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

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  Lowell’s disciplined, curbing, and creating intellect would be brought to bear on the New England myth and reality, on a disposition that registered life acutely, distributively across mind and senses. Lowell’s early grapplings with the instability in his mind and moods would help him later to bring madness to the bit. Or more to the bit than otherwise would have been likely. His close study of the Puritanism of his ancestors, as well as his immersion in Boston’s literary and political history, gave him a deep well from which to draw. The North Atlantic coast, the “thousand small town New England greens,” Boston, Nantucket entered first into his memory and later his poetry. He took New England’s influence seriously. There was in New England, he believed, “a kind of carnal gravity,” a longing “so strong for what is not that what is not perhaps exists. Or maybe something still deeper, a peculiar stain or genius that is unkillable, inescapable.”

  Lowell drew deeply from the work of other writers who shared not only his New England roots but his temperamental disquiet: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry Adams, Jonathan Edwards, Henry David Thoreau. Lowell, who had declared Henry Adams particularly good “on his and our manic-depressive New England character,” himself understood this aspect of that character; he inherited not only his manic-depressive illness from his New England ancestors but their legacy for nerve, hard work, and words as well. After a particularly devastating mental breakdown he wrote to Elizabeth Bishop that he would welcome her visit “with open arms, joy, and whatever stability and wisdom my hereditary granite New England morality still retains.” Hard work and nerves alone could not keep madness at bay, but they provided tactics and mettle for the fight. The forces that shaped him as a child gave him armor—partial, imperfect, essential—for what he would come up against as an adult.

  Shaping forces are all. “Everything in the geologist’s mind is a symptom of something happening,” wrote Adam Nicolson when describing how islands come into being. “They see the process, the mineralisation, the conductive cooling, the developing faults.” To understand the creating forces is to understand what is important. The force of wind and tide, fire and cold, make an island the way it is; one must “think always of how it came to be.” We, like islands, come to be. Land, history, and family shaped who Robert Lowell was, how he came to be: his imagination and ambition; his conscience, his moral failures; the bounty and shortfall in his life; his periodic madness, his dominant lucidity. At a more ancient and abiding level, he came into being through the capricious, determining hurl of the genetic dice.

  When he was thirty-eight years old, Lowell undertook a sustained exploration of his ancestry. He did this in part at the suggestion of his psychiatrist and in part because of the inescapable interest shown by his family and others in his Lowell and Winslow ancestry. They were prominent New England names, with roots going back to early colonial times. “Ours was an old family,” he said once. “It stood-just.” The family names of his father and mother represented different things to Lowell at different times in his life. His Lowell and Winslow ancestors were real to him, part of a historic past to which he was drawn and into which he entered easily by way of a vivid imagination. They were a link from times past to the future. “I woke up the other morning with a curious feeling of continuity,” he wrote to his cousin Harriet Winslow. “Great falling festoons of loose green vines, trees and white woodwork. One thing dropping, slightly tangling and touching another indefinitely. And a feeling that as we pass through our fairly brief lives, we stay long enough to pass something on that someone else catches by his fingertips. A little bit of my grandfather and that old world seems to touch Harriet.” Ancestors were part metaphor, part fate, part explanation; they symbolized values against which to fight, forces to live up to, decay to resist. He would rake through his pedigree for flaw and madness, for poetic gift; he would use it as a portal into the history of his race.

  Lowell’s ancestors not only entered into, they inhabited his imagination: they were biddable, subject always to fresh interpretation, a mythic or flaw-finding take. Jonathan Miller, who directed Lowell’s New England plays in London and New York, said that Lowell’s imagination seemed to “feed off history” and that his poetry was “nourished by figures from the past.” These ancestral figures were not so much dead as living: When his forebears emerged in his writing, most unforgettably in Life Studies, they came with a specificity of name and place and carried with them not only personal but historical and artistic meaning. They came with possibility and regret, a sense of pride, discontent, enmity, and tenderness. “In different hours,” wrote Emerson, “a man represents each of several of his ancestors.” They are rolled up in his skin and “constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.” Lowell’s ancestors passed down uncommon sheet music. “What is history?” asked Lowell. “What you cannot touch.” Seamus Heaney observed that Lowell spoke with a “dynastic as well as an artistic voice.” His “preoccupation with ancestry was a constant one. From beginning to end, his poems called up and made inquisition of those fathers who had shaped him and the world he inhabited.”

  Lowell’s research into his ancestry was thorough and enthusiastic. “I had a little ancestor worshipping spree the other day,” he wrote to his cousin Harriet Winslow. “[I] even worked out on four type-written pages my family-tree. How quickly it runs into the sands of the unknown.” A month later, fully immersed in family records and genealogies, and beginning to see what he could not see, he wrote to her again: “A lot is lost and a lot was never seen and understood. We stand in our own characters, of course, and warp our own knowledge. Still, it’s fascinating to see what one can fish up, clear up and write down.” It was like going to a chiropractor, he said, “who leaves me with all my original bones jumbled back in a new and sounder structure.”

  The ancestors return in their own way, he wrote in “Revenants”:

  They come back sometimes, I know they do,

  freed like felons on the first of May,

  if there’s a healthy bite in the south wind,

  Spring the echo of God’s single day.

  They sun like earthworms on the puddly mall,

  they are better equipped for everything than people,

  except perhaps for living. When I meet them

  covertly, I think I know their names:

  Cousin So, Ancestral Mother-in-Law So…

  I cannot laugh them into laughing back.

  “Dead we have finally come to realize

  what others must have known from infancy—

  God is not about. We are less scared—

  with misty bounds we scale the starry sheer.”

  The idea of ancestral sin was seed and crop for many New England writers, Puritan to present. John Calvin had believed that original sin was “an hereditary depravity and corruption of our nature, diffused into all parts of our soul.” There was, he added, a “positive energy of this sin.” The notion that darkness passed down the bloodlines proved irresistible to writers with impressionable imaginations. Decay and sin had appeal then as now; each generation looks fresh to the past and mines it. Ancestry is preordaining, corrupting, benevolent, benign, damning.

  Several of the New England writers most influential on Lowell attached themselves to the idea of ancestral sin; Nathaniel Hawthorne did so with particular genius. “I feel more warmth for Hawthorne than the more exemplary heroes…a certain closeness to his temperament,” wrote Lowell. His “being was of such intermingled gloom and brightness [that] his mood is hard to find….He was an anti-Puritan, troubled as perhaps no true believer has ever been by the Puritan light, which was darkness.” Hawthorne was the great-grandson of a magistrate who presided during the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. Found guilty of witchcraft by the magistrate, one of his victims hurled a curse upon the judge and his descendants. The curse, enticing in imaginative possibility, fell onto Hawthorne’s bleak temperament and paid its dividend in literature.

  “How comes it you hav
e such a taste for the morbid anatomy of the human heart?” asked a friend of Hawthorne. “I should fancy from your books that you had some blue chamber in your soul, into which you hardly dared to enter yourself.” Hawthorne wrote from the blue chamber. He ruminated on sins and sinners and the role of suffering in life and art. Truth, he believed, came from suffering; redemption and art, were they to come, must begin in despair. “He was earnest as a priest,” his daughter said, “for he cared that the world was full of sorrow & sin.”

  “The spirit of my Puritan ancestors was mighty in me,” Hawthorne wrote in his notebook. It was a sentiment he took into his fiction. The sins of the father were his son’s, he wrote in The Scarlet Letter:

  It is now nearly two centuries and a quarter since the original Briton, the earliest emigrant of my name, made his appearance in the wild and forest-bordered settlement….He had all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil. His son, too, inherited the persecuting spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him….I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them…may be now and henceforth removed.

  The theme of sin passing from generation to generation was front and deep in The House of the Seven Gables: “The wrong-doing of one generation lives into successive ones,” Hawthorne wrote. There “might be drawn a weighty lesson from the little regarded truth, that the act of passing generation is the germ which may and must produce good or evil fruit, in a far distant time; that, together with the seed of the merely temporary crop, which mortals term expediency, they inevitably sow the acorns of a more enduring growth, which may darkly overshadow their posterity.” Corruption, blighted ambition, persecution, madness: all pass their way through the family line. Predestined, blighted, unseeing, man travels from birth to death on a course fixed to his ancestors.

  “As a man-of-war that sails through the sea, so this earth that sails through the air,” wrote Herman Melville. “We mortals are all on board a fast-sailing, never-sinking world-frigate, of which God was the shipwright; and she is but one craft in a Milky-Way fleet, of which God is the Lord High Admiral. The port we sail from is forever astern. And though far out of sight of land, for ages and ages we continue to sail with sealed orders, and our last destination remains a secret to ourselves and our officers; yet our final haven was predestinated ere we slipped from the stocks at Creation.”

  That sin and culpability might pass down through the generations—as we would have it in our time, like the helical strands of DNA—is an intensely attractive metaphor, and it is not surprising that the New England writers, brought up in the shadow of their Puritan past, would make good use of it. Lowell’s great-great uncle, James Russell Lowell, a pallbearer at Hawthorne’s funeral, wrote after Hawthorne’s death, “I never thought it an abatement of Hawthorne’s genius that he came lineally from one who sat in judgment on the witches in 1692; it was interesting rather to trace something hereditary in the sombre character of his imagination, continually vexing itself to account for the origin of evil, and baffled for want of that simple solution in a personal Devil.” The minister who spoke at Hawthorne’s graveside said simply, “I know of no other thinker or writer who had so much sympathy with the dark shadow, that shadow which the theologian calls sin….He seemed to be the friend of all sinners.”

  Robert Lowell, drawn to Hawthorne and his dark original work, took him as a subject in both his poetry and prose and adapted two of Hawthorne’s short stories for his play The Old Glory. He saw Hawthorne as a kindred spirit who, with Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, and other nineteenth-century writers, shaped the myth of New England. “It was then,” said Lowell, “that the great imaginative minds first clearly saw their heritage as something both to admire and fear.”

  “Hawthorne died depressed,” wrote Lowell. “Like Mallarmé and many another, he found life too long for comfort and too brief for perfection.” In a poem about Hawthorne, written a century after his death, Lowell wrote that Hawthorne’s “hard / survivor’s smile is touched with fire”:

  Even this shy distrustful ego

  sometimes walked on top of the blazing roof,

  and felt those flashes

  that char the discharged cells of the brain.

  ……………

  Leave him alone for a moment or two,

  and you’ll see him with his head

  bent down, brooding, brooding,

  eyes fixed on some chip,

  some stone, some common plant,

  the commonest thing,

  as if it were the clue.

  The disturbed eyes rise,

  furtive, foiled, dissatisfied

  from meditation on the true

  and insignificant.

  Ancestry, like all in life, was a source both of darkness and light. In “91 Revere Street,” Lowell contrasted the Puritan legacy left him by the early Lowells and Winslows with the lighter, more recent one of his great-great-grandfather Myers, someone who “had never frowned down in judgment on a Salem witch. There was no allegory in his eyes, no Mayflower. Instead he looked peacefully at his sideboard, his cut-glass decanters, his cellaret—.”

  Norman Mailer, who Lowell, his daughter, and numerous of Lowell’s friends believe captured Lowell’s personality and character uncannily well, better than anyone, wrote that one could see in Lowell the weight of family blood. And its privilege:

  The hollows in his cheeks give a hint of the hanging judge….The hollows speak of the great Puritan gloom in which the country was founded—man was simply not good enough for God….Lowell’s shoulders had a slump….One did not achieve the languid grandeurs of that slouch in one generation—the grandsons of the first sons had best go through the best troughs in the best eating clubs at Harvard before anyone in the family could try for such elegant note.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, daguerreotype, c. 1850

  “I cannot resilver the smudged plate.” Credit 7

  Robert Lowell gave off at times the unwilling haunted saintliness of a man who was repaying the moral debts of ten generations of ancestors. So his guilt must have been a tyrant of a chemical in his blood always ready to obliterate the best of his moods….Lowell was at the mercy of anyone he considered of value, for only they might judge his guilt, and so relieve the intolerable dread which accompanies this excessive assumption of the old moral debts of his ancestors.

  In 1850, the year that Robert Lowell’s great-great-grandmother Harriet Brackett Spence Lowell died insane in Boston, a violent storm swept across the Orkney Islands. Orkney, an archipelago of seventy islands and skerries off the northeastern coast of Scotland, was the birthplace of her father and her mother’s father and the home ground for her imagination. Now, in the year of her death, wild winds ripped the grass off the top of sand dunes above the bay on the main island of Orkney. Exposed beneath the dunes was a long-buried Neolithic village, a small grouping of stone houses. Five thousand years earlier the inhabitants of the village of Skara Brae had raised sheep and cattle, farmed, fished, and harvested seaweed. Their furniture was cut from local stone and included cupboards, storage chests, and dressers; there were indoor water tanks to keep limpets alive, perhaps for food or bait. The people of Skara Brae had lived in their small prehistoric village for six hundred years. When they abandoned Skara Brae—no one knows why—they left behind them pottery, ornamental beads and awls made from walrus and whale ivory, and intricately carved stone balls, used perhaps as gaming pieces or ritual items for worship. They left behind pieces of a small seaside world; they left behind questions, provoking and unanswerable.

  Skara Brae is a place that invites myth, one where imagination takes over. The Orkney poet George Mackay Brown wrote that all one knows of Skara Brae is “a few ambiguous scratches on a wall—a scattered string of beads.” It is a world with all things left unsaid, unwritten. It seems even now a place somehow beyond path or sail, beyond
understanding. Where did the first people of Skara Brae come from? Why did they leave? Perhaps they were in danger, perhaps disease had come or invaders threatened. They left behind jewelry and pottery that must have been of value to them. They left the trace of art.

  Had there been music as well at Skara Brae? Had there been a poet? Why had they left? Had the sea invaded their freshwater loch, spoiling what they needed to survive? Did they leave because they had to, or because someone imagined a better life somewhere beyond? Did they go inland or to sea? We don’t know. There are limits to knowledge, but none to imagination. We weave worlds, we fill in the comings and goings of left places. We fill in why some stay, others leave.

  Harriet Brackett Spence Lowell spoke often of her Orkney blood, conjured for her family the land of their Traill and Spence ancestors. In 1837 she traveled with her husband to see Orkney for herself. (Her great-great-grandson would do this more than a century later to see, as he put it, his “ancestral islands.” It was to the Traill-Spence bloodline, his Orkney ancestors, that Robert Lowell believed he owed a not inconsiderable part of his gift for poetry.) No one knew for certain why the Traills and Spences had left Orkney, or why they had come to New England. But Harriet Lowell kept close to her the island music and poetry that her parents and grandparents had sung and read aloud. She wove her own ancestry. She was descended, she said, from Sir Patrick Spens, the greatest of Scots sailors, whose final resting place was in Orkney. Or, if one believed the ballad, he lay fifty fathoms deep, drowned in a winter storm at sea. If in fact he had ever lived. What Lowell’s great-great-grandmother could not know, she imagined. Literature and music were always a part of this; they were in her blood. This she inherited from her parents and this, along with her mercurial moods and precarious grasp on reality, she passed on to her children.