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

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  Later, in “For the Union Dead,” the aquarium would take on a different meaning: the old South Boston Aquarium would be an image of decay with its broken, boarded windows, a child’s tracing hand, scaling weather vane, and dry tanks filled with the memory of “cowed compliant fish.” Memories of his madness and childhood floated up from the bottom of his mind, mixed in with recollections of his agitated days as a patient in a psychiatric hospital. The chips of memory move restlessly within the frame of “Near the Unbalanced Aquarium.” The movement of the separate yet meshing parts is fluid, perturbed. His mind, he said, “remained in its recollections, weightless, floating.”

  Lowell was admitted to the hospital “trying as usual to get my picture of myself straight.” Once again he had known “the yeasty manic lift of my illness”; once again he had been struck by “a violent manic seizure, an attack of pathological enthusiasm.” Everything—his mind, his marriage, his work—was in flux. Even the walls of the Payne Whitney Clinic, like the workings of his mind, “seemed to change shape like limp white clouds.” He likened the hospital to “that island in the Seine, a little Manhattan with river water on both sides, the island of King Louis’s Sainte-Chapelle, all heraldry and color and all innocent, built to house a thorn!” The associative path his ill mind took was to suffering and beauty. The medieval chapel, it is said, houses the crown of thorns worn by Christ. I have been Christ, Lowell had told his doctor. I have walked on the Sea of Galilee; I have known Christ’s suffering, the thorns he wore. Had Christ borne toward the lee shore as he walked on the Galilee? Lowell surely had.

  The hospital in its own way was like Sainte-Chapelle, “purely and puritanically confined to its office of cures.” Lowell was in no doubt that his mind was in need of curing. He had become unhinged after his mother’s death and had fast-edged into mania. “Tireless, madly sanguine, menaced, and menacing,” he had entered the Payne Whitney Clinic “for all those afflicted in mind.” He seesawed from deranged to torpid, watched as his mind chased “its own shuffle down the empty ward.”

  Dr. James Masterson, Lowell’s doctor during his 1954 Payne Whitney admission, recorded in Lowell’s medical chart the changes in his clinical condition. “Was I paying Dr. Masterson to talk to me or to listen?” asked Lowell. He “sat in his white smock, like the Snow Queen.” Later, in “Near the Unbalanced Aquarium,” Lowell gave his own version of his mental state and behavior during that time. The contrast between the sparse language of clinical observation and the writing of a poet is striking, if not unexpected. Most of the events that Lowell describes in “Near the Unbalanced Aquarium” are documented in Dr. Masterson’s medical notes. Tellingly, Lowell does not write about the subject he broached most often with his doctor: his unshakeable fear that he would go mad again.

  Dr. Masterson:

  The patient began showing signs of going into another manic attack. He became aggressive, over-talkative, over-active, tense, hostile with much sexual talk….Another patient was reading F. S. Fitzgerald to Miss A. Patient grabbed him off the couch by his feet. Singing at the top of his voice in the lounge. Breaking rules on the floor. Transferred to the 7S floor.

  Lowell:

  Suddenly I felt I could clear the air by taking hold of Roger’s ankles and pulling him off his chair….Without warning, but without lowering my eyes from Anna’s splendid breastplate blouse, I seized Roger’s yellow ankles and pulled. Roger sat on the floor with tears in his eyes. A sigh of surprised revulsion went round the room….

  Next morning, while I was weighing in and “purifying” myself in the cold shower, I sang

  Rex tremendae majestatis

  qui salvandos salvas gratis

  at the top of my lungs and to a melody of my own devising. Like the catbird, who will sometimes “interrupt its sweetest song by a perfect imitation of some harsh cry such as that of the great crested flycatcher, the squawk of a hen, the cry of a lost chicken, or the spitting of a cat,” I blended the lonely tenor of some fourteenth-century Flemish monk to bars of “Yankee Doodle,” and the mmm-mmm of the padlocked Papageno. I was then transferred to a new floor, where the patients were deprived of their belts, pajama cords, and shoestrings. We were not allowed to carry matches, and had to request the attendants to light our cigarettes.

  Dr. Masterson:

  He was started on Chlorpromazine treatment. The dose was started at 15 mg. qid [four times a day] and gradually worked up to 200 mg. qid. The patient’s subjective response was “feeling restless and weighed down.” “I feel as though I’m carrying 150 lbs. of concrete in a race.” “I feel slow witted and helpless.” Likes to play badminton but tires easily.

  Lowell:

  For holding up my trousers, I invented an inefficient, stringless method which I considered picturesque and called Malayan. Each morning before breakfast, I lay naked to the waist in my knotted Malayan pajamas and received the first of my round-the-clock injections of chloropromazene [sic]: left shoulder, right shoulder, right buttock, left buttock. My blood became like melted lead. I could hardly swallow my breakfast, because I so dreaded the weighted bending down that would be necessary for making my bed. And the rational exigencies of bedmaking were more upsetting than the physical. I wallowed through badminton doubles, as though I were a diver in the full billowings of his equipment on the bottom of the sea. I sat gaping through Scrabble games, unable to form the simplest word; I had to be prompted by a nurse, and even then couldn’t make any sense of the words the nurse had formed for me.

  Dr. Masterson:

  Patient desires peace. Patient discussed his drab feelings of hollowness and withdrawal. Blankness, fatigue, despondent.

  Lowell:

  “Why don’t I die, die?” I quizzed myself of suicide in the mirror….I suspected that my whole soul and its thousands of spiritual fibers, immaterial ganglia, apprehensive antennae, psychic radar, and so on, had been bruised by a rubber hose.

  The concise language of the physician stands in distinction to the words of the poet, words that are inward, direct, dense, and hopeful of healing. Lowell’s words are vivid; he describes a world as though it is important that we see the place. Important for its writer, important for the reader. “Near the Unbalanced Aquarium” bears witness to that hope, to the promise of art and the possibility of solace. “I am writing my autobiography literally to ‘pass the time,’ ” Lowell wrote at the end of his essay. “I almost doubt if the time would pass at all otherwise. However, I also hope the result will supply me with swaddling clothes, with a sort of immense bandage of grace and ambergris for my hurt nerves.”

  This book is in part about mania and depression and how, at times, they serve art. What Lowell knew, as did many writers before and since, is that art also serves the writer who is ill. Not perfectly, seldom lastingly, but essentially. Words heal, provide a bandage of grace, give meaning and moment to awful things. The Gettysburg Address, Lowell said, was a “symbolic and sacramental act”; it gave meaning to what the war had wrought. Through his words Lincoln had given the field of battle “a symbolic significance that it had lacked.” Words give meaning to the battle.

  Robert Lowell in Boston, 1959

  “These are the tranquillized Fifties, and I am forty.” Credit 27

  Rowan tree with berries

  “Into its emptiness, there grew a solitary, beautiful, rusty-red-leafed rowan tree.” Credit 28

  IV

  CHARACTER

  How Will the Heart Endure?

  Your lacerations tell the losing game

  You play against a sickness past your cure.

  How will the hands be strong? How will the heart endure?

  —From “Mr. Edwards and the Spider”

  9

  With All My Love, Cal

  Bringing ice out from the kitchen, Cal stops in the warm gloom of the unpainted passageway, puts the ice-bucket down on the plank floor, and scootches to the fruit-crate level inhabited by Harriet’s pets. As Harriet tends them, Cal tends her….He hugs her to his sho
ulder with total gentleness. Then, with no perceptible transition, he picks up the ice-bucket, and lugs his whole grizzly-bear frame back over the transom into the adult barn.

  —Philip Booth, “Summers in Castine”

  Robert Lowell had a severe form of manic-depressive illness. When mania came, it was brutal; when it left there remained depression, remorse, and the certainty it would be back. Yet Lowell endured the kind of suffering that brings most to their knees or to suicide. And, more remarkably, he did it without irredeemably ceding his work, dignity, or friendships. Courage, which he had in measure, could not change the course of his illness, but it was determinative in how he dealt with the pain and fear that came with mania and depression. He studied the actions of courageous men with the kind of care he studied other poets.

  Lowell’s character, upbringing, and intellect were central to his survival. He was disciplined and had a stone will, a mind that learned from adversity, and character and imagination that put the learning to good use. He believed he could shape his fate and, to an unlikely extent, he did. Like Thoreau, he believed that man could elevate his life by conscious endeavor; he believed he could choose what to resist, what to worship, what to pursue. And he worked remarkably hard. He loved his work, drew from it. He didn’t give up. He had the capacity to regrow, regenerate, and heal.

  Robert Lowell survived his repeated attacks of mania through courage and discipline, definingly; work, most sustainingly; family and friends, essentially. But it was complicated. He was among the sanest of men, his friends said, except when he was ill; during those times they scarcely recognized him. He became then everything he was not when he was well: unkind, arrogant, and incomprehending. Those closest to him came to understand the madness that twisted him from Jekyll into Hyde. Mania lay dormant most of the time. Now and again it broke out, and when it did, it seared everyone. His family, friends, and colleagues had to learn to disentangle his personality and character from his disease, had somehow to reconcile the wrenching contrast between Lowell when sane and Lowell when ill.

  Lowell for his part had each time to grapple his way back from madness, face embarrassment and worse among his family and friends, students and colleagues, and return to writing. He had to make sense of what mania had done to him and what his manic cruelty had done to others. It was one thing to regret the hurt he had caused, another to heal a bruised marriage or friendship. Repairing the damage done by mania was made more difficult by the depression that came in its wake. Lowell felt lasting remorse for things he had done—he made this particularly clear to the doctors who treated him—but more than anyone he knew the limits of apology, the limits to which wrongs could be righted. In addition to confronting the pain his illness caused others, and the shame he felt from his often public behavior, he had to face the certainty that his madness would come back.

  Getting well, repairing that which had been damaged, facing the inevitability of another attack: each required courage and time. Each required underlying psychological health, however eroded, on which he could draw and which he needed to replenish. Lowell wrote of erosion and rebuilding in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop in 1964: “I think of my life with its recovery from steps into disintegration. There must be a huge hunk of health that has survived and somehow increased through all these breakdown[s], eight or nine, I think, in about fifteen years. Pray god there’ll be no more.” It was as if, as Henry Adams put it, his identity remained but “his life was once more broken into separate pieces.” As the spider did, he had to “spin a new web in some new place with a new attachment.”

  Lowell brought a complex and uniquely observant mind to understanding the effects of his madness on his friends and family. Toward the end of his life, when his illness had come back full force and he knew that his mind would not hold, he wrote about it without self-pity. When he was a young man he had described the fear and uncertainty he faced: “You play against a sickness past your cure,” he had written. “How will the hands be strong? How will the heart endure?” The questioning proved elemental from youth to death.

  —

  Lowell sustained himself with books and ideas, of course. In addition to literature—Dante, Milton, Hardy, Homer, Virgil, Hawthorne, Melville, so many—he drew upon his passion for history, paintings, the late music of Schubert and Beethoven. He looked to the lives of other poets, to history and myth, and to the ancient exemplars for a path through uncertainty. He availed himself of the strength of his Protestantism and recognized its weaknesses; then, for a while, he turned to the theology and rites of Catholicism. He found peace in fishing, albeit in a distracted, falling in the water sort of way, holding on to the pleasure he had taken casting for bass in New England ponds when he was a child. He looked to figures such as John Crowe Ransom and his cousin Harriet Winslow for the acceptance and affection he had not received from his parents as a child.

  Like Henry Adams, Lowell sought out those who could teach him. His decision as a young man to leave Harvard, his parents, and New England was one of the most important he made. He chose possibility over predictability and the exertion of will over hopelessness, choices he would make in one form or another for the rest of his life. He made decisions when he was well that secured against the damage he did when he was ill.

  Lowell learned early how to take advantage of the sea when it was fair. When he was well he headed under his own sail to ports of his own determining; when he could not make harbor on his own, he rode in tow as best he could. As a young man, he had written of the choice he was to make time and again throughout his life:

  The channel gripped our hull, we could not veer,

  the boat swam shoreward flying our wet shirts,

  like a birchlog shaking off loose bark and shooting:

  And the surf thundered fireworks on the dunes.

  This was the moment to choose, as school warned us,

  whether to wreck or ride in tow to port.

  Lowell endured because he was tough, because when he was well he made good decisions, and because his work gave him reason to live. He also endured because he had an unusual capacity for friendship. He was a good friend and someone who elicited loyalty in others. His friends described him as deeply loyal, generous, principled, witty, and quick to recognize and encourage the ability of other poets. He was known as a gentle and kind man when he was well. That he was well most of the time is underappreciated; the shadow cast by his illness was long.

  “Cal was a big man in bulk but an extremely gentle, poignant person, and very funny,” said the poet Derek Walcott. “I don’t think any of the biographies have caught the sort of gentle, amused, benign beauty of him when he was calm.” Lowell’s gentleness was intrinsic to who he was, Walcott added. So too was the immediacy of his person and his openness to new experience. People who met Lowell tended to remember him, in part because he was one of the most famous poets of his time, of course, but also because of the strength of his personality, his distinctive appearance, and his disheveled dignity and wit.

  Lowell was “attractive, rather feverish-faced,” observed Joyce Carol Oates. “He carried himself with an air of ironic dignity.” He was “achingly well-mannered,” James Atlas said. He was tall, had arrestingly blue eyes—“troubled blue eyes, intense and roving behind the thick glasses, rarely [coming] to rest,” according to Stanley Kunitz—an energetic way of jabbing his hands in the air to make a point, and a patrician disarray; he was said to drop shirt buttons, manuscripts, cigarette ash, and magazines in his wake and to lose his way as often as he found it. He was a relentless chain-smoker. “The ashtray was heaped with bent and broken half-smoked cigarettes,” remembers Atlas. “Lowell wasn’t one of those smokers who exhale in vigorous plumes; he smoked as if it made him ill. His skin had a mushroom-like pallor; his tie was streaked with ash.”

  His accent was notable, as much for what it was not, patrician Boston, as for what it was: a bit southern, a bit Boston, a bit unplaceable. His voice, said the poet Robert Shaw, was “a drawl, qui
zzical and wavering, dipping into throatiness, it was Tennessee with some of the softness taken out, given a tough New England edge.” Words and ideas flew. “At submanic velocity the man was truly amazing,” Dudley Young recalled of Lowell’s days in England. The range of his conversation was “dazzling, the anecdotes endless and funny and fine.” Jason Epstein added that Lowell’s words “seemed to come out all in a heap as though they were dumped from a suitcase.”

  “Lowell was the most engaging man, very kind,” Peter Levi, the Oxford Professor of Poetry, recalled at the time of Lowell’s death. “He was a man one actually loved.” “I feel almost too much about him to be able to get to the heart of it,” Flannery O’Connor said of Lowell. “He is one of the people I love.” Donald Jenkins, a student in Lowell’s writing seminar, described Lowell as “really a kind, intimately friendly man.” In addition to helping him with his writing, he said, Lowell had offered to pay for an operation that his wife needed. Isaiah Berlin commented, as did many, on his simultaneously civilized and engaging nature. “Everyone likes him,” he wrote.