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

by Kay Redfield Jamison

Lowell defended his use of Hardwick’s letters. “I did not see them as slander, but as sympathetic, tho necessarily awful for her to read,” he wrote to Bishop in March 1972. “She is the poignance of the book….The trouble is the letters make the book, I think, at least they make Lizzie real beyond my invention….How can the story be told at all without the letters?” He discussed with Bishop, as he did with others, rearranging the poems to make the overall effect less painful. “The problem of making the poem unwounding is impossible,” he continued a week later; “still I think it can be made noticeably milder without losing its life.” The struggle between not using the letters and compromising the poems—between protecting his family and protecting his art—obsessed him: “How can I want to hurt? Hurt Lizzie and Harriet, their loving memory? Working on my poem is a must somehow, not avoidable even though I fail—as I must partially.”

  In July 1973, in the wake of a few particularly savage reviews of The Dolphin, Lowell wrote to his publisher, defending having published fragments of Hardwick’s letters—“a mixture of quotes, improvisation, paraphrase”—which appeared to have been “shocking” to some critics. “The portrait is very careful and affectionate,” he maintained. “The essence of her charm and bravery, her own words humor and sharpness” remained intact. Caroline Blackwood, although she had been portrayed in a much harsher light in several of the Dolphin poems, nonetheless told an interviewer, “Lizzie didn’t come out badly….And when he did it with me, I didn’t care. Once it’s turned into a poem, I don’t think it has anything to do with one. When he called me a ‘baby killer whale’ or wrote that I was ‘warm-hearted with an undercoat of ice’ or a mermaid who ‘serves her winded lover’s bones in brine,’ I didn’t mind.”

  Elizabeth Hardwick did mind. They were different women and in different circumstances. Before she actually saw the poems, Hardwick’s view on Lowell’s publishing them was open, even philosophical. In April 1972 she wrote to Lowell, “I don’t know what you should or should not do, but it seems to me that you have been writing for thirty years and publishing for nearly the same number. The matter of your work is yours entirely and I don’t think you have it in your power to ‘hurt me.’ I suppose that is something I control since the feelings are mine and perhaps my feelings are not as simple as my friends think. I mean that I cannot see what harm can come to me from a poem by you. Why should I care? The credit or discredit is entirely yours. I don’t see any of this as having anything to do with me in the long run. I just wanted to ‘go on record’ in this.” She added, “I feel strongly that you should do what you wish.” To a point, Lowell could be forgiven for assuming some permission to go on writing the Dolphin poems.

  Hardwick’s openness to publication stopped dead when she read the poems a year later. She was angry and humiliated. She wrote to Lowell’s publishers, aghast that they had published the poems without obtaining her permission. When she received the book, she told them, “the reality was disturbing far beyond anything I could have imagined. Had I seen the poems, the letters of mine, those using my name, I do not know what I would have done.” It should not have been left up to Lowell’s discretion, she continued. It was the publisher’s job to advise and to tend to the “indiscretions of authors.” She particularly resented the inaccuracy of Lowell’s portrayal of key facts. There was, she wrote, “nothing about my willingness to divorce, my acceptance of the separation, the good spirits of myself and the utterly gratifying contentment of my daughter.”

  “He used and misquoted her letters,” acknowledges Harriet Lowell many years after the deaths of both her parents. “It seemed out of character….It was so vituperative to my mother. The quotes did not sound much like her, but then she wasn’t writing him sonnets and he did change them. She resented the bad lines he gave her as a writer with her own unique voice and that the story was changed so that her anger was taken out of context.” Hardwick did not change her mind about the Dolphin poems. “She minded his use of the letters always. In general, she did not object to him writing about his life (which meant her). This was different. She resented that he took the worst of her reactions, out of context, and excised all the many acts of generosity. She felt he misrepresented her. He made it all about two women fighting over him….They made up, clearly, so she forgave him, but she did not change her mind. It wasn’t so much that it was revealing and embarrassing, but it was ungenerous.” For Hardwick, it was not enough to hear from Lowell, “I’m sorry I brought this on you, the ghastly transient voices, the lights.” The transient voices, the lights, the public scrutiny were not transient at all; they were there, indelible, and painful.

  Scandals blaze; they die down. Art lasts or it doesn’t. Douglas Dunn put the question of Lowell’s responsibility into the context of his art: “On the evidence, Lowell seems to have cared deeply about the pain his behaviour and literary revelations caused others. His private Court of Appeal was Poetry, which said that he must do what Poetry must have—the device is rhetorical and sentimental, and I think it was to Lowell, too.”

  Two years after Lowell died, Elizabeth Hardwick told an interviewer that Lowell was “like no one else—unplaceable, unaccountable.” Unplaceable, unaccountable. Perfect words: wife to husband, writer to writer.

  Madness—misarranging to art and love, monstrous, capricious—was the subject of many poems in the three books Lowell published in 1973. Lowell had dreaded that his madness would return. When it did, it was a devastating and extended attack. Other than the brief recurrence of mania in summer 1970, lithium had kept him out of hospitals from spring 1967 until late autumn 1975. This sharply contrasted with his life before he began lithium; his attacks of mania had occurred at least once a year, required hospital admission, and were followed by months of depression. His recurrence of mania in November 1975 can be traced in all likelihood to lithium toxicity he experienced in May 1975 and the instability in his blood levels that followed.

  Predictably, only a few months after Lowell’s toxic reaction to lithium he was once again manic. He was treated in late autumn 1975 for mania, first at Priory Hospital in London, then at Greenways Nursing Home, and, at the end, at St. Andrews Hospital in Northampton. For more than two weeks after he left Greenways and before he was admitted to St. Andrews Hospital, he received twenty-four-hour private nursing care at home. He was severely manic. At first, Blackwood was hopeful that Lowell’s London doctor would be able to intercede quickly enough to keep his mania from escalating. This did not happen. “We had one hope,” Blackwood said, “that if he had a massive valium injection it might stop—you know, that thing where they do it right into the vein….Dr. Brass came round and gave him the massive valium. Dr. Brass was here all night giving him more valium.” The physician told Blackwood that patients had their legs amputated under the same dose he had given Lowell. “Cal was still walking around, talking and waving his arms.” Dr. Brass “had never seen anything like it.”

  Lowell was “mad as the vexed sea.” He dug for Etruscan treasures he believed to be hidden in the walls of their house and carved into an electric light socket with a nail file until he reached the exposed wires. He drank disinfectant and ate detergent. He stripped off wallpaper with a bread knife. He was incoherent, delusional, and overpowering. Remembering that T. S. Eliot had told him he “adored English hardware stores,” he went to the local ironmonger and shoplifted domestic appliances. (The psychiatrist asked Blackwood, “Why do you think the professor loves hardware so much? Is he a man of the kitchen?”) He read Mein Kampf aloud to Blackwood and, with tears streaming down his face, proclaimed that Hitler was a better writer than Melville. This was a declaration Blackwood found so far from anything Lowell believed when sane, so at variance with his political liberalism, not to say with his reverence for Melville, that she was horrified, repelled, and terrified. She feared that he would never regain his sanity.

  When Jonathan Raban visited Lowell at the Priory he found Lowell deeply mad, “wandering out on the lawn, carrying what looked like a piece
of motor car engine, or part of a central heating system, and Cal was standing there holding it up and saying, ‘The Chief Engineer gave me this. This is a present from the Chief Engineer.’ I said, ‘Oh yes.’ And he said, ‘You know what this is. This is the Totentanz. This is the instrument they used to eliminate the Jews.’ I said, ‘Cal, it’s not. It’s a piece of steel. It’s nothing to do with the Jews.’ And then this awful sad look in his eyes, full of sorrow, as if he were hearing what his mouth was saying and was appalled, and he said something like, ‘It’s just my way. It’s only a joke.’ ” For Lowell, like many patients with manic delusions, the tyrants and conquerors in history, such as Hitler, Napoleon, Caesar, Mussolini, Achilles, and Alexander, came easily to mind as subjects of identification or persecution. An insatiable passion for conquest and power and the drive to reap some cosmic good or sow unmatched destruction get fueled by the grandiose mood of mania and its paranoid bent of mind. Vitriol and bigotry often emerge. Once mania has passed, the delusional identity is abhorred, disavowed, or forgotten.

  Blackwood grew skeptical about the value of traditional medical care in treating Lowell’s mental illness. She arranged for homeopathic treatment as well as acupuncture. Seamus Heaney accompanied Lowell to his acupuncturists in Harley Street in January 1976. “They called him Professor. They spoke calmingly to him and he became calm. He answered their questions about what they called his tension with an unexpected childlike candor. He allowed them to palp along the line of his neck and over his temples and down the back of his skull. He took off his shirt. He bowed a little and accepted the needles, one by one, in a delicate gleaming line, from the point of his shoulder to the back of his ear. I had a great feeling of intimacy and honour and heartbreak as I watched it all from behind, yet I could not stop myself from turning that accidental moment into an image, there and then, as it was happening. Gulliver in Lilliput, disabled, pinned down, yet essentially magnificent. The bull weakened by the pics of the picador. St. Sebastian. At any rate, it remains with me as an emblem of his afflicted life, his great native strength and his sorrowful, invigilated helplessness.”

  Heaney, who was to receive the Duff Cooper Prize for literature in early 1976, asked Lowell to present the award. John Julius Norwich, the son of Duff Cooper, recalls the nightmare that unfolded. Caroline Blackwood, an old friend of his, called to tell him that Lowell was in the hospital and could not attend the award ceremony; later in the afternoon she telephoned to say he had checked himself out of the hospital and might turn up after all. He was “drugged up to the gills,” Blackwood told Norwich, and on no account was anyone to let him have anything to drink. Norwich warned his mother, Lady Diana Cooper, who was known for her aplomb as well as her wit and beauty. “She was thrilled,” he recounts, “as I knew she would be; this was just the sort of situation she loved.”

  Norwich dropped his mother off and parked his car. By the time he arrived at the award celebration, Lowell was standing with “a brimming champagne glass in each hand” talking to Lady Diana. He looked as if he had “been pulled through a hedge—tousled hair on end, a sweat-sodden white shirt open to the navel and, it seemed to me, a wild, wild look in his eye. ‘Oh darling,’ my mother said. ‘You must meet this delightful gentleman. I’m afraid I didn’t catch his name, but I’ve just been telling him all about this loony who’s going to try and present the Prize.’ ”

  “Then came the anguish,” Norwich remembers. “Cal took up Seamus’s book and read aloud the first four lines, which he settled down to analyse, unfavourably and at length.” He did the same with the second four lines and then the third. “The audience grew restive. Mercifully he stopped in midsentence. ‘So here’s your prize,’ he said—and handed it over.” At that moment, Caroline Blackwood arrived “accompanied by two men in white coats.” “Cal went quietly,” Norwich observed. Seamus Heaney remembers the evening as a “sad, mad event, Lowell going about with a jacket over his pyjama tops.” He was drinking champagne and “looking absolutely wild,” recalls Lowell’s British publisher. He gave an “odd rambling speech and now and again ‘crowed’ with a sort of ‘wild manic laughter.’ ” Most in the audience, he said, “simply assumed he was drunk. Of course, he was. Mad and drunk.”

  Lowell was taken to St. Andrews Hospital in Northampton. It was, he wrote in “Home,” a place where “[o]ur ears put us in touch with things unheard of,” a place where “a thorazined fixture” such as himself “might envy museum pieces / that can be pasted together or disfigured / and feel no panic of indignity.” It was a way station to death, a place where visitors came only to leave, and where desertion was felt by visitor and visited alike:

  At visiting hours, you could experience

  my sickness only as desertion…

  Dr. Berners compliments you again,

  “A model guest…we would welcome

  Robert back to Northampton any time,

  the place suits him…he is so strong.”

  When you shuttle back chilled to London,

  I am on the wrong end of a dividing train—

  it is my failure with our fragility.

  If he has gone mad with her,

  the poor man can’t have been very happy,

  seeing too much and feeling it

  with one skin-layer missing.

  The immovable chairs have swallowed up the patients,

  and speak with the eloquence of emptiness.

  By each the same morning paper lies unread:

  January 10, 1976.

  I cannot sit or stand two minutes,

  yet walk imagining a dialogue

  between the devil and myself,

  not knowing which is which or worse,

  saying,

  as one would instinctively say Hail Mary,

  I wish I could die.

  Less than ever I expect to be alive

  six months from now—

  1976,

  a date I dare not affix to my grave.

  “I wish I could die,” Lowell wrote in 1976; twenty years earlier, pacing and despondent in the Payne Whitney Clinic, he had “quizzed” his “face to suicide in the mirror” and asked, “Why don’t I die, die?” He told more than one of his doctors that he “wished only to die,” and in several of his hospital charts the attending physician recorded that Lowell was “potentially suicidal.” Often Lowell’s expressed desire to die was in the context of depressive bone weariness. At other times he believed he had irrevocably destroyed his ties with his friends and family, or humiliated himself in front of his colleagues or students. He repeatedly told his psychiatrists that he could not face the prospect of his madness coming back. Lowell, recalled one friend, said he wanted to die because he had “absolutely no future, that he would just wreck all the people I love.” He had expressed the same despair to Blackwood. “I never know when I’m going to hurt the people I love most,” he told her. “And I simply can’t stand it, and in a way I would rather be dead.” Blackwood, although she told Ian Hamilton that Lowell had not been suicidal during their time together, said in the same interview, “I did always worry that he was going to jump out of a window.” The concern that Lowell would jump out the window was expressed by more than one of his students at Harvard.

  After leaving St. Andrews Hospital in Northampton, Lowell wrote to Frank Bidart, “I am weighed down by the new frequency of attacks. How can one function, if one is regularly sick. Shades of the future prison.” He had lost much of his earlier hopefulness that lithium would keep his mania at bay, although he was now having regular tests to monitor his blood level. He repeated his fear to Blair Clark: “I can’t really function against two manic attacks in one year.” Lowell was looking behind him at the damage he had done and forward to the damage he was certain to do. The reality of his future was that his illness would come back, peace would elude him, he would humiliate himself, wound people he loved, and he would be unable to write as he wished and needed. It took sheer will to live and continue to create.

 
At times Lowell expressed not so much an active desire to die as passive submission to an accumulating tide of despair. His mind was less willing and able to engage the fight. “I’ve been sixteen times on my knees,” he had told Sidney Nolan. “I’ve got up sixteen times. But if one day I don’t get up, I don’t mind.” Jill Neville, in her roman à clef about her brief affair with Lowell, quotes the Lowell character as saying—after having talked about his repeated breakdowns—“I’d never drown myself. But if I had a button I’d switch myself off. The show’s been going on too long.”

  Lowell seldom mentioned suicide to his family or friends. We know no details about intent or plans he might have had. He wrote about suicide in his poetry, but so have many poets who were not suicidal. He did discuss suicide with his doctors on several occasions. All but one of Lowell’s hospital admissions were for mania, so suicide was not the major clinical concern during those periods.

  Still, manic-depressive illness carries a very high rate of suicide, and a constellation of factors put Lowell at particular risk: being male; his history of impulsive and violent behavior when he was manic; his heavy use of alcohol. Many of his contemporaries similarly affected by manic-depressive illness did go on to kill themselves. What stopped Lowell? A few reasons are likely. There is a genetic tendency to suicide, and Lowell did not have a significant history of suicide in his family. His impulsiveness, a risk factor for suicide, was largely confined to his manic periods. He was less impulsive during times when he was depressed. He received good psychiatric care and, unlike many, he largely followed the treatment recommendations of his physicians. For more than twenty years, Elizabeth Hardwick provided as stable a life as possible and, by seeing to the practical things to which he was oblivious, kept him grounded. He had strong friendships. He had a will of granite and a compact with his work. He had no expectation that life would be without suffering. He had contended throughout his life with madness and had known violence and depression since childhood. He knew as best one could how to live with them. Critically, for many years when he was at high risk for suicide he was taking lithium, a drug that is impressively effective in preventing suicide.