Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character
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With what gratitude I look back on Europe for the first time….Antwerp and Ghent: what wonderful names, he said, hard as the heavy cobbles in the square. Amsterdam, a city of readers. All night long you seemed to hear the turning of pages….Those fair heads remembered Ovid, Yeats, Baudelaire and remembered suffering, hiding, freezing. The weight of books and wars.
Lowell had been insistent they settle in Amsterdam: “It is quiet and still—as far as the outer world goes, I guess it has been still since the seventeenth century, when it was at the full tide, a baroque, worldly, presbyterian, canal-and-brick, glorious Boston.” He read “gobs of Italian, German, French and Latin poetry, Greek, French and Turkish history, and art books, till my head rocks, as though it held the lantern-slides of the world.”
In the summer of 1952, Lowell and Hardwick went to Salzburg, where he taught in a conference on American studies. By most accounts he taught dazzlingly well, and then too dazzlingly well. He “got very wound up,” in Hardwick’s words: he was euphoric, voluble, goading, impulsive. He fell in love with an Italian music student. He disappeared from the castle where the conference was being held and had to be tracked down to the German border, where he had wandered off alone. He talked excitedly and ceaselessly from evening into the early morning hours. He wore out those whose company he kept.
The director of the seminar, Shepherd Brooks, described the scene at the castle after Lowell had become overtly manic. Police cars swarmed everywhere; it was chaos. “All the faculty were at one end of the castle,” said Brooks. “At the other Professor Lowell was on the top floor surrounded by police…barricaded in his room and wouldn’t come out.” When Brooks went into Lowell’s room, “Cal [was] wearing just a pair of shorts, looking wild and terribly strong, and charged with adrenaline.”
Lowell was taken, talking fast, furious, incessantly, incoherently, to the American Army Hospital in Salzburg; from there he was transferred to the U.S. Army Hospital in Munich. It was a harrowing, exhausting experience for those in the car with him. Reality is an early casualty of mania. “It was extraordinary,” recounted Brooks. “He was creating his own reality and then responding to it, and everyone else had to go along with it.” Sleep is another casualty of mania, not only for those who are manic but for those who find themselves in their fellowship. Depression, Lowell once said, is an illness for oneself, mania an illness for one’s friends. His friends came to know this well.
Hardwick, distraught by the recurrence of Lowell’s mania and by being on the receiving end of the sharp-tongued, cruel remarks that so often spewed out during it, wrote to friends during Lowell’s stay in the Army Hospital in Munich: “I pity Cal from the bottom of my heart, and I fear for him in every way. Even though he’s still in a closed ward, they let me see him….I don’t dare to tell them that I can hardly bear it for more than five minutes. I find responding extremely difficult and he sees that. He torments me, apparently so far as I can tell trying to provoke tears or an argument….I don’t know how to respond for his own good.” She added the fear that would come to haunt them both: “What tomorrow holds no one knows.”
Lowell’s stays in the U.S. Army Hospital in Munich and the Bellevue Sanatorium in Switzerland, where he was transferred, were relatively short, less than a month. The doctors attributed this to the sudden onset of his mania, generally more treatable than one with a more insidious course, as well as his willingness to go into the hospital sooner rather than later. The mania was nonetheless crushing for them both. Lowell was “terrified of such a thing ever happening again,” said Hardwick. He was “utterly heart-broken…shattered and ashamed.” Her hopes for him and their marriage lay in “how much courage he has.”
Lowell was given a course of six or seven electroshock treatments in the U.S. Army Hospital in Munich; as it had in Baldpate Hospital, the electroshock therapy stopped his mania. With the passing of not much time, his stay in the hospital and the electroshock treatment moved from experience into verse:
“Oh mama, mama, like a trolley-pole
sparking at contact, her electric shock—
the power-house!…The doctor calls our roll—
no knives, no forks. We file before the clock,
and fancy minnows, slaves of habit, shoot
like starlight through their air-conditioned bowl.
It’s time for feeding. Each subnormal boot-
black heart is pulsing to its ant-egg dole.”
In a letter to his mother after his Salzburg breakdown, Lowell gave credit to Hardwick for helping avert a more serious attack. She had an informed insight into the nature of his illness, the kind of insight that disappears for most patients when they are manic. Due to her alertness, he said, it was a “very mild repetition of the trouble” that had led up to his 1949 hospitalization. He minimized the severity of his recent attack and projected an optimism about the future that must have been hard to summon. “In a period of twenty days,” he wrote, “I went through the three stages of exuberance, confusion and depression, and can now safely say it’s all definitely over, without any likelihood of relapse or return.” He was eager to keep rumors about his illness at bay. “I’m not anxious to build up a reputation for poetic instability,” he ended his letter. He was whistling past a grave.
Generally Lowell was able to get back into life uncannily well. “Cal’s recuperative powers were almost as much of a jolt as his breakdowns,” wrote Elizabeth Hardwick. “Knowing him in the chains of illness you could, for a time, not imagine him otherwise. And when he was well, it seemed so miraculous that the old gifts of person and art were still there, as if they had been stored in some serene, safe box somewhere. Then it did not seem possible that the dread assault could return to hammer him into bits once more.”
Lowell and Hardwick returned to the United States in 1953, where Lowell took up a short-term teaching appointment at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He then accepted a visiting professorship at the University of Cincinnati, meant to last from January through June 1954. Cincinnati was to be the backdrop for one of Lowell’s most severe attacks of mania. It also continued a remarkable exposition of madness and its toll by two of America’s great writers, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick Lowell. Their letters, and the prose writings and poetry that came from that time, give an extraordinary portrayal of madness, art, love, and navigation through suffering.
Hardwick’s descriptions of mania, and the pernicious effect it has on those flailing, drowning in its wake, are among the best I know. She is astute and direct in her account of being married to someone with manic illness, of being married to a famous poet with manic illness. Madness is easy to overdramatize and thereby underestimate; it is less easy to convey its capacity to erode identity, disfigure love, and violate trust. The real horror of madness is more subtle and corrosive than its caricature.
Lowell wrote brilliantly about his illness, and that is, in part, the subject of this book. But Hardwick had the contemporaneous view. She wrote as she tried to get Lowell into the hospital, as she met with lawyers and talked to the police, as she visited him in the ward. She wrote as he shot into mania, fell into depression. And she wrote time and again as they rebuilt their life. Hardwick and Lowell left a written legacy of madness, imagination, and determination that is unmatched. The two writers struggled not only with Lowell’s manic illness but with its moral, psychological, and legal reverberations; they fought for the survival of their marriage, for their writing, and for their friendship. Together and separately, they contended with fundamentals. What is madness? Is it beyond one’s control or not? How does madness cross into work, into art and imagination? What is character? What are its limits? How does a marriage of two strong wills and intellects survive madness and infidelity? Is art worth the pain it causes? What lasts? What sustains?
Silhouettes of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick Lowell, 1953 Credit 18
After the 1952 manic recurrence in Salzburg, Lowell and Hardwick lived with heightened uncertainty about what would h
appen to his mind—would he stay sane, how long would it be before his next manic attack? They had their answer sooner rather than later. Two years after Salzburg it all happened again. In February 1954, Lowell’s mother, touring in Italy, had a severe stroke. On his way to be with her Lowell stopped in Paris to have dinner with his friend Blair Clark, who recognized the signs of incipient mania straightaway. “He was in the early stages,” he recalled. “I knew the symptoms by that time—he couldn’t sleep, sat up all night talking and drinking and so on. Everything was racing.”
Lowell, concerned about his health in the wake of his mother’s death, wrote to Hardwick from Europe, “I know you worry about me. But I am taking great care to sleep. The nine days [sic] voyage [accompanying his mother’s body back to America] will be a great easing.” As a precaution he asked a doctor to give him a box of sedatives. Despite his efforts, Lowell’s mania took off after his mother’s funeral. (Funeral mania has been observed since ancient times. Psychoanalysts have attributed it to the individual’s conflicted feelings toward the dead, more biologically inclined psychiatrists to the stress and the accompanying lack of sleep that may set off mania in those susceptible to it.) By March he was “completely deranged,” observed Hardwick, “but still in the extremely ‘happy’ stage.” He fell in love again with the Italian music student he had fallen for in Salzburg and declared his intention to divorce Hardwick. The sudden obsession with Giovanna Madonia, while humiliating and painful to Hardwick, was also a clear sign to her of his mania. “The blow will always fall upon me,” she wrote to friends in April. “When Cal gets a little manic the first desire is to be away from the person who represents reality, responsibility, skepticism, and to make new connections.” She was in a difficult position, she admitted. “I can’t say, ‘Cal wants to leave me, therefore he’s crazy.’ ”
The early stages of Lowell’s mania were difficult for many of his colleagues and friends to recognize, or to recognize quickly enough to act. Randall Jarrell, who saw him in April 1954 and noted his eccentric behavior, grew impatient and angry with Lowell’s preoccupation with himself and his “tactless Yankee comments about Southerners.” Only later, when Lowell telephoned to say he was in the hospital, did he realize that Lowell had been ill. According to Jarrell’s wife, when he got off the telephone after talking with Lowell he shook his head from side to side and said, “So that’s what it was. He was manic….As any fool could plainly see…but me….Oh, Randall, you’re so dumb….How really stupid of me….Poor old Cal.”
Not only Jarrell was slow to recognize Lowell’s illness. In the early stages of his mania Lowell was seductive, flush with words and ideas and confidence. If his thinking did not always flow in a coherent way, it was tantalizing and it came from a renowned poet. His ideas and behavior fitted the stereotype of the brilliant and disturbed artist. Other professors and poets were taken in more often than not. “Cal is definitely out of his senses,” said Hardwick. But, she wrote later, “if he asked for a knife one of these dumb ‘professors’ would take it to him.”
Mania is extraverting, disinhibiting, and infectious; its early, mild effects can be captivating. “One of the difficulties with inexperienced observers,” noted Hardwick, “is that these states of Cal’s do seem fine, partly because he’s so friendly, so available—that’s one of the signs. The man in our house said he’d been seeing a lot of Cal, they had long talks.” Had he been well, she made clear, the long talks with a stranger would have been very unlike him.
Many of Lowell’s friends and colleagues confused early mania with mere eccentricity. Jonathan Raban, the editor of Lowell’s Selected Poems, a friend and companion fisherman, described first meeting him in London. Lowell was becoming manic, but Raban did not recognize the signs. “His manic passion then was dolphins, especially stone dolphins—and then buying a large number of stone dolphins on the King’s Road.” They visited the London Dolphinarium together; stone dolphins began to dot the Lowell gardens and the steps leading up to his house. Raban saw Lowell’s exuberance for all things dolphin as “poetic and eccentric, how you might have found Yeats. It took a good long while for a rather callow 28 year-old to understand mania.” The difficulty that some colleagues and friends had in recognizing his manic behavior continued through his lifetime. His publisher, Robert Giroux, remarked that Lowell was “encouraged by people who have no suspicion of the boiling volcano beneath the apparently controlled and sometimes even sweet exterior”; then, “the fireworks begin.”
It is one thing to dismiss early mania as eccentricity or as a manifestation of the artistic temperament but quite another to ignore or make excuses for distinctly pathological behavior. John Thompson, a friend from college days and the person who had taken Lowell to Baldpate Hospital in 1949, had few illusions when he observed Lowell’s mental state in Cincinnati in 1954. He, like Hardwick, was unhappy with the denial of Lowell’s illness by his colleagues in Cincinnati and with their failure to see his erratic behavior as part of an illness rather than as poetic sensibility: “Literary people would rather be murdered than call the police,” Thompson said caustically. The “sentimental saps” found it hard to make tough decisions. “The President of the University—he didn’t want any scandal, of course—he didn’t want to have his star lecturer hauled off to the loony bin. He was very upset. He said, ‘But he’s supposed to deliver his lecture. We’ve sold all the tickets.’ I said, ‘Believe me, you don’t want this man to get up there and deliver a public lecture.’ ”
Lowell when manic was not the person described by those who knew him when he was well. “In his manic states,” said George Ford, an English professor at the University of Cincinnati, “he was a frightening fellow, very powerful physically, and not the traditional willowy poet at all.” When he was well, the contrast was total. “He was gentle…kind and considerate, interested in other people, and altogether excellent company.” He had charmed Ford’s young daughter, Ford said, and had gotten her to talk when no one else could.
Lowell was not at all well when he lectured in Cincinnati in 1954. His lectures progressed from tensely brilliant to indisputably psychotic. His lecture on Ezra Pound and madness, “a tricky subject for Cal at that time,” was “full of tensions,” according to Ford. Another lecture, on Robert Frost, which focused on Frost’s depression and dark view of life, was thought by the faculty to be excellent, but things went from cusp to beyond when he returned to Cincinnati after his mother’s funeral.
“He came back to Cincinnati [from Italy] in an alarmingly manic state, talking like a machine gun with blazing eyes and even more tense than ever,” said Ford. One evening Lowell talked brilliantly and without stop about the Roman poets through drinks, through dinner, and then long after dinner. “It was dazzling, but also alarming,” Ford recalled. “One felt he might be on the edge of a breakdown.” It got worse, to the point that the chairman of the English Department, once dismissive of Hardwick’s warnings about Lowell’s illness, prepared for Lowell’s lectures by putting “the strongest and biggest members of the department…in the front row in case anything violent developed.” Flannery O’Connor, who had been slow to see the signs of Lowell’s madness when they were together at Yaddo, said drolly, “It seems [Lowell] convinced everyone it was Elizabeth who was going crazy….Toward the end he gave a lecture at the university that was almost pure gibberish. I guess nobody noticed, thinking it was the new criticism.”
It had been noticed. In early April, Hardwick initiated a court order to commit Lowell involuntarily to Jewish Hospital in Cincinnati. The weeks leading up to his admission had been a pinwheeling scramble of disruption, insults, and public spectacle, prodigious drinking, and increasingly bizarre behavior. His “seizure,” wrote Hardwick, had been building up slowly like the Yaddo attack; this, she had been told by the doctors, “is much more dangerous than going completely berserk quickly.” She described Lowell’s mania as a “brain fever,” a brain “literally hot, whirling…fevered, askew and shaken out of shape.”
“Cal is badly deranged,” Hardwick wrote shortly before Lowell was committed to the hospital, but “I feel at the moment something near hatred for this horrible idiot talking such insulting nonsense, but then of course he is ill and is not all that sort of moral monster when he is himself.” Her awareness of the cause of his behavior was of limited consolation. “I am shocked and repelled by what Cal has done to me this time…he has been of course indescribably cruel. I simply cannot face a life of this.”
What she had been through, she said, was impossible for anyone to understand who had not experienced what she had:
No one has the slightest idea of what I have been through with Cal. In 4½ years, counting the present break-up, he has had four collapses! Three manic and one depression. These things take time to come and long after he is out of the hospital there is a period which can only be called “nursing.” The long, difficult pull-back—which does not show always to others. I knew the possibility of this when I married him, and I have always felt that the joy of his “normal” periods, the lovely time we had, all I’ve learned from him, the immeasurable things I’ve derived from our marriage made up for the bad periods. I consider it a gain of the most precious kind. But he has torn down this time everything we’ve built up—he has completely exposed to the world all of our sorrows which should have been kept secret; how difficult these break-ups are for both of us. I’ve put on a show to some extent. But he has opened the curtain and let everyone look in.