was noble and your words were all things,
I find this boily creature in your place;
find you disarranged, squatting on the window sill,
irrefutably placed up there,
like a hunk of some big frog
watching us through the V
of your woolen legs.
Even so, I must admire your skill.
You are so gracefully insane.
We fidget in our plain chairs
and pretend to catalogue
our facts for your burly sorcery
or ignore your fat blind eyes
or the prince you ate yesterday
who was wise, wise, wise.
Less to the gut but powerful, Derek Walcott drew the contrast between Lowell’s gentleness and the lingering presence of his madness:
Cal’s bulk haunts my classes. The shaggy, square head tilted,
the mist of heated affection blurring his glasses,
slumped, but the hands repeatedly bracketing vases
of air, the petal-soft voice that has never wilted—
its flowers of illness carpet the lanes of Cambridge,
and the germ of madness is here.
Not everyone was able to accept or live through Lowell’s attacks of mania; some had to distance themselves until he was well again. Staying away was understandable. Lowell experienced full-bore madness, not the pastel version of mental illness portrayed in drug company advertisements as containable, acceptable, simplistically treatable. Kathleen Spivack, a young woman at the time she first met Lowell, said that she was “incapable of dealing with Lowell’s breakdowns, so I stood outside his inner circle in that respect….I never was able to shake a slight fear of his unpredictability, the flashes of cruelty that could and did emerge.” William Meredith wrote to Lowell in similar vein. His silence, he explained, was not “altogether cowardice, but a sense of my being necessarily in exile when that part of you is in power. But you know, too, it is not unconcern.” Lowell, for his part, understood the difficulty. “There was no point in getting in touch with me,” he wrote to Meredith. “I know all too much about the uninstructed heart, and it is wearisome and quite fruitless for human ears to try and catch its clamorous babble.”
Some colleagues found it difficult to understand Lowell’s mania; it was not so much that they withdrew until the storm had blown through, it was that they attributed his madness to weakness in character or self-indulgence. This is not an uncommon reaction to mental illness even now, although there is more public awareness about mania and depression. The critic and poet William Empson, who had received at least one profoundly delusional letter from Lowell comparing himself to an electroshock-treated Christ, told Jonathan Raban, “There’s nothing wrong with the man at all. Just one of those things that Americans invent.” Empson was one of several who never grasped the extent of Lowell’s illness and who failed to recognize, in Elizabeth Hardwick’s words, the “incredible flow of energy, the streams of incredible madness.” (Empson did go forward during a poetry reading to embrace Lowell, who, just recovering from a breakdown, was shaking violently.) W. H. Auden too was left unmoved by Lowell’s suffering. Anthony Hecht recalls telling Auden about Lowell’s breakdown in Salzburg in 1952, expecting from him “some grunt of commiseration, at least.” There was none. “He regarded Lowell’s whole tortured history of crack-ups as pure self-indulgence and undeserving of any sympathy.” Auden, it was said, had joked that John Berryman had written in his suicide note: “Your move, Cal.” There was no note.
William James, perhaps because he knew mental suffering so well himself, had given a broader berth of explanation to illnesses of the mind. In 1901, after Henry Adams’s brother-in-law killed himself, James wrote a letter of consolation to his daughter. “Not only death but all forms of decay knock at our gate,” he wrote to her. “We must house it and suffer it and take whatever it brings for sake of the ends that are certainly being fulfilled by its means, behind the screen.” Her father’s death proved the separation of character and disease, how “purely extraneous” and disconnected they were. The cause, he continued, was “probably an internally generated poison in the blood which ‘science’ any day may learn how to eliminate or neutralize, and so make all of these afflictions so many nightmares of the past.”
No one understood better or went through more of the best and the most difficult of Robert Lowell than did Elizabeth Hardwick. She has been portrayed as a martyr to Lowell’s illness, infidelities, and verbal cruelty, yet those who knew her well disagree. Even a cursory look at her work, letters, and interviews makes clear that she was more than able to sort through and live with their complex marriage and friendship. It was not an easy relationship but it was a lasting one that both took meaning in. In substantial ways she provided the love, respect, and constancy that many other writers’ husbands and wives, such as Leonard Woolf and Sophia Hawthorne, have provided over the years. Sophia Hawthorne, for one, understood that her husband, brooding and difficult and a genius, needed long periods of time to himself if he was to write and keep psychologically afloat; he also needed a highly regimented lifestyle, a tight routine of meals, sleep, writing, and friends. Hawthorne’s prickly and frail temperament required tending: “He cannot bear anything,” she wrote. “He must be handled like the airiest venetian glass.” His dark moods took their toll. “I have been weighed to the earth by my sense of thy depressed energies and spirits in a way from which I tried in vain to rally,” she wrote to him. “This wrenching off thy wings and hanging dead upon thy arrowy feet.” Her frustration would be familiar to anyone who has lived with a depressed spouse: “So apathetic, so indifferent, so hopeless, so unstrung.”
Elizabeth Hardwick, 1983
“my wife…your lightness alters everything, and tears the black web from the spider’s sack.” Credit 30
Yet exasperation not uncommonly exists alongside love, in the midst of relationships of great caring. It is in the nature of depression and mania to be complicated, hard, and insinuating. Moods are contagious—depressive, joyous, infuriating. They change, damage, and enrich. Husbands and wives have understood this, and poets have written about it, for centuries. Little is straightforward for spouses who come to know mania. Lowell’s parents had advised their son against his marriage to Hardwick in large measure because of his mental illness and the toll it would take. Four days before his own death, Lowell’s father acknowledged they had been wrong. “We think it is nice to do well in your poems,” he wrote, “but it is equally advisable to do well in a wife, & we think that you did.”
Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick had a complicated marriage and a hard divorce; importantly, they also had a lasting friendship. At different times, and in many ways—in his letters, conversations with his friends, and writing—Lowell made clear his debt to her. He was acutely aware that his illness had burst into her life and their marriage. In “Man and Wife,” published in Life Studies in 1959, the wife yet again faced the “kingdom of the mad,” once more dragged her husband home alive:
All night I’ve held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad—
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye—
and dragged me home alive.
In “Night Sweat,” a poem that Elizabeth Bishop particularly loved—it is “very beautiful, musical, spontaneous…wonderful”—Lowell wrote of his life’s fever and the cost of art; of the debt to the dawn by the night forces; a lightness that altered everything; a wife’s absolution and salvaging, the heavy cost:
Work-table, litter, books and standing lamp,
plain things, my stalled equipment, the old broom—
but I am living in a tidied room,
for ten nights now I’ve felt the creeping damp
float over my pajamas’ wilted white…
Sweet salt embalms me and my head is wet,
everything streams and tells me this is right;
my life??
?s fever is soaking in night sweat—
one life, one writing! But the downward glide
and bias of existing wrings us dry—
always inside me is the child who died,
always inside me is his will to die—
one universe, one body…in this urn
the animal night sweats of the spirit burn.
Behind me! You! Again I feel the light
lighten my leaded eyelids, while the gray
skulled horses whinny for the soot of night.
I dabble in the dapple of the day,
a heap of wet clothes, seamy, shivering,
I see my flesh and bedding washed with light,
my child exploding into dynamite,
my wife…your lightness alters everything,
and tears the black web from the spider’s sack,
as your heart hops and flutters like a hare.
Poor turtle, tortoise, if I cannot clear
the surface of these troubled waters here,
absolve me, help me, Dear Heart, as you bear
this world’s dead weight and cycle on your back.
“Your lightness alters everything, / and tears the black web from the spider’s sack,” he wrote. It is tribute and supplication—from husband to wife, and drowning man to lifeline.
Hardwick recognized the good beyond the ill in their marriage. It was worth it, she said: “He was the most extraordinary person I have ever known, like no one else—unplaceable, unaccountable.” But Hardwick, more than anyone in his life, was also aware of how destructive Lowell could be when he was manic. The harm was real; she did not pretend otherwise. In a letter to Allen Tate, she raised the moral questions that she knew close at hand. “If only these things of Cal’s were simply distressing,” she wrote. But “they cause me and other people real suffering. And for what? I do not know the answer to the moral problems posed by the conduct of a deranged person, but the dreadful fact is that in purely human terms this deranged person does a lot of harm.” He was, she continued, “terribly demanding and devouring. I feel a deep loyalty and commitment to him, and yet at the same time I don’t know exactly what sort of bearable status quo I can establish with him.”
“I tire of my turmoil,” Lowell wrote, “and feel everyone else has, and long for a Horatian calm.” Indeed. It was not only Hardwick who took the brunt of Lowell’s manic attacks; it was not only Lowell who suffered. It was his friends and colleagues as well. Those in his life had different capacities to tolerate his illness depending upon their own mental vulnerabilities, how many of his manic attacks they had witnessed, and the extent to which their blood had been drawn by Lowell’s lacerating remarks. Lowell’s illness was, for everyone, exhausting. He knew this:
Nothing! No oil
for the eye, nothing to pour
on those waters or flames.
I am tired. Everyone’s tired of my turmoil.
No one said otherwise, yet what is striking is that he kept his friendships. His daughter, Harriet, describes this capacity and the loyalty and love he commanded when he was himself:
No doubt people did tire of the repeated breakdowns and were saddened and unnerved by them and tired of taking turns rescuing him, but what is missing is why the man commanded such loyalty. The originality and depth and warmth of his company and the real pain of the descents and strange humor in them made us love him….We weren’t casualties to art, but witnesses to it, enriched by our contact with this unusually tender and intelligent man. We loved him and he loved us almost more, as his need for love was so great, but not in a pulverizing way. He felt things deeply though he could be careless and dismissive and even arrogant. It’s a complex legacy. Mostly he wasn’t arrogant and came off nervous and wanting everyone’s opinion. He was the most collaborative of writers and livers, wanting and needing to share it all and take it all in….He seemed so vulnerable, almost heartbreakingly so, yet was full of fun. He was happiest, surrounded by his friends and family, and when he was working. These are the things that saved him.
Harriet Lowell, firstborn, hoped for and not expected, disagrees with the stereotypic portrayal of her father that emerged after his death: unstintingly mad, lacking in humor, and thoughtless. “He’d become a cartoonish version of himself,” she says, “a mad Caligula, who destroyed his art as carelessly as he seemed to destroy lives.” The father she knew was a “very present and loving father, whatever his mental state, and wonderfully odd.” He took her to museums, zoos, and ice skating, carried her on his shoulders in Central Park, taught her how to ride a bike and swim. They took late-night summer drives in Maine to spot deer, porcupines, foxes, and skunks. He was an “interested father, who would ask me all kinds of questions as a child and really wanted to know what I was thinking.” He was not in the least patronizing, unlike most of the adults she knew, and was “very empathetic about what it was like to be an only child and awkward at school.”
He read Charlotte’s Web to her, Kipling’s Just So Stories, and The Hound of the Baskervilles. He read his own poetry and asked for her opinion, as he asked for everyone’s. (Being read to aloud was “the lament of the poet’s wife,” said Elizabeth Hardwick.) Mostly, Harriet says, “I remember the sound of his voice, his breathing. It sounded like waves crashing to me as a child.” Her father, she adds, “was unusually tender and open, for a man.” They had quiet family evenings at home listening to opera or songs from the American Civil War. Her parents scarcely had a “debauched lifestyle,” she notes. “They were not libertines, but rather stodgy WASPs.” Her parents also entertained friends, intellectuals, artists, and poets, evenings she describes as brilliant: “There is no way to recreate or even describe these conversations. Part of the attraction was the sharing of ideas. He had a terrible disease, but was charming, mischievous and full of fun.”
Robert Lowell and Harriet Lowell, Castine, 1960
“I’ll love you at eleven, twenty, fifty, young when the century mislays my name—” Credit 31
Lowell, for his part, delighted in his daughter from before she was born to her visits to him in England as a young woman. In a poem he dedicated to her he recalled a summer evening in Maine that started in darkness and ended on a father’s love:
I wake to your cookout and Charles Ives
lulling my terror, lifting my fell of hair,
as David calmed the dark nucleus of Saul.
I’ll love you at eleven, twenty, fifty,
young when the century mislays my name—
no date I can name you can be long enough,
the impossible is allied to fact.
Like most children born to older parents, Harriet brought her parents a particular sense of wonder. And change. “Chaos grows like a snowball in our house,” Lowell wrote to a friend shortly after Harriet’s birth. She was a “handful,” yet delicate, and frighteningly so: “The world would stop for us,” he said, if anything should happen to her. Harriet’s birth put a different slant on Lowell’s and Hardwick’s world. “I’ve always suspected that Lizzie and I were curiously unlike other families,” he wrote drolly to Peter Taylor. “My multiple absent-mindednesses, Lizzie’s way of executing small, domestic acts with the splendor of an early Verdi heroine—now against the background of a normal child, I see we are very strange. However, we now have our own flower garden, play doubles daily and have a faint glimmer of how people live.”
Months before his daughter’s twenty-first birthday, in September 1977, Lowell died suddenly. At the memorial service Seamus Heaney read two of Lowell’s poems. The first was “Home After Three Months Away” from Life Studies, which told of a father who returns home from the mental hospital and laments the time he has missed with his young daughter; grieves the time and hope that he has lost to madness; fears his darkening, uncertain future. Heaney then read a poem that Lowell had written years later. It spoke differently to the rush of time and the certainty of decay, the switch from mouse-brown hair to the white lion’s mane; the hurry of spring into summ
er. It spoke of the ripening of youth and a father’s love. Like “Home After Three Months Away,” it spoke as well of the uncertainty of what might come:
Summer: 5. Harriet
Spring moved to summer—the rude cold rain
hurries the ambitious, flowers and youth;
our flash-tones crackle for an hour, and then
we too follow nature, imperceptibly
change our mouse-brown to white lion’s mane,
thin white fading to a freckled, knuckled skull,
bronzed by decay, by many, many suns….
Child of ten, three-quarters animal,
three years from Juliet, half Juliet,
already ripened for the night on stage—
beautiful petals, what shall we hope for,
knowing one choice not two is all you’re given,
health beyond the measure, dangerous
to yourself, more dangerous to others?
Their sentiments and instincts are wholly transformed by the disease; men, formerly kind and benevolent, become violent, passionate, vindictive….They acquire faults and vices foreign to their former nature, and which render it impossible to live with them.
—DANIEL HACK TUKE, “CIRCULAR INSANITY,” 1892
Mania, Robert Lowell had said, was an illness, extremity, for one’s friends, depression an illness for oneself. There is truth in this, and Lowell was aware of it. Certainly, mania wreaks havoc in those who are psychologically and physically in its path. Manic psychosis is peculiarly social and personal in its impact, a fact noted by the ancient physicians as well as contemporary ones. Intense, irrational, and abrasive behavior toward others is, in many ways, as characteristic of mania as the more classical symptoms such as grandiosity, flight of ideas, relentless energy, and pressured speech. Manic behaviors—verbal attacks; boorishness; outbursts of rage punctuated by seductiveness; sexual infidelity; excessive spending and impulsive financial investments; physical violence—seem more willful than they are. There are convincing, but illusory, islands of reasonableness during mania.