Robert Lowell: A Biography Read Online Free

Sepulcher; 1 a strikingly inept work, it featured as its hero a tormented schoolboy poet, for whom Lowell was the model. The “action” of the play involves the anguished hero-figure being examined and pronounced upon by a succession of baffled but well-meaning adults: the parents, the schoolmaster, the school psychiatrist and then a second professional psychiatrist. The “facts” the play deals in must be seen as questionable, but there is a value in its general view of the adolescent Lowell: for those grown-ups who took an interest in him he was clearly thought to be more than just ordinarily odd or mixed-up . The character portrayed by Eberhart is demonic and possessed , not really human.
    Eberhart’s personal view is (presumably) stated in the advice offered by the schoolmaster:
    I am for you but I am also against you.
    The cost is too great, the prize you seek too high.
    The world is rough. Torn too, I give my advice:
    Keep your feet on the ground, renounce the sky.
    The college psychiatrist is even less sympathetic; to him the Lowell figure is quite simply “mad,” he “eats toenails,” is “rude, vain, cruel, gloomy” and “talks with bitter cryptic wit”: “Furthermore, I must point out that he is unclean.”
    Small wonder that the playwright enlists more specialized assistance . The professional psychiatrist is called in and delivers the following summary of symptoms to the boy’s mother:

    I note here especially the trauma at his birth,
    That he growled when young, with stance of an animal
    Much too long, that as a little fellow he was vicious,
    Delighted in sharp instruments, was like a cannibal
    In being violently able to get his way;
    That early he developed the solitary and lonely, the surly.
    And that with the others he did not choose to play.
    He refused you as nurse, and that was early.
    All this fits rather too neatly with the Caliban cartoon of Lowell as half-man, half-beast, but what does seem certain is that before Lowell left St. Mark’s, his mother had had consultations with a Boston psychiatrist called Merrill Moore and that Moore had talked to Eberhart. The Crystal Sepulcher amalgamates all the prevailing anxieties and prejudices and suggests that by 1935 Lowell had indeed become a “case.”
    Merrill Moore was thought to be the right man to opine on Lowell because he was himself a poet of some reputation. He had been a fringe member of the Southern “Fugitive” group led by John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate and was famous for writing only—but voluminously—in sonnet form. One of his books was called simply M because it contained one thousand sonnets, and a current story was that Moore kept a note pad on the dashboard of his car and could scrawl out fourteen-liners while waiting for the lights to change. At any rate, the sheer bulk of his output was usually sufficient to quell any very severe critical objections, and from Charlotte ’s point of view he offered a perhaps unique combination of medical and literary know-how. She herself had been seeing him about her own “nerves” and had left Moore in little doubt that her mental balance depended largely on the balance of her errant son.
    The consultations with Moore were all part of Charlotte’s continuing campaign to “tidy up” her no longer small Napoleon. Her efforts had intensified as they had become more self-evidently hopeless . Both Frank Parker and Blair Clark have memories of her incessant , fruitless nagging:
    She was very uncomfortable about him—he was so clumsy, so sloppy, so ill-mannered. She would say things to him like “See what nice manners Blair has.” And I played that role because it was helpful to him. Ireally think there was a psychological fixation on dominating Cal by that woman. And what does an only child do—with an obsessed mother and a weak father who goes along with that obsession? 2
    Inevitably, one of Charlotte’s chief obsessions was that—after St. Mark’s—Lowell should take his