1943 ‘Dear Mr President’, Lowell wrote in answer to his draft notice, ‘I very much regret that I must refuse the opportunity you offer me in your communication of August 6, 1943, for service in the Armed Forces.’ Once willing to serve, he had now become a conscientious objector in protest at the Allies’ policy of saturation bombing of German cities. ‘I was a Roman Catholic at the time’, he recalled in a 1969 BBC interview, ‘and we had a very complicated idea of what was called “the unjust war”. … So I refused to go into the army and was sent to jail. I spent about five months in jail and mopped floors.’1
Before being sent to the Federal Correctional Center in Danbury, Connecticut, which specialised in COs, along with first-offence bootleggers and black marketeers, he was held a few days in New York’s tough West Street jail, in a cell next door to Murder Incorporated’s Louis (Lepke) Buchalter. ‘I’m in for killing’, said Lepke. ‘What are you in for?’ ‘I’m in for refusing to kill.’ Lepke laughed. Five months later he was electrocuted at Sing Sing.2
‘Memories of West Street and Lepke’, in Life Studies (1959), would tell the story more succinctly:
I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,
and made my manic statement,
telling off the state and president …
That was written looking back from ‘the tranquillized Fifties’, as Lowell put it. But an earlier poem, one that mentions nothing of these particulars, had much more to say about the poet’s mood and thought at the time. This was ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’ (1946), a strenuously ambitious meditation drawing on Thoreau’s description of a shipwreck in Cape Cod (1865), Captain Ahab’s mad pursuit of the white whale and the sinking of his ship in Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), and other allusions to the self-destructive will.
‘The Quaker Graveyard’ is dedicated to ‘Warren Winslow, Dead at Sea’. Winslow was Lowell’s cousin, a sort-of alter ego to the poet. Both hailed from the high-minded New England Protestant establishment; both attended Harvard. But while Lowell left to study poetry with John Crowe Ransom, converted to Catholicism and got jailed for resisting the draft, Winslow joined the Navy on graduating in 1940, serving as an officer on three destroyers.
On 3 January 1944, while Lowell was ‘serving’ in quite another sense, the last of Winslow’s postings blew up while at anchor at the entrance to New York harbour, killing 123 sailors and fifteen officers, Winslow among them. No enemy was involved; the damage was entirely self-inflicted. To the poet the accident must have seemed a perfect emblem for what he felt had changed Allied strategy. The real theatre of operations was in home waters, the real violence self-generated, the real struggle within the American soul.
1 Robert Lowell, ‘Et in America ego – The American Poet Robert Lowell Talks to Novelist V.S. Naipaul about Art, Power, and the Dramatisation of the Self’, The Listener, 4 September 1969, pp. 302–04.
2 Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell, London: Faber & Faber, 1983, p. 91.