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

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  it’s the light of an oncoming train.

  —From “Since 1939”

  The Lowells moved back to Boston in September 1954 and a year later settled at 239 Marlborough Street, not far from his parents’ old house, “a block down Marlboro [sic] and almost visible when there are no leaves.” The neighborhood had changed little in thirty years. Marlborough Street itself was much the same, and even their dining room, said Lowell, was a bond with the past, “a fraying reconstruction of my parents’ dining room at 170 Marlborough Street.” If mental quiet could be secured by reentering the geography of childhood, Lowell had purchased it with their new home. Elizabeth Hardwick, in Sleepless Nights, described their new existence:

  Here I am in Boston, on Marlborough Street, number 239. I am looking out on a snowstorm. It fell like a great armistice, bringing all simple struggles to an end….Under the yellow glow of the streetlights you begin to imagine what it was like forty or fifty years ago. The stillness, the open whiteness—nostalgia and romance in the clear, quiet, white air…

  Climbing up and down the four floors gives you a sense of ownership—perhaps. It may be yours, but the house, the furniture, strain toward the universal and it will soon read like a stage direction: Setting—Boston. The law will be obeyed. Chests, tables, dishes, domestic habits fall into line.

  Lowell started psychotherapy with the psychiatrist Dr. Vernon Williams not long after he returned to Boston and saw him three to five times a week for the first two years and then once or twice a week after that. “His doctor is very, very sensible,” wrote Hardwick. “He tells one the truth in a simple, fatherly way and we are all above board at least.” The doctor recommended a routine of regular sleep, walking, and writing that Lowell took to “gladly.” The occasional downswing in mood was surmountable. “Together we have managed so far to keep the depression from becoming incapacitating,” Hardwick said. “It comes down upon us like a cloud, but always lifts in a day or two.” She spent so much of her time reassuring Lowell when he was depressed, she said, that she found it difficult to remember the devastating mania, the “other side of the coin.”

  Lowell began work on a prose autobiography, in part at the suggestion of his psychiatrist as a way to help him reconstruct his childhood. By February 1955, five months after Lowell had left Payne Whitney, Hardwick was writing to Peter Taylor that “Cal is fine. He’s been steadily improving week by week and now seems his old self again…he’s been at the desk for the last 3 days 16 hours or so and I’ve very nearly been feeding him through a tube. He is writing some remarkable prose things….They are reminiscences of childhood—that is the closest I can come—and I think of extraordinary beauty and interest.”

  Lowell kept to his determination for a calmer life; he gave up smoking and drinking and rejoined the Episcopal Church, the faith of his family. His return, to the Church of the Advent on Beacon Hill, only a few minutes’ walk from his grandfather Winslow’s house, was beholden more to liturgy and tradition than to any belief in doctrine.

  In April he wrote to Ezra Pound that his return to Boston had exposed the vulnerability of being without the colored cloths and dreams of his youth:

  This has been a funny, eye-opening winter i.e., living in the Boston I left when I was seventeen, full of passion and without words. I suppose all young men get up the nerve to start moving by wrapping themselves like mummies from nose to toe in colored cloths, veils, dreams etc. After a while shedding one’s costume, one’s fancy dress, is like being flayed. I’ve just been doing a little piece on Why I live in Boston. I made it impersonal and said nothing about what I was looking for here—the pain and jolt of seeing things as they are.

  It was an icy spring day in Boston, he added. The “magnolia blossoms are freezing as they decay.”

  At the end of the year, in December 1955, Hardwick wrote to friends that “Cal is feeling very well—calm, energetic and contented….A few weeks ago he read his poems at Harvard and put on the most superb show, very witty, very relaxed. This winter has been the best in some time.” Lowell concurred. Two weeks later he wrote to his cousin Harriet Winslow about the happiness of his Christmas Eve and Christmas and the peace that came from staying put in Boston: “It’s soothing to be stopped in one place—it’s like suddenly discovering, after running for twenty years that one can move just as fast by standing still on some sort of escalator—maybe I’ve been on one all along, only running against the mechanism.”

  Throughout 1956 Lowell was immersed in the study of his ancestors and began to write about his parents, grandfather, and childhood, work that was to be central to Life Studies. He also wrote “Near the Unbalanced Aquarium,” an autobiographical piece about his 1954 stay at the Payne Whitney Clinic. Hardwick wrote to Harriet Winslow, “Cal is fine, still deep in his genealogical studies. He seems very happy up on the top floor, with his long writing table, his books, and his beloved FM radio which goes all day with the finest music. His book is coming along day by day….That makes him happy above all.” In late February 1956 she wrote that Lowell had not had a drink for a year, was “well and happy,” writing steadily, and eating an improbable pound of honey every day—a nice touch for a man who identified with bears and did bear imitations throughout his life.

  It was a time of calm, steady but not frenzied writing, and a long-hoped-for but, because they were nearing their forties, unexpected venture into parenthood. In June 1956 Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Bishop that he and Hardwick were expecting a child in January; his droll delight is clear in the many letters he dashed off to friends. “Already we are exhausted,” he wrote Bishop. “We lie about on sofas all day eating cornflakes, no-calorie ginger-ale and yoghurt. Elizabeth never moves except to turn the page of an English newspaper or buy a dress. I never move except to turn on my high-fi radio or go on expeditions for second-hand books.” “We hear of women,” he continued, “who ski all through pregnancy, give birth in bomb shelters without doctors etc. But we don’t approve, and are timid, delicate and ante-bellum.” To another friend he wrote, “It’s terrible discovering that your one moral plank, i.e. an undiluted horror of babies, has crumbled! We’re so excited we can hardly speak.”

  Harriet Winslow Lowell was born in January 1957; she became a source of gentle wonderment to Lowell, a constant in his inconstant life. Over the next twenty years, until his death, he dedicated many of his poems to her, openly delighted in her precocity, and wrote often about her in his poetry and in his letters to his friends. His late-born daughter was an answer to the question he had posed in “Mr. Edwards and the Spider”: How will the heart endure?

  Lowell kept free of severe mania for more than three years, from the fall of 1954 to December 1957. It was a long time but not unlimited. Not unusually, there is an extended period of normal health in the early stages of manic-depressive illness; later, if untreated, the disease becomes more unforgiving. The relative stability of Lowell’s moods was due as well to the protective net he and Hardwick had woven together to maintain routine and fend off excessive excitement. They kept a quiet way of life. He saw his doctor often, they saw friends. He followed ordered days of reading and writing in their Boston house on “hardly passionate Marlborough Street.” He taught poetry at Boston University. He drank less, for long periods not at all. The rheostat was set to Slower.

  Western Union Storkgram

  “We’re so excited we can hardly speak.” Credit 19

  But mania, like the seasons and the sea, has its own force and keeps to its own rhythm. Restraint could not hold back the madness. It was as with the great sailor Sir Patrick Spens, claimed as kin by Lowell’s imaginative but unstable great-great-grandmother Harriet Brackett Spence Lowell. Spens had drowned. His sailors’ efforts were to no avail; twine and “silken claith” were no match for the sea: “they wrapp’d them round that gude ship’s side, / But still the sea came in.”

  The sea came in. In early 1957, Lowell traveled to the West Coast for a reading tour; it was the start of a jagged escalation into
full-blown mania. He slept less and drank more than his brain could stay quiet by. He took low doses of chlorpromazine to settle himself but soon “wound up”; in the bubblings of mania, he started writing poetry again. This time, however, he wrote in the loosened, more simplified language that was to distinguish the work of Life Studies.

  The same enthusiasm that sped his imagination frayed his nerves. The previously forsaken whiskey sours and martinis went down quickly again; his mind flew. During his family summer in Maine he made unwanted advances to his close friend Elizabeth Bishop. This was ill-advised. He was married and his wife and Bishop were friends; Bishop was in a long-standing lesbian relationship. Bishop’s friendship with Lowell was of great meaning to them both; they were supporters and astute critics of each other’s work and frequent correspondents. Lowell wrote openly to Bishop about his illness in a way he did to few others. Fortunately both Lowell and Hardwick recognized the symptoms of early mania—the frenetic pace and heavy drinking, the pursuit of women—and he was able to ward off a psychotic attack by taking promazine, a drug closely related to chlorpromazine. The medication took hold; judgment returned. So too did remorse.

  “I see clearly now that for the last few days I have been living in a state of increasing mania—almost off the rails at the end,” he wrote to Bishop in early August. “It almost seems as if I couldn’t be with you any length of time without acting with abysmal myopia and lack of consideration. My disease, alas, gives one (during its seizures) a headless heart….I am at last in reverse.” The effect of the medication was “like the slowing and ache of a medium fever. One’s thoughts are not directly changed and healed, but the terrible, over-riding restlessness of one’s system is halted so that the mind can see life as it is. I want you to know…Oh dear, I wanted you to know so many things.”

  The return to health was not easy. “Today I feel certain that I am not going off the deep end,” he wrote. “Gracelessly, like a standing child trying to sit down, like a cat or a coon coming down a tree, I’m getting down my ladder to the moon.” Bishop, for her part, wrote back with a deflecting grace: “Dear Cal, do please please take care of yourself and be an ornament to the world (you’re already that) and a comfort to your friends.”

  Lowell continued to work on the poems that collectively became Life Studies. His behavior settled down to the point that Hardwick could write to their friend Susan Sontag, “Cal is better than he has been for three years!…He is quite happy, devoted, sober….When all is going well, I find it difficult to remember the other states….The new well-being is now a month old and I believe it will last throughout the winter.”

  It did not. Lowell’s mania erupted again. In December, without telling Hardwick, he invited more than forty friends to a party. The night was chaos. He insulted his guests, in the deft and awful way that only those who are manic can. He pitted guest against guest, sent the wine and cocktail glasses flying off a coffee table with a dramatic sweep of his foot. Alcohol flowed. Once again, as a guest observed, “nobody seemed to realize he was mad.”

  At the end of three sleepless days and nights he was much worse. Lowell’s close friend, William Alfred, the playwright, described the wrenching scene after the police arrived at Lowell’s home: “So the police arrived at Marlborough Street to take him away. Before he left, he wanted to sit for a few moments in Harriet’s room and watch her sleep. He did this, with me telling the cops: ‘He won’t be long.’ Then we left in the police wagon. And I remember the look on Cal’s face—it was as if the real Cal, the Cal I knew, were looking out at me from within the mania. It was very moving. I’d never seen him crazy.”

  The police took Lowell to Boston State Hospital in early December 1957. The papers that authorized his involuntary commitment stated that for the week prior to admission he had been excited, violent, overactive, and at times suicidal. His Boston psychiatrist, Dr. Vernon Williams, told the Boston State doctors that Lowell had been free of symptoms until three weeks prior to the involuntary commitment; at that time he had become “overly active,” “threatening,” and had made an excessive number of unrealistic plans.

  Boston State Hospital, which opened as the Boston Lunatic Asylum in 1839, was far from the elegant sitting rooms of Payne Whitney, where he had been twice before, and from McLean Hospital, where he was to be admitted in six weeks’ time. Lowell’s psychiatrist at the state hospital, Dr. Robert Spitzer, noted that “the patient refused transfer to a private hospital stating that he wanted to ‘experience life.’ ” Most of Lowell’s psychiatric care was in private hospitals, but this would not be the last time that Lowell stated a preference for learning about life from the “less elite.”

  Dr. Spitzer wrote in Lowell’s chart when he was admitted that he was a “large, approximately 61, well-built, attractive white male demonstrating hyperactivity and flight of ideas and push of speech in spite of drowsiness produced by tranquilizers.” Lowell, notwithstanding his mental state, had retained some of his sense of humor. When asked by the psychiatrist why he thought he was in a psychiatric hospital, Lowell replied, “My wife thought I needed a rest.” Then he added, “She was right.”

  Spitzer examined Lowell and found that he was oriented (that is, he knew when it was, who and where he was, and his circumstance) and that he was neither delusional nor hallucinating. He had no preoccupations of thought or obsessions, although he did exhibit a “moderate flight of ideas.” His memory was intact and he had “superior intelligence.” He was hyperactive and elated, neither of which was significantly changed by administering sedating medication. His admitting diagnosis was manic-depressive reaction, manic type, with paranoid trends.

  Lowell told Dr. Spitzer that he had slept very little in the week leading up to his hospitalization and that he had become increasingly irritable. He “thought that he might be having another manic episode because he [had] been writing with increased facility for the past several months.” The presentation of his illness was essentially the same as that recorded during earlier hospitalizations; when asked when he had had his first breakdown, he said that it had been when he was a student at Harvard, an earlier time frame than he had given before. He also said that he had “become involved” with a student six weeks before being admitted to the hospital.

  Lowell was given chlorpromazine and intramuscular sodium amytal, a sedative-hypnotic. At the end of a week Hardwick and his private psychiatrist, Dr. Williams, arranged for Lowell to be transferred, while still on an involuntary commitment, to Massachusetts Mental Health Center (formerly known as the Boston Psychopathic Hospital), a teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School. He was discharged from Boston State Hospital as “unimproved.”

  Lowell’s psychiatrist at Mass Mental, as the psychiatric facility is known by most, was Dr. Marian Woolston, a second-year resident at the time of Lowell’s admission. Her examination and medical notes for Lowell are thorough and informative. She noted that during Lowell’s stay at Boston State Hospital he had been described by the doctors as “grandiose, hyperactive, occasionally assaultive and destructive.” He also had exhibited flight of ideas and insomnia. At the time Dr. Woolston first evaluated him he had begun to come down from his mania; he was “in contact, ingratiating, talking easily but without great pressure of speech. He is extremely intelligent, eager to receive help.” She added, with the skepticism that can come with treating mania, “or says so at present.”

  Lowell told Dr. Woolston that he had stopped seeing his psychiatrist in the fall because he was “too busy writing.” It was during this time, in September and October 1957, that Lowell had been working at full bore on his Life Studies poems, a period he described as his “most productive months of writing poetry.” In November, as he became overtly manic, he had “ceased his great spurt of writing.” Following this intense period of literary output, Hardwick told Dr. Woolston, Lowell had become increasingly active, “making too many phone calls and writing too many letters.” This intensification of mania, she said, was “ch
aracteristic of his behavior following a heavy spurt of writing.” He had been “grossly hyperactive and inappropriate in behavior,” reciting his poetry everywhere and to anyone. He had been talking far more than usual and was verbally hurtful to others; this, Hardwick told Dr. Woolston, was “very atypical behavior for the patient who is usually much more quiet and reserved.”

  Dr. Woolston recorded in her initial examination of Lowell that he was a “tall, well-built, attractive, very overactive man.” He was “ingratiating” and “seductive.” He exhibited a “dramatic flight of ideas, covering everything from Shakespeare to Sec. 79 [the legal basis for his involuntary psychiatric commitment]” and had “the most eloquent use of the English language.” He also had an “undue preoccupation with greatness, almost a sense of mission in making a new contribution.” Lowell had no delusions or hallucinations at the time he was admitted to the hospital, although he did say that he “thought in hallucinations.” He had little insight into the nature of his current condition but told Woolston that in the preceding three years, when he felt he was becoming manic, he had used chlorpromazine on several occasions.

  Lowell also told the psychiatrist that new love affairs and intermittent extreme outbursts of writing poetry tended to excite him into mania. His “prevailing tone,” wrote Dr. Woolston, seemed to “suggest the desirability of psychosis as a qualification for great artistry.” His preoccupation was with “success, energy and creativity….Complete engrossment in his writings has always been accompanied by verbal hyperactivity sometimes to the point of an acute breakdown.”

  More than fifty years later Dr. Woolston still remembers Lowell well: he was “unforgettable,” she says. “When he was in the hospital everyone knew.” She describes him as dramatic, flirtatious, and intrusive when manic, and “a romantic.” She liked him very much, found him charming and engaging. His insight into his manic illness, however, was limited; he was “on top of the bubble and didn’t have much perspective.”