Robert Lowell: A Biography by Ian Hamilton Read Free Book Online

in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: he told her that Merrill Moore might be willing to “take her on” as “a voluntary patient.” Moore also intended to improve the quality of her social life:
    He has several “voluntary” jobs up his sleeve and is going to pass on all his literary invitations to you, i.e. going to parties, not giving them. Keep on the point of marriage! Perhaps you’ll get an invitation to dinner with Robert Frost in a few days.
    Reading over the “Fugitive” poets on the train I decided Allen Tate is very topnotch, a painstaking tecnician [ sic ]and an ardent advocate of Ezra Pound. Three things I want to do. I doubt if Moore is in sympathy with any: Reach Ezra, keep up my organization, and have you prepare for our marriage. 26
    Notes
    1 . Revised and printed as The Mad Musician, in Collected Verse Plays of Richard Eberhart (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), pp. 131–66. Eberhart, in a letter to I.H., November 26, 1981, writes: “What you ought to do is reprint my entire play about him … wherein I try to tell the truth way back then.”
    2 . Blair Clark, interview with I.H. (1979).
    3 . R.L. to Arthur Winslow, May 18, 1935 (Houghton Library).
    4 . Frank Parker, interview with I.H. (1980).
    5 . This and subsequent quotations from Anne Dick are from an interview with I.H. (1979).
    6 . Charlotte Lowell to R.L., August 1936 (Houghton Library).
    7 . Anne Dick to Charlotte Lowell, July 1936 (Houghton Library).
    8 . R.L. to Frank Parker, n.d.
    9 . R.L. to Richard Eberhart, August 23, 1936 (Dartmouth College Library).
    10 . R.L., “Visiting the Tates,” Sewanee Review 67 (1959), pp. 557–58.
    11 . Ms in Richard Eberhart collection (Dartmouth College Library).
    12 . Robert Lowell Papers (Houghton Library).
    13 . Anne Dick, interview with I.H.
    14 . R.L. to Richard Eberhart, n.d. (Dartmouth College Library).
    15 . Charlotte Lowell to Anne Dick, 1936 (Houghton Library).
    16 . R. T. S. Lowell to Mrs. Evans Dick, December 22, 1936 (Houghton Library).
    17 . R. T. S. Lowell to Evans Dick, December 23, 1936 (Houghton Library).
    18 . Evans Dick to R. T. S. Lowell, December 23, 1936 (Houghton Library).
    19 . Robert Lowell, Notebook 1967– 68 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), p.37.
    20 . R.L. ms, c. 1956 (Houghton Library).
    21 . Frank Parker, interview for BBC TV (1978).
    22 . Frank Parker, interview with I.H. (1980).
    23 . R.L. to Sarah Cotting, March 24, 1937 (Houghton Library).
    24 . R.L. to Mrs. Arthur Winslow, March 24, 1937 (Houghton Library).
    25 . R.L., BBC radio portrait of Ford Madox Ford, c. 1960.
    26 . R.L. to Anne Dick, n.d. (Houghton Library).

15
    During his first week in a locked ward at McLean’s, Lowell wrote a draft of the poem he later called “Waking in the Blue.” The first draft is titled “To Ann Adden (Written during the first week of my voluntary stay at McLean’s Mental Hospital),” and it reads as follows :
    Like the heart-toughening harpoon,
    or steel plates of a press
    needling, draining my heart—
    your absence …..
    What use is my sense of humor,
    basking over “Jimmy”, now sunk in his sixties,
    once a Harvard ail-American (if such were possible from Harvard)
    still with the build of a boy in his twenties,
    as he lolls, ram-rod,
    with the luxuriance of a seal
    in his long tub,
    vaguely sulphurous from the Victorian plumbing.
    His bone brow is crowned with a red golf cap
    all day, all night,
    and he thinks only of his build,
    gobbling ice-cream and ginger ale—
    how to be more shut off from words than a seal.
    Thus day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean’s;
    it ends with ‘Hughey’ 29,
    looking like Louis XVI
    released from his white whig [ sic ],
    reeking and rolly-polly as a sperm whale,
    as he careens about naked,
    horsing down chairs.
    This fine figure of bravado ossified young.
    In between the limits of day, here,
    hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts,
    and slightly too little non-sensical bachelor eyes
    of the R.C.