He was fascinated and impressed by Freud. “I’ve been gulping Freud,” he wrote to Hardwick in 1953, “and am a confused and slavish convert.” In later years he retained his respect for Freud’s humanity and writing but became disenchanted with psychoanalytic theory and techniques, especially the extremes to which Freud’s work had been taken by his followers. Lowell told the English critic Al Alvarez in 1965, “I get a funny thing from psycho-analysis. I mean Freud is the man who moves me most: and his case histories, and the book on dreams, read almost like a late Russian novel to me—with a scientific rather than a novelist’s mind. They have a sort of marvelous old-order quality to them, though he is the father of the new order, almost the opposite of what psycho-analysis has been since.”
Lowell was drawn to Freud’s affinity for the past and his portrayal of the intricacies of the human condition. “All that human sort of color and sadness, that long German-Austrian and Jewish culture that Freud had, seems something in the past; but it was still real to him. There is something rather beautiful and sad and intricate about Freud that seems to have gone out of psycho-analysis; it’s become a way of looking at things.” Freud and Lowell had important interests in common. They both grappled with the hard truths of the mind: irrational forces that drive behavior and belief, madness, war, and death. In his 1918 “Reflections on War and Death,” Freud wrote that the truth of death should be given its due: “Were it not better to give death the place to which it is entitled both in reality and in our thoughts?” he argued. It was a critical question for Lowell as well. If you wish to have life, argued Freud, prepare for death. Si vis pacem, para bellum. Si vis vitam, para mortem. Death is always there, the irrefragable and last place toward which we move. But it is to life that one owes toughness and commitment. “To bear life,” Freud wrote, is “the first duty of the living.”
Lowell believed that Freud was an original thinker, a religious teacher and prophet, and someone who spoke for both the Jewish and Christian traditions. Freudian orthodoxy, on the other hand, with answers to be presented “like the Catechism,” put him off. Freud “is not like Freudians,” Lowell wrote. He is “marvelous, like Proust, the most revealing mind of our age.” Lowell did not believe that psychoanalysis could treat the madness that broke in him. But, he said, Freud “provides the conditions that one must think in.”
Lowell was treated by many psychiatrists over the years, some well-known in the medical communities of New York and Boston. In 1958 he wrote to Bishop (and it was almost always to Bishop he wrote when discussing his psychotherapy) that he was seeing his doctor three times a week. “He does me a lot of good, and I am learning not to throw my weight around the household every minute to prove I am not like my Father. Oh, and much else.” A year later, he reiterated that seeing his doctor three times a week was “really doing great things, and I begin to hope that by this time next year the knot inside me will be unsnarled.”
Lowell scaled back his expectations of psychotherapy as his illness progressed. His dramatic response to lithium made him skeptical of the therapy that had failed to treat his manic depression, an illness that he had begun to conceptualize as a “salt deficiency.” A friend who saw Lowell at the end of 1967, less than a year after he started taking lithium, said, “This was the first year in eighteen he hadn’t had an attack. There had been fourteen or fifteen over the past eighteen years. Frightful humiliation and waste. He’d been all set up to taxi up to Riverdale five times a week at $50 a session, plus (of course) taxi fare. Now it was a capsule a day and once-a-week therapy. His face seemed smoother, the weight of distress-attacks and anticipation both gone.”
Lowell regretted the time he had spent in psychotherapy, according to his friend Peter Taylor. He also took offense at the things he had been encouraged to believe. “He felt very strongly in his later years that [his madness] was a chemical imbalance and he would tell me that he resented having been made to feel that he hated his father and wanted to marry his mother, all of these. He said, I was made to feel all these things and all the while it was just—it was just a physiological thing.”
Whatever truth there was in Lowell’s skepticism about psychotherapy, his relationship with his psychiatrists was more complicated than he acknowledged. Lowell’s life was one of words and metaphor; his work came out of observations about human relationships; his mental life was of nuance in meaning and mood. His life, family, and childhood were bloodstream to his poetry. “Once he was on lithium,” observed Helen Vendler, “he joked retrospectively about all the hours he had spent in therapists’ offices, which never cured him. But I think he recognized that he would never have written Life Studies without those hours.”
Certainly Lowell looked to psychotherapy to help him exert control over his mania and the depression that came in its wake. He told Dr. Vernon Williams, his Boston psychiatrist in the 1950s, “Now coming back to the question of what I would like to get from my therapy. I must say that I find it difficult to be sensible, concrete and sustained on this subject. I am tempted to use empty clichés, rhetoric, irrelevances, unexplained images—then feeling none of these will do, I face a blank and want to avoid answering.” He said he knew that life had gone “fairly well for long stretches in the past” and that he “felt drawn to ask impossible things of myself and then do nothing.” He stated he hoped to be a better husband, writer, and teacher.
But the “largest thing I hope for from my psycho-therapy,” he said to his doctor, was to “put an end to my recurrent wild manic outbreaks and the hangovers of formless self-pity that follow. If a total cure is impossible, I feel sure that both extremes can be moderated, and that I will always have the foresight and self-knowledge.” He added that he also hoped that in the future he could take “quick preventive measures and never again lose control.”
It is in the nature of manic illness to recur and with recurrence to progress; from this comes a fear that is hard to grasp for those who are not affected. The relatively long periods of health during the early years after the first or second breakdown can lead to unwarranted optimism about the years to come. Thus Hardwick wrote to Lowell when he was in the hospital for depression in 1949, “I know you’re all right, dear one. Don’t be depressed about being in the hospital. Remember we both know it’s for a permanent relief for you.”
A month later she wrote to Peter Taylor that the doctors had told her “there should not be an incapacitating attack either of elation or depression again.” She and Lowell, like Palinurus, trusted too much to a calm sea and were “betrayed so often by calm, deceptive skies.” It is a necessary and human thing. Hardwick’s optimism did not mean that she thought others would look at his illness in the same way. Later that year, when she and Lowell had not heard from the University of Iowa about his application for a teaching position there, she wrote to Allen Tate: “I can’t quite take it upon myself to tell him what the true difficulty at Iowa is, although I feel sure he’s thought of the procrastination in a realistic way. I’m afraid, if he is finally turned down, he’ll feel all teaching jobs are closed to him for the same reason.”
Hardwick and Lowell dipped into and out of denial about the chances that his madness would come back. In 1952, after his breakdown in Salzburg, Lowell wrote to his mother that “it’s all definitely over, without any likelihood of relapse or return.” At the same time, however, Hardwick was writing to friends, “Cal takes this all with dead seriousness, of course, and is terrified of such a thing ever happening again.”
The writer and psychotherapist Eileen Simpson, who was at the time married to John Berryman, described an evening after the opera during the Christmas season following Lowell’s second breakdown. They were dancing, although he was so depressed that he was oblivious to the music. “Over the noise of the band,” Simpson wrote, “he asked me the question which was tormenting him: Would it happen again? He knew, as he knew I knew, that, the nature of his illness being cyclical, there was every chance of a recurrence. What haunted him was not simply the
idea of another period of mania, during which he would do God knew what, nor even the incarceration in an institution and the horrors of electroshock therapy. It was the fear that the next time, or the time after, he would not recover. Or, if he did, that he would be released with the part of his brain he used for writing poetry burned out by the high voltages of the shock machine. Would his illness finish him as a writer?”
In January 1964, Hardwick wrote to Allen Tate that Lowell’s attacks were now “out of the control of the will” and that he was “utterly bewildered.” The artist Sidney Nolan observed, much later in the course of Lowell’s illness, “Of course, he feared the breakdowns. He said to me in Central Park, ‘I’ve been sixteen times on my knees. I’ve got up sixteen times.’ Then he added, ‘But if one day I don’t get up, I don’t mind.’ ” Near the end of his life, in “The Downlook,” Lowell wrote of the downward, now and again resurrecting cycle:
How often have my antics
and insupportable, trespassing tongue
gone astray and led me to prison…
to lying…kneeling…standing.
At times he seemed resigned to his fate. “I am back from a month in the sanitarium,” he wrote to Elizabeth Bishop in 1965. “These attacks seem now almost like something woven in my nervous system and one of the ingredients of my blood-stream, and I blame them less on some fatal personal psychotic flaw.”
In his letters and discussions with his doctors, as well as in his poetry, Lowell expressed dread that his mania would come back. “ ‘Remarkable breakdown, remarkable recovery’—,” he wrote, “but the breakage can go on repeating / once too often.” In “Waking in the Blue,” he described being a patient in McLean Hospital and standing “before the metal shaving mirrors,” watching “the shaky future grow familiar.” In “Home After Three Months Away,” recovering from a breakdown, he watched the tulips in the garden, “pedigreed” just twelve months earlier and “now no one need / distinguish them from weed.” “Bushed by the late spring snow,” he observed, “they cannot meet / another year’s snowballing enervation.” Life kept to its cycle of possibility, then it dashed hope. Relief was fleeting:
“Waiting out the rain,
but what are you waiting for?
The storm can only stop
to get breath to begin again.”
Robert Fitzgerald described Lowell’s fear and how it led to a new caution: “After his first grave manic attack in 1949, after his first hospitalization, all concerned grew wary on his behalf, as indeed he did himself, of excitements religious, political, or poetic. He could no longer be a Catholic because, as he told me, it set him on fire. He had to govern his greatness with his illness in mind.” Years later Mary McCarthy said that Lowell had spoken “with horror of his old mania, like someone who has been through a searing fire.”
Fire is a central image in Lowell’s work. Destruction is the obverse side of fire that is excitement, creation, and power. His faith, an intoxicating enthusiasm, had set him on fire during his high Catholic days, and he never again saw the Church in an entirely benign way. He wrote to George Santayana in 1950, “I am back where I was in my faith—fallen or standing in disillusionment. Only the bull who has been burned out of a barn looks at the sunset and trembles. Often I long to walk in the great house of the Church, but the candles would set my clothes on fire long before I reached the altar.”
Lowell returned time and again to the image of cattle, once burned out of their barns, trembling in terror at the fire of the sunset. In “The Puritan,” a prose piece written in the mid-1940s, before his first manic break, he wrote, “Even now I feel as though I were sitting on dynamite. They say a cow who has been burnt out of her barn always looks at the sunset and trembles.” Twenty years later, in “Cattle,” published in Notebook 1967–68, Lowell brought the image back: “Cattle have guts, but after the barn is burned, / they will look at the sunset and tremble.” The image repeats in “Cow,” a poem revised when he was in his fifties and included in his 1973 History.
Fire and mania break erratic and fast into danger and need to be taken with a heed not always possible. There is temptation to push the boundaries of what fire can do. “We do not burn to survive,” said Lowell of the Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky, “but to step on the gas.” Fire balloons may climb the mountain height, wrote Elizabeth Bishop in a poem dedicated to Robert Lowell. “If it’s still they steer between / the kite sticks of the Southern Cross.” But “in the downdraft from a peak,” they “suddenly [turn] dangerous.” Fire gives life, brings death, gives power; it creates, welds, and scorches; it seduces. “I made men look into the fire,” Lowell had Prometheus declare in his translation of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. “Alone and bemused in the slothful dark, they studied the fire’s whirling and consuming colors, and believed they would some day taste the breath of life. No one knows, I haven’t told anyone, the many wonders I have invented. I was out of my mind, my hand was everywhere.”
Fire used well, Lowell’s Prometheus says, “can remake, or destroy the earth.” Before he stole fire from the gods and gave it to man, “men had eyes and saw nothing….They had ears and heard nothing: a splatter, a splash, fizzings, buzzings, hissings, mazes of muddled vibration, sounds without the cutting edge of words.” Fire gave and it took, as mania does. “Before I made men talk and write with words,” said Prometheus, “knowledge dropped like a dry stick into the fire of their memories, fed that fading blaze an instant, then died without leaving an ash behind.” Lowell’s thinking about mania, about fire, was complicated; any healing that would take place—through doctor or writing—would have to contend with this complexity. Mania demanded engagement; it was a war to be fought, if usually lost. It might be harnessed but only at terrible risk.
Lowell had several good doctors over the nearly thirty years he was treated for his illness. Healing is different from treatment, however, and healing from the damage inflicted by psychosis demands a particular kind of understanding. What he does not seem to have had was the kind of healing relationship exemplified by the poet Siegfried Sassoon’s with his psychiatrist, W. H. R. Rivers. In Craiglockhart, the shell-shock hospital near Edinburgh where Sassoon was a patient during World War I, madness and the horror of war were at the heart of the therapeutic relationship. The war-damaged mind needed healing. Words used well and memories brought to mind in a way gradual and tolerable could tamp down the horrors of war and madness. Rivers, a British army psychiatrist as well as an acclaimed anthropologist and experimental psychologist, uniquely understood the scars created by the trauma of war.
The scars of madness, Lowell observed, are like those of war. This common territory of war and madness is true and underappreciated. Both madness and war upend habit and incite behavior beyond the moral code. They create dread and uncertainty. For good reason, episodes of mania are referred to as “attacks.” Mania is an assault on the mind that is traumatic in every clinical and human sense of the word. The damage from mania cannot be set aside, forgotten, or exiled into the mind’s back chamber. It will be remembered. If it is not, it will take a greater toll.
War and madness were powerfully linked in Lowell’s life and writing. When he was young, he had been obsessed by Napoleon and his military campaigns. He wrote about the Greek and Roman wars, King Philip’s War, the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the long centuries of European wars. He wrote about military heroes and despots. He volunteered several times to serve in World War II; after the Allied razing of Hamburg, he became a conscientious objector and refused to serve. The brutality and senselessness of war were critical to several of his most important poems. He prominently denounced the Vietnam War. Throughout his life he grappled with the question of the just and unjust uses of military power. He was attracted to and repelled by dangerous force. When he was manic, his delusions often centered on military figures. He spoke to his doctors and friends of the damage caused by his attacks of madness, of the warring forces in his head, the fiery sieges that overtook
his mind. Mania broke alliances, bred mistrust, sowed destruction.
Mania shatters the mind and principle; it begets guilt. Things done in mania are inexplicable and unjustifiable; the mind during mania, like war, is a pitched battlefield. From it arises chaos, as well as opportunity. War, said Henry Adams, breeds life because it breeds chaos. Within the broken world of war, out of its chaos, courage could emerge. Lowell recognized this early. In his schoolboy analysis of The Iliad, he had written that war gives “a chance to gain self-respect and honor.” One could learn, act, lead. Likewise with madness. If one was unable to control the attacks, one could exhibit courage in dealing with them. Mania compelled a counteraction and revision; it set the ground for reconstruction and reinvention. But the mind needed to heal.
The healing of war-torn minds was what W. H. R. Rivers practiced, studied, and taught; it was the legendary healing he gave to the shell-shocked officers he treated. It was the kind of psychotherapy that can begin to heal the ravages of mania. Rivers was interested in how he could use the controlled recollection of horror to bring his patients to understand what they had been through, to “face the facts” of their trauma, and to allow them to meet the horror “in their own strength.” In lectures given at the University of Cambridge in 1919 and at the Phipps Clinic at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1920, Rivers laid out his observations about undertaking psychotherapy in those who had experienced war trauma, or shell shock.
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character Page 20
