its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye—
and dragged me home alive.
—From “Man and Wife”
6
In Flight, Without a Ledge
Getting out of the flats after a manic leap is like our old crew races at school. When the course is half-finished, you know and so does everyone else in the boat, that not another stroke can be taken. Yet everyone goes on, and the observer on the wharf notices nothing.
—Letter to Theodore Roethke, 1958
Mania is a high-voltage, tense, and unstable state. The mind leaps; speech rushes: words ribbon out fast, unbidden, cutting. Ideas and schemes proliferate; alliances shift. Mania calls the plays. Robert Lowell, who was subject to attacks of mania throughout his adult life, knew all of this. For the thirty years that he was in and out of mental hospitals, his diagnosis, manic-depressive illness, was consistent. This is not surprising. His life was laden with instability; mental illness ran deep in his family. Incendiary enthusiasms marked his youth; later they accelerated into the religious zealotry of his twenties. His mind was high velocity. As a child he had been moody, volatile, and often beyond his parents’ control. His defiant childhood gave way to the late adolescent summers in Nantucket he had described to Ezra Pound: a fevered immersion in literature that took place in the midst of a self-imposed monastic discipline just shy of the hair shirt and whip. After college came his conversion to Catholicism, an embrace so sudden and extreme as to seem like madness to many who knew him. He left the Church and then, when he again became manic, he rejoined it.
When Lowell first left the Church, he did it gradually but emphatically. Jean Stafford believed that he had simply “used up” Catholicism, gotten from it what he could artistically and emotionally and then, as with their marriage, moved on. Allen Tate suggested that Lowell, psychotic, had “merely used the Church…to establish his mania in religious terms.” Lowell viewed his decision differently. “When I came on the Catholic Church,” he wrote to the philosopher George Santayana in 1951, “it was a museum to contemplate, of course; but what I was after was a way of life.” He had hoped, he said, that “I could respect and feel at peace and at home with that lived life. I never got very deep. There was discipline, gentleness and understanding, but not at the heart, or rather, not at my heart, or if at the heart it never circulated from there into the fingers.” The Church and he had remained strangers, at heart’s length, despite his attempt to become one with it.
Santayana wrote back: “I recognize that your center, as in Protestant religion, is in yourself, not in the cosmos or history or even society. If it had been in natural science or history you would never have thought of taking refuge in Catholicism. No doubt, it was not a refuge for you but an adventure—a voyage and a love-affair in a new dimension.” Santayana, perhaps uniquely, understood Lowell’s Protestant roots and his complicated wending toward and away from Catholicism, saw the appeal of adventure and the gaps in his experience to date. Importantly, he intuited the mutability of Lowell’s religious passion into the secular passion of love. This was prescient. Lowell’s first mania came in the wake of his wranglings with God and the Devil; virtually all of his remaining attacks of madness would be prefigured by intense love affairs. These romantic obsessions, like his earlier ruling passion for the Church, would be forsaken once sanity returned.
Lowell left the Catholic Church for the first time in 1946, the year Lord Weary’s Castle was published. The following year he divorced Jean Stafford. Between 1946 and his first hospitalization for mania in 1949 Lowell lived in Massachusetts, Maine, Washington, D.C., and New York; had a few tense love affairs; met Elizabeth Hardwick, whom he would marry in a few years’ time; and met and became friends with the poets Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Delmore Schwartz, Theodore Roethke, and John Berryman.
He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Lord Weary’s Castle in 1947 and acclaimed by critics as the poet of his generation.
In October 1948 Lowell went to Yaddo writers’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, to work on a long poem, “The Mills of the Kavanaughs.” For many years a residence for writers, Yaddo was described by John Cheever as the home to “more distinguished activity in the arts than any other piece of ground in the English-speaking community and perhaps the world.” Lowell described Yaddo to Elizabeth Bishop in less acclamatory terms: It has “run down rose gardens, rotting cantaloupes, fountains, a bust of Dante with a hole in the head, sets called Gems of Ancient Literature, Masterpieces of the World, cracking dried up sets of Shakespeare, Ruskin, Balzac.” There were “pseudo Titians, pseudo Reynolds, pseudo and real English wood, portraits of the patroness, her husband, her lover.” There was, in short, everything to recommend it. “I’m delighted,” he ended his letter. “Why don’t you come?”
Lowell was “winding up,” a phrase he and his friends would come to use to describe his ascents into mania. As was its wont, his mania smoldered before it ignited. He drank heavily. His mind sped. The poem he was working on was running with the wind; there were nine hundred lines altogether, five hundred written in October and November alone. He was writing flat out, in great “messy spurts,” and, throughout it all, his personal experiences kept “flooding up.” He was beginning to lose control over his writing.
In February 1949, “wound to the breaking point,” he became obsessed with what he felt was a growing Communist influence at Yaddo. This fixation grew to delusional proportions, and the subsequent unwarranted charges made by Lowell were damaging to the director of Yaddo, Elizabeth Ames, although she eventually was exonerated; they were also damaging to Lowell’s reputation. Most who were directly involved in the scandal, including the writers who publicly denounced him, came to realize that Lowell had been mentally ill when he made his allegations, but the consequences of his accusations remained. Early stages of mania are not always recognized as derangement, and the capacity to injure is that much the greater.
Exalted, excited, filled with a sense of bestowed grace and the divine, Lowell again sought out the Catholic Church. On Ash Wednesday he attended Mass for the first time in a year, accompanied by the writer Flannery O’Connor, herself a devout Catholic. She, like most of those who knew him during his breakdown at Yaddo, had no experience to aid her in understanding Lowell’s escalating madness. “I just thought that was the way poets acted,” she said. “Poor Cal was about three steps from the asylum,” O’Connor would write years later. “He had the delusion that he had been called on some kind of mission of purification and he was canonizing everybody.” Lowell’s mind and behavior rocketed out of control, she recalled, “until I guess the shock table took care of it. [Lowell was given electroshock therapy when he was hospitalized a few months later.] It was a grief for me as if he had died. When he came out of it, he was no longer a Catholic.”
Lowell told the other residents at Yaddo that he had received an “incredible outpouring of grace” and that God was “speaking through him.” He fell in love with the writer Elizabeth Hardwick and declared his determination to marry her. He sent an urgent telegram to Allen Tate enlisting him in the Fight against Evil. He slept little, “canonized” those he met, and then retreated to a Trappist monastery for a week. When he returned to Yaddo he was yet more consumed with the notion of evil, as well as with its obverse side, the grace and bidding of God.
In early March, Lowell called his friend the classicist and translator Robert Fitzgerald. On Ash Wednesday, he disclosed to Fitzgerald, the “day of the Word made Flesh,” he had “received the shock of the eternal word.” Fitzgerald was instructed to transcribe Lowell’s actions and thoughts, which he did:
Telegram to Allen Tate, March 1949
“Come fight evil.” Credit 16
March 3 was the day of humors; I [i.e., Lowell] prayed to St. Anthony of Padua, who himself held the child (and prayed God to spare me His humor) and Elizabeth was miraculously purged of the pollution caused by her evasions. I prayed over her, and had to call on all
the heavenly host, St. Michael and others, and prayed over her using the psalm (?) beginning “God said to the prophet, Even if the mother should forsake the child…” She was purged and became like that music of Haydn’s.
Today is the day of Flannery O’Connor, whose patron saint is St. Therese [sic] of Lisieux.
Also: you are to take St. Luke the physician and historian as your patron saint.
That morning, he said afterward, he filled his bathtub with cold water and went in first on his hands and knees, then arching on his back, and prayed thus to Therese [sic] of Lisieux in gasps. All his motions that morning were “lapidary,” and he felt a steel coming into him that made him walk very erect. It came to him that he should fast all day and give up cigarettes. After mass and communion he walked, going in to a Protestant Church to observe and think about the emptiness and speculate as to how it could be filled—also the “nimbleness” there (for Protestants have some good things that Catholics don’t) and then up to the Jesuit Church on 14th Street and then to the Church of St. Francis in the 30s feeling how in both love radiated from the altars.
Lowell was very sick, and things hurtled out of control from there. He set off for Chicago to visit his friend and former teacher Allen Tate. It was a disaster. He revealed to Tate’s wife that he had discovered the secret of the universe; he also told her the names of her husband’s lovers over the years. Then, reputedly, he held Tate out of a second-story window while reciting Tate’s poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” There was a scene at a restaurant. Later, Lowell opened the window in his hotel room and shouted obscenities to the world beyond. It took four policemen to overpower and handcuff him.
Lowell was taken to a psychiatrist at the University of Chicago, who diagnosed him as having had a “psychotic reaction,” a nonspecific term generally indicating a profound mental removal from reality. Tate called Peter Taylor and told him that Lowell was “deranged”; then, with trepidation, anger, and relief, he saw him onto the train to Bloomington. Lowell, persuaded that there was a plot against him orchestrated by “the forces of evil,” was terrified that there was dangerous gas in the air in the train; he, however, was “indestructible.” Taylor met him at the station; it was soon apparent that Tate had not overstated the disarray in Lowell’s mind.
“As soon as Cal stepped off the train,” said Taylor, “I could see he was out of his head. He wasn’t the Lowell I knew.” During lunch at the Indiana University faculty club, Lowell sniffed the air and asked, “Do you smell that?” It was brimstone, he said, and the Devil was hiding behind one of the potted plants. Chaos unfurled after that. Lowell darted from the faculty club into the street, assaulted a police officer, and was put into a straitjacket. Then he was jailed.
Years later Lowell described what had been going on in his mind during that time. “I had an attack of pathological enthusiasm,” he said. “The night before I was locked up I ran about the streets of Bloomington Indiana crying out against devils and homosexuals. I believed I could stop cars and paralyze their forces by merely standing in the middle of the highway with my arms outspread.” He was convinced that he possessed special powers and that he alone could decipher the delusions and hallucinations fixing him in their grip. “Each car,” Lowell explained, “carried a long rod above its tail-light, and the rods were adorned with diabolic Indian or Voodoo signs. Bloomington stood for Joyce’s hero and Christian regeneration. Indiana stood for the evil, unexorcised, aboriginal Indians. I suspected I was a reincarnation of the Holy Ghost, and had become homicidally hallucinated. To have known the glory, violence and banality of such an experience is corrupting.” Glory, violence, banality: it is an apt and killing description.
After a night in the Bloomington jail, Lowell was taken to the airport to return to the East Coast. During a holdover at LaGuardia in New York he talked exuberantly about Italian opera with the police officers assigned to guard him. The flight to Boston was a nightmare. When he arrived he was driven thirty miles north to a small New England town that, in a twist of coincidence and continuity, was but a few miles from where his ancestor Percival Lowle had first settled in 1639. Lowell was admitted to Baldpate Hospital, a small private psychiatric institute surrounded by acres of woods. The beauty of the hospital grounds gave the lie to the pain that was housed within, but this reality was one that escaped Lowell during the early days of his stay at Baldpate. The hospital, he said with some jocularity soon after he arrived, was “a combination of boarding school, jail, and Yaddo.” He had not yet come down from the bubbling irreverence of his high mental state. The screams from the locked wards registered more acutely a few weeks later.
Lowell was admitted to Baldpate Hospital in early April 1949 and received a diagnosis of acute mania; he remained at the hospital for three months. When he arrived he was euphoric, overexcited, overactive, exalted, and talked “without cease.” He told his doctors that he was “indestructible,” a messenger from heaven. He had been Christ not long before, he said; he had walked upon the waters. He was in regular communication with God and had defeated the massing forces of evil. He was the reincarnation of the Holy Ghost. But not everything had been glorious in the past weeks, he acknowledged. He had had hallucinations of people with green skin, which had terrified him. He had seen a rooster that wasn’t there. He had seen things he ought not to have seen. He had been assaultive, verbally abusive, and had slept next to not at all. He was, in short, manic.
It was a particularly frightening time for Elizabeth Hardwick, who was engaged to marry Lowell in a few months’ time. “It went on for months,” she said about the confusion leading up to his hospitalization. “He was in terrible shape and I was petrified….It shouldn’t have been allowed to go on so long—and, of course, it wouldn’t be again.” Once he was in the hospital he was still “raving” but “glad to be in there in a way…he felt protected in some way.”
Lowell’s first letters from the hospital billowed with high spirits, a tone at variance with his circumstance but not with his mania. Palm Sunday seemed a propitious time for Lowell to send out a stream of ebullient messages. He sent many. “I’m in grand shape,” he wrote to Elizabeth Bishop. “The world is full of wonders,” he confided to George Santayana. “I’ve been having rather tremendous experiences.”
“I hope some one told you why I couldn’t spend the week-end with you,” he wrote to William Carlos Williams. “I’m taking sort of a rest….The doctors are learning about as much as I am.” They probably were. He wrote to Hardwick, his wife-to-be, to a former girlfriend, and to his former wife, Jean Stafford. To Stafford he said, cryptically, “I’m going through another Yaddo, but with flying colors. I think we’re still married in a sense, but not meant to be together.”
Lowell’s early correspondence from Baldpate reflects a mind in denial, a mind intoxicated by mania. His behavior, however, made it increasingly difficult for those who knew him to continue their own denial. Frank Parker, his friend from boarding school and Harvard, acknowledged this: “My trouble was that I didn’t believe he really was mad until I saw him in Baldpate…he was in the maximum [locked ward]….People wandered in and out, these nuts. He of course was right in his element, lecturing and haranguing and instructing them.”
By this time the unequivocal nature of Lowell’s illness—his bizarre delusions and hallucinations, his religious mania and uncontainable energy, the assaultiveness and verbal attacks so inconsistent with who he was when sane—made the diagnosis of mania reasonably straightforward. His doctors briefly considered a diagnosis of schizophrenia, another early onset psychotic illness but with a generally poorer prognosis; they dismissed it within a few days, however, and mania was, with only brief, quickly abandoned consideration of schizophrenia, the diagnosis he received for the rest of his life.
The only meaningful treatment for mania in 1949 was electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Also known as electroshock therapy, ECT is effective in treating both severe depression and mania. It was first used in the late 1930s and is sti
ll often employed as a treatment for severe depression; it is used less often for acute mania because modern medications generally work quickly and well. Small electrical currents are passed through the brain to induce a seizure. It is thought to work by, among other things, altering the chemical messengers in the brain and adjusting stress hormones that regulate mood, sleep, energy, and appetite. The use of ECT has been controversial, not because of its efficacy or safety, but because it was overused and misused, leading to sensationalist portrayals of it in films and books. Too, before the introduction of safe muscle relaxants and short-lasting anesthesia, there were more medical complications from the procedure.
Lowell received six ECT treatments in June 1949, fewer than would be typical in modern psychiatric practice. His delusions and manic behavior stopped almost immediately, and he was moved from the locked ward to the convalescent area of the hospital. Within a week of his final ECT treatment, however, Lowell plummeted into a deep depression. He was unable to concentrate or write and he talked about killing himself. He told his doctors he felt hopeless and wished to die. His speech was slow, his energy nonexistent, and he avoided being with other people.
Lowell left the hospital better than when he had arrived, but he was far from well. He was left to piece together his mind, which had been shattered; it was a hard and unsettling business. He had, as well, to make right the damage he had done to others when he had been manic. He felt humiliated and was overcome with remorse; he was not clear what he had done or why. The “whole thing,” he said, “seemed like a prolonged dream.”
“I’m well and about to leave,” he wrote to Peter Taylor, “feeling rather gravelled and grim and dull.” He was out of his “delirium” and “sorry for all the foolishness and trouble of my stay in Bloomington.” Public spectacle, “pathological enthusiasm,” depression, remorse, humiliation: these would milepost each attack of madness. Dread of future attacks would weigh upon him. Mania not only blasted apart Lowell’s dealings with God, it shredded his belief in what he might expect of his mind.
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character Page 12