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

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  Others were beginning to acknowledge his work. His advisor at Harvard said that there was “a sense of grandeur in his verse which can stand alone.” And Lowell made it clear that he meant to write: “The honor of earning one’s own living,” he wrote to his parents, “is a very small thing when set against the honor of writing lasting literature.” To his mother, when he was twenty, he wrote, “My vocation is writing and…if I should fail at that I should certainly fail in anything else: fail to make good and fail to gain happiness.” He was in no hurry for recognition, he wrote to a teacher: “I have no doubt in my ability to produce in the end.”

  Lowell set his course, but Harvard was not a part of it. It was not able to give him what he wanted; indeed, it gave him a great deal he did not want. His conflict with his parents and with their expectations for the correct Boston life he felt would keep him bogged and bound. (These expectations were held beyond his family; Lowell’s decision to leave Harvard was written up in the Boston newspapers.) Merrill Moore, who had finally gotten together with Lowell, was perceptive enough to see that his best choice was to leave Harvard and, at least for a while, to move away from New England. “We are dealing with a boy who has a personality like rock crystal, glittering, very hard, and very definite in its formation,” wrote Moore. “The longer I know Cal,” he said, “the greater respect for his personality I have.” In 1937 Moore wrote to his friend, the poet John Crowe Ransom, and asked him to take Lowell under his tutelage at Vanderbilt. “It is my opinion that Harvard is a very bad place for him on account of his family associations which irritate him and do not particularly help him,” he wrote to Ransom. Lowell, he said, was an extreme individual, a bit odd and ornery, but someone who had a gift for poetry. Ransom agreed to take Lowell on as a student, a tribute to Moore’s intuition and Ransom’s kindness.

  A year later, Moore wrote to Charlotte Lowell that her son’s poetry was “tight, compact, difficult but full of meaning and originality and psychologically subtle, very subtle.” He had become more and more convinced, he said, that Lowell was “a man of genius and that we will just have to adjust to him as he is.” Moore had gone from doctor to admirer and advocate, a long journey over a not-too-long period of time. “It looks as if our future job is going to be nursemaid for a famous poet,” Moore wrote to Lowell’s mother in January 1938. “If I am correct in this, then it behooves us to learn all we can about neurotic geniuses and their patterns of behavior and their difficulties just like one has to learn all about diabetes if one has to live with a diabetic.” The psychiatrist who a year earlier had met with Lowell’s parents to chart their wayward son’s future was now counseling them to give him a long lead. They did this, to an extent. Lowell, for his part, tried as well. Things were less fractious, but not intimate.

  —

  Time gentled Lowell’s view of his mother, although in a complicated and incomplete way. His letters to her moved from a combative tone to a gentler one, as if agreeing to look away from the things he knew had not worked or had been poisonous, as if recognizing she was still and after all his mother. She, in turn, extended more tenderness to him in the aftermath of his breakdowns. After his first hospitalization in 1949 she wrote, “I can well understand how you must feel, and admire your courage and wisdom….We have undoubtedly made many mistakes in your upbringing but we have always loved you and tried to help you and we always will….Our thoughts are often with you and I feel that when this is all over you will be much better than ever before.” She wrote to him with pride as his work gained recognition, and her pleasure in his dedication of an early book to her and in memory of his father is clear. “Nothing could have given me more pleasure than receiving your beautiful book ‘The Mills of the Kavanaughs,’ ” she wrote. “I feel greatly touched and honored by its dedication to me and in memory of Daddy. Your affection and thoughtfulness in doing this I shall always appreciate. I am really so pleased to have the book that I hardly know what to say.”

  In time Charlotte Winslow Lowell came to consider the possibility of her own culpability in their earlier, fraught relationship: “Time is so final, relentless and unforgiving,” she wrote to her son three years before she died. “If we could only have it over again, how much better we might do.” There had been “plenty of time for memories, regrets.” Acknowledging the pain her son had been through, she added, “Your own life has not been easy.”

  When his father died, Lowell slipped into his place, if partially, and in a less conflicted way. It was a slow circling around to a relationship with his mother that had less edge and more compassion, one sealed with the inescapable recognition of shared traits. “Most of our lives were weighed on each other like stones,” he wrote to Ezra Pound after his mother died. “But at the end [in the last ten months] we were in a funny way, speaking different languages, very close—the same metabolism, the same humor, the same boldness, and slowness.” In a late poem, “To Mother,” published more than twenty years after her death and in the year of his own, he wrote:

  It has taken me the time since you died

  to discover you are as human as I am…

  if I am.

  Lowell would return to New England at different times throughout his life to reroot and teach, to write, to marry and become a father, and to spend long summers with his wife and daughter. He would choose to be buried there, next to his father and mother; he would choose and select their epitaphs. Carved into his father’s gravestone, under the eagle and anchors of the United States Navy, are the last lines of “Where the Rainbow Ends,” the final poem in Lord Weary’s Castle. “Stand and live,” it reads. “The dove has brought an olive branch to eat.” “Where the Rainbow Ends” was the only poem read at Lowell’s own funeral nearly thirty years later.

  Lowell’s mother died in Italy in 1954, less than an hour before Lowell arrived to be with her. Her nurse told him of her final days: “She kept trying to heal the hemorrhage in her brain by calling for her twenty little jars and bottles with their pink plastic covers, and kept dabbing her temples with creams and washes.” “And always,” he added, in a nod to her now and again spartan ways, “her quick cold bath in the morning.”

  Lowell arranged an Episcopal service for his mother in Rapallo and picked out a “black and gold baroque casket…suitable for burying her hero Napoleon at Les Invalides.” It “was regal but flawed,” he wrote later. “The spelling of her name on the casket was incorrect, Lovel not Lowell.” She was still and sealed; he accompanied her body home.

  The day of their sailing the shoreline “was breaking into fiery flower,” a sight at far remove from the frozen ground and firs of New England. Lowell had a long time to think as he kept vigil over his mother’s coffin. “Mother, permanently sealed in her coffin, lay in the hold,” he wrote. “She was solitary, just as formerly, when she took her long walks by the Atlantic.” She had walked a lifetime; in more recent years during her September holidays in Mattapoisett and, thirty-seven years earlier, pregnant with her son, wishing that she were dead. Now, Charlotte Winslow Lowell “shone in her bridal tinfoil, and hurried homeward with open arms to her husband lying under the White Mountains.” It is a stunning and curious image.

  Lowell wrote about his mother’s death, as he did his father’s, in Life Studies. Traveling “first-class in the hold,” sealed in death and with her son in attendance, she sailed past the fiery banks and through the Mediterranean waters. She was on her way home to New England:

  While the passengers were tanning

  on the Mediterranean in deck-chairs,

  our family cemetery in Dunbarton

  lay under the White Mountains

  in the sub-zero weather.

  The graveyard’s soil was changing to stone—

  so many of its deaths had been midwinter.

  Dour and dark against the blinding snowdrifts,

  its black brook and fir trunks were as smooth as masts.

  A fence of iron spear-hafts

  black-bordered its mostly Colon
ial grave-slates.

  …………….

  Frost had given their names a diamond edge….

  In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother’s coffin,

  Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL.

  The corpse

  was wrapped like panettone in Italian tinfoil.

  On Charlotte Winslow Lowell’s gravestone, carved below the Winslow family crest, there is an epitaph chosen from another poem he had written: “Reserved and bracing lady,” the granite reads. “Buoyant now where time is love.”

  “The wheel is broken at the well,” the eighteen-year-old Lowell wrote in his poem “New England.” In the spring of 1937, he left that New England, and what he thought to be its brokenness, long enough to study and come into his own. But he did not leave it for long. Like Henry Adams, he had honed his instinct for resistance and reform; he had learned to fight for what he wanted and to write from what chafed him. He was twenty years old when he left New England. By the age of thirty he had exchanged Protestantism for Catholicism, anonymity for literary acclaim, and sanity for madness.

  5

  A Brackish Reach

  the bough

  Cracks with the unpicked apples, and at dawn

  The small-mouth bass breaks water, gorged with spawn.

  —From “After the Surprising Conversions”

  Lowell left Boston for Nashville in order to study with the poets John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate. It was more than clear, he wrote of his train ride south, that he was no longer in New England. The village greens and the North Atlantic, Boston and Cape Cod and Nantucket slid into a Tennessee countryside that was “plains of treeless farmland.” The pulverizing heat that “gushered” up over the concrete highway and “bombard[ed] the horizon.” It was like watching a Western, he said, “waiting for a wayside steer’s skull and the bleaching ribs of a covered wagon.” He was wearing “last summer’s mothballish, already soiled white linens, and moccasins, knotted so that they never had to be tied or untied.” His head was full of “Miltonic ambitions” and his suitcase “heavy with bad poetry.”

  The South to which he came was attuned to its own culture. Lowell became newly and differently aware that he was a New Englander: “I was Northern, disembodied, a Platonist, a Puritan, an abolitionist.” He was far from averse to finding himself in an opposing world, but more important, he was provided examples of how a poet and person ought to be. Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom tutored him in art and life. “Like a torn cat,” he would write later, “I was taken in when I needed help.”

  John Crowe Ransom, whose work and character early on commanded Lowell’s respect, gave him a long lead to pursue his poetry. Lowell would be judged by his writing and academic studies, not by the parental judgments he had found grating and impossible to live with. Given freedom to create, and literary standards to match his ambition, he opened up as a writer and person. Lowell found in Ransom the father and teacher he had desired but not had. Ransom understood where Lowell’s imagination could go and he was able to give him the structure, freedom, and affection that allowed his originality free yet disciplined movement. The affection went in both directions. “Lowell is more than a student,” Ransom wrote in a letter of recommendation, “he’s more like a son to me.” Twenty-five years after first meeting him, Lowell made his debt clear: “I often doubt if I would have survived without you. I was so abristle and untamed, nor would any discipline less inspired and kind than yours have held me.”

  Lowell spent the late spring and summer of 1937 in Tennessee and then enrolled in Kenyon College in Ohio, where Ransom had taken a faculty position. While at Kenyon he studied deeply in the classics, published several of his poems, and talked through the night with other students likewise in earnest about their work. Several of them, the short-story writer Peter Taylor, the poet Randall Jarrell, literary critic and poet John Thompson, and novelist and critic Robie Macauley, became friends for life. “How sad and serious we were,” said Taylor. “We wanted to be writers.”

  In April 1940 Lowell completed his undergraduate studies at Kenyon; he wrote to his parents what neither would have predicted from his flailing youth: “Dear Mother and Daddy,” he wrote. “Monday I graduated summa cum laude, phi beta kappa, highest honors in classics, first man in my class and valedictorian.”

  From the brashness of his adolescence, Lowell moved into a period of important writing, marriage, and the onset of severe manic illness. In 1940, shortly after he graduated from college, Lowell married the novelist Jean Stafford. Stafford, who became an acclaimed writer and received a Pulitzer Prize for her work, suffered repeated depressive breakdowns, attempted suicide, and was on several occasions hospitalized for implacable alcoholism. Lowell and Stafford fueled each other’s worst tendencies and in the process provoked corrosive mistrust and jealousy.

  Jean Stafford described Lowell as a man whose rages—more fierce than those he had experienced as a child and adolescent—terrified her. When she initially refused to marry him, she said, “he kept saying if I didn’t marry him he would just run the car off the road etc., so I said he could go to hell…and he got savage and I got scared, so I said well I will see you once more but only in the company of other people.” There is no question that Lowell could be frightening when he was manic, and Stafford was not alone in her fear of him when he was ill. He was powerful and tall, six foot one; when he was psychotic, it was hard for the police to constrain him; a smaller, unarmed woman had cause for fright. Stafford was no minimalist in putting her words together, however. “I had the tongue of an adder,” she wrote in an autobiographical short story about her relationship with Lowell; her heart, she said, was “black with rage and hate.”

  Lowell, Stafford wrote to a friend shortly before she decided to marry him, was “an uncouth, neurotic, psychopathic murderer-poet.” Lowell, writing later about their relationship as it drew to an end, spoke of its ill health: “Jean is mysterious and contradictory. We had an excruciatingly unpleasant meeting in which she said that she loved me and her one desire was to drive me wild.” The truth of any marriage is not fully given, even to those bound by its vows; certainly it is beyond the understanding of those who are not. But no one who knew them spoke to amity in the Lowell-Stafford marriage.

  The years between Lowell’s graduation from Kenyon College in 1940 and his first hospitalization for mania in 1949 were shot through with unrest. The fitful rages that punctuated his childhood and adolescence uncoiled into something more dangerous, although at times they came together into eruptively brilliant poetry. In December 1938 Lowell crashed his car into the wall of a cul-de-sac in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Stafford, who was in the passenger seat, was seriously injured and required repeated operations to repair her injuries, including a badly broken nose. She would suffer the physical and emotional aftermath of the accident for years. Although physically unhurt, Lowell was “thrown almost into a psychosis.” His moods swung wildly, continued his mother’s psychiatrist, ricocheting between inappropriate “hypomanic happiness,” “despair,” and a “state of hysteria.”

  There would be more violence associated with Lowell’s mental instability, usually in short-lasting, impulsive, seizure-like rages, most notably in the years before he was treated with lithium. In 1940, Lowell rebroke Stafford’s nose in an argument, and in December 1945, jealous, enraged, almost certainly manic, although not yet formally diagnosed as such, he tried to strangle her. This reportedly happened with two other women as well; he was to both of them “unrecognizable” in his manic rage. According to Stafford and to Lowell’s friend Frank Parker, she was dreaming of a former lover and spoke his name when Lowell woke her to make love. Lowell, in his long poem “The Mills of the Kavanaughs,” reimagined the incident:

  “Then I was wide

  Awake, and turning over. ‘Who, who, who?’

  You asked me, ‘tell me who.’ Then everything

  Was roaring, Harry. Harry, I could feel

  Nothing—it was so black—except your s
eal,

  The stump with green shoots on your signet ring.

  “I couldn’t tell you; but you shook the bed,

  And struck me, Harry. ‘I will shake you dead

  As earth,’ you chattered, ‘you, you, you, you, you….

  Who are you keeping, Anne?’

  ……….

  “ ‘Harry, I am glad

  You tried to kill me; it is out, you know;

  I’ll shout it from the housetops of the Mills;

  I’ll tell you, so remember, you are mad.’ ”

  In an earlier version of “The Mills of the Kavanaughs,” the husband spends the rest of the night rocking back and forth, much as Lowell’s mother had described him doing as a child, hours on end, waiting for “the blue of morning.” Lowell wrote his memory and remorse into verse of careful specificity. The signet ring was engraved with the “stump with green shoots,” the crest of the Winslows, his mother’s family. Its motto, “Cut down we flourish,” was carved deep into his grandfather’s ring; it was the seal of his Pilgrim fathers.

  —

  Lowell’s manic illness simmered in his youth, with outbursts of consuming anger and obsession, then progressed to manic psychosis in his early thirties. The pattern in his twenties was marked by focused zeal, dotted by fits of rage, diverted into an extended period of religious fervor. Lowell’s spiritual pilgrimage was neither surprising nor without benefit. He was by temperament inclined to impose a monastic structuring on his enthusiasms; he had done this with his childhood obsessions and during the novitiate summers in Nantucket. Cycles of excitement, disciplined pursuit, and enervation marked his life. It was no great surprise that he threw himself into Catholicism and, when incipiently mad, took his Catholicism to a psychotic extreme.