Robert Lowell: A Biography (27 page)

It is probable that most of the
Kenyon
’s younger readers would have been quite baffled by that “boxer-like” designation.

Jarrell was right to single out “Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid” as the most effective poem in
The
Mills
of
the
Kavanaughs;
certainly it is the one that most explicitly defines the difference in character between this book and
Lord
Weary
’
s
Castle.
In it, an old man dreams over his Virgil and, when he wakes up, finds that he’s too late for church—the Aeneid has served him as a Bible. And even in “Mother Marie Therese” it is the Mother Superior’s delinquencies that are obliquely celebrated. Throughout the book, orthodox religious
passion
is viewed as either deranging (“Thanksgiving’s Over”) or debilitating (witness Father Turbot in “Mother Marie Therese”). The book is full of truants and delinquents, and there is no reduction in the level of self-loathing, but the Church no longer affords Lowell his symbolic armory; and without it he is—almost literally—
unmanned
. Whereas in
Lord
Weary
’
s
Castle
autobiography made for clarity and exactness, in
The
Mills
of
the
Kavanaughs
it produces something close to chaos: the reason for this is that Lowell is
attempting
to adjust the instincts of the confessional to the decorum of an “objective” work of art, to speak of his most personal shames with supreme impersonality. Hence the cardboard characters, the dramatic monologues that all sound the same, the classical myths that don’t quite fit, the narratives that weave in and out of dreamed and “real” experience, past and present actions, without ever
yielding
enough clues for us to sort out which is which.

Since the book is, in so many of its parts, impenetrable, the reader has to work in a piecemeal fashion, making the best sense of what
can
be made sense of. And much of this “making sense” can involve fitting the poem to what was happening, or had just happened, in Lowell’s life when he wrote it. It is immediately noticeable, for example, that the book is a clamor of distraught, near-hysterical first-person speech, and that almost always the speaker is a woman. The men in the book are usually under attack. Thus, the rhetoric of “Thanksgiving’s Over” and of large sections of the title poem can, not too fancifully, be heard as a fusing of two rhetorics—the enraged, erupting aggression of
Lord
Weary
somehow loosened and given a new spitefulness by echoes of the letters Lowell had been getting—throughout 1947—from Jean Stafford, and echoes too (we might reasonably speculate) of the “adder-tongued” invective that she used to pour into their quarrels:

And again:

(If a hint of “You are a bastard, Michael, aren’t you!
Nein
”
found its way into Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through,” then Plath—it could be said—chose a thoroughly apt poem to borrow from.) Lines like these could fit, without evident strain, into almost any one of Stafford’s pleading, vengeful letters:

These are two paragraphs from a closely typed five-page letter; and throughout 1947 Lowell was for periods bombarded almost daily with similarly intense communications from his sick, abandoned wife. The voice is unmistakably the voice he borrows for Anne Kavanaugh. And the lines that Lowell’s Anne puts in her husband’s mouth seem meant to exemplify the “calm olympian brutality” which—according to Stafford’s repeated accusation—was Lowell’s actual posture at the time:

But Lowell was not just using poetry in order to recapture the flavor of marital quarrels. He seems genuinely to have been trying to fathom how
he
seemed to his women—to know this, and to judge it. And—being Lowell—to judge it without mercy. The paradox is that although he needed to do this in poetry, he could hardly bear to do it in public.

In her short story “A Country Love Story”
78
Jean Stafford has a narrator who is trapped in a sterile marriage to an ailing,
intellectual
husband; to sustain herself—and indeed the marriage—she
invents
an imaginary lover. Her husband doesn’t guess this. In life, Lowell was susceptible to rumor about Jean’s amorous fancies: there is evidence in letters that he was at various times led to believe she was interested in one or another of his friends, and that violent quarrels could result from these suspicions. With these two elements in mind—her restlessness, his jealousy—the central scene of “The Mills of the Kavanaughs” can easily be read as a parable of his marriage to Jean Stafford. In it, Anne Kavanaugh is in bed with her husband and dreams that she is being seduced by a young boy. Harry wakes and hears her speaking to her imaginary lover, attacks
her in a jealous rage and then, in remorse, tries to destroy himself. The scene presents an extraordinary tangle of sexual angers and anxieties. It is worth quoting at some length (the “snowplow”
mentioned
in the first stanza here appears in Stafford’s story and—years later—in “The Old Flame,”
79
where there is also reference to
Stafford
’s “ghostly imaginary lover” whom “No one saw”):

Harry tries to strangle her; she threatens to “shout it from the housetops of the Mills” that her husband is mad, that he has tried to kill his wife “for dreaming.” The next scene in Anne’s reverie shows Harry:

Harry doesn’t recover his sanity; he lives on for a short time—“to baby-smile into the brutal gray / Daylight each morning” and to stare unknowingly at his “charts of … New England birds.” What little we see of Harry’s madness, in fact, has echoes of Lowell’s later descriptions of his father’s terminal days. And there are other strands in the poem that have as much to do with Boston as they do with events at Damariscotta Mills. Thus, at times, Anne is
identifiably
Stafford as Persephone—trapped in the underworld, half worshiping, half loathing her dead husband, but finally rejoicing in her freedom from his sexless tyranny. At other times the voice in which Anne despises Harry is more like the voice Lowell might have imagined his mother using to speak of
her
dead husband—although Lowell had begun writing the poem in 1948, it was
completed
after his father’s death. Who else, one thinks, but Charlotte could he have had in mind when Anne declares:

Harry’s naval career in the poem might even be viewed as the kind of career Lowell would have had if he had been his father’s son: it ended at Pearl Harbor.

Altogether, then,
The
Mills
of
the
Kavanaughs
is a confused,
self-punishing
, bleakly secular performance—and a crucial one in
Lowell
’s development. But if one can catch his “own” voice—Lowell as Lowell—in the noise of those berating female voices he invents, then it is a voice that is perilously close to despair. If anything is yearned for in the book, it is silence, space, “sea-room”; in life, he seems to say, these must be stolen, but not so in death: “All’s well
that ends: / Achilles dead is greater than the living.” And it is surely Lowell and not his Stafford-derived heroine who speaks the
anguished
closing lines of “Her Dead Brother”: