A Literary Anecdote

Poets in their Youth: A Memoir by Eileen Simpson. Reminscences about John Berryman, R.P. Blackmur, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Jean Stafford and Others.

VII
Analysands All

Sometimes after the publication of Lord Weary’s Castle, and the appearance of Randall’s and John’s laudatory reviews of the book, Cal [Robert Lowell] called from New York to ask if he could bring Randall to Princeton. Come early, John said, to allow time for a good long talk before dinner. They appeared at our door in the early afternoon, Cal looking as sturdy as a woodsman beside a wan and willowy Randall. The previous evening they attended a cocktail party for Cyril Connolly at which everyone, Cal included, had overindulged—everyone except Randall, who, as usual, had drunk not a drop. It seemed hardly fair that the teetotaler should be the one to suffer from a hangover. From the canapés! Cal couldn’t imagine anything funnier.

Randall was not amused. He felt so ghastly he asked if he could lie down. I installed him on the couch in the living room with pillows and a comforter. He participated only listlessly in the conversation, and when dinner was ready said he couldn’t face food; he doubted that he would ever be able to eat again. With his pale face against the pillow, the comforter pulled up to his chin, he reminded me of a Mary Petty cartoon I’d cut from an old New Yorker that I’d found in a secondhand magazine store and pinned up over John’s desk, to rib him about the way he carried on when he was ill. In a Victorian bedroom, in a high bed, buried under a mound of covers, one sees the figure of a man. His head, with its peaked face, is framed by snowy white pillows. A doctor, looking grave, says, “You’re a very sick poet.”