Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character
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“I feel rather like a character”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Giovanna Madonia Erba, June 2, 1954, Letters, 236.
“We are both fine”: Letter from Elizabeth Hardwick to Harriet Winslow, April 25, 1958, Houghton Library.
“My own things rise”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Theodore Roethke, September 18, 1958, University of Washington Libraries.
rather like going to Mass: Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with Ian Hamilton, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
readmitted to McLean: Robert Lowell was hospitalized at McLean Hospital from April 28, 1959, until July 22, 1959.
“it is distressing beyond words”: Letter from Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy, May 9, 1959, Vassar.
“flight into illness”: Ibid.
“I feel particularly discouraged”: Ibid.
“I feel rather creepy”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, July 24, 1959, Letters, 351.
“an incredible formless time”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, January 4, 1960, Words in Air, 308.
“I have been thinking much about you”: Letter from Robert Lowell to John Berryman, September 19, 1959, Letters, 352–53.
“Boston’s a pleasant place”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, December 12, 1958, Letters, 333.
“We are awfully sick of Boston”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Randall Jarrell, February 15, 1960, Berg Collection, New York Public Library.
“Boston had solved the universe”: Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 34.
“had lost its seriousness”: Robert Lowell interview with V. S. Naipaul, Listener 82 (September 4, 1969): 302.
“With Boston and its mysteriously enduring”: Elizabeth Hardwick, “Boston: The Lost Ideal,” Harper’s Magazine, December 1959, 64.
“A simpler manner of life”: Ibid., 65.
“The importance of Boston”: Ibid.
“Boston is not a small New York”: Ibid., 66.
“Boston is a winter city”: Ibid., 68.
“What stands out”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Harriet Winslow, October 12, 1959, Letters, 355.
“Harriet is terrific”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, August 9, 1960, Letters, 368.
“Home from you”: Robert Lowell, “Across Central Park,” Collected Poems, 541.
“He leaves home”: Letter from Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy, April 3, 1961, Vassar.
a locked ward at Columbia-Presbyterian: Robert Lowell was hospitalized at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York from March 4, 1961, until the end of March 1961.
“No one predicts”: Letter from William Meredith to Adrienne Rich and Philip Booth, March 17, 1961, Connecticut College.
an elated telegram: Telegram from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, September 10, 1962, Letters, 409.
kept a record: Keith Botsford’s records of Robert Lowell’s 1962 trip to Buenos Aires and his interview with Ian Hamilton, 1981, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“became very fragmentary”: Ibid.
Institute of Living: Robert Lowell was hospitalized at the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut, from October 1, 1962, until November 7, 1962; early December 1963 through mid-January 1964; and early January 1965 through February 1965. Erik Linnolt, M.D., was his primary physician. Dr. Linnolt’s clinical observations about Robert Lowell were made during an interview with the author, June 28, 2012.
“very warm, reserved”: Erik Linnolt, M.D., interview with the author, June 28, 2012.
“This thing just came on him”: Letter from Elizabeth Hardwick to Allen Tate, January 9, 1964, Princeton.
“How we miss you”: Letter from Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell, December 12, 1963, Houghton Library.
“He said he had these periods”: Correspondence from Harriet Winslow Lowell to the author, April 2012.
“It’s a little painful”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Mary McCarthy, February 20, 1964, Letters, 442.
“what a mess I’ve made”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Hardwick, February 9, 1965, Robert Lowell Papers, HRC.
“full of irrational turbulence”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Hardwick, February 5, 1965, Robert Lowell Papers, HRC.
“I am back from a month”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, February 25, 1965, Letters, 456.
“I have a feeling”: Letter from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell, March 11, 1965, Words in Air, 572.
“The cyclical beginning”: Xandra Gowrie, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1980, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“I had never witnessed”: James Atlas, “Robert Lowell in Cambridge: Lord Weary,” 56–64.
“Cal was leaning back”: Grey Gowrie, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1980, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“ ‘You should go’ ”: Ibid.
“and what is man?”: Robert Lowell, “Christmas in Black Rock,” Collected Poems, 12.
8. WRITING TAKES THE ACHE AWAY
“My great need of the moment”: Robert Lowell, essay written for Vernon Williams, M.D., n.d. 1950s, Robert Lowell Papers, HRC.
doctors of antiquity: Many medical historians have written about how mania and melancholia were understood and treated at differing times and in different cultures, including J. R. Whitwell, Historical Notes on Psychiatry: Early Times–End of 16th Century (London: H. K. Lewis & Co., 1936); S. W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); and G. Roccatagliata, A History of Ancient Psychiatry (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986).
Its scarlet thread: S. E. Jelliffe, Series of Research Publications 11, Manic-Depressive Psychosis, Research in Nervous and Mental Diseases Proceedings (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1931).
The brain, Hippocrates said: Medical observations attributed to Hippocrates are generally believed to represent the writings and practice not only of Hippocrates but of his school: Works of Hippocrates, trans. and ed. W. H. S. Jones and E. T. Withington (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923–31).
“Mania,” used by the early Greek physicians: See S. W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression, and G. Roccatagliata, A History of Ancient Psychiatry, for detailed discussions of the ancient meanings of mania and the distinctions made between madness with or without fever.
“the modes of mania”: Aretaeus, The Extant Works of Aretaeus, the Cappadocian, ed. Francis Adams (London: The New Sydenham Society, 1856), 301.
“laugh, play, dance”: Ibid., 302.
“have madness attended with anger”: Ibid.
“naturally passionate”: Ibid., 301.
“truly from the muses”: Ibid., 302.
“The painter keeps his brushes clean”: J. R. Whitwell, Historical Notes on Psychiatry, 201–2.
“Melancholia is the commencement”: Aretaeus, The Extant Works, 299.
more than sixty before 1750: O. Diethelm, “Mania: A Clinical Study of Dissertations Before 1750,” Confinia Psychiatrica 13 (1970): 26–49.
“These Distempers often change”: Thomas Willis, Two Discourses on the Soul of Brutes, trans. S. Pordage (London: Thomas Dring, 1683), 188.
“an open burning or flame”: Ibid.
la folie circulaire: J. P. Falret, “Mémoire sur la folie circulaire,” Bulletin de l’Académie de Médecine 19 (1854): 382–415. The clinical descriptions of Falret and Baillarger are translated and cited in Daniel Hack Tuke, “Circular Insanity,” A Dictionary of Psychological Medicine (Philadelphia: P. Blakiston, Son & Co., 1892), 214–29.
la folie à double forme: J. Baillarger, “De la folie à double forme,” Annales Médico-psychologiques 6 (1854): 369–91.
“The profusion of ideas”: Ibid.
“compose and write prose and verse”: Ibid.
His 1921 monograph: Emil Kraepelin, Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia (Edinburgh: E. & S. Livingstone, 1921).
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual: Mental Disorder
s (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1952).
“The patient should be kept in bed”: M. Ahonen, “Mental Disorders in Ancient Philosophy,” in Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind (Switzerland: Springer, 2014), 15–16.
leeches, fennel, and applying oil of roses: J. R. Whitwell, Historical Notes on Psychiatry, 93.
“curious compound of pharmacy”: Daniel Hack Tuke, Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles (London: Kegan Paul, 1882), 1.
“to be drunk out of a church-bell”: Ibid., 2.
Medieval Persian treatments: N. Vakili and A. Gorji, “Psychiatry and Psychology in Medieval Persia,” Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 67 (2006): 1862–69.
Ibn Síná: Michael W. Dols, Majnun: The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society, ed. D. E. Immisch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
the murder of Becket: John Guy, Thomas Becket (London: Viking, 2012).
marigold is “much approved”: Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1620; New York: New York Review Books, 2001), 216.
“a ram’s head”: Ibid., 248.
“elixir made of dew”: Letter from Sir Kenelm Digby to J. Winthrop, Jr., January 26, 1656, cited in James Russell Lowell, “New England Two Centuries Ago,” 56.
The nineteenth-century asylum physicians: S. B. Woodward, “Observations of the Medical Treatment of Insanity,” American Journal of Insanity 7 (July 1850): 1–34; S. B. Thielman, “Madness and Medicine: Trends in American Medical Therapeutics for Insanity, 1820–1860,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 61 (1987): 25–46.
“a medical fact”: Rufus Wyman, quoted in “Evidences of Insanity,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 11 (January 14, 1835): 364.
“I went off to the hospital”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Adrienne Rich, February 25, 1964, Letters, 444.
“Then at last the books”: Letter from Elizabeth Hardwick to Ian Hamilton, n.d., Robert Lowell Papers, HRC.
“I won’t go into the boredom”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Hardwick, January 30, 1965, Letters, 454.
“It was a sunny”: Robert Lowell, “Near the Unbalanced Aquarium,” Collected Prose, 357–58.
shielded his mania: William Styron spoke often about the underappreciated respite that came from being in a psychiatric hospital: “The hospital was my salvation, and it is something of a paradox that in this austere place with its locked and wired doors and desolate green hallways—ambulances screeching night and day ten floors below—I found the repose, the assuagement of the tempest in my brain, that I was unable to find in my quiet farmhouse.” William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (New York: Random House, 1990), 69.
electroconvulsive therapy: S. Mukherjee, H. A. Sackeim, and D. B. Schnur, “Electroconvulsive Therapy of Acute Manic Episodes: A Review of 50 Years’ Experience,” American Journal of Psychiatry 151 (1994): 169–76; H. K. Schoeyen, U. Kessler, O. E. Andreassen, et al., “Treatment-Resistant Bipolar Depression: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Electroconvulsive Therapy Versus Algorithm-Based Pharmacological Treatment,” American Journal of Psychiatry 172 (2015): 41–51.
“All the late froth and delirium”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, March 15, 1958, Letters, 315.
“Psycho-therapy is rather amazing”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, November 18, 1949, Letters, 150.
“I have been seeing a psychiatrist”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Charlotte Winslow Lowell, March 10, 1950, Houghton Library.
“I’ve been gulping Freud”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Hardwick, September 10, 1953, Letters, 200.
“I get a funny thing”: Robert Lowell interview with Al Alvarez, “A Talk with Robert Lowell,” Encounter 24 (February 1965).
“All that human sort of color”: Ibid.
“Were it not better”: Sigmund Freud, “Reflections on War and Death,” trans. A. A. Brill and A. B. Kruttner (New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1918).
“To bear life”: Ibid.
“is not like Freudians”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Giovanna Madonia Erba, March 13, 1954, Letters, 215.
“provides the conditions”: Al Alvarez, “A Talk with Robert Lowell.”
“He does me a lot of good”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, November 19, 1958, Letters, 332.
“really doing great things”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, March 30, 1959, Letters, 340.
“This was the first year”: Richard Stern, “Extracts from a Journal,” TriQuarterly 50 (Winter 1981).
“He felt very strongly”: Peter Taylor, BBC program, “Robert Lowell,” March 9, 1965.
“Once he was on lithium”: Helen Vendler, e-mail correspondence with the author, February 9, 2011.
“Now coming back”: Robert Lowell, essay written for Vernon Williams, M.D., n.d. 1950s, HRC.
“fairly well for long stretches”: Ibid.
“largest thing I hope for”: Ibid.
“I know you’re all right”: Letter from Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell, September 20, 1949, Houghton Library.
“there should not be”: Letter from Elizabeth Hardwick to Peter and Eleanor Taylor, October 20, 1949, Vanderbilt.
“betrayed so often”: Letter from Elizabeth Hardwick to Allen Tate, December 28, 1949, Princeton. Virgil wrote in The Aeneid:
Aeneas felt his ship adrift, her pilot lost,
and took command himself, at sea in the black night,
moaning deeply, stunned by his comrade’s fate:
“You trusted—oh, Palinurus—
far too much to a calm sky and sea.
Your naked corpse will lie on an unknown shore.
Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 2006), 181.
“it’s all definitely over”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Charlotte Lowell, October 19, 1952, Letters, 191.
“Cal takes this all with dead seriousness”: Letter from Elizabeth Hardwick to Robie and Anne Macauley, September 1952, HRC.
“Over the noise of the band”: Eileen Simpson, Poets in Their Youth, 193.
“out of the control of the will”: Letter from Elizabeth Hardwick to Allen Tate, January 9, 1964, Princeton.
“Of course, he feared”: Sidney Nolan, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1980, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“How often have my antics”: Robert Lowell, “The Downlook,” Collected Poems, 836.
“I am back from a month”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, February 25, 1965, Letters, 456.
“ ‘Remarkable breakdown’ ”: Robert Lowell, “Home,” Collected Poems, 824.
“before the metal shaving mirrors”: Robert Lowell, “Waking in the Blue,” Collected Poems, 184.
“now no one need”: Robert Lowell, “Home After Three Months Away,” Collected Poems, 185–86.
“ ‘Waiting out the rain’ ”: Robert Lowell, “Departure,” Collected Poems, 726.
“After his first grave manic attack”: Robert Fitzgerald, “Thinking of Robert Lowell: 1917–1977,” Robert Fitzgerald Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
“with horror of his old mania”: Letter from Mary McCarthy to Hannah Arendt, June 26, 1970, in Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949–1975, ed. Carol Brightman (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 257.
“I am back where I was”: Letter from Robert Lowell to George Santayana, January 8, 1950, Letters, 153.
“Even now I feel as though”: Robert Lowell, “The Puritan,” ca. 1945, Miscellaneous Prose, Houghton Library, 2794.
“Cattle have guts”: Robert Lowell, “Cattle,” Notebook 1967–68, 143.
The image repeats: Robert Lowell, “Cow,” Collected Poems, 458.
“We do not burn”: Robert Lowell, “Andrei Voznesensky,” Collected Prose, 120.
“If it’s still”: Elizabeth Bishop, “The Armadillo,” Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 101–2. The poem, dedicated to Ro
bert Lowell, ends:
O falling fire and piercing cry
and panic, and a weak mailed fist
clinched ignorant against the sky!
“I made men look”: Robert Lowell, Prometheus Bound (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 23.
“can remake, or destroy”: Ibid., 11.
“men had eyes”: Ibid., 21–22.
The scars of madness: “Madness was like being in war,” he told Richard Stern; “the humiliation and the increasing shame were terrible.” Richard Stern, “Extracts from a Journal.”
War, said Henry Adams: Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 249.
“a chance to gain”: Robert Lowell, “War: A Justification,” The Vindex (St. Mark’s School), June 1935, Robert Lowell Papers, HRC.
In lectures given: W. H. R. Rivers, Instinct and the Unconscious: A Contribution to a Biological Theory of the Psycho-Neuroses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924).
“banishing such experiences”: Ibid., 188.
“was to find some aspect”: Ibid., 191.
“It’s bad to think of war”: Siegfried Sassoon, “Repression of War Experience,” in Siegfried Sassoon: The War Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1983), 73.
“You’re quiet and peaceful”: Ibid., 74.
“I was on my Ghazala”: T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926, 1935; London: Penguin Classics, 2000), 561.
“If imagination is active”: W. H. R. Rivers, Instinct and the Unconscious, 226.
“war’s sordor, heroism”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Richard Fein, March 13, 1960, Letters, 361.
“My definite approach”: Siegfried Sassoon, Sherston’s Progress (London: Faber & Faber, 1936), 28.
“fallen to pieces”: Ibid., 149.
“unexpected and unannounced”: Ibid.
“I undo the clotted lint”: Walt Whitman, “The Wound-Dresser,” Leaves of Grass, ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold Blodgett (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 310.
“I thread my way”: Ibid., 311.
“I am weighed down”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Frank Bidart, February 15, 1976, Letters, 644.
“I can’t really function”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Blair Clark, March 4, 1976, Letters, 645.
“I had a longish”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, March 4, 1976, Letters, 644.