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

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  “You know

  you were an unwanted child?”

  He knew:

  Mother,

  I must not blame you for carrying me in you

  on your brisk winter lunges…

  for yearning seaward, far from any home, and saying,

  “I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead.”

  Unforgivable for a mother to tell her child.

  That he had been unwanted cut Lowell. His mother’s grinding disapproval and her assault not only on his but his father’s will fueled defiance. When Lowell was hospitalized for depression at the Payne Whitney Clinic in 1949, his doctor wrote that Lowell had “all his life consciously rebelled against the mother for being disappointed in her ineffectual husband.” He had fought as well against his mother’s attempts to make him into a “conventional human being.” He had refused to learn to dance, Lowell told his doctor; likewise, he rejected her pleas to play cards or tennis, to dress well, or to cultivate the kind of socially prominent friends she thought suitable.

  Years later, during one of his many hospital admissions for mania, the psychological issues were the same. His basic issue with his mother, wrote his psychiatrist, “was not to be mastered by her.” This, the doctor believed, had extended into “a general fear of not being mastered by anyone.” His determination to escape his mother’s rule and to live life on his own terms motivated Lowell into near-monastic discipline and, in his psychiatrist’s words, put him on the course to “mastering learning.” And, it is clear, to mastering his own emotions. Mania, he told his doctor, allowed him to shatter the control. Rebellion flared, anger boiled over. When he was manic, he said, he could relive his battles with his mother and win them. It allowed him to vent his rage at being “fixed in society,” bound to the expectations of his social class; it allowed him to escape the “dreariness of being a Lowell.”

  Those who knew Charlotte Winslow Lowell said that she was incapable of accepting her husband and son as they were: one bland, the other raging. Lowell’s friends found her judgmental, cold, and controlling: “Charlotte was a Snow Queen who flirted coldly and shamelessly with her son,” wrote one. Another, a close friend of Lowell from boarding school, recalled her as “a monstrous woman, clinically monstrous.” Lowell’s wives agreed. His first wife, the writer Jean Stafford, referred to Charlotte Lowell as “Mrs. Hideous.” Elizabeth Hardwick, who knew Charlotte Lowell best and longer, said that in her presence “all the joy goes out of existence—there is not even a little corner left which you can fill up with affection or humor or respect or pleasure.”

  But Hardwick was kinder in her judgment of Charlotte Lowell than most who knew her, more circumspect in her overall assessment, perhaps because she knew Lowell’s mother when Lowell was older and less pulled into her grasping orbit. “In general Mrs. L. was much more insecure, hysterical, frightened than she has been made to appear,” she said at one point. “She was a thorn, but not a formidable thorn, if there is such a thing, rather a neurotically scratching presence.” She was “instinctively conventional.” “The thing about the Lowells,” Hardwick said, “was their unwavering gentility in conversation, manner of life. This gross, arguing couple [as portrayed by others], this domineering Clytemnestra is the most painful invention.”

  Charlotte Lowell was subject to hysteria, as her son noted in an autobiographical piece he wrote describing the time in 1924 when he, seven years old, and his parents lived in Washington. “Mother had lately been having dizzy spells. New naval people, a new city, and new child-problems made her hysterical.” In 1957 he told his doctor that his mother had been subject to “hysterical fainting spells” when he was young and that she had been “very unstable.” Low-grade hysteria occasionally flared into a full-blown attack. Her psychiatrist in Boston, Merrill Moore, described to a medical colleague an attack Charlotte Lowell experienced in 1937 when Lowell was twenty years old: “She went into a hypnotic trance. She was in a complete state of hysterical dissociation and as far as the world was concerned was unconscious.” She could not be awakened, despite loud noises and painful stimuli. It was, he said, “just like a demonstration from Charcot.” A few days later Moore wrote to another colleague, “I think that she can become so disturbed that she herself may go into a mild hysterical semi-psychotic state and may need to have a nurse or go to a mental hospital.” Lowell’s father was sufficiently concerned to contact several psychiatric and neurological specialists at Harvard about his wife’s condition.

  Ten years earlier, Moore said, when Lowell was ten years old, she had had a similar episode following an emotional family scene. After fainting and an extended period of unconsciousness, “she came to with a complete amnesia for the entire episode.” She was, he added, “as interesting and simply dissociated a personality as anybody Dr. Janet could ever have described.” It does not appear that Moore ever formally diagnosed Charlotte Lowell, although he wrote in her medical records, two weeks prior to her hysterical episode in 1937, that she was “slightly manic.”

  Charlotte Lowell wrote poetry on occasion, especially after her son’s writing moved into the public eye. She appears to have written most of her poems for her psychiatrist, whose opinion of their quality and psychological meaning is not discernible. Her poetry does not stun the reader with its originality or beauty, but its content—the importance of art, the ubiquity of suffering, suicide, the sense of being alienated and misunderstood, is of interest. Lowell’s mother, who was referred to as Lady Macbeth by more than one who knew her, was well known for her preoccupation with social class and power. Her cutting ambition—however much an overlay to her insecurity and acknowledged incapacity to love—was a subject of conversation for Lowell’s friends and for Lowell himself. At one point Charlotte Lowell wrote a poem for Dr. Moore based on Macbeth’s speech to his wife’s doctor. Shakespeare had written:

  Macbeth

  How does your patient, doctor?

  Doctor

  Not so sick, my lord,

  As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies

  That keep her from her rest.

  Macbeth

  Cure her of that.

  Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,

  Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

  Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

  And with some sweet oblivious antidote

  Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff

  Which weighs upon the heart?

  Doctor

  Therein the patient

  Must minister to himself.

  Charlotte Lowell was concerned with the healing of the mind—she read deeply in psychology and psychiatry and assisted Moore with his psychiatric practice—albeit more with what the doctor could do than what the patient must. She rendered her own Macbeth:

  Has Byrnam Woods then come to Dusmane Hill?

  Do witches with black magic try to kill?

  Ah no; Tis but a poets [sic] pretty thought

  To light a darkness, cheer a mind distraught.

  Be lyon mettled proud and take your share

  For he who frets[,] psychiatry will care

  And even though life be a scorching flame

  We thank the ones who help us play the game.

  It is not surprising that mother and son alike, fascinated as they were by power and control, by the kings and tyrants of Shakespeare, were drawn to the life of Napoleon. For an entire year Charlotte Lowell took on the habits of the French emperor: she insisted on sleeping on an army cot, took cold plunges in the morning, and, in behavior not without psychoanalytic interest, began calling her father “Napoleon.” Once she threw a hairbrush at a maid for turning on the bedroom radiator before noon. Through this and other means, observed Lowell, she “learned how to lead her father: she only pretended to let him dominate.”

  As a young boy Lowell, too, was fixated on Napoleon. He compiled an extensive library of books about him and put together a collection of notebooks, crammed tight with troop strengths, t
he names of the French commander’s marshals and subordinate officers, battles won and lost, and the capture and surrender of regimental eagles. The psychiatrist who saw Lowell when he was fifteen years old wrote that Lowell had “a mania about Napoleon” and that he had insisted upon taking twenty-one books about Napoleon with him when the family went away on summer vacation.

  When he was a boy, Lowell said, his mother had read to him about their hero:

  And I, bristling and manic,

  skulked in the attic,

  and got two hundred French generals by name,

  from A to V—from Augereau to Vandamme.

  I used to dope myself asleep,

  naming those unpronounceables like sheep.

  Lowell’s interest in Napoleon persisted; years later, when he was manic, Lowell identified delusionally with Napoleon. His attraction to force and military genius, especially during periods of manic excitement, was not uncomplicated, and the implications of the attraction were to prove disturbing not only to Lowell but to some of those who knew him. Years after his youthful fixation on Napoleon had come and gone Lowell would reflect on the dangers of unchecked power:

  for uprooting races, lineages, Jacobins—

  the price was paltry…three million soldiers dead,

  grand opera fixed like morphine in their veins.

  Dare we say, he had no moral center?

  All gone like the smoke of his own artillery?

  Lowell’s fascination with Napoleon continued until the late years of his life, at times reassuming a manic obsessiveness. Jonathan Raban described Lowell, well into his fifties, providing a nearly real-time reenactment of Napoleon’s battles: “Cal came down and sat on my carpet and traced out the battles. I have had almost every major battle that Napoleon ever conducted demonstrated to me in detail on the carpet…with Cal taking all the parts. And they were incredibly boring, and you just ached for him to show some semblance of normalcy.”

  Lowell’s ties to his father were differently fraught from those to his mother. He rose up against his mother to preserve his identity and battled his father, whom he believed had capitulated to his mother. He wrote of his father, whose own father had died before he was born, that he “was half orphaned…such a son / as the stork seldom flings to ambition.” Lowell’s father, decidedly not flung to ambition, was a naval officer and an engineer educated at Annapolis, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His military career was no Napoleonic calling: “His ivory slide rule,” wrote his son, “protruded from a pigeonhole of the desk, where it rested in its leather case, as handy as some more warlike householder’s holstered revolver.” He was subject not only to the orders of his commanding officer but to those of his wife. She was clear that she was neither born nor bred to be a navy wife, nor was she transportable. Naval barracks were not Beacon Hill and postings away from Boston were postings away from civilization. She did not take well to the life she had agreed to. Her husband yielded, her son watched. Both simmered.

  Lowell watched his mother hollow out his father’s will, cringed as she demanded that he leave the navy. His father became, as his son later would describe himself, an albatross on land: city bound, a stranger to the sea, a stockbroker with few clients and fewer assets. As a promising young naval officer his “life had opened out utterly to him,” Lowell said of his father; he had possessed a “buccaneer imagination.” Now, drifting in the civilian world, his employers “were afraid of his heart condition and quite astonished by a certain beaming inattentive languor.”

  “Why doesn’t he fight back?” his son asked. “Why doesn’t he fight back?” There was no good answer. “In his forties,” Lowell wrote, his father’s soul “went underground: as a civilian he kept his high sense of form, his humor, his accuracy, but this accuracy was henceforth unimportant, recreational, hors de combat….In the twenty-two years Father lived after he resigned from the Navy, he never again deserted Boston and never became Bostonian.”

  “Mrs. Lowell,” her daughter-in-law Elizabeth Hardwick said, “got Mr. Lowell to retire—and I think [his son] found this unforgivable. There was nothing for him to do…he began to draw into himself…he’d lost his nerve, so to speak.” Hardwick, like most who knew him, spoke of Mr. Lowell’s affability and intelligence, his emptiness, his surrender. His son, she said, thought that his father “didn’t know who he was” and there was in this something that he “minded terribly.” “Mr. Lowell,” she added, was also “a bit frightened” of his son. “Having this large, somewhat bumbling young man around the house was quite bewildering to him.”

  To his psychiatrists, Lowell described his father as “constantly belittled” by his mother. He was an “affectionate, but distant and ineffectual man—shy, uncertain, and inadequate.” Yet, Lowell always added, his father was also “gentle and considerate.” He was “quiet and humorous, a man of good tastes but completely overpowered by my mother.” He disdained his father’s passivity but extended to him an affection and pity he could not to his mother. (Throughout his life, when corresponding to his parents, he would address them as “Mother” and “Daddy,” respectively.) “I was like Father, but not so marked and tried to be just the opposite.”

  “We were all born with hardening arteries.” Lowell wrote about himself and his parents: “Our drives ran in grooves. Mother wanted to live in Boston, and be a daughter. Father wanted to live on his battleship, and be a bachelor just about to announce his engagement. I wanted to live at Rock [his grandfather’s farm] twelve months of the year. I wanted to be the Napoleon of my daydreams, an orphan who lived on a trust fund, a fisherman who lived on fish that cooked themselves.”

  Lowell told his doctors that his father seemed to him to be depressed—there was, as he wrote in “Near the Unbalanced Aquarium,” an “inattentive languor that had been growing on him for years”—and that his mother had been sufficiently concerned to consult a psychiatrist about his depression. After his father died, Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Bishop that his father had not been a “suffering or heroic man.” But, he said, there was “at least one great might-have-been—a first-rate Naval career. The death seems almost meaningless, as is perhaps always the case when the life has long resigned itself to a terrible dim, diffused pathos.” The border between demoralization and depression is a porous one.

  Lowell’s father wrote to him with less obvious emotion than his mother did, but he injected into his letters the details of places and people he had seen. Specificity, not expressiveness, marks his writing. He described the Peabody Museum in Salem: “I think you would like the Museum, it houses the East India Marine Society…they brought back archeological & marine exhibits, and perfectly fascinating ship models.” The Natural History of the Essex Institute, he continued, “with all the fish & birds & snakes & other stuffed animals—you would thoroughly love it.”

  He looked forward, he said, to showing his son the museum and taking him to lunch. It is a dry and literal letter, but considerable affection comes through. At Christmas, he thanked his son for a knife: “I liked the way it was done up, with the interesting Xmas paper, & the stars you pasted on, like the Southern Cross—which incidentally is about the only constellation you can see in the Southern hemisphere.” Unlike his wife, for whom emotional expression was paramount, if problematic, and abstractions such as “Boston” were all, Lowell’s father kept his words and ideas more grounded. “Talking with Daddy before bed was different,” observed his son. “There was no magic phrase, like let’s go back to Boston, that would have made my Father happy.”

  His father wrote about the sea and the natural world better than he did about people and emotions, but his eye for the specific in the world made its way into his son’s writing. If his father’s words lack complexity or stay too long in the light, if they are at variance with his mother’s more emotion-rich language, then that is not inconsistent with Lowell’s own contradictory nature. “Somehow it’s hard to write very fully, or interestingly or honestly about personal matte
rs,” he wrote to Elizabeth Bishop. “I always feel my Mother’s moralizing wrestling with my father’s optimism. Almost from birth I decided they were both wrong and the truth lay elsewhere. Then from time [to time] I talk like both of them at once.”

  Lowell’s views of his father, like those he had of his mother, gentled over time; perhaps he was more aware of human frailty—theirs and his—and the limits of personality and character. In “Middle Age” he looked to his own life in the light of his father’s:

  At forty-five,

  what next, what next?

  At every corner,

  I meet my Father,

  my age, still alive.

  ……

  You never climbed

  Mount Sion, yet left

  dinosaur

  death-steps on the crust,

  where I must walk.

  Twenty-five years after his father’s death, Lowell wrote a short recognizance, “To Daddy.” Life was more complicated, his father more complicated and protecting, than he had thought when young:

  I think, though I didn’t believe it, you were my airhole,

  and resigned perhaps from the Navy to be an airhole—

  that Mother not warn me to put my socks on before my shoes.

  From childhood, Lowell felt himself to be of a different tribe from his parents. He began in their world, took it in sparingly, fought it, and re-formed it into something neither conventional nor quiet. It was as if a goose had been born to a mallard pair, the ducks ill-suited to each other but of like look, common expectation, and uncritical respect for the boundaries laid down by others. Lowell did not fit; he was ungainly, restless, wild, thrashing, brash, irritable, contrary, and discontented with the boundaries of his home waters. He grew, his wings scraped. He was clumsy, broody. Boundaries were not inviolable, he knew this instinctively; they were to be crossed and renavigated. Routes were anything but set; they needed to be found, redrawn, renamed. Flight itself was different, its dangers were his, his destination different: “There were no tickets for that altitude,” he would write. His parents, knowing no subtler way, pressed hood and fetter; he shook his way out. He would write throughout his life of free flight and sailing, bubbles and balloons, stairs, mania, and all things leading out of restraint and darkness. Here, from “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow”: