I picked with a clean finger nail at the blue anchor
on my sailor blouse washed white as a spinnaker.
What in the world was I wishing?
…A sail-colored horse browsing in the bulrushes…
A fluff of the west wind puffing
my blouse, kiting me over our seven chimneys,
troubling the waters….
As small as sapphires were the ponds: Quittacus, Snippituit,
and Assawompset, halved by “the Island,”
where my Uncle’s duck blind
floated in a barrage of smoke-clouds.
Double-barrelled shotguns
stuck out like bundles of baby crow-bars.
In December 1932, when Lowell was fifteen and in his third year at St. Mark’s School, a private Episcopal preparatory school in Massachusetts, his parents took him to see a psychiatrist at the Judge Baker Guidance Center in Boston. His mother reported to the doctor that Lowell was “doing very poor work,” as well as having “personality difficulties.” He was “always against things,” she said, “disagreeable at home, uncommunicative, and did as much as possible outside the family circle.” She reported that when young he had, for hours, repetitively rocked himself back and forth in bed, obsessively collected junk, and showed little competitive interest.
“On the top floor of our house, in a room that was dark but always germ-free because the windows were open, I used to lie on my back, and hold my knees, and vibrate,” Lowell wrote later. “ ‘Stop rocking’: my nurse or Mother would say. I remember this trembling fury.”
The extensive psychological evaluation done on Lowell when he was fifteen revealed, not surprisingly, that he possessed a very good vocabulary. His reasoning powers were assessed as “variable,” however, and his motor control as “poor average.” His IQ, recorded as 121, was in the superior but far from highest range, a seemingly unexpected finding in someone later widely acknowledged as a genius. Inattention may have contributed to the relatively low score, although the person who administered the intelligence test noted that Lowell was “quite cooperative during the test period”; the score is, however, consistent with research demonstrating that creativity and intelligence often diverge above an IQ of 120. (Nobel laureates James Watson, the codiscoverer of the structure of DNA, and Richard Feynman, the theoretical physicist, both tested with IQs of approximately 120.) The gap between Lowell’s verbal intelligence and his other abilities is consistent with the neuropsychological profile common in those who go on to develop manic-depressive (bipolar) illness; that is, a marked discrepancy between high verbal skills and significantly lower motor and spatial skills.
The psychiatrist who saw Lowell at the clinic found him “reticent, unwilling to face his situation.” He was without goals and easily bored but said he liked jazz. He seemed “a little confused, a little obstinate, weakly argumentative.” Lowell, when asked to describe himself, said that he was “lazy” and read only what he wanted to read. He said he was sorry when his father left the navy; he thought he would himself end up in business. It was clear to the doctor that “the boy badly needed a father.” He ended his psychiatric evaluation with the hope that “the young gentleman will face it all.” Two years later, Lowell’s father reported to the psychiatrist that Lowell’s behavior at home had not changed significantly but that he was on the school football team and had received honors in three of his six college examinations. Things were changing, although not as rapidly as Lowell’s parents wished.
In November of 1936, when Lowell was nineteen years old and a sophomore at Harvard, his parents consulted with the Boston psychiatrist Dr. Merrill Moore. Moore was a poet as well as a doctor, and a member of the Fugitives, a Vanderbilt-based group of poets and literary scholars that included Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and John Crowe Ransom. His professional relationship with Charlotte Lowell was to prove unorthodox by any standards. He may have had an affair with her; certainly Lowell and others thought he had. He asked her for money and social introductions and encouraged her to counsel his patients, despite her lack of educational qualifications.
“We are having trouble with our boy,” Lowell’s parents told Moore. “We don’t know what to do. We want to see if psychiatry can help us.” His chief difficulties, they said, were his attitudes toward his parents, life in general, and Harvard. He was living at Lowell House at Harvard, they said. “We tried to explain to him what we thought he should be like in order to live up to the expectations of what would be demanded of a member of our family, but he paid no attention.” His mother elaborated: “He is so uncooperative and antagonistic to all reasonable arguments and demands.” His parents did not tell Lowell that they were seeking psychiatric advice about him.
It is hard not to sympathize with Lowell’s parents, who appear to have been at the end of their tether in making sense of, much less influencing, their son’s behavior. Yet it is clear that for them he had become as much of a problem as a person, not an ideal situation for any child. In the eleven pages of typed notes that Lowell’s mother gave to Dr. Moore she does not mention a single positive thing about her son’s personality, character, or abilities. Instead, she begins her long litany with “I always thought that Bobby was a peculiar child.” He was a terrible crier, she continues, he rocked ceaselessly in his bed, was uncooperative; he was always a problem. It was hard to get anyone to look after him, “A nurse would come in one door and go out the other.” He collected screwdrivers, nails, and hammers rather than playing like “normal” children. He took his bed to bits. “He gave us a miserable time most of the time. He never was a natural child.” He was irritable and would break things, was defiant and oppositional in the extreme.
“He was very hard to manage from the start,” his mother told Dr. Moore. “He would have awful tantrums and scream and howl.” He “goes off his head,” she explained. “He bangs doors and slams windows. He has scenes and leaves suddenly.” He collected everything around him, “like a mouse.” His parents and nurse “could hardly get him past an ash or trash can. He wanted to stop, investigate, and get things out.” It took Lowell’s parents most of his youth to recognize that oppositional behavior is, in fact, in opposition to someone or something, and that the more tightly they tried to control him the more defiant he became.
Some light drifted in after Lowell and his mother had a prolonged battle over his obsession with snakes. Lowell had been sent to a summer camp for “difficult children” and, not surprisingly, had proven to be difficult; after an initial period of trial and resistance, however, the camp counselor was able to interest Lowell in nature, particularly in snakes. His mother recounted to Dr. Moore what happened next:
He returned home at the end of the summer with a large box of small snakes. He was a very nervous, highly strung child….That started the snake craze. He never let up on the snakes for several years but cultivated them, and got them from everywhere and kept them all over the house. He frightened the servants to death. This lasted a long time. He would bring them into the house, and if I opened a bureau draw[er] there would be a snake, if I opened the closet there would be another snake, and one day he came in with a very large one, he had gotten from somewhere. He was argumentative and troublesome about it. He looked up passages in the Bible about snakes and argued with his father and me saying that they were God’s creatures, and that they deserved affection and attention like anything else. I have noticed that he gets through with things about the time the opposition stops. We decided we would accept the snakes and him, but when we did this he lost his interest in them. Then he went in for fishing.
The defiance; the wile, stubbornness, and perverse mischief in fighting against those who tried to control him; the intense energy and monomaniacal interests; the letting up of resistance as another’s control lessened: all of these things were there when he was young and they continued for the rest of his life. There was a slight shift in his mother’s appreciation for what his control and will might entail, however.
Charlotte Lowell’s preliminary eleven-page accounting of the difficulties brought into her life by her unwanted son was supplemented not long afterward by another two pages of things done and left undone by Lowell. She describes his “terrible temper tantrums which he tries to overcome, white and dangerous” but, for the first time, mentions a positive quality. He has, she writes, “great strength of character—controls himself when [he] wants to, [has] great control over suffering.” “He has a very strong will,” she told Dr. Moore. “He can make himself do what he wants to do. He can stand pain, and once when bitten by a muskrat the doctor cauterized the wound without any anesthetic and Bobby did not flinch.”
“Mentally or verbally, it was hardiness which was always praised,” Lowell was to write. “When, later, I simply would not be sick, hardiness was fine and yet somehow associated in my mind with perverse stubbornness, with an assertion of my will against my mother’s.” Imagination would allow him to escape, vanquish.
Merrill Moore concluded, on the basis of the mother’s reports, that Lowell, whom he had not met, had “considerable unconscious conflict” and might be in the “early stage of a psychosis.” Three months later Moore, who still had not actually met Lowell, wrote that he was also “something of a genius” and that “there were moments when he was probably not responsible for some of his emotional reactions.” He was sullen, short fused, and curt to his parents, less often but not infrequently to his friends.
The battle of wills in the Lowell family continued, each participant adamant and unbudging. A diagram drawn up by Dr. Moore and Lowell’s parents captures the struggle. It shows the “ideal” trajectory Lowell’s parents thought Lowell’s life should take over the next few years; that is, that he should graduate from Harvard with the rest of his class. They drafted a “failure course,” as well, one portraying the possibility that Lowell would drop out of Harvard and end up like his friend Frank Parker, who had left Harvard prematurely (Parker became an artist and did the cover art for Lowell’s books), and an unspecified “compromise” life course. Lowell was not present for the mapping out of his life.
The conflict came to blows in December 1936, a month after Lowell’s parents first consulted Dr. Moore. It was inevitable. His parents were attempting to control someone who had fought control in all ways from the youngest of ages and who now was far less controllable: he was older and freer to act independently and, at the same time, his moods and behavior were less under his own control, much less the control of anyone else. The accelerant for the conflict was Lowell’s “unsuitable” engagement to a woman older than he was and “not of his class.” Lowell’s father wrote a formal letter to the young woman’s father disapproving of her visits to Lowell’s rooms at Harvard and calling into question her “good reputation.” Lowell, gored and raging, went to his parents’ house, confronted his father with what he had done, and knocked him to the ground. “He glowered apelike,” his father recounted to Moore. “He’s sick and dangerous and ought to be put away.” He is “so awfully wild when he gets wild,” his father said. “He is an extremist even for a wild person.”
Parents’ plans for Lowell, 1937–39 Credit 12
It was an act that Lowell was to regret for the rest of his life, one that would make its way time and again into his poetry and letters. Like dynamite, it shook the settled. It was an act that his father, a gentle man whatever else, found inexplicable but stark and undeniable; it also forced father and son to restructure what had been a frayed and superficial relationship. It forced Lowell to face the gravity of what he had done; it pressed him to rethink, build, and create. A few months later, in March 1937, he apologized to his father, asking that they both look to themselves for a reasonable division of blame and to make better what had not been good:
Dear Daddy:
I have been churning about and turning things over for the last two months or so, and have at last come to realize I have been very foolish, very weak, aside from the fact that what I did might have had far more disastrous results; one can not get away with striking his father or for that matter using violence to anyone. I am sorry and wish to be forgiven.
Things in the past have been very wrong, and of course the blame must be divided. Relations were not cordial, but cold, distrustful, and deceptive, and if I am allowed to re-enter the family I hope we can establish a condition of mutual confidence. I believe that many of the provisions you have made for me have proven sound, but I do not believe they were made with sympathy and understanding. My objections have not been to what you have done but to how you have done it. Our aims and desires, I think will turn out to be much less opposed than they have appeared, if discussed openly without prejudice. I think that given a fair chance I can work with and not against you, and hope if you will permit it to have a much more intimate relationship than was ever possible in the past. I will be glad to apologize whenever you find it convenient.
Affectionately,
Cal
Lowell’s violence against his father reflected not only the friction in their relationship but his steadily developing manic illness. He would need to come to terms with rash acts not always under his control, acts for which there would be, and he would feel, moral culpability.
The act of bringing down a father was an ancient and fit subject for poetry. Ten years after the incident, in “Rebellion,” Lowell described what had happened:
There was rebellion, father, when the mock
French windows slammed and you hove backward, rammed
Into your heirlooms, screens, a glass-cased clock,
The highboy quaking to its toes. You damned
My arm that cast your house upon your head
And broke the chimney flintlock on your skull.
More than two decades after the publication of “Rebellion” in Lord Weary’s Castle, years after his father had died of a heart attack, Lowell returned to the primal act, to the festering violence and his mind’s “hot nerves”:
myself brooding in fire and a dark quiet
on the abandoned steps of the Harvard Fieldhouse,
nomad quicksilver by saying Lycidas—
Then punctiliously handing the letter to my father.
I knocked him down.
“I struck my father,” wrote Lowell, in a continuation of memory and remorse; “later my apology / hardly scratched the surface of his invisible / coronary…never to be effaced.” He took the complex relationship between remorse and forgiveness, the tangled feelings of those who obligate forgiveness and those who must forgive, into “Middle Age”:
Father, forgive me
my injuries,
as I forgive
those I
have injured!
His father was a “gentle, faithful, and dim man,” Lowell wrote in “Near the Unbalanced Aquarium.” He didn’t really know why he was against his father: “I hope there will be peace.”
Lowell’s erratic moods and behaviors escalated alongside his growing discipline and his determination to be a poet. These parallel threads, a relentless Puritan work ethic together with the exertion of will against his more destructive energies—energies that could headwater his imagination or drown him—are threads that run together throughout his creative life. He re-created himself from the “thuggish” schoolboy, who had been nicknamed “Cal” for the Roman emperor Caligula (or, some said, for Caliban from The Tempest), into an introspective adolescent determined to be a writer. Something could come from imagining, inhabiting the life of the mad, pained, and brutal emperor to whom Lowell had become bound by name. Something might be hooked from the identification with degradation.
“Tell me what I saw / to make me like you,” wrote Lowell in “Caligula,” thirty years after his school days at St. Mark’s. “I took your name”:
Your true face sneers at me, mean, thin, agonized,
the rusty Roman medal where I see
my lowest depths of possibility.
What can be salvaged from your life? A pain
> that gently darkens over heart and brain,
a fairy’s touch, a cobweb’s weight of pain,
now makes me tremble at your right to live.
Lowell wrangled his ferocious energy into writing. He wrote his first poem in 1934 when he was seventeen years old and by the fall of that year had written more than thirty. “I have come to realize more and more the spiritual side of being a poet…of breathing the same air as Shakespeare,” he wrote to one of his teachers. The following month he wrote about God “that he always forgives, suffers when we suffer, and that he seeks only to serve, and never punishes. This is the highest, and only duty of art, for here only is truth.”
He continued to write poetry at school and during his years at Harvard. His subjects were death and decay, God and art. Lowell wrote a raw, free-associative account—surreal, morbid, and hypersensitive—of life rotting into shadow and spoil. “Sometimes, when we are in disorder, every pinprick and scraping blade of grass magnifies,” his essay begins. The gardener spills a bag of mown grass in a pond; its smell is “wet and lifeless, floating and stifling.” Then, a “grass green sea,” with shark fins and water “toothed” with tusks, a nether world with submerged, submerging shadows. “The underneath was dank. Maggots crawled and crawled, searching after a putrifying [sic] rat, buried under grass. Fermentation had set in….And the maggots seethed and seethed, searching for the rats….Earth devours her offspring….Earth, I am able to momentarily retard your dinner.” All rots, all decays. Lowell ended his essay as he began it, speculating that the fever in his brain was linked to his dark perception of the world: “When I woke up and lay for months in bed, the membranes of my brain sprained, I wondered if the coincidence existed between noon, the putrifying [sic] rat, and my sunstroke.”
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character Page 9