With Robert Lowell and His Circle by Kathleen Spivack

Author:Kathleen Spivack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Northeastern University Press

HOMOPHOBIA

An unsophisticated Puritan town, Boston was supposedly ruled by proper heterosexual families, patriarchal men, who participated in manly sports and activities. Actually, when you think about it, women played a huge role, and perhaps they ran the show — Mrs. Peabody, for instance, so active in civil rights — but the flutter was all about pretending that the man was always right. So Bishop, as we see in one of her letters, wanted nothing to do with going public in Boston about her personal life. Lowell, in public, was actively homophobic — perhaps more so because he was a poet. Brahmin “real men” were heterosexual, worked in banks and law firms downtown, wore pink sailing pants, played elegant tennis, drank a lot but held their liquor, and were “real men” in a New England, cultured, refined sort of way — as opposed to the hunting, shooting, fishing, James Dickey–like violent, abusive, alcoholic “real men” who fathered sons like well-known poet-sons-of-alcoholics of the Midwest. Here women ruled: it was really a matriarchal society with all the ambivalence that went with that.

Perhaps as protective coloration, Lowell and Bishop treated the subjects of homosexuality differently. Lowell was openly homophobic; he would complain to me about members of his workshop when he relaxed in his rooms after classes or lunches. He sometimes would taunt members of his later workshops about homosexuality, just to see how far he could go. Lowell made sure we understood that he was differentiated. Yet the people who were most present to him during the breakdowns were men who were available, didn’t have children, and had enough money to be able to leave everything and give time to Robert Lowell.

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