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

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  Thus manic behavior can at times seem less part of a psychiatric illness than a manifestation of flawed character: self-indulgence, irresponsibility, narcissism. This pattern has been described for centuries, and modern diagnostic criteria incorporate it as a significant part of manic illness. The DSM-5, for example, lists as a criterion for mania “excessive involvement in activities that have a high potential for painful consequences (e.g., engaging in unrestrained buying sprees, sexual indiscretions, or foolish investments).” Still, it is understandably difficult for people who have been hurt to see the harmful behavior as part of an illness, rather than as a reflection of the true intent of a friend, spouse, or child. It may be clinically accurate to conclude that an impulsive love affair was a result of mania, but it stretches the credulity and understanding of the person wronged.

  Nevertheless, clinical studies of thousands of manic patients confirm that impulsive love affairs are far more common in mania; there is, relatedly, a marked increase in sexual desire and behavior during mania. This was described two thousand years ago by Aretaeus of Cappadocia—his manic patients, he wrote, were unrestrained and notable for their “lewdness and shamelessness”—and by clinicians since. “Manic patients are very susceptible to quick courtship and sudden marriage,” wrote John D. Campbell in his 1953 text on manic-depressive illness. Mania, he observed, alienates husbands from their wives and increases the demand for divorce; it leads to the often public pursuit of new romantic involvements. The sexual symptoms of mania are “the most powerful and important of all,” wrote John Custance of his own experience. One lusts, one acts on lust; lust becomes a part of love, then a part of urgent, universal love. “The normal inhibitions disappear.” One acts. Mania brings passion, depression brings apathy. Hope lies in moods and seasons that pass; it lies in love and in “things that spring.”

  Chaucer’s old January made hay with May.

  In this ever more enlightened bedroom,

  I wake under the early rising sun,

  sex indelible flowers on the air—

  shouldn’t I ask to hold to you forever,

  body of a dolphin, breast of cloud?

  You rival the renewal of the day,

  clearing the puddles with your green sack of books.

  —FROM “HARVARD: 3. MORNING”

  When Lowell was in his late forties, he translated Horace’s “Spring’s Lesson.” Life is short, Horace wrote. Death waits, but not for long, and time does not wait at all. The only hope against the night was to grasp pleasure and pursue beauty; Lowell translated: “Now, now, / the time to tear the blossoms from the bough, / to gather wild flowers from the thawing field.” Lowell gathered life from the ruins as best he could. “Cal’s recuperative powers were almost as much of a jolt as his breakdowns,” Elizabeth Hardwick said. “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.” Work and doctors, friends and family, helped preserve his gifts of person and art. But sometimes, as he wrote to John Berryman, “it’s only love that lets air in our lungs.”

  —

  Lowell read Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago not long after it was published in 1957. He was stunned by its ambition and its novelistic vision of the human condition; its sweeping world of revolution, history, and disillusion; the love story that gave life back to those who had been broken. In a way that Lowell felt could not be expressed in poetry, Zhivago consciously took on the deepest things: death and resurrection; life that emerges from love, that brings sensation to the numb. “The last pages of Pasternak’s Zhivago are still reeling through my mind,” Lowell wrote to his cousin in September 1958. “It covers most of our century with a tragic weary hero who loathes the stereotyped and has a Graham Greene–like willessness and worlds besides. For a moment the stone facades of the new Russia blow away like gauze, much of our own too.”

  “You must read the Pasternak Dr. Zhivago,” he wrote to Elizabeth Bishop two days later. “Everyone says it’s great but too lyrical to be a novel. I feel shaken and haunted by the main character.” It “dwarfed” all postwar novels, he thought, except Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. He saw in Zhivago, doctor and poet, more than a glimpse of himself. A month later he wrote to Bishop again. “Did I write you about Pasternak—really an earthquake—bigger perhaps than anything by Turgenev and something that alters both the old Russia and the new for us—alters our own world too.” To Peter Taylor he wrote simply, “I’m shatteringly impressed by Pasternak.”

  Pasternak and Lowell had much in common. They were public poets, highly critical of the state yet with unseverable emotional ties to their respective countries. Their writing—dense, complex, original—was bred in the personal, especially Life Studies and Doctor Zhivago. Lapsed convert and Jew, they both used Christian imagery and ritual to effect. Both poets were attractive to women, and attracted to them. Each had affairs and married three times; both turned to passion for escape and solace, and muse. Both were translators, and their voices were strong and idiosyncratic, elliptical. Lowell, who translated Pasternak’s poetry—Peter Levi wrote in his biography of Pasternak that Lowell’s translations were “the best by far that have ever been done of Pasternak”—acknowledged his difficulty in translating the Russian poet (he had to rely upon others’ translations), but his respect for Pasternak was constant. “I have come to feel that he is a very great poet,” he wrote. Only a few months before he died, Lowell visited Pasternak’s grave in Russia and raised a glass of vodka in respect.

  “The Frosted Rowan,” a pivotal chapter in Doctor Zhivago, is an ice-fire depiction of Lowell’s most important subjects: death and renewal; the restorative, then killing, cycle of nature; the entangled roots of love and art: violence, upheaval; the history of a race. In the “dense, impassable forest,” Zhivago comes upon a “solitary, beautiful, rusty-red-leafed rowan tree, the only one of all the trees to keep its foliage. It grew on a mound above a low, hummocky bog, and reached right up to the sky, into the dark lead of the prewinter inclemency, the flatly widening corymbs of its hard brightly glowing berries.”

  The first woman, according to Nordic myth, was made from the rowan tree, and Lara Antipova, Zhivago’s lover and muse, seems to him as the rowan: life in the midst of death, comfort in mid-winter. The rowan tree, Pasternak writes, was “half covered with snow, half with frozen leaves and berries, and it stretched out two snowy branches to meet him. He remembered Lara’s big white arms, rounded, generous, and taking hold of the branches, he pulled the tree towards him. As if in a conscious answering movement, the rowan showered him with snow from head to foot.” The rowan—its berries the blood force of nature, its wood a balm against suffering—gave hope against time’s passing. The Russian song of the rowan tree was, in Pasternak’s words, “a mad attempt to stop time with words,” a force against the unspeakable, against the atrocities of the Revolution.

  The rain falls, and the soil swims up to breathe;

  a squatter sumac shafted in cement

  flirts wet leaves skyward like the Firebird.

  Two girls clasp hands in a clamshell courtyard, watch

  the weed of the sumac failing visibly;

  the girls age not, are always last year’s girls

  waiting for tomorrow’s storm to wash

  the fallen leaf, turned scarlet, back to green.

  —FROM “THE HEAVENLY RAIN”

  Lowell, too, tried to stop time with words and women. He had many affairs, most of them in the early stages of his manic attacks. They were hallmarked by an intense, impulsive involvement, usually with someone young. He was reckless: declared that his marriage was over, pledged his future to the woman involved, set up new living arrangements, and spent rashly. Then, when the mania cooled, he or his lawyers disassembled the commitm
ents. This pattern is not rare in mania. Less frequently, Lowell had romantic and sexual involvements with women when he was not manic. Most of these affairs were with writers, a few of them students, and generally they were characterized by respect and affection. For the most part the women were more emotionally involved with Lowell than he was with them. When he was not ill, he made it clear that he did not plan to leave his marriage and, until he fell in love with Caroline Blackwood in 1970, he did not.

  Lowell often described his lovers in terms of healing and renewal. “I was in a hospital for five weeks or so,” Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Bishop in 1961. “Once more there was a girl, a rather foolish girl but full of a kind of life and earth force.” To someone he had fallen in love with when he was manic in 1954, he wrote, “It has been as though there were deep inside me some great festering wound, as if I had rolled some great stone over it (to pretend it wasn’t there) and thus I went on half alive. And now that I know you still love me and are waiting, the wound is purifying and draining. I am alive again.” A few months later he wrote to her, “Away from you I dry up like grass.” (Later, after Lowell’s mania had cleared and he had broken off from her, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote, “Poor Giovanna—Cal leaves the bones all over the world.”)

  Several of Lowell’s affairs were associated with not only renewal of body and mind but the inspiration of poems, including, “Waking in the Blue” and the poem sequences “The Charles River,” “Harvard,” and “Mexico.” For Lowell, like Pasternak’s rowan tree in the snow, love affairs were the representation of life, the possibility of regeneration. “Love is resurrection,” Lowell wrote. “Woman wants man, man woman, as naturally / as the thirsty frog desires the rain.” Love, or the illusion of love, set one free. “O to break loose,” he wrote. “All life’s grandeur / is something with a girl in summer.” Love, he wrote elsewhere, is “all that kept off death at any time.”

  Renewal, “dying into rebirth,” were critical themes in his work. But renewal was a complicated, messy thing; it was not simple and was often mixed with pain for himself and others. Rot was proximate to renewal. After William Carlos William died, Lowell wrote, “Our town was blanketed in the rain of rot and the rain of renewal. New life was muscling in, everything growing moved on its one-way trip to the ground.” Life came from death and returned to it. Lowell knew this. He knew the New England seasons as Thoreau and Henry Adams did, the seasons of love as a poet does, the seasons of moods and madness as those who have suffered greatly. Childhood, desire, and suffering: each kept its own season. Imagination did as well. Words spun frictionless or they went dry—“a slack of eternity,” Lowell said of these times. It was as he had written of the ice in Maine: it goes “in season to the tropical, / then the mash freezes back to ice, and then / the ice is broken by another wave.” Our hope, he wrote, is in things that change, that spring:

  Tannish buds and green buds,

  hidden yesterday, pioneers today.

  The Georgian thirties’ Harvard houses

  have shed their brashness in forty years;

  architecture suffers decline with dignity

  and requisitions its atmosphere—

  our hope is in things that spring.

  Tonight in the middle of melting Boston,

  a brick chimney tapers, and points a ladder

  of white smoke into the blue black sky.

  —“RETURN IN MARCH”

  When Lowell was fifty, he had a brief but intense affair with a young woman. From it came some of Lowell’s most directly sensuous, voluptuous, and tender writing. “I, fifty…/ dead laurel grizzling my back,” he wrote in “Mexico”; “you, some sweet, uncertain age, say twenty-seven, / untempted, unseared by honors or deception.” Their differences in experience, age, and position were set out by him from the start. But within these limits he found a kind of amulet against passing time. “I have lived without / sense so long the loss no longer hurts,” he wrote. Life seeped in. His young lover wrote to him as he returned to New York: “I wanted to run over and give you the blue flower I was wearing,” she said. “But then I thought how it would begin to die and wither in your hands on the way home, and I didn’t want you to have anything but a sense of life, not withering….Let us clasp and not grasp what’s life and fragile.” She thought of him, she said, had twined jasmine flowers in her hair. Lowell kept the blue flower alive: “Poor Child, you were kissed so much you thought you were walked on; / yet you wait in my doorway with bluebells in your hair.” Words kept memory, if unable to hold off time.

  In “Eight Months Later” he looked back on what remained:

  The flower I took away and wither and fear—

  to clasp, not grasp the life, the light and fragile….

  It’s certain we burned the grass, the grass still fumes,

  the girl stands in the doorway…

  …………

  I see the country where the lemon blossoms,

  and the pig-gold orange glows on its dark branch,

  and the south wind stutters from the blue hustings;

  I see it; it’s behind us, love, behind us—

  the bluebell is brown…

  Lowell’s affairs brought him distraction, pleasure, discomfort, and poems. To others, certainly Elizabeth Hardwick, they brought pain. She was almost always aware of the women he was involved with when he was manic; he made little effort to conceal those relationships and, indeed, was humiliatingly public about them. Hardwick seems not to have been so aware of his nonmanic affairs. His impulsive alliances undertaken while manic, made easier by mania’s accompanying extraversion and disinhibited charm, could be understood by Hardwick on a clinical level. The human level was harder. What gave hope to Lowell and helped sustain him gave her nothing but pain.

  When mild, the disinhibiting qualities of mania can charm others, ease conversation, and loosen imaginative thought. As the mania progresses and the disinhibition accelerates, however, little charm remains for others, only hurt, anger, fear, betrayal, and embarrassment. Satan, it has been said, “loves to fish in roiled waters.” Mania roils. It damages, and often destroys, marriages and friendships in obvious and not so obvious ways. Infidelity and physical violence are among the most devastating and difficult to forgive. But verbal cruelty is also hard for many spouses and friends. The psychoanalyst Frieda Fromm-Reichmann wrote that manic-depressive patients “are uniquely able” to find and exploit vulnerable emotional spots in other people. This has been documented in the clinical research literature. Cutting remarks made during mania are often stinging in their perceptiveness. When they are made in front of other people, which is often the case, they are yet more crushing. The manic verbal cut or enraged diatribe is hard to forget and hard to forgive, even after the mania has resolved. Mania is a brutal thing.

  Lowell, when manic, injured others, himself, and his reputation. He was unfaithful. He took up quite publicly with young women. He went on relentlessly about Christ and extolled Hitler and other tyrants. He accused others unfairly and made cruel remarks. As his illness got worse, and his delusions became more darkly tainted, tyranny took on a disproportionate weight. He was on several occasions physically violent. He had a virulent illness.

  Lowell was a public person, in sickness as in health, and accounts of his illness took on a semi-mythic quality, relayed from person to person, colleague to colleague, student to student. The things he did when he was manic were viewed by some with compassion, by others with bewilderment, outrage, or malice. His illness gave confirmation to those who disliked or envied him; it confused and frightened those who cared about him. It is one of the unfairnesses of manic-depressive illness that it causes suffering not only to those who have it but to the people they love and that it places the responsibility for an unsought disease onto the person who has it. It makes those who become ill feel responsible for doing things that are beyond their control and against their values.

  Yet while it is in force, for the patient, mania is a compelling state that confe
rs certainty and power. If, as John Custance said, “I am God. I see the future, plan the universe,” or if, like Lowell, you believe that you are the Holy Ghost or Achilles or Alexander the Great, the moral constraints of the world do not seem applicable. Sexual drive is commanding; cruelty is less apparent and seems less awful than it would in the light of a normal day. Violent force seems a more justified response to threat. Christopher Ricks has argued that violence and family were Lowell’s essential subjects, an apt perspective on his life and work. The violence, Ricks said, is “terrible in its variety (of time, of place, of motive, of nature) and terrible in not changing.”

  The amoral force at the heart of mania has always raised philosophical, moral, and medical questions. Is mania a failure of character or is it a disease? What control does a person have over an inherited illness, one whose impact on brain structure and functioning is demonstrated by modern neuroimaging techniques? How do we understand what is said or done in mania? Is the behavior willed or is it beyond the will, like delirium or a seizure? If the breakdowns repeat, and the pathological periods blur more and more into the norm, does the moral disturbance remain separable from character?

  From his childhood until he died, Lowell struggled to impose his will on forces that were beyond his control. Whether reason can hold any meaningful sway over insanity is a debate that dates back to the ancient philosophers and physicians and remains today at the center of discussions by doctors, ethicists, jurists, patients, and their families. Eli Todd, the first superintendent of the Hartford Retreat for the Insane, which opened in 1824 and where Lowell was a patient at three different times during the 1960s, knew madness close at hand. His father was mentally ill and his sister killed herself. “The great design of moral management,” Todd wrote, “is to bring those faculties which yet remain sound to bear upon those which are diseased, and by their operation to modify, to counteract, or to suspend their morbid actions. This constitutes the process of self-control, the groundwork of cure, the grand tactical principle which is to decide the issue of the contest between reason and insanity.” This he knew was easier said than done.