“really a kind”: Letter from Donald Jenkins to Ian Hamilton, June 19, 1980, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“Everyone likes him”: Letter from Isaiah Berlin to Noel Annan, May 1, 1964, in Isaiah Berlin, Building, 191.
“Until his arrival”: W. D. Snodgrass, “A Liberal Education: Mentors, Fomenters and Tormentors,” Southern Review (Summer 1992): 450.
“In the name of his art”: William Phillips, A Partisan View: Five Decades of the Literary Life (New York: Stein and Day, 1983), 215.
Evgenia recollects: Evgenia Citkowitz, interview with the author, March 12, 2004.
“the last madness of child-gaiety”: Robert Lowell, “Ivana,” Collected Poems, 694.
The words used time and again: Ibid.; Evgenia Citkowitz, correspondence with the author, August 11, 2015; Harriet Lowell, correspondence with the author, April 2012; Ivana Lowell, interview with the author, April 16, 2014; Ivana Lowell, Why Not Say What Happened? (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 27.
“I loved him at first sight”: Elizabeth Bishop, “Elizabeth Bishop on Robert Lowell,” Words in Air, 809, “Lowell Reminiscences,” Bishop Papers, Vassar.
“Kindness has always been”: Ibid., 810.
“There’s no one else”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, April 7, 1959, Letters, 344.
“I think of you daily”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, March 10, 1963, Letters, 420.
“Please never stop writing”: Letter from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell, July 27, 1960, Words in Air, 332.
“just the faintest glimmer”: Letter from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell, February 27, 1970, Words in Air, 665.
“from thinking about your letter”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, March 10, 1962, Letters, 397.
“It was a Maine lobster town”: Robert Lowell, “Water,” Collected Poems, 321–22.
“Swimming, or rather standing”: Elizabeth Bishop, “Elizabeth Bishop on Robert Lowell,” Words in Air, 811.
“inexhaustible pleasure”: Alan Williamson, “Robert Lowell: A Reminiscence,” The Harvard Advocate 113 (November 1979): 38.
“I know that he used”: Elizabeth Bishop, statement for the English memorial service for Robert Lowell, London, October 12, 1977. Many writers noted Lowell’s acts of kindness: unrequested financial help, unsolicited nominations for fellowships and awards, letters of support and understanding. Archibald MacLeish, one of these many, wrote to Lowell on May 10, 1960, that he was a “doer of good works. It seems to me that whenever I turn I see your hand held out to help somebody along.” Quoted in Words in Air, 325.
“In my middle age”: Letter from Donald Davie to Robert Lowell, June 24, 1967, Houghton Library.
“There was a kind of litmus quality”: William Alfred, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1981, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“I have never had a more loyal friend”: Frank Parker, “The Lively Arts: Robert Lowell: A Life Study,” BBC Broadcast Archives, February 22, 1980.
“One of the most extraordinary things”: Blair Clark, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1979, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“I think he never”: William Alfred, interview with Ian Hamilton. Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“was a supremely challenging”: Diantha Parker, “Robert Lowell’s Lightness,” Poetry Foundation, November 25, 2010, www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/69622.
“his gaiety, his love of life”: Esther Brooks, “Remembering Cal,” 42.
“modest and arrogant”: Stanley Kunitz, “The Sense of a Life,” New York Times Book Review, October 16, 1977, 3.
“You never felt quite safe”: Seamus Heaney, “Gulliver in Lilliput: Remembering Robert Lowell,” in The Norton Book of Friendship, ed. Eudora Welty and Ronald A. Sharp (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 547.
“All flaws considered”: Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night, 74.
“complex, tortured, and difficult”: Kathleen Spivack, With Robert Lowell and His Circle.
“He was great fun”: William Alfred, “The Lively Arts: Robert Lowell: A Life Study.”
“The world became larger”: Frank Parker, quoted by his daughter Diantha Parker in “Robert Lowell’s Lightness,” from remarks for “The Lively Arts: Robert Lowell: A Life Study.”
“He had that quality”: Caroline Blackwood, conversation with Kathleen Spivack, quoted in Kathleen Spivack, With Robert Lowell and His Circle, 150. Some of the comments about Robert Lowell are similar to those made about Virginia Woolf. “One would hand her a bit of information as dull as a lump of lead,” said Nigel Nicolson. “She would hand it back glittering like diamonds. I always felt on leaving her that I had drunk two glasses of an excellent champagne.” Joan Russell Noble ed., Recollections of Virginia Woolf by Her Contemporaries (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1972), 128.
“very sociable, curious”: Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1982, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“took up all the air”: Correspondence from Wendy Lesser to the author, February 3, 2012.
“There was no point”: Jonathan Raban, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1979, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
Lowell staged a reenactment: Jonathan Raban, correspondence with the author, October 21, 2016.
“There were times toward the end”: Ibid.
“I felt that I couldn’t bear”: Stephen Spender, interview with Ian Hamilton, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
overwhelming, dominating, and draining: Jonathan Miller, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1980, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“I can remember being unable”: Alan Brownjohn, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1981, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“We gossiped on the rocks of the millpond”: Robert Lowell, “John Berryman,” Collected Prose, 112.
“a bleak spot”: Anne Sexton, “Classroom at Boston University,” The Harvard Advocate 145 (November 1961): 13.
“with a cold chisel”: Ibid.
“Week after week”: W. D. Snodgrass, “A Liberal Education,” 451.
“through uncharted galaxies”: Ibid.
“I was disquieted”: Robert B. Shaw, “Learning from Lowell,” Yale Review 89 (January 2001): 78.
“once during class”: Kathleen Spivack, interview with the author, March 19, 2014. Also in Kathleen Spivack, With Robert Lowell and His Circle, 26: “Lowell seemed agitated, we had the distinct fear he was going to throw himself out of the window.”
“In the thin classroom”: Anne Sexton, “Elegy in the Classroom,” To Bedlam and Part Way Back (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 45.
“Cal’s bulk haunts my classes”: Derek Walcott, “Midsummer XXXII,” Midsummer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984).
“incapable of dealing with”: Kathleen Spivack, “Robert Lowell: A Memoir,” Antioch Review 43 (Spring 1983): 183.
“I never was able to shake”: Ibid., 185.
“altogether cowardice”: Letter from William Meredith to Robert Lowell, September 16, 1959, Connecticut College.
“There was no point”: Letter from Robert Lowell to William Meredith, September 18, 1959, Letters, 352.
“There’s nothing wrong”: Jonathan Raban, interview with the author, June 20, 2012.
“incredible flow of energy”: Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1982, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
Empson did go: Meena Alexander, e-mail to Saskia Hamilton, August 28, 2016. Permission to cite from Meena Alexander.
“some grunt of commiseration”: Anthony Hecht, Robert Lowell: A Lecture Delivered at the Library of Congress on May 2, 1983 (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1983), 11.
“Your move, Cal”: James Wolcott, “The Limits of Poetic License,” Harper’s, December 1982, 54.
“Not only death”: Letter from William James to the daughter of Ned Hooper, brother of Clover Adams, after his (probable) suicide in 1901, May 10, 1901. Qu
oted in Natalie Dykstra, Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), 174.
“He cannot bear anything”: Letter from Sophia Hawthorne to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1861, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. Quoted in E. H. Miller, Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 468.
“We think it is nice to do well”: Letter from Robert Lowell, Sr., to Robert Lowell, August 26, 1950, Houghton Library.
“All night I’ve held your hand”: Robert Lowell, “Man and Wife,” Collected Poems, 189.
“very beautiful, musical”: Letter from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell, August 16, 1963, Words in Air, 481.
“Work-table, litter, books”: Robert Lowell, “Night Sweat,” Collected Poems, 375.
“He was the most extraordinary”: Elizabeth Hardwick, quoted in Richard Locke, “Conversation on a Book,” New York Times, April 29, 1979.
“If only these things of Cal’s”: Letter from Elizabeth Hardwick to Allen Tate, June 1, 1959, Princeton.
“I tire of my turmoil”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Isabella Gardner, October 10, 1961, Letters, 389.
“Nothing! No oil”: Robert Lowell, “Eye and Tooth,” Collected Poems, 335.
“No doubt people did tire”: Harriet Lowell, correspondence with the author, April 2012.
“He’d become a cartoonish version”: Ibid.
“I wake to your cookout”: Robert Lowell, “The Human Condition,” Collected Poems, 632.
“Chaos grows like a snowball”: Letter from Robert Lowell to J. F. Powers, February 6, 1957, provided to author by Katherine A. Powers.
“I’ve always suspected”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Peter Taylor, June 27, 1960, Vanderbilt.
“Spring moved to summer”: Robert Lowell, “Summer: 5. Harriet,” Collected Poems, 609.
“Their sentiments and instincts”: Daniel Hack Tuke, “Circular Insanity,” 219.
Mania, Robert Lowell had said: “Mania is extremity for one’s friends, depression for one’s self. Both are chemical.” Ian Hamilton, “A Conversation with Robert Lowell,” 10–29.
“excessive involvement”: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed. (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2013), 124.
clinical studies of thousands: A review of studies of approximately two thousand patients found than 51 percent were hypersexual when they were manic. F. K. Goodwin and K. R. Jamison, Manic-Depressive Illness; D. H. Tuke Dictionary of Psychological Medicine (1892); Emil Kraepelin, Manic-Depressive Insanity (1921); Eugen Bleuler, Textbook of Psychiatry, 4th German ed., ed. A. A. Brill (New York: Macmillan, 1924); J. D. Campbell, Manic-Depressive Disease (1953); and Mayer-Gross, E. Slater, and M. Roth, Clinical Psychiatry (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1955) are among the many earlier clinicians who reported increased sexual desire and behavior during mania.
“lewdness and shamelessness”: Arateus, The Extant Works of Aretaeus, 302, 304.
“Manic patients are very susceptible”: John D. Campbell, Manic-Depressive Disease (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1953), 156.
“the most powerful and important”: John Custance, Wisdom, Madness, and Folly: The Philosophy of a Lunatic (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1952), 40–54.
“Chaucer’s old January”: Robert Lowell, “Morning,” Collected Poems, 615.
“Spring’s Lesson”: Horace, Odes and Epodes, ed. and trans. Niall Rudd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univerity Press, 2004), 33.
“Now, now”: Robert Lowell, “Spring,” Collected Poems, 398.
“Cal’s recuperative powers were almost”: Elizabeth Hardwick letter to Ian Hamilton, n.d., HRC.
“it’s only love”: Letter from Robert Lowell to John Berryman, September 9, 1969, Letters, 525.
“The last pages of Pasternak’s Zhivago”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Harriet Winslow, September 16, 1958, Letters, 327.
“You must read the Pasternak”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, September 18, 1958, Words in Air, 265.
“Did I write you about Pasternak”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, October 16, 1958, Words in Air, 271.
“I’m shatteringly impressed”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Peter Taylor, October 31, 1958, Vanderbilt.
unseverable emotional ties: “I am bound to Russia by my birth, my life, and my work. I cannot imagine my fate separated from and outside Russia.” Letter from Boris Pasternak published in Pravda, November 1, 1958.
“the best by far”: Peter Levi, Boris Pasternak (London: Hutchinson, 1990), 92.
“I have come to feel”: Robert Lowell, Imitations (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961), xii.
“The Frosted Rowan”: Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Vintage, 2011), 316–36.
“dense, impassable forest”: Ibid., 316.
“solitary, beautiful, rusty-red-leafed”: Ibid., 317.
“half covered with snow”: Ibid., 336.
“a mad attempt to stop time with words”: Ibid., 325.
“The rain falls”: Robert Lowell, “The Heavenly Rain,” Collected Poems, 559.
“I was in a hospital for five weeks”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, June 27, 1961, Words in Air, 366.
“It has been as though”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Giovanna Madonia Erba, February 22, 1954, Letters, 211.
“Away from you”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Giovanna Madonia Erba, July 11, 1954, Letters, 238.
“Poor Giovanna”: Letter from Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair and Holly Clark, April 16, 1954, HRC.
“Love is resurrection”: Robert Lowell, “Mohammed,” Collected Poems, 449.
“O to break loose”: Robert Lowell, “Waking Early Sunday Morning,” Collected Poems, 385.
“all that kept off death”: Robert Lowell, “Three Poems: 1. Seal of the Fair Sex,” Collected Poems, 519.
“Our town was blanketed”: Robert Lowell, “William Carlos Williams,” Collected Prose, 37.
“a slack of eternity”: Ian Hamilton, “A Conversation with Robert Lowell,” The Review 26 (Summer 1971): 12.
“in season to the tropical”: Robert Lowell, “Circles: 6. The Hard Way,” Collected Poems, 632.
“Tannish buds and green buds”: Robert Lowell, “Return in March,” Collected Poems, 806.
“I, fifty”: Robert Lowell, “Mexico,” Collected Poems, 624.
“I have lived without”: Ibid., 627.
“I wanted to run over”: Letter from Mary Keelan to Robert Lowell, January 9, 1967, Houghton Library.
“Poor Child”: Robert Lowell, “Mexico,” Collected Poems, 628.
“The flower I took away”: Robert Lowell, “Eight Months Later,” Collected Poems, 629.
“loves to fish in roiled waters”: “Satan is now in his passions, he feels his passions approaching, he loves to fish in roiled waters.” Nathaniel Ward, “The Simple Cobbler of Aggawan,” 1647; reprinted in Perry Miller, The American Puritans, 95.
“are uniquely able”: Frieda Fromm–Reichmann, “Intensive Psychotherapy of Manic-Depressives,” Confinia Neurologia 9 (1949): 158–65.
documented in the clinical research: Donald Hack Tuke, “Circular Insanity”; Emil Kraepelin, Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia; D. S. Janowsky, M. Leff, and R. S. Epstein, “Playing the Manic Game: Interpersonal Maneuvers of the Acutely Manic Patient,” Archives of General Psychiatry 22 (1970): 252–61; D. S. Janowsky, K. El-Yousef, and J. M. Davis, “Interpersonal Maneuvers of Manic Patients,” American Journal of Psychiatry 131 (1974): 250–55; F. K. Goodwin and K. R. Jamison, Manic-Depressive Illness.
“I am God”: John Custance, Wisdom, Madness, and Folly, 51.
Christopher Ricks has argued: Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 256.
“The great design of moral management”: Eli Todd, quoted in The Institutional Case of the Insane in the United States and Canada, ed. Henry M
ills Hurd (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1916), 81.
members of Johnson’s staff: Jeffrey Meyers, “Ignorant Armies,” Times Literary Supplement, May 21, 2015.
“Cal was perfectly analytic”: Grey Gowrie, interview with the author, June 30, 2011.
“shattered by what he had done”: Xandra Gowrie, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1980, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“he was blue”: William Alfred, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1981, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“he could remember all”: Esther Brooks, “Remembering Cal,” 42.
“It’s the most awful feeling”: Caroline Blackwood, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1979, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“My Dolphin, you only guide”: Robert Lowell, “Dolphin,” Collected Poems, 708.
“I saw your eyes”: Robert Lowell, “The Mills of the Kavanaughs,” Collected Poems, 84.
“we know this”: Robert Lowell, “Death of Alexander,” Collected Poems, 437.
“His doom seemed”: Robert Lowell, “Remarks to Trumbull Seniors at Yale,” June 10, 1968, Yale Library.
“These attacks seem”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, February 25, 1965, Letters, 456.
“impetuous driving force”: Robert Lowell, “Remarks to Trumbull Seniors at Yale.”
Frank Sinatra once said: Frank Sinatra, Playboy interview with Joe Hyams, February 1963.
“I’m for anything that gets you”: Frank Sinatra, quoted in Bill Zehme, The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin’ (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).
10. AND WILL NOT SCARE
“The struck oak that lost”: Robert Lowell, “We Took Our Paradise,” Collected Poems, 767.
“All law, morals, and rewards”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Anne Dick, n.d. summer 1936, Letters, 8.
“A man should stop his ears”: Robert Louis Stevenson, “Aes Triplex,” in Aes Triplex and Other Essays (Portland, ME: J. B. Mosher, 1903), 16–17.
“What—beyond his poetry”: Alan Williamson, “Robert Lowell: A Reminiscence,” 38–39.
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character Page 54