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

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  During Lowell’s hospitalization he was given chlorpromazine at much higher doses than when he had been at the state hospital. His “extreme hyperactivity,” which included throwing furniture around the ward, ratcheted down. He became progressively calmer and was allowed out of the hospital for brief periods of time so that he could teach his graduate seminar. Lowell, according to a note in his chart written by a nurse two days before he was discharged from the hospital, was busy with correcting school papers and had many visitors. He was quiet, friendly, and cooperative. The note ends, without apparent irony, “Appears to do a great deal of deep thinking?”

  His prognosis at the end of his first hospitalization at Payne Whitney had been “good”; after his second stay it had been downgraded to “fair.” Now, more ominously, Dr. Woolston listed his prognosis as “guarded.”

  Nurse’s note, Massachusetts Mental Health Center, January 12, 1958 Credit 20

  Lowell was better at the time he left the hospital but he remained “as active as electricity,” said Hardwick. Certainly he was far from well. The details of his attacks, Hardwick wrote to Elizabeth Bishop, “are always like a Russian novel because of the immense activity of these states, the fact that things are happening, wildly, even from the hospital. The activity urge is greater than the confinement and is never fully confined.” Hardwick was again at wit’s end, “very much discouraged and very fearful of the future.” Lowell had “begged to come home to his study, his routine, etc., and of course I agreed.” He told her he wanted to come home, stay married forever. He was heavily drugged; if he stopped taking his medication, she predicted, “he would climb right back up to an overexcitement again.”

  Lowell, at about the same time, wrote to William Carlos Williams, “I’ve just passed through another of my periodic crack-ups….I’m fine now.” Some of this was “keeping up a front,” which he had told Dr. Vernon Williams was his “great need of the moment.” Hardwick, for her part, while noting that Lowell was “quieting down gradually,” wrote to his cousin, “I suppose underneath it has been harder for him to come back to the world than we know. There is a great deal of uncertainty, shame, regret and bravado, fierce self-assertion may be the only way of handling it at first.”

  Lowell’s core of peace, observed Hardwick, was their home at 239 Marlborough Street. “He has always loved the house, loved his study with his books, his records. And loved the beauty of the house….His commitment to the ‘things’ is complete—they belonged to his family.” She and Lowell needed “just to sit tight, with our routine, making the best of things until they right themselves.”

  Two weeks after leaving Mass Mental, Lowell was once again floridly manic; he was admitted to McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. Formerly the McLean Asylum for the Insane, where Lowell’s great-great-grandmother had been a patient more than a hundred years earlier, the hospital had been founded in 1811 in affiliation with Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital. Although McLean has famously treated the well-placed in society, the hospital cares for people from all walks of life. It has provided and continues to provide some of the best clinical care in the country; it has also contributed significantly to our understanding of the causes and treatment of mental illness. Still, the McLean Hospital that treated Lowell in the 1950s and 1960s was far removed from Boston State Hospital. Activities for McLean patients at the time of Lowell’s hospitalization in 1958 included poetry evenings, an excursion to Boston Common to view the Christmas lights, a James Thurber reading, and a dinner party at the Colonial Country Club.

  These activities are far from the patient activities prescribed in most mental hospitals, but no patient, however wealthy, and however elite the hospital, can escape the pain of mental illness. “I myself am hell,” Lowell wrote in “Skunk Hour,” echoing Milton, who had said, “within him Hell / He brings.” Milton’s Satan, for whom Lowell kept an admiring affection, spoke for him: “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.” Lowell could not escape his illness by change of place. Terror was within; gracious surroundings, although they made a difference, did not rid him of the rack and bale of mania.

  Lowell was admitted as a voluntary patient to McLean Hospital at the end of January 1958, following what the admitting physician described as “an episode of excitement” and a “general disorganization of ideas.” The day before he entered the hospital he had written to the poet and critic William Empson; excerpts from his letter give a sense of the loosely linked thoughts so typical of manic flight of ideas, as well as Lowell’s delusional identification with Christ:

  The Christ was killed by the Jews under Caiphas [sic] and the Romans under Pontius Pilate. He was manic (just as I—four times—and hundreds of others have been) shortly before his capture. At the time of his capture h[e] was in the depth of a depression. Sweating blood, all but speechless. He didn’t quite die but was smuggled by Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea from the tomb, and kept reappearing on the margins of activity, at least up [to] the time when he met and commissioned Paul as his Captain general. Did you ever notice what [a] superior job Paul did to the Christ’s when he too had to appear in Jerusalem before Lysisas [sic], Festus, Felix and King Agrippa?…

  4. The Mass. The composers, Palestrina, Bach, Beethoven[,] Hayden [sic], Schubert, Verdi, Berlioz, Stravinsky, made a garden even here, i.e.: in the dreary lit crumby liturgical desert of the R. C. Mass. It’s not human sacrifice and sadistic torture that is being celebrated, rather it’s Christ climbing to his feet after the cruelest of all electric shock treatments.

  Lowell’s 1958 hospitalization at McLean continued the painful course of reckoning for himself and Hardwick. She had had little letup in dealing with his illness; he continued to live with the fear of what might happen to his mind and writing in the years to come. In mid-February, Hardwick wrote to Harriet Winslow: “For the future, the unimaginable, frightening future which seems awful no matter what happens about the present: the [McLean] doctors think Bobby can be cured, but that it would be hard, take years of serious working out with a doctor of his profound problems and fears. I spoke quite frankly to them and said, ‘It is all very well to talk about cures, coping with problems, working it out, and so on. But do you really believe it? Do you really get these cures when someone is middle aged, has had countless breakdowns, etc.?” They assured her that they did.

  The doctors told Hardwick that Lowell’s psychological health required him to believe that if he divorced her he would gain a new and stable life. The illusion that a fresh start was possible, they said, kept “knowledge, fear and insecurity from coming to his full consciousness.” In short, his doctors said that it was necessary for Lowell to delude himself in order for his sanity to return. “There is in these manic things a kind of flight,” Hardwick told Ian Hamilton many years later. “I’m here and I’ll go there, and everything will be all right.” The illusion faded as his mania faded, but the fear of illness remained. “He becomes furious if you use the word ‘sick,’ ” Hardwick wrote to friends. “He is profoundly aware that depressive symptoms—fear, remorse, uncertainty, anxiety, chaos—are always threatening him and he would truly rather wreck his whole life than have these symptoms for a moment. The doctors think he is scared to death and so do I.”

  In mid-March Lowell wrote to Harriet Winslow, “My mania has broken.” He wrote similarly to Peter Taylor: “It’s not much fun writing about these breakdowns after they themselves have broken and one stands stickily splattered with patches of the momentary bubble. Health; but not the kind that encourages the backward look.” The backward look discomfited but it also gave a glimpse into the effect he felt mania could have upon his writing: “What can you do after having been Henry VIII or even a cock of the walk weekly sheriff? You get beautifully your character’s living for the moment he is seen or heard. All life for the flashes! Everyone has a lot of that, and we writers more than most, only the words, the structure, the tune come out of us, are us.”

  On the same day, Lowell gave Bishop a vivid a
ccount of his fellow patients at McLean:

  The man next to me is a Harvard Law professor. One day, he is all happiness, giving the plots of Trollope novels, distinguishing delicately between the philosophies of Holmes and Brandeis, reminiscing wittily about Frankfurter. But on another day, his depression blankets him. Early in the morning, I hear cooing pigeon sounds, and if I listen carefully, the words: “Oh terror, TERROR!” Our other male, assembles microscopically exact models of clippers and three masted schooners. Both men, and I too, shrink before a garrulous Mrs. Churchill….Sometimes with a big paper napkin stuck like an escaping bra on her throat, she will dance a little jig and talk about being presented to Queen Victoria. She was.

  Lowell had been writing poetry intermittently while in the hospital, including two of his most regarded poems about madness, “Waking in the Blue” and “Home After Three Months Away.” “I like the language of my new poems,” he wrote to Elizabeth Bishop, “but feel fatigued by their fierceness.” He enclosed in his letter a copy of “Home After Three Months Away,” its last verses telling of time lost, as man and father, bone-weariness, and the elusiveness of cure:

  they tell me nothing’s gone.

  Though I am forty-one,

  not forty now, the time I put away

  was child’s-play….

  …….

  Recuperating, I neither spin nor toil.

  Three stories down below,

  a choreman tends our coffin’s length of soil,

  and seven horizontal tulips blow.

  Just twelve months ago,

  these flowers were pedigreed

  imported Dutchmen; now no one need

  distinguish them from weed.

  Bushed by the late spring snow,

  they cannot meet

  another year’s snowballing enervation.

  I keep no rank nor station.

  Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small.

  The frizzled, stale state that comes after mania, the depressive letdown, is one of consuming fatigue, doubt, and fragility. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his 1936 autobiographical essays, The Crack-Up, wrote that his depressive breakdown left him feeling like a cracked plate, “the kind that one wonders whether it is worth preserving.” He and the dish were one, he said, and it was not the dish he had ordered. The plate had lost its strength and carrying capacity: “It can never again be warmed on the stove nor shuffled with the other plates in the dishpan; it will not be brought out for company, but it will do to hold crackers late at night.” The plate, like Lowell’s horizontal tulips, could not bear further weight; it could only “go into the ice box under left-overs.”

  Lowell had written earlier of holding place, feeling purposeless: “I feel rather like a character in one of Allen Tate’s poems that ends I believe, ‘The wall-paper, imperishably old / Uncurls and flutters, it will never fall.’ ” It was the same again.

  By the end of April both Lowell and Hardwick had reentered the swing of the world. “We are both fine and so is the baby,” Hardwick wrote to Harriet Winslow. “The weather is glorious, our magnolia is in bloom, the swan-boats are gliding along in the garden.” But, as a practical matter, Hardwick sought out legal advice to remove some of the burden of having to commit her husband if he again became manic. She was beginning to acknowledge the independent life of his disease: “The thing comes or goes in its own way,” she conceded.

  A few months later Lowell looked back on his writing of Life Studies; it had been a dangerous time but he had written new and well. “My own things rise out of great stylistic and logical helplessness, days of staring at ugly fragments,” he told Theodore Roethke. “I leave armfuls of waste paper behind me—exercises, confessions, confusion. Now a new book is almost done, and it seems at times as though I’d discovered a way of getting something new and felt said. A pioneering effort, but worth doing.”

  Lowell continued in psychotherapy but he had lost faith that it could help; it was dutiful, said Hardwick, rather like going to Mass in the hopes of being saved from his illness. He and Hardwick were correct: psychotherapy could not prevent mania. A year passed; then at the end of April 1959, just before the American publication of Life Studies, Lowell was readmitted to McLean, initially as a voluntary patient. The admission form stated that he had been feeling “increasingly anxious over recent events.” Aware that past manic attacks had caused him “great embarrassment and inconvenience,” the examining doctor wrote, “he voluntarily places himself in hospital at this time to receive treatment and to protect himself.”

  By mid-June, while still in the hospital, Lowell had to be committed involuntarily by a justice of the district court. Two physicians confirmed for the court that he had a repeated history of psychiatric hospitalizations for manic-depressive psychosis and that, during his current McLean admission, he had been overactive, excited, argumentative, and had flight of ideas; he had also been impulsive and, among other things, had thrown furniture around the ward. Medications had helped somewhat, but the doctors stated it would be unwise for him to leave the hospital.

  Admission form, McLean Hospital, April 1959

  “He voluntarily places himself in hospital at this time to receive treatment and to protect himself.” Credit 21

  The worsening of Lowell’s illness was mirrored in Hardwick’s increasing discouragement. She wrote to their friend Mary McCarthy that “it is distressing beyond words.” Hardwick found his doctors frustrating although well-intentioned. They talked to her about his “flight into illness” (a psychoanalytic concept that construes mania in part as a flight of escape from depression and reality); she was skeptical and questioned whether it was not “just an illness that comes.” She confided, “I feel particularly discouraged because this latest flare-up came after a very happy year for both of us.”

  Lowell, too, was weary of the lost hopes, the illusions burst. In July he wrote to Elizabeth Bishop: “I feel rather creepy and paltry writing now to announce that I am all healed and stable again. So it is. Five attacks in ten years make you feel rather a basket-case….In the hospital I spent a mad month or more re-writing everything in my three books. I arranged my poems chronologically, starting in Greek and Roman times and finally rose to air and the present with Life Studies. I felt I had hit the skies, that all cohered. I[t] was mostly waste.” The period following a manic attack, he explained to Bishop, was “an incredible formless time of irresolution, forgetfulness, inertia, all the Baudelairean vices plus what he must never have known, stupidity.”

  To John Berryman, who had been through so much pain of his own—mania, alcoholism, depression, the suicides of his father and an aunt—and who would himself commit suicide in a few years’ time, Lowell wrote a letter of compassion:

  I have been thinking much about you all summer, and how we have gone through the same troubles, visiting the bottom of the world. I have wanted to stretch out a hand, and tell you that I have been there too, and how it all lightens and life swims back….There’s been so much fellow feeling between us, and for so long now….

  Well what is there to say? The night is now passed, and I feel certain that your fire and loyalty, and all-outedness carry you buoyantly on. The dark moment comes, it goes.

  By the end of the 1950s Boston had worn thin for Lowell and Hardwick. It had failed as a shield against madness, or as substantive balm. It was, they had come to believe, a place of lost vitality. In December 1958 Lowell wrote to Bishop, “Boston’s a pleasant place, but the home product is all dandification and jelly. The woodiness of the old caution, now these 50 years no longer sprouting, the jelly of Vogue and Literary Digest literary tastes.” Intellectual women didn’t seem to exist in Boston, he told her, and “our new friends all seem to drift on trust funds or hold Harvard University chairs.” To Randall Jarrell he wrote more bluntly. “We are awfully sick of Boston,” he said. “The only unconventional people here are charming screwballs, who never finish a picture or publish a line. Then there are Cousins and Harvard professors. All very plea
sant, but…”

  Henry Adams, Lowell’s exemplar New Englander, had said that “Boston had solved the universe; or had offered and realized the best solution yet tried. The problem was worked out.” For Adams and Lowell, creatures of flux and uncertainty, the assumption of a worked-out solution was repellent. Years later Lowell told V. S. Naipaul that he and Hardwick had moved to New York because Boston “had lost its seriousness, its imagination, and if you wanted to be a writer you couldn’t be a conventional New Englander.”

  Hardwick was more scathing and public in her views on Boston, perhaps because it was her nature, and perhaps because she had not been heir to Lowell’s social upbringing in Boston. Nor had she had the imprinting advantages of Boston’s intellectual history, an essential nutrient of Lowell’s imaginative growth. In December 1959, Harper’s published her “Boston: The Lost Ideal,” a full-throated attack on what she saw as the moral and intellectual depletion and implacable social conservatism of Boston. She started, “With Boston and its mysteriously enduring reputation, ‘the reverberation is longer than the thunderclap,’ as Emerson observed about the tenacious fame of certain artists. Boston—wrinkled, spindly-legged, depleted of nearly all her spiritual and cutaneous oils, provincial, self-esteeming—has gone on spending her inflated bills of pure reputation, decade after decade.”

  Her perspective on Boston did not gentle down over the course of the essay. She quoted Henry Adams on Boston, who had said, “A simpler manner of life and thought could hardly exist, short of cave-dwelling”; she decried the decline in Boston’s intellectual contributions to the country. “The importance of Boston was intellectual,” she wrote. If its intellectual life was dying, Boston most certainly was. She compared Boston to New York, brilliantly, and not to Boston’s advantage. If she and Lowell had not already thought about moving to New York she was leaving them little choice: