Robert Lowell: A Biography Read Online Free Page A

rightful place at Harvard. Cousin A. Lawrence Lowell was president of the college, and while still at St. Mark’s, Lowell had spent evenings with him rather as he spent evenings with Eberhart. In both cases, the extramural guidance Lowell sought was in the interests of poetry, not of academic scholarship , but for Charlotte both mentors seemed reassuringly solid and conventional. Her hope was that Harvard orderliness would eventually tame Lowell, and in the fall of 1935 she was relieved to find her son actually enrolled and attending classes. His grades at St. Mark’s had improved during his last year, and on leaving school he had been able to muster enough courtesy to write a “proper”—if slightly ambiguous—letter to his grandfather:
    I have had five very pleasant years at school and I will be sorry to leave. I have at last found myself and now feel confident that I can and shall accomplish what I set out to do. College in spite of certain objections will on the whole I think prove very profitable. 3
    This was written before Lowell’s summer at Nantucket. By the time he actually entered Harvard, his self-educating impulse had hardened to a state of near rebellion. And, as always, the rebellion would be all the more enticing if it could be directed at his mother. Charlotte believed in Harvard; it was to be expected that Lowell would therefore decide to treat Harvard with contempt. He enrolled in an all-English course, a clear declaration of his intention merely to use the university, and, after dabbling in this for a while, simply gave up going to classes.
    There were higher matters to attend to. He announced to Frank Parker and Blair Clark that the trio’s energies should henceforth be directed exclusively towards the arts. Parker, he declared, would be a painter; Clark would be a musician—or, failing that, a philosopher. He, Lowell, was the poet. Parker’s obedience was so complete that he left Harvard during his first year in order to devote himself to his new calling:
    I thought myself that I’d never amount to much, perhaps no more than a cartoonist, even. But Cal thought there was no limit to what one could do. We were reading the commentary on Dante where a man can put himself into heaven or hell, and Cal sort of believed that, and made me believe it: that I was going to paint and he was going to write. It was like that—the splendours, the terrors. 4
    Blair Clark was less easily swayed; or maybe it was just that Lowell did not press him so hard as he pressed Parker. It is possible that he had already discerned a different role for this competent lieutenant: Clark would provide a link with the world of practical affairs and serve as a buffer between Lowell and the Lowells. As it turned out, Clark spent most of Lowell’s freshman year in California, recovering from illness.
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    In May 1936 Lowell was introduced to Anne Tuckerman Dick, a distant cousin of Frank Parker’s. A slightly over-age (at twenty-four ) ex-debutante, Anne was viewed with suspicion by the smart-stuffy Boston set in which her family moved. She was thought to be too vehement and “driven,” not at all a safe marriage bet for any of the grander Boston sons. Sitting out at a ball one evening, Anne had been told by Charles Francis Adams III: “You know, none of us would marry you because we’ve heard you’ve been to a psychiatrist .” 5 And she had taken this to summarize her plight. By the time she met Lowell, Anne felt herself to be drifting towards a mildly wayward spinsterhood; certainly, she was ready enough to be intrigued by the overtures of a nineteen-year-old poet:
    The first time we met I said the only thing I knew how to say. “Do you like dances?” And he said, “I’ve never been to one.” Well, I’d been to maybe a thousand. I’d never spoken to anyone who hadn’t been to one. It was different.
    In their first meetings, it was almost as if Lowell was weighing Anne up as a possible recruit to his exclusive