by Alex Beam
Sexton had another idée fixe: She wanted to be admitted to McLean. “I want a scholarship to McLean,” Sexton confided to her longtime friend and amanuensis Lois Ames, as if she was talking about a fellowship to the American Academy of Arts and Science. Sexton certainly had the qualifications: Two suicide attempts by the age of thirty; extended stays at the Glenside and Westwood Lodge sanitariums. She wrote about her mania in her first poetry collection, To Bedlam and Part Way Back. She reveled, theatrically, in her madness and was not above exploiting her shocking mood swings to manipulate her friends and family. But Dr. Orne, wary of McLean’s high prices and extended stays, refused to commit her there. Sexton had won the Pulitzer Prize and been profiled in national magazines. But she had never punched her ticket at McLean.
Why McLean? Because of Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. “We both recognized that Plath and Lowell had been there, and she wanted to be in that lineage,” Ames says. “The same way she wanted to be buried in Mt. Auburn cemetery, where her family was buried.” Sexton was ferociously competitive with Plath in all respects. Both had been reared in Boston’s well-to-do western suburbs. Both women were fearfully articulate, beautiful, and sexually alert. They had both committed themselves to big poetry, publishing in the big magazines (The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly) and with the big publishing houses (Knopf and Houghton Mifflin), and to winning the big awards (the Yale Younger Poets Award, the Pulitzer Prize). Each knew she was unstable and vaguely understood that psychological torment somehow produced good poetry. Both saw themselves—correctly—as future suicides. Meeting in drunken martini klatches at the Ritz Hotel following Lowell’s Boston University poetry seminar, the two femmes fatales even discussed killing themselves. (Sexton on Plath: “She told the story of her first suicide in sweet and loving detail.”) The conversation was never hypothetical. When talking about suicide, Plath and Sexton were not interested in questions of “if” or “when” but of “how.” After Plath died, Sexton published a bitchy essay/poem, griping that Plath had trumped her in their mortal combat:Thief!
how did you ... crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for so long.
The experiences of Lowell, a mentor of sorts, weighed heavily in Sexton’s thinking too. Although deeply versed in classical poetry, Lowell wrote in a beautiful American vernacular, and he wrote about life as he found it, whether it be an uncompromising portrait of his ineffectual father (“Father’s death was abrupt and unprotesting”) or a heartrending description of returning to his wife and daughter after a few months in the “bin” (“I keep no rank nor station / Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small”). As a student in his class, she could not help but notice that he disappeared around Christmas time, sometimes to McLean, when his mania overwhelmed him. One of Sexton’s first recognized poems describes the ungainly Lowell, “like a hunk of big frog,” leaving his crowded poetry seminar to make the trip to the hospital grounds in suburban Belmont: “I must admire your skill,” Sexton wrote. “You are so gracefully insane.”
By the time he first checked in to McLean in 1958, Robert Lowell was, as they say in the consumer-products field, a repeat user. Forty-one years old, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and one of the country’s most respected poets, Lowell experienced uncontrollable manic surges and had been institutionalized before. To the astonishment of those around him, he would swell up with power, anger, and delusion. He would shower his closest friends with bitter, mocking curses or proclaim undying love to an airline stewardess and insist on leaving the plane with her to start a new life. He was capable of delivering a gibbering lecture lauding Adolf Hitler. Some stereotypes are true; there are people in mental institutions who want to assume the power of Napoleon or Jesus Christ, and at times Robert Lowell was one of them.
Robert Lowell was the uncrowned poet laureate of McLean just on the strength of his magnificent poem “Waking in the Blue”—excerpted at the front of this book.
“Waking” was included in the book Life Studies, which many Lowell scholars believe to be his best book. It is intensely autobiographical and unsparing of his immediate and extended family. One of the poet’s cousins, Sarah Payne Stuart, has recently suggested that the family’s hostility to the poems may have precipitated a breakdown that landed Lowell back at McLean. After reading a prepublication copy of the book, Lowell’s formidable aunt Sarah Cotting announced that “I’ve just read what Bobby wrote about [his parents] Charlotte and Bob, and it’s just awful.” From her Beacon Hill town house, she marched downhill to Lowell’s home on nearby Marlborough Street and gave her nephew a piece of her mind. (This was the same aunt who once mused, while sitting on her yacht: “Why doesn’t Bobby write about the sea? It’s so pretty.”) “I’m sorry you didn’t like it,” Lowell answered softly. “I thought it was rather good.” A few weeks later, when Life Studies was formally published, Lowell was at McLean.
Because he was born into the Boston aristocracy, Lowell understood instinctively who was in McLean and why. He had grown up with the “Mayflower screwballs”; the “thoroughbred mental cases”; “these victorious figures of bravado ossified young.” No nuance of Boston snobbery could escape him, not least that he hailed from the line of thin-blooded—that is, creative—Lowells as opposed to the broad-shouldered, industrialtitan Lowells who enriched themselves from the textile mills along the Charles and Merrimack Rivers. Ralph Lowell, the downtown banker chairman of McLean’s trustees, was a “real” Lowell. Robert and his family, although they lived quite comfortably, were comparatively poor relations. Robert’s father, Robert Traill Spence Lowell III, was a middle-ranking naval officer who had made a good match. His wife’s family, the Winslows, proudly traced their ancestry back to the Mayflower. The venerable names attached to the McLean halls—Wyman, Appleton, Higginson, and Bowditch—were the names of family friends. Robert had attended St. Mark’s School with them, and they had gone on to Harvard too. Writing to his friend the poet Elizabeth Bishop, Lowell read the hospital like an open book, in this case the book being a crazy salad of a Marquand novel, the Harvard faculty directory, and the Social Register:I live in an interesting house now at McLean’s, one in which no man had entered since perhaps 1860; suddenly it was made co-ed. It was like entering some ancient deceased sultan’s seraglio. We were treated to a maze of tender fussy attentions suitable for very old ladies: chocolate scented milk at 8:30; a lounging and snoozing bed read after meals, each announcement of an appointment gently repeated at ten minute intervals, an old crone waiting on table barking like television turned on full to pierce through deafness. On the other hand, it took three days to get a shaving glass.
The man next to me is a Harvard Law professor. One day, he is all happiness, giving the plots of Trollope novels, distinguishing delicately between the philosophies of Holmes and Brandeis, reminiscing wittily about Frankfurter. But on another day, his depression blankets him. Early in the morning, I hear cooing pigeon sounds, and if I listen carefully, the words: “Oh terror. TERROR!” Our other male assembles microscopically exact models of clippers and three masted schooners.
Both men, and I too, shrink before a garrulous Mrs. Churchill, sometimes related to the statesman and sometimes to the novelist. “How are you related to Thomas Arnold Lowell?” I assumed she meant James Russell Lowell, and was abysmally wrong and have never been to explain. Pointing to a classical moulding on a mantelpiece, she will say, “That’s Cameron Forbes, the ambassador to Japan,” or begin a dinner conversation with, “Speaking of Rhode Island reds ...”
Sometimes with a big paper napkin stuck like an escaping bra on her throat, she will dance a little jig and talk about being presented to Queen Victoria. She was.
Lowell visited McLean four times over the course of eight years. Like Plath, he left a paper trail of letters with the distinctive return address “175 Mill Street, Belmont, Massachusetts.” He is possibly the only patient to have exchanged letters from the wards with Jacqueline Kennedy; she thanked him for a book he had sent her and congratul
ated him on getting away for the holidays. Lowell also corresponded with the poet Theodore Roethke, who had his own struggles with mental illness (Lowell: “I feel great kinship with you”), and mailed a letter from Bowditch to Ezra Pound, who had been locked up in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. “Do you think a man who has been off his rocker as often as I have could run for elective office and win?” Lowell inquired of Pound.
I have in mind the state senatorship from my district—the South End, Back Bay Boston, and your son’s Roxbury etc. The incumbent is an inconspicuous Republican. His rival is a standard losing party democrat. I’d run as a democrat, and if I could edge out in the very difficult primaries, then I’d cream the Republican. And then there’d be vistas before me as I sat in the Boston State Capitol on my little $5,000 a year job that would cost me about $10,000. What’s your advice?
There is no trace of a reply.
Many of Lowell’s students, some of whom became noted poets in their own right, trooped out to Belmont to visit their mentor. Some days, Lowell was very clear and his students would read to him from books he had requested, or they would share poetry, occasionally attracting a small crowd of not-very-aware patients. On other days, Lowell was in the mania, reworking famous poems in his copy of the Norton Anthology or retranslating, for naught, works from Greek and Latin. The students were suffused with sadness, seeing their brilliant teacher temporarily defeated by mental illness.
Poet Frank Bidart, a former student who became Lowell’s friend and literary executor, recalls one visit:People knew he was a writer. He was an older person, and there were other older people there, as well as some kids in their twenties. There’s a way in which the place and the circumstances became very egalitarian, each patient is just one more person with a roommate. There was no hierarchy. Lowell was fine with that. I think he was a little embarrassed at the beginning for me to see him like that, that he couldn’t leave, that I had to bring him books. I mean, he could have worn shoes if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to. He was living as if he were at the beach or something, but he wasn’t at the beach.
Just before Alfred Stanton took over as psychiatrist-in-chief at McLean, Franklin Wood admitted a young woman who would become the hospital’s first mass-market celebrity patient: an intelligent, troubled Smith College junior named Sylvia Plath. Writing about her suicide attempt in her novel The Bell Jar, Plath informed a generation of young women that one could suffer a nervous breakdown and live to write about it, in theory, at least.17 Three weeks after its publication in Britain, in 1963, Plath killed herself. When it appeared in America eight years later, with its vivid descriptions of life on “Wymark” (Wyman) and “Belsize” (Belknap) halls, it became must reading for young girls, in the same way that J.D. Salinger’s classic Catcher in the Rye was being devoured by moody, adolescent boys. In The Bell Jar, thousands of American teenagers were getting a firsthand look inside McLean, which, the twenty-one-year-old Plath told a friend, was “the best mental hospital in the U.S.”
The story of Plath’s stay at McLean has entered the literary canon not only by way of The Bell Jar but also from the pens of numerous biographers and memoirists. The consensus tale runs like this: Plath, a sensitive, erudite, and hard-working young woman from a conventional but not particularly happy family in Wellesley, Massachusetts, experienced mild depressions while studying at Smith College. As versed in Freud as any budding intellectual of her generation, she thought she had “penis envy” and suffered from “schizophrenia.” After winning a prestigious national contest to work at Mademoiselle magazine in New York during July 1953, she suffered a rare career setback; she was denied admission to a Harvard summer writing seminar. Trapped at home in August, drained of energy, she began to contemplate suicide. After a half-serious attempt to drown herself during a beach picnic, Plath swallowed an overdose of her mother’s sleeping pills and hid in a crawl space underneath her parents’ home. She very nearly died. (“Beautiful Smith Girl Missing at Wellesley” and “Top Ranking Student at Smith Missing from Wellesley Home” were two of the front-page headlines in the Boston papers.) Her family and doctors properly concluded that her attempt exceeded the classic suicide gesture and packed her off to McLean.
As at Smith, Plath was a “scholarship girl” at McLean, supported by the well-to-do novelist Olive Higgins Prouty, a forceful and intelligent woman who had suffered her own nervous breakdown a quarter-century before. Talented and ambitious, Plath had a knack for aligning herself with the best brains wherever she was, and McLean was no exception. The psychiatrist with whom she met every day was the aforementioned Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse, a real New York Tiffany and a rare female doctor at McLean. Freudians would call it a transference; whatever the case, Plath fell in love with her doctor. In The Bell Jar, Plath invoked her Mademoiselle magazine training to describe “Dr. Gordon,” as she called Barnhouse in the book: “She wore a white blouse and a full skirt gathered at the waist by a wide leather belt, and stylish, crescentshaped spectacles. This woman was a cross between Myrna Loy and my mother,” Plath concluded. Who could ask for anything more?
Although Plath did provide vivid descriptions of life at McLean in her letters, she rarely discussed her therapy. In one sense, there was not a great deal to discuss. When Plath first arrived, Barnhouse decided to supplement psychotherapy with insulin shock treatment, which not only failed to address the patient’s acedia but also caused her face to bloat up and bruise, spoiling her natural beauty and compounding her crisis of self-doubt. Like most McLean patients, Plath was dosed up on the antipsychotic drug Thorazine, which contributed to her affectless behavior. Months after arriving, her therapy was blocked. “I got her to draw things first, and then I had gotten her to talk, which was already something,” Barnhouse recalled. “But she had been in there for months, and Mrs. Prouty was paying the bills—this was going on and on. She was totally depressed and she wasn’t getting any better.”
Mrs. Prouty was visiting Sylvia regularly, and she was becoming quite impatient with McLean. In November, she wrote a letter to director Franklin Wood threatening to stop paying for a treatment regime—Prouty felt it was nontreatment—that seemed to be leading nowhere. Prouty herself had spent time at Silver Hill in Connecticut, a mental hospital with a more structured approach to mobilizing depressed patients, and she could not abide McLean’s laissez-faire attitude. “I usually find Sylvia wandering listlessly up and down the corridor and when I leave she says she will do the same, as there is nothing else for her to do,” Prouty complained in a letter to Wood. Indeed, McLean was notorious for failing to fill “the other 23 hours” of the day, meaning the hours when the patients were not receiving psychotherapy.18
Plath’s story was approaching its climax. Barnhouse decided to gamble and proposed electroshock therapy to the young girl. The idea of shock therapy was plenty scary, but it was especially scary to Plath, who had suffered through several painful and impersonal shock sessions at the hands of Dr. Peter Thornton and then Kenneth Tillotson at Valley Head Hospital that summer. She had received no anesthesia for the treatments, and after being semi-electrocuted, she had been wheeled into an empty recovery room to cope with her trauma. “She was not properly protected against the results of the treatment,” Prouty wrote to one of Plath’s doctors, “which were so poorly given that the patient remembers the details with horror.” Prouty was a meddler, but an informed meddler, and she voiced her opinion that the botched electroshock sessions had driven Sylvia to attempt suicide. Plath herself later described the “rather brief and traumatic experience of badly-given shock treatments” at Valley Head to a friend: “Pretty soon, the only doubt in my mind was the precise time and method of committing suicide.” But Barnhouse promised to stay with Plath during the McLean sessions and managed to convince the young woman that this time the results would be different.
They were. On December 15, Plath received the first of two shock treatments. She regained her personality and composure so rapidly that she was able to sp
end Christmas at home. Prouty brought her a typewriter, and Plath resumed her erudite and chatty correspondences with friends: feeling better; the company is swell. She rejoiced in the high-minded company: a classmate from Smith, girls from Vassar, Radcliffe, and Cornell, “plus an atomic genius from M.I.T.” The hospital officially discharged her in late January, and by February she was back at Smith. Five years later, Plath mentioned the treatments in her journal: “Why, after the ‘amazingly short’ three or so shock treatments did I rocket uphill? Why did I feel I needed to be punished, to punish myself.” Neither she nor Barnhouse could explain the miraculous turnabout. “I can’t tell you what happened,” Barnhouse said in a 1998 interview.
The human mind is very complex.... That sounds obvious but people keep forgetting it. They think you just throw a little Prozac in here, and a little of something else in here, it’ll do this, this and this. It’s ridiculous.