More than forty years ago, Keith Botsford accompanied Robert Lowell, his then-wife Elizabeth Hardwick, and their daughter on a journey from the north of Brazil to Argentina. According to Botsford, Hardwick was bored; the daughter sulked; and Lowell was in a manic phase that ended with his commitment in Buenos Aires and his eventual return North thanks to an old friend and the State Department. Botsford has kept up his commonplace book cum journal intermittently since 1945; much of what follows has been reconstructed from these journals. –ND, ed.

Swooping down on Belem do Para. Bethlehem. Mouth of the Amazon. Ten at night, the Lowells due at midnight: hence the poet's full moon turned out for us, and the river bright as tinfoil. We see it, distorted by the double-pained windows of our DC-6. Then we don't see it. We have to punch through a storm, shaped like a trompe, which the OED calls a water blowing-engine (French has it as a musical instrument, the horn for instance): black turbulent air. Glimpses, as we buck about, of black-green forest below. We boil in our belts, then we get sleet: I can see it bouncing off the wings into the ocean, and I can see the pattern of the delta disemboguing, great semi-circular swatches of sand under shallow water. Then we circle around the forest again. Wet smoke rises from the forest, each wisp isolated by mile after mile of darkness.

Companions (plane and airport: you can't get rid of them): one American tourist, harmless, silent, bewildered; a chatty Brazilian engineer, cadging tobacco, with that wet-eyed admiration for his county these people have—"There's nothing like Brazil, is there?" Looking down into the void, waiting for me to say, "Yes, there's nothing like Brazil."

Also a Dutch planter, ex-Indonesia. His Paris Match bears General Salan on the cover. "This thing's a bloody mess, isn't it?" he says. English impeccable, but accented, gin-blue eyes, breath of juniper. I think he means the O.A.S. is going too far. No, he goes on to say it's all de Gaulle's fault: " Algeria 's French and always will be." And Indonesia 's Dutch.

"Ten million Algerians don't think so," I answer.

"They're nothing," he says angrily. "I know those bloody wogs."

Perhaps he's been drinking too much. His name is van Schellenberg; he has a lumber camp up the Amazon, and a man I meet later in the Pension knows him well, says he's a progressive when it comes to treating his labor right. South America crawling with refugees from lost empires: descendants of Maximilian, White Russians, Nazis, those who couldn't stay in the Congo or Java. All this green is a sea, really, with ports; their boats run aground, or they run out of money. A dingy Conrad met them, recorded them. Now they seem less interesting.

Waiting for the Lowells in the airport. Did I say the American tourist was harmless? He did not know my language until we go through some useless formality on arrival. "So, you're an American too!" he says. Surprise? Relief? In such circumstances, someone is about to ask for my help. I try to get away. But I have an hour and a half to wait. So does he. "I'm the Vice-President of the fifth largest bank," he says. In the U.S.A. ? The world? Is there any difference in degree?

*      *      *

The Lowells arrive. I haven't seen him in nearly a decade. A good description: he looks older.

He cocks his head to one side as though he doesn't want you to take either seriously or antagonistically what he's going to say. The sentences are all very short, and from inside, somewhere. They come out through short, quick laughs, while he's looking away. He talks across you; he pursues his own conversation.

There are bad travelers in this world. They belong to a place. In a sense, they are helpless outside it. Until they re-establish it, with words.

While we wait for their baggage, letters occupy the front of the stage. Then, taking a taxi in search of a hotel, a colonial house is "like a setting for a Tennessee Williams."

*      *      *

Wandering around the city the next day, his queer eye lurches over the landscape, picking up the odd detail. He climbed like a boy all over the roof of Nossa Senhora do Carmen. Against the tiles of the roof, I photographed him, in a decent blur, half smiling. He has an athlete's body, almost accidentally.

Dr. Zhivago and Dr. Faustus are the only two masterpieces since the war: something to agree on in a belfry.

Lowell is interviewed. He is known as a Catholic poet. Perhaps the later books haven't reached here. "When I wrote 'The Dead in Europe ' I was a practicing Catholic," he tells our seedy little reporter (badge of the trade. A sweat-stained fedora). "Now I would say that religion is an unproved hypothesis for which I have great sympathy."

He quotes Santayana to me: "The pity is it's got no bottom."

What is 'it'? Unrecoverable from a Journal. The Church has no bottom?

An impassioned speech from Lowell against mass culture: "Their salaries should be limited to $25,000," he says. We spent much of our time discussing the differences between nations; we were both fascinated by the specific qualities of each country, the genie de la langue extended to include the whole culture. And then in the middle, he'll fling in a joke: "When Santayana was urged to see the Pope, he said, 'I don't particularly want to meet celebrities.'"

In contact with the gossip of all ages: "The best critics are probably unfriendly, like Arnold on Byron," or quoting Virginia Woolf on Eliot: "Tom came today looking more pleased with himself than usual; he'd just finished Ulysses and announced that the novel was dead in our time." To which Lowell commented: "She was in the middle of working on Orlando."

*      *      *

In Recife , we found a movie of Al Capone playing. Lowell says, "There's something terribly interesting about power and brutality; it's enthralling. " In the film, Steiger plays croquet back-handed, misses the ball and kicks it furiously into the bushes. A paradigm.

The most trifling intellectuals turn out for the poet, with humble arrogance, needing to be seen. Do they let the poet talk? No, they fill the air with their own buggered personalities.

In our hotel, my toilet is marked 317 B.C. Six years after Alexander died: things were bound to get bad.

The newspapers religiously cover his every appearance; Lowell says, "I feel like Queen Victoria."

He reads his poems, quietly and intensely, like a man both obsessed and surprised. Noticeable, his habit of launching into expression, with the explosive energy of a river suddenly undimmed. Elizabeth says his style consists in saying things that are profound without seeming to attach importance to them.

Then we went on an ill-fated trip to Buenos Aires , during which Lowell fell ill. No one in Buenos Aires seemed to know what to make of him. They sat him down at dinner, Héctor Murena, the critic, Alberto Girri, the poet, and another, and the sum of the evening was expressed by Murena who said Argentineans were boring, but not bored. The dinner put Lowell up against something inhuman that he could not explain: we fled to a movie. The world of letters is a republic, but great poets attract more fleas than the most savage lions. And they remain conscious of their quality, always: and Lowell cited Pound, who, when asked for a photograph, said: "Wait till you get it on a postage stamp." And what had Pound said to him? "God go with you, if you like the company!"

It is not just pronouncements, of course. He has a sense, too, of the moral values of the poet's position. He calls it 'compassionate virtue'; he says, "It grows day by day; you can have more of it at ninety than at eighty-seven."

He met Borges, and later presented him with an etching from Don Quixote , which the blind Borges admired: tribute does not need to be seen, only felt.