Lowell did what he could do to control his illness. With unusual exception he took the medications he was prescribed, undertook extensive psychotherapy, and submitted to hospital admission time and again. He expressed remorse for his behavior after each attack of mania. It was not enough. He was jailed; he alienated friends and family; he suffered the kind of psychological pain that often leads to suicide; he lost the regard of more than a few people he liked and respected. Some who disagreed with him for other reasons used his illness to undermine his writing and personal convictions. When, for example, Lowell refused an invitation from President Lyndon Johnson to the White House in 1965 in protest against the Vietnam War, members of Johnson’s staff said that Lowell was a “troubled man” and an “unstable poet,” rather than that he differed on principle and objected vehemently to what he considered an immoral war. His mental illness affected his reputation while he was alive; it affects it still.
“Cal was perfectly analytic about when he had been manic,” said Grey Gowrie. “The worst thing was that he didn’t forget a thing from his manias. He was consumed by guilt and remorse. By the awfulness of what he had done. He was a very gentle and sweet man. These things were quite out of character for him.” Gowrie’s former wife, who also knew Lowell well, said that after a manic evening, having said awful things about the people he most liked, he would be overcome with remorse, “shattered by what he had done…shattered by his own cruelty.”
After Lowell had been released from the hospital, said William Alfred, “he was blue, which happens after these breakdowns. And what you do is go for a walk with him….His chin began to drag. I said, well, why do you get blue like this? He said, I remember all the mean things I said and did while I was sick. One by one…I just shrivel with shame.” Lowell’s friend Esther Brooks said that Lowell had told her that “he could remember all he had said and done when he was ill….Everything. And that is the worst part of it.” He felt himself “responsible for everything he was, regardless of his state, sane or deranged, manic or depressed, or on the thin edge of illness.” Lowell made a particularly chilling remark to Caroline Blackwood toward the end of his life: “It’s the most awful feeling—I never know when I’m going to hurt the people I love most. And I simply can’t stand it, and in a way I would rather be dead.”
Madness and remorse; the grace and hard limits of love; the expediencies of art—he put these at the heart of the last poem in the book he dedicated to Blackwood:
My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,
captive as Racine, the man of craft,
drawn through his maze of iron composition
by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre.
When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body
caught in its hangman’s-knot of sinking lines,
the glassy bowing and scraping of my will….
I have sat and listened to too many
words of the collaborating muse,
and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,
not avoiding injury to others,
not avoiding injury to myself—
to ask compassion…this book, half fiction,
an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting—
my eyes have seen what my hand did.
The final line echoes words he had written many years earlier. In “The Mills of the Kavanaughs,” the wife confronts her husband after he has tried to strangle her. “I saw your eyes,” she said. “Looking in wonder at your bloody hand.”
Remorse came after madness subsided. Lowell had at times when manic thought that he was Alexander the Great, sometimes wore a golden coin stamped with the likeness of Alexander on a chain around his neck. Not by chance he wrote in “Death of Alexander,” “we know this, of all the kings of old, / he alone had the greatness of heart to repent.”
Compassion was the note of grace. In June 1968, a few days after the assassination of Robert Kennedy, Lowell spoke to a gathering of Yale students about the capacity for gentleness that can reside within a predestined, driving force. “His doom seemed almost woven into his inheritance, into his nervous system,” Lowell said about Kennedy. He had used these words three years earlier to describe his own madness to Elizabeth Bishop. “These attacks seem now almost like something woven in my nervous system,” he had written to her after a recurrence of his mania. He urged the students to take a compassionate view of the person beholden to disturbing forces. The most important thing, he said, is that the “impetuous driving force that was sometimes rather scary really was governed by gentleness, a good merciful heart.”
Frank Sinatra once said that being a manic-depressive meant living a life of violent contradictions. It meant having an “overacute capacity” for feeling. Whatever his critics threw at him for the way he lived his life, he said, his music was honest. A moral sense might be compromised in the effort to stay alive; often surviving madness becomes a pragmatic thing. In Sinatra’s words, “I’m for anything that gets you through the night.”
10
And Will Not Scare
The struck oak that lost
a limb that weighed a ton
still shakes green leaves
and takes the daylight,
as if alive.
—From “We Took Our Paradise”
Contending with his madness and its attendant uncertainties was to Robert Lowell a matter of courage. From childhood, he had studied the lives and actions of courageous leaders, observed and emulated those whose bravery he admired. He took what he could from history, religion, and literature to provide him with the “battle array for the fire.” To act with courage was the thing. When he was nineteen years old, Lowell had written to the woman with whom he was involved:
All law, morals, and rewards are based by necessity on the black and white of action. No notice can be taken of the individual’s utter depravity or suffering. For some warfare is a lark, they are incapable of being terrified. They are dull amiable cows, munching buttercups. There is also the man whose heart’s blood flows consciously to his fingers and the bottoms of his feet, whose every nerve is a glowing filament, and whose soul flounders in his mouth. Both receive the same reward. In the staggering zig-zag to a machine gun nest, one endure[s] little more annoyance than the keeper of the beehives caught without his gloves, the other goes through the darkest horrors of hell.
Lowell was intensely interested in what it meant to overcome fear, just as he was drawn to study the use and abuse of power. Courage is usually discussed in the context of nerve on the field of battle or equanimity facing death. But the courage to live with madness and with the knowledge that it will return is as real as zigzagging to a machine gun nest. Courage was to serve Lowell well, if not always sufficiently.
“A man should stop his ears against paralyzing terror,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, “and run the race that is set before him with a single mind….As courage and intelligence are the two qualities best worth a man’s cultivation, so it is the first part of intelligence to recognize our precarious estate in life, and the first part of courage to be not at all abashed before the fact.” Lowell ran the race set before him aware of the precariousness of his mind and uncertain about when it next would break. He kept in the race, uncertain after each break whether he would write again, love again, teach again. Or whether he could regain the edge to write poetry that would “change the game.”
“What—beyond his poetry, even—made him a hero to a great many people,” wrote the critic Alan Williamson, who had been Lowell’s student at Harvard, “was the fact that, living in the imminence of an internal chaos that would have wrecked many lives, he so often seemed stronger and not weaker than the normal person: in his steady and enormously ambitious work, which even illness could not interrupt; in his political courage; in the importance he gave to friendship; and in his ability to synthesize harsh truths with deeply felt values.”
“Courage,” Lord Moran said in his classic study of the psychological effects o
f war, is a “moral quality; it is not a chance gift of nature like the aptitude for games. It is a cold choice between two alternatives, the fixed resolve not to quit; an act of renunciation which must be made not once but many times by the power of will. Courage is will power.” Moran, Winston Churchill’s personal physician during World War II, was himself the recipient of the Military Cross for valor during the Battle of the Somme. Courage, he believed, was the individual’s “exercise of mind over fear through self-discipline.” Some individuals had deeper wells of willpower from which to draw courage, but all had limits on how often the well could be tapped. War drew deep. Courage was necessary to make it through the worst and most extreme conditions in life: war, madness, exploration of the unknown, proximity to death.
Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the youngest member of Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s last Antarctic expedition, made the famous, horrifically cold, five-week winter journey to collect emperor penguin eggs for scientific study. He was keenly interested in physical and mental courage, endurance, and in their limits. Like Scott, Cherry-Garrard was subject to dark moods. He had severe depressions and, ultimately, a debilitating psychotic break. Scott and Cherry-Garrard were explorers legendary not only for their attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole, but for undertaking an ambitious and successful scientific expedition to collect rocks and fossils, make magnetic observations, and bring back thousands of geological and zoological specimens. They mapped a new territory, measured the winds and temperatures of the Antarctic, and contributed hundreds of articles to the scientific literature. They sought the primacy of discovering the South Pole, which they did not obtain, but they sought knowledge as well. “There are many reasons which send men to the Poles,” wrote Cherry-Garrard in his classic book, The Worst Journey in the World. “But the desire for knowledge for its own sake is the one which really counts.”
The primacy of discovery matters, of course, as does the journey itself and the response to risks taken, the need for impossibility denied. But what one learns from the struggle counts as much or more. “Much of that risk and racking toil had been undertaken,” Cherry-Garrard wrote, “so that men might learn what the world is like at the spot where the sun does not decline in the heavens, where a man loses his orbit and turns like a joint on a spit and where his face, however he turns, is always to the North.” They traveled for Science, he said, “in wind and drift, darkness and cold…that the world may have a little more knowledge, that it may build on what it knows instead of on what it thinks.” They sang hymns against night and ice. A poet might say a similar thing about the journey to understand the human condition, the search for words and images that will make a difference, the confrontation with the bleak and the final. “Oak and three layers of brass were wrapped round the heart of that man who first entrusted a fragile craft to the savage sea,” proclaimed Horace. Land led to sea; the sea became its own hard crossing.
Throughout his Antarctic journey and for the rest of his life Cherry-Garrard was intrigued with why some survive great stress, setback, terrifying circumstances of mind and body, and others do not. “The man with the nerves goes farthest,” he wrote. “What is the ratio between nervous and physical energy? What is vitality? Why do some things terrify you at one time and not at others? What is this early morning courage? What is the influence of imagination? How far can a man draw upon his capital?” He believed, as did Lord Moran, that deliberate willpower was the basis of courage, and that it was not limitless. Some were courageous beyond reckoning and endured what only a few could. But always there was a price. In his own case, he said, there had been “an overdraft on my vital capital which I shall never quite pay off.” In the case of five other men, including Scott, the price was death.
Character, “sheer good grain” character, pulled Scott through not only the extremes of polar exploration but also his black moods, concluded Cherry-Garrard. Courage, grit, a sense of responsibility toward others: the words he applied to Scott were as applicable to himself. “The man with nerves,” he said, “gets things done, but sometimes he has a terrible time in doing them.” Scott would go down as the Englishman who conquered the South Pole, though he did not reach it first. But Scott oversaw a great expedition that brought a new understanding of the Antarctic: its rocks and penguin eggs, its sea flow, the patterns of its ice and winds. An excellent observer and writer, he gave words to an unknown continent. Scott would be remembered in history for his character, for how he died, “as fine a death as any man.” But the South Pole, said Cherry-Garrard, was not Scott’s greatest triumph: “Surely the greatest was that by which he conquered his weaker self, and became the strong leader whom we went to follow and came to love.” Their journey ended differently than they had hoped—it became instead “a first-rate tragedy”—but they completed it on terms they believed to be moral ones. “We took risks, we knew we took them,” Scott wrote. “Things have come out against us [but] we have no cause for complaint.”
Robert Lowell’s character was the mix of nerve and risk and ice that Cherry-Garrard and Lord Moran described. Few can prevail against mental illness as severe as Lowell’s; still less can they reenter the mix of life, as he did time after time. Insanity can be a stress as extreme as being under fire or surviving brutal temperatures, and it demands energy and psychological reserves most do not have; it entails exposure to the world most neither want nor feel they can tolerate. They redraw their borders and lower their expectations of life. To anyone who knows the pain of mania and severe depression, this is the human and natural response to assault and suffering.
Lowell did not do this. He had a virulent disease but his determination and discipline, together with his ability to form and keep relationships, made it possible for him to continue to work and love, imagine ways to survive, and to take what he learned from adversity into his poetry. A disease is not just a constellation of symptoms with a natural course; it is something that occurs to an individual who has strengths and liabilities of character; these, in turn, determine how the disease is perceived, fought, and handled. Most diseases change over time and manic-depressive illness particularly so. Early in its course strong character and discipline may make survival more likely, life fuller, and allow the rendering of good from pain. But this may change as the illness progresses. The power of character to affect circumstance can erode under the repeated battering of mania; disillusion and hopelessness may come to dominate. Toughness of character is important, but it may not be enough.
—
From childhood on, Lowell knew and lived with dark swings in moods and attacks of violent irrationality. He was used to difficulty and he learned from it. His imagination allowed him to create his way to a new poetry and fresh chances at life. Stability and conventional sanity never came easily to him, and he did not have the expectation that he should have a straight shot at the meaningful things in life or art. Even his mother, reluctant though she was, had acknowledged her young son’s “great control over suffering.” When he had been bitten by a muskrat as a child, she had told her psychiatrist, he “did not flinch.” He knew young that art and life were difficult and that he would need courage. It was a deliberate approach to life. In that lay the iron and haleness of his life, the restoration of his mind after each attack of madness.
It fares, indeed, with the patient after an attack of Mania, as with a city or garrison after the horrors of an assault. The milder but more permanent supremacy of the enemy may succeed; or the whole may present but a heap of smouldering ruins; or the re-action of native strength having repelled the foe, there may be more or less of obvious dilapidation to mark the fierceness of the conflict.
—J. C. BUCKNILL AND D. H. TUKE, “MANIA,” 1858
Lowell often used military images in his poetry—armor and shield—as he did images of exposed flesh and flayed or missing skin. Exposure to the physical and psychological elements was fundamental to him; fighting it was a given. Armor was not a simple idea; it was necessary for protection but it slowed an
d was cumbersome; it was a barrier to direct sensation and contact. It allowed its wearer a safer passage, but it made for less nimble, less imaginative navigation of battle and life. Armor pulled its wearer down; it was the opposite of the ballooning lightness and high, free flight of mania, although a balloon was bound, in its own way, to a fragile, enclosing, death-guaranteeing skin.
Lowell needed but derided the armor he had put on as a young poet. His early poems, he said, seemed to him “like prehistoric monsters dragged down into the bog and death by their ponderous armor.” Courage in art, as life, meant exposure and risk. The breakthrough in style that led to Life Studies required getting rid of his “medieval armor’s undermining.” Too much elaboration and too baroque a style had left chunks of the human experience behind. They made him less vulnerable but stagnant. His work, he wrote, had been “alive maybe, if anything can breathe under the formidable armor of its rhetoric and stance.”
Courage was necessary to break down the standing order, to create something new. The courage that allowed him to survive madness was a helpful, if costly, education for his art. Survival in life and art came from staring danger down and looking ahead, creating a new world on the ruins of the old. In his “Afterthought” to Notebook, Lowell wrote, “A poet can be intelligent and on to what he does; yet he walks, half-balmy and over-armored—caught by his amnesia, ignorance and education. For the poet without direction, poetry is a way of not saying what he has to say.” But in order to say it he must be close joined to life. Armor conceals flaw, vulnerability, and paralyzing terror. “I too wore armor, strode riveted in cloth,” Lowell wrote, “stiff, a broken clamshell labeled man.”
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character Page 27