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

shaving mirrors,
    and see the shaky future grow familiar
    in the pinched, indigenous faces
    of these thoroughbred mental cases,
    twice my age and half my weight. We are all old-timers,
    each of us holds a locked razor. 2
    The thread of marine images—seals, turtles, sperm whales—is insinuated with a casual air, but it serves to lend true elegiac weight to the near-cartoon images of Stanley and Bobbie: two highborn and historical New England “wrecks,” each of them kingly, thoroughbred and ossified in the habits of their pampered childhoods, and each of them therefore a terrible mirror image for the strutting, grinning, cock-of-the-walk St. Mark’s and Harvard poet: “We are all old-timers, / each of us holds a locked razor.” (But could Stanley or Bobbie ever hope to pull off the rhyming triumph of those last five lines—“faces,” “cases,” and then the “a” sound of “age” and “weight” supplying the hoist forward to “locked razor”: a final rhyme superbly softened, inexact and ominous?)
    “Waking in the Blue” is twenty-five lines shorter than the original “To Ann Adden,” and the missing lines are those that Lowell specifically addressed to his new love. It is not known whether or not Ann Adden saw “her” version of the poem; if she did, she probably didn’t like it much. In spite of its air of high-spirited infatuation, its transmutations are surely too awesomely grand-scale: Ann Adden becomes lioness, Valkyrie, goddess—“massive, tawny, playful, lythe”: a high price to pay for happening to be of Nordic origin. And there is a distinct note of menace in Lowell’s reference to “earlier, now defunct, claimants” to the insignia she jingles on her wrist. She, too, the poem seems to say, will shortly be “defunct”—but only when Lowell has tired of his mischievous “charade,” or has become bored with her both as metaphor and as reverential playmate . William Alfred saw “the real Cal” looking out at him from within the mania; Ann Adden might well have felt the same when Lowell addressed her as
    My Goddess…. But where in literature
    has a goddess been able to stand up
    to flesh and blood?
    A lioness, then. With Descartes
    I can almost lower animals to the realm of machines.
    And sure enough, by the time Lowell was finished with his poem, he was also finished with Ann Adden: there is a near-chilling efficiency in his final excisions—“Waking in the Blue” reveals no trace of its first “inspiration.” Ann Adden is both written out and written off. (Although later on, it should perhaps be said, there is further cause for uneasy admiration: in a poem called “1958,” published in 1964, 3 and in “Mania” [1969], 4 Lowell resurrects half a dozen of the discarded “Ann Adden lines” and blithely recasts them into elegy.)
    In January 1958, though, Ann Adden was still a lively presence. Although she was adopting a fairly guarded style—“This time you must get well and I must not interfere”—she was still a regular visitor to McLean’s, and was assiduously following a reading program Lowell had devised for her; Hitler, she wrote to him, “has the greatest retrospective power,” and she was also deep in Dante: “The X Canto is a beauty. Only sorry you’re not present to read the Italian aloud.” After Dante she would “delve into” Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. But what, she wondered, ought she to do about “the Picasso? …. If you want it sent to Marlborough Street, you better say something to Lizzie. I don’t know where you ordered it or what you want me to do.” 5
    For Hardwick, the girl’s adoring presence was pure irritant, making it almost impossible for her, or any of Lowell’s other “real-life” friends, to help him much: “These damned girls complicate everything ; they keep me from acting in his best interests often because I don’t want to seem pushing or jealous.” 6 In early February, Hardwick retreated to New York and rested