Robert Lowell: A Biography (25 page)

After a “rainless, sea-sickless”
26
voyage via Tangier, Lowell and Hardwick reached Genoa on October 10,1950, and from there they made for Florence, intending to stay for a week before moving on to Rome. But Florence was not to be passed through so casually:

The five-room apartment they had found was “wonderfully
furnished
, beautiful dishes, sheets, silver, furniture and in a
chic
location
,” and $200 a month covered rent, food, heating and a maid. For Hardwick it was perfect: the maid meant that she could do her own work (she was writing a novel based on the Iowa City murder trial) and not be swamped by “the torture of the laundry, the cooking and the cleaning.” As for Lowell, he had immediately launched himself into historic Florence, and was soon “in a daze about Italy.”
28

It became Lowell’s habit over the next few months to search for an American parallel to each new European marvel; part of this was homesickness, but mainly it was an attempt to impose limits on his own excitement. Thus, Florence was Boston, Rome was New York, and Italy was “like America—a slightly older America, such as that of my childhood in the twenties.”
29
Constantly, and not too
convincingly
, he would attempt to
place
each bewildering new place: “Even the greyest houses are attractive and you might think you were living in the glorious Victorian age in the poor Italian section of Boston, except for the posters and motor-bikes.”
30

The posters in Communist Florence mostly said things like
“Death to the criminal MacArthur,” but that didn’t worry Lowell. The Korean War had broken out in the summer of 1950, but in Florence “the people are divided every which way, and seem to be marking time—waiting for the giants, Russia and America, to act.”
31
On the whole, he felt, the city was relaxed and slow, and in any case it was not modern political Florence he had come to see: “We’d get up at seven, and we’d walk all day and come back to wherever we were at 5—seeing everything.”
32
And when Lowell was not looking, he was reading “grammars and art books” and Florentine histories. And his classical education gave him the
pleasing
illusion of being able to communicate with the natives:

During his first two months in Florence he was also “fussing with my Kavanaughs”:
34
in other words, massively rewriting the whole book in galley proofs. Robert Giroux would write reminding him that printers charged real money for this kind of thing, and Lowell would take no notice. The book was now “much improved,” he wrote to Peter Taylor.
35
It would be called
The
Mills
of
the
Kava
naughs
and would include the title poem along with the six other pieces he had completed since
Lord
Weary
’
s
Castle.
It was scheduled to appear in the spring of 1951.

Lowell and Hardwick lingered in Florence from October 1950 until May 1951, with only intermittent excursions. There was a three-day trip to Monte Carlo—“no gambling, just sight-seeing”
36
—and further visits to Rome. For one luxurious ten-day spell they were entertained in the country villa of Princess Caetani, the
publisher
of an international literary magazine called
Botteghe
Oscure
, and in Rome itself Lowell paid regular visits to George Santayana. A Boston Catholic, Santayana had been impressed by
Lord
Weary
’
s
Castle
and had spoken of “the flames of piety that appear repeatedly, contrasting with the Bostonian and Cape Cod atmosphere of the background.”
37

Rome was the glittering metropolis—“much more lively
socially
and intellectually than Florence,” Hardwick thought, but both she and Lowell were usually pleased to return to a city where “you can walk everywhere and learn your way about in a day.”
38
In Florence they had met the poet Montale, “and had several sweaty, mute evenings of language difficulty and great displays of blundering affection. We walked up the Arno, I remember, and Montale, since we couldn’t talk, sang into the night ‘In Questa Tomba Oscura’ and other songs.”
39
In Florence, too, there was Bernard Berenson, the celebrated connoisseur of Italian painting and another self-exiled Bostonian. Berenson’s villa was an “
attraction
” for visiting American intellectuals, and the old man himself was a dependable host figure, an “inn-keeper” almost: “He was too old,” Hardwick wrote, “had been viewed and consulted far too much; you had the belated feeling you were seeing the matinee of a play that had been running for eight decades.” In this same essay, Hardwick muses on the notion of expatriatism—and it seems that if she and Lowell ever thought of moving permanently to Europe, the example of Berenson was enough to give them pause:

She felt the same about other, less renowned Americans who had tried to settle into the “dream-like timelessness of Italy”:

For the mere traveler, though, there was still so much to see, and during the summer Lowell and Hardwick set off to “discover” Europe. They traveled in France with the Macauleys and to Greece
and Turkey with the art critic Anthony Bower. Hardwick
remembers
it all as a period of

In October, Lowell wrote excitedly to Randall Jarrell:

As it turned out, Lowell wasn’t able to “stop” until late that autumn. The climax of his soaring and intense summer came in August with the arrival in Paris of the almost equally energetic Charlotte Lowell. Unfortunately, Charlotte’s energies were not the kind that drove her into churches and art galleries; they were more to do with the shortcomings of bureaucrats and flunkies—wherever she went, Lowell wrote, she would leave “a wake of shattered chefs, ships-captains, hotel managers, Cook’s agents etc. etc…. truly, and I’m not exaggerating.”
44
And for Hardwick,

After a month of this, tension was running fairly high; as Mrs. Lowell later diagnosed: “It was a great adjustment for us all.”
46
And it was in this atmosphere that Lowell suddenly announced his
winter
plans: he had decided they would go to Holland. Hardwick was appalled; she had expected that they would return to Italy as soon as Charlotte’s visit had been coped with—after all, most of their luggage was still stored in Florence. Lowell would not be dissuaded; he wanted Hardwick to go ahead of him to Amsterdam to find somewhere to live; meanwhile he would escort Charlotte to the next bit of her holiday, at Pau. Hardwick, in the end, complied, but, she says:

Even though Lowell knew that Hardwick felt stranded and
desperate
in Amsterdam—she wrote to him of her “paralyzing anxiety”—he continued to argue that Amsterdam was where he needed to be:

He wanted “sunlit rooms, a busy, perceptive, productive day and calm and joy between us.”
49
He had been reading Motley’s
Rise
of
the
Dutch
Republic
(which had given him “nightmares” when “still in short trousers”;
50
he now describes it as a “magnificent, rather obtusely and fiercely Macaulayish anti-Catholic affair”
51
), and he had learned from it that “Catholic apologetics are more a splendid lawyer’s harangue than the story of what happens.”
52
He was
anxious
to see Dutch paintings; Rembrandt’s
Syndics
in the
Rijksmuseum
had, he said, once been his “cause,” and he badly wanted to see it:

Chiefly, though, he wanted to rest for a time in a culture that was in accord with “my own Protestant New England background.”

There was a note of desperation in all this, and Hardwick wrote urging him:

Lowell continued to write almost every day from Pau; he didn’t want Hardwick to settle for Amsterdam unless she was genuinely willing, but he also pleaded:

And in another letter: