Robert Lowell: A Biography (18 page)

The quarterlies were rather less ecstatic. Austin Warren in
Poetry
was cautious and exegetical, but aware that here was something new: “Lowell never sounds much like anyone else—and never like Eliot or Auden.” He suggests a comparison with Hopkins, Dylan Thomas and John Wheelwright, but concludes: “Probably Lowell can’t imitate docilely even when he wishes.”
17
Louise Bogan in
The
American
Scholar
praised Lowell’s “moral earnestness … it is
extraordinary
to find it at present in so pure a form,”
18
and Howard Moss in the
Kenyon
Review
greets him as “that surprising phenomenon, a religious poet who writes like a revolutionary,” and
confidently
ventures that “with this new book, Lowell can easily take his place beside the few excellent contemporary poets America has produced.”
19

The most eccentric review of the book was by Richard Eberhart in the
Sewanee
Review.
20
Eberhart devoted the majority of his piece to a rumination on the very earliest of Lowell’s poems, those that he had been privileged to view in manuscript twelve years before. He even goes so far as to quote, approvingly, a particularly
embarrassing
lyric from those days: “A sight of something after death / Bright angels dropping from the sky.” Eberhart is at pains to point out, not without a hint of mystery, that “experience” has darkened the young poet’s view since then: with
Land
of
Unlikeness,
“The years had matured the wild early strains; much reading had been assumed; much experience had taken its toll.” The book had had much “spiritual power,” though, and also a “rugged, harsh New England quality”: “It was a manacle-forged mind I heard.” He then devotes a page and a half to itemizing the revisions Lowell has made to the
Land
of
Unlikeness
poems that are reprinted in
Lord
Weary
’
s 
Castle.
Eberhart does not approve of these: “in my opinion the cold-hearted tampering has in many cases dimmed the heat and originality of the prime utterance.” There is an almost plaintive note in all this: as if Eberhart is letting Lowell know that he would have done far better to have consulted his old teacher. As to the new poems in
Lord
Weary’s
Castle
—i.e., three-quarters of the book—Eberhart has a single paragraph on these. They are “passionate, forceful, sometimes choking and bursting from the rigorous moulds” and, on the whole, are “excellent.”

April 1947 completed Lowell’s extraordinary triumph. In that month he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship of $2,500, and an award of $1,000 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was also sounded out for various teaching jobs—at Iowa and Chapel Hill, North Carolina—and was invited to spend two months at Yaddo, the writers’ colony. To add a comic twist to all these solemn tributes,
Life
magazine produced a large photofeature on America’s new great poet and this provoked an excited call from Hollywood. Robert Giroux, Lowell’s editor at Harcourt, Brace, remembers:

During May, Lowell toyed with these various offers (although Hollywood seems never to have followed up its interest), and after a good deal of haggling over money he wrote off to Iowa on May 30 accepting $3,000 a year for “two or three hours classwork, just teaching writing.” In June, though, he withdrew his acceptance, having been offered the prestigious post of Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress at a salary of $5,000 a year. This
appointment
would start in October 1947 and run for a year, and so Lowell decided to spend July and August at Yaddo before moving to
Washington
in September. In the space of a few months he had become unmarried, non-Catholic, the most promising young poet in
America
, and perhaps the first World War II CO to be offered a job in the government. Back in Boston, the
Sunday
Globe
proclaimed him
MOST PROMISING POET IN 100 YEARS … MAY BE GREATER THAN JAMES
AND AMY
. And the paper carried a comment from “Robert Traill Spence Lowell, Annapolis graduate, retired navy officer and
stockbroker
”; “Poets,” Lowell’s father said, “seem to see more in his work than most other people.”

*

During these months of triumph Lowell had been living mainly in New York. His only lengthy trip had been to Greensboro, North Carolina, where Peter Taylor had organized a Writers’ Forum (
really
a kind of Kenyon reunion, with old classmates Robie Macauley and John Thompson there, as well as Taylor and Jarrell). Throughout this time, though, he had been getting weekly, sometimes
twice-weekly
, communications from Jean Stafford. Stafford stayed at Payne Whitney until summer 1947, and remained bitter and
despairing
: “I do not know what monstrous crime I did when I was a child to merit this punishment. These ghastly months in this ghastly asylum, this ghastly future which I face without
money.
”
22

Money was very often the topic of her letters. One week, Jean would be renouncing all alimony claims; another, she would file some impossibly huge “minimum requirement.” One week, she would be arranging to dismantle and sell the house in Maine;
another
, she would be determined to hang on to it. In March, Lowell wrote to Peter Taylor: “Things have been going very badly for Jean and I feel so depressed I almost dread seeing anyone.”
23
At various times he did make financial offers—his first offer was $5,000 payable over ten years—but it was not always easy to talk business:

And when Jean was prepared to talk, she would talk fairly tough:

After the announcement of Lowell’s prizes and awards, it was
perhaps
to be expected that Jean would adopt an even harder line. Certainly as the year progressed, her demands did escalate. By
September
she was asking for $7,000 payable over five years, $800 for life and one-third of his trust fund, also for life. Lowell refused and was denounced as “Bostonian,” “intransigent” and “shrewd.”

The style of the negotiations, though, would always depend on Stafford’s mood and on what she guessed to be the state of Lowell’s relationship with Gertrude Buckman. Lowell was writing to friends throughout 1947 saying that his “remarriage” would be postponed until possibly a year after his divorce became final, and Gertrude Buckman would now say that marriage between them was never a serious possibility: “marriage with him would have been a crazy thing, really crazy. He wasn’t husband material.”
26
It is by no means certain that she thought this at the time; but it must be said that there was not much weight of feeling in a spoof verse review Buckman printed in
Partisan
Review
in March 1947:

It must have taken a certain impish bravery to publish this, under all the circumstances, and if Stafford saw it she could perhaps be forgiven for immediately adding a few hundred dollars to her
alimony
claim.

With matters still unsettled, Lowell left for Yaddo in June 1947 and hoped to “work like a steam engine” until Washington. He was translating
Phèdre
and planning a “symbolic monologue by an
insane
woman”; it would be a thousand lines long, he said, and made him feel like Homer or Robert Browning. Yaddo, he found, was “a marvellous place to work,” but much of the fun was in observing his co-workers: mostly “goons,” but “friendly and harmless.” There
was Theodore Roethke: “a ponderous, coarse, fattish, fortyish man—well read, likes the same things I do, and is quite a competent poet”; there was Mary McCarthy and her husband, Bowden
Broadwater
; and there was Marguerite Young—“really rather
crucifyingly
odd and garrulous.”
27

And Yaddo itself was a bizarre establishment, near Saratoga Springs. According to its brochure, it is built in “late Victorian eclectic style” and is modeled on an English country house—
although
it prides itself on touches of Gothic, Moorish and Italian Renaissance. Inside, the mansion is luxuriously furnished with “
carpets
, carved wood, ecclesiastical furniture from Europe, and period pieces”; its grounds are extensive and elaborately formal, and the Rose Garden is its special pride and joy. The original owner was a New York financier called Spencer Trask, and his wife, Katrina, had been particularly fond of roses: “Images of roses are evident throughout Yaddo in the stained glass windows, the furniture, paintings, woodwork, china and linen, for this flower was the motif of Katrina Trask.”
28
It had been Katrina’s idea that Yaddo should be turned into a “retreat” for artists, writers and composers; when Mr. Trask died before these plans were finalized, she married his close (and equally rich) friend George Foster Peabody; between them they opened the colony in 1926, with Elizabeth Ames as director—Mrs. Ames was an adopted relative of Mr. Peabody and, according to Lowell, you could “cut her liberalism with a knife.”
29

The faint absurdity of the place delighted Lowell, just as it had delighted Jean Stafford in 1943. She had written of it then:

So, nothing much had changed. But Lowell liked the place well enough to ask for his stay to be extended and to write letters to his friends begging them to join him; and the “people” improved with the arrival of the short-story writer J. F. Powers, “a fine person” and admired by Jarrell. The wily, altogether worldly Catholic priests who populate his work would have had a timely appeal for Lowell;
certainly, Powers became one of his very few favorite American prose writers.

During July and August, Lowell continued to fiddle with his long poem—“but I must get down to things I’ll really do”—and as early as July 3 he had completed three shorter pieces and “drafted a fourth.” Just before leaving Yaddo, on September 2, he wrote to Gertrude Buckman: “I’ve finished another long poem of 127 lines and part of another of same length. This will make ½ of a book—not too bad for a summer.”

This, from John Thompson, was the typical response of Lowell’s friends to his Washington appointment: delighted as they were, it was hard not to find something ribald in the idea of this notoriously ungainly and disheveled figure attempting to master an 8:30-to-5:00 office job.

The post of Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress had been established in 1937, and the required duties were in fact
attractively
vague and flexible. The consultant was meant to keep an eye on the library’s poetry shelves, to “survey” the existing collections and to recommend additions; he was also to solicit gifts of books and manuscripts from authors and collectors, answer “reference
questions
” that came in by mail and “confer with scholars and poets using the library’s collections and facilities.” By December, Lowell was writing to J. F. Powers:

Lowell’s 1947 appointment happily coincided with the
inauguration
of a new scheme. The library wished to build up a collection of recordings of poets reading their own work, and it was to be the
new consultant’s responsibility to organize these recording sessions: to pick the poets, persuade them to take part and entertain them when they came to Washington. For Lowell, this was a thoroughly appealing chore: it would mean a steady stream of mostly congenial visitors, and also an opportunity to get to know poets he admired but hadn’t met. He immediately sent off invitations to William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop—whose book
North
and
South
he had just admiringly reviewed, along with Williams’s
Paterson
Book 1, in the
Sewanee
Review
(Summer 1947)—and Randall Jarrell. He also invited Robert Frost, who wrote to him: