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

  ALSO BY KAY REDFIELD JAMISON

  Nothing Was the Same

  Exuberance:

  The Passion for Life

  Night Falls Fast:

  Understanding Suicide

  An Unquiet Mind:

  A Memoir of Moods and Madness

  Touched with Fire:

  Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament

  TEXTBOOKS

  Abnormal Psychology

  (with Michael Goldstein and Bruce Baker)

  Manic-Depressive Illness:

  Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression

  (with Frederick Goodwin)

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2017 by Kay Redfield Jamison

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,

  a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York,

  and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

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  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Owing to limitations of space, permissions to reprint previously published material appear beginning on this page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Jamison, Kay R., author. | Traill, Thomas A., author.

  Title: Robert Lowell, setting the river on fire : a study of genius, mania, and character / Kay Redfield Jamison.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016028281 | ISBN 9780307700278 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781101947968 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Lowell, Robert, 1917–1977—Mental health. | Manic-depressive persons—United States—Biography. | Poets, American—20th century—Biography. | Genius and mental illness. | Creative ability. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary. | PSYCHOLOGY / Psychopathology / Depression. | PSYCHOLOGY / Creative Ability.

  Classification: LCC RC537.J356 2017 | DDC 616.89/50092 B—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.​loc.​gov/​2016028281

  ISBN 9780307700278

  Ebook ISBN 9781101947968

  Cover photograph of Robert Lowell by Gisèle Freund/IMEC/Fonds MCC

  Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

  First Edition

  v4.1_r3

  a

  For my husband,

  Tom Traill

  For a week my heart has pointed elsewhere:

  it brings us here tonight, and ties our hands—

  if we leaned forward, and should dip a finger

  into this river’s momentary black flow,

  infinite small stars would break like fish.

  —From “The Charles River”

  Robert Lowell in Paris, 1963 Credit 1

  Reading Myself

  Like thousands, I took just pride and more than just,

  struck matches that brought my blood to a boil;

  I memorized the tricks to set the river on fire—

  somehow never wrote something to go back to.

  Can I suppose I am finished with wax flowers

  and have earned my grass on the minor slopes of Parnassus….

  No honeycomb is built without a bee

  adding circle to circle, cell to cell,

  the wax and honey of a mausoleum—

  this round dome proves its maker is alive;

  the corpse of the insect lives embalmed in honey,

  prays that its perishable work live long

  enough for the sweet-tooth bear to desecrate—

  this open book…my open coffin.

  —Robert Lowell

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Kay Redfield Jamison

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Reading Myself

  Prologue

  Old Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 19, 1845

  “The Trouble with Writing Poetry”

  I

  INTRODUCTION

  Steel and Fire

  1

  No Tickets for That Altitude

  2

  The Archangel Loved Heights

  II

  ORIGINS

  The Puritanical Iron Hand of Constraint

  3

  Sands of the Unknown

  4

  This Dynamited Brook

  5

  A Brackish Reach

  III

  ILLNESS

  The Kingdom of the Mad

  6

  In Flight, Without a Ledge

  7

  Snow-Sugared, Unraveling

  8

  Writing Takes the Ache Away

  IV

  CHARACTER

  How Will the Heart Endure?

  9

  With All My Love, Cal

  10

  And Will Not Scare

  V

  ILLNESS AND ART

  Something Altogether Lived

  11

  A Magical Orange Grove in a Nightmare

  12

  Words Meat-Hooked from the Living Steer

  VI

  MORTALITY

  Come; I Bell Thee Home

  13

  Life Blown Towards Evening

  14

  Bleak-Boned with Survival

  15

  He Is Out of Bounds Now

  Appendix 1. Psychiatric Records of Robert Lowell

  Appendix 2. Mania and Depression: Clinical Description, Diagnosis, and Nomenclature

  Appendix 3. Medical History of Robert Lowell (by Thomas A. Traill, FRCP)

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Illustration Credits

  A Note About the Author

  Prologue

  Old Cambridge, Massachusetts

  March 19, 1845

  No one knew what she was thinking. It was a short carriage ride; perhaps she was not thinking much at all. “In regard to her mind,” her husband had said, “I hardly know what to say.” No one did. Had she looked from her carriage window the tracks in the snow might have triggered a memory from childhood, helped to ward off the present. More likely, that kind of innocence was past retrieving. The Boston paper had said that today’s snow was a “March sugar snow,” one that would speed the flow of maple sap in the New England sugar orchards. As a child she might have found pleasure in such an image; she had been known for her lively mind. Now she was impenetrable. In her son’s words, only as much of her remained as the “hum outliving the hushed bell.”

  The carriage took her from Old Cambridge to Somerville, a neighboring town on the banks of the Mystic River. It took her away from her husband, children, and their home with its great elms and long view of the Charles River. The house, built for a colonial loyalist, had in its time been a field hospital for Washington’s troops and then home to a vice president of the United States. Later it would become the official residence for the presidents of Harvard. But for the passenger it was the house in which she had lived with her family for nearly thirty years and where her youngest child had been born. She was about to exchange one grand house for yet a grander one, one view of the Charles River for another. It was not an exchange anyone would willingly make.

  Had the passenger cared, and had she kept an eye open for such things, she would have noticed that a street in the town of Somervill
e was named for her husband’s family; so too was one of its railroad lines. Beyond the town limits an entire city bore his name. Her husband’s name could be found in many places, it seemed, but it was of little help. It could not make right what was wrong in her head. And it was what was wrong in her head that brought her to Somerville.

  The carriage drove up Cobble Hill and stopped at the large mansion built in the eighteenth century for a Boston merchant. The two-hundred-acre estate of gardens and fishponds, fruit orchards, and a rose-covered summerhouse had been described by a visitor to Boston in 1792 as “infinitely the most elegant dwelling house ever yet built in New England.” When the original owner died, the wealthy of Boston, the “treasurers of God’s bounty,” had purchased the residence and a portion of the grounds in order to provide for the “class of sufferers who peculiarly claim all that benevolence can bestow…the insane.” This “most elegant dwelling house” was now the McLean Asylum for the Insane and it was here that Harriet Brackett Spence Lowell was committed on March 19, 1845.

  She arrived at the asylum in a “very irritable state.” She would not permit the attendant to help her from her carriage nor would she allow anyone to carry her cloak. She would not converse with the other “boarders” and was “all the while scolding the staff.” Her name, entered into the asylum’s admission book, joined those of other old New England families—brokers and bankers, university presidents, writers, legislators, and merchants—whose ancestors had sailed on the early ships from England. Others, not so often with Mayflower names—the blacksmiths, rope makers, sailmakers, farmers, and whalers who lived and worked in Boston or other towns in New England—were also in the ledger. Insanity then, as now, cut across class and circumstance.

  The patient’s husband, Dr. Charles Lowell, minister of the West Church in Boston, knew from his own life, as well as the lives of his congregants, that madness could come to anyone. His account of his wife’s erratic behavior, recorded in the medical ledger of the McLean Asylum, makes this clear. Mrs. Lowell’s natural disposition, he said, was “to be particular about things”; each detail of her life had to be carried out with precision. Habit and exactitude had become all. She took long hours at dining and spent longer still at “dressing and undressing for her [corset] strings must be exactly even, & her garters wound round the stockings, at night, in a certain way.”

  McLean Asylum for the Insane, c. 1845, Somerville, Massachusetts Credit 2

  She would not allow her family to touch or come near her. Once fastidious about her personal care, she now was heedless. Reading and the company of her family, even listening to the Bible read to her, no longer pleased her. More concerning was her lack of reason. “It has been her habit when anything seems foolish to her, to say nonsense,” her husband said. “Now she uses it constantly & applies it to her own thoughts. And her reason seems often to be contending against these thoughts, & she will suddenly burst out, ‘Be still! I didn’t say so. Why did you put these thoughts into my head—I didn’t say so. Why did you make me say so for?’ ”

  Charles Lowell was not the only one to express concern about his wife’s behavior. Their children, as well as friends, described her as being at times unmanageable and violent. Her moods swung wildly from “manic fits” to despair. She became reclusive for long periods of time and, on occasion, was indisputably insane. Once high-spirited and charming, she now sat by the fire depressed and unreachable. Occasionally she raved. The wife of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, their friend and neighbor, wrote to an acquaintance the common view: Mrs. Lowell, she said, is deranged.

  Harriet Brackett Spence Lowell had “been insane for many years,” according to the admission note made in the asylum ledger at the time of her commitment. Except for a brief period of treatment with Dr. Rufus Wyman, the first superintendent of the McLean Asylum, she had been cared for entirely at home. The first seven months of her confinement at McLean were uneventful. She was quiet and particular and required little of her attendants. She spoke next to not at all. She walked, rode, did needlework, and visited with her husband and children on their weekly trips to the asylum. Things were to “be today as they were yesterday.”

  In early November 1845 she changed. Her doctor and attendants observed that “she began to be more excited, which was shown in paroxysms of screaming, running about her room disarranging her furniture & not seeming to know what she is about.” She “has had scarce any sleep.” By January of the following year she was “more comfortable” but far from well: “For the month or more just passed [she] has been more afflicted with false hearing & under that influence frequently screams with great violence. Is the great annoyance of all about her. In other respects she continues on from month to month with scarce any variation.” Her obsessive eating rituals continued; she insisted on solitude. “Almost the only communion she has,” states her medical record, is “with spirits not of this earth.” On a few occasions she allowed “another lady” to stand in her doorway and talk with her about music. Mrs. Lowell “makes herself very interesting in these conversations,” her attendant noted, and “expresses herself very understandingly.”

  It is not known what medicines Harriet Lowell received, nor if her blood was let. We know from the McLean ledger that her children visited her every week and she appeared glad for this. It helped but did not cure. She returned to her family in Old Cambridge after nearly three years in the asylum but was not, in a meaningful way, improved. “The fire is turning clear and blithely,” wrote her youngest son, but “there thou sittest in thy wonted corner / Lone and awful in thy darkened mind.”

  Harriet Brackett Spence Lowell died insane. She passed on to her children, and their children in turn, the instability that her parents had passed on to her. Her great-great-grandson was heir to this mental instability. He was also to write poetry that, in the words of a critic, “will be read as long as men remember English.”

  “The Trouble with Writing Poetry”

  The trouble with writing poetry is that you have readers, and the trouble with readers is that you have to listen to them after they have spent their time reading you. Mine, unless they are young poets or teachers of English, usually say one of three things. If they are relatives, they ask me why I choose such sordid downhill subjects. If they are strangers who want to be cordial yet dislike what they have read of me, they admit that some of the things I have published are over their heads. If they are not sure that they want to be cordial, they overemphasize that they are not intellectuals. They confess that all they can do is run a brokerage, make money, have five children, build a house from their own plans, and run, say, the Boston Museum of Natural Science as a hobby. The final blow is to ask me in a harsh, clear, incredulously polite voice about the Pulitzer Prize. “You won the Nobel Prize, didn’t you? Everyone can’t do that.” Now, at the time when I was choosing “Art and Evil” as a title for this talk, I was spending many evenings with a favorite relative, an elderly lady who had recently been through a landslide of sorrows, but yet managed to be more observant, more lighthearted, more full of talk, and more all there than anyone I have known. We would listen to the lavishly anguished music of Schubert’s Winterreise sequence, a work in which naïve and morbid lyrics are made sublime by the music. My cousin enjoyed every drop of this work, but then she would talk to me about being more positive. “You mustn’t mislead younger people,” she would say, “with your verses.” Though a moderate drinker herself, my cousin believed with A. E. Housman that malt could do more than Milton. She would hold out a huge pale cylinder of martinis. “This will do you good,” she would say. She would urge me to take siestas after lunch, knowing that sloth is the safest cure of all vices. Finally she would hand me an armful of fierce whodunits with horrifying covers. Nothing in this line was too rough for her: I still feel wounded when I think of how my cousin found my poems gloomier than the Winterreise, more inflammatory than martinis, duller than detective stories, and deader than sleep.

  Credit 3

  Harp
oon, New Bedford Whaling Museum

  “All men live enveloped in whale lines.” Credit 4

  I

  INTRODUCTION

  Steel and Fire

  Your Cantos have re-created what I have imagined to be the blood of Homer. Again I ask you to have me. You shan’t be sorry, I will bring the steel and fire, I am not theatric, and my life is sober not sensational.

  —Letter to Ezra Pound, 1936

  1

  No Tickets for That Altitude

  The resident doctor said,

  “We are not deep in ideas, imagination or enthusiasm—

  how can we help you?”

  I asked,

  “These days of only poems and depression—

  what can I do with them?

  Will they help me to notice

  what I cannot bear to look at?”

  —From “Notice”

  “Darkness honestly lived through is a place of wonder and life,” Robert Lowell wrote. “So much has come from there.” It was October 1957 and he was forty, writing poetry “like a house a fire,” and taking darkness into “new country.” It was, he said, the best writing he had done, “closer to what I know” and “oh how welcome after four silent years.” The new poems became the heart of Life Studies, “perhaps the most influential book of modern verse since T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.” The poems, most written at the boil in a few months’ time, left their mark. “They have made a conquest,” wrote a reviewer. “They have won…a major expansion of the territory of poetry.”

  In December 1957, after his summer and fall blaze of writing, Lowell was admitted to a mental hospital severely psychotic. It was his fifth psychiatric hospitalization in eight years. He was involuntarily committed to the Boston State Hospital and then transferred to the Massachusetts Mental Health Center (until 1956 known as Boston Psychopathic Hospital). In early 1958 he was transferred yet again, this time to McLean Hospital, where his great-great-grandmother had been institutionalized more than a hundred years earlier. The repetition of circumstance was not lost on Lowell; Life Studies had begun with a steeping in his ancestry. Harriet Brackett Spence Lowell, he had come to believe, was the one who had brought poetry into the Lowell line.