Wild Man

By Melvin Maddocks

ROBERT LOWELL by Ian Hamilton Random House; 527pages; $19.95

To those who never saw Robert Lowell on the occasions when he was out of his mind, the best poet of his generation seemed almost too proper a Bostonian. Students in his classroom at Boston University during the '50s (including Sylvia Plath) found him "diffident" and "reserved." His "mild, myopic manner" hardly placed him in the company of the wild men of letters, like his friends Delmore Schwartz and John Berryman. But Lowell, as the English poet-critic Ian Hamilton reveals in this melancholy biography, was the wildest of them all.

The son of a naval officer and one of those ramrod matriarchs who appeared to have walked straight from the Mayflower to Beacon Hill, young Bobby seemed to be born with sand under his skin. The man who would go to jail as a conscientious objector in World War II was a schoolboy brawler nicknamed "Cal" after the most violent of Roman emperors, Caligula.

In late adolescence two strains appeared. Young Lowell abandoned the purely physical world of football and fighting and became a fanatical reader, of Job, of Shakespeare and then of any poetry he could find. He also began to exhibit signs of manic depression. Both aspects showed in his pursuit of a poetic career; in 1937 he journeyed to Vanderbilt University outside Nashville to visit his idol, Allen Tate. He pitched a tent on the poet's lawn for three months.

In 1940, after breaking Jean Stafford's nose in an automobile accident, Lowell, 23, married her. Then during a squabble, he broke her nose again, with his fist. For a while the strange marriage worked. She wrote her bestseller Boston Adventure. He converted from Episcopalianism to Roman Catholicism and labored at his poetry as if salvation depended on it. At 29 he published his first book of poems, entitled Lord Weary's Castle, a quirky, indelible mix of Boston locales and Old Testament theology. A Pulitzer Prize followed.

But one spring night in 1949, while visiting the short-story writer Peter Taylor, Lowell's quiet psychosis went public on the streets of Bloomington, Ind. Until he was jailed, he wandered the city raving against devils and homosexuals. Similar episodes followed wherever he traveled: in Boston, in London, in Salzburg, in Buenos Aires. At some point he would fall in love: with a nurse, an airline stewardess, a Latvian dancer. It hardly mattered. She would become the angel of his "rebirth."

It was a brutal cycle, but Lowell always managed to emerge intact, writing away as if the poet and his demons were connected in some dark Dionysian manner. His second wife, the novelist and critic Elizabeth Hardwick, describes him in 1958 at the time he completed Life Studies. After three months in an institution, "the papers piled up on the floor, the books on the bed, the bottles of milk on the windowsill, and the ashtray filled. He looked like one of the great photographs of Whitman. . ."

As time passed, the cycles of fury and sanity related to Lowell's development as a poet. Something of the fervid excitement of the early poems disappeared forever. He welcomed middle age as if it were synonymous with sanity. Settling down in Boston, he became an Episcopalian again. In 1957 he fathered a daughter, Harriet, by Hardwick.

But Cal the wild man could not so easily be put to rest. In 1967, when Lowell marched on the Pentagon to protest Viet Nam, Norman Mailer noted "a Cromwellian light in his eye." Two years later, Lowell found one last angel of rebirth: Lady Caroline Blackwood, Irish aristocrat and novelist. She bore him a son, Sheridan, when he was 54, but it was an ill-fated union. Lowell drove Caroline to drink, and she drove him, white-haired and ailing, back to Hardwick. He was on his way to her apartment on Manhattan's West Side in a cab when he slumped over with a heart attack and died at the age of 60. The cabby thought his fare had fallen asleep.

Hardwick once said that being relieved of her husband's manic presence was like coming out of a cave. But she also counted him "a delight, a wonderful pleasure to be with" when the demons were sleeping. Reading Hamilton's moving account leaves a reader too sobered for glib generalizations about the wound and the bow, the trade-off of art and life. But, along with the poems, Hardwick's hard-earned judgment can stand on its own: "All of this had, in my view, much that was heroic about it."

--ByMeMnMaddocks

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