Boston is not a small New York, as they say a child is not a small adult but is, rather, a specially organized small-creature with its small-creature’s temperature, balance, and distribution of fat. In Boston there is an utter absence of that wild, electric beauty of New York, of the marvelous, excited rush of people in taxicabs at twilight, of the great Avenues and Streets, the restaurants, theatres, bars, hotels, delicatessens, shops. In Boston the night comes down with an incredibly heavy, small-town finality. The cows come home; the chickens go to roost; the meadow is dark.
Yet she circled back to the Boston of tradition, quiet, habit, and winter stillness that she and Lowell had sought out after his 1954 breakdown, a world of retreat and unjangled sensibilities:
Boston is a winter city. Every apartment has a fireplace. In the town houses, old persons climb steps without complaint, four or five floors of them, cope with the maintenance of roof and gutter, and survive the impractical kitchen and resign themselves to the useless parlors. This is life: the house, the dinner party, the charming gardens, one’s high ceilings, fine windows, lacy grillings, magnolia trees, inside shutters, glassed-in studios on the top of what were once stables, outlook on the “river side.” Setting is serious.
Their young daughter was the exception to the dead, fine life of the city, and Lowell took obvious pleasure in watching her take in the world and take in her parents. To his cousin Harriet Winslow, her namesake, he wrote in October 1959, “What stands out this fall though is Harriet leaving three times a week at nine for nursery school. Like an artist, she brings back huge colored scrolls of paper covered with her first abstract expressionist paintings. She drives a tricycle, catches a big rubber ball, gulps observations like a vacuum cleaner. Or rather, her foot is on the ladder.” To Elizabeth Bishop he said, “Harriet is terrific, like living with the new forces. I don’t think she knows how frail we are, but being a child, she is heavy on her feet and we can almost keep up with her by cheating and using cunning and withdrawing into the shadows she can’t understand.”
In 1961, when Harriet was three years old, Lowell and Hardwick bought an apartment on West Sixty-Seventh Street in New York City. They hoped to set a distance between themselves and the illness that had come to dominate their lives. They could not. The shifts from light to dark, steady to stretched nerve, were to be much the same for him in New York as they had been in Boston; the magic of the city was not magic enough:
Home from you, and through the trodden tangle,
the corny birdwalks, the pubescent knoll,
rowboats three deep on the landing, tundra
from Eighty-First Street to my 15 Sixty-Seventh,
snow going from pepper and salt to brain-cell dull,
winter throwing off its Christmas decorations.
The afternoon has darkened in twenty minutes
from light to night—
…….
I in a Dickensian muffler, snow-sugared, unraveling.
Lowell’s cycles of illness and health continued. Hardwick distilled it down for Mary McCarthy: “He leaves home, rushes off to another girl, announces that he’s in love, and has this manic affair and then he’s carted off to the hospital until he is well and then he comes back home. Everything goes along well for a year or so and this thing begins to mount again.” And it did.
Early in 1961, not long into their new life in New York, Lowell started an affair with a young New York poet, declared he was divorcing Hardwick and that he would start life anew.
Lowell was admitted to a locked ward at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York; his friend William Meredith described his condition: “No one predicts how long it will be before the drugs take hold & Cal begins to be himself,” he wrote to Adrienne Rich and Philip Booth. “Meanwhile he writes and revises translations furiously and with a kind [of] crooked brilliance, and talks about himself in connection with Achilles, Alexander, Hart Crane, Hitler and Christ, and breaks your heart.”
He recovered, but the following year, in August 1962 on a trip to Argentina sponsored by the American Cultural Council, Lowell became manic yet again: he started to drink heavily, double vodka martinis before lunch, talked too fast and too much, and made advances to women he had just met. He was “electric” once more and sent an elated telegram to Elizabeth Bishop: “come here and join me its paradise!” He couldn’t sleep. He threw away his medication and publicly insulted the general who was about to be sworn in as president. Keith Botsford, the American representative in Argentina who was shepherding Lowell from reading to reading, kept a record of his charge’s behavior. Lowell, he wrote, was grandiose, irritable, and pulsing with near-inhuman energy. He insisted on buying everyone expensive presents and sent cables to the pope and to the former president, Dwight Eisenhower, expressing his conviction that America was the new Roman Empire. He believed himself to be the Caesar of Argentina. He took off his clothes, climbed up onto the military equestrian statues, and “rode next to the generals”; he did this throughout Buenos Aires, a city not without equestrian statues.
Lowell’s conversation sparked in all directions: he talked about the genius of Boris Pasternak and Doctor Zhivago, expressed his ardent wish that his daughter not have to experience the kind of unhappy childhood he had had, declared Thomas Hardy a great poet for his profound experience of human life, and praised Yeats for his rhetoric. He rank-ordered the world’s poets, military leaders, and novelists with what he said was complete objectivity. His conversation, according to Botsford, “became very fragmentary and disconnected. I used to think of it as a great knot which would twist and twist and twist and then a sentence would come out of it, pushed by a sort of breathing impulsion, and it was always in a totally unexpected direction.”
The outcome was inevitable. It took six men to force Lowell into a straitjacket and admit him to the Clinica Bethlehem in Buenos Aires, where he was restrained with leather straps and heavily medicated with chlorpromazine. Blair Clark flew to Buenos Aires to bring him back to the United States. On the flight to New York Lowell “fell in love” with one of the stewardesses, told Clark he wanted to marry her and that they were going to start a new life together in South America. He was taken to the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut, where he was a patient for six weeks in October and November 1962; he would be admitted there twice more, first in December 1963 and then in January 1965.
—
Dr. Erik Linnolt, the psychiatrist who treated Lowell during his inpatient stays at the Institute of Living, recalls that he was assigned to the Whitehall Unit, the “fancy” unit, and that he was “very warm, reserved, polite, and accepting of his situation.” He was, Linnolt continued, “physically robust, attractive, and strong; basically he was a rebel but a polite rebel.” Lowell had a tremendous sense of humor, Linnolt remembers, and did not complain about his illness or circumstances. He made it clear that he was frightened because his illness had come back and more frightened that it would return. Lowell told Dr. Linnolt, who saw him in psychotherapy once a day at the beginning of his stay in the hospital and later three times a week, that his manic-depressive illness was “part of him and his work.” The early stages of his mania, he said, “came with increased creativity and a flow of words.” Dr. Linnolt treated Lowell for what everyone knew was a very bad disease that was getting worse. “Mr. Lowell,” Dr. Linnolt told me, “was a kind but complicated man who had a bad illness.”
The attacks continued. Lowell was a patient at the Institute of Living for a second time in December 1963 and stayed there until mid-January 1964. Hardwick wrote to Allen Tate about Lowell’s discouragement and their struggle to understand why his attacks kept coming back. “This thing just came on him and it is most discouraging because he tried awfully hard to push it away,” Hardwick wrote to Tate. “He hasn’t had a drink for a year; he goes to the doctor and does whatever is suggested. It doesn’t seem to be under the control of the will at all, not even a little bit….He’s very triste, utterly bewildered. They tell him at th
e hospital that they think it is an organic affliction and it doesn’t have to do except in the most indirect way, with what one does.”
The causes were fugitive, the pain was what they lived with. Hardwick wrote to Lowell at Christmas when he was on the psychiatric ward: “How we miss you. The tree is up, the cards are all around, presents everywhere for Harriet.” Their daughter, she said, “has begun to worry about you and I am trying to reassure her, as I will be able to of course.” Harriet was older when her father explained to her about his mental illness one morning in the lobby of their New York apartment building as they sat waiting for her school bus. “He said he had these periods of ‘enthusiasms’ and used the term ‘manic-depressive,’ ” she remembers. “He explained it was a disease. He’d stop sleeping, get very ‘keyed up’ (my mother’s word), hallucinated even and ended up hospitalized. In the hospital, they would give him drugs and shock treatments (which he did not remember) and hosed him down with water, which strangely helped….I hated to think of him locked up, drugged and going through all this, but he seemed to accept it.” At some point he told her he was taking lithium for a “salt deficiency.” Harriet Lowell recalls that she “wasn’t hyper aware of his mental illness, though I knew he had these breakdowns. I was influenced by his resignation and my mother’s sympathy for it. He was always very gentle with me. I was never afraid of him and neither was my mother.”
Lowell’s illness continued in its foreseeable way, laced in with writing, friends, and life with his wife and young daughter: mania, near-unforgivable breaches of friendship, shame, depression, greater shame. Then, when the fever had run its course, hope and life and work came back and slowly reassembled. These attacks that threw him into “the kingdom of the mad” came with the seasons and brought with them horror and doubt about his life to come. The form of the disease remained constant; only the details varied of the mania and the social affronts, ever grist for gossip, and the wreckage they left. Lowell’s remorse was profound; so too was the increasing awareness that he had little power to affect his illness. “It’s a little painful prodding the formless, embarrassed mind to pick up the pieces,” he wrote to Mary McCarthy after a winter breakdown in 1964. “These things can come from the air. The stir of a feather can start them, though no doubt I would be immune if I had a different soul.”
Lowell’s 1964 breakdown had been exacerbated by his increasingly frenzied work on a new play. Jonathan Miller, at about the same time, was directing Lowell’s trilogy The Old Glory, based on works by Hawthorne and Melville. Two days before opening night Lowell burst into the theater and exclaimed that he had written a new, fourth play that had to be added. It featured the severed head of Sir Walter Raleigh, streaming blood. The blood, Lowell suggested helpfully, “could be done very nicely with ribbons.” The dark Raleigh images were not lost; they made their way into a poem a few years later: Raleigh’s head, “still dangling in its scarlet, tangled twine, / as if beseeching voyage. Voyage? / Down and down; the compass needle dead on terror.”
Lowell wrote to Hardwick in 1965 apologizing for “what a mess I’ve made of my human ties.” He was “full of irrational turbulence….Surely, there’s some terrible flaw in my life that blows a bubble into my head every year or so. It mustn’t continue, though I suppose that’s only partly up to me and partly [up] to fate, nature, God and whatever.”
Lowell also wrote to Elizabeth Bishop, not long before his forty-eighth birthday: “I am back from a month in the sanitarium….These attacks seem now almost like something woven in my nervous system and one of the ingredients of my blood-stream, and I blame them less on some fatal personal psychotic flaw….Life and work go on.” Bishop wrote back straightaway. “I have a feeling there will soon come a time when the bloodstream you refer to will just refuse to carry the poison one more time and throw it out forever. You will then look back and wonder that it ever happened at all.”
But the poison did carry. The tempo quickened, the banal quatrain played out. Lowell was admitted to McLean Hospital for the third time in early December 1965; by the end of 1966, he was manic again. He purchased an expensive bust of Tecumseh, the leader of the Shawnees; became romantically obsessed with his friend Jacqueline Kennedy; believed himself to be King James IV, Napoleon, Hitler. He stood up at the Metropolitan Opera and tried to conduct the orchestra. Xandra Gowrie, Lowell’s close friend, described how direful it had become. “The cyclical beginning of his crack-up” began in September, she said. He would start to “look chaotic—hair wild—hand shaking—stopped wine, started in on vodka and milk—staying up later and later—started saying awful things about people he liked.” The next morning she would find him “shattered by what he had done….Shattered by his own cruelty.”
Lowell’s teaching at Harvard became jangled and disconnected as he accelerated into mania, and colleagues had to take over his classes. Each attack of mania added to the mad, brilliant poet myth. He was generally well liked by his Harvard students, and held in awe by many of them, but his mania frightened more than a few. “I had never witnessed one of these breakdowns,” remembers the writer James Atlas. “But I had heard about them in grim detail: Lowell showing up at William Alfred’s house and declaring he was the Virgin Mary; Lowell talking for two hours straight in class, revising a student’s poem in the style of Milton, Tennyson, or Frost; Lowell wandering around Harvard Square without a coat in the middle of January, shivering, wild-eyed, incoherent.”
On Christmas Eve 1966, a day Xandra Gowrie described as snowy and piercingly cold, “eight massive police officers with guns” arrived to take Lowell away. “Cal was leaning back against the sink, picked up a milk bottle and threw it at one of the policemen, an agonizingly sad gesture.” Her husband, Grey Gowrie, remembers Lowell as a tormented-looking man. “I said, ‘You should go, you must go,’ and he said, ‘Well, I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll go if they will sit down and listen to a poem’ and I remember very well getting all these heavy Boston cops to sit down and listen to a poem [“Waking in the Blue”] he wrote about McLean, where they were just about to take him.” “My heart grows tense,” Lowell recited to the police officers and his friends, “as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill. / (This is the house for the ‘mentally ill.’)” It was then, said Gowrie, “not the mad scene at all, it was rather moving.”
The police took Lowell to McLean, where he was put on an involuntary hold. The hospital and court documents stated that he was “in need of immediate care and treatment because of mental derangement.” He was described by the doctors as excited, argumentative, assaultive, and delusional; he believed that he was the “Jewish Messiah,” was “impulsive, unwise in his judgments, threatening, and sleepless.” He stayed at McLean for two months.
The McLean Hospital keeps copies of the magazines with pieces written by patients who have been hospitalized there. One issue from 1965 contains a poem contributed by a patient, “Robert L,” and “reprinted by permission of the author.” The poem, “Christmas in Black Rock” from Lord Weary’s Castle, ends: “and what is man? We tear our rags / To hang the Furies.”
The Furies would slip the noose.
8
Writing Takes the Ache Away
My great need of the moment is to keep up a front….I see very well that I need to find a middle path and that ecstasy and despair will always be problems….I think therapy can help me not to give up or run away, I think I can learn to use my head and eyes together. I want to be able to see my faults, do something about them, be a good husband, a writer who can grow, and a steady, capable teacher.
—To Vernon Williams, M.D.
The illness from which Robert Lowell suffered, manic-depressive illness (or bipolar disorder), was well-known to the doctors of antiquity. Its scarlet thread, said one medical historian, is discernible throughout the “twisted strands” of history. The priests and physicians of ancient China, Egypt, Persia, India, and Greece described mania and depression in detail. The manic patients they treated were excit
ed, agitated, lacked reason, slept little, and were easily provoked into paroxysms of rage. They talked, ran, sang, and danced without inhibition, declared themselves to be a god or a descendant of the gods, decorated themselves with oils and flowers. Melancholic patients, in contrast, were downcast, slept fitfully, and ruminated on their misery and unworthiness. They had no hope, no will, and often wished to die.
The derangements of the mad, the ancient physicians believed, came from demonic possession or a misalignment of natural forces; ill-sweeping winds, bile, or poison; passions too violent to allow sanity. Five hundred years before Christ, Hippocrates and his followers taught that these were diseases of the brain; they attributed madness to natural rather than supernatural causes. It was the brain that went awry; madness did not come from action of the gods. The brain, Hippocrates said, governed emotion, perception, sleep, and incited madness; from it arose everything that makes us human, “our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears.” From the brain came imagination, madness, and despair. The brain was the discerner, the interpreter of the world, the governor of sleep and mood and the senses, and the determiner of consciousness. If the brain turned too hot, too cold, too moist, or too dry, madness took residence. If fire was ascendant in the blood the brain shifted its moorings, lost its stillness. With stillness gone, reason itself went.
“Mania,” used by the early Greek physicians to connote insanity or mental frenzy, was then, as now, a word that could mean different things, describe many states. It could exist with or without fever; it was a furor of the mind and body, a cauldron of agitation, delusion, wrath, and threat. It came and went, often with the seasons. Those who were deranged by mania were consumed by religious fanaticism; their ideas were grandiose, their actions impulsive and intrusive. Mania was a disruptive force that could not be ignored by the doctor, priest, or community.
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character Page 18