Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
During his first week in a locked ward at McLean’s, Lowell wrote a draft of the poem he later called “Waking in the Blue.” The first draft is titled “To Ann Adden (Written during the first week of my voluntary stay at McLean’s Mental Hospital),” and it reads as
follows
:
Like the heart-toughening harpoon,
or steel plates of a press
needling, draining my heart—
your absence …..
What use is my sense of humor,
basking over “Jimmy”, now sunk in his sixties,
once a Harvard ail-American (if such were possible from Harvard)
still with the build of a boy in his twenties,
as he lolls, ram-rod,
with the luxuriance of a seal
in his long tub,
vaguely sulphurous from the Victorian plumbing.
His bone brow is crowned with a red golf cap
all day, all night,
and he thinks only of his build,
gobbling ice-cream and ginger ale—
how to be more shut off from words than a seal.
Thus day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean’s;
it ends with ‘Hughey’ 29,
looking like Louis XVI
released from his white whig [
sic
],
reeking and rolly-polly as a sperm whale,
as he careens about naked,
horsing down chairs.
This fine figure of bravado ossified young.
In between the limits of day, here,
hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts,
and slightly too little non-sensical bachelor eyes
of the R.C. attendants
(there are no blue-blooded
old Boston screwballs in the Catholic Church)
Ann, what use is my ability
for shooting the bull,
far from your Valkyrie body,
your gold-brown hair,
your robust uprightness—you, brisk
yet discrete [
sic
] in your conversation!
II
(a week later)
The night-attendant, a B.U. student,
rouses his cobwebby eyes
propped on his Social Relations text-book,
prowls drowsily down our corridor….
Soon, soon the solitude of Allah, azure day-break,
will make my agonized window bleaker.
What greater glory than recapturing the moment of glory
in
miseria?
Snow’s falling. Farther off in time,
a more illuminating snow:
on the slopes of the Mittelsell,
near Franconia, topped by Mount Washington,
you loom back to me, Ann,
tears in your eyes, icicles on your eyelashes,
bridal Norwegian fringe
on your coat, the wooly lining of a coat.
Your salmon lioness face is dawn.
The bracelet on your right wrist jingles with trophies:
The enamelled Harvard pennant,
the round medallion of St. Mark’s School.
I could claim both,
for both were supplied by earlier,
now defunct claimants,
and my gold ring, almost half an inch wide,
now crowns your bracelet, cock of the walk there.
My Goddess…. But where in literature
has a goddess been able to stand up
to flesh and blood?
A lioness, then. With Descartes
I can almost lower animals to the realm of machines.
Ann, how can I charade you
In a lioness’s wormy hide?—
massive, tawny, playful, lythe [
sic
]?
God be thanked, I now weigh 200 pounds,
have been a man for forty years;
You are 19,
see me still a St. Mark’s sixth former,
my symbol the Evangelist’s winged lion!
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From these diffuse beginnings, the finished poem—worked on over a period of three months—was to become a supreme
example
of Lowell’s new “informality,” an informality seamed with high instinctive artifice (if such were possible!): small, almost whispered intrusions of alliteration and half-rhyme, a shrewd, suspenseful balancing of short and long lines, an almost
ceremonial
tightening here and there into strict meter or heroic couplet. In his first draft, Lowell really
is
informal, hasty, talkative; in the completed poem he makes every accent and line break earn its formal keep—he elevates exuberant chatter into haunting,
measured
eloquence:
The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,
rouses from the mare’s-nest of his drowsy head
propped on
The
Meaning
of
Meaning.
He catwalks down our corridor.
Azure day
makes my agonized blue window bleaker.
Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.
Absence! My heart grows tense
as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.
(This is the house for the “mentally ill.”)
What use is my sense of humor?
I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties,
once a Harvard ail-American fullback,
(if such were possible!)
still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties,
as he soaks, a ramrod
with the muscle of a seal
in his long tub,
vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing.
A kingly granite profile in a crimson golf-cap,
worn all day, all night,
he thinks only of his figure,
of slimming on sherbet and ginger ale—
more cut off from words than a seal.
This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean’s;
the hooded night lights bring out “Bobbie,”
Porcellian ’29
a replica of Louis XVI
without the wig—
redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale,
as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit
and horses at chairs.
These victorious figures of bravado ossified young.
In between the limits of day,
hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts
and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle
of the Roman Catholic attendants.
(There are no Mayflower
screwballs in the Catholic Church.)
After a hearty New England breakfast,
I weigh two hundred pounds
this morning. Cock of the walk,
I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor’s jersey
before the metal shaving mirrors,
and see the shaky future grow familiar
in the pinched, indigenous faces
of these thoroughbred mental cases,
twice my age and half my weight. We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.
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The thread of marine images—seals, turtles, sperm whales—is
insinuated
with a casual air, but it serves to lend true elegiac weight to the near-cartoon images of Stanley and Bobbie: two highborn and historical New England “wrecks,” each of them kingly, thoroughbred and ossified in the habits of their pampered childhoods, and each of them therefore a terrible mirror image for the strutting, grinning, cock-of-the-walk St. Mark’s and Harvard poet: “We are all old-timers, / each of us holds a locked razor.” (But could Stanley or Bobbie ever hope to pull off the rhyming triumph of those last five lines—“faces,” “cases,” and then the “a” sound of “age” and “weight” supplying the hoist forward to “locked razor”: a final rhyme superbly softened, inexact and ominous?)
“Waking in the Blue” is twenty-five lines shorter than the
original
“To Ann Adden,” and the missing lines are those that Lowell specifically addressed to his new love. It is not known whether or not Ann Adden saw “her” version of the poem; if she did, she probably didn’t like it much. In spite of its air of high-spirited infatuation, its transmutations are surely too awesomely grand-scale: Ann Adden becomes lioness, Valkyrie, goddess—“massive, tawny, playful, lythe”: a high price to pay for happening to be of Nordic origin. And there is a distinct note of menace in Lowell’s reference to “earlier, now defunct, claimants” to the insignia she jingles on her wrist. She, too, the poem seems to say, will shortly be “defunct”—but only when Lowell has tired of his mischievous “charade,” or has become bored with her both as metaphor and as reverential
playmate
. William Alfred saw “the real Cal” looking out at him from within the mania; Ann Adden might well have felt the same when Lowell addressed her as
My Goddess…. But where in literature
has a goddess been able to stand up
to flesh and blood?
A lioness, then. With Descartes
I can almost lower animals to the realm of machines.
And sure enough, by the time Lowell was finished with his poem, he was also finished with Ann Adden: there is a near-chilling
efficiency
in his final excisions—“Waking in the Blue” reveals no trace of its first “inspiration.” Ann Adden is both written out and written off. (Although later on, it should perhaps be said, there is further cause for uneasy admiration: in a poem called “1958,” published in 1964,
3
and in “Mania” [1969],
4
Lowell resurrects half a dozen of the discarded “Ann Adden lines” and blithely recasts
them
into elegy.)
In January 1958, though, Ann Adden was still a lively presence. Although she was adopting a fairly guarded style—“This time you must get well and I must not interfere”—she was still a regular visitor to McLean’s, and was assiduously following a reading
program
Lowell had devised for her; Hitler, she wrote to him, “has the greatest retrospective power,” and she was also deep in Dante: “The X Canto is a beauty. Only sorry you’re not present to read the Italian aloud.” After Dante she would “delve into” Kant’s
Critique
of
Pure
Reason.
But what, she wondered, ought she to do about “the Picasso? …. If you want it sent to Marlborough Street, you better say something to Lizzie. I don’t know where you ordered it or what you want me to do.”
5
For Hardwick, the girl’s adoring presence was pure irritant,
making
it almost impossible for her, or any of Lowell’s other “real-life” friends, to help him much: “These damned girls complicate
everything
; they keep me from acting in his best interests often because I don’t want to seem pushing or jealous.”
6
In early February,
Hardwick
retreated to New York and rested for a few days in the home of Blair and Holly Clark. “I needed it so much,” she wrote to the Clarks on her return to “the inferno of suffering” in Boston:
A thousand thanks for putting me up, putting up with me, feeding me, talking to me…. coming home, with such enormous responsibility. I spent all of Friday at the hospital and came home as if someone had been beating me all day.
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Lowell, she found, was calm, quiet, superficially “well,” but
insisting
there was nothing wrong with him that could not be cured by a divorce:
he says he must go to Reno immediately, marry someone or other, and
then
he will take treatment. He truly feels this is a life or death matter:
it is the only bearable plan for “curing himself” and he is clinging to it wildly. He becomes furious if you use the word “sick” and so on; he is profoundly aware that depressive symptoms—fear, remorse,
uncertainty
, anxiety, chaos—are always threatening him and he would truly rather wreck his whole life than have these symptoms for a moment. The doctors think he is scared to death and so do I—he is truly so desperate that he can’t even allow himself to be helped. The whole thing is appalling—and it may go on and on. Control and a great deal of calm have returned, but he will not allow true realization that he has had another collapse to overcome him. Poor Cal! It is truly pathetic.
8
The one “hopeful” aspect for Hardwick was that the doctors at McLean’s agreed with her “on every point”; they were assuring her that Lowell indeed had a real commitment to her—“one of the few they can find in his life history.” They encouraged her to try to “stand it,” to stall about the divorce, which they believed “would be a disaster for him, etc.”
9
On February 15 she wrote to Cousin Harriet describing the McLean’s prognosis:
For the future, the unimaginable, frightening future which seems awful no matter what happens about the present: the doctors think Bobby can be cured, but that it would be hard, take years of serious working out with a doctor of his profound problems and fears. I spoke quite frankly to them, and said: “It is all very well to talk about cures, coping with problems, working it out, and so on. But do you really believe it? Do you really get these cures when someone is middle-aged, has had
countless
breakdowns, etc?” They assured me that they have begun in the last years to get permanent cures, that B. is not so seriously ill in terms of mental illness patterns, etc.
10
On March 5 Blair Clark wrote a letter to Charles P. Curtis of the Boston law firm Choate, Hall and Stewart. Clark’s letter has the value of being neutrally pitched and humbly factual, yet written from the very center of the “Lowell problem.” It is quoted here in full:
Dear Mr. Curtis,
This letter is to ask you for advice (or rather to ask if you would consider giving me some advice) on a very difficult matter concerning one of my oldest and closest friends. I refer to Robert Lowell who has been my friend since we were classmates at St. Mark’s.
I would guess that you know that Lowell has had more than one severe mental breakdown during the last decade. Right now he is in McLean’s sanitarium outside Boston, recovering from the violently
irrational
phase of his latest “episode.” The indications are that he will stay there for at least another month, and perhaps more. Doctors have
diagnosed
Cal’s illness as a recurring manic-depressive psychosis; I am using the terms inexpertly, but there have been four such seizures since the war serious enough to require hospitalization. In between, as you know, Cal functions brilliantly, and I mean this to apply not only to his writing but to his personal and family life.
The latest lull between the attacks was nearly four years long. During this period Cal’s wife, Elizabeth, who is also an old and very dear friend of Holly’s and mine, had a baby daughter, born when she was about forty. The child is Cal’s only one (and Elizabeth’s too, for that matter). When one of these attacks is coming on, and during the early stages of it, before he is made to go or voluntarily retreats to a hospital, his wife and child are by all accounts subjected to risks that so far, fortunately, have not gone beyond the threat of violence. I know, however, that Elizabeth has been badly frightened about the safety of the child and herself. I think that there is no one who has seen Cal in one of these crises who would not say that her apprehensions are thoroughly justified; she is not at all hysterically-inclined.
During this last period, it struck Elizabeth very forcibly that she was in a very difficult position with her husband as the one who was called upon to call the cops, so to speak—and, unfortunately, in fact, once or twice. And, from her accounts to me of what happened, the doctors involved took less responsibility for committing Cal, even for brief periods of observation, than one would have thought normal. So it was his wife, whom he naturally turned against in his irrational moments, who had to be the one who insisted that he should be taken off and treated as a sick person. She was his jailer.
I have now at last arrived at the point of my letter to you. It is to ask you whether you would think about, and advise me on, a device that would help to remove the entire burden of committal from Cal’s wife’s shoulders in any future episodes—(which all doctors who have seen Cal in the past say there will most likely be). Elizabeth knows, of course, that she cannot completely shuck her part in this; she has great common sense and no wish to duck all responsibility. But my question to you arises from talks I have had with her about the possibility of setting up something which would work at least in part automatically in the case of recurrence.
I am not thinking of anything as simple and crude as a signed-
in-advance
committal paper in a doctor’s hands, although it might perhaps
come to that. But it seems to me that the possibility should be explored of some legal method that would remove some of the burden of being her husband’s keeper from Elizabeth without either taking needless risks with his liberties or leaving him with the constant apprehension that his freedom is subject to someone else’s whim. As you can see, I have not been able to think this out to any sort of solution, and that is why I am consulting you. It seems to me that this is a matter of great delicacy, involving a whole range of human, medical and legal problems. I
anticipate
no easy or rapid solution, but I think that the possibility of easing the present situation should be examined, and I can think of no one who would be more apt to have valuable thoughts on it than yourself.
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