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

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  Despite the end now obvious in their marriage, Lowell and Blackwood rented a house in Cambridge for the upcoming Harvard term. Blackwood went ahead of Lowell to America while he remained in the hospital in London. Ten days after leaving the hospital he arrived in Boston; Frank Bidart and Blackwood picked him up at Logan Airport. He was in “awful” shape, said Bidart. “Enormously upset.” Blackwood, on edge following Lowell’s recent stay in the hospital, was quick wired to any sign that he might be ill. Within minutes of his getting into the car she told Bidart that Lowell was sick again. Bidart disagreed. He was “just nervous,” he said. Cal was in “intense distress,” but he was not manic.

  He had to have peace, Lowell said again and again. He needed quiet, a place apart from Blackwood. He couldn’t take the drama anymore, he told Bidart. He couldn’t take the anger and tension. His desperation was obvious in everything he said and wrote during this time. Lowell stayed with Bidart for three weeks, grateful to be away from the turmoil. He found relief in the respite, solace in the beauty and familiarity of the Schubert piano trios Bidart played for him the first night he stayed with him. He found a trace of long-elusive peace.

  Not long after Lowell returned to America, in late January 1977, he found it increasingly difficult to breathe. He was short-winded, he wrote to Blackwood. Even when sitting he felt he couldn’t draw enough breath. Frank Bidart drove him to the Stillman Infirmary at Harvard; later he was evaluated at McLean Hospital and then transferred to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He described the events later to Blackwood: “After my cardiograph came out irregular, I wavered a long moment, then was practically handcuffed in a sort of sitting up stretcher, bounced down a stairless gangway (all this was in McLean’s) then banged in an ambulance to Mass. General. More waits, while I absorbed the imaginable seriousness of my condition. Death? Ivan Ilyich? But there was no pain at all, and it seemed to me that death would be nothing. What gentler thing could one ask for, except, though painless, it had absolutely no meaning, no long private message. Of course, I was soon reassured, when new drugs I had already been given at McLean’s removed the drama.”

  Lowell was admitted to the Phillips House Coronary Care Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital on February 1. He told the attending physician, Dr. Timothy Guiney, that he had found it increasingly difficult to breathe, particularly when climbing stairs. In addition to his cardiac history, the doctor noted Lowell’s long history of manic-depressive illness and recorded that his lithium level was elevated. (Lowell told the doctor his lithium level was 1.7 mEq/L, which is in the toxic range, but by the time his blood was drawn at the hospital it was down to 1.2 mEq/L, still high but not remarkably so.) His mood was somewhat slowed and depressed and he seemed to be “anxious and rather shy.”

  Lowell remained in Phillips House for a week, the same place where as a college student he had visited his dying grandfather Arthur Winslow. In a poem published a few months later in Day by Day, “Phillips House Revisited,” he described his reaching for breath, as if muffled in snow.

  A weak clamor like ice giving…

  Something sinister and comforting

  in this return after forty years’ arrears

  to death and Phillips House…

  this irreverent absence of pain,

  less than the ordinary that daily irks—

  except I cannot entirely get my breath,

  as if I were muffled in snow,

  our winter’s inverted gray sky

  of frozen slush,

  its usual luminous lack of warmth.

  The nursing staff noted on admission that Lowell had “very flat affect and falls asleep continually.” They were concerned about his history of manic-depressive illness and monitoring his lithium but observed “he reads a great deal and spends a good amount of time in conversation with other ‘learned’ fellows.”

  On February 9, 1977, Lowell was discharged “in good spirits” with a diagnosis of congestive heart failure. “Thank you for referring Mr. Lowell to me,” Dr. Guiney wrote to Lowell’s doctors at McLean Hospital. “He proved to be just as interesting a person and a patient as you suggested he might be.”

  Lowell’s marriage to Blackwood was over. He spent Easter with her in March 1977 and returned to Boston distraught and clear in his mind that the relationship must end. Such times of happiness as there were could not stand against the tension, heavy drinking, anger, and threats of leaving and suicide. Lowell appeared to his friends to be resigned to a life without Blackwood; he also seemed to them sadder and less emotionally engaged with the world. Blair Clark, his friend since school, said, “Cal’s tone was quite flat, as if he were talking about someone else’s life.”

  Lowell and Hardwick spent a quiet summer in Maine writing and reading and seeing friends. The days followed the predictable pattern of work and friendship that had been the rock-steady rhythm of their family summers in Castine. Hardwick and Lowell “were quite nice to each other—extremely warm and comfortable,” said Bidart. “But at the same time he seemed, emotionally, in a kind of suspended animation.” In July they went to the Soviet Union for ten days as part of an American delegation of writers that included William Styron and Edward Albee. Lowell looked “tired and melancholy,” Styron recalled. “I remember Cal speaking of Boris Pasternak, whose work he admired passionately; he said that he wanted to visit his grave, and spoke of death.” He told Styron, “We all have one foot in the grave.” There was “so much suffering,” Styron said, in Lowell’s “brooding, sorrowing Beethovenesque head.”

  Lowell’s last summer in Castine, as in the past, was given to writing. “He lived quietly and most of all wrote an extraordinarily complex essay about a huge number of figures,” Hardwick recalled about Lowell’s “New England and Further.” The essay, which was published after his death, was a sparse, eloquent montage of short pieces about New England thinkers and writers, including Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and Thoreau. It was, Hardwick said, done from memory and came from a long life of “saturation in New England texts.” This immersion in New England writings “had been his life” and the source of the “originality of his thoughts about American literature.” Lowell’s mind was well during his last summer, she said, his “free, independent intelligence, still hourly, daily there for him to call upon.”

  Lowell’s writing about New England in the summer of 1977 is epigrammatic, dense, often brilliant. At times it is nostalgic, especially when describing the New England landscape—“so many beautiful villages, one after another. The red maples, ocean, lake, mountain. A twisted seacoast”—at others, blistering in his observations of the corruption of first-held beliefs and fought-for values, the fall from high ideal to indifference and greed. Always there is an appreciation of the questioning, fiery, original minds of New England.

  Lowell was writing poetry as well during the final months of his life. He started two new poems in Castine, “Loneliness,” which he addressed to Elizabeth Hardwick, and “Summer Tides,” his last completed poem, addressed to Caroline Blackwood. These last poems are shot through with summer images of wharf, sea, beach ladders and sail, shore and tides, regret and foreboding. They are of childhood; his own—“I would wish to live forever, / like the small boy on the wharf / marching alone, far ahead of the others”—and the childhoods of his son and daughter and his three young stepdaughters.

  In his poem to Hardwick he writes of a separate peace, with all that that implies: “We were / so by ourselves and calm this summer,” he writes in “Loneliness.” “A stonesthrow off, / seven eider ducks / float and dive in their watery commune…/ a family, though not a marriage.” The summer was a moment of calm and light for Hardwick as well. After Lowell died she wrote to Mary McCarthy, “It has been much more painful than I thought it reasonable to show, much more lonely and sometimes frightening. Having the companionship of Cal this summer and some of the spring before was a wonderful break of lightness and brightness for me.”

  With the end of hi
s marriage to Blackwood inescapable, death on his mind, his physical and mental health uncertain, Lowell wrote a deeply affecting poem about damaged, damaging love, the precarious present and yet more precarious future. He does not know what his future holds, knows only that there will be a shortfall in what he can give his children. “Last year / our drunken quarrels had no explanation, / except everything, except everything.” His bearings tremble. Bolts are missing in the beach ladder; the bulwark rots. The rail is loosened. In every sense, the final lines of his final poem are, as he would have it, heartbreaking:

  My wooden beach-ladder swings by one bolt,

  and repeats its single creaking rhythm—

  I cannot go down to the sea.

  After so much logical interrogation,

  I can do nothing that matters.

  The east wind carries disturbance for leagues—

  I think of my son and daughter,

  and three stepdaughters

  on far-out ledges

  washed by the dreaded clock-clock of the waves…

  gradually rotting the bulwark where I stand.

  Their father’s unmotherly touch

  trembles on a loosened rail.

  In early September 1977, a few days after completing “Summer Tides,” Lowell gave Frank Bidart a typed fair copy of it and told him that he was “very proud” of the poem. Bidart agreed; indeed, he said he was “knocked out by it.” Lowell had dinner with Bidart and Helen Vendler just before he took the night flight from Boston to Ireland to visit Caroline and Sheridan. “He seemed a very lonely figure,” observed Bidart. He was “dreading” seeing Blackwood; it was clear that “this was not a life that could have continued.” Lowell talked about death and told Vendler that he wanted to be buried in the family graveyard in Dunbarton. He had specified in his will that his funeral would be a high Mass at the Church of the Advent in Boston. “That’s how we’re buried,” he told her; that was how the Lowells and Winslows were buried.

  Lowell’s trip to Ireland proved that his decision to leave Blackwood was the only one possible. He was deeply unhappy, as was she. Lowell was extremely restless, Blackwood said. He moved from room to room, discontent to discontent. The electricity went out, the telephone failed, and he had locked himself in the house, unable to get out. He was trapped in every sense, agitated and depressed. He called Hardwick to say he was coming back early to America. Things were “sheer torture” with Blackwood, he said. He changed his ticket to fly into New York rather than Boston so he could stay with her a few days before going back to Harvard.

  —

  The stone masons of Winchester Cathedral cement thin pieces of glass across the ancient stones. If the cathedral moves, if the stones shift, the glass breaks to warn of danger.

  —

  The glass had broken. He “drifts with the wild ice,” he had written: “Ice that ticks seaward like a clock.” His heart was failing; his marriage was failing. His mind was unstable; he was near certain to go mad again. He had no peace.

  “The east wind carries disturbance for leagues,” he had written in his poem for Caroline. They both knew it to be so. After he returned to America she found a fragment of a poem he had been working on:

  Christ,

  may I die at night

  with a semblance of my faculties,

  like the full moon that fails.

  Lowell arrived at Kennedy Airport in New York on the afternoon of September 12 and took a taxi to Elizabeth Hardwick’s apartment in Manhattan. He had with him his briefcase, containing notes for new poems and, held in his arms, a painting of Caroline Blackwood by her first husband, Lucian Freud. Her picture was not, in the end, turned to the wall. It was a scene of past, present, and a shade of future, thick in symbol and irony. When the taxi arrived at Hardwick’s apartment, the driver noticed that Lowell was slumped over and appeared to be asleep. When he did not wake up, the driver rang Hardwick’s doorbell; she came down to the taxi and knew immediately that Lowell was dead. She accompanied his body to the hospital, eight blocks away.

  “My heart longs to be home,” Odysseus told Circe. She said: “Another journey calls. You must travel down to the House of Death.” Odysseus replied, “Who can pilot us on that journey? Who has ever / reached the House of Death in a black ship?” And Circe said: “Let no lack of a pilot at the helm concern you, no, / just step your mast and spread your white sail wide— / sit back and the North Wind will speed you on your way /…to the moldering House of Death. / And there into Acheron, the Flood of Grief, two rivers flow, / the torrent River of Fire, the wailing River of Tears / that branches off from Styx.

  Robert Lowell died suddenly, shortly before 6:00 p.m. on September 12, 1977, at the age of sixty. There was no autopsy, and the death certificate was signed by a doctor at Roosevelt Hospital; at that time and place there was no requirement to identify the cause other than to affirm that death was due to natural causes. Dr. Thomas Traill, a cardiologist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, reviewed Lowell’s available medical records from 1949 to 1977. His summary of Lowell’s heart disease and the rest of his medical history is contained in Appendix 3. Sudden death in someone with Lowell’s medical history is nearly always due to ventricular fibrillation, the final sequence of severe chronic heart-muscle injury, probably the result of widespread coronary artery disease. In common language, Lowell died suddenly of a heart attack, having suffered for some time from cardiac failure. Death would have been instantaneous and likely came without warning or pain.

  “I remember once, a dozen years before he died,” Blair Clark recalled, “bringing him back to my house in New York in one of his crazed escapes from home. Watching him breathe in heavy gasps, asleep in the taxi, the tranquillizing drugs fighting the mania, I thought that there were then two dynamos within him, spinning in opposite directions and tearing him apart, and that these forces would kill him at last. No one, strong as he was, could stand that for long. And, finally, the opposing engines of creation and repression did kill him in a taxi in front of his own real home.”

  Death certificate of Robert Lowell Credit 49

  From the obituaries for Robert Lowell, September 1977:

  The famous American poet died last night in New York. No doubt the same report had been flashed to Rome, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Moscow, Istanbul and beyond. After Eliot and Pound, had the death of any other American poet been treated as world news?

  —The New York Times

  Robert Lowell, who died on September 12 at the age of 60, was fairly generally considered the most distinguished American poet, and indeed the most distinguished poet writing in English, of his generation….Perhaps no imaginative writer of our time agonised more over, or turned to more fruitful use what he himself called “our momentous sublime”; the grandeur and wretchedness of American history.

  —The Times (London)

  He is dead now, and Boston has lost its greatest writer, the poet who spun magic out of the Public Garden and gave us a brilliant poet’s tour of life among the Winslows and the Lowells, in an area firmly bounded by Revere Street and Beverly Farms, Marlborough Street and Cambridge, with only occasional side trips to Belmont for a genteel breakdown at McLean’s.

  He was a man who could speak with coruscating language, show a gentle wit, make profound insight seem simple. His genius was unmatched in his generation. He served Boston better, by making it seem a magic place, than any paid public servant has ever served the city.

  —The Boston Herald American

  Robert Lowell followed the [Democratic presidential] campaign of 1968 through the shoe factories and knitting mills of New Hampshire….He went to the bowling alleys and to baseball parks, and irritated staff by talking to the candidate for an hour about the origin of the word “fungo”…while the press waited. He flew in small planes over the tamarack swamps and lakes of Wisconsin, still gray with April ice, to be introduced to small inland college audiences as “the poet.”

  — Eugene McCarthy, The Washington
Star

  A sense of loss, of something now out of reach and foreclosed, prompts us to measure what remains.

  And the sense of loss will be all the greater—for some of us, anyway—with the passing of this poet, in whose poems we were obliged to relive so much of the history and so many of the terrible emotions of our time. These he often stated with a violence that seared our sensibilities and made the poet seem, at times, an ally of the very impulses he castigated….Lowell was never an easy poet.

  —The New York Times

  The Pulitzer Prize judges of 1974 called Robert Lowell “by common consent of both reader and critic, the most considerable poet since T. S. Eliot.” This was a sweeping verdict. From the beginning of his career, Lowell was recognized as a figure of eminent stature; he dominated American poetry of the past 30 years….No other American poet of mid-century could challenge Lowell in the majesty of the total achievement….Robert Lowell could be uneven, vague and lofty, but he was a force to be reckoned with, a supreme artist who leaves work that will endure as long as the American language lives.

  —The Boston Globe

  Robert Lowell’s painful and glorious autobiography in verse, unfolding these many years in more than a dozen books that brought him fame and honors as the foremost American poet of his time, was concluded yesterday at a funeral in Boston, the city where he was born 60 years ago, and in a graveyard in Dunbarton, N.H., where his forebears rest.