Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
Robert Lowell: A Biography (57 page)
I got my first glimpse of McCarthy fifteen days before New Hampshire, when some wealthy backers arranged a cocktail party at a posh town house in Manhattan. There were carefully collected show-business
people
, arts and writing people, rich people: come with curiosity and a bit of trepidation….
McCarthy looked grave and weary. Eventually, he made a little talk with allusions to poets, expressing his sense of the country’s divisions. The President could not travel openly, he commented. But one’s mind wandered….
Before that, Robert Lowell had supplied a rambling introduction. “You’re supposed to be artists,” he said to the beautiful people, “I don’t see any artists here.” But his audience knew better—they had signed the artists and writers petition against the war. Finally, Lowell turned to the candidate, who sat beside him, in an antique chair. “You haven’t got a chance, you know that, don’t you?”
McCarthy sat motionless, his face set, his eyes to Lowell with no expression, no acknowledgment. The room was silent. No one spoke, not even the official backers. Lowell resumed his introduction with grim satisfaction. What on earth were we doing there?
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In spite of this elegant inertia at the top, McCarthy attracted huge support among the young; indeed, he was the sole “legitimate” rallying point for the diverse groups and factions that opposed the Vietnam war. Pundits wrote condescendingly about the “McCarthy kids,” “the Children’s Crusade,” and it was casually prophesied that in McCarthy’s first real test—the New Hampshire primary on March 12, 1968—he would be lucky to get 10 percent of the vote, even though Johnson had done no campaigning in the state. Of McCarthy himself, one commentator wrote: “His obvious dislike of campaigning, his low-key style, his virtual political obscurity at a national level—all this put him, if not beyond the pale, at least crawling on the fringes.”
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On March 12, though, came what this same writer called “the most sensational political upheaval in recent American history.” McCarthy captured a stunning 42 percent of the vote to Johnson’s 49 percent. The Children’s Crusade had turned out to be a grown-up electoral reality. Four days after New
Hampshire
, Lowell wrote to Peter Taylor:
I’ve been all over the place and followed McCarthy three days in New Hampshire going through two sweater factories, one shoe factory and one wood factory, one Lions and Kiwanis club, and two ladies clubs. My line was that if I spoke he’d lose the few votes he had. It’s a miracle how such a quiet and in many ways soporific campaign worked.
27
(McCarthy himself recalls that Lowell almost
did
lose him votes by telling the owners of the sweater factories that the workers in the shoe factory seemed so much happier than their own employees: “But we’ve got very good industrial relations!” “Yeah, but they just seemed happier somehow, maybe it’s something to do with the shape of the shoes, or the leather….”)
28
Within days of McCarthy’s triumph in New Hampshire, Robert Kennedy announced that he would enter the presidential race. Up to this point, he had been careful neither to back McCarthy nor to deplore him. For Lowell, Kennedy’s intervention presented a small challenge to his loyalty. Since 1965 he had been playfully intrigued by Bobby—or, at any rate, by the idea of him as a driven, fated prince. He would ask people which character in Shakespeare Bobby could most aptly be compared with. Also, according to Blair Clark, Jackie Kennedy “was busy educating Bobby. Cal was one of the educators—upgrading the savage Bobby into the cultural hero that
he became.”
29
Lowell had, for instance, given Jackie Kennedy a marked copy of Plutarch’s
Lives
and was much excited when he later learned that Bobby had borrowed it and read it: “Bobby was very conscious of the nobility and danger of pride and fate.”
30
After Plutarch, Kennedy and Lowell met a few times and exchanged letters. On February 18, 1966, Kennedy wrote to Lowell:
You have probably read it as I understand you have read everything but when I found the following in Edmund Wilson’s book “The Bit
Between
My Teeth” I thought of you.
“That hour is blessed when we meet a poet. The poet is brother to the dervish. He has no country nor is he blessed with the things of this world; and while we poor creatures that we are, are worrying about fame, about power, about riches, he stands on a basis of equality with the powerful of the earth and the people bow down before him.”
Pushkin
When are they going to write those kind of things about those of us in politics.
See if you can start a trend in that direction.
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And Lowell, not long out of McLean’s and in a “down” period, answered on February 25:
I have always been fascinated by poets like Wyatt and Ralegh, who were also statesmen and showed a double inspiration … the biggest of these must be Dante, who ruled Florence for a moment, and would never have written about Farinata and Manfred, without this experience. Large parts of the Commedia are almost a Ghibelline epic. Then there are those wonderful statesmen, like Lincoln and Edmund Burke, who were also great writers.
Well, I do think you are putting into practice that kind of courage and ability that your brother so subtly praised in his
Profiles
, and know how to be brave without becoming simple-minded. What more could one ask for in my slothful, wondering profession?
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Kennedy, however, was no docile student, and he could easily become impatient with Lowell’s grand historical perspectives. Grey Gowrie, who sometimes dined with Lowell and the Kennedys (Jackie and Bobby), believed that “Bobby was rather funny about Cal. He sort of admired him but at the same time he thought his politics were absolutely bananas. But that was in late ’66 and Cal was
reasonably bananas at that time.”
33
He also thought that Lowell was slightly envious of Bobby’s effortless charisma. And an anecdote related by William Vanden Heuvel, a Kennedy campaign aide in 1968, does rather comically ring true:
[Bobby] and Lowell discussed
The
Education
of
Henry
Adams.
Bobby said he found it a boring book and pulled it off a bookshelf. Robert Lowell took it and proceeded to read the part of it that describes the funeral of John Quincy Adams—which is a very moving and eloquent chapter of the book. Bobby suddenly got up and excused himself. Lowell followed him right to the door of the bathroom, still reading. Bobby shut the door and said “If you don’t mind.” Lowell said: “If you were Louis XIV you wouldn’t mind.”
34
It was perhaps because of such lapses of
grandeur
that Lowell
decided
to stick with McCarthy even after Kennedy had made his declaration. He wrote to Peter Taylor:
My heart, such as it is, will have to be with McCarthy to the end, personally and because he is much the better candidate as far as I can judge and then (this almost means most) because he hoped and dared when no other politician in the whole country hoped or dared, when there was no hope.
35
And two months later, speaking for McCarthy in Oregon, Lowell—after first admitting that he personally liked and admired Kennedy—was uncharacteristically bitter about Kennedy’s “shy, calculating delay in declaring himself” and “the shaggy rudeness of his final entrance”:
And who can look forward to the return of the old new frontiersmen? They don’t look as good as they once did, after eight years. These men, tarnished with power and thirsting to return to that power. We cannot forgive Senator Kennedy for trying to bury us under a pile of gold.
36
The next primary after New Hampshire was Wisconsin, and on March 22 Lowell set off for Milwaukee “with somehow a heavy heart … the odds seem set against our getting any but the two worst candidates. What a nightmare to be in all this.”
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It is not surprising that the
New
York
Times
detected a certain failure of enthusiasm in both Lowell and his candidate:
Senator McCarthy, a reader of poetry and a secret poet himself, not only feeds somewhat bemused audiences of Rotarians and dairy farmers
quotations
ranging from Walt Whitman to an ancient Irish bard named Caduc the Wise, but also has traveling with him an authentic poet, the distinguished Robert Lowell of Harvard.
When candidates speed from town to town, they usually spend their time in close conversation with aides about the peculiar characteristics and problems of the next stop, rehearsing the names and sensitivities of the important local politicians.
But not Gene McCarthy. He rides with Robert Lowell, whose
knowledge
of politics extends no further than the Guelphs and Ghibellines in 14th-century Florence and whose total interest in the campaign is
embraced
by his statement: “I am for peace.”
Arcadians both, Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Lowell discuss poetry and divert themselves with a kind of “in” conversation, of which the
following
is a sample:
LOWELL
: Can they draft monks?
M
c
CARTHY
: No.
LOWELL
: Well, that’s a loophole.
M
c
CARTHY
: Do you suppose we could get some bishop to give all our student supporters minor orders?
38
This kind of levity was, of course, thoroughly disquieting to McCarthy’s fervent aides: “We tried to keep Lowell from McCarthy at very crucial times because we always thought he took the edge off. Every time Lowell and McCarthy would get together, Lowell, or so we thought, would convince McCarthy that really he was above all this.” At times, they would book McCarthy into hotels under a false name, “to hide him, not from the press but from people … like Robert Lowell.” But Lowell “had a very good nose” and would invariably track him down.
39
McCarthy himself still
chucklingly
recalls the day he kept James Reston waiting for an interview: he was deep in literature and jokes with Lowell “and could not be disturbed”;
40
for the aides, he remembers, this was almost the
unforgivable
last straw. Lowell might later have been blamed for
distracting
McCarthy from his duties, but it is evident that the senator was a more than willing collaborator in these truancies. Several accounts picture the two of them as chortling naughty boys, and Lowell’s most convinced tribute to McCarthy later on was to the “brilliance” of his jokes. As for McCarthy, his fondest memory is of Lowell inventing the slogan “Porky Pig is for Lyndon”; “and everywhere
we went he kept pointing out these empty lots and saying: ‘That would be a great place for one of my Porky Pig billboards.’”
41
On March 31, 1968, Lyndon Johnson threw the whole contest into magnificent confusion by announcing that he would not be seeking reelection. It was now McCarthy versus Kennedy—and the winner would almost certainly face Hubert Humphrey in August. McCarthy had a walkover in Wisconsin, and defeated Kennedy in Oregon, but the key confrontation, it was generally believed, would come in California in June. Lowell joined the McCarthy entourage at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, having already—it seems—formed the view that if McCarthy lost in California, “his people should support Kennedy and vice versa.” Without consulting McCarthy, Lowell arranged a meeting with Kennedy, who was staying in the same hotel. Arthur Schlesinger, in his biography of Kennedy, records:
They had a fairly unsatisfactory talk. Kennedy, in Lowell’s view, was making debater’s points. Lowell said: “You mustn’t talk to me this way.” Kennedy said mildly that he guessed there was not much more to say. Lowell said: “I wish I could think up some joke that would cheer you up, but it won’t do any good.” Afterward, he told McCarthy: “I felt like Rudolf Hess parachuting into Scotland.”
42
McCarthy and Kennedy were about to face each other in a
televised
debate; the McCarthy camp believed this to be the crucial test and were anxious that their candidate should at least
seem
to take it seriously. Again, though, the memoirists recall that Lowell’s
presence
was disruptive:
Finney [Thomas Finney, McCarthy’s chief adviser in California] was trying to brief him à la Kennedy, with little cards that let him know things that were important and would come up, and how he felt McCarthy should respond. And McCarthy was very, very good. He was going through all this and taking pieces of paper from Finney, looking at them and dropping those on the floor that he’d studied carefully. You’re never sure about McCarthy. It
looked
like he was attentive and interested. But then, of course, Lowell got to him fifteen minutes
beforehand
, and they started to drink, the two of them, and went
downstairs
….
McCarthy and Lowell got into the same limousine. On the way to the
studio, McCarthy wanted to see Alcatraz. And so they took a detour, and McCarthy looked at the prison. He and Lowell composed, I think, a twentieth-century version of “Ode to St. Cecilia’s Day” in the backseat. So, by the time he got to the studio, yes, he was then like Henry V at Agincourt.
43
McCarthy himself is dismissive of the theory that Lowell was
responsible
for his poor showing in the TV debate: “There was no point in preparing for that debate because you couldn’t anticipate what lies Kennedy would come up with.”
44
And Blair Clark, who by a strange chance (“Cal had nothing to do with it”) had become McCarthy’s campaign manager, would also absolve Lowell from the blame:
A lot of people say that McCarthy lost the debate with Bobby Kennedy in San Francisco in May 1968 because he spent the morning joking with Cal, Mary McGrory and me in the hotel room instead of boning up on Kennedy’s record on housing. But that’s not why he lost the debate. He lost the debate out of not wanting to win it, and out of some contorted resentment of the Kennedys. That’s why he lost the debate. And it cost him California.
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