Letters: American poet Robert Lowell's correspondence reveals an artist with a complicated life and a common touch.
He was better than good, less than great. Pungent phrase-making, forceful rhythms, crackerjack technique and a credible public rhetoric all contributed to the high reputation Robert Lowell's poems enjoyed at the time of his death (aged 60) in 1977. Few reputations live on poetry alone, and Lowell's prominence owed as much to his deeds as to his words: he was jailed as a conscientious objector during the second World War, persistently protested against the Vietnam War, refused an invitation to the White House Festival of the Arts in 1965 because of "dismay" at President Johnson's foreign policy, and campaigned for the anti-war Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 presidential campaign. Born into a patrician Boston family, he knew and elegised Robert Kennedy, attended Jacqueline Kennedy's birthday bash ("a little lurid and in bad taste in a world of poverty and blood"), played a starring role in Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night and was crowned in laurel on the cover of Time magazine.
Robert Lowell's mastery of a plausible public voice was not something even his most clairvoyant first readers could have foreseen. His early poems can be intensely, densely private - if only because the unventilated armour-plating of their language makes minimal concessions to clarity. By contrast, his breakthrough book Life Studies (1959) cuts straight to the core of experience. Although that experience is itself personal and familial, the hard-won style of Life Studies - deceptively direct, yet always capable of eloquence and flourish - served him well when he came to write his resounding public poems, not least the plangent title-work of For the Union Dead (1964). Life Studies and For the Union Dead are still the essential books, buttressed by individual successes including the turbid Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket; Waking Early Sunday Morning, a minuet segueing into a dance of death; and some of the freehand adaptations and approximations of foreign-language poems assembled in Imitations (1961).
Elizabeth Hardwick - the poet's loyal and lenient, stoical and forgiving spouse for more than 20 years - is said to have quipped that his Collected Poems took as long to edit as it had taken Lowell to write. By the time that 1,000-page brick of a book had been laid before readers in 2003, it was like a reserved judgement, delivered too belatedly to fully rehabilitate Lowell's reputation. The New York School poets, especially John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara - the latter despised Lowell's "plain bad" writing and treated his best-known poem Skunk Hour as a stinker - are now the dominant influence on younger American poets; and the poems of Elizabeth Bishop (the exiled recipient of Lowell's most admiring and most unguarded letters) have soared in status skyward like the fire balloons in the poem she dedicated to Lowell: "Climbing the mountain height . . . it's hard/ to tell them from the stars."
ROBERT LOWELL'S LETTERS, meticulously edited and annotated by the American poet Saskia Hamilton, present a less frenzied impression of the life than is generally found in portraits of this artist. For much of his adulthood - until 1967, when the drug lithium slowed the cruel cycle - Lowell endured a manic breakdown virtually every year; consequently, he has been typecast as a poet who was, as it were, one couplet short of a sonnet: undressing to climb equestrian statues in Argentina, despatching telegrams to the Pope, jaywalking through New York's traffic and always, always falling madly - the mot juste for once - in love with some hapless young woman (every mental breakdown threatened a marriage break-up).
While groups of letters in this book are manifestly manic, complete with giveaway volleys of exclamation marks, Lowell is usually encountered at his most sane: courteous, considerate and solicitous; a poet who was happiest when quietly reading and writing at his sunlit desk in Maine "surrounded by chintz and Cousin Harriet's sombre 19th-century oils of Alpine valleys".
All three of Lowell's wives (Jean Stafford and Lady Caroline Blackwood, as well as Hardwick) were writers, as were most of his close friends. Because of his political activism, one hesitates to say that he regarded life as a synonym for art; but, in his own words, he was a "gravely impractical" person for whom "nothing is so solid . . . as writing". Even a baby's arrival prompts literary jokes: while Hardwick was pregnant, he confidently predicted that their child would be "a prodigy whose first words will be Partisan Review"; after that child - their daughter Harriet - was born in January 1957, he described her as looking "more like Dylan Thomas than, say, Audrey Hepburn".
When handwriting letters, Lowell preferred a "soft lead pencil" to permanent ink and would not have viewed his correspondence as part of his indelible literary output. His bulletin-board epistolary style - chatty and gossipy - was energy-efficient, allowing his best resources to be held in reserve for poetry. From the late 1960s onward, many letters concerned the hundreds of sonnets which he published in haste and repented at leisure, revising and re-ordering with the obsession of a poet who could devise limitless alternatives for every usage he employed. Lowell was a willed poet more than an inspired one; so, a production line of habitual sonnets became an attempt to create an inspiration machine. The dogged, episodic, solipsistic poems which emerged were dappled intermittently with brilliance but monotonous and inert, crying out for divine afflatus rather than monkey-wrench revision.
WHAT MAKES LOWELL'S own account of the editorial evolution of his final sonnet sequence (and penultimate collection) The Dolphin (1973) both fascinating and damning is the fact that we can read the limp justifications he advanced in support of his cruel and indefensible decision to splice private letters from Elizabeth Hardwick into the sequence (which documented the end of their marriage and celebrated his new life with Caroline Blackwood). Even if that artistically uneven and ethically dubious book had been a masterpiece, I would still agree with Elizabeth Bishop that "art just isn't worth that much".
On the whole, however, Lowell's awareness of his own fallibility and mental fragility ensures that these 711 letters - the first from Harvard College, the last from Castletown House - exhibit far more charm and empathy than arrogance and presumption. At his most charming, he could make neglect seem the highest form of devotion; apologising for not replying sooner to William Carlos Williams, he provides the perfect alibi we can all now employ: "What better way of keeping your friends in mind than always being on the point of writing?"
Dennis O'Driscoll's New and Selected Poems was published last year. He received the 2005 EM Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
The Letters of Robert Lowell Edited by Saskia Hamilton Faber, 852pp. £30