Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character
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“hard / survivor’s smile”: Robert Lowell, “Hawthorne,” Collected Poems, 352.
“Even this shy distrustful ego”: Ibid., 351. The last verse of “Hawthorne” closely follows the text of Hawthorne’s Septimius Felton. “Let him alone a moment or two,” wrote Hawthorne, “and then they would see him, with his head bent down, brooding, brooding, his eyes fixed on some chip, some stone, some common plant…[in his eyes] a kind of perplexity, a dissatisfied, foiled look in them.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, Septimius Felton, vol. 11, The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. George Parsons Lathrop (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883), 232.
“had never frowned down”: Robert Lowell, “91 Revere Street,” Collected Prose, 343–44.
Norman Mailer: Lowell’s friend Robert Fitzgerald said that “by far the best portrait of him” was in Mailer’s The Armies of the Night. Lowell’s daughter, Harriet, described Mailer’s portrayal as “capturing the essence somehow, probably better than anything else.” Lowell told V. S. Naipaul that Mailer’s “description of me is one of the best things ever written about me, and most generous.” V. S. Naipaul, “Et in America Ego—The American Poet Robert Lowell Talks to the Novelist V. S. Naipaul,” Listener 82 (September 4, 1969): 303.
“The hollows in his cheeks”: Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night, 33.
“Lowell’s shoulders had a slump”: Ibid., 44.
“Robert Lowell gave off at times”: Ibid., 83.
“Lowell was at the mercy”: Ibid.
long-buried Neolithic village: Evan Mackie, Science and Society in Prehistoric Britain (London: Elek, 1977); Colin Renfrew, ed., The Prehistory of Orkney BC 4000–1000 AD (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985); William P. L. Thomson, History of Orkney (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1987); Anna Ritchie, Prehistoric Orkney (London: B. T. Batsford/Historic Scotland, 1995).
“a few ambiguous scratches”: George Mackay Brown, An Orkney Tapestry (London: Victor Gollancz, 1969), 18: “There are a few ambiguous scratches on a wall at Skara Brae. We wander clueless through immense tracts of time. Imagination stirs about a scattered string of bone beads found in Skara Brae. Did the girl have no time for adornment when a westerly gale choked the doors with sand; or did sea raiders tear them from her neck?”
spoke often of her Orkney blood: Ferris Greenslet in his biography of James Russell Lowell writes, “Mrs. Lowell possessed much of the wild beauty of the people of these windy northern isles, and her mind showed an irresistible tendency toward their poetic occultism. This tendency became irretrievably fixed by a visit which she made to the Orkneys in company with her husband early in their married life. Thenceforward until 1842, when her tense brain became disordered, she was a faerie-seer, credited by some with second sight.” Ferris Greenslet, James Russell Lowell: His Life and Work (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), 9.
She was descended, she said: Edward Wagenknecht, James Russell Lowell.
Sir Patrick Spens: “Haf owre, haf owre to Aberdour, / It’s fiftie fadom deip, / And their lies guid Sir Patrick Spence, / Wi the Scots lords at his feit.” The Oxford Book of Scottish Verse, ed. John MacQueen and Tom Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 284.
“Time, that used to drive”: Letter from Keith Spence to Mary Traill Spence, January 25, 1804, Spence-Lowell Collection, Huntington Library, box 3.
“a lowness of spirits”: Letter from Keith Spence to Mary Traill Spence, July 1, 1805, Spence-Lowell Collection, Huntington Library, Box 3. Spence wrote earlier to her of his “indolent lowness of spirits which lands on me,” June 26, 1803, Spence-Lowell Collection, Huntington Library, box 3.
“the absolute force of necessity”: Letter from Keith Spence to Mary Traill Spence, July 26, 1803, Spence-Lowell Collection, Huntington Library, box 3.
“There are circumstances and situations”: Letter from Keith Spence to Mary Traill Spence, December 23, 1799, Spence-Lowell Collection, Huntington Library, box 2.
“must support Serenity”: Letter from Keith Spence to Mary Traill Spence, September 18, 1797, Spence-Lowell Collection, Huntington Library, box 1.
“I shudder at your past Indisposition”: Letter from Keith Spence to Mary Traill Spence, November 21, 1797, Spence-Lowell Collection, Huntington Library, box 1.
“perturbations” of her nerves: Letter from Mary Traill Spence to Keith Spence, November 5, 1807, Spence-Lowell Collection, Huntington Library, box 4.
“each year, each month”: Letter from Mary Traill Spence to Harriet Brackett Spence Lowell, February 21, 1807, James Russell Lowell Papers, Houghton Library.
“sinks me to the grave”: Ibid.
“renders me totally incapable”: Ibid.
“This must not be seen”: Letter from Mary Traill Spence to Harriet Brackett Spence Lowell, March 13, 1807, Spence-Lowell Collection, Huntington Library, box 4.
“She is I think quite recovered”: Letter from Dr. Joshua Brackett to Robert Traill, July 3, 1781, Spence-Lowell Collection, Huntington Library, box 1.
“for a long time past been much impaired”: Petition of Mary Traill to New Hampshire General Court, June 12, 1781, New Hampshire State Archives.
“Nervous drops”: Bill from Dr. Robert Forbes to Robert Traill for medical services, December 22, 1784, Houghton Library, bMS Am 1832.
“extreme volatility of Temper”: Letter from Keith Spence to Mary Traill Spence, November 21, 1797, Spence-Lowell Papers, Huntington Library, box 1.
“extraordinary state of mind”: Letter from Keith Spence to Mary Traill Spence, October 17, 1808, Spence-Lowell Papers, Huntington Library, box 4.
“to rouse him from his poetic Dreams”: Ibid.
“What could put Poetry in his head?”: Ibid.
“a good writer”: Obituary of Captain Robert Traill Spence, The Critic, October 10, 1891. The paper noted that the commission papers for Robert Traill Spence had been signed by Thomas Jefferson and that he “rose very rapidly in the Navy.” Carroll Spence Papers, Georgetown University Library, box 2, folder 11.
“an elegant scholar”: Obituary for Captain Robert Traill Spence, Carroll Spence Papers, Georgetown University Library, box 2, folder 12.
“All three were high-strung”: Ferris Greenslet, The Lowells and Their Seven Worlds (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946), 87.
“I have in a very considerable degree”: Ibid., 121.
“perfectly incapacitates”: Ibid., 176.
periods of ferocious energy: Ibid., 125.
“like all Lowell men”: Letter from Keith Spence to Mary Traill Spence, August 14, 1809, Spence-Lowell Papers, Huntington Library, box 4.
“alarmingly excitable”: Ferris Greenslet, The Lowells and Their Seven Worlds, 265.
“complete breakdown of the machine”: Percival Lowell to A. E. Douglass, April 21, 1897, Lowell Observatory Archives.
“I am quite anxious about his condition”: Letter from T. J. J. See to A. E. Douglass, September 13, 1897, Lowell Observatory Archives.
“nervous weakness still continues”: Letter from T. J. J. See to A. E. Douglass, October 7, 1897, Lowell Observatory Archives.
“Dr. Lowell has not been in the office”: Letter from W. Louise Leonard to V. M. Slipher, December 31, 1912, Lowell Observatory Archives.
“Is it not too bad that his nerves”: Letter from W. Louise Leonard to V. M. Slipher, December 31, 1912, Lowell Observatory Archives.
“I hadn’t realized his errors”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Hardwick, July 2, 1976, Letters, 652.
“nervous exhaustion”: Letter from W. Louise Leonard to T. J. J. See, December 19, 1912, Lowell Observatory Archives. “Dr. Lowell has been housed now for two months with nervous exhaustion but is, I am happy to say, well mending now.”
“Breadth of mind”: Percival Lowell, Mars as the Abode of Life (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 184.
“Not the possible, but the impossible”: Louise Leonard, Percival Lowell: An Afterglow (Boston: Gorham, 1921), 41.
“A pioneer should have imagination”: Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913;
New York: Penguin, 1989), 15.
a bleak view: Percival Lowell wrote, “But though we cannot as yet review with the mind’s eye our past, we can, to an extent, foresee our future. We can with scientific confidence look forward to a time when each of the bodies composing the solar system shall turn an unchanging face in perpetuity to the Sun. Each will then have reached the end of its evolution, set in the unchanging stare of death.
“Then the sun itself will go out, becoming a cold and lifeless mass; and the solar system will circle unseen, ghostlike, in space, awaiting only the resurrection of another cosmic catastrophe.” Percival Lowell, The Solar System: Six Lectures Delivered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), 134.
“hum outliving the hushed bell”: James Russell Lowell, “The Darkened Mind,” in The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell, 427.
“the patron and encourager”: Quoted in Leon Howard, Victorian Knight-Errant: A Study of the Early Literary Career of James Russell Lowell (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1952), 56.
“morbid excitements”: Letter from James Russell Lowell to Charles Frederick Briggs, February 15, 1854, in Letters of James Russell Lowell, ed. Charles Eliot Norton (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1893).
“my dear Mother’s malady”: Letter from James Russell Lowell to Lily Norton, quoted in Edward Wagenknecht, James Russell Lowell, 50.
“everything is dreary”: Ibid.
As a young man, suicidal: Lowell said he thought “of my razors and my throat and that I am a fool and a coward not to end it all at once.” Quoted in Wilson Sullivan, New England Men of Letters (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 213.
he had put a pistol to his head: Quoted in Edward Wagenknecht, James Russell Lowell, 50–51, 192, 206.
“The drop of black blood”: James Russell Lowell, quoted in Edward Wagenknecht, James Russell Lowell, 75.
“How shall a man escape”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Fate,” 311.
“We had some toughness”: James Russell Lowell, “An Interview with Miles Standish,” Collected Poetical Works, 82.
“They talk about their Pilgrim blood”: Ibid., 82.
“In one sense it matters very little”: Letter from James Russell Lowell to Lady Lyttleton, February 20, 1888, Letters of James Russell Lowell.
“I envy his strenuous grace”: Robert Lowell, “New England and Further,” Collected Prose, 196.
referred to her as “mad”: Letter from Fanny Longfellow to Thomas Appleton, February 1866, quoted in Martin Duberman, James Russell Lowell (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 436.
“I broke down”: Robert Traill Spence Lowell, statement for Memorials of the Class of 1833, Prepared for the Fiftieth Anniversary of Their Graduation, ed. Waldo Higginson (Cambridge, MA: John Wilson and Son, 1883), 129.
“the setting of my Grandfather’s”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Peter Taylor, n.d. 1969, Letters, 512.
“His poetry is forgotten”: Harold Blodgett, “Robert Traill Spence Lowell,” New England Quarterly 16 (1943): 589.
“he was unquestionably”: Ibid., 578.
“tame and honorable”: Robert Lowell, “91 Revere Street,” Collected Prose, 310.
“at each stage of his life”: Ibid., 315.
a direct descendant: Tradition, although not historians, has it that the thirteen-year-old Mary Chilton (1607–79) was the first female to wade ashore at Plymouth, following in the slightly quicker footsteps of her fellow passenger John Alden. She married John Winslow, a passenger on the Fortune, which had sailed to Plymouth the year after the Mayflower; together they had ten children. Winslow, a merchant in the fast-growing town of Boston, was at the time of his death one of Boston’s wealthiest men.
John and Mary Chilton Winslow were active citizens in colonial New England and in 1671 joined the Third Church (Old South), a prominent church in Boston’s history. In 1703 Benjamin Franklin was baptized there and, seventy years later, Samuel Adams, a congregant, shouted the signal from the Old South Meeting House to trigger the Boston Tea Party.
From its pulpit in 1677, the only Puritan judge to recant his part in the Salem witch trials stood to bear witness to the “blame and shame” of his actions. The Puritan grip on New England history was a driving force in early Boston and, nearly three hundred years later, in the creative life of Robert Lowell. It was a history rich in metaphoric complexity and stark in the use and abuse of moral authority; Lowell drew upon this from his youth until his death.
When John and Mary Chilton Winslow died they were buried in the Puritan burial ground of King’s Chapel in Boston, the first Anglican church in New England, said to have softened “the hard manners and customs of the Puritans.” As in many colonial churches the congregation of King’s Chapel was deeply divided in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War. Thirty of its seventy-three pews were occupied by Loyalists to the king and forty-three by those of the “Patriotic, or American Party.” (Paul Revere cast the bell that to this day summons parishioners to worship. The bell, Revere said, “was the sweetest bell we ever made.”) The division within church congregations affected the Winslow family, some of whom were Loyalists and lost their property in the war; other Winslows returned to England rather than support the break from Britain.
Mourt’s Relation: Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, ed. Dwight B. Heath (Bedford, MA: Applewood, 1963). Edited from the original text of 1622. The principal author is assumed to be Edward Winslow, with assistance from William Bradford.
Of Plymouth Plantation: William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation: 1620–1647, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Knopf, 1996).
“They fell amongst dangerous shoals”: Ibid., 60.
“We are well weaned”: Ibid., 33.
“cry of the heart”: Perry Miller, The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), 213.
“The land was ours”: Robert Frost, “The Gift Outright,” The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Henry Holt, 1979), 348. For an anthology put together by George Santayana, Lowell recommended two poems by Robert Frost, “The Gift Outright” and “Acquainted with the Night.” Letter from Robert Lowell to George Santayana, May 20, 1948, Letters, 100.
“One small candle”: William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 236.
“We shall find that the God of Israel”: John Winthrop, lay sermon delivered before sailing, or on the deck of the Arbella during its crossing to New England, March 1630.
“no people’s account”: Peter Bulkeley, “The Lesson of the Covenant, for England and New England,” in Perry Miller, The American Puritans, 151.
“Wickedness did grow and break forth”: William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 316.
“It is now a part of my misery”: Ibid., 33.
Few countries had had such an advantage: Ibid., 123. Bradford quotes William Hubbard’s contemporary History of New England, which was written before 1683 but not published until 1815.
“What had been a wondrous”: James Russell Lowell, “New England Two Centuries Ago,” 12.
“could not renew the fiery gush”: Ibid., 7.
“It is time we had done”: Henry David Thoreau, The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), entry for June 16, 1854.
“As there are certain creatures”: James Russell Lowell, “New England Two Centuries Ago,” 12–13.
“A century passes”: Robert Lowell, “New England and Further,” Collected Prose, 182–83.
Their descendants were many: One of the direct descendants of Edward Winslow, a member of the branch of the Winslows that lost their property during the Revolutionary War and returned to England, Forbes Benignus Winslow (1810–74), was a physician who wrote one of the first and most influential books in English about suicide. In his Anatomy of Suicide, he forcefully argued that suicide was the result of mental disease, not moral or
criminal defect. His text discussed the physical and psychological causes of suicide, statistics, suicide’s relationship to “the enthusiasm exhibited by men of great genius…an unhealthy exercise of the imaginative faculty,” seasonal patterns of suicide, and prevention. Winslow brought compassion and rigor to a morally fraught topic. Forbes Benignus Winslow, The Anatomy of Suicide (London: Henry Renshaw, 1840), 121. In his lectures as the Lettsonian Professor of Medicine of the Medical Society of London, he stated that he had “carefully, scrupulously, and jealously analyzed no less than 10,000 cases of the various shades and degrees of insanity.” He was amazed, he asserted to his medical colleagues, that there “ever could have existed a shadow of a doubt as to the physical origin of insanity.” Forbes Benignus Winslow, Lettsonian Lectures on Insanity (London: John Churchill, 1854), 53–54.
Forbes Winslow also studied, treated, and wrote about acute mania, a particularly dangerous condition in a time before effective sedating medication was available. He prescribed bloodletting, as was not uncommon in the nineteenth century, but “cautious depletion,” not the more extreme bloodletting used in many asylums. He ordered prolonged hot baths, eight to fifteen hours at a time, as well, and tincture of digitalis, hydrochlorate of morphia, and soaking mixtures of henbane, hemlock, and cherry laurel leaves. Throughout his long years of practice with the insane he retained the capacity to observe closely, keep an intelligent sympathy, and write up his findings for science.
4. THIS DYNAMITED BROOK
“Resistance to something”: Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 7.
“I grew up as an only child”: Robert Lowell, essay written for Vernon Williams, M.D., n.d. 1950s, Robert Lowell Papers, HRC, box 20.8.
“Is there no way to cast”: Robert Lowell, “The Drunken Fisherman,” Collected Poems, 35.
Dynamite, a word: For example; “I dwindle…dynamite no more” (“Death of a Critic”); “dynamite his way to the gold again” (“Phillips House Revisited”); “Past your gray, sorry and ancestral house / where the dynamited walnut tree” (“The Exile’s Return”).