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

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  Lowell wrote about suicide at different points in his life, beginning with early poems, such as “A Suicidal Fantasy,” which he wrote when he was twenty, revised, and then published as “A Suicidal Nightmare” in Land of Unlikeness. “After the Surprising Conversions,” published in Lord Weary’s Castle in 1946, took as its starting point a letter written by Jonathan Edwards and included a graphic description of suicide. A few years later, in The Mills of the Kavanaughs, Harry Kavanaugh, who wears a Winslow family ring and in a jealous rage tries, as Lowell had, to strangle his wife, kills himself. In other poems, Lowell wrote sympathetically and perceptively about friends who had died by suicide. Finally, in Day by Day, published a few months before his death, he wrote “Suicide,” which ends:

  Do I deserve credit

  for not having tried suicide—

  or am I afraid

  the exotic act

  will make me blunder,

  not knowing error

  is remedied by practice,

  as our first home-photographs,

  headless, half-headed, tilting

  extinguished by a flashbulb?

  In “Suicide,” as in his earlier poem “Home,” not only does he express the wish for death but also his piercing fear of being abandoned. “One light, two lights, three—” Lowell writes in “Suicide.” “Your car I watch for never comes, / you will not see me peeping for you / behind my furtively ajar front door.” In “Home,” the imagery of departure is palpable. “At visiting hours, you could experience / my sickness only as desertion,” Lowell wrote. “When you shuttle back chilled to London, / I am on the wrong end of a dividing train— / it is my failure with our fragility.”

  Lowell’s relationship with Blackwood had become one of love withdrawn and promised, love needed. He missed what they had known:

  I don’t need conversation, but you to laugh with—

  you and a room and a fire,

  cold starlight blowing through an open window—

  whither?

  The things that attracted Lowell and Blackwood to each other—their passion and shared aspects of mind—made the turmoil and pain all the worse when he was manic and her drinking was out of control. Blackwood had been clear at the time of Lowell’s breakdown in 1970, only a few months into their affair, that she could not provide him with what he needed when he was sick. Her instinct was to leave him until his illness cleared. “I always felt it was my fault in some way, that I must have sent him mad,” she said after his death. “I should have been nicer about his mania. But I couldn’t be. I hadn’t got that stamina.”

  Blackwood worried about having to make hospital arrangements for him when he was manic and about getting trapped together in their house with its “terrifying” balcony. She was anxious that Sheridan would be damaged by “seeing his father mad.” The situation was not survivable, she said. “It’s like someone becoming an animal, or someone possessed by the devil. And that’s what tears you apart. You think, I love this person, but I hate him. So where are you?” Lowell felt abandoned at these times; she knew it but could not be otherwise. “He’d say, ‘Supposing I go mad—you won’t be able to bear it, will you?’ And I’d say, ‘Perhaps you won’t go mad.’ I couldn’t say I could bear it, because I couldn’t.”

  Lowell, for his part, found it increasingly difficult to hold on to his sanity in the presence of Blackwood’s heavy drinking and depression. They made each other worse. His breakdowns made her “more wild, more destructive, more out of control,” observed Frank Bidart. “And he was afraid of how destructive she could be when she drank. She was always a very vivid talker, but she got to be much more flamboyant, and there was a kind of vehemence, an apocalyptic, destructive coloration, and one never knew how much would remain only talk, or somehow would get acted out in her life. Cal said to me, ‘I feel I make her sick.’ ” “At the sick times,” Lowell wrote, “our slashing, / drastic decisions made us runaways.”

  It is difficult to read Lowell’s last letters to Blackwood, to watch the disintegration of a marriage that had begun in hope and passion and sympathy. It is pointless to assign responsibility. Madness and alcoholism destroy love indiscriminately, without intent. Love is not enough.

  In April 1977, five months before he died, Lowell wrote to Blackwood from America of his increasing pessimism about their relationship: “And us? I really feel too weak and battered by it all. I fear I do you more harm than good. I think your blackness would pass if you didn’t live in fear of [my] manic attacks. And they don’t seem curable—almost thirty years. How’s that for persistence? I miss you sorely.”

  Lowell’s view to the future was dark, its contrast with his earlier happiness almost entire. “I don’t know what to say, our problems have become so many-headed and insuperable. Nothing like the sunshine of the years we had together—when it shone, as so often—so blindingly.” And, a few days later, “Us? Aren’t we too heady and dangerous for each other?” Lowell’s letters to Blackwood during the last months of his life make it clear that he was still in love with her but that their marriage could not be salvaged. The damage they had done to each other—inadvertent, devastating—made it impossible.

  “I am afraid of your visit,” Lowell wrote to Blackwood in early May 1977. “I am afraid nothing will be done except causing pain. How many lovely moments, weeks, months, we had.” But, he continued, “the last two years have been terrifying for us both—and neither of us have made it any better for the other. It hasn’t been a quarrel, but two eruptions, two earthquakes crashing.” There was no way to go back, Lowell ended the letter. “I have had so much dread—the worst in my life—that I would do something, by my mere presence I would do something to hurt you, to drive you to despair. Who knows cause.”

  Lowell wanted peace, he told Blair Clark in November 1976. He wanted to return to America and to Elizabeth Hardwick. He told Grey Gowrie the same, that he was going to leave Blackwood and go back to Hardwick. He was tired. The first symptoms that his heart was failing were apparent, and years of smoking and drinking, as well as the physical ravages of his manias, were obvious in his energy and appearance. “He was very clear, very un-high, very agonized,” Gowrie recalled. “He said, ‘You know, I’m not going to live long. I just must have some peace.’ ” Not long before he died he talked with Helen Vendler about leaving Blackwood. He said he was still in love with her but that “life with her was impossible, because of what they were like together. He didn’t blame her. There weren’t any recriminations or ill-speaking of her.” But, he said, “there was no way he could live in the turbulence of their mutual life. He had to have something quieter.”

  When Lowell returned in late 1976 to teach at Harvard he had stayed for a while with Frank Bidart in Cambridge. He was “unbelievably grateful and relieved” to be in an environment where there wasn’t “enormous turmoil, anger, drama, tension,” Bidart said. It was clear that Lowell needed a haven. He wanted to return to a life with Hardwick because “he needed security, needed a home, needed someone who could deal with his illness.”

  Hardwick had no illusions about taking Lowell back. In June 1977, she wrote to Mary McCarthy, “There is no great renewed romance, but a kind of friendship, and listening to his grief. His intention is to stay here with me, staying mostly in the studio, but sharing the life here, the books, the records, his family setting (Boston), which is pretty much as he left it. He went up to Maine with me for part of the week I spent there opening up. It could be said we ‘are back together,’ but the phrase is not really meaningful.

  “We are trying to work out a sort of survival for both of us, and both are sixty,” she continued to McCarthy. “We, together, are having a perfectly nice time, both quite independent and yet I guess dependent.” She was, as ever, practical about his illness. “I know that Cal can get sick again and will talk to the McLean doctor on the way up to Maine. Cal has been very much in touch with him, working out what could be most sensibly done if he becomes ‘keyed up.’ ”
/>
  Harriet Lowell remembers going into her mother’s office at Barnard, where Hardwick taught and Harriet was a student, the day they were expecting him home, the day her father died. “She said she was unsure what would happen, but for now he was frail, and she did not expect him to ‘learn to cook after all these years or live like a bachelor’ and ‘it was his house too and I have always been aware of that.’ Despite all that had happened, she felt great affection for him and that ‘he gave me everything, including you, and all that I learned from him those years in Europe and all the years we spent together.’ ” Harriet adds, “They had made their peace clearly enough.”

  Inscription to Elizabeth Hardwick in Day by Day Credit 46

  Nearly twenty years earlier Lowell had written in Life Studies about the wife who yet again had “faced the kingdom of the mad,” who once again had “dragged her husband home alive.” A few weeks before his death he gave Hardwick an inscribed copy of his just-published Day by Day and inscribed it. “For Lizzie,” he wrote, “who snatched me out of chaos.”

  Lowell knew that peace was impossible with Blackwood. “I feel broken by all conversation, and a voice inside me says all might be well if I could be with you. And another voice says all would be ruin, and that I would be drowned in the confusion I made worse. If I were to get sick in Ireland? But here it all can be handled. But it’s the effect my troubles have on you. It’s like a nightmare we all have in which each motion of foot or hand troubles the torment it tries to calm.”

  Caroline Blackwood

  “Out of your wreckage…came your book.” Credit 47

  Lowell carried with him a photograph of Caroline Blackwood taken when she was “bright as the morning star”:

  in the photo of you arranged as figurehead

  or mermaid on the prow of a Roman dory,

  bright as the morning star or a blond starlet.

  Our twin black and tin Ronson butane lighters

  knock on the sheet, are what they are,

  too many, and burned too many cigarettes….

  Night darkens without your necessary call,

  it’s time to turn your pictures to the wall.

  In the end, Lowell did turn her pictures. The personal cost went deep, but it perhaps changed him for the better. Elizabeth Hardwick believed that Lowell’s suffering and vulnerability to Caroline changed him in a fundamental way. “The passion and grief he knew from Caroline and from his feeling for her have made him more like the rest of us,” she said. His fear “made Cal a better person, more in touch with the terror of this kind of turmoil than he had ever been before.” “I think there was more openness in him,” Frank Bidart observed. It opened him to the suffering of others. There was “a little more kindness, a little more empathy, a little more pity. I did feel that happened in that last year. The thing that in a sense broke something in him also gave him something.”

  Lowell’s hopelessness at the return of his madness, his broadening awareness of his mortality, and his newfound vulnerability to heartbreak all went into Day by Day. In this, his final book, he wrote for Caroline Blackwood what he could have written for himself: “Out of your wreckage, beauty, wealth, / gallantries, wildness, came your book.”

  14

  Bleak-Boned with Survival

  The line must terminate.

  Yet my heart rises, I know I’ve gladdened a lifetime

  knotting, undoing a fishnet of tarred rope;

  the net will hang on the wall when the fish are eaten,

  nailed like illegible bronze on the futureless future.

  —From “Fishnet”

  There was, Lowell said, a single main theme coursing through the poetry of Robert Frost, “that of a man moving through the formless, the lawless, and the free, of moving into snow, air, ocean, waste, despair, death, and madness. When the limits are reached, and sometimes almost passed, the man returns.” It was the journey Lowell knew. It was the epic journey, Homeric: the voyage out, the seeking and longing for home; the return of Odysseus to Ithaca.

  “Sing to me of the man,” The Odyssey begins: “the man of twists and turns / driven time and again off course…./ Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds, / many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea.” Odysseus had read the minds of men as keenly as he read the swells of the sea. For ten years after the fall of Troy, he sailed in search of Ithaca and home. Storm-wrecked, time and again blown off the map, he willed and reckoned his way home to Ithaca. His supple mind and eloquence—words that “came piling on like a driving winter blizzard,” a language of grace and sense—gave him means, the stars, to navigate his way home.

  Homer’s epic of journey and trial, of finding one’s way, had captured Lowell’s imagination as a schoolboy and young man. Odysseus, wrote Lowell when he was eighteen years old, was a man of hardship and war, who radiated “life, energy, and enthusiasm.” Only by going through hell could Odysseus “reach aesthetic perfection.” By the end of his life Lowell knew the truth of that hell. He knew art; he knew the futility of its perfection; he knew hell. The Odysseus described by Lowell in his final years had “grown bleak-boned with survival.” Lost at sea, he grasped for peace.

  As an undergraduate, Lowell had written to Ezra Pound that Homer’s world “contained a God higher than anything I had ever known.” When young he had reveled in the energy and savagery of Homer’s heroes, took to heart their valor. He knew The Odyssey first from the early days of his childhood; later, in college, he majored in classics. He translated and on occasion taught Homer and Virgil and the Greek tragedians. “It is hard for me to imagine a poet not interested in the classics,” he once said.

  Lowell’s great-grandfather, the first Robert Traill Spence Lowell, a priest, poet, and novelist, was a classicist as well, a professor of Latin studies. In 1862 he wrote a short story, “A Raft That No Man Made,” about an Odysseus-like character who had “grown wise in seafaring” and “visited the far countries,” who had “learned the story of the King of Ithaca.” He had kept “words and things from crowded streets and fairs and shows and wave-washed quays,” seen the “great wonders of land and sea,” and been with those who had “gone forth and forward into a dim and shadowed land.” Like the Greek warrior, he had been “borne along a perilous path,” learning “something of men and something of God” during his long years of exile.

  His great-grandson wrote about exile nearly one hundred years later. The title of the first poem in Lord Weary’s Castle, “The Exile’s Return,” is a phrase that recurs in The Odyssey. “Odysseus journeys home,” writes Homer. “The exile must return.” The exile would not remain innocent, said the Greek poet, nor would he return in the “convoy of the gods or mortal men.” Instead he would come back on “a lashed, makeshift raft and wrung with pains.”

  In “Ulysses and Circe,” the first and establishing poem of Day by Day, Lowell writes explicitly of Odysseus’s/Ulysses’s wrenching search for home. He must break the spell of the witch-goddess, Circe, the chaotic enchantress reminiscent of Blackwood, before he can sail for Ithaca:

  She is a snipper-off’er—

  her discards lie about the floors,

  the unused, the misused,

  seacoats and insignia,

  the beheaded beast.

  She wants her house askew—

  kept keys to lost locks,

  unidentifiable portraits, dead things

  wrapped in paper the color of dust…

  the surge of the wine before the quarrel.

  Exhausted, wrung out, Odysseus starts once again for home. Life has dealt him what it will; Odysseus will die like any other, beholden to the gods, seeking the world beyond the sun:

  Young,

  he made strategic choices;

  in middle age he accepts

  his unlikely life to come;

  he will die like others as the gods will,

  drowning his last crew

  in uncharted ocean,

  seeking the unpeopled world beyond the
sun,

  lost in the uproarious rudeness of a great wind.

  Always Lowell came back to Homer. During the last summer of his life, writing in New England about New England, Lowell wrote as well about the craft and resourcefulness of Odysseus, the soaring and rage of the “mercurial and proud” Achilles: a world of valor. He celebrated “the cycle of Greek radiance, barbarism, and doom”; Homer and New England had never left him.

  Robert Lowell spent his final summer in England in 1976 before returning to America, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Harvard. He returned to what he knew. Everything drew him back to childhood and his country. England was not America, he said. America was different from England in memory and fact.

  “England didn’t have real summers like my Grandfather’s farm,” he wrote to Elizabeth Bishop in July 1976. “Sometimes I almost move to set off for the lake with my trolling rod for pickerel.” He sought his roots. He was restless, at bay. He was disenchanted with England, did not feel at ease there. His third marriage was unraveling, his mind unstable. The writer’s life was different in England; politics and expectations were different. The British literary and social world was removed from what he knew and enjoyed. He wrote in his 1973 notebook about the awkwardness he felt:

  A big house in England weedy, fuzzy, unkempt [?] holly-weeds in the drive lush June vegetation [weeds] & garden flowers—trip to meet to [sic] queen mother again in her better home—our laughter at the silliness of it & boldness of it—received by 3 royal figures—are they honoring me or I they? They bow, I start to bow, humorously realize my error. Startled that these people are very smart, charming, tough, knowing but gradually as I go through the house, thru my now casual reception, thru time, I realize that I am claiming to be in a world, I can’t be in, as in like I can’t be part of England—the uneasiness and even terror of detached roots, of being examined, tried.