Robert Lowell, the great American poet, writes to Peter Taylor, a writer and winner of the 1987 fiction Pulitzer; the two men attended Kenyon College together, where they studied under poet Allen Tate, among others. Here, Lowell criticizes Tate for his superficial expressions of faith when the men visited Paris.
[Vienna or Salzburg, Austria, n.d. June? 1952]
Dear Peter:
I feel about the way you do. When there’s someone to talk to, I talk. When there isn’t I plot or read a book. By now we’ve met a dozen or so people we’re enthusiastic about (it’s hard to believe) and it breaks my heart that you and Elizabeth Bishop and Powers and Robie aren’t with us. I mean I’m wild about them the way I am about my American friends—each one is impossible to imagine coming from any country or even region except his or her own—as hard as imagining you coming form New England.
Allen (don’t on your honor repeat this) came to Paris loaded down with rosaries, letters to Catholic notables from Maritain, Maritain’s translation of the “Confederate Dead,” orders for Christopher medals done by modern French medieval craftsmen, arguments against Descartes, leather-bound pictures of Caroline. After lunch he said, “I’ve never seen the inside of St. Germaine des Pres (14th century church) [.”] We go in. Allen looks at nothing; but kneels and crosses himself before an alter where the Host isn’t. Next day he met Mrs. Spender and the whole Catholic façade vanished. I must say Caroline has it coming—I mean really, not just Allen’s as a wolf, but everything that is honest and intelligent and gay and intuitive in him. He’s really gloriously effervescent and unacademic. Now we’re all to meet with the Spenders in Venice for another conference in September. I’m not anti-Church by the way, but it’s intolerable that a man of Allen’s vitality should go the Tartuffian dumbshow of a fraudulent conversion—the real Catholic is himself, his faith is part of himself, just like anyone else’s.
Reading your letter, I felt I [had] been living it all; we were having the same emotions at identical moments—each in his own character. Goodbye old friend; can’t you get away from it all for a month or two?
Love from us both to you.
Cal
Please, for God’s sake, don’t repeat the above.
FURTHER READING
Read more of Robert Lowell’s thoughts on religion and religious poetry here, in an interview for the Paris Review.
For another perspective on Allen Tate’s Catholicism, read Peter Huff’s article in HUMANITAS, here.