Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
The honeymoon was at the critic F. W. Dupee’s house in Red Hook, New York, and it could hardly be counted a success:
Lowell
’s depression didn’t lift; he remained “very self-critical, very
tortured
about himself, his future, almost on the point of tears.”
60
Hardwick contacted John Thompson, and it was arranged for Lowell to see a doctor in New York. The diagnosis was “reactive depression,” and it was agreed that Lowell should go into the Payne Whitney Clinic for treatment—at specially reduced rates. On his first night there he wrote to Hardwick: “Dearest, dearest, dearest Lizzie. I think of you all the time, and worry so about all
I have dumped on you. We are going to work it all out, dear, be as wonderful as you have been.”
61
And shortly afterwards, on
September
15, 1949: “This is a thorough and solid place—what I have long needed … in a week or so the craziness and insecurity will begin to go.”
62
1
. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, December 22, 1948.
2
. Jean Stafford to R.L., January 1, 1949 (Houghton Library).
3
. R.L. to Caroline (Gordon) Tate, December 1948 (Firestone Library).
4
. R.L. to Robie Macauley, n.d.
5
. Charlotte Lowell to R.L., December 25, 1948 (Houghton Library).
6
. Peter Taylor to R.L., June 28, 1948 (Houghton Library).
7
. Elizabeth Bishop to R.L., December 31, 1948 (Houghton Library).
8
. Peter Taylor to R.L., October 11, 1948 (Houghton Library).
9
. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1979).
10
. R.L. to T. S. Eliot, January 18, 1948.
11
. Allen Tate to Marcella Winslow, April 20, 1949.
12
. Robert Hillyer,
Saturday
Review
of
Literature:
“Treason’s Strange Fruit” (June 11, 1949) and “Poetry’s New Priesthood” (June 18, 1949).
13
. Radcliffe Squires,
Allen
Tate
(New York: Pegasus, 1971), p. 188.
14
. Robert Fitzgerald, Open Letter to T. S. Eliot, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, William Carlos Williams, J. F. Powers, Randall Jarrell, Peter Taylor, Katherine Anne Porter, Louise Bogan, Leonie Adams,
Elizabeth
Bishop, Marianne Moore, John Berryman, R. P. Blackmur, George Santayana, May 26, 1949.
15
. Transcript of a Yaddo directors’ meeting, February 26, 1949 (Malcolm
Cowley
Papers, Newberry Library).
16
. Malcolm Cowley to Louis Kronenberger, March 8, 1949 (Newberry
Library
).
17
. Robert Fitzgerald, Open Letter.
18
. Sally Fitzgerald, interview with I.H. (1980).
19
. Robert Fitzgerald, Open Letter.
20
. Allen Tate to Elizabeth Hardwick, March 3, 1949 (Houghton Library).
21
. Robert Fitzgerald Journal, March 4, 1949.
22
. Robert Fitzgerald to Allen Tate, March 4, 1949.
23
. Malcolm Cowley to Allen Tate, March 27, 1949 (Newberry Library).
24
. Petition in support of Elizabeth Ames, March 21, 1949 (Newberry Library).
25
. Robert Fitzgerald, Open Letter.
26
. Malcolm Cowley to Granville Hicks, April 5, 1949 (Newberry Library).
27
.
New
York
Times,
March 27, 1949.
28
.
Testimony:
The
Memoirs
of
Dmitri
Shostakovich,
as told to and edited by Solomon Volkov (Harper & Row, 1979), p. 108.
29
. Allen Tate to Elizabeth Hardwick, March 8, 1949 (Houghton Library).
30
. Ibid.
31
. Ibid., March 30, 1949 (Houghton Library).
32
. Ibid., March 31, 1949 (Houghton Library).
33
. Robie Macauley, interview with I.H. (1980).
34
. Allen Tate to Malcolm Cowley, April 4, 1949 (Newberry Library).
35
. Allen Tate to Elizabeth Hardwick, April 4, 1949 (Houghton Library).
36
. Peter Taylor, interview with I.H. (1979).
37
. Robert Giroux, interview with I.H. (1979).
38
. Ms (Houghton Library).
39
. Merrill Moore to Allen Tate, April 12, 1949 (Firestone Library).
40
. Peter Taylor, interview with I.H. (1979).
41
. Peter Taylor to Allen Tate, April 21, 1949 (Firestone Library).
42
. John Thompson, interview with I.H. (1979).
43
. Merrill Moore to Peter Taylor, May 24, 1949.
44
. Charlotte Lowell to Peter Taylor, April 16, 1949.
45
. Robert Giroux, interview with I.H. (1979).
46
. Merrill Moore to Allen Tate, May 10, 1949 (Firestone Library).
47
. Allen Tate to Merrill Moore, n.d. (Library of Congress).
48
. Allen Tate to Peter Taylor, April 10, 1949.
49
. Allen Tate to Elizabeth Hardwick, April 18, 1949 (Houghton Library).
50
. R.L. to Allen Tate, May 5, 1949 (Firestone Library).
51
. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, May 9, 1949.
52
. R.L. to Randall Jarrell, May 21, 1949 (Berg Collection).
53
. Randall Jarrell to Peter Taylor, n.d.
54
. Elizabeth Hardwick to R.L., June 24, 1949 (Houghton Library).
55
. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, July 1, 1949.
56
. Ibid., July 6, 1949 (Houghton Library).
57
. R. T. S. Lowell to R.L., July 13, 1949 (Houghton Library).
58
. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1979).
59
. Lesley Parker, interview with I.H. (1981).
60
. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1979).
61
. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, dated “First Night” from the Payne Whitney Clinic.
62
. Ibid., September 15, 1949.
At first, Lowell’s admission to Payne Whitney was kept as quiet as possible. The fear was that rumors would spread that he had “cracked up” for a second time. In 1949 psychiatry was still fairly mysterious territory, even to most New York intellectuals, and Elizabeth Hardwick did not relish having to explain over and over again that Lowell’s depression was the predictable down-curve of a manic-depressive cycle.
The doctors at Payne Whitney were cautious about making a diagnosis—for the first two weeks, Lowell was kept under
observation
, encouraged to mix with the other patients, play badminton and Russian Banker, do elementary carpentry, and so on. In the third week it was decided to label him “manic-depressive, which is not very serious, they say, since they seem certain it is
psychogenic
in origin.” A course of mild psychotherapy was prescribed—Payne Whitney was not psychoanalytically inclined: Lowell would be encouraged to talk about himself, and be gently guided towards an understanding of his predicament, but he would not be urged to dig too deeply for its origins. The prognosis was highly optimistic. Elizabeth Hardwick wrote to Peter and Eleanor
Taylor
:
I have spoken to the head doctor and to the doctor treating Cal and they both say there should not be an incapacitating attack either of elation or depression again. This isn’t nonsense; on the contrary, these doctors can’t resist taking a profound, mysterious and pessimistic line. They like to look at you, as if they were revealing a great discovery, and say, “you know there is a lot of anxiety beneath the calm
surface
.”
1
Lowell cooperated with the therapy as enthusiastically as he was able to, telling the doctors “all the sordid and awful things about myself I could think of.”
2
As to the doctors, they felt that his willingness to reveal “all sorts of shameful and embarrassing things” was indeed a healthy sign, but they were worried that he was able to be so “impersonal and unemotional about these admissions.”
3
To Peter Taylor, Lowell wrote:
I am now in the Payne Whitney Clinic, where Jean was, and will probably be here two or three months for therapy. I seem to be in the other half, the down-half of what you saw in Bloomington—self-enclosed, unable to function, depressed.
4
In fact, this letter was not sent, and it was late October before it became generally known that Lowell was at Payne Whitney.
Hardwick
had carried on living at Red Hook, commuting to make
regular
visits and staying over in hotels. During September, Lowell had had visits from both Tate and his wife. Allen urged him:
Tell yourself every morning, five times, that you are one of the best poets and that your friends feel about you precisely as they always have; that is, devotedly. You should never think as well of yourself as other people do, but you ought to think better of yourself than you do now. And you will.
5
Caroline, always more consistently sharp-tongued than her
husband
, found the whole visit “depressing,” even irritating:
He seems to be in much the same state he was in when he broke down in Chicago, only past the violent stage. I imagine that he summoned me partly for the same reason he came to see us in Chicago: to disclose his recently discovered secret of the universe. I guess it’s no secret to you that it’s Counter-Point! I choked back so many remarks in the hour and a half that I was there that I became almost apoplectic. I would go to see him again if I thought it would do any good but I can’t see that it would.
6
Caroline Tate goes on to recommend a Jungian approach to
Lowell
’s illness; Jungians, after all, deal in the same materials as poets: “symbols, archetypes.” And then, gratuitously: “It is pretty plain by this time that these attacks are cyclic, don’t you think?”
7
By the end of October, Lowell was well enough to be allowed out of the hospital on Wednesdays and on weekends, and he was able to spend these times with Hardwick in an apartment she had rented on Central Park West. He had been in Payne Whitney for nearly three months, but his parents had never been told. “It was my idea,” Hardwick has recalled, “not telling them. Partly shame, partly not wanting to seem to be asking for help.”
8
Eventually, they found out from Baldpate that Lowell was having “follow-up treatment” in New York, and Merrill Moore reassured them that a reactive
depression
was only to be expected. Moore had, in fact, written to
Hardwick
early in October that Mr. and Mrs. Lowell were so involved with their own problems and anxieties (Mr. Lowell had become “quite infantile and demanding and difficult”) that it would be better for them to be kept at a distance:
Actually from now on in they are not important and will not be any more. They are on their street car going to the end of the line where the car will stop and they will get off and walk the rest of the way.
They can never do much for Cal (they never have) and if he tries or if you try to adjust to them at this stage it would waste priceless energy which they need for their life tasks and which you both need for yours.
9
It was November 5 before Lowell communicated directly with his parents: he had been too “ashamed and puzzled,” he said, to write to them before. He felt that he was “beginning to really learn something from the psycho-therapy” and added, in a postscript: “I’ve been trying to understand my first six or seven years and have many questions to ask you.”
10
A week later his father wrote,
praising
Lowell for agreeing to take treatment—“I think it is such a very sensible and responsible thing to do”—and then drifting off into paternal emptiness:
You had a wonderful career in college, and we certainly don’t want your health to interfere with a brilliant career. So many literary people did not develop their bodies to keep pace with their brilliant minds.
Psychiatry can do a lot for people but most people go, because
someone
else wants them to, and not because they really have any interest in it themselves, and it is not to be wondered at, that the results are not up to expectations.
Saturday, we went to the Lunts in “I Know My Love”—a new
Theater Guild that started here. It is very well done, and I am sure you would enjoy it.
11
By Christmas, 1949, Lowell was “functioning” again; his letters are brisk and busy, as if he was anxious to make it clear that he was finally back in the world of practicalities. To his mother he wrote:
I have a world of things to do—preparing to leave hospital, my course at Kenyon, a lecture on Browning to be delivered at Kenyon, readings at St. Johns and here and the Commencement poem to be read at Harvard on the 19th of June—like James Russell Lowell, but I guess our poems will have little in common.
12
The Kenyon course he mentions here was to take place in the summer at the newly instituted Kenyon School of Letters—an event organized by Ransom but not officially tied in with Kenyon College. Lowell’s immediate hope was that Tate would be able to persuade Paul Engle, director of the writers’ workshop, to offer him a job at Iowa similar to the one he had turned down in 1947. On January 1, 1950, he heard that Tate had been successful (“You are a wonderfully generous friend,” Lowell wrote to him, “and I shall never forget”),
13
and that he was expected to arrive at Iowa by the end of the month. Lowell was discharged from Payne Whitney, having agreed to make contact with a psychiatrist in Iowa, and by January 25 he and Hardwick were installed in a one-and-a-half-room apartment in Iowa City: “a strange place … it’s so flat and ugly and somehow has the air and look of a temporary town. Actually,
anything
over fifty years old is a landmark.”
14
Even so, within a week of their arrival, Lowell had got back to work; Elizabeth Hardwick wrote to Charlotte Lowell:
Cal has started writing poetry again and has been steadily at it for the past week with his old inspiration and fantastic concentration. Even he must admit that what he has done is brilliant as ever and so he’s fine and busy.
15
And when classes started a week later, Lowell found them
surprisingly
agreeable. “There are no fireworks, nothing of the icy lucidity of the professional,” but of the twenty-five poets in his class he
thought that five or six were “really trying to do something” and that the atmosphere was “tame and friendly”—like almost
everything
else in Iowa City:
Every afternoon a pack of very harmless and sorry-looking stray dogs settles on our pathway. This is one of the marks of Iowa City; the others are high-brow movies, the new criticism, and the Benalek murder trial, which Elizabeth is moving heaven and earth to enter as an accredited reporter.
16
Lowell was making weekly visits to an Iowa psychiatrist, and in March he wrote to his mother: “… I am well out of my extreme troubles. There is a stiffness, many old scars, the toil of building up new habits. I definitely feel out of the old perverse dark maze.”
17
A new plan had been devised for 1950: after Iowa, there would be the visit to Kenyon, and after that “a frugal year abroad.” With money saved from Iowa, the fee from Kenyon and the remainder of the 1947 Guggenheim, Lowell and Hardwick calculated that if they set off in September, they would be able to survive in Europe—“in Italy mostly”—until the following June. Lowell now felt that teaching would always be there to come back to; indeed, Iowa had assured him that there would be a position for him there on his return. And the European trip would, he thought, give him “the time, freedom and stimulation to finish his new book of poems.”
18
The Kenyon course was a success. Delmore Schwartz and
Ransom
were teaching there, and Lowell was able to show them the first draft of his long poem “The Mills of the Kavanaughs”; he gave lectures on Browning and on Frost and was applauded by Ransom for doing “a fine job for us here.”
19
After a short spell back in New York and a visit to Lowell’s parents, Lowell and Hardwick were ready to leave. They had
arranged
to take a Norwegian freighter to Genoa—“it was all this youth stuff,” Hardwick has recalled, although, in their early thirties, “we were not so young”—and in preparation they installed
themselves
and their luggage in a hotel. On August 26 Lowell’s parents wrote to wish them “Bon voyage.” Charlotte was anxious that they should always remember to contact the naval attaché at the
appropriate
American embassy, “and say that your father was a naval officer. That was helpful to us and gave us especial attention.”
20
And, unusually, there was a note from Mr. Lowell;
21
he had enjoyed
their visit to Boston, he said, and would handle Lowell’s mail while he was away:
We think it is nice to do well in your poems, but it is equally advisable to do well in a wife, and we think that you did.
Hope you have a fine trip. Best love to you both.
Affectionately,
Your Dad
Four days later a telegram arrived:
DADDY DIED VERY SUDDENLY AT
THE BEVERLY HOSPITAL.
22
Lowell and Hardwick left their luggage at their New York hotel and returned to Boston, where Lowell helped to organize his
father
’s funeral. He later wrote:
I was the only person Mother permitted to lift the lid of the casket. Father was there. He wore his best sport-coat—pink, at ease, obedient! Not a twist or a grimace recalled those unprecedented last words to Mother as he died, “I feel awful.” And it was right that he should still have the slight over-ruddiness so characteristic of his last summer. He looked entirely alive, or as he used to say:
W
&
H:
Well and Happy. Impossible to believe that if I had pressed a hand to his brow to see if it were hectic, I would have touched the
cold
thing!
23
And Elizabeth Hardwick has recalled:
Cal was upset and there were some rather distressing things that had happened. He asked his mother, at Beverly Farms, about his father’s will. His father didn’t mention him in his will at all. And Cal said, “Didn’t he even leave me his watch, or something?” And she said, “Oh,
Bobby
.” And he said he wanted to talk to his mother about how much money she had and what she was going to do with her life. She wouldn’t discuss it. Instead she fell over and fainted, and crumpled down on the stairs. She would do rather dramatic things like that
occasionally
. But he was quite hurt that his father didn’t mention him in his will.
But
how
could
that
have
happened?
What had happened was that Cal came into a small trust that went by will to him on his father’s death. I mean, it was out of Mr. Lowell’s jurisdiction, and so I suppose he thought that since Cal had that, there was no special reason to mention him in the will.
24
Lowell and Hardwick stayed on at Beverly Farms for a month, and on September 29 they finally embarked for Europe. From the boat, Lowell wrote to his mother:
Just a note to say goodbye and remind you must tell us anything that comes up and call on us for any help we can give. The last month has been a hard one and an instructive one—an education or its beginnings for us all. I’ll miss you deeply.
25