Robert Lowell: A Biography (14 page)

Land
of
Unlikeness
was a considerable critical success. For a first volume put out as a limited edition by a small press, it had prominent reviews; and most of them could be taken as “encouraging.”
Accent
placed it in a batch with Auden’s
For
the
Time
Being
and with books by William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore; their reviewer, Arthur Mizener, was cagey about the book’s sometimes “ludicrous” complexities and warned that “hysteria may be mistaken for
directness
, the accidental personal experience for the generally valid,” but concluded that “When Mr. Lowell succeeds, what you hear is
something
like the voice of the prophetic poet, a voice which we have rarely heard since the seventeenth century; grand without
grandiloquence
and intimate without triviality or meanness.”
17
In
Poetry
, John Frederick Nims coupled Lowell with Thomas Merton under the heading “Two Catholic Poets” and confessed that “After the glassy aureoles of Merton, it is good to discover the gnarled and oaken wainscot of Lowell’s chapel.” Nims goes on (a little
unconvincingly
) to praise the “brilliance” of Lowell’s technique, claiming to have discerned in it “an intricate counterpoint of form and
diction
, form and matter, feeling and idea,” and to express interest in “the strange marriage of Catholic belief and New England
Puritanism
.” But his conclusion is lukewarm and almost daringly wide of the mark: “What Lowell lacks is sufficient emotional drive to make his disparate images organic.”
18

Luckily, no other reviewer contrived to reproach Lowell for his
lack of powerful feeling, but there was an element of wariness in even the most glowing notices. Usually, there would be an assent to the book’s power, its daunting physical attack, but a
bewilderment
about the poet’s motives, the true sources of his intimidating anger. Even Randall Jarrell, in
Partisan
Review
,
seems mildly
shell-shocked
. His piece strains for superlatives:

But many of Jarrell’s assertions seem to describe poems that he wishes Lowell to write rather than the ones that are actually before him: “his harshest propositions flower out of facts.” This seems singularly wrong as a description of
Land
of
Unlikeness
;
indeed, one might rephrase it: “
if
only
his harshest propositions flowered out of facts.”

Jarrell, though, is too good a critic not to see that Lowell’s
political
satires have “a severe crudity,” that his literary punning, his ubiquitous allusiveness, is often no more than “a senseless habit,” that there is something “Bismarckian” in his surveillance of the moral world, and a tendency throughout to slip into an “Onward Christian Soldiers” style of battle rhetoric. Even so, such censure is well hidden, and Lowell had achieved what many would have thought impossible—he had disconcerted the notoriously definite Jarrell.

The other key review was by R. P. Blackmur and appeared in the
Kenyon
Review
(Ransom later wrote to Lowell to apologize for Blackmur’s “patronizing and superior remarks”
20
). Unlike any of the other reviewers, Blackmur meets the book’s essential character head on, and his strictures may well have been the ones that Lowell brooded on most fruitfully:

Since leaving Kenyon, Lowell had written two substantial pieces of literary criticism: on Hopkins and on Eliot’s
Four
Quartets.
22
They are both admiring, but where they do offer reservations it is interesting that in each case those reservations could as easily be turned against the poems Lowell himself was writing at the time. Of Eliot he complains that “Occasionally the symbols are
paradoxically
too personal and too general to either exist in themselves or carry sufficient symbolic meaning.” As to Hopkins, his “rhythms … have the effect of a hyperthyroid injection”:

There is also in Hopkins, though infrequently, a tendency for lines to “collapse in a style-less exuberance.” Lowell quotes:

and comments: “
Messes
of
mortals
!
This is a murderous example of numb sprung rhythm and alliteration.”

*

In November 1944 Lowell and Stafford moved to Westport,
Connecticut
. In a desultory manner, Lowell began to look for work that would fit both his religion and his writing—at one point he speaks of taking a job counseling juvenile delinquents, but this seems not to have been followed through. His sense of Catholic mission was sustained, he said, by a vision of a postwar world dominated by the totalitarian threat: “there will be more wars, a universal materialistic
state [and] Christians will be driven underground.” The time had come “to be very evident indeed about our Faith.”
23

Lowell’s letters of this period are full of gloomy, grand-scale prognostications of this sort, but there is little real passion in them; in reality, he was enjoying a stretch of low-pressure domestic
stability
—working on new poems and feeling grateful that someone else was cleaning up the nurses’ floors in Bridgeport. Jean’s letters are jaunty and contented, studded with fond anecdotes of married life:

Lowell would often conclude his weighty sermons on the coming darkness with some modest and agreeable disclaimer:

And in another letter, perhaps most tellingly of all: “We who have accreted illusions all our lives, must read just to be able to see.”

While they were living in Westport, Jean Stafford’s novel
Boston
Adventure
made its appearance and was an immediate success. Within a few months of publication 40,000 hardcovers were sold, and then a further 300,000 went via book clubs and overseas editions. Suddenly, Jean Stafford had some money; “We are neither
respectable
nor rich,” Lowell wrote triumphantly to Allen Tate.
26
And Stafford took a special pleasure in reflecting that the source of her new wealth was a novel about Boston snobbery; shortly after the book appeared she made a point of visiting the Lowells:

With the proceeds of
Boston
Adventure
,
Jean planned to buy a house in Maine where they would live for “all but the very coldest months.” In July 1945 their tenancy at Westport expired, and they found a temporary base in a small furnished cottage at Boothbay Harbor: “a sort of Maine Monteagle; the nights are cool, the scenery is beautiful and the summer people, to the number of 15,000, are atrocious. There are 27 gift and local color shops.”
28
From there, Jean began her hunt along the Maine coastline and, within a month, discovered Damariscotta Mills, a village at the head of the
Damariscotta
estuary, seventeen miles from the sea. The house she bought there was on a hillside and overlooked the remarkable Damariscotta Lake, a lake “as long as the river, crowded with bass and salmon in the summertime.” For this alone, Lowell the fisherman would have given quite a lot, but the house itself was “large and grandly
Hellenic
” and to Jean “too wonderful to be believed in.”

They took possession in September 1945, too late to fortify the place for winter living. It was decided to spend part of the winter in Tennessee visiting Jarrell and Peter Taylor, who was now
discharged
from the army; after that they would base themselves at Delmore Schwartz’s house in Cambridge and make occasional trips to Maine (or Jean would) to furnish and decorate the house in time for spring.