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

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  —Letter to Philip Booth, 1966

  Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and John Berryman were “brilliant, mordant, and lighthearted young men,” recalled the classicist Robert Fitzgerald at Lowell’s memorial service in 1978. In the late 1940s, they were poets in a class by themselves. “They faced the age of anxiety with nerve and love, and they had hard lives.” Indisputably they had nerve and hard lives. Berryman killed himself and Jarrell almost certainly did as well. They were of a generation of writers whose madness, stints in mental hospitals, and public acts of self-destruction became front-page news; at times they were more written about than read. Death comes sooner or later, said Lowell. “These made it sooner.”

  It seemed a uniquely blighted era of writers; manic breakdowns, depression, addiction, alcoholism, or suicide struck, among others, Hart Crane, Vachel Lindsay, Sara Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Delmore Schwartz, Theodore Roethke, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Jane Kenyon, Boris Pasternak, Dylan Thomas, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Styron, Jean Stafford, James Schuyler, James Wright, Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Mary McCarthy, F. O. Matthiessen, Elizabeth Bishop, Edward Thomas, Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, Anthony Hecht, William Carlos Williams, Walker Percy, Moss Hart, William Inge, George Mackay Brown, Louis MacNeice, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Edmund Wilson, Robert Penn Warren, Franz Wright, James Dickey, and William Meredith.

  Allen Ginsberg, himself no stranger to instability, began “Howl” with words that would be repeated by a river of followers: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” They “bared their brains to Heaven…passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating.” They jumped to their deaths from city rooftops, fire escapes, and bridges. John Berryman, one of these best minds, who leapt to his death from a bridge, had written of the tax levied on his contemporaries:

  I’m cross with god who has wrecked this generation.

  First he seized Ted, then Richard, Randall, and now Delmore.

  In between he gorged on Sylvia Plath.

  That was a first rate haul. He left alive

  fools I could number like a kitchen knife

  but Lowell he did not touch.

  Lowell he did touch, of course. In a tribute to Berryman after his suicide in 1972, Lowell described their common anguish: “I feel the jagged gash with which my contemporaries died, with which we were to die.” Later he added his name to the marked and mad:

  Ah the swift vanishing of my older

  generation—the deaths, suicide, madness

  of Roethke, Berryman, Jarrell and Lowell.

  Berryman, wildly brilliant, was bound to literature as poet, Shakespeare scholar, critic, and teacher. He mixed his madness with alcohol to deadly effect. “He seemed to throb with a singular rhythm and pitch,” Lowell wrote. “One felt the fierce charge of electricity and feared that it might burn out the wires.” Berryman’s intensity made him difficult for others to bear at times. “Hyper-enthusiasms made him a hot friend,” Lowell said, and could “make him wearing to friends—one of his dearest, Delmore Schwartz, used to say no one had John’s loyalty, but you liked him to live in another city.”

  Lowell, whose own attacks of mania upended lives around him, recognized the chaos wrought by others of like mind and temperament. “I felt frightened to be with him,” Lowell wrote about Delmore Schwartz. “I was sure it would lead to confusion and pain.” The “dark rays of his paranoia” scorched those nearest to him and he became “unbearable.” Schwartz, whose literary destiny Lowell described as “the most hopeful of any young poet in 1940,” disintegrated into the “most dismal story of our generation.” It was due, in Lowell’s way of putting it, to “some germ in the mind.”

  Lowell was acutely aware of the mental instability that haunted him and many of his contemporaries. In March 1959 he wrote to Berryman, “It seems there’s been something curious twisted and against the grain about the world of poets of our generation have had to live in. What troubles you and I, Ted Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Delmore, Randall—even Karl Shapiro—have had.” Three years later he wrote again to Berryman, in similar vein: “What you said about the other poets of our generation is something I’ve brooded much on. What queer lives we’ve had even for poets! There seems something generic about it, and determined beyond anything we could do. You and I have had so many of the same tumbles and leaps. We must have a green old age. We both have drunk the downward drag as deeply as is perhaps bearable.”

  The downward drag would come in the wake of a dizzying upward current; it came as ash from fire, backwash to the fierce writing life led by their generation. It came coiled within a mania for words, as Lowell wrote in a poem for Berryman:

  all the best of life…

  then daydreaming to drink at six,

  waiting for the iced fire,

  even the feel of the frosted glass,

  like waiting for a girl…

  if you had waited.

  We asked to be obsessed with writing,

  and we were.

  They, and other poets of their age, had been obsessed with words. “I feel I know what you have worked through,” Lowell wrote; “you / know what I have worked through—we are words; / John, we used the language as if we made it.” Mania, Lowell had said, was “a magical orange grove in a nightmare.” It began in incandescence, lighting them and the sky against which they stood. In time, the darkness was more the reality than the incandescence. The shifts in light were beyond metaphoric to Lowell.

  Lowell corresponded with many writers, but his closest correspondent was Elizabeth Bishop, to whom he wrote often about his life and especially about poetry. He confided in her about his breakdowns and treatment, yet it was to his male friends, also poets—Ezra Pound, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, and Randall Jarrell—that he confided the raw details of his attacks of mania and the depression that followed. Perhaps he wanted to spare Bishop and their relationship how he had felt and what he had done while he was manic; perhaps he believed that Bishop, who unlike Lowell, Pound, Jarrell, and Roethke had never been manic, would not understand the particular terrors of mania. From her own experience, Bishop knew depression and alcoholism well. But she did not know full-bore madness, a very different thing. Her spells, she wrote to Lowell, “are a lot like yours, on a modest scale, I think….But you have to do everything on the grand scale!” The proportion was not one in which he took pride or pleasure.

  In April 1965 Lowell wrote sympathetically to Randall Jarrell, who had been manic and medicated, attempted suicide, and was at last in the hospital. He extended hand and heart from his own life:

  I have thought twice about intruding on you, but I must say that I am heart-broken to hear that you have been sick. Your courage, brilliance and generosity should have saved you from this, but of course all good qualities are unavailing. I have been through this sort of thing so often myself that I suppose there’s little in your experience that I haven’t had over and over. What’s worst, I think, is the grovelling, low as dirt purgatorial feelings with which one emerges. If you have such feelings, let me promise you that they are temporary. What looks as though it were simply you, and therefore would never pass does turn out to be not you and will pass.

  Please let me tell you how much I admire you and your work and thank you for the many times when you have given me the strength to continue. Let me know if there’s anything I can do. And courage, old Friend!

  Six months later Jarrell lunged in front of an oncoming car and was killed. Lowell, like most, believed that Jarrell’s death was a suicide and was devastated. Jarrell had been brilliant in a rare way, Lowell said, “the most heartbreaking” poet of his generation.

  Lowell had written with understanding to Ezra Pound two years earlier: “It was sad to hear that you have been suffering greatly in the last two years. There’s no reason. But I think it does no good to say this. I think there ar
e times that cannot be softened or explained off, but which can only be lived through—that blank sense of failing. Now I gather it has lifted and you are reviving. Don’t let me intrude. I sympathize and suppose I’ve lived in the same cellar for moments.”

  It was to Theodore Roethke, however, that Lowell wrote at greatest length and with most feeling about mania and the toll it and depression had taken on both of their lives. “I feel a great kinship with you,” Lowell wrote to Roethke in 1958. “We are at times almost one another’s shadows passing through the same jungle.” He and Roethke were very different poets, Lowell once told an interviewer. “What we share, I think, is the exultant moment, the blazing out.” Their manic-depressive illness was a shared affliction that they wrote about with droll understanding. “Well, it’s happened again,” Roethke wrote to Lowell in 1957 after yet another manic attack. “Same old routine: 4 or 5 city police…dragging me off to the same old nut-bin, the same old commitment routine—what a bore.”

  Lowell wrote to Roethke about experiences that came with “our dizzy explosions.” “Our troubles are a bond. I, too, am just getting over a manic attack. Everything seemed to be going swimmingly, then suddenly I was in the hospital—thorazine, windy utterances, domestic chaos…the old story. Now it’s passed; I’m back typing in my study; my feet are on the floor. When you come we can spill out to each other.” A few months later Lowell observed that Roethke appeared to have passed through the worst of his attack. Still, he predicted, there would be darkness to come: “For months (perhaps always) there are black twinges, the spirit aches, yet remarkably less as time passes. I feel almost in a thanksgiving mood—so much of life is bearable. I’ve quite stopped wanting to turn the clock back or look for a snug hole.”

  Lowell wrote his last letter to Roethke in 1963, a month before Roethke died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-five. He spoke again of their common bond, rued the forces that were wrecking the poets of their time:

  We couldn’t be more different, and yet how weirdly our lives have often gone the same way. Let’s say we are brothers, have gone the same journey and know far more about each other than we have ever said or will say. There’s a strange fact about the poets of roughly our age, and one that doesn’t exactly seem to have always been true. It’s this, that to write we seem to have to go at it with such single-minded intensity that we are always on the point of drowning. I’ve seen this so many times, and year after year with students, that I feel it’s something almost unavoidable, some flaw in the motor. There must be a kind of glory to it all that people coming later will wonder at. I can see us all being written up in some huge book of the age. But under what title?

  In 1976, the year before he died, Lowell became manic again and had to be committed to a hospital. Roethke, Jarrell, and Berryman were dead. Threads that had connected him to a shared kind of understanding were cut or fraying. It was left to another poet, Philip Larkin, to allude to the painful company Lowell’s poetic mind had kept. He was sorry to hear that Lowell was not well, he wrote to Caroline Blackwood, but perhaps it was “the price one pays for being such a rich, inventive and variegated writer. I only wish I had one-eighth of his creativeness.” It was a high price.

  Lowell and his contemporaries were far from being the first to observe that a germ in the mind, some flaw in the motor, rocks the lives of poets. The early Greek philosophers had described the “divine madness” that touched the minds of poets and taught that melancholia was a determining element in the minds of artists. This Aristotelian conception of “divine madness” was broad. Over the centuries the suggested link between “madness” and genius narrowed to a more clinical notion of madness, usually the excitable mental state we know as mania. Mania, whose clinical description has scarcely changed over the centuries, was believed by the philosophers and doctors of antiquity to make minds and senses keener; it heightened the power of observation, they believed, and it yoked passion to discovery and imagination.

  The body and mind were unearthly alive, freed from the mundane. Mania intensified and sped the mind, forced it into places it would not otherwise go. “Their senses are acute,” Aretaeus of Cappadocia wrote about his manic patients in the second century AD. They learned that which they could not when they were well—astronomy, philosophy, and other previously unknowables. There were “advantages in disease,” Aretaeus concluded; his patients not only learned new material uncannily well but they “wrote poetry truly from the muses.”

  The clinical observation that intellectual and imaginative advantage might accompany mania, especially a conspicuous fluidity of language, was reported time and again. During mania, it was thought, the senses could perceive what normal senses could not; memory, the tributary to imagination, could be preternaturally tapped. The manic mind flooded with original associations. For more than a thousand years—in clinical papers, asylum records, correspondence to other physicians—doctors made note of instances of enhanced memory and originality in their manic patients.

  The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century physicians left a long chronicle of these observations. Benjamin Rush, the “father of American psychiatry,” was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, surgeon general in the Continental Army, and Thomas Jefferson’s pick to tutor Meriwether Lewis in medicine before he set out on his westward exploration. He was also a keen observer of aberrant mental states, particularly mania. He wrote in his widely used 1812 text on the diseases of the mind that when patients are manic “the senses of hearing and seeing are uncommonly acute.” Knowledge long buried could be “resuscitated,” new talents could emerge:

  Where is the hospital for mad people, in which elegant and completely rigged ships, and curious pieces of machinery, have not been exhibited, by persons who never discovered the least turn for a mechanical art previously to their derangement? Sometimes we observe in mad people an unexpected resuscitation of knowledge; hence we hear them describe past events, and speak in ancient or modern languages, or repeat long and interesting passages from books, none of which we are sure they were capable of recollecting, in the natural and healthy state of their minds.

  Jean-Pierre Falret, the nineteenth-century French alienist who delineated the symptoms and course of “la folie circulaire,” wrote that manic patients “cause surprise by the activity and fertility of their ideas, by their esprit and by their vivid imagination….Their intellect is, as it were, in fermentation, and suggests a thousand undertakings and plans.” Their memory, inflamed and overexcited, is able to call to mind that which ordinarily was inaccessible. They are “astonished with their remembering a great number of often insignificant facts, which they believed to have faded out of their memory a long time ago. They remember long phrases from classical authors, which they learned in their childhood and of which they were able to remember only isolated fragments before their illness.” They compose poems and “speak and write incessantly, and often with a variety of terms and aptness of expression which they did not possess in the normal condition.” Falret’s countryman Jean-Étienne Esquirol had written in 1838 that the manic patient “associates the ideas most unlike; forms images most whimsical; holds the conversations most strange.”

  Emil Kraepelin, the German psychiatrist and author of the seminal text Manic-Depressive Insanity, noted the fluency of mental associations during mania and the increase in writing and rhyming. Ideas “become unbridled,” he wrote, and “associations with external impressions and rhyming frequently occur in the conversation of the patients….Many patients develop a veritable passion for writing [Kraepelin’s emphasis], cover innumerable sheets.” They are also “very fond of composing poems, letters, petitions to highly placed personages.” A prominent early twentieth-century British text on insanity described similar behavior. During mania, its author wrote, patients are “often able to recall at will whole pages of poetry, to quote extensively from standard prose works…all of which would be impossible in the sane state.” They display, he continued, an unexpected “mental bril
liancy” and a “wonderful facility” in expressing ideas. Their command of language “appears inexhaustible” and, while manic, they have “solved problems, and written even brilliant works.” John Campbell, whose excellent clinical textbook on manic-depressive illness was published in 1953, observed that the intense pressure of thoughts during mania often led to a propulsive drive to write. “Urged on by the pressure of ideas as well as an excess of physical energy the manic patient has an inner drive which will not allow him to rest.” Ideas rush from mind to paper.

  None of these physicians, ancient or modern, would have argued that manic-depressive illness was anything but a dangerous, corrosive disease. Yet they and many of their colleagues were piqued by the occasional brilliant surge of ideas; the urgent pressure to write, especially poetry; and the fluid access to memory that they observed in their manic patients. Such clinical anecdotes cannot form a scientific case that mania has a role in bringing art into being. They have, however, encouraged more systematic study of the cognitive and mood changes that occur during mania, and of the characteristics of temperament shared by those who become manic and those who create. In its own right, anecdotal observation offers a vivid glimpse into why a link between creativity and madness has been posited for so many hundreds of years.

  Is there, contemporary psychologists and neuroscientists have asked, a fundamental link between “madness” and creativity, or is this old belief just a cultural myth, a naïve romanticization of mental illness and a clichéd caricature of the tormented artist? If there is such a link, if those who have been manic, or otherwise mentally perturbed, are more likely to write lasting poetry or music, or to be more imaginative in mathematics and the sciences, may they also be disproportionately innovative in business, the law, or in the acts of everyday life? And, if so, why? The question is not whether the majority of great artists and writers have been mentally ill, nor is it whether most of those who have been mentally ill have been unusually creative. Neither is true. The question is whether there is a higher rate of mental disorder, especially bipolar illness, in those who are unusually creative and, if so, why?