newcritics

Jean Stafford was already gone from Robert Lowell’s life when Elizabeth Bishop entered into it and he entered into hers.  So Stafford makes fleeting appearances in his letters to Bishop.  When I started grad school Lowell and Stafford were my ideal of a bohemian romantic couple.  I had no good reason for this.  I hadn’t read any of Stafford’s fiction yet and, although I owned a copy of Lowell’s selected poems and had read it through diligently, I doubt I understood more than a few lines, and all of those were from For the Union Dead. 

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
a girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens’ shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half of the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city’s throat.
Its Colonel is a lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound’s gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man’s lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die-
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

I hardly knew Lowell as a poet.  I knew him much better as a playwright.  And as a character in Mailer’s Armies of the Night.  I think I was smart enough not to trust Mailer’s characterization of him.

My feelings about Stafford and Lowell were based entirely on a photograph of the two them with their friend Peter Taylor.  At the time I hadn’t read any of Taylor’s short stories either.  Amazingly, I was considered very well-read by other members of the Writers’ Workshop.  The photograph of Lowell and Stafford and Taylor reminded me of the picture of Robert Redford, Katherine Ross, and Paul Newman as Sundance, Etta, and Butch.  I don’t know what I was wishing for.  A life of robbing banks and trains and coming home at night to write for a while and then stay up late arguing about literature?   I’ve never had a romance that included either bank robbery or poetry, mine or hers.  I dated actresses and dancers and one painter, but no poets or fiction writers, and none of the girls I was serious about, including the one I married, was very bohemian.  I’m not much of a bohemian myself.

At Iowa I was Peter Taylor to Steve Kuusisto and his girlfriend’s Lowell and Stafford, or was I Butch to their Sundance and Etta.  I talked to Steve on the phone this morning about Lowell.  I forgot to ask him if he and his girl back in Iowa robbed any banks.

Steve admires Lowell no end.

Talking to him I remembered that I have a non-connection connection with Lowell.  He taught at Boston University.  Long before I got there, but he’d died only a couple of years before, so you’d think he’d have been a topic of conversation around the creative writing department.  I swear I never heard his name mentioned.  In fact, I didn’t know he’d taught there until I got to Iowa where a girl in the poetry workshop told me about it.  “Oh,” she exclaimed at a party, “You went to BU?  Did you take any courses with Robert Lowell?”  I’m pretty sure she knew Lowell was dead, but she was hazy on the dates.  I didn’t let on that what she was saying was news to me.

I told Steve that it still surprises me that Lowell was such a non-presence at BU.  He was not a forgettable guy.  I speculated that he had offended the entire faculty and two decades later they hadn’t gotten over the hurt.  Steve said he didn’t doubt it, academics are easily offended and Lowell was a difficult character.  He went on to describe Lowell in words I should have written down and that I can’t remember now because they’ve been over-written in my memory by Lowell himself.  After I spoke to Steve I read one of Lowell’s essays on his friend Randall Jarrell.

He could be very tender and gracious, but often seemed tone-deaf to the amenities and dishonesties that make human relations tolerable.  Both his likes and dislikes were a terror to everyone, that is to everyone who either saw himself as important or wished to see himself as important.  Although he was almost entirely without vices, heads of colleges and English departments found his frankness more unsettling and unpredictable than the drunken explosions of some divine enfant terrible, such as Dylan Thomas. 

Lowell’s description of Jarrell is pretty close to what I now recall Steve saying about Lowell, except for the part about being almost entirely without vices, and Lowell was known to explode drunkenly from time to time.

I imagine that Lowell inspired jealousy among his colleagues too.  He was tall and handsome and famous.  The prettiest and smartest co-eds must have flocked to his classes.  Around him the professors probably felt like fat bald squirrels in the presence of a fox.

I’m skipping around in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. It’s Spring of 1962.  Bishop’s poem First Death in Nova Scotia has just been published in the New Yorker.  Lowell’s been sick and sicker.  He’s down to a hundred and seventy three pounds.  He’s been dreaming of Philip Rahv.  He’s amazed at how many of their old Bohemian friends have become snobs and social climbers.  Lowell’s coming to Brazil, maybe.  Bishop is planning a trip to Italy, but not while Lowell’s in Brazil of course.  She’s trying to get him a cheap rate at a swanky hotel in Rio.  Lowell tells her that when he comes it will be with his family in tow and they’ll be taking along a Radcliffe girl to look after Lowell’s little daughter.  At this point, Lowell was teaching at Harvard not BU.  Based on nothing else but my own imagination, I’m thinking the Cliffy went along to look after Lowell too.  This is probably unfair of me.  Lowell often behaved badly towards the women in his life, but I don’t know if he ever behaved that badly and in that way.

Later, when I mentioned to the blonde about Lowell’s absence from my memories of BU, she was dubious.  Her professors talked about him, she said.  She can’t recall anything particular that they said, but she’s sure they were all proud of having been his colleague and, in one case, his student.  She thinks I just must not have been paying attention, which could be, since not paying attention is something I was very good at when I was an undergrad.

It’s June, 1956.  Lowell’s wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, is expecting.  It’s very hot in Boston where they live.  Bishop’s last letter reported the arrival of the Lowells’ Christmas present.  Lowell can’t believe it took so long to get to Brazil where Bishop’s living.  The present was a pitcher bought at a shop near the State House.  That shop was still there when I lived in Boston thirty years later.  I wonder if I’d gone in there and asked they would have remembered Lowell.

While I was on the phone with Steve I put on my boots and parka and went outside to wait for the mail.  Our mailbox was plowed in and has iced over and our carrier cannot get her truck close enough to reach it and deliver our mail.  I kicked at the snow piled up against the box to test if I could budge it with a shovel.  Pellets of ice sprayed away from the heel of my boot with a hiss.  Despite the cold it was a good day to be outside.  The sun was brilliant and the sky an almost summery blue.  A cardinal was singing in a bush by our fence.  Both Lowell and Bishop could have done something with that cardinal and the snow and the bright blue sky.  They were good with animals.

Lowell:

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air–
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

Bishop:

Now, it’s all right now
even to fall asleep
just as on all those nights.
–Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.

A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus’s hot hood.

Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man’s voice assures us
“Perfectly harmless. . . .”

Some of the passengers
exclaim in whispers,
childishly, softly,
“Sure are big creatures.”
“It’s awful plain.”
“Look! It’s a she!”

Taking her time,
she looks the bus over,
grand, otherworldly.
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?

“Curious creatures,”
says our quiet driver,
rolling his r’s.
“Look at that, would you.”
Then he shifts gears.
For a moment longer,

by craning backward,
the moose can be seen
on the moonlit macadam;
then there’s a dim
smell of moose, an acrid
smell of gasoline.

It’s January, 1949.  Bishop is learning how to play pool from a Polish girl and the elevator boy at her hotel.  She’s either in New York or Key West, I can’t tell which and she doesn’t say and the editors aren’t helpful.  Must be Key West because she’s thinking of going bone fishing in June.  I didn’t think there were any buildings tall enough to need elevators in Key West.  But it’s a hotel.  Who wants to climb steps in the Florida heat carrying luggage?  She has to be in Key West.  Sunday she is going to the cock fights.  She calls herself a female Hemingway.  Meanwhile, Lowell has seen Djuna Barnes kissing T.S. Eliot.  He says that Bishop and Peter Taylor have always made him feel like something of a fake and he loves them both for it.  He had to interrupt his letter at that start because he smelled something burning and had to go look to see what was on fire.  Turns out it was the pocket of his jacket.  He’d stuffed a lighted cigarette into it.  There were some matches in the same pocket.  He’s been reading Moliere and thinks he’s swell.

It’s January, 2009.  Sixty years later.  I’m not in Key West.  There are no cigarettes burning holes in any of my pockets.  I think Moliere is swell.  I don’t want to imagine T.S. Eliot kissing anyone.