Robert Lowell: A Biography

by Ian Hamilton

  At the end of April 1954 Lowell’s Cincinnati doctor—Philip Piker—wrote to Merrill Moore advising that Lowell seemed well enough to be moved to a hospital more suited to “convalescent purposes” (and also one that was rather less expensive).28 Hardwick approached Payne Whitney, and although they were reluctant to treat patients who had not “kept up after their last treatment,” they eventually took Lowell back for “extensive psychotherapy.”29 At the beginning of June—after a relatively calm and lucid interval—there was a new surge of “elation,” of hostility to Hardwick, and a resurrection of the “Giovanna theme.”30 By mid-June there was a complete relapse:

  Poor Cal—I feel nearly reduced to prayer at this point. Blair, isn’t it terrible, this poor creature has acute mania again! I can hardly bear it for him. He’s now cut off from all visitors, letters, calls—on the most severly [sic] ill floor. I shudder to think how long it may be before he comes within reach again.31

  When Hardwick wrote this letter to Blair Clark (on June 15), Lowell had been cut off from visitors for ten days; and the diagnosis was now leaning towards “acute schizophrenia”: “This is not necessarily more serious … but it is very serious and while they expect Cal to pull out of this attack they don’t expect the permanent relief that one gets in less serious cases.”32 In place of shock treatment, the Payne Whitney doctors were now trying “a new drug”—chlorpromazine, or (by its trade name) Thorazine.

  As he relapsed, Lowell began writing again to Giovanna Madonia, who, according to Hardwick, now had for him the same function that the Catholic Church had served in earlier attacks. Lowell literally wanted to “join” Giovanna—and it was when he threatened to sign himself out of Payne Whitney in order to make tracks for Europe that the hospital had consigned him to one of their “acute” wards. As for Madonia, she knew by this time that Lowell was in a hospital, but she assumed that he had suffered a “nervous breakdown” in response to the stress of his separation from Hardwick. She too was under stress, she wrote, for similar reasons (her husband was refusing an annulment), she too was sick. As she saw it, both she and Lowell were struggling against a common foe; they had to make sure that they became “well and stable…. Before taking decisions we have all to be well—I am not dreaming. I want to spend my life with Cal, that’s all.”33 On June 26 Madonia cabled Lowell: “I am serene and I am waiting,” and on the same day wrote a letter saying that she would not travel to the United States until Lowell was completely “cured.”

  Lowell spent nearly three weeks in the locked ward at Payne Whitney. As with other hospitals he was admitted to, it has not been possible to consult his medical records. In this instance, though, Lowell set down his own—nonmedical—account of the “events” of June and July 1954. It is his most extensive and most richly detailed attempt to recapture the “tone and feel” of a psychotic episode:

  When Mother died, I began to feel tireless, madly sanguine, menaced, and menacing. I entered the Payne-Whitney Clinic for “all those afflicted in mind.” One night I sat in the mixed lounge, and enjoyed the new calm which I had been acquiring with much cunning during the few days since my entrance. I remember coining and pondering for several minutes such phrases as the Art of Detachment, Off-handed Involvement, and Urbanity: a Key to the Tactics of Self-control. But the old menacing hilarity was growing in me. I saw Anna and her nurse walk into our lounge. Anna, a patient from a floor for more extreme cases, was visiting our floor for the evening. I knew that the evening would soon be over, that the visitor would probably not return to us, and that I had but a short time to make my impression on her. Anna towered over the piano, and thundered snatches of Mozart sonatas, which she half-remembered and murdered. Her figure, a Russian ballerina’s or Anna Karenina’s, was emphasized, and illuminated, as it were, by an embroidered, middle-European blouse that fitted her with the creaseless, burnished, curved tightness of a medieval breast-plate. I throbbed to the music and the musician. I began to talk aimlessly and loudly to the room at large. I discussed the solution to a problem that had been bothering me about the unmanly smallness of the suits of armor that I had seen “tilting” at the Metropolitan Museum. “Don’t you see?” I said, and pointed to Anna, “the armor was made for Amazons!” But no one took up my lead. I began to extol my tone-deafness; it was, I insisted, a providential flaw, an auditory fish-weir that screened out irrelevant sonority. I made defiant adulatory remarks on Anna’s touch. Nobody paid any attention to me. Roger, an Oberlin undergraduate and fellow patient, sat beside Anna on the piano-bench. He was small. His dark hair matched his black flannel Brooks Brothers’ suit; his blue-black eyes matched his blue-black necktie. He wore a light cashmere sweater that had been knitted for him by his mother, and his yellow woolen socks had been imported from the Shetlands. Roger talked to Anna with a persuasive shyness. Occasionally, he would stand up and play little beginners’ pieces for her. He explained that these pieces were taken from an exercise book composed by Bela Bartok in protest against the usual, unintelligibly tasteless examples used by teachers. Anna giggled with incredulous admiration as Roger insisted that the clinic’s music instructor could easily teach her to read more skilfully. Suddenly, I felt compelled to make a derisive joke, and I announced crypticly [sic] and untruely [sic] that Rubinstein had declared the eye was of course the source of all evil for a virtuoso. “If the eye offends thee, pluck it out.” No one understood my humor. I grew red and confused. The air in the room began to tighten around me. I felt as if I were squatting on the bottom of a huge laboratory bottle and trying to push out the black rubber stopper before I stiffled [sic]. Suddenly, I knew [corrected in E.H.’s hand to “felt”] I could clear the air by taking hold of Roger’s ankles and pulling him off his chair. By some criss-cross of logic, I reasoned that my cruel boorishness would be an act of self sacrifice. I would be bowing out of the picture, and throwing Roger into the arms of Anna. Without warning, but without lowering my eyes from Anna’s splendid breast-plate-blouse, I seized Roger’s yellow ankles. I pulled; Roger sat on the floor with tears in his eyes. A sigh of surprised repulsion went round the room. I assumed a hurt, fatherly expression, but all at once I felt eased and sympathetic with everyone.

  When the head nurse came gliding into the lounge, I pretended that I was a white-gloved policeman who was directing traffic. I held up my open hands, and said, “No roughage, Madam; just innocent merriment!” Roger was getting to his feet; I made a stop-signal in his direction. In a purring, pompous James Michael Curley voice, I said, “Later, he will thank me.” The head-nurse, looking bored and tolerant, led me away to watch the Liberace program in the men’s television parlor. I was left unpunished. But next morning, while I was weighing-in and “purifying” myself in the cold shower, I sang

  Rex tremendae majestatis

  qui salvandos salvas gratis

  at the top of my lungs and to a melody of my own devising. Like the cat-bird, who will sometimes “interrupt its sweetest song by a perfect imitation of some harsh cry such as that of the Great Crested Flycatcher, the squawl of a hen, the cry of a lost chicken, or the spitting of a cat” I blended the lonely tenor of some fourteenth century Flemish monk to bars of Yankee Doodle, and the Mmm Mmm of the padlocked Papagano [sic]. I was then transferred to a new floor where the patients were deprived of their belts, pajama-cords and shoe-strings. We were not allowed to carry matches, and had to request the attendants to light our cigarettes. For holding up my trowsers [sic] I invented an inefficient, stringless method which I considered picturesque and called Malayan. Each morning before breakfast, I lay naked to the waist in my knotted Malayan pajamas and received the first of my round-the-clock injections of Chloropromzene [sic]: left shoulder, right shoulder, right buttock, left buttock. My blood became like melted lead. I could hardly swallow my breakfast, because I so dread the weighted bending down that would be necessary for making my bed. And the rational exigencies of bed-making were more upsetting than the physical. I wallowed through badminton doubles, as though I were a diver
in the full billowings of his equipment on the bottom of the sea. I sat gaping through Scrabble games unable to form the simplest word; I had to be prompted by a nurse, and even then couldn’t make any sense of the words the nurse had formed for me. I watched the Giants play the Brooklyn Dodgers on television. … My head ached, and I couldn’t keep count of the balls and strikes for longer than a single flash on the screen. I went back to my bedroom and wound the window open to its maximum six inches. Below me, patients circled in twos over the bright gray octagonal paving-stones of the courtyard. I let my glasses drop. How freely they glittered through the air for almost a minute! They shattered on the stones. Then everyone in the courtyard came crowding and thrusting their heads forward over my glasses, as though I had been scattering corn for pigeons. I felt my languor lift and then descend again. I already seemed to weigh a thousand pounds because of my drug, and now I blundered about nearly blind from myopia. But my nervous system vibrated joyfully, when I felt the cool air brushing directly on my eye-balls. And I was reborn each time I saw my blurred, now unspectacled, now unprofessorial face in the mirror.34

  This account is taken from Lowell’s original draft for the prose essay “91 Revere Street”; the tone in which Lowell remembers himself when “mad” is chillingly consistent with the tone he uses to recall childhood misdeeds. There is an amused, tolerant, near embarrassment as Lowell recalls the “mischief” he has done—in both schoolroom and asylum. The assault on Roger described here could almost have taken place at Rivers, and the expectation of punishment is casual but alert, just like a naughty boy’s.

  There is something similarly boyish in a letter Lowell wrote to Blair Clark on August 6:

  I’ve been out of my excitement for over a month, I think, now, and am in good spirits, though I don’t feel any rush of eloquence to talk about the past. It’s like recovering from some physical injury, such as a broken leg or jaundice, yet there’s no disclaiming these outbursts—they are part of my character—me at moments.

  On the subject of Giovanna Madonia, Lowell said he had written to her that he “was staying married to Elizabeth”:

  However I wrapped my letters up in emotions (really felt at the time and made them as soft as I could). I haven’t had an answer, and don’t quite see what I can write her at this point. The whole business was sincere enough, but a stupid pathological mirage, a magical orange grove in a nightmare. I feel like a son of a bitch.

  He wanted Clark to find out how she was: “I do know that I am responsible for whatever disturbances have happened in her life.”35

  In spite of its first side effects, Lowell had reacted swiftly to the Thorazine treatment, and Hardwick was mildly encouraged: “The most hopeful thing for the future is his extraordinary response to the new drug.”36 She was advised that Lowell’s final diagnosis would, after all, be “manic-depressive” and not “schizophrenic”; the reassurance here being that schizophrenia was supposed to leave more “scarring” after an attack. By September 15 Lowell was ready to be discharged from Payne Whitney on condition that when he and Hardwick moved to Boston (where they intended to stay until the house at Duxbury was fixed), he maintain some kind of regular “psychotherapy.” A fairly empty exhortation, it would seem, since—as Hardwick wrote to Clark:

  The doctors at Payne Whitney are not very hopeful about dramatic results from psycho-therapy for Cal. It isn’t just putting in time with a doctor; you have to be the sort of person who can have detailed and changing insight into himself: you must do the work yourself. Of course Cal must take the psycho-therapy, but it will probably be most useful as a kind of support rather than a cure—or so they think now.37

  At the end of September 1954 Lowell and Hardwick moved into a “half palazzo and half loft” apartment on Commonwealth Avenue. On October 24 Lowell wrote to Peter Taylor: “After months of walking in this maze, one is a little speechless and surprised to have eyes. We are both very well and send our love to you both. Cal.”38

  Notes

  1. Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair and Holly Clark, February 20, 1954.

  2. R.L. to Blair Clark, March 21, 1954.

  3. R.L. to Peter Taylor, March 19, 1954.

  4. R.L. to Blair Clark, March 21, 1954.

  5. Blair Clark, interview with I.H. (1981).

  6. Giovanna Madonia to R.L., March 21, 1954; translated from the Italian by Holly Eley (Houghton Library).

  7. Ibid.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair Clark, March 27, 1954.

  10. R.L. to Blair Clark, March 30, 1954.

  11. Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair Clark, March 27, 1954.

  12. Ibid, April 1, 1954.

  13. Ibid, n.d.

  14. Diary of Van Meter Ames, read to I.H. by Elizabeth Bettman (1981).

  15. George Ford, letter to I.H. (1981).

  16. Elizabeth Bettman, interview with I.H. (1981).

  17. John Thompson, interview with I.H. (1979).

  18. Elizabeth Bettman, interview with I.H. (1981).

  19. R.L. to Ezra Pound, March 10, 1954 (Beinecke Library).

  20. Ibid., March 25, 1954 (Beinecke Library).

  21. Ibid., March 30, 1954 (Beinecke Library).

  22. Ms poem (Beinecke Library).

  23. Cable from Blair Clark to Elizabeth Hardwick, April 12, 1954 (Houghton Library).

  24. Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair Clark, April 10, 1954.

  25. Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair and Holly Clark, May 4, 1954.

  26. Giovanna Madonia to Blair Clark, March 19, 1954.

  27. Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair Clark, April 4, 1954.

  28. Philip Piker to Merrill Moore, April 26, 1954 (Houghton Library).

  29. Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair Clark, May 15, 1954.

  30. Ibid., June 9, 1954.

  31. Ibid., June 15, 1954.

  32. Ibid., June 22, 1954.

  33. Giovanna Madonia to Blair Clark, May 23, 1954.

  34. R.L., draft autobiography, 1955–57 (Houghton Library).

  35. R.L. to Blair Clark, August 6, 1954.

  36. Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair Clark, August 31, 1954.

  37. Ibid.

  38. R.L. to Peter Taylor, October 24, 1954.

  14

  By February 1955 Elizabeth Hardwick was writing to friends that Lowell was “his old self again” and that he had begun work on a series of “remarkable” prose pieces: “They are reminiscences of childhood—that is the closest I can come—and I think of extraordinary beauty and interest.” Lowell was at his desk each day for “sixteen hours or so and I’ve very nearly been feeding him through a tube.”1

  In the same month, Lowell wrote to Ransom seeking a reference for a teaching post at Boston University—he wanted a job, he said, “to keep my hand green and my mind mellow.”2 In the meantime, though, it did seem that his new prose project was discipline enough: his own retort, some would say, to the kindly promptings of the psychotherapists. An orphan and an heir, for the first time he could explore his Boston origins without any self-defensive rancor. His new therapist had encouraged him to adopt a strict daily regime—“get up at eight, shave, take walk etc”—and after their first three months in Boston Hardwick had reported: “Together we have managed so far to keep the depression from becoming incapacitating—it comes down upon us like a cloud but always lifts in a day or two.”3 The prose “reminiscences” were a way of cementing Lowell’s new, timetabled calm—prose, Lowell found, need not thrive on bouts of high “enthusiasm.”

  Not that these pieces were mere therapeutic exercises; Lowell knew that during the later stages of this last episode his delusions had been neither Christ-like nor Napoleonic, and that more notably than in earlier episodes, there had been a regression to the infantile: the mother’s boy no longer had a mother.

  … after six or seven weeks at the Payne-Whitney Clinic, my bluster and manic antics died away. Images of my spoiled childhood ached inside me, and I would lean with my chin in my hand, and count the rustling poplars, so many league
s below me, which lined the hospital driveway and led out to the avenues of Manhattan, to life. I used to count the poplars, and gave them the names of old ladies. This one was my Great Aunt Sarah. That one was Cousin Susy Pickering. That was Cousin Belle Winslow. That was Mrs. Robbins. That was Gaga [the pet name of Lowell’s maternal grandmother]. My grandfather Winslow had named his country house Chardesa for his children Charlotte, Devereux and Sarah.4

  And on April 17, 1955, he wrote to Ezra Pound:

  This has been a funny, eye-opening winter i.e. living in the Boston I left when I was seventeen, full of passion and without words. I suppose all young men get up the nerve to start moving by wrapping themselves like mummies from nose to toe in colored cloths, veils, dreams etc. After a while shedding one’s costume, one’s fancy dress, is like being flayed. I’ve just been doing a little piece of Why I live in Boston. I made it impersonal and said nothing about what I was looking for here—the pain and jolt of seeing things as they are.5