In 1982, I wrote a piece about Ian Hamilton’s biography of Robert Lowell. The essay was published in the Voice Literary Supplement and turned out to be one in a sub-genre I called "the romance of being number two." In these pieces—for example on Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, and Lee Krasner—I looked at women in the generation before mine who were raised as almost a first principle to place the value of men before the value of women, including of course themselves. In their minds, their value is as Mrs. Him. Do they believe it? They believe it maybe sometimes, and they don’t believe it.
I wanted to understand the generation of our mothers, some of whom entered the women's movement, glad to share with other women they had been living in disguise. Other women of that generation were bitter and sneering about rethinking what a woman’s life could be. It made their choices look ridiculous and defunct.
Why revisit a piece that’s 40 years old? When I reread it I thought, damn, the issues are still so relevant. I’ve rewritten the piece somewhat, shortened it and spliced in comments from now.
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Robert Lowell died of heart failure in a taxi on the way from Kennedy Airport to the apartment where Elizabeth Hardwick lived, on west 67th Street. It was September 12, 1977, and he was 60 years old. At the time, Lowell was dissolving his marriage to Caroline Blackwood, whom he married in 1972. He was returning to Hardwick (and their daughter Harriet), to whom he’d been married from 1949 until the day of his marriage to Blackwood. Lowell had spent August with Hardwick in Maine and had publicized the reconciliation. Even so, in early September, back in England with Blackwood (and her three daughters and their son), he’d tried to persuade her to return with him to the States and continue their marriage. According to Blackwood, she said no. He grew agitated, paced the rooms, and drove himself into a frenzy of indecision. She left their country house for London, and Lowell decamped. He died holding a large parcel wrapped in brown paper. When Hardwick opened it, she found a portrait of Blackwood he’d brought back to New York to have appraised.
Lowell began taking lithium in the early 1970s. It took the edge of his mood swings. Before that he sometimes imagined himself Alexander the Great, Napoleon, or a modern tyrant such as Hitler. He married three writers—Jean Stafford was the first—and he had dozens of affairs. He would meet a young woman: a hospital attendant, a student, an admiring poet, an actress. He would fall in love, move in on her, and plan to end his old life and begin a new one. He would bounce between the women, growing more anxious, drunk, and sleepless. That’s when he’d lock people in rooms, or encircle them in his bear arms, or threaten another form of violence. Once he held Allen Tate above an open window while reciting one of Tate’s poems. He slapped Jean Stafford so hard he broke her nose a second time. The first time was when he drove their car into a wall. Police came. There were stays in mental hospitals.
Lowell’s nickname at St. Mark’s school was Cal—short for Caligula, or sometimes Caliban, meaning he was wild and shaggy, a footballing terror who loved tackling and bruising. For his contribution to the school’s literary review, Lowell wrote an essay called “War: a Justification.” He decided to become a poet when, in his last year at St. Mark’s, he met Richard Eberhart, a poet who had studied at Cambridge with I. A. Richards and William Empson. Lowell slipped on the suit of the literary life as if it were already hanging in his closet. He was a Lowell, after all, a close relative of James Russell Lowell and Amy Lowell. A Brahmin.
He went to Harvard more or less to pass the time while writing poems. The Lowell name cut a butter path to Ford Maddox Ford, and then to Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom. He traveled with Tate and Ransom to Tennessee and camped out on Tate’s lawn for two months. He liked the scent of celebrity. He enrolled at Kenyon college, where he met Randal Jarrell, Robbie Macauley, and Peter Taylor, friends he kept for a life, as well as a southern accent. And he met Jean Stafford, who was beautiful, talented, and willing to be number two. They married in 1940.
Lowell decided where they would live, what they would eat, what they would read, and how they would understand what they read. According to the picture that emerges from the biography of Lowell by British poet and critic Ian Hamilton, the women in Lowell’s life start off as lovely “girls” his mother hates. Somewhere along the line, the “girls” become women he has to betray with new “girls.”
Stafford was the only woman in Lowell’s life who threatened to steal his literary thunder when, in 1944, she became famous, unexpectedly, with the publication of her first novel, Boston Adventure. Lowell had a hit himself in 1946 with his second volume of poetry, Lord Weary’s Castle. There was a Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, a story in Life magazine about America’s new great poet, and a job as consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress. There was also a divorce and later a new woman named Elizabeth Hardwick, whom Lowell met at Yaddo.
Hamilton’s narrative crackles up to this part of Lowell’s life—about the first third of his nearly 600-page book. He appreciates Lowell’s achievement without overstating the case. From Life Studies (1959) on, Lowell’s subject was openly intimate experience. A biographer doesn’t have to search under beds or in attic trunks for dirt. Hamilton’s opinions about what he gathers come off shrinky. About Lowell’s mother, he writes, “Nor was Charlotte herself in need of any extra restraints on her own natural bossiness. She had a man she worshiped [her father]; now she wanted one who would unquestionably worship her.” Speaking of Lowell as a boy, Hamilton writes, “From a tender age, Lowell became a keen student of enslavement. And from his father he learned that decency and good intentions can be abject.”
Hamilton reports that Ann Dick, Lowell’s first fiancé, told him that she and Lowell had sex only once; she says Lowell came to her bedroom, announced he’d been “to a whorehouse twice” and proceeded to teach her what he’d learned. According to Jean Stafford’s account to friends, Lowell refused to have sex with her after their first year of marriage.
In 1943, Lowell became a conscientious objector and served six months in Danbury Penitentiary. He had tried (then failed) to enlist in 1942, in order to attend officer’s training school, but when he was finally called up, he changed his mind. In a letter he wrote to President Roosevelt, Lowell claimed that the U.S. demand for unconditional surrender by the Germans and Japanese amounted to the “permanent destruction” of those countries, a course he found violent and dishonorable. More than Lowell hated violence—his heroes had always been military heroes—he hated communism, Hamilton points out, noting that Lowell backed Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Hamilton: “Thus, America’s alliance with the Soviet Union would have seemed to him a repugnantly high price to pay for the defeat of Hitler.” In his letter to Roosevelt, Lowell says nothing about Hitler or Jews. According to many accounts, when he’d mention Jews—in manic states and when he wasn’t manic—he made the usual, anti-Semitic cracks that were okay in his circles.
We feel Lowell’s animal presence in Hamilton’s pages, the power on others of Lowell’s beautiful, wide-jawed face, lean body, and flying mass of hair. We see Lowell committed to art with a capital A, a man consuming all the air at cocktail parties and leaving others gasping like guppies out of the bowl. We see a man hurling his rage and temperament at the English language.
When Hardwick enters the story, the writing wilts and even shrinky judgments are left on the curb. He doesn’t want to rile her up. He drives away fast from the first time Hardwick and Lowell joined forces. It was in 1949, during their stay at Yaddo when Lowell began a campaign, endorsed by Hardwick, to oust the director, Mrs. Ames, because of her friendship with Agnes Smedley, a writer and communist who had recently visited China. In Lowell’s letter to the board of directors, he said that Yaddo was a “body” and called Mrs. Ames “a diseased organ, chronically poisoning the whole system, sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes almost imperceptibly, sometimes, as now, fatally.” Lowell next presented a case against Ames full of scurrilous allegations. A group including John Cheever and Alfred Kazin supported Ames, and the board refused to buckle under Lowell’s pressure. Hamilton: “The transcript of a meeting with the board makes fairly ugly reading.” How ugly is fairly ugly?
Hamilton adopts the voice of a TV news anchor, reporting events that are sometimes horrendous with a flatness that calls attention to the weird emptiness of the tone. The person, Lowell, gets lost in the public figure who corresponded with TS Elliott, Ezra Pound, and Edmund Wilson. Hamilton quotes from some letters not because they reveal much about Lowell but to emphasize his rank in the literary pantheon. The Lowell who weighed in on his times all but disappears until Hamilton recalls Lowell’s activism against the Vietnam war and quotes Norman Mailer’s smitten take on him from Armies of the Night: “Obviously spoiled by everyone for years, he seemed nonetheless to need this spoiling. These nerves—the nerves of a consummate poet—were not tuned to any battering . . . . [He] made no effort to win the audience, seduce them, dominate them, bully them, amuse them, no, they were there for him, to please him, a sounding board for the plucked string of his poetic line, and so he endeared himself to them.”
Hamilton can’t write because Hardwick is in his face, or on his shoulder, shaking her head and saying, in effect, forgetski with that detail, forgetski with that comment. He introduces Hardwick to the reader with brief remarks about her days as a critic at Partisan Review. There’s no description of what she looks like, no discussion of what she wanted from life when she met Lowell or of what she has wanted to achieve as a writer. It doesn’t cross Hamilton’s mind to take the writing of women seriously. He doesn’t mention Hardwick’s books or Caroline Blackwood’s novels, nor does he discuss what Lowell thought of their work.
You’re shocked. I know. Fainting with shock. Get up off the floor.
It’s difficult to write critically about people who are alive and whom you know. Hamilton doesn’t interpret the marriage between Hardwick and Lowell, although it’s the focus of the last two-thirds of his book. So I will.
Hardwick and Lowell were married for 23 years and closely involved for 28 years. This marriage is the most significant emotional relationship of Lowell’s life. He matured as an artist while he was with Hardwick. The marriage enabled Lowell to go on working during some of his bleakest periods. There appears to have been an inexhaustible supply of talented, loving women willing to take care of him, and while he was with other women Hardwick didn’t pull out. She was with him while he wrote most of his best work, and their marriage became the subject of much of it. The marriage allowed Lowell to be Lowell. It affirmed his image of himself, and it affirmed his thinking.
Instead of thinking about the marriage—and maybe Hamilton doesn’t know how to think about the marriage—he gives the reader Hardwick’s version of the marriage, expressed mainly through her letters. What you get is a museum of the past as if the past is not a museum. Sometimes it’s hilariously off in tone. Describing Lowell’s rages against Stafford, Lowell’s friend Frank Parker says: “Mind you, we none of us ever thought Cal was crazy or anything. He was just a violent man doing his own thing.”
Hardwick’s version of the marriage comes down to this: There was a genius who behaved cruelly because of a chemical imbalance in his brain that caused manic depression. There was a wife who was devoted to the genius. The wife who was devoted to the genius suffered indignities because the goods of her marriage outweighed the bad things that happened to her. The good things are referred to sometimes but are not laid out on the table. The memories that are vivid are mostly not good. Sometimes the wife becomes angry and exasperated. Always her concern for Lowell, the man and the genius, matters more than everything else.
Writing to a cousin of Lowell’s in 1958, Hardwick describes the aftermath of an affair Lowell had: “These damned girls complicate everything; they keep me from acting in his best interests often because I don’t want to seem pushing or jealous.”
OMG. Elizabeth Hardwick. For fuck’s sake. Pushing or jealous! I feel for her. I know what she’s writing is crazy, but I feel for her the way you might feel for a person who has entered a cult and is still in the I have drunk the Kool-Aid phase. The Kool-Aid phase is what Simone de Beauvoir wrote a very long book about called The Second Sex (1949)
In 1961, addressing a returning Lowell, who had recently left her for the poet Sandra Hochman, Hardwick writes: “I hope you won’t become so vexed with the horrors of settling into your new life that you’ll want to flee it. By the way, do you think you would be happier with a little apartment of your own? . . . . I really want to make the effort to give you—or allow you—the life that is most healthy for you and am going to make a really superhuman effort to improve as a wife so that your home and daily life won’t make you sick again.”
OMG. Elizabeth Hardwick. Walk me through how this statement could work. What I mean is, if you squashed a thing under your boot, and it said it would try to do better not to make you squash it again, wouldn’t that make you want to squash it again?
Responding to a request made by Lowell to come home in 1965, after his affair with an actress named Vija Vetra, Hardwick writes: “Cal, my heart bleeds for you, but remember what greatness you have made of your life, what joy you have given to all of us. My purpose, beloved, is to try to see what can be done to help us all. I hate for you to get sick. I would kill myself, if it would cure you. There must be something more we can lean on—medical, psychiatric, personal, the dearest love goes out to you from your apartment here on 67th Street. I long to talk to you again.”
Oy.
Reading these letters, as I first did in 1982 and again now, you have to wonder about the role Hardwick thought she was supposed to play. The entire life of a woman in a marriage like this is a faked orgasm. Did she really feel no jealousy about Lowell’s affairs? Did she really believe his home life had made him sick? How did she think she could possibly have improved as a wife? Lowell sure knew how to pick them. Jean Stafford, writing to Lowell in 1947, strikes a similar, Stepford note: “What do I care if Randall likes my books? Or anyone? Why should it console me to be praised as a good writer? . . . . There is nothing worse for a woman than to be deprived of her womanliness. For me, there is nothing worse than the knowledge that life holds nothing for me but being a writer.”
Hardwick spends enormous energy helping Lowell. He isn’t just her husband. He’s a great man. When she suffers and sacrifices, it’s also for art and culture. This sense of her role seeps through most of her letters. She doesn’t mention the possible up side of this for her. If you do a lot for someone else’s work, you don’t have to do your own work. Lowell hung out with bright and powerful people in the arts and politics. The large world was made available to Hardwick as Mrs. Famous Writer. Maybe that was worth holding onto, whatever the cost.
Did she have affairs while Lowell was screwing (or maybe only cuddling) around? She doesn’t say and Hamilton doesn’t ask. He writes about Hardwick’s sacrifices as if they were a natural, wifely thing, maybe a bit on the Griselda side, but still, ordinary wifely. And natural. Women’s lives aren’t all that real to Hamilton, so women’s unrealness to themselves isn’t something he notices. Nor that Hardwick is pushing an agenda for how women should be.
In Seduction and Betrayal (1974), Hardwick reads Ibsen’s plays as if her life were a gloss on them, particularly Hedda Gabler. She works so hard to prop up her role as artist’s wife she can’t see what Ibsen was actually writing about. Describing the character Thea, Hardwick writes: “One of those opportunities for transcendence suddenly changed Thea’s nothingness to the most joyful promise. She meets Eilert Lövborg . . . a thinker, an artist, a bohemian, a sort of Nietzschean figure whose career and accomplishment have been spoiled by drinking. Thea falls in love with him. But it is more than romance; it is a mission, a sacred trust, or one of those dedications that challenge the very essence of a superior woman. Lövborg is more than a romantic man; he is the instrument through which Thea can find some purpose for her own intellectual possibilities. She is a sort of graduate student; she believes in learning, in writing, in art, and culture. The flames of a passionate collaboration consume her. To live with Lövborg, keep him from drinking, help him to bring into actual being the books he has wanted to write: this mission absorbs her whole heart.”
Later in the essay Hardwick calls Thea’s attachment to Lövborg and his work “radical.” And about Hedda, she writes: “Her determination to destroy the worthy, loving, serious Thea, if for no reason or gain to herself, comes from a nature not only damaged but fundamentally low . . . It is Iago’s destructive compulsion, rooted at one moment in a triviality, and at another in something more threatening but never adequate to the destroying impulses. There is waywardness in her never to be explained . . .”
Hedda is destructive and unlikable, yes, but Hardwick is wrong about her “waywardness.” It’s what the play is about. Hedda is the woman who has come to a dead end in the suburbia of possibilities available to 19th Century women. Femininity is the constricting, provincial outpost far from the bustling center that men inhabit. Unlike Hardwick, Hedda doesn’t appreciate Thea’s devotion, because Hedda doesn’t want to help Lövborg. She wants to be Lövborg. Knowing she cannot, that she’s uneducated and enfeebled in other ways, she turns violent. At the opening of the play, Hedda is already in a state of terminal depression. The symptoms are easy to recognize. But to see Hedda’s predicament, you have to sympathize with her refusal to play the parts of wife and disciple. Hedda is smart enough to know what she’s been denied and too weak to change the world. She has every reason to hate Thea for being a sellout, from Hedda’s perspective, and for making a meal from the almost nothing women get to eat.
It’s odd that Hardwick was mystified by Hedda, since she sounds so much like Lowell’s mother, Charlotte, a woman described as sharp-tongued and who felt tethered to a man she considered weak. A woman who spent her unused intelligence on molding her son. Hardwick sees the Heddas in life as driven to destroy the plucky, resourceful Theas, and if ever there was a Hedda who got her revenge on a Thea, it is Charlotte on Elizabeth through the instrument of her son.
Hardwick’s position on femininity argues against her own ambition to be a writer. It’s always that way with smart women who drink the Kool-Aid. Lowell, on the other hand, wrote in the interest of his own interests. He was tolerated because he was talented, a Lowell, good at wheedling, terrifying when denied, and fragile. There was always someone ready to listen to a poem, type it up, and carry it to the post office. When Lowell was disenchanted, he grew cool and dismissive. Lovers were cruelly rejected. Sometimes a lawyer would write a curt note. The ease of Lowell’s life didn’t make him crazy, but it may have contributed to his never getting well. The milieu that accepted his hostility as normal colored his interpretation of his life.
In June 1967, Lowell started writing sprawling, 14 line poems, chocked with personal minutiae, newspaper headlines, bits of conversations, and his ongoing autobiographical absorptions. These poems were influenced by John Berryman’s Dream Song, by William Carlos Williams’s Patterson, and Ezra pound’s Cantos. For the rest of his life, Lowell would be prolific in this free form. As Hamilton puts it: Lowell was “breaking loose from the requirement never to write badly.”
Lowell’s last ten years are more pain-wracked and reckless than even the preceding ones. In his work he sometimes sees his psychological state as an endowment. As he once told Berryman: “These kinds of knocks [his and Berryman’s breakdowns] are almost proof of intelligence and valor in us.” Lowell used his poetry to record his despair and destructiveness to others, wishing to make his behavior if not acceptable at least human in his eyes.
Some of these poems were published under the name Notebook (1969). In Lowell’s last book, Day by Day (1977), he wrote about his method in the poem “Epilogue”:
But sometimes everything I write
With the threadbare art of my eye
Seems a snapshot,
Lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
Heightened from life,
Yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave it to the sun’s
Illumination
Stealing like the tide across a map
To his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
Warned by that to give
Each figure in the photograph
His loving name.
“Why not say what happened?” is a wonderful line. Lowell’s desire to reveal what he knows without masks or modesty, without inhibition or self-censorship, steered his best writing. The question is, how much of himself did Lowell know?
The reasons he decided to publish The Dolphin (1973) look like the same old same old Cal serving Cal. The poems are who should I pick, Hardwick or Blackwood? Hardwick (called Lizzie) is the vengeful, ousted wife. Lowell quoted from her telegrams and phone conversations and published it all without asking her permission. Before going to print, he showed the manuscript to several friends. Elizabeth Bishop wrote: “One can use one’s life as material—one does, anyway—but these letters—aren’t you violating a trust?” Bill Alfred, a colleague from Harvard, said he thought the poems would “tear Elizabeth apart.” Stanley Kunitz wrote: “Some passages I can scarcely bear to read: they are too ugly, for being too cruel, too intimately cruel. You must know that after its hour has passed, even tenderness can cut the heart.”
(He’s right, and I wish I had learned that earlier in my life, but that’s an entirely irrelevant story. Apologies.)
The Dolphin was published along with two other manuscripts, History and For Lizzie and Harriet. Most reviewers found the books difficult to swallow, despite strokes of linguistic brilliance. Adrienne Rich nailed the problem of the project in the American Poetry Review, saying that the “same unproportioned ego” that went ahead with the publications was “damagingly at work” in the poems. Lowell tried to anticipate and answer critical objections in the final poem of The Dolphin:
I have sat and listened to too many
words of the collaborating muse,
and plotted perhaps too freely
with my life,
not avoiding injury to others,
not avoiding injury to myself –
to ask compassion . . . this book,
half fiction,
an eelnet made by man for the
eel fighting—
My eyes have seen what my
hand did.
Lowell was widely attacked for his cruelty and mean-spiritedness in these books. He says in the poem he’s not looking for compassion, but that’s what he had always received no matter the barbarisms. He had to think the painful things he did could be vindicated, could even be transformed into useful instruments, if the end result was art. He might have thought even Hardwick would come around. After all, going public with the things he did was only a variant of the things he did. And she had always forgiven him.
Lowell’s voice in his poems is amazed, vindictive, accusing—and gratuitously hurtful—long before The Dolphin. In his poem about Ford Madox Ford, for example, he writes of “practiced lies” and “Flattering the others and me we’d be great poets/How wrong you were in their case.” Maybe Lowell thought it would be okay to keep making misery if he could express exactly how he did it. It might have been something, and maybe a kind of art, if he’d known he had excessive power to wound because he’d been allowed to stay dumb and beautiful—and if he’d had the guts to say that.
Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick
WOW. just wow. such a fantastic piece, laurie. even tho i've read bits n bobs of some of this in earlier posts (maybe FB?), i could not stop reading. so many great lines: "Lowell slipped on the suit of the literary life as if it were already hanging in his closet." "The Lowell name cut a butter path..." "What you get is a museum of the past as if the past is not a museum." "...if you squashed a thing under your boot, and it said it would try to do better not to make you squash it again, wouldn’t that make you want to squash it again?" "The entire life of a woman in a marriage like this is a faked orgasm."
The comedic timing of this break: "You’re shocked. I know. Fainting with shock. Get up off the floor." i'm up! are you writing a book about "the romance of being number two" compiling these contemplations about hardwick, debeauvoir, krasner, etc? i would DEVOUR it.
How painful it is to read the powerful truths you have written about here.
How much the power dynamics have/have not changed.
Katie Couric posted an article on her news site just today about the growing trend to be a traditional housewife. (Hashtag tradwife!)
Talk about feeling the one-two punch in one morning. Woah!