Robert Lowell: A Biography

by Ian Hamilton

  And so it went on for fifteen days. On January 21, though, he was readmitted to Greenways. Caroline Blackwood remembers his final forty-eight hours at home as involving “every sort of horror,” and it is easy to see why. The nurses, however, icily recorded the events as follows:

  9 a.m. Rather tired and drowsy during morning. Had small amount of breakfast. Dr Lederman phoned.

  10 a.m. Asked for pt. to have 2) Orphenidrine.

  12 a.m. To Harley Str. Very drowsy in taxi—for acupuncture.

  1.30 p.m. When leaving taxi (I had to pay taxi-driver as Prof. Lowell had forgotten his wallet) he slipped away.

  3.35 p.m. Returned in company of a friend (later Prof Lowell said he was a director of plays). He said he had found the professor in a pub and he had had an amount to drink. Patient did not appear in any distress, and not noticeably drunk. (Had had lunch in Hamburger Heaven).

  4.30 p.m. Friend left after reading poems to professor and conversing.

  4.45 p.m. Lady Caroline came to see her husband.

  5 p.m. Dr Lederman informed of Professor’s drinking and said not to give him any further sedation.

  8 p.m. Dr Lederman gave acupuncture.

  8.30 Had a bath

  9.30 p.m. Quite normal. Walking around the flat. Smoking a lot.

  10.00 p.m. Dr Lederman phoned (prescribes medication)

  11.00 p.m. Gone off to sleep.

  1.00 a.m. Awake and walking around. Drinking lots of juice and coffee (medication given)

  5.00 a.m. Awake and restless, (more medication given) Slept until 7.30

  a.m. Got dressed by himself and went out with me to buy the papers.

  8.30 a.m. Professor got undressed and went back to bed.

  9 a.m. Dr Lederman rang (prescribes different medication) and asked for Lady Caroline to encourage as many visitors as possible to visit the Professor. Said Prof not to go to acupuncture.

  12 Noon. But pt. wanted to go to Harley St. with Lady Caroline. Not so restless during morning. Returned from acupuncture.

  1 p.m.–2 p.m. Slept.

  2 p.m. Had consomme and toast and orange juice and coffee. Up to lounge. Continues to be extremely untidy in appearance and dirty in habits. Smoking incessantly, but appears calmer and not so agitated.

  3 p.m. Took the bread knife and started taking strips off the walls. Lady Caroline informed Dr Lederman. G.P. will be coming. Not violent or difficult to manage but insisting on taking bread knife.

  3.30 p.m. Dr Brass came and gave valium injection.

  3.30 p.m.–5 p.m. Pt. slept.

  5 p.m. Prof rang psychiatrist (a different one from the one who was attending him before). Dr Brass will probably bring psychiatrist to see Professor. To be put into Greenways.

  5.30 p.m. Had a bath. Spray prescribed by Dr Brass applied to areas where he had shampooed himself with hair lacquer.

  5.30–7 p.m. Resting quietly. Had a bottle of milk.

  7 p.m. Dr Benaim (psychiatrist) rang and will get in touch with Dr Brass.

  6.30–8 Slept.

  7 p.m. Had plate of lentil soup and toast

  8 p.m. Appears cheerful

  That night Lowell slept longer than on almost any previous night recorded in the nurses’ logbook. At 7 A.M. on the following day he “got dressed and went out to buy newspapers. Behaviour quite normal.” This is the final entry in the logbook. Later on that same day Lowell returned to Greenways. Again, though, Blackwood was haunted by the fear that he would be “let out too soon.” It was all too easy for him to “escape” from Greenways, and after one or two alarms, Blackwood decided that she would have to have him legally “committed”—and committed, moreover, to a hospital far enough from London for her to feel safe from the threat of a surprise appearance. The hospital was St. Andrews in Northampton, some sixty-odd miles from London, and Lowell was taken there by ambulance towards the end of January 1976. In the poem “Home,” Lowell writes poignantly about one of Blackwood’s visits: there will always be some sense of desertion when a loved one disappears “round the bend,” some sense of “You chose to go /where you knew I could not follow:

  at visiting hours, you could experience

  my sickness only as desertion …

  Dr. Berners compliments you again,

  “A model guest … we would welcome

  Robert back to Northampton any time,

  the place suits him … he is so strong.”

  When you shuttle back chilled to London,

  I am on the wrong end of a dividing train—

  it is my failure with our fragility.

  If he has gone mad with her,

  the poor man can’t have been very happy,

  seeing too much and feeling it

  with one skin-layer missing.6

  Lowell spent only two weeks in St. Andrews. In mid-February, he wrote to Frank Bidart:

  So good to hear your voice. I had just been talking to Lizzie, and felt a rush of health. My recovery has been easy in most ways, but I am weighed down by the new frequency of attacks. How can one function, if one is regularly sick. Shades of the future prison. But all’s well for the present. The doctors differ somewhat but are optimistic. So am I. We sit by the fire paying bills. Caroline has written three chapters of a novel. I’ve written a short heart-felt poem.7

  On March 4 Lowell wrote a rather shamefaced and gloomy letter to Peter Taylor, who had visited Britain during the later days of Lowell’s attack: “I got well shortly after your visit and wish to god it had been sooner so that you would have been spared my antics. However now I am the most halting and tedious person on earth.”8 To Blair Clark, on the same day, he writes:

  I finally deciphered the crucial word “tricky” in your lithium warning. I think you mean the blood has to be taken every month or so to check the amount of lithium in the system. I’ve been doing that, though hating the blood needle. However, the air is full of rumours against lithium, hard to check on because it is almost a universal faith with English doctors. It’s the preventative effectiveness that shakes me, I can’t really function against two manic attacks in one year.

  This one was drawn out, but not too bad. I’ve been home a month now, rather downlooking at first, then thawing, all the while writing with furious persistence.

  Outside the sun is shining. Harriet is arriving tonight. A coal and wood fire warms the large bright-window room, and we swim along happily writing and rewriting.9

  And, in a P.S. to this, he writes: “Tell me if you come across anything more detailed on lithium. I am trying to find a substitute.”

  Two poems—“The Downlook” and “Thanks-Offering for Recovery”—suggest that Lowell knew what had been lost, perhaps irretrievably, by his drawn-out winter antics. He was to place the poems, unchronologically, at the very end of his book Day by Day, as if to locate the precise point of damage in his relationship with Blackwood:

  Last summer nothing dared impede

  the flow of the body’s thousand rivulets of welcome,

  winding effortlessly, yet with ambiguous invention—

  safety in nearness.

  Now the downlook, the downlook—

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  How often have my antics

  and insupportable, trespassing tongue

  gone astray and led me to prison …

  to lying … kneeling … standing.10

  And, from “Thanks-Offering for Recovery”: “This winter, I thought/I was created to be given away.”

  *

  In April, Lowell and Lady Caroline flew to New York for a performance of The Old Glory at the American Place Theatre (it was put on as part of the American bicentennial celebrations). “The production,” Lowell thought, “didn’t come up to Jonathan’s of course and was often like the original coin restamped in plaster.” He wrote this to Elizabeth Hardwick, whom he had visited on the day before he left, and added: “I miss having you to talk to. I feel deeply all you had to put up with me for so many y
ears.”11 And in the poem “Off Central Park” there is clear nostalgia for “our light intimacy of reference,” for the solid detail of shared history. There are the “old movables …/… I can give the dates when they entered our lives,” the bureau where he could always find “fresh shirts,” and

  In the bookcase, my Catholic theology,

  still too high for temptation—

  the same radical reviews

  where we first broke into print

  are still new to us.

  The reestablished old familiarity is such that Lowell feels able to hazard a direct quote from Hardwick without fear of Dolphin-style recriminations:

  “After so much suffering,” you said,

  “I realize we couldn’t have lasted

  more than another year or two anyway.”12

  Before leaving England, Lowell had written to Clark resurrecting the idea of a permanent move back to America, but this brief April visit had made New York, at any rate, seem “too fast and fallen for us.”13 He still felt the tug, though, and was evidently much relieved that he was once again on “talking” terms with Hardwick. Indeed, in July he wrote to her again, as if seeking a final peace on the matter of The Dolphin:

  I regret the Letters in Dolphin. The only way to make a narrative was to leave a few. I hesitated to send you a copy of the Selected Poems, but Giroux acted on his own; which was right because the bulk of them were written under your eyes.

  Autobiography predominates, almost forty years of it. And now more journey of the soul in my new book. I feel I, or someone, wrote everything beforehand. If I had read it at twenty would I have been surprised, would I have dared to go on?14

  A month later Hardwick visited London for a PEN conference, and shortly after this Lowell wrote: “I can’t find the words or maybe the style to say how comforting and enjoyable your visit was. It was so strange seeing you and Caroline easily together, that I almost feel I shouldn’t refer to it.”15

  The “haunting transatlantic problem” continued to haunt Lowell throughout the summer. In America, “both Caroline and I would be decisively better off, yet the move would be a shattering one for us as a family, getting the children resettled etc. or paying them flying visits, the groaning effort of abandoning houses, finding something new.”16 In Britain, he was beginning to feel “an expensive, parasitical burden,” and this uneasiness was sharpened when, in September, Blackwood decided to sell Milgate, which “just got too expensive to run, £900 a quarter for electricity, etc.” They would look for a smaller place, perhaps near Oxford, “costing as much, but cheaper to run.”17 There was no need for an immediate decision, he believed. A house had been rented in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the fall semester (September through January), and he expected that Milgate would still be intact on his return. In September he wrote to Frank Bidart that “we arrive Flight BA 561 2.05 p.m. on Wednesday the 15th…. I’m surprised how glad I am to be getting back to Harvard this fall, and to you the center of it.” And in a P.S. he tells Bidart that Milgate is “on the market. It won’t go soon, I suppose. The unfixed future is bewildering.”18

  As it turned out, Lowell did not travel on Flight BA 561; shortly before the fifteenth he was again in Greenways. And this time Blackwood could not take it: “I’m no use to him in these attacks. They destroy me. I’m really better if I’m away if he has one”; “It’s like someone becoming an animal, or someone possessed by the devil. And that’s what tears you apart. You think, I love this person, but I hate him. So where are you?”19 This time, however, in mid-October, she flew to America with Sheridan and Ivana, and from the rented house in Cambridge she telephoned Blair Clark, who made notes of their conversation:

  She said she’d come with Sheridan for a few weeks because Cal was threatening to leave the hospital—a doctor had done a phoney “miracle” and said he was all right and was ready to release him. The only way to handle that was to come here. She said then “nobody could take it on.” She said she’d talked to Cal this morning on the phone, and he had said he was better and might come “out” (i.e. to the U.S.) in 2 weeks. She said this was a straight crackup on the eve of his coming to Harvard,—no drug problem.20

  On October 30 Lowell wrote to William Alfred that he was “three days out of hospital, but ninety percent certified healthy.” His worry was that “Caroline is very sick with habitual overdrinking”—but she, like him, “makes miraculous turnabouts.”21 And in the poem “Runaway” he wrote: “At the sick times, our slashing, / drastic decisions made us runaways.”22

  In Cambridge the confusion was exacerbated: Blackwood was convinced that Lowell was still sick, and he was convinced that she needed help far more than he did. On November 25 Lowell called Blair Clark, as Clark records:

  Cal Lowell called, I having called him. He was at Frank Bidart’s in Cambridge. He said, in effect, that he’d left the house and Caroline for a while to get some peace. He said Caroline was in real trouble, that the late night “tirades” after drinking were bad. There was a suicide attempt (I gathered this was not recent). He had a doctor at McLean’s who said he might be able to help her. And this doctor would tell Harvard he was OK and could bring him out of a manic breakdown “in a week” if that happened. I got impression Caroline would go back to England in a couple of weeks, with Sheridan but that Cal might not go. He said it was bad for her to have to go because of taxes (he mentioned 80%). He said he was “crazy about” her and there was no one else for him, but it was hard now. We agreed we’d talk this week and he might stay with me when he was down for “Y” reading Dec. 8th.23

  Lowell stayed at Bidart’s apartment for ten days (“he was just unbelievably grateful and relieved to be in an atmosphere that was not this terrific turmoil, anger, drama, tension”24). Five days before Lowell’s reading at the YMHA in New York (a reading at which he read “two very negative poems about Caroline”25), Blackwood returned to England. With some hesitation, Lowell followed her in mid-December. They spent Christmas in Scotland, and then—much against her wishes—Lowell returned to Cambridge in January 1977. Frank Bidart recalls:

  I went to pick him up at the airport, let’s say, Thursday or Friday night. The school term (he had not taught at all in the fall, and Harvard had agreed to let him teach the spring semester instead) was to start, say, the following Tuesday or Wednesday, and it was arranged he was to stay in Dunster House, but he’d stay with me first for like a week or so. It was terrifically cold, and the second night about two in the morning—we’d both been asleep—he knocked on my door and said that he couldn’t breathe and he felt he had to go to the infirmary. So we got dressed and went downstairs and got into my car. My car was quite old and it was terribly cold and my car wouldn’t start. And he was just incredibly gracious about it. I mean, he was having trouble breathing and you might have expected that he would be somewhat angry with me for having this car that was so unreliable, but there was a kind of resigned patience to the way the world works—a sense that, well, this is the way it is, we have to go back inside now and call a cab. I don’t think he climbed back up again, but anyway, I got a cab and we went to the infirmary.26

  A doctor examined Lowell but could find nothing, and it was arranged that he should have tests at McLean’s on the following Monday. Lowell gives his account of Monday’s events in a letter to Caroline Blackwood:

  I should tell you about the hospital, though it is a tame story—that’s its point. After my cardiograph came out irregular, I waited 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 Illich: 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 tests I had already been given at McLean’s removed the drama.27


  The diagnosis was congestive heart failure; in Lowell’s definition: “the lungs filled with water because the heart can’t squeeze enough.” He stayed for about ten days in Phillips House at Massachusetts General—much intrigued by the memory that his grandfather had died in “almost” the same hospital room—and Hardwick came up from New York to visit him. During the week he contacted his Aunt Sarah (Cotting), the oldest surviving member of his family; Aunt Sarah had refused to speak to him since his marriage to Lady Caroline, but he now “asked her to come in to see him, to bury the hatchet, and she came. He was afraid he would die with the sun going down on his wrath with Aunt Sarah.”28 In spite of such fears, Lowell “was in no sense a good patient.” Helen Vendler, who had been asked to take over Lowell’s first Harvard class if he was still in the hospital when term began, remembers that “he didn’t particularly obey the instructions given to him by the hospital. He did take the diuretics that he was supposed to take, but he did not stop drinking. … And he was supposed to stop smoking of course. And he didn’t.”29

  On his release from Mass. General, Lowell took up residence in Dunster House (“very small, two rooms, fireplace, view of the Charles, two desks, bookcases, third floor, meals if I want them”), and felt himself to be “an old student among students.” On his first day there he wrote to Blackwood: “I don’t think I’ve ever been so on my own, so firmly pinned down to emptiness…. The mind goes numb reading through about thirty student poems. The body goes numb in its little room, too enervated to read through Anna Karenina as one resolved.”30

  On February 23, however, there was light relief when Lowell gave a reading in New York with Allen Ginsberg. He read “Phillips House Revisited,” a new poem about his stay in Massachusetts General (and confided to the audience that he was now suffering from “water in the lungs”), “Man and Wife,” “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage,” and—by popular request—“Waking Early Sunday Morning” and “For the Union Dead.” Towards the end of the evening (possibly because the reading took place in St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery, where he had been married to Jean Stafford) he read “To Delmore Schwartz,” and when he finished and was about to begin “Ulysses and Circe,” a “genial if sloshed young man, who was sitting with his wife and baby near the front, suddenly shouted: ‘Robert, you left out that great line about paranoid’” (“the paranoid inert gaze of Coleridge”). Edgar Stillman reported the ensuing banter for the Soho Weekly News: