Constant comment

There is no need to decide who was the superior letter writer, although Lowell's poetic gift for the original phrase or word is continually on display, and to dazzling effect. He describes the three-month visit of his mother to him and Hardwick in Amsterdam, "the three of us, all behaving very badly, then being very self-sacrificing, and fuming inside like the burning stuffings of an overstuffed Dutch chair." As for marriage, he writes Bishop that Hardwick "has just said the only advantage of marriage is that you can be as gross, slovenly, mean and brutally verbose as you want." (But Hardwick may not have said it quite so succinctly and finally.) Back home, he and his wife are learning to drive, practicing in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, "past J. R. Lowell, Rufus Choate etc. and were quickly spotted, and warned that the graveyard, despite appearances, was heavy with threat: bends, knolls, other heedless amateurs learning." Lowell's friend Frank Parker is interested after 6 o'clock only in "drinking red wine and talking about the sexual act"; Allen Tate is "no traditionalist but a whole-hearted masher and anarchist"; while Lowell and Richard Eberhart "discussed the prostate operation in saturating detail." By far the most memorable vignettes are of his and Bishop's (but especially his) friend Randall Jarrell, "a terror for his friends in public - you are either corrected, ignored, or expected to loudly agree." Visited at Cape Cod, Jarrell is "a fencer who has defeated and scarred all his opponents . . . and Randall stands leaning on his foil . . . unchallenged, invulnerable, deadly, salt marsh and deserted tennis court stretching below him." This is devastating, also beautiful.