Mad, good and dangerous to know
Sam Leith
THE LETTERS OF ROBERT LOWELL edited by Saskia Hamilton Faber, £30, pp. 852, ISBN 0571202047 ✆ £26 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 ‘T omorrow morning some poet may, like Byron, wake up to find himself famous,’ wrote Randall Jarrell, ‘for having written a novel, for having killed his wife; it will not be for having written a poem.’ Jarrell’s cynicism is too slick, too rueful; but it does snag something in Robert Lowell, as it does in several of the American poets of his generation. Lowell was, at his best, a towering poet, but his public fame often rested on other things: that he was Boston posh; that he publicly thumbed his nose at the government; that he was, above all, mad.
He was all these things, and a great poet, too. It’s easy myth-making to say that Lowell’s genius and his madness went hand in hand, but it’s certainly the case that they took turns at the helm. At one point, he writes to Pound that the writer’s colony Yaddo is ‘a sort of St Elizabeth’s without bars’ (history doesn’t record whether Idaho Ez found that funny); later, Lowell reports of his own psychiatric hospital that it is ‘not unlike Yaddo without race courses, night life and literati’.
The cycles of his manic-depressive illness steal through the notes to the letters. ‘Possibly written while mildly manic,’ will preface one note. ‘Written during an acute manic episode,’ will head the batch that follows — urgent telegrams breaking appointments; staccato notes of wild enthusiasm; effusive love-letters to unannounced women. Then come the recantations, the apologies, the wretchedness of recovery. And a sense, between the lines, of the terrible, terrible hurt done.
Breakdowns? Everyone was at it. As Randall Jarrell cracked up, or John Berryman suffered an alcoholic collapse, or Theodore Roethke underwent another manic episode, the letters and the lacunae in the letters tell the story. Thus Roethke: ‘Well, it’s happened again! Same old routine: 4 or 5 city police (as the boogs say) dragging me off to the same old nut-bin.’ But it wasn’t madness that made Lowell a poet. It was the absolute, lifelong, obsessive determination with which he set about being a poet. He talks often of ‘vocation’. The first letter in this book is an earnest, arrogant pash-note to Ezra Pound, asking to be taken on as a disciple. Letter after letter that follows in Saskia Hamilton’s edition (which comes with good notes, though I’d have liked fuller, and a superbly interesting introduction) to Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich — at one time or another pretty much any of the considerable poets then writing — shows a man voraciously reading and aggressively wrestling with style and form. And, lord, did he work hard!
That determination also, manic-depression aside, seems to have constituted, or to have been the symptom of, a wider form of madness. In this riveting, voluminous, tremendously sad and angering collection of his letters, Lowell often emerges as the villain of his own story: a man who even when sane seems to have found it hard to believe that other human beings, off the page, really existed.
One of the defining characteristics of Lowell’s Life Studies poems — Allen Tate deplored it — was the exceptional cold ness of his eye. If these letters are to be read as the document of a man, it wasn’t a stylistic tic. You can see the style of Life Studies — with its unimaginable, out-of-nowhere lines of declarative flatness — latent here in his prose well before it broke through the dense rhetoric of his early verse. He writes about his father’s death as if watching himself through the wrong end of a telescope. Reporting his mother’s death to Elizabeth Hardwick, his second wife and a woman for whom the word ‘long-suffering’ does not seem close to adequate, it is the bizarre postscript that leaps out: ‘PS: Mother’s doctor is Max Beerbohm’s.’ Among the strongest in Life Studies are the desolating, comic final lines of ‘Sailing Home from Rapallo’: ‘In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother’s coffin,/ Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL./ The corpse/ was wrapped like panettone in Italian tinfoil.’ The original is here, in the letters: ‘The casquet itself had a big brass crucifix on it, and mother’s name misspelled Charlotte Winslon.’ [She was a Winslow.] So much here is amazing. There are glints and phrases that you can see reconfigured in the poems: ‘tired of turmoil’; ‘jolting revaluation’. During his first breakdown he writes, ‘I’m in an odd place but Arms [his alter-ego, an imaginary bear] is with me with no one to talk to.’ I hear in that, proleptically, the chill of ‘Skunk Hour’: ‘I myself am hell/ nobody’s here.’ Or, in recovery, the tense ambiguity of the end of ‘The Exile’s Return’ (‘Pleasant enough,/ Voi ch’entrate, and your life is in your hands’) is echoed in his, ‘However “the world is all before us” before us all and life and happiness.’ You see him spotting Lowelly details — a broken bust of Dante, say, at Yaddo, full of cigarette butts. And there are funny sketches of other writers — Flannery O’ Connor is introduced as ‘a former Kenyon class-mate of mine, who at the age of six was in a Pathe News Reel for having a chicken that walked backwards’ — and amusing asides. Before a trip to the USSR, he’s advised to drop his nickname: ‘PS: I’m told I mustn’t let anyone call me Cal in Russia because it means something like dogshithead.’ Lowell is effusive in his protestations of love (especially to Bishop), and fulsome in his praise, constantly telling other poets that they are the best currently writing in the language (especially Bishop), but you often sense that what is most felt in these letters is ambition. Even Harriet, the daughter on whom he dotes, appears as a sort of curious animate object — at arm’s length; someone who might say something funny for the poet in him to use.
He is passionately self-absorbed. Even his sympathy soon turns round on himself. His letter of condolence to Theodore Roethke’s widow — ‘I feel as though a great chunk of myself has dropped into the pit’ — becomes, a couple of sentences in, the occasion for an exercise in writerliness: ‘Outside, there’s a close cold Maine sky, smoke, smoke-coloured clouds, a sense of summer’s having drifted between our fingers into winter.’ Often, it’s simply comical. ‘Sorry about your kidney,’ he writes to Hardwick. ‘I live on mutually antagonistic pills. Nothing much wrong though but teeth. I feel my mouth is falling to chalk but the dentists will find only one urgent hole.’ He describes himself at one point as ‘callous’ and in a 1969 letter to Stephen Spender half-apologises for what he calls his ‘exuberant callousness’. Lowell doesn’t always seem, sincerely, to mean it as a term of deprecation, admiring elsewhere the ‘callousness and bravado’ of Pound. Cal was callous.
Nowhere is that more obvious than in the letters during the early 1970s, discussing the sonnet sequences that were to be published in The Dolphin. In these he took the confessional mode of the earlier poems further, not only describing his final absconding from his marriage to Hardwick, but quoting from her private letters to him and, where it suited his poems, altering them.
They represented the major moral crisis of his poetic career; and yet the only person for whom they don’t seem to have been a major moral crisis was the poet. He was presented with a choice between kindness to someone to whom he had done terrible harm, and his reputation as a poet, and he chose the latter unhesitatingly.
He was bloody determined not just to write, but to publish that book. He sent copies of the manuscript to Bishop and a couple of others (though not, apparently, to Hardwick). When they wrote back Bishop most famously and most forcefully — to tell him that he simply could not publish these poems, he wriggled. He’d argue that the artistic form of his book demanded them; that writing but not publishing would be unbearable to him; and if all else failed, claimed one of his correspondents, ‘He said, “All right, I won’t print that one,” but he pretended I’d got the pagination wrong and so it was another poem.’ As an adolescent, besotted with Lowell, I remember thinking there was something heroic about the wreckage he produced in the name of art; that his greatness as a poet outweighed other moral considerations. That was a very teenage view. It was one Lowell himself never grew out of. In his letters the self-exculpation and special pleading — rhetorically effective in the poems — are naked, and he seems nothing short of monstrous. In a letter to Blair Clark, he at once presents what he has done as a consequence of his nature (i.e. something for which he can’t be held truly responsible), and asks to be pitied for the results: ‘I increasingly fear the blood I’ll have to pay for what I have done, for being me [my italics].’ It sends you back to those late poems spoilt, self-pitying, bogus — with a jaundiced eye. ‘I have ... plotted perhaps too freely with my life,/ Not avoiding injury to others,/ Not avoiding injury to myself — / To ask compassion ...’ Quite so. What a phoney. What a dogshithead. ‘Art just isn’t worth that much,’ wrote Bishop in anguished italics. She was right.
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