Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
Robert Lowell: A Biography (51 page)
During 1965, of course, Lowell became something of a public figure himself: his refusal to attend the White House Arts Festival
disrupted
an event that had—in part—been meant to demonstrate that the Johnsons were no less cultivated than the Kennedys, that Lady Bird could compete with Jackie in matters of graciousness and taste. Also during 1965 Jacqueline Kennedy was from time to time “
escorted
” by Blair Clark, who had been a classmate of John Kennedy’s at Harvard. According to Clark, Lowell began to feel a certain schoolboy rivalry, and “there was much jostling about who was going to be closer to Jackie.” As to her feelings about Lowell, Clark surmises:
She was interested. She was a collector—not of
personages
exactly, but personalities. She was genuinely interested in him as a personality. I don’t think there was any more than that. She was interested in the sense that he was unique, interesting as a character.
28
In November—on the anniversary of her husband’s assassination—Lowell presented Jackie Kennedy with a signed copy of
The
Old
Glory
and was delighted by her fairly warm response—although she addressed him formally as “Dear Robert Lowell.”
29
She was
grateful
, she said, for the play, as she had been for the books he had given her the year before. She would have been glad, though, if Lowell had announced himself—why didn’t he tell her in advance when he was planning one of his Santa Claus appearances? Did he just leave his presents and run off? Or did he have to haggle absurdly with her Secret Service bodyguards? Anyway, she was genuinely touched—this was the worst bit of the year for her, and it was somehow strengthening to have this “Friend Across Central Park,” as Lowell later described himself in a poem:
I, in my Dickensian muffler, snow-sugared, unraveling—
so you phantasized—in the waste thaw of loss:
winter and then a winter; unseared, your true voice seared,
still yearningly young; and I, though never young
in all our years, and younger when we meet.
A week later, on December 1, 1965, Lowell’s interest in Jackie Kennedy had become a gossip item: he was pictured with her on the
front page of
Woman
’
s
Wear
Daily
—they were attending the first night of
Hogan’
s
Goat
,
a play by Lowell’s Cambridge friend
William
Alfred. A week after that, Lowell was telephoning his friends to tell them of his fierce new admiration.
He also reported that he had acquired a marvelous new art
objet
—a bust of the Indian chief Tecumseh. It had cost him $3,500, and he had put it on his dining table at West 67th Street, replacing a bust of Napoleon. His new prize had been made in Rome in 1854. Taylor wrote to Allen Tate:
One has to laugh at his antics, but it is heartbreaking. I wonder if there is nothing more that can be done for him than is being done. And I wonder how long his health and his luck can hold out. Some sort of violent end seems inevitable.
30
The climax of this episode came with an evening at the opera, an evening that Robert Giroux—who was Lowell’s host that night—described later as “a combination of Walpurgis night and the Marx Bros.”
31
Giroux tells how the evening began:
I’d asked him and Lizzie and the Fred Dupees. and it was a black tie night. We were going to have dinner at the opera—a rather festive occasion. But during the day Lizzie called me and said “Cal’s in terrible shape. I’m sorry we can’t come.” Anyway, we’d just sat down for drinks in the Met Club room when the door opened and in walked Cal in the most exalted state I’ve ever known him to be. He was brilliant—but superhuman, so to speak. His first remark was “I’m so sorry, Lizzie can’t come, she’s not feeling well.” And then he went into this nonstop talk—he was in a fugal state of some kind, but very articulate, talking about “brilliant women”—Lizzie, Mary McCarthy, Jacqueline Kennedy. He just talked a blue streak about them. You couldn’t get a word in; we all sat there absolutely bedazzled by this performance. Well, we went in for the first act, but he’d no sooner sat down than his head fell forward and he began to snore.
32
But not for long. In one account of Lowell’s night at the opera, he is said to have risen to his feet and, from the front of Robert Giroux’s private box, begun conducting the orchestra. In another, he is seen backstage congratulating one of the performers. Sidney Nolan gives the following account:
I do remember that night at the opera in New York, with Bob Giroux. There was a dinner with a course between each act. And Cal was pretty high and he kind of did in the dinner. The opera was
Don
Carlos.
And as we were having the first course Cal started quoting remarks that some dead friend had made about the various people
present
. Things like “Oh, Bill always said you were a nice girl but you had legs like a table.” That was the name of the game—you know, dead friends can’t be contradicted. And he kept it up all night. It was quite awkward. And there’s a scene in
Don
Carlos
where a chap is shot in the dungeons. So there’s this shot and dead silence, and Cal said in a loud clear voice, “Oswald!” And we went around afterwards to see the chap, an Italian tenor—we finally got to see him and Cal said to him, “You were a king tonight.” And he said, “No, no, I sang well, but no king, not a king, just a tenor.” And Cal said, “You are a real king, do you understand?” And then turned to his wife, who was there, and said, “Your man is a king, a king amongst men.” And I thought, Oh God. Then Cal said, “Since you are a king, I’ve brought the Duke of Wellington to meet you.” And the man’s face fell—and I had to disentangle and get out.
33
In Robert Giroux’s account, the opera was Tchaikovsky’s
The
Queen
of
Spades
(or
Pique
Dame
),
and after the first act he spotted Nolan in the audience:
The hero of the evening was gentle Sidney Nolan. I saw him in the box (he was probably William Meredith’s guest), and told him how sick Cal was, and wondered how we could persuade Cal to leave. He said, “I don’t think Cal likes opera that much. I’ll suggest that the three of us go back and discuss my illustrations for his book.” I was amazed that it really worked; Cal seemed happy to go. We sat him between us in the taxi, and when we reached his apartment on West 67th Street there, standing in the doorway, with her arms folded, was his doctor. When he wouldn’t get out of the taxi, she actually said to him, “Cal, how can you do this
to
me
?” She got in the front seat. Again Nolan was the hero, and suggested we drive around Central Park. The driver, a typical New York taxi man, said, “What’s this all about?” I told him to keep the meter running and drive around the park. The second time around, Nolan quietly directed the driver to Cal’s hospital. He was much calmer now, and when we got there, Nolan said, “Cal, why don’t you and I go in the hospital. You know you want to get this settled.” He quietly got out with Nolan, and the doctor joined them. I drove back to
The
Queen
of
Spades
, and called Elizabeth before I went in for the last act, in which
mad Hermann keeps muttering, “Three cards! Three cards!” before he’s done in by the
Pique
Dame
.
34
These were clearly two different nights at the opera and two quite separate escapades—there is an understandable tendency for
Lowell
’s friends to muddle the events of one illness with those of another, and during this period Lowell was a frequent opera-goer. What seems certain, though, is that after a day in a hospital in New York, Lowell was driven up to Boston with Nolan and admitted to McLean’s on December 7, 1965. The following day, Dr. Bernard wrote to Blair Clark: “Mr. L. reached McLean yesterday by car, accompanied by Mr. Nolan—left with good feeling toward wife and myself and pleased to be going to McLean’s.” On December 30 Lowell had a letter from Jackie Kennedy.
35
She thanked him for a book he had sent her for Christmas—a book on Alexander the Great—and assured him that she had been assiduous in her reading of Joinville and Cato: two earlier Lowell recommendations, it would seem. About Alexander, she was puzzled about Lowell’s reasons for introducing her to the less than lovable world conqueror. It is a touching, slightly bewildered note—she rather envies Lowell, she says, for being “in retreat” over the Christmas season. If she were he, she would stay in McLean’s forever; but Lowell, she believed, had more courage than she did, and would no doubt soon be back in town.
*
Just as there is a tendency for the details of Lowell’s episodes to get blurred in his friends’ memories, so there was almost a probability that his antics would get distorted or embellished as reports of them went into general circulation. There were now “Cal stories” that could be swapped at dinner tables and chuckled over at literary gatherings. The Jackie Kennedy story, the Tecumseh story, the Latvian dancer story, and so on: the more celebrated Lowell became as a poet and as a public figure, the more avid the requirement for fresh pranks. And, more troublingly for those who cared for him, his enemies could all too easily construct from accounts of his
delusions
a portrait of Lowell as a sort of near fascist—How was it, they could disingenuously wonder, that this renowned spokesman for correct liberal causes persistently “revealed,” in mania, a fascination with tyrants and monsters of the right? Lowell was by now a much envied “star” of literature, and with each new breakdown, each new
round of malign gossip, he seemed—almost willfully—to be
mocking
the supposed invulnerability of his position and prestige.
As for Lowell’s closest friends, they knew that in his illnesses there was always an element of simple mischief, of sly, childishly perverse outrageousness—“I am going to appall you by doing, or being, the worst thing you can imagine,” and so on. But by now they had seen it all so many times, the shock tactics no longer had much sting. In letters these friends would now make only passing reference to Lowell’s latest “crack-up.” It was not that “everyone’s tired of my turmoil”—although many were; it was more that
everyone
was now used to it, and knew that it was almost certainly incurable. A letter from Allen Tate to Peter Taylor, written a week after Lowell had been admitted to McLean’s, provides some
indication
of the tone that was now being taken by his friends—still deeply sympathetic, but resigned and (as Taylor himself said) “one has to laugh”:
I was in N.Y. last week and heard a play-by-play account by Stanley Kunitz of the purchase of Tecumseh. The statue, it appears, is now back with the dealer, who will not refund the $1,000 deposit; it remains with him as a credit towards the purchase later of another “work of art.” I have not heard about Cal’s debut as an opera conductor. All this is very sad. Stanley fears that the gap is closing, that the seizures are becoming more frequent. Elizabeth assured me on the telephone that the present upset is milder than the others; at least there was no Lady Poetess, or dancer, this time. I feel that the crush on Madame Jacqueline is an improvement in the direction of sublimation. Perhaps we should
encourage
it, even going so far as to implore Madame’s assistance as a sort of therapy-at-a-distance. Wystan Auden told me that Cal had told him that I had written last summer 800 lines because I was away from “that stupid girl from Boston.” I wrote 200. To exaggerate only fourfold indicates real restraint in Cal.
36
A week before Lowell was admitted to McLean’s he had agreed that his name be put forward as a candidate for one of England’s more eccentric academic posts: the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford. Even if Lowell had not been in an elated mood, he would have relished the sheer quaintness of the job, and the small, donnish dramas that surrounded it. The Poetry Professorship was not a conventional university appointment; indeed, it was famous for
offering “no power, little work, and less money.” For three lectures a year the Professor would receive a token £300 (then $840); and he would be expected to serve a five-year term. The drama of the thing, though, derived not from the job itself but from the time-honored method of deciding who should get it. The Poetry Professorship was the one Oxford chair that was decided by election. Every five years the university’s thirty thousand or so Masters of Arts were entitled to vote for one or another of the nominated candidates—but they had to vote in person, and they had to wear the regulation cap and gown. It was all faintly absurd, but Oxford loved it; during the buildup to an election, high tables would be abuzz with barter and intrigue, and the weightier national newspapers would follow the campaigns with full front-page solemnity.
It is not clear how much Lowell knew about the job when Charles Monteith, of his London publisher Faber and Faber, proposed his nomination; it may well have been enough for him that the post had in the past been held by some illustrious figures—Matthew Arnold, W. H. Auden, Robert Graves—and that, were he to be elected, he would be Oxford’s first non-British Poetry Professor. On
November
27 he cabled to Monteith: “Propose my name if you have the courage to do so.”
With Lowell’s agreement secured, Monteith began recruiting sponsors for his candidacy, and within days had enlisted the support of substantial Oxford figures, such as Sir Maurice Bowra (the
Warden
of Wadham College), Isaiah Berlin, Professor Nevill Coghill (Merton Professor of English Literature) and Mr. Alan Bullock (Master of St. Catherine’s). He also persuaded W. H. Auden and Cecil Day Lewis (another previous Professor) to sponsor Lowell’s candidature. Auden’s agreement was offered, though, with a
cautionary
postscript: