Robert Lowell: A Biography
Page 21
… in the very nature of things, we cannot function as his parents. Cal, in his emotional dependence, has caused us more anxiety in the past twelve years than our own child has caused us in all her twenty-four. This has been particularly trying because he feels towards us something of the ambivalence of a child towards his real parents: love and hate, docility and disloyalty, etc. In view of this we had not sought his company since 1943; he had sought us.47
Charlotte, he said, “should be satisfied now”; and to establish this, Tate resurrected his earlier, pre-breakdown diagnosis of the “Lowell problem”:
Cal gave up Jean, he has given up the Church (the recent reconversion was not real—he merely used the Church for a few weeks to establish his mania in religious terms), and he has given up poetry. I don’t know whether he told you that he left the manuscript of his unfinished poem at Yaddo, in the hands of a virtual stranger. I am told that everything that paranoiacs do is symbolic action, and an objectivization of the delusion. In giving up these three things Cal has given up the three defenses against disintegration: but his mother will feel that he has given up all those wicked influences.48
At around the same time, Tate was also writing to Elizabeth Hardwick, urging her to acknowledge that Lowell “is homicidal, deeply and subtly…. You were in danger as long as you had him with you.”49 Even so, Hardwick was one of the first to visit Lowell at Baldpate and one of the very few visitors he welcomed.
During May, Lowell’s letters were confused and ecstatic. He wrote to Tate that “I’m in wonderful shape in all ways but the days are long, long, long!!!”;50 to Jean Stafford, pleading that their Catholic marriage was still valid;51 and to Randall Jarrell, instructing him to reread Paul and the Gospels: “you’ll see that the truth is both with the Jews and the R.C. Church; or so God said.” He also told Jarrell:
I’ve been thinking that you’re perhaps the best poet in America (where are there better poets)—unless I am—I’m poor, helpless and conceited here—so bear (Arms) with me.
I’ve read Vanzetti’s letter to Sacco’s son for the first time. Their case is mine—I’m sure the pro-Russian traitors are secretely [sic] supported by certain rich men—those who have sold us (the poor—who’s worse paid than the poet—even carpenters get more and work less) sold us for “a pair of shoes.”
When I get out I’m going to do everything in my power to get the Sacco case re-opened, so that those responsible are imprisoned and electrocuted.
Mother of God, old Randible, there’s no man I love more than you.52
Jarrell later described this letter as “pathetic.”53
By the middle of June, Lowell had been given electric shock treatment and seemed well enough for Hardwick to spend two weeks near the hospital (at Frank Parker’s house in Ipswich) and regularly visit him. When she returned to New York, she was wholly reassured and wrote to Lowell: “I feel so happy about you that I’m suspiciously dizzy and in fact it may be true, as the rumor goes much to my chagrin, that I’ve had a nervous breakdown.”54 He replied, “Gosh, your visit was wonderful and SANING. Hope you can stand me still,”55 and then five days later wrote (on July 6):
How would you care to be engaged? Like a debutant. WILL YOU?
How happy we’ll be together writing the world’s masterpieces, swimming and washing dishes.
P.S. Reading The Idiot again.56
Hardwick agreed to “be engaged,” and a few days later Lowell was discharged from Baldpate. The announcement of his engagement produced the by now almost ritual letter from his father:
I understand that you and Miss Hardwick plan to get married and live in Boston…. I think that it is much too soon to marry anybody—just after you have been discharged from a mental hospital, after shock treatment.
He had “nothing personal” to say against Elizabeth Hardwick, but:
I do feel that both you and she, should clearly understand, that if she does marry you, that she is responsible for you.
If, instead of marrying, you would like to come down here and convalesce here slowly, while working on your Guggenheim, we would, of course, be glad to have you.
At the present time, I do not feel that you are in any position to take care of yourself, let alone look out and provide for a wife, and we cannot approve.57
Mr. Lowell added that the fees at Baldpate had been deducted from money that Lowell had left with his parents for safekeeping, and that apart from the small income from his trust fund, he now had only $600 of his own. Elizabeth Hardwick had a one-room apartment in New York, but otherwise, as she recalls, “he literally had no place to go. He couldn’t go home. And he’d never taught, he’d just written.” Also, soon after leaving Baldpate, Lowell began to slide into a depression: “No one can care for me,” he’d say to Hardwick. “I’ve ruined my life. I’ll always be mad.”
So we got married, in his parents’ house. He wanted to do it, and I wanted to do it. I don’t think it was a very happy occasion for anybody else. He had just come out of an illness and here he was taking on something else. One doctor at the hospital said: “He certainly needs someone, but if I were you I wouldn’t do it.” Well, we did….58
Frank Parker was Lowell’s best man, and his wife, Lesley, a mildly appalled guest:
Cal and Lizzie were staying with us in Ipswich, and also Mary McCarthy and Bowden Broadwater. Lizzie appeared in peacock-blue silk and a hat, and Mary McCarthy gave one look at her and said, “You cannot be married looking like that. No, you are going to wear my Balenciaga.” So Lizzie went off in this very unaccustomed, perfectly beautiful black lace hat which belonged to Mary. Frank was best man, and he had, as I realized when we got there and all knelt down, two odd socks, one white and one black. The pastor’s opening remarks were: “Dear friends, we are here for a wedding, not a funeral …”—looking around at everyone’s glum faces.59
The honeymoon was at the critic F. W. Dupee’s house in Red Hook, New York, and it could hardly be counted a success: Lowell’s depression didn’t lift; he remained “very self-critical, very tortured about himself, his future, almost on the point of tears.”60 Hardwick contacted John Thompson, and it was arranged for Lowell to see a doctor in New York. The diagnosis was “reactive depression,” and it was agreed that Lowell should go into the Payne Whitney Clinic for treatment—at specially reduced rates. On his first night there he wrote to Hardwick: “Dearest, dearest, dearest Lizzie. I think of you all the time, and worry so about all I have dumped on you. We are going to work it all out, dear, be as wonderful as you have been.”61 And shortly afterwards, on September 15, 1949: “This is a thorough and solid place—what I have long needed … in a week or so the craziness and insecurity will begin to go.”62
Notes
1. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, December 22, 1948.
2. Jean Stafford to R.L., January 1, 1949 (Houghton Library).
3. R.L. to Caroline (Gordon) Tate, December 1948 (Firestone Library).
4. R.L. to Robie Macauley, n.d.
5. Charlotte Lowell to R.L., December 25, 1948 (Houghton Library).
6. Peter Taylor to R.L., June 28, 1948 (Houghton Library).
7. Elizabeth Bishop to R.L., December 31, 1948 (Houghton Library).
8. Peter Taylor to R.L., October 11, 1948 (Houghton Library).
9. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1979).
10. R.L. to T. S. Eliot, January 18, 1948.
11. Allen Tate to Marcella Winslow, April 20, 1949.
12. Robert Hillyer, Saturday Review of Literature: “Treason’s Strange Fruit” (June 11, 1949) and “Poetry’s New Priesthood” (June 18, 1949).
13. Radcliffe Squires, Allen Tate (New York: Pegasus, 1971), p. 188.
14. Robert Fitzgerald, Open Letter to T. S. Eliot, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, William Carlos Williams, J. F. Powers, Randall Jarrell, Peter Taylor, Katherine Anne Porter, Louise Bogan, Leonie Adams, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, John Berryman, R. P. Blackmur, George Santayana, May 26, 1949.
16. Malcolm Cowley to Louis Kronenberger, March 8, 1949 (Newberry Library).
17. Robert Fitzgerald, Open Letter.
18. Sally Fitzgerald, interview with I.H. (1980).
19. Robert Fitzgerald, Open Letter.
20. Allen Tate to Elizabeth Hardwick, March 3, 1949 (Houghton Library).
21. Robert Fitzgerald Journal, March 4, 1949.
22. Robert Fitzgerald to Allen Tate, March 4, 1949.
23. Malcolm Cowley to Allen Tate, March 27, 1949 (Newberry Library).
24. Petition in support of Elizabeth Ames, March 21, 1949 (Newberry Library).
25. Robert Fitzgerald, Open Letter.
26. Malcolm Cowley to Granville Hicks, April 5, 1949 (Newberry Library).
27. New York Times, March 27, 1949.
28. Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as told to and edited by Solomon Volkov (Harper & Row, 1979), p. 108.
29. Allen Tate to Elizabeth Hardwick, March 8, 1949 (Houghton Library).
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., March 30, 1949 (Houghton Library).
32. Ibid., March 31, 1949 (Houghton Library).
33. Robie Macauley, interview with I.H. (1980).
34. Allen Tate to Malcolm Cowley, April 4, 1949 (Newberry Library).
35. Allen Tate to Elizabeth Hardwick, April 4, 1949 (Houghton Library).
36. Peter Taylor, interview with I.H. (1979).
37. Robert Giroux, interview with I.H. (1979).
38. Ms (Houghton Library).
39. Merrill Moore to Allen Tate, April 12, 1949 (Firestone Library).
40. Peter Taylor, interview with I.H. (1979).
41. Peter Taylor to Allen Tate, April 21, 1949 (Firestone Library).
42. John Thompson, interview with I.H. (1979).
43. Merrill Moore to Peter Taylor, May 24, 1949.
44. Charlotte Lowell to Peter Taylor, April 16, 1949.
45. Robert Giroux, interview with I.H. (1979).
46. Merrill Moore to Allen Tate, May 10, 1949 (Firestone Library).
47. Allen Tate to Merrill Moore, n.d. (Library of Congress).
48. Allen Tate to Peter Taylor, April 10, 1949.
49. Allen Tate to Elizabeth Hardwick, April 18, 1949 (Houghton Library).
50. R.L. to Allen Tate, May 5, 1949 (Firestone Library).
51. Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, May 9, 1949.
52. R.L. to Randall Jarrell, May 21, 1949 (Berg Collection).
53. Randall Jarrell to Peter Taylor, n.d.
54. Elizabeth Hardwick to R.L., June 24, 1949 (Houghton Library).
55. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, July 1, 1949.
56. Ibid., July 6, 1949 (Houghton Library).
57. R. T. S. Lowell to R.L., July 13, 1949 (Houghton Library).
58. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1979).
59. Lesley Parker, interview with I.H. (1981).
60. Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with I.H. (1979).
61. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, dated “First Night” from the Payne Whitney Clinic.
62. Ibid., September 15, 1949.
11
At first, Lowell’s admission to Payne Whitney was kept as quiet as possible. The fear was that rumors would spread that he had “cracked up” for a second time. In 1949 psychiatry was still fairly mysterious territory, even to most New York intellectuals, and Elizabeth Hardwick did not relish having to explain over and over again that Lowell’s depression was the predictable down-curve of a manic-depressive cycle.
The doctors at Payne Whitney were cautious about making a diagnosis—for the first two weeks, Lowell was kept under observation, encouraged to mix with the other patients, play badminton and Russian Banker, do elementary carpentry, and so on. In the third week it was decided to label him “manic-depressive, which is not very serious, they say, since they seem certain it is psychogenic in origin.” A course of mild psychotherapy was prescribed—Payne Whitney was not psychoanalytically inclined: Lowell would be encouraged to talk about himself, and be gently guided towards an understanding of his predicament, but he would not be urged to dig too deeply for its origins. The prognosis was highly optimistic. Elizabeth Hardwick wrote to Peter and Eleanor Taylor:
I have spoken to the head doctor and to the doctor treating Cal and they both say there should not be an incapacitating attack either of elation or depression again. This isn’t nonsense; on the contrary, these doctors can’t resist taking a profound, mysterious and pessimistic line. They like to look at you, as if they were revealing a great discovery, and say, “you know there is a lot of anxiety beneath the calm surface.”1
Lowell cooperated with the therapy as enthusiastically as he was able to, telling the doctors “all the sordid and awful things about myself I could think of.”2 As to the doctors, they felt that his willingness to reveal “all sorts of shameful and embarrassing things” was indeed a healthy sign, but they were worried that he was able to be so “impersonal and unemotional about these admissions.”3 To Peter Taylor, Lowell wrote:
I am now in the Payne Whitney Clinic, where Jean was, and will probably be here two or three months for therapy. I seem to be in the other half, the down-half of what you saw in Bloomington—self-enclosed, unable to function, depressed.4
In fact, this letter was not sent, and it was late October before it became generally known that Lowell was at Payne Whitney. Hardwick had carried on living at Red Hook, commuting to make regular visits and staying over in hotels. During September, Lowell had had visits from both Tate and his wife. Allen urged him:
Tell yourself every morning, five times, that you are one of the best poets and that your friends feel about you precisely as they always have; that is, devotedly. You should never think as well of yourself as other people do, but you ought to think better of yourself than you do now. And you will.5
Caroline, always more consistently sharp-tongued than her husband, found the whole visit “depressing,” even irritating:
He seems to be in much the same state he was in when he broke down in Chicago, only past the violent stage. I imagine that he summoned me partly for the same reason he came to see us in Chicago: to disclose his recently discovered secret of the universe. I guess it’s no secret to you that it’s Counter-Point! I choked back so many remarks in the hour and a half that I was there that I became almost apoplectic. I would go to see him again if I thought it would do any good but I can’t see that it would.6
Caroline Tate goes on to recommend a Jungian approach to Lowell’s illness; Jungians, after all, deal in the same materials as poets: “symbols, archetypes.” And then, gratuitously: “It is pretty plain by this time that these attacks are cyclic, don’t you think?”7
By the end of October, Lowell was well enough to be allowed out of the hospital on Wednesdays and on weekends, and he was able to spend these times with Hardwick in an apartment she had rented on Central Park West. He had been in Payne Whitney for nearly three months, but his parents had never been told. “It was my idea,” Hardwick has recalled, “not telling them. Partly shame, partly not wanting to seem to be asking for help.”8 Eventually, they found out from Baldpate that Lowell was having “follow-up treatment” in New York, and Merrill Moore reassured them that a reactive depression was only to be expected. Moore had, in fact, written to Hardwick early in October that Mr. and Mrs. Lowell were so involved with their own problems and anxieties (Mr. Lowell had become “quite infantile and demanding and difficult”) that it would be better for them to be kept at a distance:
Actually from now on in they are not important and will not be any more. They are on their street car going to the end of the line where the car will stop and they will get off and walk the rest of the way.
They can never do much for Cal (they never have) and if he tries or if you try to adjust to them at this stage it would waste priceless energy which they need for their life tasks and whi
ch you both need for yours.9
It was November 5 before Lowell communicated directly with his parents: he had been too “ashamed and puzzled,” he said, to write to them before. He felt that he was “beginning to really learn something from the psycho-therapy” and added, in a postscript: “I’ve been trying to understand my first six or seven years and have many questions to ask you.”10 A week later his father wrote, praising Lowell for agreeing to take treatment—“I think it is such a very sensible and responsible thing to do”—and then drifting off into paternal emptiness:
You had a wonderful career in college, and we certainly don’t want your health to interfere with a brilliant career. So many literary people did not develop their bodies to keep pace with their brilliant minds.
Psychiatry can do a lot for people but most people go, because someone else wants them to, and not because they really have any interest in it themselves, and it is not to be wondered at, that the results are not up to expectations.
Saturday, we went to the Lunts in “I Know My Love”—a new Theater Guild that started here. It is very well done, and I am sure you would enjoy it.11
By Christmas, 1949, Lowell was “functioning” again; his letters are brisk and busy, as if he was anxious to make it clear that he was finally back in the world of practicalities. To his mother he wrote: