The Private Voice of Robert Lowell
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry The Private Voice of Robert Lowell By Phoebe Pettingell Throughout his turbulent career, Robert Lowell kept critics and readers off balance. Just when the latest phase of his poetry...
...In my view, The Dolphin falls short of Lowell's strongest poetry-not because the book is too personal, as many critics have charged, but because, for all the emotional drama, the telling feels constrained...
...The 26 years between his death and the issue of Collected Poems in 2005 did not help...
...The poet was as impulsive a correspondent as he was a meticulous craftsman of his art...
...I was your student and younger friend...
...and his ruminations on the long shadow of history as it affects our present understanding of self and culture...
...Ah Allen," Lowell replied gently, "which of us has insulted the other more...
...In the 1960s, he marched on Washington to protest the Vietnam War and refused an invitation to dine at Lyndon B. Johnson's White House...
...Hardwick had been weathering his repeated breakdowns and infidelities since they married in 1949...
...You and I have had so many of the same tumbles and leaps...
...This response allowed their mutual affection to prevail...
...More than anything, Lowell feared growing stale as a poet...
...One of the appendices in this volume lists the more than 30 addresses he used over his lifetime...
...The Old Glory...
...Like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Adams, Lowell brooded over our heavy Calvinist heritage and the ironies of our history...
...Despite their carping, he was the most mesmerizing American poet of his era, impossible to ignore even when his latest work seemed baffling...
...Nor did several biographies that appeared soon after his passing, which tended to obscure the subtle intelligence behind the poems with melodramatic retellings of the disordered life...
...But it unraveled when he met the beautiful, unstable Blackwood on a trip to England...
...The editor observes that they are "attempts to arrange his companionable, social self with his 'ragged conduct, unreality, squabbling, uncontrollable desires, etc' The shape ofthat arrangement-what he describes, what he leaves out-is very different from his other writings...
...critics have paid him little attention, and readers even less...
...I have several on my family tree...
...By contrast, Lowell's will to survive was quite powerful...
...They are especially revealing about the composition of The Dolphin (1973), an unrhymed sonnet sequence that shocked even his closest friends in the literary world with its account of his deserting Hardwick and his teenage daughter Harriet for Blackwood...
...These qualities were the subject of his trilogy of plays...
...His colorful public life in politics and religion (not least his stint in jail during World War II as a conscientious objector) made good copy for Time and Newsweek...
...Alas, a decade later, Berryman made his terminal "leap" offa bridge in Minneapolis...
...While his political and religious loyalties shifted, the antiwar stance persisted...
...The poet campaigned for Eugene McCarthy, but ultimately left the country to live in England with a titled new wife...
...Though he married Blackwood and they had a son, he remained pulled in two directions...
...The Letters of Robert Lowell arrives at a timely hour...
...Lowell describes Pound as "very sad and silly," naively convinced "that the world will be alright if people would only read the right books...
...bipolar breakdowns...
...The letters return us directly to Lowell's voice...
...Once the fit passed, he would feel "shriveled, stale and small," shaken with remorse for the wounds he inflicted...
...then by losing some of the manuscript...
...What one wouldn't give to be a fly on the wall...
...Letters from this period demonstrate that he had not fully processed his torturous situation...
...Lowell himself could say crushing, hurtful things in what he termed "the euphoria of sickness," or "my exuberant callousness...
...In the same way, he revered "Uncle Tom" Eliot and William Carlos Williams as literary masters...
...Initially a follower of the conservative Fugitive Poets, Lowell later ranged from scintillating formalism to an almost conversational free verse...
...The letters addressed to her are the high point of this volume...
...In his hot-blooded youth, Lowell wanted to drop out of Harvard, journey to Italy, and sit at Ezra Pound's feet...
...We must have a green old age...
...His charismatic personality attracted (and sometimes appalled) friends, literary colleagues and readers...
...For this and other complicated reasons, his posthumous Collected Poems took 26 years to assemble, finally emerging in 2005...
...She was beginning a career as a writer after bearing her second husband three daughters...
...Only man thinning out his kind sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind swipe ofthe primer and his knife busy about the tree of life...
...He insulted his friends with harsh truths and grew obsessed with history's tyrants-Napoleon, Hitler and, yes, Caligula...
...With her he shared his most thoughtful observations on poetry, and he admired her most of his contemporaries...
...Your letter isn't a good way to keep friends...
...Of late his reputation has suffered...
...Elizabeths Hospital for his treasonous broadcasts during the war, the two did get to know each other...
...Many poets, once they discover a congenial style, stick to it while refining their themes...
...A perfectionist, Lowell compulsively reworked poems...
...These epistles provide fascinating contrasts to the more polished verse...
...And forget your diatribe, it's too inspired by half...
...Tate furiously blasted his former pupil for a long series of injuries real and imagined, closing a letter with a scornful assessment of his addressee's latest poems: "Your Napoleonic stance permits you to confess other people's lives- Not quite yours as always...
...I am laborious, too much like everybody else, a bit harsh and perverse," he complained to Elizabeth Bishop, whose serene style he admired and envied...
...There seems something generic about it, and determined beyond anything we could do...
...He certainly remained something of a moralist...
...Just when the latest phase of his poetry began to make sense, he would veer off in a new direction, leaving part of his audience exasperated as the rest rushed to catch up with him...
...Between 1944-when Lowell published his first collection, Land of Unlikeness-and his death in 1977-shortly after the appearance of his final work, Day by Day-he was among America's most innovative poets...
...The nickname underscored two aspects of his character that came to the fore during his perpetual battles against manic depressive attacks...
...The metrical proficiency and dazzling formalism that flashed through his early books were later cast aside because, as he explained in a 1958 letter to Robert Flint, ' is found reading aloud that I wanted more humor, more immediate clarity, fewer symbols, more of the good prose writer's realistic direct glance...
...adaptations of stories by Hawthorne and Melville for the stage that brought him to the attention of theatergoers who never read his verse...
...travels...
...religious and political involvements...
...Lowell was not one to rest on his laurels...
...Many of the letters illustrate how graceful he was at mending fences in their aftermath...
...Her first husband had been the painter Lucian Freud, grandson of Sigmund...
...His writing remained highly rhetorical-a reason so many of his lines are memorable...
...The bipolar tension that informed his poems still has the power to excite...
...At the same time, Lowell was aware of a side of himself tugged toward chaos and destruction...
...new versions would surface many years after their original publication...
...Critics periodically charged that he had betrayed his talent...
...The letters show that he sometimes fed on turmoil, that he was too intelligent not to realize this, and that he hated this aspect of himself...
...His writings suggest a belief that we face judgment, and periodically he lapses into prayer...
...Regaling Elizabeth Bishop with stories of a poetry-prize awarding panel, Lowell wrote her: "When I arrived at the Fifth Avenue palace Marianne Moore was sprawled like some Boucher goddess in a print dress and black cartwheel hat on the huge marble disc of the huge marble banister...
...Please forgive me for this book business, which I trust will come out happily...
...What queer lives we've had even for poets," Lowell wrote Berryman in 1962...
...The press portrayed Robert Lowell as the Great American Poet, heir to the foxy Robert Frost...
...He drove himself to compose poetry when his muse abandoned him, clutching at the hope she would return-as she always did...
...Lowell's letters uncover a lifelong interest in theology, lingering long after he left the Catholic Church, when he would refer himself as a Christian or a "Christian atheist...
...Instead, he left Cambridge in 1937 to study with John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate at Kenyon College...
...We might say the same about Robert Lowell...
...These barbs proved the more wounding because his judgments could be so acute...
...Letters were dashed off in bursts, often breaking months, or years, of silence with their recipients...
...His public life was almost as fickle...
...Nevertheless, he could not curb his restlessness...
...the childhoods of his two children...
...His affection for his "Dearest Elizabeth" never wavered...
...In a note to Philip Larkin, he praised the British poet's "elegance and homeliness"-commending him for verse at once beautifully crafted and resembling speech, not oratory...
...Still I have no mind for your gospel, and don't let's talk about the Jews...
...love affairs...
...Starting with his groundbreaking Life Studies in 1959, he concentrated on the raw material of his private life: three marriages to the fiction writers Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick and Lady Caroline Blackwood...
...Being "real," as Lowell sometimes expressed it, clearly meant so much to him because he hated the way his manic episodes distorted his perspective and personality...
...Again and again, he disrupted his settled, relatively happy existence, wounding those around him as he sought a new home, new love, new life...
...Lowell mythologized his peers in the manner of Yeats, and we cannot help but think, "There were giants in those days...
...The Letters of Robert Lowell (Farrar Straus Giroux, 888 pp., $40.00), edited by Saskia Hamilton...
...He continued to be called Cal by all but his older relatives...
...His Boston Brahmin ancestors, prominent figures in the country's history, dated back to the colonial era...
...The letters have the immediacy of the first rhythm and the first thought that occurred to him-the very thing he revised away in his poems...
...In 1970, he riled the notoriously quarrelsome Southern Fugitive Tate, first by failing to edit a book of his old mentor's essays he had agreed to do...
...A gangly misfit in prep school, Lowell was nicknamed "Cal" by his classmates-a nod both to Calvin and the mad Roman Emperor Caligula...
...For Lowell, correspondence was a means of personal communication, not-as with some poets-an opportunity for literary polish...
...Lowell was a public figure in a way few literary authors have been...
...No biography of Lowell has yet captured the poet as acutely and dramatically as his letters...
...You have, as is right...
...He wrote as he lived, always searching...
...Lowell's decency glows through many letters...
...Pity the monsters" he wrote in an oft quoted line...
...During the attacks that came as often as once a year, he typically ran off with some young woman who would "save" him...
...He was unusually generous to other writers and forgiving of their flaws...
...Nevertheless, his anecdotes and offhand remarks about other writers sparkle-as does a vignette about Alice Roosevelt Longworth boring Pound with synopses of books she read as a girl, and cameos of his close friend Mary McCarthy, waspishly putting others down...
...And please believe that I love you...
...Even at his most depressed, you can sense him perking up in telling her news or musing about their common art...
...Among them were New England preachers, presidents of Harvard, politicians, and two poets-James Russell Lowell and Amy Lowell...
...The cumulative effect of his letters demonstrates how doggedly he clung to life...
...Lowell knew he was caught in a scenario out of Shakespeare's sonnets, and he wanted to portray it in verse...
...The new drug lithium seemed to have broken the pattern of his annual manic attacks, and his letters from the years preceding the split suggest a newfound calm...
...He wrote Hardwick, "I feel like a man walking on two ever more widely splitting roads at once, as if I were pulled apart and thinning into mist, or rather being torn apart and still preferring that state to making a decision...
...In Lowell's case, however, one might say that he had already invaded his own privacy (as well as that of those closest to him) in his confessional verse, picking up snippets of letters written by friends, wives and lovers...
...For a time a convert to Catholicism, he was anti-Communist and refused to serve in the Army during World War II...
...But he wrote eloquently about the innate impulse to violence that endangered humanity...
...This volume confirms that his "imitations" (translations of nonEnglish poets) and plays based on stories by other writers or Greek tragedies served as stopgaps if inspiration ran dry...
...He became puffed up with grandiose ideas, and his considerate temperament vanished...
...Elsewhere, Dylan Thomas looked to Lowell as though his hair was "combed with a salad spoon...
...Many of his closest friends bumed their candles at both ends: Delmore Schwartz, Theodore Roethke, Randall Jarrell, and John Berryman all ultimately lost their battles with the private demons of mental illness and alcohol abuse...
...The complication of loving two women was compounded by a struggle between his longing for stability and his desire to pursue a relationship he sensed might stimulate his creative impulses...
...Lowell honed both right up to the end...
...But he tried to temper that tendency in himself, lest he slip into bombastic sentimentality...
...After another decade had passed and Pound was back in Italy, Lowell wrote to him: "I love you, laugh with you, know you are a great poet, and always feel either talking with you or reading you that you open the windows...
...Pray for the grace of accuracy," he wrote in the Epilogue to Day by Day...
...Acquaintances were horrified by his using parts of Hardwick's reproachful, often angry, intermittently poignant letters as literary grist...
...After specializing in long poems, he wrote four successive books of unrhymed sonnets...
...A decade later, when he was Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress and the modernist hero was incarcerated at Washington's St...
...Lowell respected Pound and treated his faults with the deference due to someone who had once taught him much...
...Responding to the escalation of the Vietnam war in 1967, he wrote in "Waking Early Sunday Morning": Wars flicker, earth licks her open sores...
...He considered much of his own behavior monstrous, recoiling from the damage he inflicted during the spells that turned him from kindhearted to cruel...
...but let's drop it...
...Now it has been joined by a companion volume...
...Exposure to private writings not intended for publication frequently feels like voyeurism...
...When he died in a taxi approaching Manhattan, he was returning to his second wife...
Vol. 88 • May 2005 • No. 3
