Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
This account is taken from Lowell’s original draft for the prose essay “91 Revere Street”; the tone in which Lowell remembers himself when “mad” is chillingly consistent with the tone he uses to recall childhood misdeeds. There is an amused, tolerant, near
embarrassment
as Lowell recalls the “mischief” he has done—in both
schoolroom
and asylum. The assault on Roger described here could almost have taken place at Rivers, and the expectation of punishment is casual but alert, just like a naughty boy’s.
There is something similarly boyish in a letter Lowell wrote to Blair Clark on August 6:
I’ve been out of my
excitement
for over a month, I think, now, and am in good spirits, though I don’t feel any rush of eloquence to talk about the past. It’s like recovering from some physical injury, such as a broken leg or jaundice, yet there’s no disclaiming these outbursts—they are part of my character—me at moments.
On the subject of Giovanna Madonia, Lowell said he had written to her that he “was staying married to Elizabeth”:
However I wrapped my letters up in emotions (really felt at the time and made them as soft as I could). I haven’t had an answer, and don’t quite see what I can write her at this point. The whole business was sincere enough, but a stupid pathological mirage, a magical orange grove in a nightmare. I feel like a son of a bitch.
He wanted Clark to find out how she was: “I do know that I am responsible for whatever disturbances have happened in her life.”
35
In spite of its first side effects, Lowell had reacted swiftly to the Thorazine treatment, and Hardwick was mildly encouraged: “The most hopeful thing for the future is his extraordinary response to the new drug.”
36
She was advised that Lowell’s final diagnosis would, after all, be “manic-depressive” and not “schizophrenic”; the
reassurance
here being that schizophrenia was supposed to leave more “scarring” after an attack. By September 15 Lowell was ready to be discharged from Payne Whitney on condition that when he and Hardwick moved to Boston (where they intended to stay until the house at Duxbury was fixed), he maintain some kind of regular “psychotherapy.” A fairly empty exhortation, it would seem, since—as Hardwick wrote to Clark:
The doctors at Payne Whitney are not very hopeful about dramatic results from psycho-therapy for Cal. It isn’t just putting in time with a doctor; you have to be the sort of person who can have detailed and changing insight into himself: you must do the work yourself. Of course Cal must take the psycho-therapy, but it will probably be most useful as a kind of support rather than a cure—or so they think now.
37
At the end of September 1954 Lowell and Hardwick moved into a “half palazzo and half loft” apartment on Commonwealth Avenue. On October 24 Lowell wrote to Peter Taylor: “After months of walking in this maze, one is a little speechless and surprised to have eyes. We are both very well and send our love to you both. Cal.”
38
1
. Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair and Holly Clark, February 20, 1954.
2
. R.L. to Blair Clark, March 21, 1954.
3
. R.L. to Peter Taylor, March 19, 1954.
4
. R.L. to Blair Clark, March 21, 1954.
5
. Blair Clark, interview with I.H. (1981).
6
. Giovanna Madonia to R.L., March 21, 1954; translated from the Italian by Holly Eley (Houghton Library).
7
. Ibid.
8
. Ibid.
9
. Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair Clark, March 27, 1954.
10
. R.L. to Blair Clark, March 30, 1954.
11
. Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair Clark, March 27, 1954.
12
. Ibid, April 1, 1954.
13
. Ibid, n.d.
14
. Diary of Van Meter Ames, read to I.H. by Elizabeth Bettman (1981).
15
. George Ford, letter to I.H. (1981).
16
. Elizabeth Bettman, interview with I.H. (1981).
17
. John Thompson, interview with I.H. (1979).
18
. Elizabeth Bettman, interview with I.H. (1981).
19
. R.L. to Ezra Pound, March 10, 1954 (Beinecke Library).
20
. Ibid., March 25, 1954 (Beinecke Library).
21
. Ibid., March 30, 1954 (Beinecke Library).
22
. Ms poem (Beinecke Library).
23
. Cable from Blair Clark to Elizabeth Hardwick, April 12, 1954 (Houghton Library).
24
. Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair Clark, April 10, 1954.
25
. Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair and Holly Clark, May 4, 1954.
26
. Giovanna Madonia to Blair Clark, March 19, 1954.
27
. Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair Clark, April 4, 1954.
28
. Philip Piker to Merrill Moore, April 26, 1954 (Houghton Library).
29
. Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair Clark, May 15, 1954.
30
. Ibid., June 9, 1954.
31
. Ibid., June 15, 1954.
32
. Ibid., June 22, 1954.
33
. Giovanna Madonia to Blair Clark, May 23, 1954.
34
. R.L., draft autobiography, 1955–57 (Houghton Library).
35
. R.L. to Blair Clark, August 6, 1954.
36
. Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair Clark, August 31, 1954.
37
. Ibid.
38
. R.L. to Peter Taylor, October 24, 1954.
By February 1955 Elizabeth Hardwick was writing to friends that Lowell was “his old self again” and that he had begun work on a series of “remarkable” prose pieces: “They are reminiscences of childhood—that is the closest I can come—and I think of
extraordinary
beauty and interest.” Lowell was at his desk each day for “sixteen hours or so and I’ve very nearly been feeding him through a tube.”
1
In the same month, Lowell wrote to Ransom seeking a
reference
for a teaching post at Boston University—he wanted a job, he said, “to keep my hand green and my mind mellow.”
2
In the meantime, though, it did seem that his new prose project was
discipline
enough: his own retort, some would say, to the kindly promptings of the psychotherapists. An orphan and an heir, for the first time he could explore his Boston origins without any
self-defensive
rancor. His new therapist had encouraged him to adopt a strict daily regime—“get up at eight, shave, take walk etc”—and after their first three months in Boston Hardwick had reported: “Together we have managed so far to keep the depression from becoming incapacitating—it comes down upon us like a cloud but always lifts in a day or two.”
3
The prose “reminiscences” were a way of cementing Lowell’s new, timetabled calm—prose, Lowell found, need not thrive on bouts of high “enthusiasm.”
Not that these pieces were mere therapeutic exercises; Lowell knew that during the later stages of this last episode his delusions had been neither Christ-like nor Napoleonic, and that more notably than in earlier episodes, there had been a regression to the infantile: the mother’s boy no longer had a mother.
… after six or seven weeks at the Payne-Whitney Clinic, my bluster and manic antics died away. Images of my spoiled childhood ached inside me, and I would lean with my chin in my hand, and count the rustling poplars, so many leagues below me, which lined the hospital driveway and led out to the avenues of Manhattan, to life. I used to count the poplars, and gave them the names of old ladies. This one was my Great Aunt Sarah. That one was Cousin Susy Pickering. That was Cousin Belle Winslow. That was Mrs. Robbins. That was
Gaga
[the pet name of Lowell’s maternal grandmother]. My grandfather Winslow had named his country house Chardesa for his children Charlotte, Devereux and Sarah.
4
And on April 17, 1955, he wrote to Ezra Pound:
This has been a funny, eye-opening winter i.e. living in the Boston I left when I was seventeen, full of passion and without words. I suppose all young men get up the nerve to start moving by wrapping themselves like mummies from nose to toe in colored cloths, veils, dreams etc. After a while shedding one’s costume, one’s fancy dress, is like being flayed. I’ve just been doing a little piece of
Why
I
live
in
Boston.
I made it impersonal and said nothing about what I was looking for here—the pain and jolt of seeing things as they are.
5
A further spur to autobiography came that same month, when Peter Taylor published his own autobiographical story, “1939.” For
Lowell
, the coincidence was disturbing. What
was
this life that others found so fascinating, that Merrill Moore had wanted to “write up,” that doctors were urging him to “probe,” that his best friend had turned into fiction, and that had now—with his mother’s death—been finally delivered into his own keeping? In response to “1939,” he wrote to Taylor:
At
first
I
was,
how
shall
I
put
it,
surprised
and
hurt
—that’s how the history of St. Mark’s school speaks of my great-grandfather’s novel, in which it was noted with surprise that Dr. Lowell’s gentle humor had used members of the faculty as characters. If you’d used one of my poems instead of one of yours I think I would have sued. So I felt after reading; but since then I have [had] so many compliments—nothing I have ever written myself has ever gotten me such attention…. Well, I stand off, hat in hand, and thank you with grudging bewildered incomprehension. But were we really quite such monsters? Seriously, though the whole
thing fascinates me—I have been trying to do the same sort of thing myself with scenes from my childhood with my grandfather, old Aunt Sarah, Cousin Belle etc. I want to invent and forget a lot but at the same time have the historian’s wonderful advantage—the reader must always be forced to say “This is tops, but even if it weren’t it’s true.” I think you’ve done the trick.
6
Prose and psychotherapy aside, Lowell’s first “grown-up” Boston spring was an “idle rather sociable” affair.
7
In April, Hardwick wrote to Cousin Harriet:
Everyone seems to come here, and so we feel rather more in the literary world than usual. We’ve had the Sitwells, Spender, John Crowe
Ransom
at Harvard last night, Lillian Hellman, and then magazine writers from Everywhere. T. S. Eliot is expected soon. Here in Boston we are somehow expected to do our part and so we are always giving luncheons and cocktails for the visitors and actually enjoying it all. It is alive here without being pulverizing like New York.
8
As well as the cocktails and luncheons there were amateur
theatricals
and the occasional poetry reading or panel. Of these last, Lowell sardonically told Blair Clark:
poets are still a special species, like the two toed sloth, and a wonder for small audiences. Most of the poets who head discussions are formidably practical men, such as Eberhart and Macleish—they seem driven to insist that poetry is something sky-high, not only
on
the side of the angels, but
at
their elbow. My role on these occasions is to debunk. I begin to think that it is only at poetry conferences that I seem a practical man, with several strings to my fiddle.
9
And in May he went so far as to attend the twentieth reunion of the St. Mark’s Class of ’35, and even persuaded Frank Parker to go along with him. But this visit could be explained away as “self-discovery”:
I’ve been thinking back on my
break
with the boys, if I can call it that, for I was never at all close or firm with them. I think I gave myself a perhaps arbitrary dilemma, that of either sitting about inertly or of running blind. Nothing is more tantalizing than re-shaping one’s silly former self, but the voice of middle-age says we are all warped old dogs set on lying in the sun and changing as little as rocks.
10
(Lowell was thirty-eight when he wrote this letter; from now on, he would regularly affect a fatigued, world-weary tone of voice and, when “well,” would usually seem older than his years. In
depression
, of course, he
was
fatigued, he
was
world-weary, and very often he was simply feeling the side effects of psychiatric medication; there is something touching, though, in the way he almost
welcomed
the label “middle-aged” as a means of explaining—to others, if not to himself—any prolonged stretches of enervation or low spirits.)
The summer of 1955 he and Hardwick spent partly in Duxbury and partly at the Castine summer residence of his cousin Harriet Winslow. Earlier in the year, Cousin Harriet had suffered a stroke and was now confined to her home in Washington. Since she herself could no longer make full use of Castine, she had offered it to Lowell as a summer retreat, an offer that would eventually make Duxbury superfluous. At Castine there was a house and a converted barn, which Lowell could use as a workplace. He later wrote of this to William Carlos Williams:
I’m sitting in a little barn my Cousin Harriet made over and painted (against all town advice) with aluminum paint a sort of pewter color inside. It’s right on the bay, which on one side looks like a print of Japan and on the other like a lake in Michigan as the rocky islands with pine trees ease off into birches and meadows.
11
Lowell and Hardwick at once decided to buy a house in “proper” Boston. The pastoral life had never quite fulfilled its promise, and, in any case, part of the point of Duxbury had been its “safe” distance from Lowell’s mother. They were now free to live anywhere they pleased.
The house they decided on was 239 Marlborough Street; “just exactly a block from the one I grew up in,” Lowell wrote,
12
as if the choice had been weirdly fortuitous, and by the late fall of 1955 they had moved into a residence that was a fair copy of the one in which Lowell had spent much of his childhood. In November he wrote to Peter Taylor:
We’re having a good fall, and feel very lordly and pretentious in our new Boston house…. It’s not really little and not at all unpretentious, and we despise everyone whose nerve for cities has failed, all country people,
all suburbanites, and all people who live in apartments, except for the Thompsons who are coming to visit this weekend. And are we priming ourselves to show off!
13
And to William Carlos Williams:
It’s a unimpassioned, darkish, bricky, Londonlike street, still the mirror of propriety…. This is the first year since 1940 when I have spent two successive winters in the same city. We’re fearfully relieved to be settled and doubt if we will ever move. We might even become Boston
worthies
, if it weren’t for the worm of life in us.
14
Lowell had, of course, come close to “settling down” before, and on at least two occasions the prospect had induced a lively panic; he had recoiled from Jean Stafford’s nest-building efforts at
Damariscotta
Mills, and in the early stages of his Cincinnati illness had tried to sabotage the Duxbury move by sending abusive letters to the woman who was handling the interior decoration. But
Marlborough
Street, it seems, was utterly unthreatening; there is even a genuinely house-proud note in Lowell’s first accounts of his new property:
The house has changed us in every way, but especially in my case: 1, I am about to explode any moment on a book-buying jag; 2, I have decided the only excuse for writing my autobiography is to make money. So I do a page a day, put in all the corn I can think of, then take my page down to Elizabeth and implore her to think of more. The book-buying is due to my not drinking, and to our for once having more unfilled shelves than can be counted.
15
Lowell’s “not drinking” had been decided on during a particularly “surly hangover mood” one Sunday in the spring and was yet another attempt to reduce the general level of “excitement.” Also, in a course of drug treatment alcohol would have been “
contraindicated
.” At first, he found that he was “twice as lazy as
previously
,”
16
but he had persisted throughout the summer—sustained by a bearlike pound of honey every day—and now could boast that he was at least a “harmless” driver. And in November 1955, as if to set a seal on his return to Boston, Lowell applied to rejoin the Episcopalian Church. The Reverend Whitney Hale, of the Church of the Advent on Mount Vernon Street, wrote to him as follows:
I am happy to report that Bishop Nash has formally restored you to communicant status and does not feel it is necessary for you to be “received back” by him with the usual ceremony used for Roman
Catholics
coming into our church inasmuch as you started out in the
Episcopal
church, but will do so if you desire it.
Also with your restoration I am now permitted to bless your
marriage.
17
Lowell’s prose reminiscences had by now become a full-scale autobiography, and his letters throughout 1956 are full of weaving genealogies and dynastic coincidences. In February 1956 he wrote to Peter Taylor:
Just spent two days in delirious ancestor-worship, i.e. reading their writings. If my sudden line wasn’t dwarfed by the Winslows, I’d say they were the most talented and charming people in the world. Have you run across any Devereuxs, Lanes, Pollocks, Mackies, Nelsons or Wilkinses?
18
And in the same month to Harriet Winslow:
I had a little ancestor worshipping spree the other day and read up all we had in the house written by ancestors, and even worked out on four typewritten pages my family tree. How quickly it runs into the sands of the unknown. What sort of man was my grandfather Lowell, who died in his twenties, leaving only a Phi Beta Kappa key, a photograph, his name on a wall at St. Mark’s school? He had only been married a few months, and Daddy, his first child was not yet born.
19
When Ferris Greenslet was preparing
The
Lowells
and
Their
Seven
Worlds
(1946), Lowell had refused to cooperate. His own copy of the book, though, is full of underlinings, and it is reasonable to assume that these were done in 1956. With Greenslet’s help, he could track the fine detail of the “Traill-Spence” line and speculate about the Tyngs, the Duanes and the Myers. He could discover in himself a trace of Jewishness, of Scots; he could wistfully identify with the heroic Beau Sabreur (his great-grandfather’s brother Charles,
married
to the sister of the celebrated Colonel Shaw and killed in the Civil War); he could conjecture about the mental illnesses that had afflicted both his great-grandfather’s mother, Harriet, and her daughter Rebecca. And on the Winslow side there was equal scope
for the kind of fanciful connections he delighted in; there were the Pilgrims, the frontiersmen, the Indian killers, the colonial
governors
, the Revolutionary War hero General Stark, and even a reputed witch—Elizabeth Hutchinson, who married Edward
Winslow
II (1634–82) was the granddaughter of Anne Hutchinson. And who
were
the Savages, the Davises, the Chiltons and the Ollyvers? Lowell wrote to his cousin Harriet in March 1956: