The first question to ask about Paul Mariani’s biography of Robert Lowell is why there should be a new life of Lowell so soon after Ian Hamilton’s biography, Robert Lowell. Hamilton’s revelations about Lowell’s disruptive manic episodes and sexual adventures were startling when published in 1982. What can Mariani add to this scandalous presentation of the great American poet’s foibles? As it turns out, he has much to add. Mariani has more interviews with those who had a close relationship with Lowell and more letters to and by him, and he can draw on Lowell’s own autobiographical fragments, memoir, and writings. The result is likely to become the definitive biography of Lowell. It sheds important light on Lowell’s relationship with such figures as Randall Jarrell, Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick, and especially Lowell’s last wife, Caroline Blackwood. Mariani’s Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell is not a critical biography, but it is as full a rendering of Lowell’s life as readers are likely to get.
Robert Lowell was born in 1917 into the famous Lowell family of Boston. He was not a member of the main branch of that famous family. His father, Robert Trail Spence Lowell III, was a naval officer rather than a writer or intellectual; he had attended United States Naval Academy at Annapolis rather than Harvard University and rose to the rank of lieutenant commander by the time he left the navy. He was, however, a weak and dilatory man who was dominated by his wife, Charlotte Winslow Lowell. She was a formidable woman who could not bear to be separated from Boston or her father, Arthur Winslow. She forced her husband to retire from the navy so that she could remain in Boston and he could earn a better living at Lever Brothers, a job he soon lost. Her relationship with the future poet was fierce and smothering. Mariani is quite good at describing the conflicts in the family; he brings out fully the oedipal conflict between Robert Lowell and his mother and the struggle he had to free himself from her domination.
The family conflict came to a head when Lowell, in his first year at Harvard, struck his father and knocked him down. The elder Lowell had written some insulting remarks to the father of Robert’s fiancée, Anne Dick. Lowell’s parents were opposed to the engagement and the marriage, and the incident resulted in Lowell’s leaving Harvard. He went to the home of Allen Tate, a poet and critic, in Tennessee. When he was told there was no room in the house and the only way he could stay there was to pitch a tent, Lowell bought a Sears Roebuck tent and camped out on the Tates’ front lawn. He then entered Kenyon College to be with the American poet and critic John Crowe Ransom.
Lowell’s parents were shocked at his leaving Harvard. Yet it was a successful move for him. Tate and Ransom were accomplished poets and critics, and they served as more useful father-figures for Lowell than his weak father. At Kenyon Lowell also embarked on lifelong friendships with the poet Randall Jarrell and the fiction writer Peter Taylor.
After he was graduated summa cum laude from Kenyon, Lowell met and married the fiction writer Jean Stafford. Mariani provides an excellent overview of their stormy relationship, especially through quotes from letters and interviews with Stafford, whose remarks are always witty and sometimes acute. It was during this period that Lowell became a convert to Roman Catholicism. He was seeking some absolute authority, especially one he could use in his poetry, and also a way to cut himself off from his parents. Charlotte Lowell had once said that Catholicism was a religion for Irish maids, and now her son was a communicant. Stafford also became a convert, although not as zealous a one as Lowell.
Lowell refused to accept induction into the military in World War II. He based his decision on the bombing of civilians in Germany and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s policy of unconditional surrender. Mariani reproduces the manic letter Lowell wrote to the president to justify his actions. As a result of his refusal, he was sentenced to a year in a federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut.
During this period, he began writing his earliest important poems and gathered enough poems for his first volume, Land of Unlikeness (1944). The poems were clogged and obscure, as Lowell was following the example of Tate and the dictates of the New Criticism. The book received respectful reviews; the critics noted a new and unpolished voice in American poetry. Mariani does not discuss the poetry at any length, and he fails to cite many of the reviews the books of poetry received. He tends to quote the poems throughout the book as if they exemplified aspects of Lowell’s life. Sometimes this works brilliantly, but at other times it can be misleading.
Lowell’s next book, Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), was a far more accomplished work, but the poems were still filled with Catholic imagery and often obscure. The book received the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and adulatory reviews. Lowell had established his reputation as an American poet. His private life was troubled, however, by the earliest signs of the manic-depressive illness that would plague him for the rest of his days, and his marriage to Stafford was dissolved in 1948.
Lowell met Elizabeth Hardwick at Yaddo, a writers’ colony. In one of his earliest manic episodes, he thought that the director, Elizabeth Ames, was a Communist and should be driven out. Nothing came of these accusations, but the stance of absolute knowledge and power that Lowell assumed here would be duplicated later with more troublesome results. He married Hardwick in 1949; the relationship was often troubled, but it marked the most secure and fruitful period in Lowell’s life.
Lowell’s next book of poems, The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951), was a disappointment. It included a narrative told in couplets that was almost impossible to decipher. Lowell needed a new style, a new subject, and, perhaps, a new father-figure. He was to find all of these in William Carlos Williams, a poet who had rejected the principles of the New Critics and the example of T. S. Eliot. Williams’ free verse and personal poetry helped Lowell find his new style and subject in Life Studies (1959).
Life Studies was written after the death of Lowell’s parents. The volume included poems on both his mother and his father, as well as poems on his manic episodes and his experiences in prison and in mental institutions. The book was immediately recognized as setting a new direction for American poetry. Mariani offers helpful insights on the origins of the book; he discusses Lowell’s interest in Williams’ poetry and W. D. Snodgrass’ Heart’s Needle, as well as his ambiguous attitude toward the Beat poets. He says little, however, about the poems that make up Life Studies, although some of the poems are cited as evidence of Lowell’s relationships with others.
Lowell had by now received every significant honor that was available to an American poet. One critic called the period “the Age of Lowell.” Yet his personal life remained troubled. His relationship with Elizabeth Hardwick was solid, and they now had a daughter, Harriet; however, Lowell was subject to manic attacks, followed by hospitalization, and a recovery marred by depression. These attacks occurred about once a year, and new drugs such as Thorazine and lithium were not able to control them. While he was in a manic state, Lowell would often announce that he was leaving his wife to marry a young woman. Naturally, this threatened his marriage. Mariani quotes from a number of letters and interviews with Hardwick which clearly show her sympathy with Lowell’s problem but also her belief that the marriage could not last under these conditions.
Lowell’s next book was For the Union Dead (1964), but Mariani has almost nothing to say about changes in Lowell’s style or the reception of the book. He is better on the new political direction in Lowell’s next book, Near the Ocean (1967). Lowell was disturbed by the Vietnam War and opposed it vigorously. He joined the March on Washington, although he was not arrested for his participation. Later, he was to support the quixotic candidacy of Senator Eugene McCarthy.
Lowell changed his style once more with Notebook 1967-68 (1969), which later became Notebook (1970) and then History (1973). The book is a long sequence of blank-verse sonnets. He believed that the structure of the sonnet would give him the enclosure of a fixed form in which he could roam free with his loose blank verse. Many critics have seen this experiment as a failure, and Lowell did need to revise his first attempt in this form many times.
In 1970, Lowell met and had an affair with Lady Caroline Blackwood. This relationship was not like those he had with many young women while he was in a manic state. His marriage to Hardwick was weakening, and he seems to have felt invigorated by the sexual relationship with Blackwood. This part of Lowell’s life is very sketchy in the Hamilton biography, but it is fully rendered by Mariani. The relationship and eventual marriage constituted a disaster for Lowell. He had a series of manic episodes that frightened Blackwood, and he never felt at home in England.
His next book, The Dolphin (1973), celebrated Blackwood as the “Dolphin” who had cured Lowell by going “for my body.” The book also had a number of poems about Hardwick and the breakup of their marriage. Some of the poems even included parts of letters that Hardwick had written to Lowell. She felt humiliated at the revelations and embarrassed at the printing of her private correspondence. Lowell made it clear that he intended the book as an updated version of George Meredith’s Modern Love (1862), another book of sonnets about the dissolution of a marriage. Soon after, For Lizzie and Harriet (1973) was published and included sonnets that had been taken from Notebook. It dealt with the painful break with and separation from Hardwick and Harriet.
As Mariani shows, Lowell remained conflicted even after the marriage to Blackwood and the birth of their son, Sheridan. Lowell remained in touch with Hardwick and seemed to be torn between the two women. Some of this conflict is reflected in Lowell’s last book, Day by Day (1977). Here Lowell finally dropped the sonnet form and recovered an ease of tone and voice that had been lacking in his work since Notebook.
By 1976, it became clear to Lowell that his marriage to Blackwood had been a mistake. He returned to the United States to teach at Harvard and made plans for a reunion and perhaps a reconciliation with Hardwick. In 1977, however, he suffered a heart attack in a taxi outside Hardwick’s apartment in New York. He was sixty years old, honored as one of America’s finest poets. Though his achievement was marred by an illness he could not control or avoid, he made great poetry out of his struggle with mental illness, his troubled relationship with his family, and his shifting relationships with the women he loved and married.
Paul Mariani’s Lost Puritan is clearly the best biography that the reading public has had and is likely to have of Robert Lowell. It is clearly written and is filled with observations and assessments of the poet by those who were closest to him. In addition, Mariani’s sympathy for Lowell and his problems comes through his narrative of Lowell’s life. Many literary biographies, including Hamilton’s Robert Lowell, do not have that sympathy and affinity with the subject of their research. In a preface, Mariani speaks about his first encounter with Lowell’s poetry. He was overwhelmed by the poems, and something of that reverence is evident in this thorough biography. Other biographies of Lowell will probably be written, but it is doubtful that any of them will add much to this scrupulously researched effort by Mariani.