Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
Robert Lowell: A Biography (49 page)
“Waking Early Sunday Morning” went through several versions before its publication, and—as Alan Williamson has valuably pointed out
51
—there is much to be learned from the stanzas Lowell eventually left out. Many of them express a distaste for the type of “ambition” that Lowell’s admirers were now expecting from him; the wish to “break loose” into the “criminal leisure of a boy” is far purer and more powerful than the impulse to pretend that poetry can save the world:
Time to dig up and junk the year’s
dotage and output of tame verse:
cast-iron whimsy, limp indignation,
liftings, listless self-imitation,
whole days when I could hardly speak,
came barging home unshaven, weak
and willing to show anyone
things done before and better done
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
For days now, or is it a week,
I run away from busywork
to lie in my far barn apart,
and when I look into my heart,
I discover none of the great
subjects, death, friendship, love or fate,
I look for doorknobs, marbles, sad,
slight, useless things that calm the mad.
Now on the radio the wars
blare on, earth licks its open sores,
fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chance
assassinations, no advance!
Only man thinning out his kind
sounds through the Sunday noon, the blind
swipe of the pruner and his knife
busy to strip the tree of life.
I cannot take it. One grows sick
of stretching for this rhetoric,
this hammering allegoric splendor,
top-heavy Goliath in full armor
toddling between two hosts, all brass,
except its breast-plate, lump and mass,
propped on its Brobdignagian staff
bull-throated bombast stuffed with chaff.
52
In an even earlier version, Lowell portrays himself as “running from crisis into crisis—/Prufrock in love with Dionysus.” As he rewrote the poem, though, he depersonalized it; the directly
self-lacerating
elements are pruned away and President Johnson becomes the empty rhetorician. Similarly, the wars that are here “on the radio” get moved to the very center of the poem. In the end, it could be said that Lowell aims for just that tone of
millennial
gravitas
which in these early drafts he is “sick of stretching for.” But is this any different from saying that because of his
distrust
of easy rhetoric he finally—indeed triumphantly—achieves a rhetoric that we can trust; a rhetoric of painful and profound “unease”?
Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war—
53
The other poems that Lowell wrote during the summer of 1965 are less “burdened” with political “unrest.” None of them, however, moves with great assurance, or even clarity, and the Marvellian couplet often encourages a tripping, near-doggerel effect:
Behind a dripping rock, I found
a one-day kitten on the ground—
deprived, weak, ignorant and blind,
squeaking, tubular, left behind—
dying with its deserter’s rich
Welfare lying out of reach:
milk cartons, kidney heaped to spoil,
two plates sheathed with silver foil.
54
This is from a poem called “Central Park,” in which Lowell tries to manifest compassion for those trapped in “fear and poverty”; all that comes over is a generalized revulsion, and the poem’s last lines—sometimes cited as a memorable evocation of urban violence—are almost offensively facile and complacent:
We beg delinquents for our life.
Behind each bush, perhaps a knife;
each landscaped crag, each flowering shrub,
hides a policeman with a club.
55
“Fourth of July in Maine” is a chatty, reverent verse letter to Cousin Harriet; it is light, sentimental and well-mannered, and has some nice Lowellian guinea pigs, but it barely gets beyond the family circle. “Near the Ocean” is a nightmarish, obscure reverie on
marriage
, both vengeful and apologetic: it seems to review earlier points of crisis in Lowell’s relationship with Hardwick, and to offer, in the end, a scarred, exhausted truce:
Sleep, sleep. The ocean, grinding stones,
can only speak the present tense;
nothing will age, nothing will last,
or take corruption from the past.
A hand, your hand then! I’m afraid
to touch the crisp hair on your head—
Monster loved for what you are,
till time, that buries us, lay bare.
56
Both poems in their very different ways speak of marital conflict, of “energies that never tire / of piling fuel on the fire,” of “wild spirits and old sores in league / with inexhaustible fatigue,” and the conclusion of “Fourth of July in Maine”—although its yearning for lost “gentleness” is rather pat—again suggests a gutted, stoic
compromise
:
Far off that time of gentleness,
when man, still licensed to increase,
unfallen and unmated, heard
only the uncreated Word—
when God the Logos still had wit
to hide his bloody hands, and sit
in silence, while his peace was sung.
Then the universe was young.
We watch the logs fall. Fire once gone,
we’re done for: we escape the sun,
rising and setting, a red coal,
until it cinders like the soul.
Great ash and sun of freedom, give
us this day the warmth to live,
and face the household fire. We turn
our backs, and feel the whiskey burn.
57
The episode with Vija Vetra had been galling for Hardwick, not because she considered Vetra a formidable rival (she says now that this was “the only affair I know Cal to have been truly, honestly ashamed of; there was regret sometimes, but not shame of choice”). Her real fury was with the “enlightened” line that had been taken by Lowell’s doctor. As with Sandra Hochman, Hardwick had
received
little backing from Dr. Bernard; “the great thing in this ‘event’ was my fury with Dr. Bernard, my feeling of helplessness with regard to her; her idea of living out these ‘test cases’ as if tying yourself up for life, or years, was a little workout in the gym to get yourself in shape.”
58
Shortly before Lowell was hospitalized,
Hardwick
wrote as follows to Blair Clark:
I have been thinking it all over. If Cal seems all right except for V.V. and if he doesn’t want to go to the hospital, I begin to feel that I at least
ought not to insist. It is only his own welfare that matters. If it is all right for him to set up a new life, I don’t think my feelings against it are very much to the point. I begin to think perhaps Cal should make one last effort to cure himself or at least to be happier, if only temporarily, than he is with me. And maybe that will ultimately cure him. For myself I do not want him to be violently treated with drugs and then sent back home in a depression—back to a home he probably doesn’t want to come to. I feel that isn’t good for either of us. If he is not doing harm to himself; if perhaps gradually with a smaller dose of the drugs he can get back to some routine and work in his new situation, then he must do that.
You can send this letter to Dr. Bernard. I am all right. And I begin to think Harriet is now old enough to be able to make the break from Cal if she has to. I know it would be hard for her, but I might gradually put her in a slightly happier situation than apartment life here. I won’t stay absolutely the same forever and neither will she.
I say all this to you, darling friend, in good faith. I do not want to force Cal back. I don’t feel any longer that he loves me. And I always felt before that he did, or I would not have fought so hard. You and Dr. Bernard do what you think is best.
59
Both Clark and Bernard thought it “best” for Lowell to be treated in the hospital, and for the Vija Vetra involvement (which even Bernard seems to have thought somewhat outlandish) to be
distanced
until Lowell was able to make a sane judgment of its
possibilities
. But what is a “sane judgment”; how much of the penitential depression that followed each of Lowell’s manic “seizures” was caused by the lowering effect of his drug therapy? Lowell’s
renunciation
of Vetra, his genuinely remorseful (and in this case, it seems, embarrassed) feelings about the havoc he had caused: were these more “true” than his exhausted, sheepish pleas to Hardwick—for forgiveness, for another chance? And how could Hardwick simply pretend that she had not been abused and humiliated; how could she take him back without some lingering rancor, and without
wondering
what horrors his next “test case” would bring? When, from Hartford, in February 1965, he told her that he had given Vetra up and wanted to come home again, Hardwick wrote back to him:
Dear one: I got your Friday note today. Cal my heart bleeds for you, but remember what greatness you have made of your life, what joy you have given to all of us. My purpose, beloved, is to try to see
what
can
be
done
to
help
us
all.
I hate for you to get sick. I would kill myself, if it would cure you. There must be something more we can lean on—medical, psychiatric, personal, the dearest love goes out to you from your apartment here on 67th St.
I long to talk to you again.
60
1
. R.L.,
The
Old
Glory,
rev. ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968), p. 217 (Introduction by Robert Brustein).
2
. “Benito Cereno,”
The
Old
Glory,
pp. 180–81.
3
. Jonathan Miller, “Director’s Note,”
The
Old
Glory,
p. 221.
4
. “Endecott and the Red Cross,”
The
Old
Glory,
p. 48.
5
. R.L. interview with Stanley Kunitz,
New
York
Times
Book
Review,
October
4, 1964.
6
. R.L. to Blair Clark, August 1, 1964.
7
. Jonathan Miller, interview with I.H. (1980).
8
. Ibid.
9
. Ibid.
10
. W. D. Snodgrass, “In Praise of Robert Lowell,”
New
York
Review
of
Books
3 (December 3, 1964).
11
. Randall Jarrell, “A Masterpiece,”
New
York
Times,
November 29, 1964, II, P. 3.
12
. Jonathan Miller, interview with I.H. (1980).
13
. Vija Vetra, interview with I.H. (1981).
14
. Ibid.
15
. Ibid.
16
. Ibid.
17
. Ibid.
18
. Ibid.
19
. Ibid.
20
. R.L. to Vija Vetra, January 30, 1965.
21
. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, February 5, 1965.
22
. Ibid., February 9, 1965.
23
. Vija Vetra, interview with I.H. (1981).
24
. Migdal, Low and Tenny to Vija Vetra, February 24, 1965.
25
. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1982).
26
. Blair Clark, interview with I.H. (1979).
27
. R.L., interview with Richard Gilman,
New
York
Times,
May 5, 1968.
28
. Blair Clark, interview with I.H. (1979).
29
. Eric F. Goldman,
The
Tragedy
of
Lyndon
Johnson
(New York: Knopf, 1969), p. 421.
30
. Ibid.
31
. Robert Silvers, interview with I.H. (1981).
32
.
New
York
Times,
June 3, 1965, p. 1.
33
. Goldman,
Lyndon
Johnson,
p. 429.
34
. Ibid.
35
.
New
York
Times,
June 4, 1965, p. 2.
36
. Goldman,
Lyndon
Johnson,
p. 447.
37
. Robert Silvers, interview with I.H. (1981).
38
. Blair Clark, interview with I.H. (1979).
39
. Ibid.
40
. Philip Roth, “Festival of the Arts Now?”
New
York
Times,
June 15, 1965, p. 40.
41
. Arthur Schlesinger, “What Schlesinger Said,”
New
York
Times,
June 21, 1965, p. 28.
42
. Dwight Macdonald, “A Day at the White House,”
New
York
Review
of
Books
5 (July 15, 1965), pp. 10–15.
43
. Mark Van Doren, quoted in Goldman,
Lyndon
Johnson.
44
. Goldman,
Lyndon
Johnson.
45
. Ibid.
46
.
New
York
Times,
August 5, 1965.
47
. Ibid.
48
. R.L. interview,
Review,
no. 26 (Summer 1971).
49
. R.L., interview with A. Alvarez,
Observer
(London), July 21, 1963.
50
.
Near
the
Ocean
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971), pp. 19–20.
51
. Alan Williamson, Lowell Special Number,
Agenda,
18, no. 3 (1980).
52
. Ms (Houghton Library).
53
. “Waking Early Sunday Morning,”
Near
the
Ocean,
p. 20.
54
. “Central Park,”
Near
the
Ocean,
p. 33.
55
. Ibid., p. 34.
56
. Title poem of
Near
the
Ocean,
p. 38.
57
. “Fourth of July in Maine,”
Near
the
Ocean,
pp. 28–29.
58
. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1982).
59
. Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair Clark, n.d.
60
. Elizabeth Hardwick to R.L., n.d.