Robert Lowell: A Biography (48 page)

As Goldman records, his first reaction to this letter was “fury. This, I told myself, was arrant troublemaking and publicity-seeking.” On reflection, though, he decided that Lowell was a “sincere and
troubled
man” and therefore might be persuaded to change his mind about publishing his letter in the
Times;
he telephoned Lowell and argued that since his acceptance of the invitation had not been widely publicized, it would surely be proper for him to withdraw now “for personal reasons”:

No, Lowell replied, he wanted to go ahead.

Goldman drafted a reply to Lowell and sent it to Johnson for his signature; it spoke of Johnson’s full and deep respect for Lowell’s disagreement with “certain phases of the Administration’s foreign policy.”
34

The next morning the
New
York
Times
carried the story on its front page, and swiftly followed it with another report under the headline: “Twenty Writers and Artists Endorse Poet’s Rebuff of
President
.”
35
Robert Silvers and the poet Stanley Kunitz had organized a telegram to Johnson expressing support for Lowell and “dismay at recent American foreign policy decisions.” The signatories were: Hannah Arendt, John Berryman, Alan Dugan, Jules Feiffer, Philip Guston, Lillian Hellman, Alfred Kazin, Stanley Kunitz, Dwight Macdonald, Bernard Malamud, Mary McCarthy, Larry Rivers, Philip Roth, Mark Rothko, Louis Simpson, W. D. Snodgrass,
William
Styron, Peter Taylor, Edgar Varese and Robert Penn Warren. “An impressive array of talent,” even Goldman had to admit, but for Johnson the telegram was more infuriating than the letter; it smacked of organization, of a conspiracy between “these people” to insult him and his office, and “to hurt their country at a time of crisis”:

Silvers and Kunitz had arranged the telegram “so that Cal wouldn’t be alone in what he did but would have the support of a group of people who felt concerned about the war and the bombing. There was the Dominican intervention too, which was highly
controversial
. But that the American B-52S were bombing was a source of consternation.”
37
Certainly, for Lowell the “bombing” was the issue. As Blair Clark has commented: “Boy, Cal’s politics—they’re a study. He was so anti-Communist in one way, and yet he had this moral thing about the bombing.”
38

Clark also perceived that Lowell had a “shrewdness” in handling his public persona, and that the “LBJ letter” was an example of his “brilliant timing”:

It is true enough that the reverberations of Lowell’s grand gesture were felt for some weeks afterwards—at any rate, in the columns of the
New
York
Times.
Arthur Schlesinger, speaking to the American Booksellers Association, was reported to have “gently ridiculed” the Lowell stand. To this, Philip Roth protested, “to me it does not seem nearly so ironic for a poet of stature to protest American foreign policy as for an Administration so insensitive to human values in its dealings with other nations to sponsor ‘a festival of the arts.’ But then each man to his own sense of the ridiculous.”
40
Schlesinger replied that he had not ridiculed Lowell—whom he “cherished” as a friend and “admired” as a poet—but had merely said that he preferred the methods of Dr. Linus Pauling, who, when invited to dinner by President Kennedy, had picketed the White House for a day and then gone in to eat his food.
41

This hint was perhaps on Dwight Macdonald’s mind when, after having signed the telegram supporting Lowell, he received
his
invitation
to the festival: it had been held up in the mail. Macdonald promptly accepted, but arrived at the White House bearing a
petition
that read: “We should like to make it clear that in accepting the President’s kind invitation to attend the White House Arts Festival, we do not mean either to repudiate the courageous position taken by Robert Lowell, or to endorse the Administration’s foreign
policy
.” By the end of the evening he had collected nine signatures, and had almost come to blows with Charlton Heston, who felt
Macdonald
to be short of “elementary manners”: “Are you really
accustomed
to signing petitions against your host in his home?” Macdonald later wrote an amusing account of his escapade for the
New
York
Review
of
Books
.
42

President Johnson put in a brief and extremely reluctant
appearance
at the festival, but he left it to Lady Bird to attend the actual readings. Each of these, Goldman writes, was a possible source of embarrassment. Mark Van Doren, for instance, had been invited to introduce the writers’ section of the festival, and the speech he had prepared was almost exclusively in praise of Lowell; in its first version it “included no word of appreciation for the sponsorship [of the Festival] by the President and the First Lady.” Goldman pleaded with him to rewrite the speech, and eventually Van Doren agreed to do so; in his revised version he merely noted Lowell’s absence “with regret”:

and then went on to thank his hosts for “their magnificent and gracious hospitality” and to pronounce that “we are all proud and happy to participate.”

Goldman’s other worry concerned John Hersey, who, on the day of Lowell’s letter to the
Times,
had said that he would make
his
protest by reading to the President some extracts from his book on Hiroshima. Hearing this, Johnson once again saw red: he and his wife did not want “this man to read these passages in the White House.” Goldman retorted that it “would be White House censorship” if they tried to prevent Hersey from reading his own work, and Johnson eventually compromised by ordering a “
blackout
” of all press and television coverage of the festival; a one-hour television special was canceled and photographers were banned. He also ordered an FBI check on all the invitees. Hersey,
meanwhile
, had decided that he wished to read a preface to his extracts from
Hiroshima;
this preface would point out, he said, that “The step from one degree of violence to the next is imperceptibly taken and cannot easily be taken back…. Wars have a way of getting out of hand.” With some nervousness, Goldman concurred, and on the night of the festival, Hersey not only read his admonitory preface but also made a point of “occasionally lifting his eyes to look straight at Mrs. Johnson, who sat in the front row. When he finished, there were a few seconds of silence, then vigorous
applause
. The First Lady, who clapped for all other readings, sat motionless.”
44

The harassed Goldman was relieved that his remaining poet guest was the light versifier Phyllis McGinley. But even she was
determined
to contribute to The Lowell Problem. She added a new verse to her poem “In Praise of Diversity”:

As Goldman describes it, the Lowell letter hung challengingly over the entire event. Even those writers, such as Saul Bellow, who believed that Lowell’s gesture had been inappropriate, became “
decidedly
unsettled”—he was, he said, “under pressure from the New York crowd” to withdraw or to make some form of protest; he had been accused of “turncoating for publicity and preferment.” There were similar complaints from Ralph Ellison. Almost everyone who turned up, it seemed, felt the need to explain what he was doing there; and so far as Johnson was concerned, the White House had been taken over for the night by a gang of conspirators and traitors. All in all—and largely thanks to Lowell—the event was “an
unmitigated
disaster”:

Six weeks after the festival, President Johnson increased still further the U.S. “presence” in Vietnam, and asked Congress for a further billion dollars so that “all that we have built” would not be “swept away on the flood of conquest.” And on August 4 he added his own comic postscript to the Lowell letter. Addressing thousands of students on the lawn of the White House, he told them that he was as “restless” as they were, and as young in spirit. He went on:

The line he quotes is, of course, from Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” Lowell, however, had used it as an epigraph for his book
The
Mills
of
the
Kavanaughs,
and clearly Johnson’s speech writer, in a hurry to supply an upbeat Lowell quote, had not adventured past the title page. LBJ was once again a laughingstock in the smart intellectual circles which his festival had at first been meant to woo.
Lowell’s own comment on Johnson’s speech was appropriately
laconic
; he told the
New
York
Times:
“I think I like things as much as the President.”
47

Lowell emerged from his skirmish with the President feeling both “miscast” and yet “burdened to write on the great theme, private, and almost ‘global.’”
48
His difficulty was that his image of America was not too sharply different from his image of himself. America he thought of in terms of
Moby
Dick:
“the fanatical idealist who brings the world down in ruins through some sort of simplicity of mind.” Such a tendency, he said, was “in our character and in my own personal character.”
49
In other words, Lowell knew that in his own life an excess of idealism had often issued in destruction. From what seat of virtue, therefore, could he now chastise the President? He felt there to be a hollowness, a fraudulence in the wise-prophet stance he was now being tempted to adopt. And yet he was tempted.

In Castine during the summer of 1965 Lowell worked on a group of poems in a meter borrowed from Andrew Marvell’s equivocal “Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland.” In their final
versions
, at least two of these poems seem more “public,” more
addressed
to an audience, than anything that Lowell had done before. Indeed, “Waking Early Sunday Morning” is now thought of as a key “political poem” of the 1960s:

The first three lines here do, almost explicitly, equate the poet’s manic elation—his “something with a girl in summer”—with the excited self-belief of the military establishment, but the shift into “global” elegy in the last stanza is also a shift away from any risk that the poem might be read as holier-than-thou polemic.