The making of a poet: Robert Lowell’s posthumous ‘Memoirs’
Robert Lowell’s poet-friends mocked and envied his distinguished dynasty. Randall Jarrell exclaimed, “I’m sure the Lowells have all sorts of ancient Egyptian connections, were in the old days, Egyptians.” Elizabeth Bishop jealously told Lowell: “All you have to do is put down the names! And the fact that it seems significant, illustrative, American gives you the confidence you display.” But Lowell’s ancestry was also a curse. His menaced and menacing Memoirs on his family and frenzy, his melancholy expression of annihilating despair, explores the darkness in the human spirit. Written in the 1950s, it was recently discovered in Harvard’s Houghton Library; it has been excellently edited and just published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
The novelist Ford Madox Ford told the young Lowell that a writer needs memory more than anything else. Lowell’s lucid memory is visual, auditory, nervous and brooding. He describes his damaged childhood, mental breakdown and adult life in a psychiatric hospital. His conduct was usually ruled by conscience, but he was dangerous when instinct took over. In his manic cycle his mind raced ominously, he began affairs with just-met women, was overwhelmed by fantasies and hallucinations, and became violent. As he said of the suicidal poet John Berryman, you liked him, but also “liked him to live in another city”.
Lowell analysed and savaged his own complex character in a series of gunshot adjectives: “I grew up as an only child, one that was always fighting off his parents and yet rejoiced at holding the center of the stage. I became stubborn, dreamy, silent, gauche, cold, furious, charming for brief moments, impenetrable,” trapped in “passionate paralysis, paralyzed passion.” Troubled by his own erratic behaviour, he concluded, “peculiar is the unusual we laugh at.” As a boy he tried to imagine himself made of marble, invulnerable “like one of Michelangelo’s rugged, ideal statues that can be tumbled downhill without injury.” But later on, as he walked round and round the penitential courtyard of an asylum, like the downcast men in Van Gogh’s Prisoners Exercising (1890), he saw himself as “distant, thorny, horny, absent-minded, ineptly polite, vacantly rude.”
Lowell had a weak and emotionally remote father, combined with a powerful and emotionally oppressive mother. His father (also Robert), a posthumous child, entered the Naval Academy at fourteen, did graduate work at Harvard and MIT, and was an engineer, accomplished mathematician and wireless expert. Neither leader nor warrior, he wound up in a dead-end job as second-in-command of the Boston Naval Yard, forced to sleep on the base though he had a house and wife in town. Always slightly or obviously out of place, patronised and shamed by his wife, he tried to make himself “heroically nonexistent.” Lowell’s mother despised her husband and crushed him by stating, “Bob hasn’t a mean bone, an original bone, a funny bone in his body!” In his forties, Lowell noted, “Father’s soul went underground.” His last words, before “his third coronary thrombosis and abrupt, unprotesting death,” were “I feel awful.” Lowell didn’t know what to make of this diminished thing.
Charlotte, the rich, spoiled and selfish monster Mom who dominates Lowell’s retaliatory Memoir, was trapped with a miserable husband. She “married because she thought it was time to. She was not at all in love with the man, nor did she really admire him, but he seemed the best that was offered. . . . Having to live in constant companionship with this comparative stranger, whom she found neither agreeable, interesting, nor admirable, was a terrible nervous strain.” She had dizzy spells and hysterical outbursts, but confidently declared, “I am never sick.” Pregnant with her unwanted Bobby, she expressed prenatal hostility and wished she could die. Lowell’s parents often woke up their young boy by arguing until they were both exhausted. Charlotte flaunted her social superiority by rudeness to intimates, visitors and other navy wives. But “her haughtiness and chilliness came from apprehension. She would start talking like a grande dame and then stand back rigid and faltering, as if she feared being crushed by her own massively intimidating offensive.”
Charlotte took out her frustration, resentment and anger on her son, a helpless victim devoured by her love. Unleashing a cataract of condemnation, she made venomous comparisons, indulged in perverse meanness and humiliated him with acid teasing. As she “shrivelled him with basilisk looks of horrified love or loving horror,” Lowell saw her as a rusty hinge and scalding rod. Their quarrels were fierce, much worse than those of his parents. Charlotte and Bobby “loved knocking their heads together until they bled. Worn, jumpy, exhilarated from such bloodletting, we could not live a day without it.” He liked to hear stories about the Emperor Nero who built a death barge for Agrippina, his ruthless and violent mother. Lowell’s mother knew he wished she were dead. She tried to exploit his emotions and begged for his support when his father was absent. When she said, “Oh Bobby, it’s such a comfort to have a man in the house,” he defensively replied, “I am not a man. I am a boy.” Lowell’s response to Charlotte’s emotional suffocation perfectly matched Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s hate-filled description, in Death on the Instalment Plan, of a mother’s Laocoön embrace: “She hugged me so hard, with such a storm of emotion, that I reeled. The tenderness that welled up from her misshapen carcass had the strength of a horse.” After great pain, Lowell only felt more pain.
Lowell’s mother hurt him into poetry. After her death from a cerebral haemorrhage, when she could no longer torment him, he should have felt joyous relief. But instead of being freed from her stranglehold, he realised that he’d always wanted her to die. Overwhelmed by guilt, he had a major mental breakdown. He began to feel tireless and frenetic, madly sanguine, threatened and threatening, violent and vicious, and entered the Payne Whitney Clinic in New York for “all those afflicted in mind.”
Lowell’s Memoirs are full of characteristically bitter wit. The only connection of his Sunday School teacher to the Bible was his Adam’s apple. His wealthy and impressive grandfather, a rock of sobriety, was “a walking decalogue.” Father’s cheap naval underwear seemed to be “borrowed from an oriental insane asylum.” His parents’ honeymoon at the Grand Canyon “left them forever after with a feeling of gaping vacuity.” The erratic elevator to Hannah Arendt’s top-floor flat in New York “was brusque and unhurried; through my ineptitude, it made false premature stops.”
The second part of the book recalls Lowell’s teachers and intellectual development, his friends and pupils: Ford, Frost, Eliot, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman and Sylvia Plath. He had an electric and energetic mind, and his elegies are eulogies, suffused with affection. The tone is gentle, the emotions deeply engaged.
When the 20-year-old Lowell met Ford in America in 1937, two years before the older writer’s death, “he was out of cash, out of fashion, and half out of inspiration; a half-German, half-English exile in love with the French, and able to sell his books only in the United States.” The nearly forgotten author of The Good Soldier and Parade’s End had volunteered, in his forties, for active service in the Great War and been gassed. He was “large, unwieldy, wheezy, unwell . . . trailed by a legend of personal heroism and slump, times of great writing, times of space-filling, past triumph and past humiliation, Grub Street drudgery and aristocratic indolence.”
Robert Frost, “a man of many ruses, subtle surprises and weathered agility” had cunningly perfected his public image as a rustic New England farmer. Eliot warned Lowell, “you have to watch yourself with the old man, he is very wicked.” In a nicely balanced sentence, Lowell questioned Eliot’s papal pronouncements and religious torments: “Under the authority, something unreliable; fuming and smoking hell fires under the dandyism.” Thinking of Eliot’s wretched marriage and editorial burdens, Lowell said that he “took a crooked pleasure in his martyrdom, and he was perhaps too intolerant of egotistical exuberance” in men like Lowell. He concluded, “I have never met anyone more brilliant, or anyone who tried so hard to use his brilliance modestly and honestly.”
Lowell explained why Randall Jarrell—whom he’d lived with in John Crowe Ransom’s house when they were students at Kenyon College in Ohio—was stuck throughout his academic career in an obscure girls’ college in North Carolina. Despite Jarrell’s brilliance as a poet, critic, editor, teacher and wit, deans and department chairmen were frightened of him. They “found his frankness more unsettling and unpredictable than the drunken explosions of some divine enfant terrible, such as Dylan Thomas.”
Berryman, like Lowell himself, had “an indignant spirit born in him; his life was a cruel fight to set it free.” Sylvia Plath had attended Lowell’s writing class at Boston University. He described the attractive and ambitious poet as “willowy, long-waisted, sharp-elbowed, nervous, giggly, gracious—a brilliant tense presence embarrassed by restraint.” In her last great poems in Ariel she was “suddenly and recklessly sure of her force and dared to let herself go in a blaze of inventiveness.” Like Jarrell and Berryman, Plath killed herself. Thinking about himself as well as the poets, Lowell describes their character, defines their talent and mourns their fate.
Lowell’s valuable Memoirs, an unexpected gift, casts new light on his privileged and crippling background, his precarious life as a boy and bipolar man, his impressive intellect and shrewd insights.
Note
The editors have not noted many of Lowell’s allusions, from the Bible to contemporary advertisements, a characteristic technique that enhances the meaning of his writing:
50:8 up- Bully: Coined by Teddy Roosevelt as a positive exclamation.
68:2- Edward Gibbon, Autobiography: “I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.”
84:2 up- Ernest Seton Thompson, Wild Animals I Have Known (1898).
127:16- Emile Coué: “Every day, in every way, I am becoming better and better.”
142:12 up- John Dryden, “MacFlecknoe”: Never “deviated into sense.”
165:11-The Book of Common Prayer: “afflicted in body or in mind.”
166:17- Matthew 5:29: “if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out.”
175:11 up- Ivory Soap ad: “Ninety-nine and Forty-four One-hundreths Percent Pure.”
199:9-10- Reginald Heber, “The Missionary Hymn”: “Only man is vile.”
268:7- Psalm 137:1. “By the waters of Babylon.”
307:6- Lord Acton (not Edmund Burke): “absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has published Manic Power: Robert Lowell and His Circle and Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs.
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