Last week, at about this time, I was writing about the poet Robert Lowell and the poet Elizabeth Bishop and Lowell's plans to visit Bishop in Brazil. Specifically, I wrote this:
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.
It might have been unfair of me to think that Lowell and the babysitter from Radcliffe were having an affair practically right under his wife's nose, and I don't know if Lowell ever behaved that badly in that way, but this afternoon I started Paul Mariani's biography of Lowell, Lost Puritan
At the moment he is trying desperately to recover from an attack of "pathological enthusiasm," characterized---as usual---by violence and the violent attempt to start over, remake himself, get the picture of who he is clearer in his fractured mind. To do this he has already abandoned his latest "girl" and is trying hard to swim back to his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. Once more the "girl" someone younger than himself, who does not know just how ill her lover is. There is too the problem of language. The girl's name is Giovanna Madonia. She is Sicillian, a former student of his, married, with very little English. Four months before, when his mind began speeding out of control, he inundated her with letters, pressing her to marry him and start life over again. Thinking him in the hospital for a rest, she has written to say that she is waiting for him.
The moment is July 1954. Lowell is in the Payne Whitney Clinic in New York City. He is shot full of Thorazine. Mariani's paragraph seems to confirm that Lowell was capable of behaving that badly, but it is not about his behaving badly, it is about his having gone off the rails again. The "girl" is exposition. I don't know why Mariani keeps putting "girl" in quotes, but I suspect it will be explained. Probably it's Lowell's own locution. He may have referred to all his lovers as his girl, as if they were all the same person, each one representing to him, as Giovanna apparently did, a way back to his own youthful innocence and a new beginning. The "girl" is a supporting character in a larger story, the story of a hurried trip to Italy to reach his mother's bedside before she died. He didn't make it in time. That story is part of the larger story of Lowell's breakdown and commitment to Payne Whitney, and that story is part of the larger story Mariani's about to tell, the serial disintegrations and re-integrations of Robert Lowell as he moves from being one kind of poet into being another. Lowell could never start his life over, but his art was reborn again and again.
The moment Mariani is attempting to pin down is the moment when Lowell found the new voice and vision he needed to begin writing the poems that became Life Studies 
No point to this post. It's an excuse to post a poem. The poem isn't from Life Studies. It's from For the Union Dead, but it fits the moment. "The Old Flame."
My old flame, my wife!
Remember our lists of birds?
One morning last summer, I drove
by our house in Maine. It was still
on top of its hill -Now a red ear of Indian maize
was splashed on the door.
Old Glory with thirteen stripes
hung on a pole. The clapboard
was old-red schoolhouse red.Inside, a new landlord,
a new wife, a new broom!
Atlantic seaboard antique shop
pewter and plunder
shone in each room.A new frontier!
No running next door
now to phone the sheriff
for his taxi to Bath
and the State Liquor Store!No one saw your ghostly
imaginary lover
stare through the window
and tighten
the scarf at his throat.Health to the new people,
health to their flag, to their old
restored house on the hill!
Everything had been swept bare,
furnished, garnished and aired.Everything's changed for the best -
how quivering and fierce we were,
there snowbound together,
simmering like wasps
in our tent of books!Poor ghost, old love, speak
with your old voice
of flaming insight
that kept us awake all night.
In one bed and apart,we heard the plow
groaning up hill -
a red light, then a blue,
as it tossed off the snow
to the side of the road.
And you thought this post had no point?
I think that poem is Lowell defending Lowell's behavior.
Penultimate stanza, Lance. Re-read it with his abominable behavior in mind. He's practically pleading, and finds his pleas unrequited.
Posted by: actor212 | Sunday, February 08, 2009 at 08:31 AM