Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  Lowell’s illness abraded his expectations of the future, to a point, but he kept the capacity after each attack to reconstruct his life, to rebuild his relationships with his family and friends. It was a painstaking atonement for things done and left undone. He returned to his work. This—the determination to move forward and to imagine a future, the work itself—remains the lasting thing.

  He was, he made clear to his friends, indebted to them for their kindness to him when he had been ill. “The hospital is still too near a memory for me to find much amusement or pleasure in describing it,” he wrote to T. S. Eliot shortly after having left the hospital. “But all my friends and even my mother and father were wonderfully helpful.” He was deeply moved by Eliot’s support, he said. “I feel that you have vicariously suffered my vicissitudes with me. Now I am taking to heart your comment on Huxley’s comment on Lawrence—about the foolishness of a spectacular life—I mean mine, not Lawrence’s, of course.”

  The reaction from Lowell’s parents during his illness and hospitalization was well-meant but mixed. They wrote to him sending their love and concern. But Lowell’s father also wrote him a blunt letter shortly after he had returned home from the hospital, just two weeks before he was to marry Elizabeth Hardwick. “I think it is much too soon to marry anybody,” he wrote. “Just after you have been discharged from a mental hospital, after shock treatment.” Both Lowell and Hardwick “should clearly understand that if she does marry you, that she is responsible for you.” At the present time, he continued, “I do not feel that you are in any position to take care of yourself let alone to…provide for a wife.” He and Lowell’s mother, he made clear, “cannot assume any financial obligations for either you or your wife.”

  It was a harsh, practical letter and not entirely out of line given the reality and uncertainties attending Lowell’s illness. No one knew what the future would bring; no one knew how his sanity would fare a year or ten years out. The psychiatrist who treated Lowell at Baldpate told Hardwick he didn’t envy her. She was taking a terrible risk, he said: Lowell’s mania would almost certainly return.

  Everything was unpredictable, a muddle of uncertainty and shame. The psychotherapist and writer Eileen Simpson, married for a time to John Berryman, recalled a dramatically discordant view during the same painful period. After Lowell was released from the hospital, Simpson wrote, “All he could remember (this John found heartbreaking) was that he had never been happier than during those manic weeks.”

  Lowell married Elizabeth Hardwick in July 1949, two weeks after his release from Baldpate Hospital. Hardwick was from a family as filled with children, eleven, as his was not, and from a state, Kentucky, as different as imaginable from Massachussetts in politics, history, land, accent, and custom. She would become a noted essayist and a novelist of impact and originality, a writing teacher at Barnard College, and cofounder of the New York Review of Books; she earned along the way a reputation as a great, if on occasion acerbic, wit.

  “The curls, the infectious chuckles,” Derek Walcott said of her. “The drawl like poured-on honey, the privilege of sharing her astute delight, and the benign devastation of her wit.” She was, he said, “more fun than any American writer I have known.”

  Lowell first met Hardwick in Greenwich Village in the summer of 1946, a time and mood he captured in “Man and Wife”:

  Oh my Petite,

  clearest of all God’s creatures, still all air and nerve:

  you were in your twenties, and I,

  once hand on glass

  and heart in mouth,

  outdrank the Rahvs in the heat

  of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet—

  too boiled and shy

  and poker-faced to make a pass,

  while the shrill verve

  of your invective scorched the traditional South.

  Hardwick was in many ways the ideal wife, friend, and critic to Lowell. Theirs was a complex marriage, one that lasted more than twenty years despite the kind of uncertainty and pain known only to those who have or live with someone who has severe manic illness. She was, importantly, a writer he respected. “He liked women writers,” Hardwick said. “I don’t think he ever had a true interest in a woman who wasn’t a writer—an odd turn-on indeed, and one I’ve noticed not greatly shared. Women writers don’t tend to be passive vessels or wives, saying, ‘Oh, that’s good, dear.’ ”

  Their life was to be a Nantucket sleigh ride, tumultuous and uncharted. Hardwick’s introduction to her husband’s madness—his religious mania in Yaddo and his psychotic behavior in Bloomington; the long hospitalization at Baldpate—was not for the faint of heart. It pointed to the years of instability to come.

  “I didn’t know what I was getting into,” Hardwick said, “but even if I had, I still would have married him. He was not crazy all the time—most of the time he was wonderful. The breakdowns were not the whole story. I feel lucky to have had the time—everything I know I learned from him. I very much feel it was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  Hardwick maintained a lasting admiration for Lowell’s intellect and work. “Certainly Cal had a great influence on every aspect of my life,” she told an interviewer. “In literary matters, his immense learning and love of literature were a constant magic to me.” The quality of his mind, she stated, was “quite the most thrilling I’ve known.” Given this, and Hardwick’s own intellect and strength of mind, it is difficult to fathom that she has on occasion been characterized as long-suffering or a “martyr” for staying with Lowell. It is a restricted view of a difficult, rich, long, pained, productive marriage and of a lasting friendship.

  Lowell and Hardwick both had constitutive toughness, a quality critical to his survival and to the endurance of their relationship. She had as well a practical and empathetic view of his mental illness. She was not so much given to castigating or romanticizing his manic behavior as she was to getting him to a hospital. His aberrant behavior was seen by her as that: aberrant. Hurtful and threatening at times, certainly, but first and foremost she saw in the early signs of his mania—his precipitate romantic entanglements followed by demands for a divorce; his increased drinking, abusive behavior, and domineering argumentativeness—an illness that needed medical treatment.

  Lowell was aware of the toll that his manic-depressive illness might take. Soon after Hardwick first visited him at Baldpate, he wrote to her: “Gosh, your visit was wonderful and saning. Hope you can stand me still.” He was high on mania but rational enough to recognize the distress he had brought to the woman he planned to marry.

  During their first summer together the newness of their married life was overshadowed by his illness. “Somehow, quite soon, he was in a very depressed state about what had happened, saying, ‘No one can care for me. I’ve ruined my life. I’ll always be mad,’ ” Hardwick remembered later. “As the weeks went on I felt Cal wasn’t well at all, but depressed. Very self-critical, very tortured about himself, his future….My heart was just breaking for him.”

  Then, once again, Lowell started hallucinating and became delusional. During a visit to friends he came downstairs one morning to tell them he had just seen the Holy Ghost; he asked them to smell the brimstone on his pajamas. He was getting sick again, even as he was trying to understand what had happened to him.

  He tried to describe to his friends and family how and why his mind had gone off the rails. In August he wrote to Peter Taylor about some of what he had been through. “Before receiving electric shocks,” he said, “I had a comical mad period singing ballads (very badly and baldly with made up tunes) and destroying furniture.” He asked Taylor’s forgiveness for not having wanted to see him. “It’s been tough,” he admitted. “Shaking all the unease, torpor, desire to do nothing.”

  In a letter to Ezra Pound’s wife he said, “My ‘experiences’ that led to the hospital now seem like a prolonged dream—and so they were, then almost unbearably dull and depressing.” He had thought often, he said, of
the similarity between Pound’s experience of madness and his own, “the astonishing jolt of having things happen to you, being put somewhere, the surprises you never planned.”

  In August, a month after leaving the hospital, Lowell wrote a letter of explanation and regret to a former lover, Gertrude Buckman:

  Nothing I can say will really do to tell you everything that happened, or why. By the time I reached the hospital I was completely out of my head—strange physical sensations—I was a prophet and everything was a symbol; then in the hospital: shouting, singing, tearing things up—religion and antics. Then depression (extreme) aching, self-enclosed, fearful of everyone and everything anyone could do, feeling I was nothing and could do nothing.

  I’m sorry about the mix-up on writing to Bald-Pate, that you heard about our marriage the way you did—sorry because of all my ill, inconsistent, selfish and so on actions toward you….I try to accept myself and hold on to the joyful.

  …I want to be forgiven and to stay friends. No harm or coldness was ever meant.

  Lowell’s depression got worse over the summer; in mid-September 1949 he was admitted to the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic of New York Hospital. His psychiatrist there, Dr. John Blitzer, wrote in his admitting note that Lowell was “sloppily dressed, unshaven, appeared and was sad and tense”; despite this he made “a considerable effort to appear friendly.” His speech was slow, with long pauses. Lowell told Dr. Blitzer that he was unable to concentrate or write and that he had withdrawn completely into himself. Before coming into the hospital he had spent entire days in bed, had had nothing to say to anyone, and had been thinking of suicide. He felt empty, he told the doctor. Empty and discouraged. He had been working on a poem begun at the onset of his elated phase but was now “very depressed by how confused he had been when writing it.”

  Dr. Blitzer’s psychiatric history concluded that Lowell had experienced several periods of intense elation as an adult, times during which he had been “overactive, over confident, over talkative, occasionally rude and domineering.” These elated periods had lasted approximately eight months and “their onset had usually coincided with [the] patient’s beginning some new [literary] project.” Each mild to moderate mania had been followed by an extended period of depression, during which Lowell reported that he felt “wrapped up in himself,” “empty,” and “self-depreciatory”; believed that he had “used others”; and had been “unable to work efficiently.” Dr. Blitzer diagnosed Lowell, as had the doctors at Baldpate Hospital, as having manic-depressive illness.

  During the initial weeks of Lowell’s hospital stay, Blitzer noted that Lowell was “extremely dependent” and sometimes followed Blitzer down the hallway, seeking “constant reassurance that he would get well.” For the first month he was too depressed and confused to engage in meaningful psychotherapy. No antidepressants, in the modern sense of the word, were available in 1949 (amphetamine and methamphetamine, although occasionally prescribed for depression, were addictive and problematic), so Lowell received only psychotherapy during the nearly four months of his hospitalization at Payne Whitney.

  In addition to his own distress, Lowell was struggling once again with the pain he had caused others. He wrote to Hardwick on his first night: “Dearest, dearest, dearest Lizzie I think of you all the time; and worry so much about all I have dumped on you. We are going to work it all out, dear….” His desire to convince her, and himself, that he was better is apparent in a letter written a few days later: “O Lord, how empty I am. However, this letter is just to tell you that the depression that I am well. Please don’t worry. When you come on Saturday, you will see improvement.”

  Two weeks later he wrote, “After I’d told all the sordid and awful things about myself I could think of, he [Dr. Blitzer] said it was 95 percent due to my condition.” The doctor’s reassurance went only so far. “Things are much the same,” he continued. “Mornings, the unbearable; afternoons, the numb—both dumb and diminishing fast. I guess all’s well.”

  Dr. Blitzer noted in Lowell’s chart at the end of six weeks in the hospital that he was “somewhat less depressed.” His sense of humor was beginning to return, he was more assertive and independent, and he was able to participate in psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy. Lowell told his friends and family that the therapy was helpful. He was “beginning to really learn something from the psycho-therapy,” he wrote to his mother. “For many fairly obvious reasons,” he said, “I have not wanted to write about coming here.” He was “ashamed and puzzled by it…shut up like a clam.”

  In two pages of notes he wrote for himself while he was in the hospital, Lowell jotted down his observations about his illness and what he must do to go forward. His thinking, he noted, was scattered and vulnerable. He was concerned about his “physical nervousness, stiffness, hesitancy” and worried about his memory. “I remember so much,” he wrote, “then memory stops (on 100s of things). I do so much, then action stops.” The best things he had done in his life, he observed, had been “done against hardest competition, with great effort.” He thought this would continue to be true. He missed “healthy summer life” and knew he needed to “get back in normal society.” He was concerned that his stay at Payne Whitney would increase his reputation for “oddness.” He resolved he must try harder with everyone.

  At the top of his list, as always, was his writing. “My profession [is] writing,” he scribbled in his near-illegible hand. This declaration was followed by three compressed phrases: “a) whole personality, b) competition, c) mania phases figure.” That Lowell had begun to link his writing to his “phases” of mania is interesting. Dr. Blitzer had written in Lowell’s chart during the same time period that “patient’s strong emotional ties with his manic phase were very evident. Besides the feeling of well-being which was present at that time, patient felt that, ‘my senses were more keen than they had ever been before, and that’s what a writer needs.’ ” A complex relationship between his illness and his poetry was beginning to be apparent not only to Lowell but to the first of several doctors who would comment on it.

  Lowell came to believe that his prolonged religious “enthusiasm” had been a symptom of his illness rather than rightful revelation. “The mystical experiences and explosions turned out to be pathological,” he wrote to George Santayana toward the end of his stay at Payne Whitney. Sacred gave way to secular. “Much against my will,” he would write in the first poem of Life Studies, “I left the city of God where it belongs.” Lowell characterized his religious zeal as a mania. “I’m out of my dumps (the religious mania seems to necessitate a kind of hangover of melancholia) and feel much as always,” he wrote to Santayana. Depression had left him “inert, gloomy, aimless, vacant, self-locked.” He had been unable to write during the depression that came on the heels of his mania, he said. “During all that blind mole’s time—the fascinated spirit watching the holocaust of irrationality[,] apathy tormenting apathy…forgive me for my involuntary foolishness.”

  Lowell described his depression in the evocative, simple words that many patients use to convey their mental confusion: the fog and witlessness and chaos. But he chose the words of a poet as well—the “blind mole’s time,” the “holocaust of irrationality.” He wrote about the “long, burdensome dull period” of his mind and the months of “wading in the muck and weeds and backwash of a depression.” Lowell’s many and original images of his stagnant, self-locked mind expanded the language of suffering.

  At the end of December 1949, a few days before he left Payne Whitney, Lowell was offered a teaching position at the University of Iowa for the spring and another one at Kenyon College for the summer. Dr. Blitzer wrote in his notes that Lowell was extremely relieved to be offered a job given what he had been through. His behavior toward the end of his hospital stay was “more cheerful and outgoing” and, although he was unable to write poetry, he was working “constructively” in preparation for his teaching.

  Lowell was released from the hospital in ear
ly January 1950. His condition on discharge was listed as “improved” and his prognosis as “good.” He had lost a year of his life to illness. It was the first of many and not the worst.

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  The course of Lowell’s manic illness was unrelenting following his first hospitalization in 1949. This progression, as well as the consistency in his diagnosis, manic-depressive illness, and the clinical state, mania, for which he was hospitalized, is clear. It is not clear exactly how many manic episodes Lowell had. Before 1949 his manic behavior was not generally recognized as symptomatic of a psychiatric illness. Later, some of Lowell’s manic episodes, while serious, were not severe enough to warrant hospitalization. On a few occasions, for example, he was able to stay out of the hospital by taking antipsychotic medications during the early stages of an attack. At other times he was hospitalized twice for the same episode of mania, either because he was transferred to a different hospital for treatment or because he was released too soon and then had to be readmitted. Once, when acutely manic, he received twenty-four-hour private nursing care instead of being hospitalized. Hospitalization is an imperfect marker for the occurrence of mania.

  Lowell had a three-year respite between his first hospitalization for mania in 1949 and his second in 1952, a respite not uncommon for those with his illness. It was a time of travel and teaching but not a great deal of writing. It was also a time of loss. His father died suddenly but not unexpectedly in 1950. The Mills of the Kavanaughs was published to mixed reviews. He and Hardwick traveled in Europe and lived for extended periods in Florence and Amsterdam. In Hardwick’s autobiographical novel Sleepless Nights, the main character describes living in Holland as one of the happiest periods of her life: