As much as anyone, Lowell knew how frightening and destructive his madness could be; and he understood Blackwood’s fear. He understood in July 1970 why she left him when he was sick, but loathed that she did. A few years later, when he was confined to yet another ward, under the care of yet another doctor, he understood, more acutely, why she had left him and taken her daughters with her to the Hebrides until he was well. But it was a hard understanding. Like all patients in a mental hospital, he waited. He waited for the doctor; he waited for medication; he waited for sanity; he waited for his wife to return:
Since you went, our stainless steelware ages,
like the young doctor writing my prescription:
The hospital. My twentieth in twenty years….
Seatrout run past you in the Hebrides.
He waited for the sea trout beyond his casting.
Lowell’s mania in the summer of 1970 could have been predicted. He was far from his own country, family, and friends; he was newly in love: heart and nerve exposed, high wired, vulnerable. His nights were late, his sleep was fractured, and he drank more than his brain could overlook. “He seemed a poor crazed creature,” said Philip Larkin at the time. Most of all, he was torn apart by the breakup of his twenty-year marriage to Elizabeth Hardwick. The affair with Blackwood was devastating to Hardwick, who recognized that this was not just another impulsive romance incited by mania. It was a serious relationship that promised the end of their marriage. “I draw a card I wished to leave unchosen,” wrote Lowell, “and discard the one card I had sworn to hold.”
Guilty and torn, Lowell wrote infrequently and ambiguously to Hardwick. Transatlantic telephone calls were expensive and unsatisfactory. Left in the dark, she was anxious about their marriage and distraught about the hurt and confusion his absence was causing their daughter—“All is as it was,” he wrote to Harriet in late August. “Tho not quite.” She was also concerned about money, Harriet’s schooling, and where they would live; she had major writing and teaching obligations of her own, in addition to the practical responsibility she had for Lowell’s papers, correspondence, and finances. As Harriet Lowell describes it, her mother had been “left to make all the arrangements for renting an apartment full of Lowell family furniture and a studio full of his papers. She had left her job and taken me out of school. She needed his input on all these decisions. She was used to talking about everything with him. Until he knew whether he wanted us to come to England or it was over, she could not move forward or backward.” And as always, Hardwick was worried about how his mind was bearing up.
Hardwick had good cause to worry. Lithium had held Lowell’s illness in check for nearly three years, but things began to unravel soon after he moved to England. Blackwood, who disliked doctors, particularly psychiatrists, had doubts about whether he should be taking lithium at all—she doubted that it worked and disliked the side effects—and it was left to Hardwick to encourage him to continue to take the drug. In April 1970 she mailed him an article about lithium; in June she wrote to him asking whether she should try to get a prescription for lithium from one of his New York doctors. She told a friend that although she thought Lowell was “more or less under control with the pills, but he should be taking more.” She reassured him about lithium even after he had been hospitalized. “Don’t feel that the lithium has let you down because of this setback,” she wrote. “It will work, it does work.”
Concerned about Lowell’s mental state, Elizabeth Hardwick flew from New York to London in late July to visit him in the hospital. She was aghast to find that he was allowed to walk around the neighborhood in his pajamas, disheveled, drugged, and ill, even free to go to the local pub. The hospital staff, she felt at least initially, allowed him to make a spectacle of himself. He was a “brilliant, proud, dignified man,” she protested, “not an ape.”
Despite her misgivings about the future—“I realized when I got here that I had no wish to start over again,” she wrote to Mary McCarthy, although this determination was to change and then change again—she had “cut Cal’s shoulder length hair, had his shirts washed, his trousers cleaned.” He was “very weak & trembling & rather frail & needs help even to get around & is quite exhausted after an hour or so.” She was frustrated and upset. “Sometimes a look of unutterable depression crosses his face for a moment and I want to weep,” she wrote to McCarthy shortly before she returned to New York in early August. “Then he pushes it back with a careless joke.”
Blackwood, despite her love for Lowell, was reluctant to be with him when he was sick. The letter she wrote while he was in the hospital is one written by a strained, wary lover:
Darling Cal—I think about you every minute of the day, and I love you every minute of the day. Have just got your letter. You are right to object to me calling it “your” sickness. It is mine. Or ours. That is the trouble. I know it is better if I don’t see you or speak to you until your attack is over even though I really long to and without you everything seems hollow, boring, unbearable. I still feel as if I am under some kind of emotional anaesthetic and can’t plan or think. But that will change. I feel in an odd way and against obvious appearances that everything is going to be alright. But not immediately. As you say we got across the Godstow Marsh and manipulated that endless Military Road, and we reached Hadrian’s wall….At the moment I feel really sub-humanly low.
Love Caroline
Her words, as was not infrequently the case, found their way, literal yet transformed, into Lowell’s work. Three years later in his book The Dolphin, dedicated to Blackwood, Lowell included the poem “Caroline.” The fourth section is titled “Marriage?”:
“I think of you every minute of the day,
I love you every minute of the day;
you gone is hollow, bored, unbearable.
I feel under some emotional anaesthetic,
unable to plan or think or write or feel;
mais ça ira, these things will go, I feel
in an odd way against appearances,
things will come out right with us, perhaps.
As you say, we got across the Godstow Marsh,
reached Cumberland and its hairbreadth Roman roads,
climbed Hadrian’s Wall, and scared the stinking Pict.
Marriage? That’s another story. We saw
the diamond glare of morning on the tar.
For a minute had the road as if we owned it.”
Lowell struggled to convince Blackwood he could set things right and start anew. “I love you with all my heart and mind, what can I do, if you give me nothing to go on?” he pleaded from the hospital in July 1970. “I can’t crowd in on you. Let’s for God’s sake try again, cool and try. So much love should go on to something. P.S. If I were with you I’d do all within my defects. Can you pretend to be the same? O try!”
After leaving the hospital, Lowell, not yet well and “terrified of being mad alone,” moved into a place not far from Blackwood’s London flat. Within a few months they were again doing “most things” together and he had recovered enough to write that he was “well and not depressed.” He stayed out of the hospital, remained relatively stable for more than four years.
In mid-October, three months after Hardwick visited him in the hospital in London, Lowell sent her a long letter giving the reasons why it was unlikely that he would return. It was a valedictory to their marriage, a testament to the spine and governance she had given to his life, and a recognition that their shared, yet separate, pain was in the end insurmountable:
I don’t know whether I’ve said or written that I feel like a man walking on two ever more widely splitting roads at once, as if I were pulled apart and thinning into mist, or rather being torn apart and still preferring that state to making a decision. Is there any decision still for me to make? After all I have done, and all that seven months have done, can I go back to you and Harriet? Too many cuts.
Time has changed things somewhat since we met at Greenways, I am soberer, cooler. More dis
pleasing to myself in many little ways, but mostly about you. A copy of my new book [Notebook] came the other day, and I read through all the new and more heavily revised poems. A sense of the meaning of the whole came to me, and it seemed to be about us and our family, its endurance being the spine which despite many bendings and blows finally held. Just held. Many reviewers saw this; though it was something I thought pretentious and offensive if claimed to push in my preface, I saw it too. I have felt as if a governing part of my organism were gone, and as if the familiar grass and air were gone.
I don’t think I can go back to you. Thought does no good. I cannot weigh the dear, troubled past, so many illnesses, which weren’t due to you, in which you saved everything, our wondering, changing, growing years with Harriet, so many places, such rivers of talk and staring—I can’t compare this memory with the future, unseen and beyond recollection with Caroline. I love her very much, but I can’t see that. I am sure many people have looked back on a less marvelous marriage than ours on the point of breaking, and felt this pain and indecision—at first insoluble, then when the decision has been made, incurable.
I don’t think I can come back to you, but allow me this short space before I arrive in New York to wobble in my mind. I will be turning from the longest realest and most loved fragment of my life.
Three days later he wrote that he had been depressed. His “once annual depression” was lighter than usual but it was enough to make him “peculiarly indecisive and useless.” No matter what choice he made, he wrote, “I am walking off the third story of an unfinished building to the ground….My useless, depressed will, does nothing well. Just the usual somberness after mania, jaundice of the spirit, and yet it has so many absolutely actual objects to pick up—a marriage that was both rib and spine for us these many years.” By early November, less than a month later, there was a wobble in his certainty to end the marriage. “I wonder if we couldn’t make it up?” he wrote to Hardwick. He acknowledged he had “done great harm” and that even if he returned to her much would stay unresolved.
“Our love will not come back on fortune’s wheel,” he wrote in “Obit,” the final poem in For Lizzie and Harriet: “After loving you so much, can I forget / you for eternity, and have no other choice?” In another poem in the same book, he set his grief for their lost marriage in coastal Maine, the place of their shared summers; times of friends and writing, of a stillness in the surrounding waters:
White clapboards, black window, white clapboards, black window, white clapboards—
my house is empty. In our yard, the grass straggles….
I stand face to face with lost Love—my breath
is life, the rough, the smooth, the bright, the drear.
Not long before going into the hospital in 1970 Lowell had written to Hardwick, “This is almost the first time since lithium that I am mostly unemployed—take leisure to be wise. I’m not quite what I was when one groping and reaching summer I began Notebook.” (Lowell’s first version, Notebook 1967–68, was revised, expanded, and then published as Notebook in 1970.) He told Ian Hamilton that during that time he “never wrote more, or used more ink in changes. Words came rapidly, almost four hundred sonnets in four years—a calendar of work days. I did nothing but write; I was thinking lines even when teaching or playing tennis.” He wrote five or six sonnets a day. “Ideas sprang from the bushes and from my head,” he said.
It had been a period, not long after starting on lithium and still “simmering,” of unparalleled productivity. He wrote in those early years of lithium treatment about seasons passing, the making of art from life; about the discontents and solace of marriage; about pernicious power. “The time is a summer, an autumn, a winter, a spring, another summer,” Lowell wrote about his Notebook sonnets. “I began working sometime in June 1967 and finished in June 1970. My plot rolls with the seasons, but one year is confused with another. I have flashbacks to what I remember, and fables inspired by impulse. Accident threw up subjects, and the plot swallowed them.”
Notebook, which was dedicated to Harriet and Hardwick, received mixed reviews. It was a “beautiful and major work,” wrote one critic; for another, it was “the response of a racked but magnanimous mind.” The poet Howard Nemerov said that the Notebook poems were “so outrageously beautiful as quite to overcome my natural envy at another writer’s success.” Douglas Dunn noted that Randall Jarrell had predicted Lowell would write the best poems of the age. “The prophecy has long been fulfilled,” wrote Dunn. “Notebook is the major endeavor so far, both as regards scale and innovation. As a record of life it is incomparable.” The writing in Notebook, he said, is “consistently brilliant.” While critical of Lowell for incorporating his ancestors into the mythic patterns of history, Dunn praised Lowell’s ambition, his “preference for the large canvas,” his aim for grandeur. Notebook, he wrote, revealed a “nervous subtlety of feeling and statement that represents a major innovation in poetry.”
Some disagreed. Notebook was “erratic,” “self-indulgent,” “self-important,” and punctuated by archaic references and “private allusions.” Lowell’s portrayal of his life was seen as idiosyncratic, if not desperate. The writing, said some, treaded old waters. No one, least of all Lowell, could say whether lithium had made Notebook possible and remarkable, or if it had kept better work from emerging.
In November 1970 Lowell wrote to Peter Taylor that he had fallen in love while “part manic.” He had been “sick in hospital a good part of the summer, got well, stayed in love. There was great joy in it all, great harm to everyone.” A week later, with “baffling vacillation…the jerky graph of the heart,” he wrote to Blair Clark that he thought he and Hardwick would get back together. Hardwick, for her part, had written to Clark two weeks earlier, “I do not want Cal back under any circumstances.” The end of a marriage tends not to bring out consistency in those involved. Lowell described Hardwick as veering from “frantic affection to frantic abuse,” while he himself tacked from “perfect happiness” with Caroline to anguish at the loss of his marriage and the hurt he was causing Harriet. This time the remorse he felt was not for manic behavior beyond his control; it was for the pain inflicted by wrenching duplicities and expediencies in his marriage; by the betrayal, infidelity, the pain and sadness of divorce. “I increasingly fear for the blood I’ll have to pay for what I have done,” he said. “For being me.”
Lowell returned to New York for Christmas, carrying with him a note written by Caroline. He took lines from it into “With Caroline at the Air-Terminal,” part of the sequence of poems “Flight to New York” that was published a few years later in The Dolphin: “ ‘If I have had hysterical drunken seizures, / it’s from loving you too much. It makes me wild, / I fear…./ I feel unsafe, uncertain you’ll get back.’ ” The future was less uncertain to Hardwick, however. When she saw Lowell at Christmas it was clear to her that he had made the decision to go back to Blackwood. He had. When he returned to England he moved in with her; two months later they learned she was pregnant. The months of her pregnancy and after were ones of unusual happiness and calm for Lowell. It was an interlude that he wrote about to friends.
“Caroline and I are having a child,” he wrote to William Alfred in March 1971. “Many problems, but somehow a calm has come for the last month and a half that is quite surprising. Like walking through some gauze screen that allowed one to see real things without touching them; but what we see is different. Anyway, for me and Caroline a peace we haven’t known, perhaps ever.” Whatever came his way in the future, he said, would be easier to face because of what they had together. In May 1971 he wrote in like vein to Peter Taylor. “I think I am happier than I’ve been,” he said. “Caroline and I haven’t quarreled for four months, an absolute record for me with anyone.” “Not a fight for seven months,” he wrote to Taylor again a few months later. It was an “unnatural and happy calm” and “unnatural to be reborn and find yourself fifty-four.” He asked another friend, “Will the hailstones of
the gods fall on me, if I say I’ve never been so happy, nor knew I could be?” The peace was soothing, stilling, primitive: “We breathe now as the cattle breathe,” he said.
Lowell’s new life with Caroline was, for a while, like the rowan berries of winter had been to Pasternak’s Zhivago: new life; scarlet against white; a promise. But the pain he knew he was causing Hardwick and Harriet made his life with Caroline a darker thing. “We are never born again I think, nor would want to be,” he wrote to the poet Adrienne Rich in the summer of 1971. “A marriage ends, and nothing stays unchanged. We face the freshness and fears and release of looking at what we really are.” Rich, a friend of Hardwick, saw things differently; her disapproval was visceral. (Rich never forgave him for leaving Hardwick and two years later wrote a blistering, often-quoted review of The Dolphin, damning him for his explicit poems—some based on private correspondence—about Blackwood and Hardwick.) “The only important thing wrong with marriage with Lizzie was our unending nervous strife,” Lowell remarked, “as tho a bear had married a greyhound. We were always deeply together and constantly fascinated and happy together, and constantly sadly vexed.” He wrote to another friend, “I think of Lizzie and Harriet hourly, yet the strain of the motor was shaking us all screwloose.”
In the spring of 1971, recalls Jonathan Raban, Lowell was on the brink of mania. He was “massively enthusiastic, schoolboyish, frantically playful.” He became obsessed with dolphins, living and inanimate, staying to watch performance after performance of the dolphins in the London Dolphinarium and purchasing stone dolphins, some outrageously expensive, in the antique shops in the King’s Road. For a while, Raban said, stone dolphins arrived at Lowell’s and Blackwood’s house in almost daily British Road Services delivery vans. Dolphins were on either side of the front door, in the garden, in the hallways; there were dolphins as hat stands. Dolphins were everywhere; they were in poetry in the making. Yet somehow Lowell was able, just, to fend off a full-blown manic attack. “Lowell and Blackwood were both treating each other with a sense of each other’s fragility,” observed Raban. Lowell held himself back because “he saw the panic in Caroline, and Caroline in a way [held] herself back from her thing, from her fear of Cal. They treated each other with an almost drunken delicacy, and you could feel a massive amount of self-restraint on both sides, and terror—terror that if one of them flipped, the whole thing would crash.” Lowell said on more than one occasion, “I am manic. Caroline is panic.” It was gasoline to tinder.
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character Page 37