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

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  Several individuals were generous with their time and recollections in showing my husband, Tom Traill, and me around Castine, including the Winslow-Lowell home where Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Harriet Lowell spent so many family summers. It is easy to see why Lowell loved Maine and wrote so much of his poetry in the converted barn with its lovely view overlooking the bay. Our thanks go to Jack and Julie Burke, Stefanie Scheer Young, Susan Hatch, Peter Davis, and Deborah Joy Corey, as well as to Paige Lilly and Sally Foote at the Castine Historical Society.

  I am indebted as well to the Reverend Allan Bevier Warren III, rector of the Church of the Advent in Boston, the Reverend Samuel Lee Wood, and the organist and choirmaster, Mark Dwyer, for their time in telling me about the church where Lowell was a parishioner at the time he died and where his funeral was held. Across the river in Cambridge, I was fortunate enough to have a highly literate and wonderful tour around “Elmwood,” for many years the family home of the Reverend Charles A. Lowell and his wife, Harriet Brackett Spence Lowell, and then their son the poet James Russell Lowell, now the official home of the president of Harvard University. It was from this gracious home that Robert Lowell’s great-great-grandmother was taken by carriage to McLean Asylum for the Insane. Professor Charles Rosenberg, who lives there with his wife, Drew Gilpin Faust, the current president of Harvard, showed me around their house, James Russell Lowell’s library, and the grounds of Elmwood. He has become a good friend, I am delighted to say. George White and Kimberly Tseko gave me much useful history of the house as it would have been in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  Robert Lowell’s papers and those of his colleagues, family, and friends, are held in many libraries. These libraries and their collections were, without exception, welcoming and helpful. Emilie Hardman and the staff of the Houghton Library at Harvard University, where most of Lowell’s papers and those of his family are archived, were particularly helpful with my endless stream of requests. I am grateful as well to the staff of the Harry Ransom Collection at the University of Texas at Austin; Helen Melody, curator of Modern Literary Manuscripts at the British Library, where Ian Hamilton’s papers and oral history of Robert Lowell are held; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the Huntington Library; Lauren Amundson and the Lowell Observatory Archives in Flagstaff; the London Library; Vassar College Library; James Smith and the staff of the Portsmouth Athenaeum; Princeton University Library; New Hampshire State Archives; Michael Frost and the staff of the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University; the Library of Congress; Elizabeth Hall Witherell, for her help with manuscripts of Henry David Thoreau, Davidson Library, University of California, Santa Barbara; Westminster Abbey Archives; University of Minnesota Library; New York Public Library; University of Washington Library; Washington University Library; Georgetown University Library; Benjamin Panciera and the staff of the Linda Lear Center for Special Collections & Archives, Connecticut College; Dartmouth College Library; University of Oregon Library; Smith College Library; Tyler Phelps at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries (National Museum of American History); Centre for Research Collections, Edinburgh University Library; Professor Shane Allwright, Trinity College Dublin, University of Dublin; William H. Welch Medical Library, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; and the Clinical Center Library of the National Institutes of Health.

  I am appreciative as well to Jo Bartholomew, Curator and Librarian of Winchester Cathedral, who verified my husband’s boyhood memory of the pieces of glass that are fixed across the stones to detect movement in the walls of the cathedral; it was an image I found heartbreaking as I thought about Robert Lowell’s last days. Diana Der-Hovanessian gave me useful information about the New England Poetry Club, Katherine Powers was kind enough to share Lowell’s letters to her father, and Christina Ball translated several letters from Italian written by Giovanna Madonia to Robert Lowell. Emily O’Dell introduced me to the works on mania written by the medieval Islamic physicians. Nancy Schoenberger and Alan Tobias were helpful in sharing information relevant to Lowell’s life.

  I am grateful to many people who helped make this book possible. My editor at Alfred A. Knopf for twenty years, Carol Brown Janeway, died in the summer of 2015. She had taken on my book about Robert Lowell with her usual intelligence, rapier wit, and loyalty; she shepherded me through the first several years of what turned out to be a considerable endeavor. Like all of her friends and authors, I miss her terribly. There was no one like her. Sonny Mehta put my book in the hands of Deborah Garrison, for which I will be forever grateful. She has made the book a better one in so many ways and has done it with deftness and grace. I am also thankful to several other people at Knopf who contributed their talents: Todd Portnowitz, Ellen Feldman, Andrew Ridker, Amy Ryan, Carol Devine Carson, Soonyoung Kwon, Josefine Taylor Kals, and Katherine Burns.

  I would not have been able to write this book without the generous support of the Dalio Family Foundation. The friendships of Ray and Barbara Dalio and Paul and Kristina Nikolova Dalio have been of much meaning to me during these past several years. I owe my usual debt to William Collins whose professionalism and flexibility have been invaluable to my work, as has the help of Silas Jones and Ioline Henter.

  Professor Guy Goodwin at the University of Oxford and Professor Raymond Depaulo at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, leading authorities on bipolar illness and superb clinicians, read my manuscript for clinical accuracy. Bruce Cuthbert, Ph.D., of the National Institute of Mental Health, was helpful in giving me information about new diagnostic approaches to mania, and the late Lori Altshuler, M.D, a missed and respected colleague, gave me perspective on longitudinal brain scan studies of bipolar patients. Several of my colleagues at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have been particularly supportive professionally and personally: Adam Kaplin, M.D., Ph.D.; Karen Swartz, M.D.; Mary Beth Beaudry, R.N., M.S.N.; Barbara Schweizer, R.N., B.S.; Philip Slavney, M.D.; and Paul McHugh, M.D. Sharon Blackburn, in the Johns Hopkins Department of Pathology, has helped design graphics for my work and Jeffrey Day, M.D., helped with the chart of Robert Lowell’s hospitalizations and lithium treatment. Henry Brem, M.D., Chair of Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, warmly encouraged my request to attend Neurosurgery Grand Rounds for two years and made me feel welcome. The medical content of the discussions, however fascinating, was of less interest to me than the language used by the surgeons that was new—mapping and naming in the way of poetry. They talked about the geography of the brain in terms of canals and caves and aqueducts and described surgical procedures in fresh and compelling ways. It was helpful to my understanding of poetry, albeit in an oblique way.

  Donald Graham read an early version of my manuscript and made very helpful suggestions, most of which I incorporated into the final text. David and Linda Hellman, Duke and Claudia Cameron, Tom and Judy Spencer, and Bill and Pam Schlott read parts of my manuscript and contributed their support, suggestions, and friendship. Erwin and Stephanie Cooper Greenberg invited Tom and me to Nantucket for a marvelous weekend and introduced us to places Lowell had lived and explored as a young man and the North Atlantic about which he wrote unforgettably in “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.” The composer Michael Hersch, whose work based on Robert Lowell’s poetry was commissioned by the Library of Congress, has been a good friend and we have had many conversations about art and music, and Robert Lowell, over the years.

  My family—the Jamisons, Campens, and Traills—have been wonderful throughout the writing of this book. I am indebted to my cousin, James Campen, for photographing the Robert Gould Shaw Monument in Boston and for the many warm family dinners in Cambridge. As always I am grateful to Daniel Auerbach, M.D., for his excellence as a doctor. I have been and blessed with the caring and company of great friends: Jeremy Waletzky and Susan Clampett, Robert and Mary Jane Gallo, Jeffrey and Kathleen Schlom, Joanne Leslie, and Alain Moreau, who did the drawing of the rowan berries for this book.

  There is no one to whom I owe a greater de
bt than my husband, Tom Traill. This book is in every sense his book. He not only has an unnerving, intuitive understanding of Robert Lowell’s work, “not an easy poet,” as the New York Times wrote in its obituary, but—perhaps because of his distant cousinship with the Traill line of Lowell’s ancestry or, more immediately, because he has read his own and the handwriting of other physicians for so many years—he was uncannily able to decipher Lowell’s horrific hand. Irreplaceably, he read my manuscript through many times and each time made it clearer; he added precision and eloquence and improved both the clinical and literary discussion. He read through Lowell’s medical records, with a focus on his heart disease, and summarized the medical history in Appendix 3. Most important, he made the writing of this book even more pleasurable than it would otherwise have been and gave me the kind of love I could only have dreamed of.

  Notes

  PROLOGUE

  “In regard to her mind”: Letter from Charles Lowell to James Russell Lowell, August 8, 1844, James Russell Lowell Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.

  “March sugar snow”: (Boston) Daily Evening Transcript, March 19, 1845. “In the city the earth was found covered this morning with what the good people in the country would call a March ‘Sugar Snow,’ which wonderfully promotes the flow of the sap in the giant maples of the sugar orchard.” The three Boston newspapers give a lively accounting of that March day in 1845: the schedules for ship sailings and packets to Havana and New Orleans; the comings and goings of whalers; the business happenings of the Boston and Lowell Railroad and the Nashua and Lowell Railroad; Massachusetts politics; reports of the many fires in Boston; lectures in Cambridge; the sale of beeswax and clover seed, cod and hake, tea, white beaver gloves direct from Paris; fine shops in Boston selling parasols and silk bonnet ribbons, sleigh robes, rhubarb and opium, molasses and indigo. The papers also carried accounts of the discussions of the Boston abolitionists like those that filled the church of Reverend Charles Lowell on Sunday mornings.

  “hum outliving the hushed bell”: James Russell Lowell, “The Darkened Mind,” in The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell, ed. Horace Scudder (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896), 427.

  their home with its great elms: Martin Duberman, James Russell Lowell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966); Edward Wagenknecht, James Russell Lowell: Portrait of a Many-Sided Man (New York: Oxford, 1971); Susan Wilson, Literary Trail of Greater Boston (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000).

  “infinitely the most elegant dwelling house”: Dean A. Fales, Jr., “Joseph Barrell’s Pleasant Hill,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, trans. 43 (1956–1963), 376.

  “treasurers of God’s bounty”: James Jackson and John Collins Warren, “Circular Letter Submitting Proposals for the Establishment in Boston of a ‘Hospital for the Reception of Lunatics and Other Sick Persons,’ ” August 20, 1810.

  McLean Asylum for the Insane: Information about the McLean Asylum in 1845 was obtained from the annual reports of the Board of Trustees of the Massachusetts General Hospital for the years 1841 through 1846; discussions with Terence Bragg, archivist for the McLean Hospital; Nina Fletcher Little, Early Years of the McLean Hospital: Recorded in the Journal of George William Folsom, Apothecary at the Asylum in Charlestown (Boston: Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, 1972); S. B. Sutton, Crossroads in Psychiatry: A History of the McLean Hospital (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1986); Alex Beam, Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America’s Premier Mental Hospital (New York: Public Affairs, 2001).

  She arrived at the asylum: The clinical notes on Harriet Brackett Spence Lowell are from the 1845 admission book of the McLean Asylum for the Insane (now the McLean Hospital). The history of her behavior and mental state provided by her husband, the Reverend Charles Lowell, also are in the 1845 admission book. There is as well a packet of papers in the Scudder Papers at Houghton Library, Harvard, that are abbreviated notes made by Horace Scudder for his 1901 biography of Harriet Brackett Spence Lowell’s son James Russell Lowell. Horace E. Scudder, James Russell Lowell: A Biography (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1901).

  “to be particular about things”: There is a considerably higher than expected rate of obsessive behaviors and obsessive-compulsive disorder in individuals who suffer from bipolar disorder. For example, see: S. L. Mc Elroy, L. L. Altshuler, T. Suppes, et al., “Axis I Psychiatric Comorbidity and Its Relationship to Historical Illness Variables in 288 Patients with Bipolar Disorder,” American Journal of Psychiatry 158 (2001): 420–26; F. K. Goodwin and K. R. Jamison, Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 234–38.

  brief period of treatment with Dr. Rufus Wyman: Rufus Wyman was the first full-time medical superintendent of an American mental hospital. His treatment philosophy was based on the so-called moral treatment advocated by the French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel and the doctors at York Retreat in England. Wyman, in addition to his responsibilities at the asylum, usually had a few patients residing with him; Harriet Lowell, before her admission to the asylum, had been one of them. Wyman wrote in medical journals about the diagnosis and treatment of mania and depression and encouraged his patients—as did other asylum doctors at the time—to be actively involved in both work and recreational activities such as chess, backgammon, music, reading, walking, and riding. Rufus Wyman, “A Discourse on Mental Philosophy as Connects with Mental Disease,” talk delivered before the Massachusetts Medical Society, June 2, 1830 (Boston: Office of the Daily Advertiser, 1830), 3–21; E. T. Carlson and M. F. Chale, “Historical Notes: Dr. Rufus Wyman of the McLean Asylum,” American Journal of Psychiatry 116 (1960): 1034–37; S. B. Woodward, “Observations on the Medical Treatment of Insanity,” American Journal of Insanity 7 (1850): 1–34.

  It is not known: No diagnosis or record of treatment for Harriet Lowell can be found in the asylum ledger. She would have been a beneficiary of the “moral treatment” movement in the United States and England, a form of care that stood in compassionate contrast to the chains and bloodletting of earlier times. In 1846, the second year of her stay at McLean, the superintendent of the Massachusetts State Lunatic Hospital gave a talk describing the philosophy underlying the care given in the New England asylums in the middle of the nineteenth century. “The mind must be managed, hope inspired, and confidence secured,” he stated. He cited the humane practices of the ancient physicians: insanity was a disease and it required medical remedy, but the mind must be “diverted as well” and the feelings of the mentally afflicted “soothed and assuaged.” To these ends, the ancients advised the ill of mind to go to the temple of their gods, to “participate in their religious rites, look upon the beauties of nature from these elevated situations, and, in the temples of Aesculapius, consult the records of experience engraven on the tablets of their walls.” S. B. Woodward, “Observations on the Medical Treatment of Insanity.”

   In a not dissimilar manner, patients at the McLean Asylum in the era of Mrs. Lowell’s confinement were encouraged to ride and walk the extensive asylum grounds—at McLean, with its graceful gardens and orchards, this would have reaped a particular bounty in “looking upon the beauties of nature”—and to participate in religious services. Rarely would physical restraints have been used. Instead, the asylum doctors prescribed medicines to soothe the agitated and to restore sleep and volition to the melancholy. Rhubarb, camphor, tincture of ginger, digitalis, and sulphate of morphia were among the many remedies used by the New England physicians. Other treatments—violets and oils of rose to calm and to take down the brain’s fever—were part of the apothecary’s kit of both the ancient and nineteenth-century doctors. Then, as now, they prescribed what they hoped would work.

  “the fire is turning clear and blithely”: James Russell Lowell, “The Darkened Mind,” 427.

  “will be read as long as”: Randall Jarrell, “From the Kingdom of Necessity,” Nation 164 (1947): 74–77.

 
“The trouble with writing poetry”: Robert Lowell, “Art and Evil,” in Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 131–32.

  I. INTRODUCTION: STEEL AND FIRE

  “Your Cantos have re-created”: Robert Lowell to Ezra Pound, May 2, 1936, in The Letters of Robert Lowell, ed. S. Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 3.

  1. NO TICKETS FOR THAT ALTITUDE

  “The resident doctor said”: Robert Lowell, “Notice,” in Collected Poems, ed. F. Bidart and D. Gewanter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 828.

  “Darkness honestly lived through”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Randall Jarrell, October 24, 1957, Letters, 298.

  “like a house a fire”: Letter from Robert Lowell to William Carlos Williams, September 30, 1957, Letters, 293.

  into “new country”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Allen Tate, November 5, 1952, Letters, 194.

  best writing he had done: Letter from Robert Lowell to J. F. Powers, November 13, 1957, Letters, 305.

  “perhaps the most influential”: Stanley Kunitz, Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1985).

  “They have made a conquest”: John Thompson, “Two Poets: Life Studies by Robert Lowell; Heart’s Needle by W. D. Snodgrass,” The Kenyon Review 21 (1959): 483.