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

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  James Russell Lowell’s sister Rebecca inherited a more severe form of their mother’s illness. A neighbor and friend in Cambridge, the wife of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, referred to her as “mad,” a description given by several who knew her. Rebecca Lowell grew more violent as she grew older and, like her mother, intermittently remained silent for weeks on end. James Russell Lowell believed, as did many, that his sister had inherited their mother’s deranged mind and dark moods.

  The first Robert Traill Spence Lowell, born in 1816, was the brother of James Russell, Rebecca, and the writer and translator Mary Traill Spence. Educated as a physician and a priest, he served for a while as a missionary in Newfoundland. Then, he said, “I broke down.” He accepted the headmastership of St. Mark’s School in Massachusetts, where, sixty years later, during the 1930s, his great-grandson, Robert Lowell, would attend boarding school. Robert Traill Spence Lowell was an educator, classicist, and writer as well as a priest and a doctor. Although his literary reputation hovered in the shadow of his younger brother, James Russell Lowell, his first novel was widely acclaimed at the time of its publication and sold well. It was a book the poet Robert Lowell knew well, and in 1969 he visited Newfoundland, “the setting of my Grandfather’s [sic] longest and best loved novel, Priest of Conception Bay.” (It was a time in Lowell’s life for ancestral pilgrimage. Two years later, in 1971, he traveled to Orkney to visit the home of the Traills and Spences.)

  The first Robert Lowell also wrote two volumes of poems, a second novel, short stories, and hymns (including a Harvard commemoration hymn). None has come down through the years in association with anything but a gentle mediocrity, although his poem “The Relief of Lucknow” still makes its way into the occasional anthology, as does a short story, “A Raft That No Man Made.” “His poetry is forgotten,” wrote a critic, “and justly so.” But the same critic also said that “he was unquestionably a man of genuine, though minor, literary originality, a poet and a novelist who wrote to please himself and in so doing earned his own position in American literary history.”

  Little is known about the son of the first Robert Lowell, Robert Traill Spence Lowell II, except that he was born in Boston, died young at the age of twenty-six, and was a naval officer. He married the granddaughter of Mordecai Myers, a man whose “tame and honorable” life opens Life Studies, and they had one child, Robert Lowell III. He too was a naval officer. Born two months after his father’s death, he was, as his son the poet wrote, “at each stage of his life…forlornly fatherless.” Like his father, he had but one child, Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV, who was born in 1917 in the Boston house of his grandfather Winslow. The Lowell men had numbers after their names, but more often than not they were alone as they grew into them.

  Title page: The Poems of Robert Lowell.

  Published by Lowell’s great-grandfather in 1864. Credit 9

  Robert Lowell’s dominant maternal line, the Winslows, dated to the origins of New England. Through his mother he was a direct descendant of Mary Chilton, a young passenger on the Mayflower, who arrived twenty years before Percival Lowle settled to the north of Plymouth in the marsh and meadowlands near Plum Island Sound. She married John Winslow, who became one of Boston’s most prominent and wealthy men. His brother Edward Winslow had the more lasting influence on the history of New England, however. He was three times governor of Plymouth Colony, represented the interests of the colony in London, and became an active link between the colonists and the local Native American tribes.

  Edward Winslow was also a lucent writer. Together with William Bradford he wrote Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, an account of the Puritan settlement at Plymouth. Edward Winslow would come to know Plymouth in a way few would ever know it: he mapped and governed it, negotiated on behalf of its Puritan people, and put into words its starkness and beauty, its possibility.

  Bradford wrote of the founding of Plymouth during a time of peril in Of Plymouth Plantation: 1620–1647. His book, written in the beautiful language of the seventeenth century, left its mark on many New England writers including, three hundred years later, Robert Lowell. Bradford’s description of the seasons and tides of Cape Cod, the earth and sea cycles of want and abundance, fill his pages as with the song of Ecclesiastes. He describes the Mayflower’s sail into Cape Cod Bay and the hard welcome given to the Pilgrims: “They fell amongst dangerous shoals and roaring breakers, and they were so far entangled therewith as they conceived themselves in great danger; and the wind shrinking upon them withal, they resolved to bear up again for the Cape and thought themselves happy to get out of those dangers before night overtook them, as by God’s good providence they did. And the next day they got into the Cape Harbor where they rid in safety.” It is the language of Tyndale, anciently rooted and wrought in beauty.

  God gave them danger, then deliverance. The cycles of New England life pursued their relentless course: peril, then a measure of safe harbor; ice and gale-force storms, then “fair, sunshining days.” Fields and crops, “parched like withered hay,” seemingly dead, were brought back by rain in such abundance “as to revive and quicken the decayed corn and other fruits.” Death, renewal, resurrection—terror made bearable by the solace of faith: these were the rhythms of the natural world. They are as well the cycles of moods and imagination.

  Map of Plymouth Harbor

  “So uncertain are the mutable things of this unstable world.” Credit 10

  The ancient cycle of death, birth, death; the determining rhythms of season, tide, and crop; the killing winters and days fair, then foul: all come fresh in the writings of Bradford and Winslow. The peril was all-present—hurricane, disease, earthquake, starvation—but the bounty of New England was overflowing, a gift from God, a promise to those who might come. There are great oaks, they wrote, and pines, walnuts, beech, ash, birch, hazel, holly, aspen, sassafras in abundance and vines everywhere, cherry trees, plum trees, and many others that “we know not.” The water was the best they had known, and the brooks full of fish. They had cast their die, England was behind them, and Bradford could in all truth declare, “We are well weaned from the delicate milk of our mother country.” The small Plymouth colony had kept its faith in God but increased its wariness in the ways of nature.

  The historian Perry Miller believes that this “cry of the heart,” the recognition of the weaning of the colonists from England, “signals a point at which the English Puritan had, hardly with conscious knowledge, become an American, rooted in the American soil.” In “The Gift Outright,” a poem admired and anthologized by Robert Lowell, Robert Frost described this complex, evolving bond with the land:

  The land was ours before we were the land’s.

  She was our land more than a hundred years

  Before we were her people. She was ours

  In Massachusetts, in Virginia,

  But we were England’s, still colonials,

  Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,

  Possessed by what we now no more possessed.

  The spiritual commitment to place, to possession, specifically to New England, is of much weight. New England had been conceived as a chosen land and settled by a chosen people unshakeably beholden to God. Now they, and the settlers who came in later ships, were making a commitment to place as an idea, a covenant, a future. The land and the people had been chosen by Providence but, in making that choice, through the teachings of their faith, there was an account to be rendered. The accounting, the recurrent betrayal of origin and ideal, was a subject that found its way into Robert Lowell’s writing more than three hundred years later.

  New England would be a light, a beacon, a spirit, and an exemplar. It was to shine, as Bradford had said: “One small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone unto many, yea in some sort to our whole nation.” John Winthrop, later the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, spoke of this to his shipmates on their crossing from England to New England: “We shall find that the
God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, ‘may the Lord make it like that of New England.’ For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”

  New England, although assumed by the Puritans to be a place of privilege in the scheme of God, would be held to harsh, high standards as well. Privilege would not come without cost, nor failure without shame. The Puritan minister Peter Bulkeley, a founder of Concord and ancestor of Emerson, warned of this as early as 1646. New England had been given much but “no people’s account will be heavier than thine if thou do not walk worthy….The Lord looks for more from thee than from other people….Thou shouldst be a special people, an only people—none like thee in all the earth.” The Puritans had gouged out a life from the wilderness and established commerce and education in a land lashed by a harsh climate and disease. Their first years in the unknown world could not help but give rise to a myth that encouraged high dreams and rewarded risk. It guaranteed an unrealizable moral standard.

  As early as 1642, William Bradford decried the decay that had entered the life of Plymouth Plantation. “Wickedness did grow and break forth,” he wrote. For Bradford, the sinfulness among the Pilgrims was a betrayal of the Christian life and the promise of Plymouth Plantation. “It is now a part of my misery in old age, to find and feel the decay,” he wrote late in life. The Pilgrims had fled a corrupt faith only to risk corrupting their own. The force of the early Pilgrim ideal was drifting, diluting. So, too, the abundance of New England’s streams and rivers was being squandered. Bass and other fish that had once packed the waters of Cape Cod were becoming scarce. Few countries had had such an advantage, wrote an observer; more than fifteen hundred bass were known to have been taken in a single tide. Now, fish were fewer and game more scarce.

  The success of New England commerce and the growing population led to the corrosion of some values and an embalming or enshrining of others. “What had been a wondrous and intimate experience of the soul, a flash into the very crypt and basis of man’s nature from the fire of trial,” wrote James Russell Lowell in 1865, “had become ritual and tradition. In prosperous times the faith of one generation becomes the formality of the next.” The Puritans, he stated, “could not renew the fiery gush of enthusiasm when once the molten metal had begun to stiffen in the mould of policy and precedent.” His friend Henry David Thoreau said it as emphatically: “It is time we had done referring to our ancestors. We have used up all of our inherited freedom, like a young bird and the albumen in the egg. It is not an era of repose. If we would save our lives, we must fight for them.”

  The Puritan candle and beacon were less constant, less bright, but Puritanism, according to James Russell Lowell, had already done what it had set out to do: “As there are certain creatures whose whole being seems occupied with an egg-laying errand they are sent upon, incarnate ovipositors, their bodies but bags to hold this precious deposit, their legs of use only to carry them where they may most safely be rid of it, so sometimes a generation seems to have no other end than the conception and ripening of certain germs.” Puritanism, Lowell said, “believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.”

  Robert Lowell, more than a hundred years later, acknowledged the debt owed by democracy to the Puritans but added a darker tone when he addressed the particular reprehensibility of the abuse of moral authority by the educated and powerful against those less fortunate. “A century passes,” he wrote, and the Pilgrim “has grown twisted with subtlety, like the dark, learned, well-connected Cotton Mather…the Salem witch hanger [and] professional man of letters employed to moralize and subdue. His truer self was a power-crazed mind bent on destroying darkness with darkness, on applying his cruel, high-minded, obsessed intellect to the extermination of witch and neurotic. His soft, bookish hands are indelibly stained with blood.”

  The Winslows settled across New England; they cleared the land and killed in large numbers those whose land it had been. They governed and traded; they planted, defended, and profited. They wrote about their God and their pilgrimage. Their descendants were many and influential; so too were others of Lowell’s maternal ancestors, including Jonathan Edwards, the great eighteenth-century theologian whose work held such sway over Lowell’s imagination and poetry; Anne Hutchinson, the Puritan preacher, heretic, firebrand, and healer, was another.

  In 1668 Anne Hutchinson’s granddaughter married the son of John and Mary Chilton Winslow. Nearly two hundred and fifty years later, their descendant Charlotte Winslow married Robert Traill Spence Lowell III. In 1917, their son was born. The blood of Edward Winslow, Jonathan Edwards, and Anne Hutchinson joined that of the Lowells.

  Pedigree of the Winslow-Lowell families, drawn by Merrill Moore, M.D. Credit 11

  4

  This Dynamited Brook

  Resistance to something was the law of New England nature; the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance; for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition; the duty was unchanged. That duty implied not only resistance to evil, but hatred of it….The New Englander…had learned also to love the pleasure of hating.

  —Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

  “I grew up as an only child,” Lowell told a psychiatrist when he was nearly forty, “one that was always fighting off his parents and yet rejoiced at holding the center of the stage. I became stubborn, dreamy, silent, gauche, cold, furious, charming for brief moments, impenetrable.” He was awkward, he said, an albatross on land. He rebelled whenever and however he could, was harsh on his parents, harsh on himself. “I was girl-shy. Thick-witted, narcissistic, thuggish.” As young as four he consciously rebelled against his mother’s demands that he behave in ways he was not willing to: “I already felt the stirrings of revolt against my mother’s judgment; I already felt an attraction to what she rebuked or condemned; in her enemies, or at least in her castoffs, I always saw a possible ally of my own.”

  Lowell was disposed to resist force and disposed to use it. He was of a temperament to query and defy, to blast. His parents held to their certainty that emotion should be kept on a short lead and private; this made a collision of wills inevitable. The clash led to twenty years of conflict and showdown; it also tutored him in the art of wile and words. He learned early to spar and to defend his ground, to put his imagination to combative and restorative use.

  “Is there no way to cast my hook / Out of this dynamited brook?” Lowell asked in a poem written when he was in his twenties. Words and art were his way to recast, to throw a line into stiller, imagined waters. From the discord and his originality came Life Studies, a jolting portrayal of the pain, the quiet terror of disillusionment, the simmering rage and disenchantments of childhood. Dynamite, a word that finds its way into many of Lowell’s poems, has its uses. It provokes change, gives notice.

  Lowell’s mother kept a judgmental watch over him as long as she lived. She disapproved of much of what he did and how he did it. She held back her approval and seeded his life with her own discontent. When family tension approached the unbearable she brought all back to her bidding with bursts of hysteria. She had a will of iron, Lowell said, and a “haughtiness and chilliness” that “came from apprehension.” Boston was home in every way to her: “There was iron in the air for her will, taste in the drawing rooms,” wrote Lowell. “Wherever she turned in Boston, she met herself.” The toughness of Boston was tonic for all that was wrong, including the “misbegotten” years the Lowells spent in Washington when Lowell was a child. “What Bobby needs are bracing winters,” Charlotte Lowell declared of their navy-ordered years in exile, “and a daily walk around the Basin in Boston.”

  She resented her
husband, any place that was not Boston, and being pregnant with her only child. In the months before he was born, Lowell wrote, the only thing his mother enjoyed while his father was away at sea was “taking brisk walks and grieving over the fact that she was pregnant. She took pride in looking into the gray Atlantic and saying, without a trace of fear or illusion, ‘I wish I could die.’ ” His mother’s antipathy toward her unborn child sent Lowell, when he learned of it, on a journey of incomprehension. He came back to it time and again, in hospital after hospital, with psychiatrist after psychiatrist.

  “The patient states that when the mother first learned she was pregnant she said she wanted to die,” his Boston doctor wrote in 1957 in Lowell’s medical chart. A statement of like meaning can be found written in nearly every psychiatric history taken of Lowell. Indeed, when he was seen by a psychiatrist for the first time at the age of fifteen, there is a simple, unelaborated sentence in the doctor’s report: “He was an unwanted child.”

  Nearly fifty years later, Lowell was still thinking about, writing, and rewriting his mother’s words. In “Unwanted,” published a few months before he died, the psychiatrist asks: