leaves aside translations) he had become as profligate as Merrill Moore. Suddenly,
everything
could be “got into” poetry: headlines, domestic trivia, chance conversations, private anecdotes, as well as his continuing autobiographical obsessions. By the end of 1968
Lowell
had written nearly four thousand publishable lines.
It is hard not to speculate about the “sources” of this new
abundance
. One influence, which Lowell has himself acknowledged, was John Berryman’s
Dream
Songs:
seventy-seven of these had been published in 1964, and since then they had been appearing by the dozen—each song comprising eighteen (or sometimes nineteen) lines divided into three stanzas. Lowell found most of the songs sloppy, “not quite intelligible,” relentlessly indulgent—but he could also see that their cumulative power, their congested, worldly vigor, could only have been captured at the expense of that shaping
carefulness
over individual lines, individual stanza breaks, which, throughout his own career, Lowell had assumed to be art’s first, most nobly difficult requirement. Lowell had poured his whole self into lyrics that could be offered to the world as “finished”; he had made his personal predicaments stand as fit metaphors for the terrors of the globe. But, with Berryman’s example in mind, he could now see how much of random circumstance, how much of life’s
haphazard
, interesting flow, was by rule excluded from poems that held their own intensity and artifice in awe. This is how, in 1964, he had described
Dream
Songs:
The scene is contemporary and crowded with references to news items, world politics, travel, low-life, and Negro music…. The poem is written in sections of three six-line stanzas. There is little sequence, and
sometimes a single section will explode into three or four separate parts. At first the brain aches and freezes at so much darkness, disorder and oddness. After a while, the repeated situations and their racy jabber become more and more enjoyable, although even now I wouldn’t trust myself to paraphrase accurately at least half the sections.
… Several of the best poems in this sequence are elegies to other writers. His elegies are eulogies. By their impertinent piety, by jumping from thought to thought, mood to mood, and by saying anything that comes into the author’s head, they are touching and nervously alive….
… All is risk and variety here. This great Pierrot’s universe is more tearful and funny than we can easily bear.
14
Two other sprawling, catch-all epics had haunted Lowell for years: Williams’s
Paterson
and Ezra Pound’s
Cantos.
But he had never trusted himself to veer that far away from the formalist stringency he had learned from Tate and Ransom.
Life
Studies
had marked the limits of his disobedience—thereafter he had gravitated back to rhyme and meter. What appealed, though, in the Berryman model was the illusion of structure: the predetermined sectioning. There was in Berryman a beguiling sense of being on parole: the freedom to break lines at will, to be prosy, talkative, discursive, jokey, and yet still have the constraint of being “boxed up” by the “machinery” of a repeated line count.