“You are a great American writer,” Elizabeth Hardwick had told Lowell. “You have told us what we are, like Melville, you have brought all the culture of England, and of course even America and other countries have something, to bear on us, on our land, on your past, your people, your family. You are not an English writer, but the most American of souls, the most gifted in finding the symbolic meaning of this strange place.” “You drank America,” wrote Seamus Heaney in his elegy for Lowell, “like the heart’s / iron vodka.” “For the Union Dead” is the great tribute of Lowell to his country, like himself a place of the mind, hard to know.
“I love my country, because it’s mine, and all I know,” Lowell wrote to George Santayana when he was thirty years old, “and [I] think our culture can stand comparison with others of the last 150 years—it’s better than most, probably. And, of course, we have Roman virtues—energy, and even clarity of a kind. But there are times…oh yes, when one trembles, and wonders if a people have ever been so dehumanized.” America could be a violent godless place, but it was wild and beautiful and knew rebellion; it was a country that believed in something better. It was ambitious, vast, restless. And it was his. “Where is America?” he asked. “I’ve had it about me for fifty remembered years; it streams through my eyes.” The color of his blood was American, he said.
Pine cone and evergreen detail, Shaw Memorial Credit 52
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Over the sculpted relief of the figure of Colonel Shaw and extending back over the heads of his soldiers, is an angel holding a laurel branch, symbol of victory, and poppies, symbol of sleep and death. Less obvious, in the bottom corner of the memorial, Saint-Gaudens has placed a pine cone and evergreen, symbols of eternal life; symbols of the hope we place in art commemorating valor.
“I see now that the best Colonel of the best black regiment had to die,” wrote Charles Russell Lowell to his fiancée, Robert Gould Shaw’s sister. “It was a sacrifice we owed,—and how could it have been paid more gloriously?” Colonel Charles Russell Lowell, a Union soldier whose bravery in battle matched Shaw’s, was the grandson of Harriet Brackett Spence Lowell—weaver of tales, incurably insane—and of the abolitionist minister Charles Lowell. He was the ancestor Robert Lowell said he’d “most like to have known.” His courage during the Shenandoah Valley campaign was legendary, his valor taken into poetry by many, including Herman Melville, who had ridden on scout with him. Robert Lowell, writing about him a hundred years after his death, said, “Twelve horses killed under him…./ He had, gave…everything…./ Charles had himself strapped to the saddle…bound to death, / his cavalry that scorned the earth it trod on.”
William James had spoken of civic courage, individual valor, the kind that resists the forces that corrupt, that stands against the sliding servility of the modern world. It was a subject Lowell returned to time and again; it was critical to his view of society and himself. Character, the struggle to master the difficult, the impossible; the determination to persist, not to squander time or gift; a set course toward a true north: these were what mattered. Robert Lowell admired Charles Russell Lowell for his military valor, for having had “twelve horses killed under him,” for having given everything for the Union cause: “He had, gave…everything.”
Robert Lowell knew civic valor. Sixteen times and more he had been down on his knees in madness, he said. Sixteen times and more he had gotten up. He had gone back to his work, entered back into life. He had faced down uncertainty and madness, had created new forms when pushed to stay with the old, had brought back imaginative order from chaos. It was a different kind of courage, this civic courage, and the rules of engagement were unclear. Lowell’s life, as his daughter observed, was a messy one, difficult for him and for those who knew him. But it was lived with iron, and often with grace. He kept always in the front of his mind what he thought he ought to be, even when he couldn’t be it; believed in what his country could be, even if it wasn’t. He worked hard at his art.
A foot of snow lay on the ground outside the church and the wind blew to the bone; it was winter in Cambridge. Had the mourners looked up at the bell tower of the church as they left the service for Robert Lowell on that March day they would have seen the bell that tolled for him. But they would not have been able to see the words carved into the shoulder of the bell. Words for the dead, they had been chosen by Lowell’s cousin nearly fifty years earlier when, as president of Harvard, he donated the bell to the college church. In Memory of Voices That Are Hushed, the bell read. In memory of the dead.
The voices of the living could be hushed as well. Lowell’s great-great-grandmother had lived a silent death in madness; her son had said that only as much of her remained as “the hum outliving the hushed bell.” The poet’s voice speaks for the dead, the hushed, the valorous. It signifies the hours, reminds of death. It gives depth and resonance to blithe times, solace in the dark.
—
“The bells cry: ‘Come, / Come home…,’ ” Robert Lowell wrote. “ ‘Come; I bell thee home.’ ”
Robert Lowell in Boston, 1965
“He had, gave…everything.” Credit 53
It was answered, that all great and honourable actions are accompanied with great difficulties and must be both enterprised and overcome with answerable courages.
—William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation: 1620–1647
APPENDIX 1
Psychiatric Records of Robert Lowell
The executors of Robert Lowell’s estate, Harriet Winslow Lowell and Robert Silvers, graciously gave me permission to request and review Robert Lowell’s medical and psychiatric records, as well as to interview his surviving physicians. Ms. Lowell and I discussed at length the medical, legal, and privacy issues involved. My clinical, personal, and research background is in the study and treatment of manic-depressive (bipolar) illness and in the relationship between creativity and mood disorders. Her hope, as mine, was that reviewing her father’s hospital records would result in a deeper understanding of his mental illness, how his illness affected his life and poetry, and the more general relationship between mania, depression, and imagination.
For unassailable reasons medical records are assumed to be confidential by patients, clinicians, and hospital administrators. They are required to be by law. Medical records remain private until the individual, a legally designated family member, or the executor of the estate gives permission otherwise. Such permission is not given lightly. The hospitals that provided me with Robert Lowell’s medical and psychiatric records—including Massachusetts General Hospital, McLean Hospital, Massachusetts Mental Health Center (formerly Boston Psychopathic Hospital), the Institute of Living, and Payne Whitney Clinic—are among the best in the United States. All are committed to the privacy of their patients’ medical records. They released Robert Lowell’s records because they were legally required to do so. The law is clear that medical records belong to the patient or, if the patient is dead, to the patient’s family. Family members often wish to better understand the cause of a parent’s or a child’s death or desire more details about a specific illness (particularly in the case of a genetic disorder). Some families wish to contribute to medical research, others to provide additional information about a historically, artistically, or scientifically prominent individual that may be of help to historians or of significant interest to the public.
Viola Bernard, M.D., one of Lowell’s psychiatrists in New York, made her obligations of confidentiality clear when she wrote to Ian Hamilton in 1980 after he had requested that she send him Lowell’s records. “My relationship with Mr. Lowell was that of a psychiatrist,” she wrote to him. “It would not therefore be professionally proper, in terms of confidentiality, for me to talk about anything I knew of him in the context of our relationship.” She added, “I am aware, of course, that Mr. Lowell himself made no secret, to put it mildly, of his bouts of mental illness; but he had the right to reveal whatever he wished about himself, and I do not.”
Much
about Lowell’s mental illness has been a part of the public record for decades. He was unusually open about his illness, not only in his letters and interviews but in his work and conceptualization of the role mania took in the generation of his poetry. His breakdowns were witnessed by his colleagues, family, students, friends, and strangers. Many of these individuals in turn wrote about or talked to interviewers about his manic attacks and depressions, as did the journalists who wrote about him at great length in national magazines and newspapers.
Most important, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick made the deliberate decision to include portions of his medical and psychiatric records in the material they put into his archives at Harvard University and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. They turned over letters between Lowell and his friends and correspondence between Lowell and Hardwick that discussed his illness at length; an essay about his illness and treatment that he wrote for his Boston psychiatrist Vernon Williams, M.D.; and the psychiatric files of Merrill Moore, M.D. The latter include Moore’s records of his treatment of Charlotte Winslow Lowell, her detailed descriptions of Lowell’s psychological difficulties from infancy on, and Moore’s diagnostic and clinical impressions of Lowell as a young man. Lowell’s archives also include the psychological evaluation that was done at the Judge Baker clinic when he was fifteen years old and the medical and psychiatric correspondence to Lowell from his Boston, New York, and London physicians.
The records I requested from the doctors and hospitals that treated Lowell focused on the many hospital stays he had for mania and included clinical details of his manic-depressive illness, the history of earlier episodes of his illness, admission notes, examinations of his mental state on admission, physical examinations, admitting and discharge diagnoses, laboratory findings, inpatient clinical progress notes, medication records, and nursing notes. I deliberately did not focus my requests on psychotherapy records, although in a few instances brief psychotherapy notes were mixed in with his hospital progress notes. I have limited my clinical description in this book to Lowell’s discussions with his psychiatrists about his illness, particularly his fears that his mania would recur and the remorse he felt for things he had done while manic; the effects of his illness on his parents and his marriages; and his observations about the relationship between his mania and his poetry. These issues are of direct relevance to the subject matter of this book; the more intimate psychotherapeutic discussions that were in Lowell’s records were not; and I did not use them here.
APPENDIX 2
Mania and Depression: Clinical Description, Diagnosis, and Nomenclature
CLINICAL DESCRIPTION
Depression and mania are characterized by significant, often profound disruptions in mood, thinking, sleep, energy, and behavior. Depression is heterogeneous; it has many clinical presentations, widely disparate levels of severity, and different causes. Most depressed individuals are hopeless, irritable, and apathetic; less able to experience pleasure than when well; and unable to stay engaged with the world. A pervasive tiredness is common and the ability to concentrate, learn new things, and remember is impaired. Thinking and movement are slowed and meaningful life appears beyond reach. Ruminative thoughts of guilt, inadequacy, and the desire to die are frequent; sleep is disrupted. The world appears grim, gray, and frightening. Suicide is not uncommon.
Mania is largely the opposite. People engage the world, whether or not the world wishes to be engaged. Manic mood is expansive and elated, but irritable. People with mania have high energy, fast and flighty thoughts that leap from idea to idea; their speech is rapid and they have little need for sleep. They are restless, easily irritated, and often paranoid. They are impulsive, display poor judgment, and impose their enthusiasms and convictions on others. They appear to be indefatigable. They buy things they do not need and cannot afford, become involved in relationships and financial undertakings that are ill-advised and costly. They lash out at those around them. As mania becomes more severe, delusions and hallucinations can occur. Mania is a high-voltage state and often dangerous.
DIAGNOSIS
In order to meet the diagnostic criteria for mania or depression, modern psychiatric diagnostic systems require a pattern, severity, and duration of symptoms of mood, thinking, energy, sleep, and behavior. The current diagnostic criteria, published in 2013 in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), form the basis for most of the clinical practice and research in the United States. The DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for mania and depression are given below:
THE DSM-5 DIAGNOSTIC CRITERIA FOR MANIA AND MAJOR DEPRESSIVE DISORDER
MANIC EPISODE
A. A distinct period of abnormally and persistently elevated, expansive, or irritable mood and abnormally and persistently increased activity or energy, lasting at least 1 week and present most of the day, nearly every day (or any duration if hospitalization is necessary).
B. During the period of mood disturbance and increased energy or activity, three (or more) of the following symptoms (four if the mood is only irritable) are present to a significant degree and represent a noticeable change from usual behavior:
1. Inflated self-esteem or grandiosity.
2. Decreased need for sleep (e.g., feels rested after only 3 hours of sleep).
3. More talkative than usual or pressure to keep talking.
4. Flight of ideas or subjective experience that thoughts are racing.
5. Distractibility (i.e., attention too easily drawn to unimportant or irrelevant external stimuli), as reported or observed.
6. Increase in goal-directed activity (either socially, at work or school, or sexually) or psychomotor agitation (i.e., purposeless non-goal-directed activity).
7. Excessive involvement in activities that have a high potential for painful consequences (e.g., engaging in unrestrained buying sprees, sexual indiscretions, or foolish business investments).
C. The mood disturbance is sufficiently severe to cause marked impairment in social or occupational functioning or to necessitate hospitalization to prevent harm to self or others, or there are psychotic features.
D. The episode is not attributable to the physiological effects of a substance (e.g., a drug of abuse, a medication, other treatment) or another medical condition.
Note: A full manic episode that emerges during antidepressant treatment (e.g., medication, electroconvulsive therapy) but persists at a fully syndromal level beyond physiological effect of that treatment is sufficient evidence for a manic episode and, therefore, a bipolar I diagnosis.
Note: Criteria A–D constitute a manic episode. At least one lifetime manic episode is required for the diagnosis of bipolar I disorder.
MAJOR DEPRESSIVE EPISODE
A. Five (or more) of the following symptoms have been present during the same 2-week period and represent a change from previous functioning; at least one of the symptoms is either (1) depressed mood or (2) loss of interest or pleasure.
Note: Do not include symptoms that are clearly attributable to another medical condition.
1. Depressed mood most of the day, nearly every day, as indicated by either subjective report (e.g., feels sad, empty, or hopeless) or observation made by others (e.g., appears tearful). (Note: In children and adolescents, can be irritable mood.)
2. Markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, activities most of the day, nearly every day (as indicated by either subjective account or observation).
3. Significant weight loss when not dieting or weight gain (e.g., a change of more than 5% of body weight in a month), or decrease or increase in appetite nearly every day. (Note: In children, consider failure to make expected weight gain.)
4. Insomnia or hypersomnia nearly every day.
5. Psychomotor agitation or retardation nearly every day (observable by others; not merely subjective feelings of restlessness or being slowed down).
6. Fatigue or loss of energy nearly every day.
&nb
sp; 7. Feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt (which may be delusional) nearly every day (not merely self-reproach or guilt about being sick).
8. Diminished ability to think or concentrate, or indecisiveness, nearly every day (either by subjective account or as observed by others).
9. Recurrent thoughts of death (not just fear of dying), recurrent suicidal ideation without a specific plan, or a suicide attempt or a specific plan for committing suicide.
B. The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
C. The episode is not attributable to the physiological effects of a substance or another medical condition.
Note: Criteria A–C constitute a major depressive episode. Major depressive episodes are common in bipolar I disorder but are not required for the diagnosis of bipolar I disorder.
Note: Responses to a significant loss (e.g., bereavement, financial ruin, losses from a natural disaster, a serious medical illness or disability) may include the feelings of intense sadness, rumination about the loss, insomnia, poor appetite, and weight loss noted in Criterion A, which may resemble a depressive episode. Although such symptoms may be understandable or considered appropriate to the loss, the presence of a major depressive episode in addition to the normal response to a significant loss should also be carefully considered. This decision inevitably requires the exercise of clinical judgment based on the individual’s history and the cultural norms for the expression of distress in the context of loss.
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character Page 45