Bio brings clarity to poet Robert Lowell’s chaotic life Matt McCarthy
Jamison gets to look at his medical records
Is there a link between madness and creativity? In her intriguing new book, Robert Lowell,
Setting the River on Fire, Kay Redfield Jamison searches for answers by examining the chaotic life of one of America’s most important poets. Lowell’s struggles with mental illness have been well documented, but this volume offers something unique: a detailed review of his medical records. It’s the first time such information has been made publicly available. The book (Knopf, 404 pp.,
opens in the fall of 1957, with Lowell caught up in a torrent of literary output, writing poetry “like a house afire.” The Harvard dropout is working on
Life Studies, which will become one of the most influential books of poetry of the 20th century. Several weeks later, in December of that year, Lowell developed severe psychosis and was involuntarily committed to the Massachusetts Mental Health Center — his fifth psychiatric hospitalization in eight years.
This was a recurring pattern: periods of intense productivity, followed by monstrous fits of mania wending into depression. “My trouble,” Lowell writes to a friend, “is to bring together in me the Puritanical iron hand of constraint and the gushes of pure wildness.” This line sets the stage for a remarkable look into the life and mind of a genius.
It’s familiar territory for Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant” recipient. She wrote about her struggle with bipolar disorder in the best-selling memoir An Unquiet Mind and has made a career redefining the diagnosis and treatment of the disease. In her new book, we discover that Lowell was an unwanted child. His mother said she wanted to die when she discovered she was pregnant with Robert, and maternal rejection would become a recurring theme in both his extensive interactions with psychiatrists and in his writing. Charlotte Lowell was a source of great pain and consternation for the young poet; she was prone to bouts of hysteria, mania and amnesia. For an entire year, she inexplicably took on the lifestyle and habits of Napoleon. (The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: Robert Lowell was similarly obsessed with the French emperor.) Translating experience into verse, Lowell mined rejection to expand the language of suffering. His prose is both illuminating and exhausting; it’s hard to read more than a few stanzas about his relationship with his mother without needing a break. The sole weakness in Jamison’s nuanced, sympathetic portrait is her presentation of mental health research. Complicated data is shoehorned into the story, disrupting the narrative, while sophisticated concepts such as genome-wide association studies are glossed over, presented without explanation, preventing the reader from truly understanding the extraordinary advances that have been made in the study of bipolar disorder. We’re brought into the most intimate moments in Robert Lowell’s life, but kept at arm’s length from the science behind his erratic behavior.
Shortly before he died, Lowell seemed to be at peace with his disease and made amends with many who he’d hurt, including the woman who had caused him such pain. In a final act of reconciliation, he chose to be buried next to her.