Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character
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Lowell viewed his illness as unavoidable, described it as “some flaw in the motor,” “some germ in the mind.” The depression that followed mania was a “formless time of irresolution, forgetfulness, inertia”; “the bottom of the world”; a “long, burdensome dull period”; “that blind mole’s time”; “dust in the blood.” He was, when depressed, “inert, gloomy, aimless, vacant, self-locked”; “graveled and grim and dull”; he was “empty.” Once well again, he looked back on his depression as “muck and weeds and backwash.” He had to shake off “all the unease, torpor, desire to do nothing,” the “grovelling, low as dirt purgatorial feelings,” the “blank sense of failing.” After mania the “somberness” set in, “the jaundice of the spirit,” the “pathological self-abasement.”
Helen Vendler gives an excellent analysis of how Lowell transformed his depression into art, into the “naming work of poetry.” She describes the forms that depression takes—its incoherence, repetitiveness, hopelessness, blotting out of memory, its stifled rhythm and imagination—and shows how Lowell persisted beyond the suffering and inhibition of his depression to transcend its stifling influence. Lowell’s depressive style and language, Vendler points out, are quite beautiful in their own way. He was able to declare simultaneously, “I am depressed” and “I am inventive in finding equivalents for depression.” His poetry was an artistic and moral victory over despair.
During his prolonged stay in McLean Hospital in 1958, Lowell drafted and then began revising the poem that would become “Waking in the Blue.” Originally addressed to Ann Adden, a young woman he had fallen in love with when he was manic, the final version maintains much of the imagery of the first draft—the harpoon to the heart, the mad of Harvard, the dark daybreak at Bowditch Hall, the Roman Catholic attendants, and the “Boston screwballs” that will become “Mayflower screwballs.” The early drafts are filled with descriptions of Adden and details of their affair. The revised version, published in Life Studies, omits Adden entirely (as Lowell did in his life once he recovered). It tightens into a brilliant, controlled poem about madness, about the illusion that class or education protects against insanity. There is a trace of “Richard Cory,” “envied” and “admirably schooled in every grace,” who “one calm summer night, / Went home and put a bullet through his head.” Being a thoroughbred, of Mayflower stock, carries little meaning. Madness is now, it lies in the future: he stands “before the metal shaving mirrors, / and see[s] the shaky future grow familiar.” The asylum levels all: “each of us holds a locked razor.”
Bowditch Hall, McLean Hospital Credit 40
Waking in the Blue
The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,
rouses from the mare’s-nest of his drowsy head
propped on The Meaning of Meaning.
He catwalks down our corridor.
Azure day
makes my agonized blue window bleaker.
Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.
Absence! My heart grows tense
as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.
(This is the house for the “mentally ill.”)
What use is my sense of humor?
I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties,
once a Harvard all-American fullback,
(if such were possible!)
still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties,
as he soaks, a ramrod
with the muscle of a seal
in his long tub,
vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing.
A kingly granite profile in a crimson golf-cap,
worn all day, all night,
he thinks only of his figure,
of slimming on sherbet and ginger ale—
more cut off from words than a seal.
This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean’s;
the hooded night lights bring out “Bobbie,”
Porcellian ’29,
a replica of Louis XVI
without the wig—
redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale,
as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit
and horses at chairs.
These victorious figures of bravado ossified young.
In between the limits of day,
hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts
and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle
of the Roman Catholic attendants.
(There are no Mayflower
screwballs in the Catholic Church.)
After a hearty New England breakfast,
I weigh two hundred pounds
this morning. Cock of the walk,
I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor’s jersey
before the metal shaving mirrors,
and see the shaky future grow familiar
in the pinched, indigenous faces
of these thoroughbred mental cases,
twice my age and half my weight.
We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.
Robert Lowell reading at Harvard, 1977
“We too follow nature, imperceptibly, change our mouse-brown to white lion’s mane.” Credit 41
King’s Chapel bell, Boston
The bell—inscribed, “The sweetest bell we ever made. Paul Revere & Son. 1817”—tolls over the graveyard where Lowell’s ancestor Mary Winslow (1607–1679) lies. Credit 42
VI
MORTALITY
Come; I Bell Thee Home
Nothing will go again. The bells cry: “Come,
Come home,” the babbling Chapel belfry cries:
“Come, Mary Winslow, come; I bell thee home.”
—From “Mary Winslow”
13
Life Blown Towards Evening
What shall I do with my stormy life blown towards evening?
No fervor helps without the favor of heaven,
no permissive law of nature picks up the bill.
—From “New York Again”
In the spring of 1970, when he was fifty-three, Robert Lowell took up a visiting fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. It was “a bachelor world,” he wrote to Elizabeth Hardwick, “but very beautiful.” By the end of his first day, the “half lost soul in All Souls” had “eaten in gown, handled a 14th century psalm book,” and enjoyed a hailstorm with its “crystal peas bouncing off mouldy parapets.” He was to remain in England for more than seven years, until shortly before he died in September 1977.
There was little at the time to suggest that Lowell’s visit to England would be other than brief. He and Elizabeth Hardwick were still married, and their daughter was a thirteen-year-old student in Manhattan. They lived in New York during an exhilarating, churned-up time, the explosive decade of the 1960s. They flourished as writers in a writers’ city. Lithium had given Lowell more than three years free of mania, an Indian summer that lasted longer than he or his doctors had hoped or thought possible. His work was full. He was teaching at Harvard and, with Hardwick, Robert Silvers, and Barbara Epstein, he helped found the New York Review of Books. He published several plays and volumes of verse, most to acclaim and award, some not. He was a prominent public figure opposed to the Vietnam War, actively involved in the antiwar movement. He worked for the 1968 presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy and he witnessed the violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He wrote “For the Union Dead”—his great poem of America at the height of her moral and civic strength, and of the counterpoint, her downward turning—and read it to a crowd of thousands on Boston Common; he adapted the work of Hawthorne and Melville for the theater. He wrote as an American, he said, as a twentieth-century American: “For all the horrors of this age, and for all the attractions of others such as antiquity and 19th Century New England, I’d rather be alive now than at any time I know of. This age is mine, and I very much want to be part of it.”
All the odder, then, that Lowell left America at such a time
in his life and in the life of his country. It was through no lack of belief in America. Although he shared with many other artists and citizens a dark view of his country’s midcentury soul, he made it clear that he was not in flight from the land of his ancestors. “I’ll go back to America and be American,” he told an interviewer, but he was glad, for a while, “to dull the glare” after ten years of living on the “front lines.” The front lines of protest and disillusionment, the New York atmosphere, sometimes bristled, he continued, “as if with bits of steel in the rain when it falls.” It struck the mind and agitated; it showed in New York edginess. He would stay just awhile in England, he said. Perhaps he would find a kind of peace.
Mostly, Lowell said, he had chosen to live in England for personal reasons. He had fallen in love. And for once he had been sane, or predominantly sane, not manic at the time that he fell. The poetry of Lowell’s years in England would be marked by that love, and by the joy and the awakening, the despair, and finally the unsurvivable turmoil that came with it. His work would also be marked by the madness he had hoped to leave behind him, madness that came galing back like a nor’easter. His poetry would be touched by a sharp sense of time passing and the limits to love, by the nonnegotiability of death. He would write what he lived: a restless odyssey, his broken way back to Ithaca, his hard way back home. He would write again about New England, his parents, and his madness. He had no expectation that it would be less than difficult. Life, like his art, was no easy thing.
Art, unlike craft, drew upon life. The latter, Lowell said, was “hard to learn and not for everyone, but once mastered always available.” Art was different, tougher: “You went to the well every time.” When he asked of himself in his fifties, “What shall I do with my stormy life blown towards evening?,” the answer was no different from the one he gave as a young man. He would draw upon it and use it for his art.
Lowell fell in love with the Anglo-Irish writer Lady Caroline Blackwood not long after he arrived in England in 1970. They had much in common: they were writers; they shared determining bits of temperament, social class, a tenebrous wit; and each was drawn to fellow artists. Blackwood had been married to the painter Lucian Freud, then to the composer Israel Citkowitz, and last to Lowell; all of Lowell’s wives—Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Caroline Blackwood—and most of his lovers were writers. Both he and Blackwood came from socially privileged but comfortless childhoods. They had fraught heredities. Blackwood’s Guinness and Sheridan ancestries rivaled those of Lowell. She had “reckless blood,” she said, “which seethed and tingled like Champagne.”
Kathleen Spivack, who came to know Caroline Blackwood well when Lowell was teaching at Harvard, regarded Lowell and Blackwood as “twins” who “thought alike, looked and moved alike, were open and vulnerable alike.” They had the “same wide, high forehead; eyes straining to understand; the same way of staring without blinking.” They both “shambled and lurched, rather than walked: a long, hunched, stumbling stride.” Xandra Gowrie, who also knew Blackwood and Lowell, agreed that they were a matched pair. “They were both drinkers, and clever, and had tons to talk about. They loved jokes. And both lived very near the cliff edge. As Cal said at some point, near the end, ‘We’re like two eggs cracking.’ ”
They cracked to dangerous effect. Blackwood was addicted to alcohol. Lowell’s mania was notably destructive to his friends and family. Much brought them close; later, their reverberating instability broke them. “Sufferer, how can you help me,” Lowell asked in a late poem, “if I use your sickness / to increase my own?”:
Will we always be
one up, the other down,
one hitting bottom, the other
flying through the trees—
seesaw inseparables?
When their relationship began, Blackwood did not know how hard Lowell’s attacks of madness had been on him or those close to him. His friends believed this was part of her appeal to him, that he wanted to escape from a life where his illness was known and a source of gossip and pain. He was newly in England; people had not yet seen him at his most disturbed. Blackwood, Spivack states, “had not seen him mad and she did not act as a reminder of his madness.” Elizabeth Hardwick, on the other hand, was “someone he knew he had hurt, for whom he felt much guilt, and someone who had seen him sick many times.” Mania had burned through their love and hopes, left them with too many bad memories.
Caroline Blackwood in the 1950s
“When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body caught in its hangman’s-knot of sinking lines.” Credit 43
Helen Vendler agrees. Lowell, she said, “dealt with consequences of his madness by taking a new wife.” After starting on lithium he wanted “a new life with someone who would not think of him as a potential madman, who had not lived through the awful scenes that Hardwick had coped with for many years.” Caroline Blackwood and his new life in England, Vendler suggests, gave Lowell the heart of his book The Dolphin, just as the “undoing” of their relationship gave him his final book, Day by Day. Blackwood, first a muse of life and creation, became the muse who tutored him in heartbreak. This hard tutoring, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote, made him, at the end of his life, more human and “more like the rest of us.”
Lowell’s early vision of Blackwood, from the myths of antiquity, was as an Ovidian dolphin, free-swimming, a savior of the shipwrecked; guide and escort for the lost and wandering; conveyor of the dead. She brought him joy and an interlude of peace. She excited his imagination, gave him a son. She cut the nets that yanked him upward into world beholdenness, severed those that drew him downward into dying. Lowell wrote of her: “I am a woman or I am a dolphin, / the only animal man really loves, / I spout the smarting waters of joy in your face— / rough-weather fish, who cuts your nets and chains.” She brought surprise and danger.
Lowell was a spur to Blackwood’s writing as she was to his. He encouraged her, reiterated his conviction that she was a “first-class” writer. He “spotted the genius in Caroline,” said Jonathan Raban. “She was surrounded by Lowell’s belief in her ability to write.” They were close collaborators, recalls Blackwood’s daughter Evgenia Citkowitz; they worked side by side, in psychological as well as physical space. “I always showed him everything I wrote,” Blackwood said. He was not threatened by her writing or by her commitment to writing. “Nobody gives me any credit for taking on three clever writers,” he once joked to her. “Most men choose to marry their secretary or somebody weaker. I think I should be given honor for my bravery.” He had a point, Blackwood said. “Writers can retaliate.”
Evgenia Citkowitz, Blackwood’s daughter with the composer Israel Citkowitz, first met Lowell when he and Caroline told her they were planning to marry. They were holding hands in the corridor of Blackwood’s London flat, she remembers. “They were shy and nervous to share the news, which gave them the appearance of young lovers, although to a child of 9, a man of 52 also looks a lot like Father Time. Cal, as he was known, seemed sympathetic and gentle; an impression that was borne out throughout the years.” He was also, she says, humorous and brilliant. He and her mother “took happiness where they could and tried to make sense of it.” “The golden summers and shadowed beauty” of The Dolphin and Day by Day, she says, were “a true evocation of the period.”
Citkowitz never saw her stepfather when he was ill; her mother protected her and her two sisters, Natalya and Ivana, from the ravages of his mania. Still his depression weighed on them, especially on her mother, “who had her own afflictions” and was “temperamental, unable to cope.” Blackwood was terrified by Lowell’s manic delusions and the possibility that he might attack her or her children. “She spoke of the dread of wondering when the next episode would come,” remembers Citkowitz. Lowell, for his part, was “likewise unequipped to deal with [Blackwood’s] difficulties.”
Robert Lowell with his stepdaughter Evgenia Citkowitz, 1972
“Our hope is in things that spring.” Credit 44
Lowe
ll and Blackwood were together seven years. Their early relationship—passionate, artistically vibrant—in time was corroded by his mania and by her drinking. The mania came quickly. They had become lovers by late April 1970; in July he was manic and, for the first time in more than three years, he was admitted to a hospital. It was a grim reminder that his illness lay dormant, like a virus embedded in tissue and blood, quiet until awakened. It was a disturbing glimpse of what was to come. Always it was to be, as Lear had implored: Let me not be mad.
Lowell’s mania in the late spring and early summer of 1970 followed the familiar course of his earlier attacks. In Oxford, dining at All Souls High Table, he was domineering, incoherent, arrogant, and rude; he made sexual advances to a don’s wife. He drank too much. He proclaimed himself the Messiah. He locked Blackwood into her London flat and kept her from telephoning anyone, including her children. Terrified not only for her own safety but that of her young daughters, she had him admitted in early July to Greenways Nursing Home, a London hospital. “I didn’t want him in the same flat as the children in the state that he was in,” Blackwood said. “Neither did I want to be locked in with him. It was the longest three days of my life.” It was a nightmare for both of them. Having exhausted her emotional resources, she announced to Lowell that she too was in the midst of a nervous breakdown, then left.