Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  Later in Lowell’s life, after knowing mania and depression, he would describe opposing factions of a different kind, a war within, to his friends as well as to his doctors. In 1951 he wrote to the philosopher George Santayana: “What a heavy way of saying that the peculiarity I seem to have been born with is a character made up of stiffness and disorder, or lethargy and passion. These words are not necessarily the best. The two horses, judgment and emotion perhaps, take many names; but they go together ill at best, and at bad times, one is lying down immobile, the other galloping.”

  Lowell told one of his psychiatrists that there was an uneasy alliance between these two, the visceral and the higher minded; it affected his work: “I find that I fall into two parts which roughly correspond to instinct and conscience….Neither one, as far as the single daily calls of life go, is much of a success. Instinct…thinks by means of images….Conscience is a fine fellow, but it has never written anything, not even a thought-out critical essay, and its experience almost entirely derives from what instinct has felt. An angel’s abstract mind on a brute’s body it talks against everything conceivable, for it cannot conceive of anything that might make its queer centaurish being work like a man.” Lowell, like the New England Puritan, knew a “sober prudence,” but he had as well a “divine recklessness which would make all things new.”

  “The lightning which explodes and fashions planets, makers of planets and suns, is in him,” Emerson had written about force and order in his essay on fate. “On one side, elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature,—here they are, side by side.” Lowell felt Emerson’s presence acutely—“the greatest nonfiction writer, the most radiant explorer among our Protestant divines”—as he did so many of the nineteenth-century New England writers. As, too, he experienced the English and French, Roman and Greek, and English writers long before them. Jonathan Miller, who directed Lowell’s plays in England and America, said that “he loves the contrast between the uncontrollable rush of the present and those things in the past with their strong, firm outlines coming to take their small clear place in history.” Contrast and contention were critical; so too was a measure of continuity.

  To Elizabeth Bishop, Lowell had described the contending forces in his mind as “the Puritanical iron hand of constraint and the gushes of pure wildness.” If not checked, he added, “I can always go off the beam into hallucinations, or lie aching and depressed for months.” Cycles in mood and will, in the capacity to act, coursed through his life. “Maybe it’s just my nature, but one seems to see-saw from a sort of rosy blandness to a blank, bare cracking feeling. It’s like swimming across a pond littered with pieces of wood; one wonders if one has the energy to push through it all, then one floats gaily and the [current] draws one forward.”

  Lowell’s experience of dueling instinct and conscience, the contrast between light and dark, was an opposition Miltonic in its intensity. This opposition, as Lowell made clear, was more than metaphor. “During this time I have had five manic depressive breakdowns,” he wrote when he was forty-two. “Short weeks of a Messianic rather bestial glow, when I have to be in a hospital, then dark months of indecision, emptiness etc. So the dark and light are not mere decoration and poetic imagery, but something altogether lived, inescapable. Even survival had to be fought and fought for.”

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, with whom Lowell declared a strong temperamental affinity, had said of himself, “Lights and shadows are continually flitting across my inward sky, and I know neither whence they come or whither they go.” His friend Herman Melville agreed: “For spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne’s soul, the other side—like the dark half of the physical sphere—is shrouded in a blackness, ten times black.” Shifting patterns of darkness and light were the heart of truth for Hawthorne and Melville, Adams and Lowell. For good cause, Lowell was drawn to tyrant as well as hero.

  Those who knew Lowell knew his contradictory sides: With his courage came fragility, with his darkness a saving wit. Mania brought brutality, even violence, but it stood sharply in contrast to his more usual and often-noted gentleness. “Lowell had the most disconcerting mixture of strength and weakness,” wrote Norman Mailer, “a blending so dramatic in its visible sign of conflict that one had to assume he would be sensationally attractive to women. He had something untouchable, all insane in its force; one felt immediately there were any number of causes for which the man would be ready to die….But physical strength or no, his nerves were all too apparently delicate. Obviously spoiled by everyone for years, he seemed nonetheless to need the spoiling. These nerves—the nerves of a consummate poet—were not tuned to any battering.”

  Lowell’s close and lifetime friend from college years, the writer Peter Taylor, recalled that Lowell searched to understand himself by mining his opposite qualities; by doing so he also searched to make meaning of life: “From the time I first knew him in his later teens, he seemed determined that there should be no split in his approach to understanding profound matters. He was searching for a oneness in himself and a oneness in the world. He would not allow that any single kind of experience denied him the right and access to some opposite kind.” Access to experience was not a problem for Lowell. It came to him as the air and when he needed more he left to find it elsewhere.

  Lowell learned best on his own and chafed under the strictures of traditional education. He was curious, observant, and thought uncommonly about what he saw. He found pleasure in his own imaginings and maintained a saving distance from structure that others might impose. He kept well enough into himself to protect room for growing. He was comfortable with discordant beliefs. He believed writing was a calling, not a profession; he aimed for the stars. His novitiate summers in Nantucket changed him; the religious fervor for ideas and art that streaked those summers would come back to him in cycles of gust or gale force for the rest of his life. He didn’t quit. He didn’t settle. He worked hard. These qualities—independence, contrariness, ambition, toughness, receptiveness to experience—are the blood supply to a creative mind and temperament; they are wellspring to imagination. The ferocity and peculiarity that shadowed him when he was a boy later made their own contributions to the man and to his poetry.

  Lowell recognized that he could be remarkable. When he was eighteen he wrote in a school essay that “the accomplishments of man are unlimited…when he places all the strength of his mind and body to the task, a new almost divine power takes possession of him.” The enlightened mind is “always questioning itself, always seeking means of self-improvement, and always striving for something higher.” While still in school, his friend Frank Parker said, Lowell decided he could do whatever he wanted to do if he worked hard enough at it. “He would be a writer, he said….He would work at it…and he would be great.”

  Another friend, Blair Clark, said that Lowell somehow survived the “quite dreadful tensions” of his childhood and “managed to invent himself. The being he created was a spring coiled by his strong, fumbling hand.” Lowell created himself in “an unusually conscious and deliberate way,” observed Clark, but that paled when “compared to the way in which he created Robert Lowell the writer. He set about that task even before he had a notion of what it was to ‘write,’ or what there was for him to write about.” Lowell “created himself as an intellect, as a creative spirit, in the most deliberate, self-conscious way….How do you make yourself better?…Cal immediately went to the classics—to Homer….The compulsion was moral—it wasn’t literary or cultural, it was an entirely priestly thing. It was to do with the improvement of ourselves.”

  Force, most significantly manic force, was a cardinal element in Lowell’s life and work; it was given and lasting, something with which he had to reckon, battle to control, try to contain. He would draw upon literature, myth, and history for his heroes, those who had engaged in epic mental or physical struggles, channe
led great wrath and powers—Achilles, Alexander, Napoleon, Jonathan Edwards, Cuchulain—and brought to the struggle his own “rock crystal” will and imagination. He looked to the past to draw down otherwise destructive force to advantage, keep it from surging over the banks; he would start in life as Achilles, bound by his wrath, and end as Odysseus: navigating, wandering, searching for home and a semblance of peace. His poetry would fill with strafing, then shielding images: net and hook; lance, shell, armor, and carapace. The wrath of God, the force of nature—storm and fire, river and sea—surged through Lowell’s early years, then his convert years of Catholicism.

  Homer and the Old Testament were obvious home waters for Lowell. In a school essay about The Iliad, Lowell declared that the “unreasoning hate of Achilles cannot continue. His smoldering anger is actually more harmful to himself than to the Trojans.” The hero’s punishment, wrote the young Lowell, will be in proportion to his wrath. “This titan must conform to the will of the universe…even he can accomplish nothing when he is out of harmony.” Years later, Lowell would return to The Iliad to describe the “insensate rage” of Achilles, the great blind force of mind that was a “wavering, irresistible force, a great scythe of hubris, lethal to itself.” Force and madness share quarters; Lowell knew it well.

  —

  Each translator of Homer opens The Iliad with his own word for the wrath of Achilles. Robert Fitzgerald starts with “anger”: “Anger be now your song, immortal one, / Akhilleus’ anger, doomed and ruinous.” Richmond Lattimore, too, writes of “anger”: “Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus / and its devastation.” More recently, Robert Fagles called it “rage”: “Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, / Murderous, doomed.” And George Chapman, whose seventeenth-century translation of Homer left John Keats spellbound and thunderstruck, wrote of the “wrath” of Achilles: “Achilles’ baneful wrath resound, O Goddess, that impos’d / Infinite sorrows on the Greeks.” So too did Alexander Pope.

  Lowell, who knew the translations of Homer well, uniquely used the word “mania” in his own translation of Homer. In “The Killing of Lykaon” he writes, “Sing for me, Muse, the mania of Achilles / that cast a thousand sorrows on the Greeks.” Lowell, deeply educated in the classics, was certainly aware of and used other translations when he did his own more than a decade after the first time he was hospitalized for mania. “Mania” is in the first line of the first poem, “The Killing of Lykaon,” in Imitations, his 1961 book of translations; it is also in the last line of the last poem in the book, his translation of Rilke’s “Pigeons”:

  Over non-existence arches the all-being—

  thence the ball thrown almost out of bounds

  stings the hand with the momentum of its drop—

  body and gravity,

  miraculously multiplied by its mania to return.

  Mania and its attendant forces, dangerous and creative, had entered his language, as they had his life.

  Robert Lowell in Nantucket, 1935

  “I have grown to love my art, and those who were great in it.” Credit 5

  Lowell coat of arms, Lowell House, Harvard University

  “Ours was an old family.” Credit 6

  II

  ORIGINS

  The Puritanical Iron Hand of Constraint

  My trouble seems to be to bring together in me the Puritanical iron hand of constraint and the gushes of pure wildness. One can’t survive or write without both but they need to come to terms. Rather narrow walking.

  —Letter to Elizabeth Bishop, 1959

  3

  Sands of the Unknown

  Robert Lowell, Poet. Born in Boston, bearer of a name twice honored in the literary history of your country, you have brought the keen moral vision of your Pilgrim ancestors to the understanding of our secular and violent age. Your New England, like theirs, has proved to be a country of the mind.

  —Honorary degree citation, Yale University, 1968

  Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was born in his grandfather’s house in Boston on March 1, 1917. Sixty years later his requiem Mass would be sung a few hundred yards away. Lowell was New England born, cast, and buried. His character, and the receding line of windmills against which he was to tilt, were formed in the shadow of his New England ancestors and his mind was hallmarked by the New England writers who kept his regard from the beginning of his life to its end. “I wrote about only four places,” Lowell said: “Harvard and Boston, New York and Maine. These were the places I lived in and also symbols, conscious and unavoidable.” The New England landscape, her history and people, were the Ithaca to which he returned over and again. “I come with signposts in one hand lettered Boston, Beacon Hill, the Atlantic Ocean etc.,” he wrote. “In the other I hold a handful of dust picked up somewhere along the road, true stuff, but unsorted, unlabelled.”

  New England, as understood by Lowell, began with his ancestry, continued with his education and upbringing, and filled out in his imagination. Land and people were experienced through an uncommonly responsive temperament. Early impressions, like later ones, were fluid, mixing time, image, and fact. “If you had come out of the brown pillared doorway of my Grandfather Winslow’s house at 18 Chestnut Street,” Lowell wrote of his earliest childhood imaginings, “you would have seen house-high brown horses with Norman noses and silver bells” that “pulled down great swags of turning leaves from the poplar trees. I thought of falling green umbrellas.” It was Beacon Hill, a sliver of upper-class New England, an era experienced through Lowell’s creating eyes and forming mind.

  In his will, written in 1938, the year he died, his maternal grandfather Arthur Winslow had written, “To my children and grandchildren I bequeath the gift of life in New England and the heritage of our ancestry dating back to early times. I am proud to be of New England and happy to have completed my life there. Its antecedents I count among the most valuable legacies to my children.” It was not a usual thing to include in a will, but it spoke to his beholdenness to New England.

  “He was my Father,” wrote Robert Lowell of his grandfather. “I was his son.” Their relationship, not so simple as Lowell’s remark would have it, was enough realized to make all the more painful to Lowell the part that was not. Arthur Winslow’s New England was as critical to Lowell’s imagination as that of his own father’s very different Lowell line. The Boston of his grandfather, and Lowell’s childhood visits to the Winslow New Hampshire farm, figure importantly in Lord Weary’s Castle and Life Studies. Arthur Winslow was a domineering figure, edging out Lowell’s own father for respect and not infrequently overshadowing the younger Lowell as well.

  Forty years after his grandfather’s death, Lowell, in the final months of his own life and a patient in the same Boston hospital room in which his grandfather had died, remembered and still compared: “This room was brighter then / when grandfather filled it…./ He needed more to live than I, / his foot could catch hold anywhere.” He conjured his grandfather’s death, mythic, a ride beyond the “Charles River to the Acheron / Where the wide waters and their voyager are one.” Arthur Winslow was buried in the cemetery of his New England ancestors, the family cemetery where he and his grandson had years earlier “raked leaves from our dead forebears,” the cemetery where Lowell himself would be buried next to his parents and close to his grandfather. In death as in life, Arthur Winslow passed on the “gift of life in New England.”

  The New England of Arthur Winslow was a less complex, less dark and allegorical New England than Lowell’s, but for both men New England was determining. New England was not just a place, it was an idea, the history of a people passed on in a ringing, righteous, rebellious account of action and conscience. “It was in the stars,” wrote Lowell, “for the American Revolution to have flamed first in Boston. Wasn’t the Jamaican rum drunk there spiced with gunpowder to burn the tongue? Here debate was hottest, debate changing to riot.” In its beginning New England was the story of pilgrims, people of a granite and intolerant f
aith who sinned and fell from grace often enough to set fire to any child’s imagination. Later, it was more complicated.

  “We New Englanders,” wrote Lowell, “can never get over the idea that simple experience is marked with pointers left here by providence, that all is allegorical and has its clue.” The New England spirit was “something of the mind. Intensely of the mind, the naked ideal hidden in vestments of a life-denying drabness, opposed to display and yet expensive, sensual, baroque disclosures of the flesh.” A mind such as Lowell’s—metaphoric, allegoric, caught in the thickets of history and ancestry, enthralled and appalled by decay and sin, played on by madness and erratic moods—could hardly have had a better home country than New England. The evocative land, Melville had said, “is not down on any map; true places never are.”

  It would seem an overstatement to assert that New England was a defining influence on Lowell—New England is too much of an abstraction, too easily called up as a symbol, too various, too taken with a history long past, too etched by change and disregard—but it was. New England was critical to how Lowell came to be. New England, and how he construed it, created a context, a net of myth and metaphor, with which to better understand his complex, variable mind and, later, his madness. The molding of his character began in New England, a region of original thinkers and revolutionary leaders. New England provided examples toward which to move, and disenchantments against which to rebel. New England, flawed and full, stood up well to reinterpretation and opposition. It was the home of writers whose work he could learn from and use. New England was a place to leave and come back to. It was the geography of first impressions. New England, as it shaped the life and work of Robert Lowell, was a country of the mind, containing within itself the beginnings of a nation and the myths the nation created as it grew.