by Ian Hamilton
Before setting off for Harvard in February 1975, Lowell visited Dr. Paul Brass and demanded a medical report for his Boston doctor, Curtis Prout. He refused to give Brass Prout’s address. In the end Brass handed over a sealed envelope. Lowell opened this on the flight over and was shaken.
This delightful man has been a patient of mine since his arrival in England. The two problems he has had over here are at present under treatment. He suffers from chronic manic depression controlled with large doses of lithium, and he also has had a raised blood pressure over the last four years. The blood pressure is controlled at about 150/100 on three tablets of methyl dopa 250 mgm per day. His pulse remains constantly at 100 per minute and I must say he never really looks particularly well.
You probably know that he had a tendency in the past to drink excessive amounts of alcohol and to smoke too much. Of his own accord he has been taking Abstem tablets one daily and has more or less been on the wagon for the last four months. He has even cut down on his cigarette smoking to about 20 a day.46
The report goes on to describe Lowell’s fainting fit at the Weidenfeld party—he “might inadvertently have taken some alcohol”—and to pass on the results of his October examination by “an eminent cardiologist.” It was this specialist’s opinion that shook Lowell:
Chest X-ray showed a slightly odd-shaped heart, but I think it was within ordinary limits. All his ECG’s show left axis deviation compatible with left anterior block. There is some delay in right ventricular conduction, but this does not amount to bundle branch block. PR Interval is normal.47
No new treatment was suggested, but the family doctor proposed that if dizziness recurred “we should consider a pacemaker…. I have not discussed this with him, particularly I have not mentioned a pacemaker. He is extremely apprehensive and this would certainly make him very worried about his future health.” There is also mention in the report of “severe chest pains … starting in his back and radiating round to the right side. X-rays show quite considerable osteo-arthritis in his dorsal spine.”
For Lowell, this talk of pacemakers and “bundle branch block” was deeply alarming; and in spite of reassurances from his Boston doctor—who wrote to Blackwood that Lowell looked “twenty years younger since I last saw him because he’s been off alcohol”—he continued to see himself as a victim of heart illness. In the spring of 1975 he collapsed again, in New York; the circumstances are not entirely clear, but it would seem that, in fear of a manic attack, he overdosed on lithium. Robert Giroux recalls:
We had lunch on that day in Greenwich Village, at an Armenian restaurant, the Dardanelles, that he liked. After we ordered our food (he did not ask for a drink), to my horror his head fell forward and he slumped down in his seat. I said, “Cal, you’re not well. Let me get a taxi,” but he said, “No, I really want some food. I’ll be all right, I’m just tired.” To my surprise, after he began to eat, he visibly improved and began to seem his old self. When we finished, I suggested we ride uptown together (my office is downtown), but he insisted he was all right. Late that afternoon he collapsed again, and the doctors at Mount Sinai diagnosed his condition as toxic. Food apparently was an antidote. Lithium requires strict monitoring, which Cal was incapable of. The doctors did not seem to understand that asking him to “have the levels checked” was absurd; he could not take care of himself in this way.48
Lowell was kept in Mount Sinai for a few days’ observation, and Robert Silvers visited him there:
I saw him the night before he went in. We’d all been to the opera, and at the restaurant afterwards Cal seemed in terrible shape—exhausted, excited, incoherent. He slumped at the table drinking glass after glass of orange juice. The next day at Mount Sinai he talked in a wandering way about Alexander the Great—how Philip of Macedon had been a canny politician but Alexander had been able to cut through Asia.49
In May 1975 Lowell was back in Boston, and Dr. Prout writes to him at 34 Cypress Street, Brookline:
A week ago, you called me because you were feeling lethargic and sleepy. You had felt unwell and thought perhaps you needed to take more lithium to prevent a manic attack, and you had gone, from your usual five, up to as many as eight tablets a day. Your blood level, at that time, was 1.5, and we consider the desirable range to be something in the order of 0.5 to 1.0. As you know, I saw you at home several times. Your heart and blood pressure continue to be good, but you didn’t feel right in the head. There was also some apprehension about the possibility of a stroke, which I helped to allay.
Perhaps, because I was overly concerned with the overdose, I overestimated the length of time it would take to reduce the lithium in your blood, because the sample taken on May 12 was 0.2, which is too low. I therefore asked you to go back to, and stay on, your five tablets, regularly, a day. I don’t think you ought to go above it or below it and I do think you might have this level checked in England in about four weeks.50
In July, Lowell was writing from Milgate that apart from “coughs, pinkeye and palpitations” there was “nothing wrong,”51 and, three weeks later, that “I don’t have sleepy sickness if I don’t mix heart slowers with lithium—not a 100 per cent answer.”52 And in August he felt strong enough to attend a fairly drunken and contentious poetry festival in Ireland: “‘too much drinking and too many poets read,’ as someone said to me, but glorious. Three or four gates to climb from where we were staying to a salmon river—the heat had driven them into the wilds.”53 In September 1975 he reported to Blair Clark that he had had “a quiet, hard working and at times American hot summer…. We go to London almost weekly, but when we see strange and numerous people are so unpractised we can hardly speak, tho I think Caroline can sometimes.” He would resume his Harvard teaching in February 1976; this time, however, he and Blackwood would live in New York and he would “commute to Harvard as once before.”54 As he explained also to Frank Parker: “It’s really almost easier for me to fly to classes from New York than to drive in from Brookline. I hope to have rooms in one of the houses and stay two nights a week. I count on seeing you a lot.”55
During the summer and early fall of 1975 Lowell had prepared a Selected Poems for the press; and he also had a book of his prose essays which he hoped to publish under the title A Moment in American Poetry. Over thirty new poems had been finished and he was thinking that this would be “about enough” for a new book; “I’ll keep writing till November, and come out in the Spring.”56
Notes
1. R.L. to Frank Bidart, n.d. (Houghton Library).
2. The Dolphin (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973), P. 64.
3. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, October 1, 1971.
4. R.L. to Philip Booth, 1972.
5. Caroline Blackwood, interview with I.H. (1979).
6. R.L. to Blair Clark, n.d.
7. Ibid.
8. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, May 21, 1973. On the Maine property, Hardwick explains (in an interview with I.H. in 1982): “The property was left in its entirety to me by Miss Winslow. Cal had no claims at all on it, but I always felt it was left to me for reasons of practicality and was not meant as a rebuke to Cal. When we were together, he and I decided that I would sell part of it in order to improve the barn on the water where he worked. That was done. When we were divorced, I wanted to live in the barn as more suitable for me and Harriet. I had to sell the house on the Commons in order to make a house of the barn. Under Maine law, Cal, as my former husband, was required to sign. Only his signature was required, but he refused for a good while, seeming to think the signature indicated that indeed the property had been left to both of us. I explained, the Maine lawyer explained, but he would not for a long time accommodate and I almost lost the sale of the other house. Behind this was, in my view, his sadness, not his greed, that Cousin Harriet, much loved by both of us, had done what she did.”
9. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, May 26, 1973.
10. Calvin Bedient, “Visions and Revisions—Three New Volumes by America’s First Poet,”
New York Times Book Review, July 29, 1973, pp. 15 ff.
11. Jonathan Raban, interview with I.H. (1979).
12. Stephen Yenser, “Half Legible Bronze,” Poetry 123 (February 1974), pp. 304–9.
13. Paul Ramsey, “American Poetry in 1973,” Sewanee Review 82 (Spring 1974), pp. 393–405.
14. William Pritchard, “Poetry Matters,” Hudson Review 26 (Autumn 1973), pp. 579–97.
15. Adrienne Rich to R.L., June 19, 1971 (Houghton Library).
16. Adrienne Rich, American Poetry Review, September-October 1973.
17. Marjorie Perloff, “The Blank Now,” New Republic, July 7 and 14, 1973, p. 24.
18. R.L. to Blair Clark, July 31, 1973.
19. Robert Giroux, interview with I.H. (1979).
20. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, July 12, 1973.
21. Ibid., July 16, 1973.
22. R.L. to William Alfred, August 31, 1973.
23. R.L. to Blair Clark, July 31, 1973.
24. R.L. to William Alfred, August 31, 1973.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. The texts of poems quoted on pp. 436–38 are as they first appeared in New Review 1, no. 1 (April 1974). They were revised for book publication in Day by Day (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977).
28. R.L. to Blair Clark, February 22, 1974.
29. Ms (Houghton Library).
30. Ibid.
31. Day by Day (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977), p. 27.
32. R.L., “The Poetry of John Berryman,” New York Review of Books May 28, 1964.
33. R.L. to Peter Taylor, May 13, 1974.
34. Day by Day, p. 38.
35. R.L. to William Alfred, May 20, 1974.
36. R.L. to Peter Taylor, July 13, 1974.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., October 9, 1974.
39. New Review 2, no. 20 (November 1975). Revised for publication in Day by Day (1977).
40. Ibid.
41. R.L. to Elizabeth Hardwick, October 13, 1974.
42. Ibid., December 13, 1974.
43. R.L. to Peter Taylor, n.d.
44. R.L. to Frank Bidart, December 14, 1974.
45. Caroline Blackwood, interview with I.H. (1979).
46. P. R. Brass to Curtis Prout, February 5, 1975 (Houghton Library).
47. Ibid.
48. Robert Giroux, interview with I.H. (1982).
49. Robert Silvers, interview with I.H. (1981).
50. Curtis Prout to R.L., May 1975 (Houghton Library).
51. R.L. to Peter Taylor, July 1, 1975.
52. Ibid., July 21, 1975.
53. R.L. to Frank Parker, September 11, 1975.
54. R.L. to Blair Clark, September 11, 1975.
55. R.L. to Frank Parker, September 11, 1975.
56. R.L. to Frank Bidart, August 7, 1975.
25
It was agonizing to watch. That was the saddest. It would start with a feeling in his spine. And he’d suddenly say, “Honey, Christ, I’m going to have an attack.” It’s as if you said to me in the middle of a conversation that you were going to have an attack. But he would say: “I can feel it. In the spine. It’s a funny, creepy feeling. It’s coming up the spine from the lower back, up.” Once at Milgate he said he was going to have an attack. And we had one hope: that if he had a massive Valium injection, it might stop—you know, that thing where they do it right in the vein. So I said: “Let’s get right on the train and go to Dr. Brass” [their London doctor]. When we set off he was talking a lot, but he was making sense. By the time we reached Victoria, he wasn’t. He’d gone, flipped. I got him to Redcliffe Square and Dr. Brass came round and gave him the massive Valium. He was there all night giving him more Valium—he said that people have their nose off and their leg amputated under the doses he’d given Cal. But Cal was still walking around talking and waving his arms. And Dr. Brass said, “That man is like a bull.” He’d never seen anything like it. But in an hour he’d gone—between Milgate and Victoria station.1
In November 1975 Lowell was admitted to a private hospital called the Priory in Roehampton, a south London suburb; for many of Lowell’s London friends, this was the first time that they had experienced one of his attacks; indeed, for several of them, it was as if literature was eerily transmuting itself back into life. The tyrant delusions, in particular, were disconcerting; after all, there was nothing much in the “mad” poems to prepare the unversed visitor for the daunting impact of the poet’s actual madness.
I went to visit Cal one afternoon and met one of those gangly mental patients hanging around in the corridors. I asked him where Mr. Lowell was, and he said, “Oh, you mean the Professor. He’s going around with his piece of steel. He’s got this very important piece of steel.” Anyway, I found Cal wandering out on the lawn, carrying what looked like a piece of motor car engine, or part of a central heating system, and Cal was standing there holding it up and saying, “The Chief Engineer gave me this. This is a present from the Chief Engineer.” I said, “Oh yes.” And he said, “You know what this is? This is the Totentanz. This is what Hitler used to eliminate the Jews.” I said, “Cal, it’s not. It’s a piece of steel. It’s nothing to do with the Jews.” And then this awful sad, glazed look in his eyes, and he said something like “It’s just my way. It’s only a joke.”2
But it was not so easy to laugh off the tyrannical elements in Lowell’s own behavior: “I think it was only when he was in hospital that he ever stood up to his full height. He sort of grew. And there was also a sort of ferocity. If one disagreed with him, he would begin to blaze. He could be very frightening.”3 Certainly, Caroline Blackwood found him so, and over the next three months she came close to despair. After Lowell had spent two wild, oppressive weeks in the Priory, he discharged himself. Blackwood was taking a course of acupuncture for a back complaint that had troubled her for many years, and Lowell decided that his problem could be similarly treated. Blackwood’s doctor reluctantly agreed to have a try, and after a single session Lowell pronounced himself entirely cured.
Indeed, for a time, it did seem that the needles had worked miracles. Lowell spent December at Milgate, seemingly much calmed. Before the end of the year, though, he was admitted once again to Greenways, the hospital that had treated him in July 1970. And on January 4 he discharged himself from Greenways. At this point, with the acupuncture “miracle” in mind, Blackwood decided that she had had enough of orthodox medicine, and for the next three weeks Lowell was treated at Redcliffe Square by a strange combination of homeopathy and acupuncture; nurses were engaged and Blackwood retired to Milgate with the children—she would commute from there to London.
I was so desperate at that point I would have gone to a miracle worker. But my heart sank when the doctor came round with these ridiculous little pills. Here was Cal, this enormous man with these enormous problems. You’ve seen homeopathic pills—they’re absolutely minute. You just couldn’t believe they could work on such a huge physique.4
A few entries from the logbook kept by Lowell’s nurses during these three weeks provide a chastening view of “the Professor” as mere patient. In the functional jottings of his professional custodians, he becomes a humbled, pitiable figure—a huge child to be watched over night and day. The notebook is titled “Mr Robert Howell,” and the General Instructions read as follows:
Professor Lowell discharged himself from Greenways. His Dr. is Dr. Lederman who is very helpful. The professor must not be left alone at any time. The day nurse must go out with him and the night nurse must sit in his room. He must not be allowed to touch alcohol in any form.
Don’t leave him alone to go shopping. He is very untidy and one has to clear up all the time. He likes orange juice and drinks gallons of milk but is a little sketchy about other things. He does like soup and toasted crumpets. He is always mislaying his cigarette holder and lighter. Smokes incessantly—
Small hints on professor’s behaviour. Has claimed to have swallowed Dettol. Has put hair lacquer in pubic area produ
cing rash. Has put olive oil in orange juice.
Don’t leave anything at all doubtful lying about.5
Most of the day-to-day entries are to do with diet, homeopathic pills and mixtures, visits from the acupuncturist. During the nights Lowell is regularly reported as “Restless and did not sleep for long intervals.” Now and then a note of mild alarm is sounded: “Visited Westminster Abbey briefly and returned home 3.30 p.m. No apparently harmful effect.” (As a result of this visit, Lowell decided he wanted to change his nationality so that he could be in Poets’ Corner.) “Had lunch with literary agent and three others at l’Escargot in Greek Street. Was told not to drink anything but had some white wine.” (At l’Escargot, Lowell tried to enlist help from the waiters and from strangers lunching at adjoining tables—help in compiling an “anthology of world poetry.” He told them that he was king of Scotland but that the anthology’s selection process would be wholly democratic.) “Left flat unaccompanied in taxi for Portobello Rd. without waiting for Miss Conway. Dr. Lederman informed. (7.30 a.m.); Professor Lowell returned from Portobello Road at 10.20 a.m. Very flushed and seemed over delighted with his purchases of books, etc.” (Among his purchases that day was a large knife, soon itself to feature in a Report by Lowell’s night nurse: “He pointed a knife at me—joking he said—a funny joke.”)