Harriet Brackett Spence Lowell’s father, Keith Spence, was born in Orkney in 1735. Little is known about his parents, only that his father’s occupation is listed as “writer” on the baptismal record in Kirkwall. Spence immigrated to New England just before the Revolutionary War and served as an officer on the USS Constellation and USS Philadelphia. His wife, Mary Traill Spence, had strong New England roots, but her father, like her husband, was also born in Orkney. (Harriet Brackett Spence Lowell gave her father’s and mother’s surnames to her second son, Robert Traill Spence Lowell, a name that would be passed down for another three generations.) Like Charles Darwin’s tangled root bank, the dominant branches of Robert Lowell’s family tree—the Traills, Spences, Lowells, and Winslows—came together to create a dense thicket of temperament and talent, gift and blight.
Medical record of Harriet Brackett Spence Lowell, 1845, McLean Asylum for the Insane Credit 8
Keith Spence’s letters to his wife lay open not only their respective struggles with depression and mental instability, they also reveal his gift for writing about people and ships and the downward drag of melancholy. He is direct in his description of his low spirits, lethargy, and confusion but, when well, writes vividly about the places he has sailed—Palermo, Gibraltar, Malta, Syracuse, the Bay of Tunis; about painting, architecture, and history; storms at sea, ship riggings, sea duty. Dark moods passed down through his blood—dark moods, we know, carry a strong debt to inheritance—but so too did a turn for language.
In a letter to his wife written in 1804, Spence told her of his dismal state of mind: “Time, that used to drive on the happy moments of my existence with lightning velocity, as if he envy’d me my enjoyment; now, as if he took pleasure in my suffering, limps and lags behind like a weary traveler; and if I murmur or complain of his tardiness, he lifts his ugly [scythe] and threatens to cut me down.” The sun, he said, “stands still at noon day; at night the Stars seem stationary; for watch after watch I look up to them but they move not.” Sleep, “that silent soother of human sorrow,” had almost entirely forsaken him, “or, if he sometimes deigns to pay me a visit, is soon drawn away, by the fantastic figures, and dreary prospects, which fancy, thro’ her magic lantern of dreams and visions, plays before my imagination.”
Despondency and a gnawing indolence come up in many of his letters. He writes on repeated occasions about “a lowness of spirits” and a prolonged fatigue when nothing but “the absolute force of necessity rouse[s] me to action.” “There are circumstances and situations in life,” he tells his wife, “in which people may be placed, where silence alone enables them to support it; and when they dare not give their afflictions the form of words, for making them too hideous.”
At the same time that Spence was sending bleak letters to his wife, he was also responding to disturbing ones from her. He writes, in light of her “Sickness,” that she “must support Serenity and Cheerfulness.” Later he tells her, “I shudder at your past Indisposition…I am much concerned for the state of your health, and the more so as the seat of it seems to be in your mind….Keep up your Spirits.”
She writes to him of the “perturbations” of her nerves, which “destroy the whole system” and reduce her “corporal strength to a state converging to the grave.” To her daughter Harriet Lowell she confides that her “distress” is increasing “each year, each month, each week, each day and hour.” Her suffering, now the severest she has known, “sinks me to the grave.” Her “diseased mind,” she writes, “renders me totally incapable of deciding upon anything of importance.”
Later, in a letter with a large section since cut out of it, she confides: “This must not be seen by any body but yourself….It is a long time since I have been able to write a coherent letter; such has been the malady of my mind, to which the complication of sickness, affliction of mind, and great perplexities have conspired….My head [is] not competent to the dictates of my heart; indeed, that is too often the case, and of the former derangement and torpor makes me fear that my reason will forsake me, or be broken down.”
The disposition to “derangement and torpor” seems to have passed in a particularly strong way through Mary Traill Spence’s maternal line. Her mother had had psychological troubles. Her physician wrote to her husband, Robert Traill, “She is I think quite recovered of the indisposition she laboured under last summer,” but, he added, “her nerves are yet weak.” A petition to the New Hampshire General Court in 1781 indicates that her health had “for a long time past been much impaired.” A bill for medical services presented to her husband lists, among other things, medications “for your lady” such as “Nervous drops” and sudorific drugs, among them scarlet pimpernel, often used in treating melancholy and other mental diseases. Certainly Mary Traill’s daughter and granddaughter suffered from disorders severe enough to warrant the designation of mental illness.
The son of Keith and Mary Traill Spence, Robert Traill Spence, seems to have had a milder form of his parents’ difficulties. Keith Spence expressed concern to his wife that their son had an “extreme volatility of Temper” and that he was “ungovernable.” A few years later he wrote that his son’s “extraordinary state of mind” was “truly alarming.” He had done all he could do as a father “to rouse him from his poetic Dreams, and from that stupor and inactivity which seems to have taken possession of him….He seems much in the same way that he was when he was in the Mediterranean, a despondency and lowness of spirits.” Of his son’s literary passion, he wrote, “What could put Poetry in his head?…I cannot conceive.” Despite his parents’ concern that he would come to naught, Robert Traill Spence became a successful naval officer and was cited for bravery by the American naval hero Commodore Stephen Decatur. He also continued to write, to experience occasional bouts of melancholy, and to have “poetry in his head.” An obituary noted that he had been “a good writer in both prose and poetry,” another that he had been “an elegant scholar…[and] a good poet.”
A link between volatile moods and the determination and ability to write, to be a poet, was an emerging one in the bloodline. Keith and Mary Spence’s other child, Harriet Brackett Spence, later institutionalized at the McLean Asylum, like her parents and brother loved poetry and music and was, as well, an accomplished watercolorist. In 1806 she married Charles Lowell, the minister of the West Church in Boston. Her new family, the Lowells, long a part of New England history, was not without its share of excitable and brooding minds.
The early Lowells, the first of whom settled north of Boston, appear to have been a steady lot. Percival Lowle (1571–1664), the first of the Lowell family to immigrate to America, sailed from London in 1639 and went to lands near Plum Island Sound, north of Boston. A prosperous merchant, he was also well schooled in English poetry, educated in Latin, and enough well-thought-of as a poet to write the elegy for Governor Winthrop. There is no indication of significant mental instability in the Lowell line until the late eighteenth century. John “The Old Judge” Lowell (1743–1802), delegate to the Continental Congress, eminent jurist, and great-great-great grandfather of Robert Lowell, had three sons. “All three were high-strung delicate men, prone to overwork and periods of nervous exhaustion,” states Ferris Greenslet, the biographer of the Lowell family. “Perhaps each, like his father, had a streak of the malade imaginaire in him.”
The eldest son, John “The Rebel” Lowell (1769–1840), graduated with distinction in classics from Harvard and became a prominent Boston attorney and activist in the Federalist Party. Throughout his life he had intermittent periods of “overwork,” followed by months of depression and exhaustion. In 1804 he described his mental state to his family: “I have in a very considerable degree restored the tone of my nervous system….The least deviation, the least anxiety, disturbs my nerves and makes me dread a relapse—I hope however that time will fortify me against this most terrible of all maladies.” Years later, when he resigned his position on the Harvard Board of Overseers, he explained to the board that his in
disposition was one that “perfectly incapacitates the subjects of it…as [from] a [paralytic] shock. There is an apparent physical vigour and health, but such a morbid state of the nervous system, as deprives the patient of all power over his faculties, and volition.”
The second son of “Old Judge” Lowell, Francis Cabot Lowell, graduated with highest honors in mathematics from Harvard and became one of the most successful businessmen in the history of New England. (It is Francis Cabot Lowell for whom the city of Lowell, Massachusetts, is named.) He, like his older brother, had periods of ferocious energy and “overwork,” followed by an incapacitating stagnancy. When on the verge or in the midst of a nervous breakdown, he, like other members of the Lowell family, went abroad to recuperate. It was an expensive way to heal but money was not a major consideration for the now and again nervously afflicted Lowells.
Charles Lowell, the third son of the Old Judge, was the husband of Harriet Brackett Spence and great-great-grandfather of Robert Lowell; he was minister of the historic West Church, a fiery congregation before and during the Revolutionary War, and a socially activist one after the war’s conclusion. (An early West Church minister is credited with railing from his pulpit against British rule, shouting out the inflammatory words of his friend James Otis, “No taxation without representation.”) There Charles Lowell taught Louisa May Alcott and Charles Eliot, the future president of Harvard and cousin of T. S. Eliot, in the church Sunday school and there he preached passionately against slavery.
There is some suggestion that Charles Lowell had a trace of the Lowell instability. He was said to share his brothers’ “high-strung” ways, excitable periods followed by weeks or months of “nervous exhaustion.” During his ministry at the West Church he moved to the country rather than continue living in Boston, which some congregants and family believed to be too stressful for him. His father-in-law, Keith Spence, not the ideal person to question someone else’s mental stability, wondered whether Charles Lowell, “like all Lowell men,” was perhaps too passionately inclined. Toward the end of his life, Charles Lowell was said by his family to be “alarmingly excitable.” Lowell’s youngest son, James Russell Lowell, believed that he had inherited his father’s “indolence (I know not whether to call it intellectual or physical).”
Two clusters of descendants particularly distinguished by creativity and literary gifts followed the “high-strung delicate” generation of John, Francis, and Charles Lowell. They too were mercurial by temperament, and by any account, their achievements stand out. Abbott Lawrence Lowell became president of Harvard and his sister Elizabeth Lowell (Putnam), the author of six books, pioneered reform in child and maternal health. Their sister, Amy Lowell (1874–1925), was a renowned poet. Like her distant cousin Robert Lowell, who was eight years old when she died, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and she, like him, was the cover subject for Time magazine (as was her brother Abbott Lawrence Lowell). Amy, a leader of the Imagist movement in poetry, intermittently suffered from “nervous prostration” and protracted “fits of depression.”
Percival Lowell (1855–1916), Amy’s older brother, graduated from Harvard with distinction in mathematics. He was a businessman, Orientalist, and astronomer who was most famous for his belief that canals existed on Mars, which, he speculated, had been built by a dying civilization. His writings about Mars influenced generations of science fiction writers, including H. G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, and Robert A. Heinlein. He founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and contributed significantly to the early scientific efforts that led to the discovery of Pluto (whose name, which includes Percival Lowell’s initials, was given in part to recognize Lowell’s contribution).
Percival Lowell had repeated nervous breakdowns, described by his associates as “nervous weakness” or “nervous exhaustion” and by himself as a “complete breakdown of the machine.” These episodes lasted from months to years at a time and usually came after periods of “frenzied over-work”: weeks of high enthusiasm, an outpouring of creative scientific work and writing, and little sleep. This pattern of excited work, peaking in a fevered mental state, and followed by depression, is strikingly similar to the one experienced by his cousin, the poet Robert Lowell.
This debilitating pattern of Percival Lowell’s nervous condition repeated itself throughout his life. In September 1897 one of his colleagues wrote, “I am quite anxious about his condition; his [nervous] weakness seems to continue, and he will need absolute rest in order to recuperate. It would be well if he would give up work entirely.” The following month the same colleague noted that Lowell was worse than ever, and that his attorney had had to take over his correspondence. He required, it was said, “absolute rest.” Two months later Lowell had improved but his “nervous weakness still continues.”
A similar extended period of nervous illness occurred again in 1912. His secretary and companion wrote to one of his colleagues: “Dr. Lowell has not been in the office for seven weeks. It is nervous exhaustion and he is up and down. Some days he cannot even telephone. He gets nervous about the work and is impatient.” Three weeks later she asked, “Is it not too bad that his nerves are so long in getting strong?”
Although Robert Lowell wrote little about his distant cousin Percival—“I hadn’t realized his errors were so fruitful, I suppose that’s the rule in science,” he wrote to his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, toward the end of his life. “In the family, we always doubted his Mars, but swore by the accuracy and orthodoxy of his Pluto”—they had in common a pursuit of things on a great scale, questing minds, conspicuous ambition, restless imagination, and a sense of the dark grandeur of life. They also were inclined to long periods of intense creative work followed by months of “nervous exhaustion.” It is more usual to place Robert Lowell’s artistic ancestry in the context of his fellow poets James Russell Lowell and Amy Lowell, but in many ways his mind was more kindred to that of the astronomer.
Percival Lowell wrote poetically as well as scientifically; indeed, several of his colleagues at the Lowell Observatory remarked that his work was excellent as literature but considerably less impressive as science. In his book Mars as the Abode of Life, published in 1908, he wrote about the types of discovery. There is discovery of a factual nature, he said, one that adds to what is known. Then there is original thought: “Breadth of mind must match breadth of subject. For to plodders along prescribed paths a far view fails of appeal; conservative settlers in a land differ in a quality from pioneers.” There were no Martian-created canals on Mars, no Martians, but Lowell’s imagination primed our curiosity about the planet and made it a more imaginable, unimaginable place.
Percival Lowell was an adventurer, indefatigable, an enthusiast who swept up others in his vitality and lived by the belief he often shared with others: “Not the possible, but the impossible.” He was an explorer and took risks; he was a pioneer as Willa Cather meant it. “A pioneer should have imagination,” she wrote, “should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.” Despite his essentially exuberant temperament, Percival Lowell had a bleak view of the probable fate of the universe, a view not unusual in those who watch the skies and spend their lives thinking in unthinkably large numbers and distances and contemplating the births and deaths of stars.
Of the interwoven, complicated Lowell bloodlines it is the Traill-Spence-Lowell line that is most directly related to Robert Lowell. His great-great grandparents, Charles Lowell and Harriet Brackett Spence Lowell, had six children, five of whom survived to adulthood. Three were writers, and at least two had serious illnesses of mood. James Russell Lowell (1819–91), born in the same year as Herman Melville and Walt Whitman, was a prominent nineteenth-century poet and essayist, and cofounder—with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes—of the Atlantic Monthly. He was as well a professor at Harvard, the United States minister to Spain, minister to the Court of St. James, and godfather of Virginia Woolf.
James Russell Lowell, indebted he said to his mother for the gift of language, was stricken with grief and horror when she became insane. It was he, her youngest son, who had written about her that only as much remained as the “hum outliving the hushed bell.” He dedicated many of his poems to her, saying that she was “the patron and encourager of my youthful muse,” but he was heir to her wild mood swings as well, instabilities that he described as his “morbid excitements.” He told friends that he had inherited more than a trace of “my dear Mother’s malady.” There were many times, he said, when “everything is dreary, and time ceases to exist….Tis as if I had taken of the insane root.”
As a young man, suicidal, he had put a pistol to his head; on two other occasions, he admitted, he would have killed himself had he had a revolver nearby. If strychnine had been available, he said, he would have taken it. “The drop of black blood I inherited from my dear mother,” he wrote, “is apt to spread itself over the pupil of my eye and darken everything.” He thought “of my razors and my throat and that I am a fool and a coward not to end it all at once.”
“How shall a man escape from his ancestors,” asked his friend Emerson. “Or draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father’s or his mother’s life?”
New England was in the bones and blood of James Russell Lowell and he wrote often about it in his poetry and essays. “We had some toughness in our grain,” he wrote in a poem about early New England and his Pilgrim ancestors. “They talk about their Pilgrim blood, / Their birthright high and holy! / A mountain-stream that ends in mud / Me thinks is melancholy.” In the Chapter House at Westminster Abbey there is a stained-glass window that commemorates the life of James Russell Lowell. One of the panels depicts the Pilgrim Fathers and the Mayflower. The harkening back is telling. “In one sense it matters very little who our ancestors were,” Lowell had written. “Though in another it is of enormous import to us, for they make us what we are; but we can’t do anything about it. There they were, and here they are, all the while dominant in our lives and fates, whether we will or no.” A century later his great-grandnephew would acknowledge this ancestral influence: “I envy his strenuous grace,” wrote Robert Lowell about James Russell Lowell. “And fear affinities with the cold, gone-out fire.”
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character Page 6