Robert Lowell in Love

Jeffrey Meyers

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781613764404
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria norteamericana

Robert Lowell was known not only as a great poet but also as a writer whose devotion to his art came at a tremendous personal cost. In this book, his third on Robert Lowell, Jeffrey Meyers examines the poet's impassioned, troubled relationships with the key women in his life: his mother, Charlotte Winslow Lowell; his three wives—Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Caroline Blackwood; nine of his many lovers; his close women friends—Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich; and his most talented students, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath.Lowell's charismatic personality, compelling poetry, and literary fame attracted lovers and friends who were both frightened and excited by his aura of brilliance and danger. He loved the idea of falling in love, and in his recurring manic episodes he needed women at the center of his emotional and artistic life. Each affair became an intense dramatic episode. Though he idealized his loves and encouraged their talents, his frenetic affairs and tortured marriages were always conducted on his own terms. Robert Lowell in Love tells the story of the poet in the grip of love and gives voice to the women who loved him, inspired his poetry, and suffered along with him.

ONE

Charlotte’s Web, 1917–1954

I

Many people don’t think about their ancestors—don’t even go back far enough to have any. They lack two middle names and have to buy their own furniture. But the poet Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV had a trust fund and inherited bountiful legacies when his parents died. The Lowells had arrived in America in 1639 and belonged to the first families of Boston, but by his father’s time, two-and-a-half centuries later, the blood had run thin. Ian Hamilton noted that “the Lowell millions were elsewhere, with the bankers and the lawyers and the cotton magnates: cousins all, but hardly intimates, and in a quite separate financial league.”¹ The poet was born on March 1, 1917—the same year as John Kennedy and Andrew Wyeth—one month before America entered the Great War.

The French philosopher Blaise Pascal observed, “What a great advantage nobility confers! It places a man at eighteen in a grand position, where he is as well-known and respected as another would be at fifty, who depended only on his merit. Here is a gain of thirty years that costs no trouble.”² Lowell’s distinguished ancestry has usually been considered a tremendous advantage. He used it to gain a great deal of attention as a conscientious objector in World War II and as an angry protester against the war in Vietnam. Richard Tillinghast expressed the traditional view by saying he had “the luck to have been born with a name and family tradition that lent authority to his utterances.”³ Lowell’s close friend Randall Jarrell, who came from a humble background, slyly mocked his impressive pedigree by remarking, “I’m sure the Lowells … have all sorts of [ancient] Egyptian connections, were in the old days Egyptians.”⁴ Yet Lowell did have a dynastic “IV” after his name and wrote that his grandfather’s house on Chestnut Street in Beacon Hill had “two loutish, brownstone pillars copied from the [Egyptian] Temple of the Kings at Memphis.”⁵ The poet Elizabeth Bishop, awed by his heritage, famously told him, “In some ways you are the luckiest poet I know!” Most poets could write about their ancestors, she continued, “but what would be the significance? Nothing at all…. Whereas all you have to do is put down the names! And it seems significant, illustrative, American.”⁶ David Heymann’s American Aristocracy (1980), about three generations of poetical Lowells, seems to substantiate Bishop’s claim.

But Lowell’s ancestry was a curse as well as a blessing. He carried the burden of privilege and was consumed as well as nourished, embalmed as well as exalted by his past. The menacing recollections and anguished expressions of despair in his autobiographical essays—“91 Revere Street,” “Antebellum Boston” and “Near the Unbalanced Aquarium”—explored the dark side of his family. He thought it no great feat to surpass his talentless predecessors. He called James Russell Lowell, minister to Great Britain, “a poet pedestalled for oblivion”—statuesque but destined to be dumped on by pigeons. ⁷ His connection to the huge, eccentric and scandalous Amy Lowell was like having Mae West for a cousin. She’d promoted Imagist poetry with Ezra Pound, who soon mocked what he called “Amy-gism.” Lowell quoted with approval a friend’s description of Amy as “that cigar-chawing, guffawing, senseless and meterless, multimillionheiress, heavyweight mascot on a floating fortress.”⁸ These versifying mediocrities were merely deadwood who had to be cleared away to open the path for his own triumphs.

Amy’s brother and Lowell’s distant cousin, Abbott Lawrence Lowell (his great-grandfather and Robert’s great-great-grandfather were step-brothers), was a member of the Massachusetts Governor’s Advisory Committee who ruled that the anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, had had a fair trial and rejected the plea for a new one. The two men were unjustly convicted and executed on August 15, 1927. Abbott Lawrence Lowell also opposed, for anti-Semitic reasons, the nomination of the distinguished jurist Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court. As the long-serving president of Harvard from 1909 to 1933, he limited Jewish enrollment, banned African American students from living in Freshmen Halls, and purged homosexual students and faculty. The “illustrious” Abbott Lawrence Lowell was actually a shameful reactionary and bigot.

Lowell’s favorite ancestors were military heroes, both of whom died gloriously in the American Civil War. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who commanded the first black regiment in the North, was killed while leading a gallant but unsuccessful assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in July 1863. Augustus Saint-Gaudens created a monument on the Boston Common to Shaw, who became the hero of Lowell’s major poem “For the Union Dead.” Shaw was connected by marriage to Major Charles Russell Lowell, the dashing cavalry officer known as “Beau Sabreur,” who was killed in Virginia while leading a charge on horseback in October 1864. James Russell Lowell called him “the pride of the family … by far, the best we had.”⁹

Lowell’s great-grandfather, the first Robert Traill Spence Lowell, had been the founder and first headmaster of St. Mark’s prep school, which both Lowell and his father attended. When Lowell walked near Eliot House with T. S. Eliot, whose cousin Charles W. Eliot had been an innovative president of Harvard, the older poet struck a chord with Lowell by exclaiming, “Don’t you loathe to be compared with your relatives?”¹⁰ When Eliot said he was delighted to find that two of his relatives had been savaged in a review by Edgar Allan Poe, he was also slyly hinting that his literary ancestors were important enough to be reviewed by a great writer. (Eliot, another New Englander influenced by the South, left Harvard to study at Oxford and never returned to finish his doctorate.)

Lowell portrayed himself as an aristocratic descendant, bearing his personal genealogy like Aeneas carrying old Anchises from the flames of Troy. With great subtlety, he both exploited and repudiated, embodied and rejected his family traditions, rebelling against its ancestral values and spiritual emptiness, its tensions and pretensions. David Heymann defined these traditions as “businesses, banks, mill towns, society balls—the mordant proprieties of Brahmin wealth, the classbound symbols of a universal order … the excruciating rites of high WASP gentility, with its aristocratic trappings and special advantages, its incivility, despair, and moral disarray.”¹¹

Lowell’s guilt-ridden rebellion against his New England heritage was closely connected to his feelings about his family. He turned his back on the textile town of Lowell, Massachusetts, and Lowell House at Harvard, for the small and comparatively obscure Kenyon College in rural Ohio in order to study poetry with John Crowe Ransom. In the Midwest, his new teacher offered the descendant of Civil War heroes a completely different, reactionary Southern tradition that Lowell eagerly adopted, along with the honeyed, drawling accent that overlaid his native speech. Lowell’s mother and maternal grandparents had been born in North Carolina; and his Southern identity was reinforced by studying with Allen Tate in Tennessee and with Robert Penn Warren in Louisiana, by his father’s friend “Billy Harkness” who drank whisky to renew his Bourbon blood and by his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. The last three were all born in Kentucky, a state redolent to the Bostonian of bluegrass racehorses, tobacco fields, folk ballads, honeyed hams, sour mash whiskey, mint juleps, decaying plantations, feuding mountain men, honorary colonels, good ole boys and lost causes.

Lowell also rebelled against his WASP background and anti-Semitic parents by emphasizing in his essay “91 Revere Street” Grandmother Lowell’s grandfather, Mordecai Myers, a soldier, “a dark man, a German Jew.” This autobiographical memoir, featuring an ancestor whose existence embarrassed his father and infuriated his mother, began and ended with a discussion of Major Mordecai and his son Colonel Theodorus. Lowell wrote of their portraits, incongruously displayed by his family: “The artist painted Major Myers in his sanguine War of 1812 uniform with epaulets, white breeches, and a scarlet frogged waistcoat…. [He was] a Grand Old Man, who impressed strangers with the poise of his old-time manners.” A friend caustically commented that the portrait of Mordecai’s son looked like “King Solomon about the receive the Queen of Sheba’s shares in the Boston and Albany Railroad.”¹²

When Delmore Schwartz visited the family, Lowell senior kept remarking that the New York poet sounded “like a Jew” while young Lowell kept pointing to Mordecai’s portrait and insisting that he himself was one-eighth Jewish. Later on, Jean Stafford liked to call A. J. Liebling her “first completely Jewish husband.”¹³ In the latter half of the twentieth century intellectuals began to prize their Jewish connections. Iris Murdoch (who had several Jewish lovers) believed that “any worthwhile person ought to have at least some Jewish blood.”¹⁴ Like Lowell, his friend Mary McCarthy, Louis Simpson, the college president John Silber, Madeleine Albright, Tom Stoppard, Joyce Carol Oates, the film director Stephen Frears, Mary Gordon and Christopher Hitchens were all pleased to discover that they were, if not Jews, at least Jew-ish.

The paternal Lowells and maternal Winslows struggled to dominate and control Robert Lowell’s character and destiny. It’s not clear exactly where the Winslows stood in the hierarchy in Boston, “Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots, / And the Cabots talk only to God.” But more historically impressive than the Lowells, they resembled the family of the aristocratic Diana Spencer, whose ancient lineage was superior to the royal Windsors. Heymann wrote that the patrician Winslows, like the Lowells,

were early New England colonists, dating back to the Mayflower journeyman Edward Winslow (1595–1655), the Pilgrim father responsible for the colonists’ first treaty with the … Indians. Edward Winslow was three times the governor of Plymouth….

Mary Chilton, later married to the early settler John Winslow, was the first female to step foot off the Mayflower. Other notable Winslows … included Edward II, “a mighty Indian killer” and twice elected governor of Plymouth colony. His son, Edward III, was a high sheriff and a noted silversmith…. Also a ferocious Indian-killer was Josiah Winslow, commander-in-chief of the colonial forces in the brutal King Philip’s War [against the Indians in 1675–78]. Lowell’s mother was related to the New Hampshire frontiersman John Stark, a Revolutionary War brigadier general, who in 1759 founded the New Hampshire township of Starkstown, later named Dunbarton.¹⁵

The Winslows later paid dearly for their loyalty to the English Tories in the American Revolution.

Lowell’s most formidable Winslow relative was his grandfather Arthur (1860–1938). Born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the six-foot, self-made millionaire and mountain climber was educated at the University of Stuttgart and at MIT. A gold-and-silver mining engineer and geologist, he founded the Liberty Bell gold mine in Telluride, Colorado, and with Germanic efficiency tore the precious minerals out of the earth. Like Willy Loman’s older brother Ben in Death of a Salesman, Arthur was, in Lowell’s boyhood, “a stolid man, in his sixties, with a mustache and an authoritative air. He is utterly certain of his destiny, and there is an aura of far places about him.” Ben boasts, “when I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. And by God I was rich.”¹⁶ When Bob Lowell was away on sea duty in the Pacific, the powerful Arthur Winslow, the only surviving grandfather, usurped his son-in-law’s role in the family. After the death of his son Devereux, Arthur became the surrogate father of the Winslow Boy. When Arthur’s farmer, his chauffeur and even his wife mentioned Bobby’s father, they always meant his grandfather. In “Grandparents” Lowell openly cried out for the affection his mother failed to provide and parodied the marriage service by pleading, “Grandpa! Have me, hold me, cherish me!”¹⁷

II

It was usually considered quite shocking, at the beginning of the modern period, to publicly condemn one’s parents. George Orwell once startled a friend at Eton by cynically criticizing his parents: “He’d been the first person I had ever heard running down his own father and mother.”¹⁸ Ernest Hemingway—“the only man I ever knew who really hated his mother”—shocked John Dos Passos in the same way.¹⁹ But Lowell, who found his parents a source of inspiration, thought it quite natural to make searing revelations about them, and attack their characters and values in his poems and prose.

Bob Lowell’s father had died of pneumonia five months before he was born, and the posthumous only child was not a good father to his own son, Bobby. Raised by his mother, Kate Bailey Lowell, and his grandmother in Schenectady, the senior Lowell (1887–1950) came to Boston as a young man. He entered Annapolis when he was sixteen and earned an engineering degree from the Naval Academy in 1906. Since the navy needed junior officers, he graduated in three years (instead of four), a weak 62nd in a class of 87. The archivist of the Naval Academy wrote, “At that time, midshipmen had to perform two years of sea duty after the four-year course at the Academy. At the completion of the six years, they were then commissioned as ensigns.”²⁰

The matey familiarity, adolescent humor and satirical tone of The Lucky Bag, the Academy yearbook, portrayed Bob as a rather anxious and trifling nerd:

An out-of-hours grub fiend with a Terhunesque way of talking and an irrepressible giggle. Recites in an eager, apologetic manner. Tortures his neighbors with a noisy sea-going clock that has a constant error on U.S.N.A. Mean Time. Holds the record for frenching paps [kissing nipples], but is a statement adept and immune to the Santee, except the quarter deck. Electrician, First Class, and McKeehan’s partner in the construction of various heathenish contrivances. A constant fusser who sends flowers before and after taking out girls.

Albert Payson Terhune was the author of popular books about collies. Santee was the station ship used to punish disobedient midshipmen; the quarter deck housed the commanding officer.

Bob’s entry begins with a couplet from Alexander Pope’s “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”—“Eternal smiles his emptiness betray, / As shallow streams run dimpling all the way”—and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1. Charlotte’s Web, 1917–1954
• 2. Southern Comfort, 1930–1941
• 3. Jean Stafford, 1937-1948
• 4. Mania, 1949–1976
• 5. Elizabeth Hardwick, 1949–1970
• 6. The Heedless Heart, 1954–1970
• 7. Women Friends, 1947–1970
• 8. Caroline Blackwood, 1970–1977
• Appendix One: The Search for Lowell’s Lovers
• Appendix Two: Annotations to Lowell’s Poems
• Appendix Three: Robert Lowell vs. Lyndon Johnson
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Photographs Follow Page 142