Lowell – ‘My mind’s not right…’

True. It was however right enough to make Robert Lowell one of America’s greatest poets. ‘Seeing less than others can be a great strain,’ he once wrote, hinting at something deeper than myopia.
‘Looking back over thirty years of published work my impression is that the thread that strings the work together is autobiography.’ He could have added history, that of his family and his country – the one a shadow outline of the other. According to the critic John Bayley, ‘The Lowell family itself was a more potent inspiration than any literature.’ His masterpiece is Life Studies – they are close to home. Few parents or indeed grandparents have been more assiduously studied than those of Robert Lowell and, as in ‘Dolphin’ and ‘Day By Day’, few wives have been portrayed with quite such forensic love as those of Robert Lowell. He poses, in poetry, Cocteau’s challenge: ‘how far one can go too far’. And answers it thus: ‘you want the reader to say, this is true’ and ‘to believe he was getting the real Robert Lowell’. It’s a line in which self-granted absolution mingles with strange Pirandello-like reverberations concerning self and persona.

Who was the real Robert Lowell? In Lowell’s case, since he was often mentally ill, the question has a tragic dimension. He was born on 1 March 1917, into American aristocracy. His family included the
Cabots, who talked only to the Lowells, and the Lowells, who talked only to God. His father was Robert Traill Spence Lowell Snr, ‘who hadn’t a mean bone, an original bone or a funny bone in his body’ –
a relative’s cruel, though it would seem accurate description. His mother, whose family came over on the Mayflower, was the formidable Charlotte Winslow, about whom her son would write two fierce
poems of love and frustration: ‘To Mother’ (‘Becoming ourselves, / we lose our nerve for children’) and the brutally titled ‘Unwanted’. Charlotte was a marital manipulator par excellence: ‘she saw her husband
as a valet sees through a master.’ She dominated him and she effectively thwarted his naval career. His father declined smiling from job to job ‘until in his forties his soul went underground’: Lowell’s
haunting description in his prose poem ‘91 Revere Street’. Even as a child – ‘always inside me is the child who died’ – he wondered, why doesn’t father fight back?

Nothing was going to thwart Robert Lowell Jnr. At school he was physically powerful and psychologically manipulative. He was nicknamed Caligula, mercifully shortened to Cal. In adolescence and
young manhood his rages and his recklessness were such that help was sought from Dr Merrill Moore, a poet-psychiatrist, and eventually, later, from Carl Jung: ‘If your son is as you have described him, / he is
an incurable schizophrenic.’ Sadly, nothing could save Lowell from severe mental illness and in his thirties he would tumble into the abyss of psychosis, often hospitalised for his own protection. ‘I believed I could stop cars and paralyze their forces by merely standing in the middle of the highway; that I was the reincarnation of The Holy Ghost – To have known the glory, violence and banality of such an experience is corrupting.’ However, within the kingdom of poetry, perhaps Lowell sensed he would work miracles or perhaps he sensed salvation. Certainly from the moment he started writing poetry aged seventeen, encouraged by the poet-teacher Richard Eberhart, he demonstrated startling intensity and utterly determined will. When told by the initially bewildered poet Allen Tate of New Criticism fame, whom he’d followed from Harvard to Tennessee, ‘we really haven’t any room – you’d have to pitch a tent on the lawn’, Lowell did precisely that. At Kenyon College they would analyse poetry down to its last Empsonian ambiguity. ‘It’s such a miracle if you get lines that are halfway right’ – though miracles are often troubling and they troubled him. His poems were worked and re-worked. ‘You didn’t write, you re-wrote,’ his friend Randall Jarrell commented.

In 1946 his collection Lord Weary’s Castle was published. It was in style and content American heroic, brilliant, allusive, technically dazzling, spiritual (he’d converted to Catholicism with typical intensity)
and difficult. ‘The Lord survives the rainbow of His will’, the famous last line of ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’, challenges the reader, who is best advised to resist and simply surrender to its beauty. The collection won ecstatic reviews and the Pulitzer Prize. He was barely thirty and he’d arrived – a literary star. In fact he’d achieved notoriety some time earlier with a letter to a president. Lowell, who’d volunteered in 1941 and had been turned down due to his eyesight, was drafted in 1943. ‘Dear Mr President, I very much regret that I must refuse the opportunity you have afforded me in your communication of August the 6th 1943 for service in the armed forces.’ Lowell attached his Declaration of Personal Responsibility. ‘We are prepared to wage war without quarter or principles to the permanent destruction of Germany and Japan. I cannot honourably participate in a war whose persecution constitutes the betrayal of my country.’ It was headline news. LOWELL SCION REFUSES TO FIGHT! He was sentenced to a year and a day in the Federal Correction Centre in Danbury, prior to which he spent a few days in West Street in the cell next to Lepke of Murder, Inc. – who was eventually executed. Lepke to Lowell: ‘I’m in for killing. What are you in for?’ ‘I’m in for refusing to kill.’

Twenty-two years later, in the sixties, Lowell’s involvement in anti-Vietnam demonstrations led to another, though calmer letter to a president, Johnson this time, turning down an invitation to the
White House Festival of the Arts. It was again front-page news. By then of course he was America’s most celebrated and most controversial poet. The publication in 1959 of Life Studies was a seminal moment for Lowell and for American literature. Anna Swir, the eminent critic, has written that the first duty of the writer is to create an individual style and the second – more difficult – to destroy it. Lowell did just that. ‘I’d been on tour and reading aloud and more and more I was simplifying my poems.’ They were indeed simpler, less allusive; they were also infinitely more disturbing. They inspired, among others, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, both of whom he taught at Harvard. They gave rise to the term ‘confessional poetry’, a term he hated but it has some accuracy. One critic described them as a form of ordered bleeding onto the page. Life Studies was followed in 1973 by the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Dolphin, which revealed, perhaps too brutally, the private pain of all concerned when Lowell (previously married to the short-story writer Jean Stafford) left his long marriage to the literary icon Elizabeth Hardwick for the stunningly beautiful, Booker Prize-winning novelist Caroline Blackwood,
whom he subsequently married.

‘(But our beginnings never know our ends)’ is Eliot’s chilling warning. Robert Lowell died of a heart attack in a taxi in New York in 1977. He was just sixty years old. He was carrying a brown paper parcel containing Lucien Freud’s portrait of his then wife, Caroline Blackwood, which Grey (Lord) Gowrie, one-time chairman of Sotheby’s, had procured for Lowell. It’s a heartbreaking scene, and Lowell knew himself to be heartbreaking. He was right. He was also a great poet.

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