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

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  Not everyone, but most. A cloud of rumor and drama, not untinged by envy, tended to precede and follow Lowell. Poets, students, and friends described the contrast between the literary gossip and how they actually found him. The poet W. D. Snodgrass, who studied with Lowell, wrote about the discrepancy between Lowell’s reputation for erratic behavior and who he turned out to be upon getting to know him: “Until his arrival he was the one topic of conversation: The time he’d done as a conscientious objector, his periods of madness, his past violence. We were surprised to find that, though tall and powerfully built, he seemed the gentlest of mortals, clumsily anxious to please.” Likewise, William Phillips, the editor of the Partisan Review, wrote: “In the name of his art and his psychological needs, Lowell has been said to have done many reprehensible things. But I always found him gentle, sweet, and considerate—if somewhat wild.”

  Lowell’s daughter, Harriet Lowell, and his stepdaughters, Evgenia Citkowitz and Ivana Lowell, describe him as a parent who was tender and sympathetic, unusually attuned to their emotional needs as children and adolescents. Evgenia recollects that although she never saw Lowell when he was manic (her mother sent her to the Hebrides when he was hospitalized in 1970; she was away at school at other times when he was ill), she could sense his psychological frailty. Ivana states that she “adored” him. When she was burned over most of her body in an accident as a young child—still in “the last madness of child-gaiety,” he wrote in a poem for her, “before the trouble of the world shall hit”—Lowell spread a towel on the floor of her hospital room and slept by her bed. The words used time and again by his daughter and stepdaughters are “kind,” “gentle,” and “sensitive.”

  Elizabeth Bishop, one of Lowell’s closest friends, said, “I loved him at first sight.” He was “rumpled,” in need of a haircut, and “handsome in an almost old-fashioned poetic way. I took to him at once.” She remembers that Lowell, aware that she was somewhat intimidated by him, tried hard to put her at ease. “Kindness has always been the dominant note in his attitude to me, over many years, and shown in many ways.” They respected each other’s poetry and were sympathetic to the tumultuous circumstances of each other’s lives. Each was a great poet; each had more than his or her share of psychological problems and complicated relationships. Each had a brilliance that the other understood and encouraged; they were competitive but neither felt substantially threatened by the other.

  “There’s no one else I can quite talk to with confidence and abandon and delicacy,” Lowell wrote. “I think of you daily and feel anxious lest we lose our old backward and forward flow that always seems to open me up and bring color and peace.” Bishop expressed a similar indebtedness: “Dearest Cal,” she wrote. “Please never stop writing me letters—they always manage to make me feel like my higher self.” During a dark time in her life, she wrote to him, she had felt “just the faintest glimmer” that she would “get out of this somehow, alive. Meanwhile—your letter has helped tremendously—like being handed a lantern, or a spiked walking stick.” They handed off lanterns for twenty-five years.

  Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, Rio de Janeiro, 1962

  “I always feel a great blytheness and easiness with you.” Credit 29

  Lowell and Bishop dedicated poems to each other (Bishop’s “Armadillo” to Lowell, Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” to Bishop); each was a sharp but generous critic of the other’s work. They wrote poems about their friendship and common ties: New England, other poets and poetry, the depression that both were heir to. “Water,” a poem written by Lowell about their relationship, began, he told her, “from thinking about your letter, how indispensable you are to me, and how ideally we’ve really kept things, better than life allows really.” The mood, the gray-green rocks and movement of the sea, her physical form, and the shape of their relationship, were mutable; his caring was not:

  It was a Maine lobster town—

  each morning boatloads of hands

  pushed off for granite

  quarries on the islands,

  and left dozens of bleak

  white frame houses stuck

  like oyster shells

  on a hill of rock,

  and below us, the sea lapped

  the raw little match-stick

  mazes of a weir,

  where the fish for bait were trapped.

  Remember? We sat on a slab of rock.

  From this distance in time,

  it seems the color

  of iris, rotting and turning purpler,

  but it was only

  the usual gray rock

  turning the usual green

  when drenched by the sea.

  The sea drenched the rock

  at our feet all day,

  and kept tearing away

  flake after flake.

  One night you dreamed

  you were a mermaid clinging to a wharf-pile,

  and trying to pull

  off the barnacles with your hands.

  We wished our two souls

  might return like gulls

  to the rock. In the end,

  the water was too cold for us.

  Bishop had her own memories of Lowell, her sense of what was constant; she left them in an unfinished manuscript:

  Swimming, or rather standing, numb to the waist in the freezing cold water, but continuing to talk. If I were to think of any Saint in his connection then it is St. Sebastian—he stood in a rocky basin of the freezing water, sloshing it over his handsome youthful body and I could almost see the arrows sticking out of him.

  His courage—kindness—increasing good manners—gentleness with his daughter—capacity for work—

  Her manuscript ends abruptly, tellingly, on his gentleness and work.

  Lowell took an “inexhaustible pleasure” in being with his friends, said Alan Williamson, spending “whole day[s] together, reading each other’s new work, taking walks, drinking white wine through dinner, and long after. He showed affection easily and without embarrassment….willingly used his own prestige to ‘throw a lifeline’ to others.” Elizabeth Bishop was one of those on the receiving end of such a lifeline. In a statement read at his memorial service in London, she said, “I know that he used his influence to be helpful to me personally in more than one difficult period of my life—acts of kindness I learned of only later and by chance.” Others took a different kind of lifeline from how he dealt with his suffering. “In my middle age, haunted by fears and hints that I have lost my way,” wrote Donald Davie to Lowell, “I hold by the thought of you and the image of you.” At social gatherings Lowell often gravitated toward those who looked in a bad state and tried to pull them out of their depression. “There was a kind of litmus quality about his sensibility,” said William Alfred. “I suppose it was the suffering that he, that he himself went through.”

  Lowell’s oldest friends, Frank Parker and Blair Clark, said that Lowell, an intensely loyal person, put a particularly high value on loyalty. “I have never had a more loyal friend, ever,” said Frank Parker. Clark agreed. “One of the most extraordinary things about Cal was something you had to call loyalty. In our little cabal at St. Mark’s [School] loyalty was the first principle, imposed by Cal.” “It wasn’t a fearful, defensive loyalty,” he explained. “It was something that Cal felt essential to his own peculiar ideas of human relations and what was worth doing in life.” Loyalty was part of a code of conduct that Lowell established for himself when he was young; it strengthened his ability to survive as life became harder. “I think he never really ever lost a friend,” observed William Alfred. “His heart was as large as his mind.” Lowell, recounts Parker’s daughter, the reporter and producer Diantha Parker, “was a supremely challenging and demanding friend, but he was a loyal and grateful one to the end. This constancy was part of Lowell’s lightness, the side of him my father wished more people understood.”

  Lowell was a complicated man, made more complicated by an illness that periodically and ra
dically changed his personality and behavior. He was a study in contradiction. His manic-depressive illness gave an aura of tragedy to his life, said a friend, but it was a darkness that fiercely contrasted with “his gaiety, his love of life, and his extraordinary intelligence.” The contrast in Lowell’s behavior when he was well and ill was stark. Stanley Kunitz said that Lowell was someone who could be “modest and arrogant, tender and mean, generous and indifferent, masterful and helpless, depressed and manic.” He was “knowing about fame and power, but no less knowing about his weaknesses.” There could be an edge, acknowledged Seamus Heaney. “You never felt quite safe with him but neither did you ever feel sold short.” The health of his mind and moods determined everything. Most who knew him acknowledged his frightening, disturbing behavior but put it in the context of a wider caring. “All flaws considered,” wrote Norman Mailer, “Lowell was still a fine, good, and honorable man.”

  Lowell’s student and friend Kathleen Spivack has described the contrasting sides of his personality. Lowell, she wrote, was “complex, tortured, and difficult, with multiple breakdowns, a horror of them, and a lot of ambition and dark streaks mixed in.” At the same time, she continued, “his darting sudden insights, humor, kindness, and generosity prevailed, despite and beyond the illness and difficult part of his character.” Lowell also exuded a potentially dangerous sexuality, she added. “If pulled into the sexual orbit of this extremely attractive person, one would be burnt to cinders.” But, first and foremost, she said, he was a man “I deeply loved.” He was “a great friend and a great poet.”

  Lowell was larger than life, said William Alfred. It was an observation made by many. “He was great fun,” Alfred said. “He loved to laugh.” His wives Elizabeth Hardwick and Caroline Blackwood, as well as many of his friends, said that Lowell enhanced the world around him, gave an added depth to life, and made it more exciting. Frank Parker, his childhood friend, remarked that Lowell made life difficult, at times very difficult, but he also made it more vivid: “The world became larger,” Parker said. “Somehow, things glowed….Everything became more.” Caroline Blackwood said much the same thing. “He had that quality, that he could make the dullest thing, like going to pick up the laundry, seem exciting.” He had such intensity “that if he read something aloud you felt: you won’t hear this again.” His artistic vision was often dark and desperate, she acknowledged, but as a person “he wasn’t dark at all.”

  Lowell was “very sociable, curious, fond of a large number of people,” Elizabeth Hardwick said. He never seemed to have enough of life, seemed never to tire. The capacity for joy was not that far from the capacity for despair. “Everything about him was outsized: his learning, his patience with his work, his dedication, and the pattern of his troubled life. I think it is true, as he said, that he knew a lot of happiness in each of his decades, happiness that is when he was fortunately for such long creative and private periods ‘himself.’ ” Lowell “took up all the air in a room,” Hardwick told the writer and editor Wendy Lesser. It was not meant as a criticism; rather, “it was meant to suggest what a substantial and attractive if difficult person he was—that he was essentially the only person you could pay attention to when he was around.”

  Jonathan Raban, who for a while lived in Blackwood and Lowell’s downstairs flat in London, said, “There was no point at which he was not more vividly alive, and thinking, and feeling and playing with words and inventive than anyone I’ve ever met. To the point at which there is an awful flatness left in the world after his death; one has absolutely no conviction that one is going to meet anyone who is as vivid to one as Cal was vivid.”

  Such intensity was not for everyone. Even Raban had a limit. Lowell staged a reenactment of Napoleon’s war against Russia—using full ashtrays and empty wineglasses as soldiers—taking much of a day. He exhausted friends and students with his nonstop manic and submanic dialogues about poets and poetry. “There were times toward the end [when Lowell was increasingly ill] when I got tired out by Cal. One was drawn into a [manic] labyrinth of somebody else’s total egotism….I was used up by it,” Raban wrote. Stephen Spender, although he too liked and admired Lowell, said, “I felt that I couldn’t bear to be with him for hours on end. I felt this kind of pressure of his personality.” Jonathan Miller found Lowell overwhelming, dominating, and draining and felt the need to pull himself out of the Lowell orbit. Intensity, especially when it takes on a manic hue, is often oppressive.

  Lowell could be great fun and fill the room with his personality; when he was manic, he could horrify and humiliate those he most loved. But laughter was much more a part of him than were his manic springs for the jugular. The poet Alan Brownjohn described a raucous, laughter-filled dinner at one of Lowell’s favorite restaurants in London. They had drunk their full share of wine and whiskey and were several sheets to the wind. “I can remember being unable to find my avocado with my spoon,” recalled Brownjohn. Lowell, for his part, was “shooting escargots out of the nutcracker thing that you crack them with and two of these things hit me in the chest.” The evening flew on from there.

  Shooting snails across a table to great hoots of laughter is not the image people have of Robert Lowell. But laughter is a defining memory held by those who knew him best. Laughter, and an appreciation for the things in life that bind: summer evenings with friends and family, martinis, rescuing a turtle lost on the road. Normal times and fellowship. Lowell caught the hours: “We gossiped on the rocks of the millpond,” he wrote of a summer evening, and “baked things in shells on the sand, and drank, as was the appetite of our age.” Perhaps life was deeper, simpler for its drops into desperation.

  Lowell was a teacher as well as a friend. He was anything but conventional in his approach to teaching—untidy and distractible, an idiosyncratic wanderer in words and chains of ideas who, now and again, had to be taken off to a psychiatric hospital—but he made a difference in the lives of many of his students. Anne Sexton was a student in his poetry class at Boston University, which was taught in a room she described as “a bleak spot, as if it had been forgotten for years, like the spinning room in Sleeping Beauty’s castle.” Lowell worked “with a cold chisel” on her poems, she wrote, and “showed no more mercy than a dentist. He gets out the decay.” But, she added, “if he is never kind to the poem, he is kind to the poet.” He taught his students what to leave out of their poems, she said. He taught taste. He taught them to set higher hurdles for themselves, then run the course.

  Lowell’s preternatural, scholarly knowledge of poetry and history, along with his infectious excitement for writing and ideas, had a lasting effect on many of his students, as did his expectation of seriousness and excellence. His mind, naturally wide flung and associative, brought to life long-dead writers and their worlds and made connections between eras and ideas that students might come to understand only days or months after leaving his seminar. “Week after week,” said W. D. Snodgrass, “we came away staggered under a bombardment of ideas, ideas, ideas. None of these works would ever look the same again.” When Lowell took on a student’s poem for analysis, “it was as if a muscle-bound octopus sat down over it. Then, deliberately, it stretched out one tentacle to haul in Mythology, a second for Sociology, a third for Classical Literature, others for Religion, History, Psychology. Meantime, you sat there thinking, ‘This man is as mad as they said; none of this has anything to do with my poor, little poem!’ Then he began to tie these disciplines, one by one, into your text; you saw that it did have to do, had almost everything to do, with your poem.” Lowell set out a vast canvas before his students, the one upon which he himself drew. If it was at times incomprehensible, it was yet one of erudition and covenant. Lowell, Snodgrass said, hauled his students with him, “through uncharted galaxies of idea and association. Who could feel less than grateful for a mind so unpredictable, so massive, so concerned?”

  With unusual exception, Lowell’s students admired and liked him, but the possibility that he would become ill w
hile he was teaching was disturbing for more than a few. This was particularly true in his last years at Harvard when his precarious sanity and overshadowing reputation as a poet made the anticipation of his presence in the classroom at times charged and uncomfortable. Students competed and scrambled to be accepted into his seminars, but, once there, they were uncertain about what to expect. “I was disquieted, as I think many others were, by apprehensions of his vulnerability,” said the poet Robert Shaw, “of what seemed a perilously delicate equilibrium that he was effortfully maintaining. Everyone knew his history of manic-depressive episodes; several times during his years of teaching at Harvard his courses were interrupted when he withdrew for treatment.” Students, he said, were deferential to Lowell because he was a great poet, but the deference was “laced with a fear of inadvertently saying the wrong thing, abrading nerves that were already rubbed raw.” Kathleen Spivack recalled that “once during class he was pushing on the window ledge, had one leg over, students thought he was going to jump out the window. He went into the hospital right after that.”

  It is hard to imagine what it was like for students to witness the transformation of their professor from famed poet into psychotic stranger. It is likewise hard to imagine how difficult it must have been for Lowell to face his students after he was released from the hospital, knowing how aberrantly he had behaved. Anne Sexton, who often acknowledged Lowell’s kindness and support for her work, and like him received a Pulitzer Prize for poetry, also like him spent time as a patient at McLean Hospital. In “Elegy in the Classroom” she wrote:

  In the thin classroom, where your face