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

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  Religious conviction was at times a sedating influence on Lowell; at others, it was a symptom of his mania or a propellant to it. Religious images and devotional practice were natural metaphors for Lowell, a way to make sense of his intense ecstasies and put them to use; the Church provided a rich, ancient, and complex language. Catholicism lived in history; its coinage was sin and redemption, the promise of rebirth. It was a metaphysical system uniquely able to hold and give language to Lowell’s imagination and the involutions of his mind. As Elizabeth Hardwick put it, religion was a “vast, valuable museum.”

  The Episcopal Church in which Lowell had been raised, and the Calvinist heritage of his Puritan ancestors, had been his settled fare; the latter, Lowell would argue later, was not so distant from Catholicism. “I was born a non-believing Protestant New Englander,” he told Ian Hamilton. “My parents and everyone I saw were non-believing Protestant New Englanders. They went to church, but faith was absurd. In college, I began reading Hawthorne, Jonathan Edwards, English seventeenth-century preachers, Calvin himself, Gilson, and others, some of them Catholics—Catholics and Calvinists I don’t think opposites; they are rather alike compared to us in our secular sprawl. From zealous, atheist Calvinist to a believing Catholic is no great leap.”

  A friend who was introduced to Lowell at the time of his conversion to Catholicism agreed that Lowell’s leap from Protestantism to Catholicism was not as great as it might have seemed: “Though his immediate ancestors were either agnostic or pale and proper Episcopalian, he had in his bones the Yankee Calvinistic sense of original sin, of the iniquity of man and of himself. His literary ancestors were Hawthorne and Melville, not Emerson or Whitman; his Catholicism was Augustinian and Pascalian, not any of the softer Counter-Reformation varieties.” Calvinism and Catholicism were to be a generative mix for Lowell and for his writing.

  In the late fall of 1940 Lowell took instruction in Catholicism. It was a critical time in his life, one that he remembered more than thirty-five years later in a letter to the priest who had shepherded him through. “I remember well your long patient explanations to me of catechism,” he wrote. “The books we discussed, I still have. You were a road over a dark stream….I turned out to be a poet, and so it continued.” Lowell read deeply and broadly in Catholic theology—Aquinas, Newman, Hopkins, Étienne Gilson—and for an extended period in Lowell’s twenties the Roman Church became the axis upon which turned his work and relationships. It offered an inner world of principle, certainty, and order; it contained enough complexity to accommodate the subtlety and ferocity of his thinking.

  Lowell described to his psychiatrist what he saw as the links between his religious beliefs, his life, and his poetry: “When I first married, I had some of the usual dreams: house, children, career etc.; but mostly I thought of setting myself to read and write works that would astonish. Society would be a little group of sympathizers and masters. This wasn’t enough. I discovered the Catholic Church, for me another mobile inner world, one that connected with the real world and was pleasantly critical of it. I tried to convert my wife. I read more books. After a while religion and poetry came together, and after a lapse of two years I started writing again and with more power and coherence. In my life religion was largely reading polemic, going to mass, but things had more order, or in a more orderly fashion I was even fiercer against the world. In the third year of my marriage I boiled over.”

  Lowell was received into the Catholic Church in March 1941. He was ardent and insistent, not to say fanatical in the practice of his new religion. He declared that his earlier marriage to Stafford was invalid and that they must remarry in the Catholic Church, which they did. He insisted on Mass at six thirty each morning, grace before and after meals, two rosaries a day, benediction in the evening, and confession. He told Stafford that they could no longer read newspapers, nor could they read any novels except those by Proust, James, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky. Otherwise, these two omnivorous readers and intellectuals were to read only books of faith. They would go to no movies unless approved by the Church censor.

  “It’s what he’s been destined for from the start,” wrote Peter Taylor to a mutual friend. “He’s literally hunted down the most complete sort of orthodoxy; and once he found it, I must say, he gobbled it up as only Cal can gobble—day and night in an earnestness that approaches perversion.”

  Six months after Lowell’s conversion to Catholicism he and Stafford moved to New York to work at a publishing house specializing in Catholic writers. There he pursued a life of monastic purity and poverty, becoming in the process a “veritable messiah.” He was determined to “lead us all out of the paths of sin and war,” said the publisher’s business manager. His asceticism and zeal continued apace; his writing followed at a distance. In the winter of 1942 Lowell and Stafford moved from New York to Tennessee to share a house with Allen Tate and his wife, the writer Caroline Gordon. There Lowell wrote many of the poems that would go into his first book, Land of Unlikeness, which would be published in 1944.

  Catholicism was constituent to his writing. “I think becoming a Catholic convert had a good deal to do with writing again,” Lowell told the poet Frederick Seidel. “I was much more interested in being a Catholic than in being a writer. I read Catholic writers but had no intention of writing myself. But somehow, when I started again, I won’t say the Catholicism gave me subject matter, but it gave me some sort of form, and I could begin a poem and build it to a climax. It was quite different from what I’d been doing earlier.” Lowell’s pattern of work—a driven, high-enthusiasm state, characterized by a rush of ideas and a mass of fragmentary writing that led, on occasion, to a shift in poetic form, followed by exhaustive revision—was to be a thread throughout his life.

  Land of Unlikeness was widely and well reviewed. The poet and critic Randall Jarrell predicted that Lowell would write some of the best poems in the years to come. “In a day when poets aspire to be irresistible forces,” he wrote, Lowell had become “an immovable object.” He was “a rock in the stream that would have to be reckoned with.”

  The United States was at war during the time that Lowell and Stafford were living and writing in Tennessee. Lowell volunteered on several occasions for military service but was rejected because of his poor eyesight. After the United States demanded Germany’s unconditional surrender, and following the Allied bombings of Hamburg in 1943 that razed the city and killed tens of thousands of civilians, Lowell stated that he no longer supported the American war effort. He sent a “Declaration of Personal Responsibility” to President Roosevelt; he also mailed copies of his statement to major newspapers, friends, and family members. Lowell gave his reasons for refusing military service: “Members of my family had served in all our wars since the Declaration of Independence,” he wrote to the president. “Our tradition of service is sensible and noble; if its occasional exploitation by Money, Politics and Imperialism is allowed to seriously discredit it, we are doomed….By demanding unconditional surrender we…[declare] that we are prepared to wage a war without quarter or principles, to the permanent destruction of Germany and Japan.

  “No matter how expedient I might find it to entrust my moral responsibility to the State,” he continued, “I realize that it is not permissible under a form of government which derives its sanctions from the rational assent of the governed.” He could not “honorably participate in a war whose prosecution, as far as I can judge, constitutes a betrayal of my country.”

  It was a statement of conscience, one offered as a Catholic conscientious objector, not as a pacifist, and, as he knew it would, the declaration made newspaper headlines across the country. He was arraigned and sentenced to a year and a day at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut. He served a shortened sentence of five months and was released on parole, a convicted felon.

  While awaiting transfer to Danbury, Lowell was incarcerated for ten days at the West Street Jail in New York. His poem “Memories of West Street and Lepke” w
as published in Life Studies in 1959. In it he alludes to his letter to President Roosevelt and to his own mental state:

  These are the tranquillized Fifties,

  and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?

  I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,

  and made my manic statement,

  telling off the state and president.

  If it was a manic statement, and certainly there were signs of early mania at the time, it was not past the bounds of reason.

  Refusing to serve in World War II was the first of several high-profile political actions that Lowell took during his lifetime, most notably his protests against the Vietnam War. Being a conscientious objector during World War II went against the grain of public opinion, but Lowell’s decision was generally seen as a matter of principle. “No one,” he wrote to Peter Taylor, “has questioned my sincerity.”

  Lowell’s Catholicism took on a deepening manic tint. While jailed at Danbury he attempted to organize the inmates into a strict Catholic community; as in the novitiate Nantucket summers of his earlier devising, they were to follow monastic rules. Not surprisingly, his calling lacked appeal. His letters to Stafford were filled with religious obsession. He had become “so fanatical,” she wrote to Peter Taylor, “so insanely illogical that our conversations and his letters could be written into a case history of religious mania.” Lowell, she said, bore no resemblance to the person she had met. After her husband’s release from Danbury, Stafford wrote to Taylor again, concerned about what appears to have been a hysterical seizure she had witnessed in Lowell. “He had a terrifying seizure of some sort in church last Sunday and I thought he was going to faint at the communion rail.”

  Lowell, still obsessed with Catholicism, began writing poetry again, including many of the poems for Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), a book dominated by themes of a fallen New England, moral decay, retribution, and the unforgiving Puritanism of his ancestors. He wrote of the complex burden of heritage and of the dark, ambiguous grace of God. The battle raged between Calvinism—the New England Protestantism that he had known longest and breathed most deeply—and the Catholicism that as an adult he had taken to heart and mind. That clash entered into his work violently and unforgettably in the poems of Lord Weary’s Castle, poems, said John Crowe Ransom, that were “written”; that is, written to stay. Poems of ambition.

  Nantucket survey map by Henry David Thoreau

  “A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket,—

  The sea was still breaking violently.” Credit 13

  “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” a long poem at the heart of Lord Weary’s Castle, is an elegy of blood force written by Lowell for his cousin who died at sea in World War II. The energy of the poem is coiled, unstable, and manic in its fury. It is beholden to “Lycidas,” Milton’s great lament for a young man drowned at sea, and to Melville’s Moby-Dick; an early version of the poem is titled “To Herman Melville.” But it owes a debt as well to the Old Testament, Henry David Thoreau, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and a life’s immersion in literature. The poem is Homeric in force, mythic in scale, and spelled by the violence of God and North Atlantic waters. It is the battleground for the contrasting forces that defined Lowell’s mind as a young poet.

  The North Atlantic fleet of Lowell’s poem merges with the whaleboats of Ahab, man and men in blind, maddened pursuit. “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” offers little consolation; there is ambiguity in God’s plans and limits on man’s will. Dense, vehement, driven by a manic rhythm, the poem is suffused with an impenetrable, dark ecstasy. The raw force of killed whale and killing whaler, death-lance, and harpoon, bones crying out for blood; rage and slaughter against sanctuary and singing stars; its violent, rhythmic power packs his verse:

  The bones cry for the blood of the white whale,

  The fat flukes arch and whack about its ears,

  The death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears

  The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail,

  And hacks the coiling life out: it works and drags

  And rips the sperm-whale’s midriff into rags,

  Gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather,

  Sailor, and gulls go round the stoven timbers

  Where the morning stars sing out together

  And thunder shakes the white surf.

  The poem, as Seamus Heaney said, is one where “the percussion and brass section of the language orchestra is driven hard and…the string section hardly gets a look in.” (“I got drunker and drunker with the sea,” wrote Lowell. “I put all my chips on rhythm, more than I have ever done since.”) Energies and images are flung upward and downward. “Their boats were tossed / Sky-high”; “sea wings, beating landward, fall / Headlong”; “upward angel, downward fish”: all is perturbed and heaving. Lowell’s poem draws upon specific images from Henry David Thoreau, a fellow New Englander with whom Lowell shared a pull toward opposition, a draw toward the easeful writing moods of summer, and a beholdenness to the cycles of the natural world. They wrote books structured around the seasons and revised unendingly. They were steeped in the classics, at ease in imagining across history. They aimed high. “My desire,” said Thoreau, is “to bear my head through atmospheres and heights unknown to my feet.” The desire was “perennial and constant.” They were willing to go to jail for their political beliefs. Renewal, as sewn into the cycles of the natural world, was more than metaphor to Lowell and Thoreau; it sang in their nerves.

  In “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” Lowell drew upon Thoreau’s observations of the carnage from a shipwreck on Cape Cod that had drowned more than 140 people. Thoreau described the scene:

  I saw many marble feet and matted heads as the cloths were raised, and one livid, swollen, and mangled body of a drowned girl,—who probably had intended to go out to service in some American family,—to which some rags still adhered, with a string, half concealed by the flesh, about its swollen neck; the coiled-up wreck of a human hulk, gashed by the rocks or fishes, so that the bone and muscle were exposed, but quite bloodless,—merely red and white,—with wide-open and staring eyes, yet lustreless, dead-lights; or the cabin windows of a stranded vessel, filled with sand.

  “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” begins:

  A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket,—

  The sea was still breaking violently and night

  Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet,

  When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light

  Flashed from his matted head and marble feet,

  He grappled at the net

  With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs:

  The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites,

  Its open, staring eyes

  Were lustreless dead-lights

  Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk

  Heavy with sand. We weight the body, close

  Its eyes and heave it seaward whence it came.

  There is a debt to content and image, but the poetry lives in the changes.

  Thoreau, looking at the wreckage on the beach and in the sea, had found it more disquieting to imagine the death of one individual than many. “If I had found one body cast upon the beach in some lonely place, it would have affected me more,” he wrote. Instead, “I saw that corpses might be multiplied, as on the field of battle, till they no longer affected us in any degree, as exceptions to the common lot of humanity.” It is, Thoreau concluded, “the individual and private that demands our sympathy.” Although death—of man and beast, of good, of innocence—scores Lowell’s poem, the death of one man, his cousin Warren Winslow, is the subject of the elegy. The individual would continue to be at the center of his work.

  “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” ends as it begins, with apocalyptic winds and high seas; there is violence in the forming of life as well as in its taking, beauty in the intimation of hope, although the beauty is uncertain. In Genesis, God had placed the rainbow in the sky as his compact with man. “
I do set my bow in the cloud,” declared the Lord. “And it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.” It is the promise of God: “The waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.”

  Lowell’s God is more ambiguous, the covenant darker:

  You could cut the brackish winds with a knife

  Here in Nantucket, and cast up the time

  When the Lord God formed man from the sea’s slime

  And breathed into his face the breath of life,

  And blue-lung’d combers lumbered to the kill.

  The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.

  Robert Lowell in 1946

  “The voice is vibrant enough to be heard, learned enough to speak with authority, and savage enough to wake the dead.” Credit 14

  Medication records for Robert Lowell, 1957

  “My round-the-clock injections…left shoulder, right shoulder, right buttock, left buttock. My blood became like melted lead.” Credit 15

  III

  ILLNESS

  The Kingdom of the Mad

  At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,

  blossoms on our magnolia ignite

  the morning with their murderous five days’ white.

  All night I’ve held your hand,

  as if you had

  a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad—