BOOKS « In Which She Absorbed A Lot From Robert Lowell »
Tuesday, March 27, 2012 at 12:25PM 
That Feeling
by ALEX CARNEVALE
Jean Stafford had recently turned twenty-two when she met Robert Lowell. Her father was a writer of pulp westerns whose pen name was either Jack Wonder or Ben Delight, depending on the circumstances. Jean's last city of residence was Heidelberg. She had spent the better part of her postgraduate year there before taking a job as the receptionist at the Michigan's Writers Conference.
Lowell was staying with the director of the conference until he was forced to find other lodgings in light of the fact that he had urinated on the man's lawn. Nevermind that, because according to a friend of Lowell's, he had found "the sanest and most charming and at the same time most promising girl" at the event.
At the time Lowell enrolled at Kenyon College (he had dropped out of Harvard the previous year), Stafford was teaching freshman comp at a junior college in Missouri. She remarked to a friend that her students were "loathsome little bitches who are homesick and have rumps like a kitchen stove." Lowell's second college life, which began as the roommate of Randall Jarrell in a second floor apartment, was extremely all over the place, but he still found time to write Jean a number of a letters.
Intending to travel to Cambridge to meet another man, Jean stopped at Kenyon to visit Lowell, where he made his first proposal of marriage to her. She told him yes, if he bought her another drink. Obsessed, he followed her east. "He wants you more than anything else in his life," a mutual friend informed her. "It makes me sick because he is an uncouth, neurotic, psychopathic murderer-poet."
Lowell on the right at age 17
One night in Boston he picked her up and drove her around, drunk beyond recognition. With Jean similarly inebriated in the passenger seat, he crashed his father's blue Packard into a brick wall. He was fine, but Jean's skull was badly fractured, her nose completely smashed. Lowell tried to wander away from the scene of the crime. For these acts his license was revoked and the state issued a fine of $75. Jean's face had to be reconstructured from medical records.
Even though she was forced to sue the Lowells to pay her medical bills, Robert's glimmering interest in her was not even the slightest bit dimmed by the legal fight or Jean's new look. Just as strangely, neither was hers. "My teeth can't be fixed," she wrote a friend, "and oh god I look so hideous and if I want my old nose back I have to have a complete plastic with two bones completely removed and others grafted in and everyone says 'oh don't be silly that nose is good enough' which is true but it isn't my nose." As a sort of rejoinder, Lowell's mother arranged for an appointment with Carl Jung to discuss her son.
Most of Lowell's friends were intimdidated by Jean's intellect. She was the only person they knew who had both read Proust and could quote it in the original. She also had gonorrhea, which she had used an excuse not to get intimate with her last boyfriend, Robert Hightower. But even this was a temporary obstacle: the next time Lowell proposed, Jean answered in the affirmative. On April 2nd of 1940, Robert Lowell and Jean Stafford were married at St. Mark's in New York. Jean wrote Hightower to say, "What a life he will have with me." They did not have sex for the entire first year of their marriage.
young Robert Lowell
Jean was not permitted at Kenyon, but after Lowell graduated, he used connections to Robert Penn Warren to get himself fellowship at LSU. He wired his new wife, "HAVE JOB COME AT ONCE." The job was for her, a typing position at The Southern Review, and Lowell was still gainfully unemployed. The new couple did not get along well from the very first. Lowell was constantly wasted, and the environment that surrounded them was neither safe or encouraging.
Eventually Lowell broke Jean's nose all over again, this time with a punch to the face. "My life has become subordinate to all other lives to which I am related," she wrote in a letter. "A monstrous pattern of struggle against rules and frustration so that my desire for anarchy has never been so passionate and the possibility of it, never so remote." By the next February, she had also developed tuberculosis. For this infirmity, if not the others, she blamed Louisiana; it was "lethal, teeming with serpents, disease, spiders, tainted meat." It surely must have seemed that way.
Lowell embraced God and was baptized in March of 1940; if they were to leave Louisiana, he told Jean, it would have to be for a Catholic community.
with her friend Robert Hightower
Instead they moved to Greenwich Village. It was Lowell's idea for Jean to take up some volunteer work; she also held a part-time job as a secretary while her husband took typing lessons. (Almost every able-bodied man they knew was in the armed forces.) Jean's health was no better, and Lowell demanded that she stop drinking and cease reading the newspaper. He also forbid her to read any novels except those of Dostoevsky, Proust, James and Tolstoy. Yet seemingly the worst was behind them. Jean's first novel, Boston Adventure, was accepted by Harcourt, Brace with a $250 advance, and a few of Lowell's poems were accepted at the Partisan Review.
Lowell had previously claimed that his eyesight prevented him from serving in the Armed Forces. When Jean saw a form he had filled out on the counter, she corrected a few of his more outrageous lies, and the government came knocking. To avoid service Lowell was reduced to sending out letters to newspapers about how his faith prevented him from saving a world in the grip of the Nazis. Despite sending out missives to every editorial page in town, Lowell was sentenced to a year in jail. Before he was carted away, Lowell had set Jean up with an apartment on 11th Street, and she still received his trust fund allowance of $100 a month.
with peter taylor in New Orleans, 1940
Lowell only served five months before he was paroled from his Connecticut jail. Resettled in New York, he suffered the first of his seizures. The poetry he wrote while Jean revised the galleys of her novel was appropriately dramatic, filled with plaudits and summations of the fact he found existence more painful a covering than ever. Jean worried he was going insane. As money started coming in from Boston Adventure, Lowell felt more than entitled to spend it. Jean's name was now becoming known, and her husband was notorious only as a draft-dodger. While Lowell toiled as the glorified babysitter of delinquent boys, Jean's brother died in a jeep accident as Patton's army marched in France.
The couple rented an 1820 homestead in Westport, Connecticut that they called "The Barn." Jean was immediately disgusted by her new surroundings. It cannot have helped that she made a long commute to Queens every Tuesday to teach a class in fiction, but she called her new town "fashionable, vulgar, anti-semitic, expensive, second-rate, bourgeoise, politically naive," among other things. With the money from her novel, Jean purchased a house near Boothbay Harbor outright. (She paid the sheriff to drive her into the next town to stock up on liquor every month.) In October of 1945 she wrote her friend Joe Cray that "a house is really the only solution for anyone. And certainly for me, who desires to immobilize myself like an eternal vegetable."
their Maine refuge
At 30, she had reached "the age when I do not want to meet any new people." In this new place Lowell refused to see anyone, so Jean visited the neighbors herself, stumbling towards another life. Her husband spent his time birdwatching and reading the dictionary on the couch, as he polished the first manuscript of what would become Lord Weary's Castle. Lowell desired a child, and Jean wanted to drink and drink. She began work on The Mountain Lion, which would become her most famous work, but she herself was "sick of the way I write." Lowell was pushing sex on her in a very inebriated state one night when she called out a name that was not his. In a frenzy, Robert almost strangled her to death.
with John Berryman - he drowned the kittens in a sack when they closed up the house that summer
The first summer after the war was over, "every poet in America" came to stay with them, and the marriage fell apart along with the house. Jean thought of leaving and going to Hollywood; she was intent on doing anything she could to get away from Lowell. His religion was slowly evaporating — it could no longer support his new ideas about the marriage. Lowell paid attention to the women who visited while Jean laid out cards for solitaire. In time, she bought a cat.
When the last guest had left that summer, Lowell told her the marriage was over. She spent the night gently dropping his letters into the fireplace. "I love Cal too much now to allow him any longer to be subjected to what seems to amount almost to insanity. I am almost altogether to blame for my life being the ruin that it is," she had written in one. "I am really on the verge of something and as soon as I have cleared the house I shall close it and go away. I don't know where yet. I am a hopeless mess."
Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about Elizabeth Cady Stanton. He tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.
jean stafford at 4, with her cat
"Easy Come Easy Go" - Great Lake Swimmers (mp3)
"Fields of Progeny" - Great Lake Swimmers (mp3)
"Cornflower Blue" - Great Lake Swimmers (mp3)
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