With Robert Lowell and His Circle: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz & Others

Literary Boston in the Late ’50s and ’60s: Social Milieu, Class, and the Literary Tradition

71 Literary Boston in the Late ’50s and ’60s Social Milieu, Class, and the Literary Tradition When I came to Boston in the winter of 1959, I was struck by the city’s class-based society. I was witness to the milieu of the Boston Brahmins, which was really something impenetrable. Their Boston carried the weighty tradition of outstanding New England literary flowering to which Lowell definitely felt connected. Boston was Puritan in somanyaspectsofthatword.Butitwaspossiblyagainstthatrepressionthat so many of our great writers who came from this region defined themselves. Coming as an undergraduate from Oberlin College to be Robert Lowell ’s tutorial student, I was in the middle of the airless atmosphere of puritanical Boston and the Lowells’ house there. I met members of his family, his old school friends, and others. I was often around for cocktail hours or meals—too shy to eat anything, too shy to go home. Elizabeth Hardwick introduced me patronizingly as “Cal’s little student.” So that was my role, my place, as in a Victorian novel: “the little student/friend/observing/secretlyin -love/Jane Eyre” in the corner, and I was defined as such within the Lowell circle. From the late ’50s to the late ’70s, I was able to observe the culture and its impact on both Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. I worked at Boston City and State Hospitals, the Whitty Boiler Manufacturing Company , the State House, at Harvard, and the posh Atlantic Monthly, peering through the large windows onto the Public Gardens. On the surface Brahmin Bostonians were classically well educated, extremely formal, and well mannered. This society was elitist, literary to the max. But underneath lay a world seething with contradictions, repression, and rebellion. In the late ’50s, the label “Banned in Boston” was a guarantee of instant success. The old North and West Churches, starchy High Episcopal bastions , flanked the Combat Zone. Prostitutes roamed the back of Beacon Hill. Money flashed in the elevators of the State House in broad daylight. So did the ever-hopeful, hairy-legged “flashers” in their raincoats. But openly gay men were locked away in back wards or clubbed to death in the bushes. Gay women, unthinkable: if possible, they went to hide in Europe. Mental hospitals flourished. Harvard cast its long shadow, and Miss Bishop was treated shabbily. Lowell was barely tolerated by the “Academy.” • With Robert Lowell & His Circle 72 The typical “Proper Bostonian” was white, straight, quietly wealthy, landrich , Protestant, and, if male, preferably a banker or lawyer. The ethnicities were ghettoized. In public, poets like Bishop as well as Lowell, so conscious of family, society, and schooling, went out of their way to assume protective coloration. The pressures on them to “conform” were intense. As did many New England writers past and present, Lowell and Bishop forged an uneasy accommodation with Boston and the larger region, which did not entirely accept them. In their life and work they sought to understand, escape, be embraced by, and transcend this complex heritage. Boston, in the late ’50s and early ’60s, and its satellite, Cambridge, had a mystique that existed in the world of paintings, literature, and thought. It was the home of the Atlantic Monthly, as well as the fearsome literature department of Harvard University. The shadow of Harvard was cast everywhere , like a tall tombstone. Revolutionary history marked the streets. Intellectuals sat in the all-night cafeterias discussing great thoughts. Most of the shops sold books, books, books: used ones and new ones and foreign ones. Small whiskered men darted in and out of these shops. There were stores with art prints in their windows. There were stationery shops, a typewriter store, and very little else that was not devoted to the life of the mind. Men wore corduroys or tweeds and heavy crew-neck sweaters. Women wore their hair up in buns, black lisle stockings, oxfords or heels, skirts and blouses. The clothing stores sold liberty blouses, primly buttoned on mannequins , plaid and pleated skirts, and cardigan-pullover sets. Girls wore camel’s hair coats or, occasionally, pea jackets. The presence of a “boyfriend ,” however, allowed one to wear his sweaters or shirts. The scene was conformist in its way, relentlessly bluestocking interspersed with young Harvard men’s athleticism. The old Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria was open until the small hours of the morning. It served watery coffee, bread or rice pudding, toasted English muffins, beef stew, and boiled meats—the standards. So did the Waldorf Cafeteria. Bums as well as students...