Robert Lowell: A Biography

...even to make small inroads on her appalling power would be to achieve victories that seemed quite beyond his father's wit or inclination...

...Lowell also knew of his mother's one great weakness—her "nerves," which contributed to her "apparently unappeasable discontent...

...Charlotte Lowell believed what she was told about her difficult son (whose difficulty was, of course, of her making), conveyed this to her child, and then the child lived up to her expectations...

...Mark's School Lowell made two important allies, Frank Parker and Blair Clark, who considered themselves half intellectuals, half rebels...

...Some said it came from Caliban, a part he acted in a student production of The Tempest...

...The Lowells finally separated after Cal began seeing Delmore Schwartz's former wife, Gertrude Buckman...

...She had a man she worshipped...

...In giving up these three things Cal has given up the three defenses against disintegration: but his mother will feel that he has given up all those wicked influences...

...I hope your exaustion [sic] is nothing very drastic...

...The Lowell marriage went into swift decline, however, as Cal's interest in religion grew more fervid...

...Stafford's nose was badly crushed and she spent months in the hospital...

...It was not a game that gave her much pleasure, but then, as Hamilton makes clear, "pleasure wasn't one of her favorite pursuits...

...Allen Tate believed that, after Lowell's first breakdown, Charlotte would at last be satisfied...

...Never one "to flaunt much boyish charm," Lowell was remembered as "dark, menacing, and belligerent," and always "bigger, stronger, and shaggier than his contemporaries...

...By this time she had decided that poetry was a source of "overexcitement" and was to be warned against...

...To prove once again the grandeur of his defiance, Lowell married Stafford in April 1940 in New York City...

...During his first breakdown, while being subdued by police, Lowell repeatedly shouted, "cut off my testicles...

...Lowell was fined seventy-five dollars in Cambridge District Court...

...Charlotte was seeing Moore about her "nerves" and "had left [him] in little doubt that her mental balance depended largely on the balance of her errant son...

...At school he was given the nickname Cal...

...In a letter to John Berryman, who was himself in the hospital suffering from exhaustion, Lowell wrote: I am back from Greensboro, where Randall and [I] enjoyed [?] ourselves lamenting the times...

...Mark's, Charlotte had consulted with the Boston psychiatrist/poet Merrill Moore, who was a fringe member of the Southern "Fugitive" group of writers led by John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate...

...and the madness may even have come to influence Lowell's ideas about the behavior of the modern poet...

...Somehow poetry became part of the whole, dreadful process...

...Clearly the poetry had little to do with Lowell's countless breakdowns...

...Lowell returned to Kenyon in January 1939...

...As Hamilton's book repeatedly demonstrates, Lowell was fortunate in having people who stayed by him...

...For a time she slept on an army cot, took cold swims in the morning, bolted her food, and even began calling her father "Napoleon...

...He would threaten friends and relatives with violence, call for a divorce from his present wife, and begin extolling the virtues of dictators like Hitler...

...And yet, according to Hamilton, despite Lowell's rebelliousness, his old New England sensibility continued to crave order—rules and tests...

...He had also spent time racing through the streets ranting about devils and homosexuals...

...It seems there's been something curious twisted and against the grain about the world poets of our generation have had to live in...

...During the Christmas holidays of 1938, while driving with Stafford in his parents' car, Lowell crashed into a wall at the end of a Cambridge cul-de-sac...

...Charlotte was expert at "the haughty bon mot, the glacial put-down...

...Mark's, and the first "real" writer Lowell came to know...

...Even before Lowell had left St...

...or, as many commentators have done, making equal claims for both...

...in the hands of a virtual stranger...

...He was not looking to be replaced "as the dominant figure in his favorite daughter's life...

...Stafford began drinking heavily and also began falling victim to a series of minor illnesses...

...Nothing in Charlotte's life was ever as it should have been...

...In a letter to Merrill Moore he wrote: Cal gave up Jean, he has given up the Church . . . and he has given up poetry...

...others said it came from Caligula, the mad Roman emperor Lowell emulated...

...He was seriously considering leaving college to marry Stafford...

...The elder Robert Lowell, a Naval officer, hadn't much of a chance either as husband or later as father...

...Lowell became dictatorial about every inch of the couple's domestic and intellectual life...

...So began Charlotte's campaign to "tidy up" her no longer small Napoleon...

...His behavior would become erratic...

...With this in mind, Charlotte and Arthur were also willing to overlook the fact that Bob was from the poor (meaning only comfortably off) branch of the Lowells, where "priests and poets figured prominently among [the] immediate forbears...

...The Lowells insisted that their son attend Harvard in the hope that they could cure him of his addiction to writing...

...Reading matter was screened for its seriousness—"no newspapers, and no novels except Dostoevsky, Proust, James and Tolstoy...

...And yet he could not deny that he was also "utterly enthralled" by her...

...According to Hamilton, in the original draft of "91 Revere Street," an autobiographical prose essay which became part of the poetry collection Life Studies, the tone in which Lowell remembered himself when "mad" is consistent with the tone he used "to recall childhood misdeeds...

...He was a below-average student who got high marks for fighting back...

...Lowell would appear to be making more of the madness than of the poetry...

...The trouble all along, Stafford contended, was that Lowell, with his "powerful alchemy," had turned her into a version of his mother and that "subconsciously she had accepted the role until she terrifyingly resembled her...

...In his fourth term at St...

...Hamilton describes him as "a fugitive from the victorious North seeking refuge with the Fugitives...

...From a tender age, Lowell became a keen student of enslavement...

...The eight-year-old Lowell would answer, "I am not a man...

...Beginning with the appearance of Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth, a memoir of her strenuous marriage to John Berryman, and followed over the course of many months by the publications of Sylvia Plath's journals, John Haffenden's life of Berryman, and now nearly six-hundred pages about Robert Lowell —considered by many to be the poet of his generation—the subject of poets and madness has been widely and hotly debated...

...She would chastise her husband, then turn to her son (and only child) and say, "Oh, Bobby, it's such a comfort to have a man in the house...

...Once married Charlotte became an even more awesome shrew...

...Jean came from Colorado and was "therefore" impossibly non-smart...

...For both father and daughter, [Bob Lowell's] combination of weak character and strong lineage was indeed perfectly correct...

...I am a boy," and was left to wonder why his father never fought back...

...Another signifiwent south to pursue "his poetic apprenticeship...

...Under their tutelage Lowell soon understood that literature—especially poetry—could be used to wear away at his mother's power...

...Forces would seem to have conspired against Lowell long before his birth...

...Quarrels increased, and one evening, in a rage, Lowell punched Stafford in the face and broke her nose again...

...and it was Lowell's opinion that his mother wanted to keep him locked up for the rest of"his life...

...What troubles you and I, Ted Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Delmore, Randall—even Karl Shapiro—have had...

...On paper the marriage of his parents, Charlotte Winslow and Robert Traill Spence Lowell, prominent names in Boston society, looked "spectacularly correct...

...The madness and the poetry kept pace with one another throughout Lowell's career...

...All of Charlotte's notions of military glamor were invested in Arthur, whom she saw as "a Prussian, tidied-up version of Napoleon...

...JLyuring this same period Lowell met the writer Jean Stafford, who was to become the first of his three wives...

...Lowell considered his mother an adversary, a "scolding, rusty hinge...

...Six years before her marriage, Charlotte had read the Duchesse d'Abrantes's Memoirs of Napoleon and had fallen for the conqueror's majestic slovenliness...

...cant influence was Richard Eberhart, the poet, who was a master at St...

...His letters from the period are filled with misspellings, which leads Hamilton to suggest that there may have been a hint of dyslexia...

...study, though the author, a poet and editor himself, as well as an intimate of Lowell's, has amassed an abundance of evidence that points us in the right direction...

...But after a rather brief and lackluster stay at the college, Lowell, with the assistance of Merrill Moore, Lowell's performance at school was perfectly in keeping with the pattern set in childhood...

...Food was similarly scrutinized...

...Hamilton points to the early formal poems and to Lowell's eventual conversion to Catholicism as confirmation of this...

...he would stay up all night drinking and talking...

...Not only did he feel an obligation to her (she was still in the hospital), but he also knew that his parents strongly disapproved of the match...

...Here we see the first indications of a pattern which was to continue throughout Lowell's two subsequent marriages (to the writers Elizabeth Hardwick and Lady Caroline Black-wood) and his very public career as a poet: a woman would come into Lowell's life and he would proclaim that, through her, a new life was beginning for him...

...Stafford had also come to confuse Cal with her dominating father, thereby completing the vicious circle...

...They were the ones who cleared a space for him where, in his lucid moments, he could create something that will live on beyond the legacy of his madness...

...And some might argue that the madness robbed the poetry of its early greatness...

...She never stopped playing "the fearfully important game of keeping the world guessing what was on her mind...

...Lowell looked to Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom as his mentors (and surrogate fathers) and eventually followed Ransom to Ken-yon College...

...Nor was Charlotte herself in need of any extra restraints upon her own natural bossiness...

...I am told that everything that paranoics do is symbolic action, and an objectivization of the delusion...

...Marked as "a wild man," he was forever "ready to take his unpopularity for granted...

...The incident caused something of a scandal and was, in his parents' opinion, further proof of their son's instability...

...It was said of Arthur Winslow that "he espoused a brand of New England integrity that even hard-line Bostonians considered somewhat over-rhetorical and Prussian...

...Her efforts were intensified as matters became "more self-evidently hopeless...

...The match apparently gave great pleasure to Charlotte's father...

...After a time the police would have to be called, and Lowell would be taken to an institution...

...And from his father he learned that decency and good intentions can be abject...

...now she wanted one who would unquestionably worship her...

...I don't know whether he told you that he left the manuscript of his unfinished poem...

...Bits of bone had to be picked out near her brain and, in the words of Blair Clark, "There was about a 25 percent reduction in the aesthetic value of her face...

...Lowell's life would appear to be about the consequences of suggestibility, especially the suggestibility born of psychiatry...

...But Hamilton's book is a refutation of the supposed link between neurosis and creativity...

...The source of Lowell's madness is not a subject actively pursued anywhere in Ian Hamilton's exhaustive Robert Leiter has written for the New Republic, Commonweal, the American Scholar, and other journals...

...Their relationship would appear to have been doomed from the start...

...these knocks are almost proof of intelligence and valor in us...

...It was Merrill Moore's opinion that Lowell was having considerable conflict between religion and sexuality...