(9 of 11)
And when he wrote, the result often surfaced not only in recollections of childhood (/, bristling and manic,/ skulked in the attic) but in raging descriptions of his tormented later years. In Life Studies, he portrays a wife, murmuring about her husband, who
". . . drops his home disputes,
and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,
free-lancing out along the razor's edge . . .
What makes him tick? Each night now I tie ten dollars and his car key to my thigh . . .
Gored by the climacteric of his want,
he stalls above me like an elephant."
In the same collection, he could be familial and tender: Gone now the baby's nurse/a lioness who ruled the roost/ and made the Mother cry. Yet even in his more resigned moments, he really seemed to distrust tranquillity: Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small.
He was, and apparently remains, haunted by totemistic objects. One is the mirror, symbol of self-knowledge, in which Lowell has seen himself as a newt and a turtle. The other is the razor, symbol of the knowledge of life that comes through the contemplation of death. The puritan-lapsed-Catholic may have arrived at the true existentialist position—confronting the possibility of suicide man learns the nature and possibilities of his life.
A Private Man. Soon after the publication of Life Studies, Lowell and his wife returned to New York City. There his reputation flowered, nourished by each successive collection of poems, including For the Union Dead, and by the ardor of the intellectual Establishment of the Eastern academies, who by general agreement considered him something of a grandee.
Two years ago, Lowell received a call from the White House asking whether he would accept an invitation to a festival for the arts. He said yes. Then, recalls his wife, "when he got the official invitation, he decided he didn't feel at all connected to the White House and that what the White House was doing didn't have much connection with the arts." Whereupon Lowell, reflecting the general disaffection of intellectuals with L.B.J., sent the President a telegram declining the invitation. "We are in danger of becoming an explosive and suddenly chauvinistic nation," he wrote. "Every serious artist knows that he cannot enjoy public celebration without making public commitments." Lowell was pleased by the "hundreds of letters" of congratulations that ensued, but he was not prepared for a sudden rush of demands for his support from dissident groups. He has refused virtually all of them, for essentially he is an intensely private man.
Real Work. Nowadays, between weekly trips to Harvard, where he teaches poetry, Lowell spends most of his time working at home in Manhattan. He and his wife own a West Side duplex apartment filled with books; the high living room walls are fitted with a traveling ladder. He writes in a studio, lying on a bed, composing his lines on a small pad. "It's such a miracle if you get lines that are halfway right," he once explained. "You think three times before you put a word down, and ten times about taking it out." When he has finished his rough draft, he begins fashioning rhymes. Later comes the "real work," which is "to make it something much better than the original out of the