Read Robert Lowell: A Biography Online
Authors: Ian Hamilton
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #General
You are very frightened by the ward,
your companions are chosen for age;
you are the youngest
and sham-flirt with your nurse—
your chief thought is scheming
the elaborate surprise of your escape.
Being old in good times is worse
than being young in the worst.
34
To William Alfred, Lowell wrote: “I don’t think you ever met Israel Citkovitz, Caroline’s former husband. He died of a stroke about two weeks ago, not unexpected—maddening, grotesque, rather lovely man. We have lived in the world of his death.”
35
And then, as if in some rehearsed drama, July brought the death of Lowell’s Kenyon mentor, John Crowe Ransom. Ransom had been ill for some time, so his death also was “not unexpected.” Its timing, though, helped to plunge Lowell even more deeply into a “grey blank.” He wrote to Peter Taylor:
John’s death. It does seem right, right that his death should show an untroubling anyone courtesy [Ransom died in his sleep, aged 86]…. He was my teacher and kept me from breaking myself. I’m struggling to write on him.
36
Taylor was also low and fearful after his heart attack, and Lowell writes to him as a companion in “death’s shadow”:
In depression and even more in travelling, I too go over my life trying to understand it—I think in a way, I never understood it, that it is addition not to be understood just completed…. Yet I can’t live that way, must live with a point to be reached—even a reward card to be won.
37
In October 1974 Lowell was at a party given by the London publisher George Weidenfeld. He was not drinking; indeed, to aid in this latest of several efforts to renounce alcohol, he was taking the drug Antabuse. On October 9 he writes again to Taylor:
The other night at a large party I suddenly felt an acute nausea as if I had been drinking heavily, then a rather comforting feeling of changing inside to ice, then I was being rolled about by six merry people on a low table, like a gentle practical joke. I had fainted. It may have been from accidentally drinking something like vodka and orange juice, or it may
not. The doctors can’t tell. Anyway it’s not serious but it made me feel close to you. I’ve written you a second poem about this and about the years that brought us to now….
38
The poem read, in part, as follows—Lowell revised it for book publication:
My thinking is talking to you—
last night I fainted at dinner
and came nearer to your sickness,
nearer the angels in nausea.
The room turned upside-down;
I was my interrupted sentence,
an accident tumbled alive
on a low, cooling black table.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1974,
the Common Market,
the dwarf-Norman fruit-tree
espaliered to the wall—
the old boys drop like wasps
from windowsill and pane.
This year for the first time,
even cows seem transitory.
The Psalmist’s glass-mosaic Shepherd
and bright green pastures
seem
art
nouveau
for our funeral.
39
And around the same time, Lowell wrote a similar reminiscing, near-elegiac poem to Frank Parker; it recalls their early friendship at St. Mark’s, the high ambitions they evolved during their 1935 summer at Nantucket: “I want to write,” “I want to paint”:
We once claimed alliance with the Redskin….
What is won by losing,
if two glasses of red wine are poison?
40
After his fainting attack, Lowell was examined by a London heart specialist and “was cleared of any heart trouble, as earlier of lung trouble,”
41
but for weeks afterwards he brooded on the incident. In
December he responded reassuringly to concerned letters from Elizabeth Hardwick—“my heart and lungs are completely cleared by science. Nothing is durable or easy-moving at our age”
42
—but to Taylor he continued to dwell on symptoms of decline:
For several years I haven’t felt my “true self.” Most embarrassing, when I get out of one of the large taxis, the driver sometimes asks if I need help; I take stairs too with a considered seriousness, I forget names and faces as always only more; if I give someone a comic name … I am liable to think it is his name. I forget things, have no memory of where I put my cigarette lighter after a few minutes, no recollection even after I find it irrationally lying on a distant bureau. I act, as all flesh must, my age.
43
In October, Lowell was also writing of “troubled times with the stock market and with Caroline. She is having what we call an acute nervous depression.” He would go to Harvard in the spring without her—“I don’t think we are up to the great expense and weight of moving our whole family to Cambridge”—but he was also now pondering the possibility of a permanent move back to the United States: “There’s the now insoluble question of whether we should live in England or come to America where I can earn and make connections. Well, this will solve itself?” In December it was
decided
that Blackwood and the children would, after all, join him for the Harvard spring semester, and she flew over to Boston for a week to look at houses. On December 14 Lowell wrote to Frank Bidart:
I am unable to thank you sufficiently for Caroline’s week, it’s [
sic
] pleasure and success. I did not want to force her hand about coming to Boston, or even try to make a delightful prospect, until she had seen and judged for herself, both the kind of house and the whole atmosphere. … I see now, as I saw when Caroline determined to fly, that everyone coming with me meant more to me than I know how to say, running through all my nerves … like our San Domingo marriage….
44
It was unlikely that Lady Caroline would have agreed to any
permanent
resettling in America, whatever the financial advantages. She believed that Lowell became dangerously excited whenever
Harvard
was in prospect:
In a new place he wasn’t as threatened by his inner things as he was in the place of his birth. At Harvard it was always touch and go. He was
so edgy at Harvard and he was so on the brink all the time—encouraged by all those hangers-on who tried to make him sit up all night drinking.
45
Although lithium had for over four years prevented a full-blown manic attack, there were certainly periods when Lowell’s friends had thought that he might be “on the brink.” During Lowell’s “exile’s return” in the winter of 1973, Jonathan Raban had been teaching in Boston, and he remembers that he and Blackwood had devised a code: if Lowell began to show symptoms of mania, she would telephone Raban and say something to him about “laundry”—Raban should then call for help. The code was never used, but its very devising suggests something of Blackwood’s continuing
anxiety
. The memory of her 1970 “lock-up” was keen enough for her to be watchful of any “highs”; she was convinced that there were grave risks involved whenever Lowell set foot on his home ground. And there is no reason to suppose that her anxiety did not
communicate
itself to Lowell.
Before setting off for Harvard in February 1975, Lowell visited Dr. Paul Brass and demanded a medical report for his Boston doctor, Curtis Prout. He refused to give Brass Prout’s address. In the end Brass handed over a sealed envelope. Lowell opened this on the flight over and was shaken.
This delightful man has been a patient of mine since his arrival in England. The two problems he has had over here are at present under treatment. He suffers from chronic manic depression controlled with large doses of lithium, and he also has had a raised blood pressure over the last four years. The blood pressure is controlled at about 150/100 on three tablets of methyl dopa 250 mgm per day. His pulse remains
constantly
at 100 per minute and I must say he never really looks particularly well.
You probably know that he had a tendency in the past to drink excessive amounts of alcohol and to smoke too much. Of his own accord he has been taking Abstem tablets one daily and has more or less been on the wagon for the last four months. He has even cut down on his cigarette smoking to about 20 a day.
46
The report goes on to describe Lowell’s fainting fit at the
Weidenfeld
party—he “might inadvertently have taken some alcohol”—and to pass on the results of his October examination by “an eminent cardiologist.” It was this specialist’s opinion that shook Lowell:
Chest X-ray showed a slightly odd-shaped heart, but I think it was within ordinary limits. All his ECG’s show left axis deviation
compatible
with left anterior block. There is some delay in right ventricular conduction, but this does not amount to bundle branch block. PR
Interval
is normal.
47
No new treatment was suggested, but the family doctor proposed that if dizziness recurred “we should consider a pacemaker…. I have not discussed this with him, particularly I have not mentioned a pacemaker. He is extremely apprehensive and this would certainly make him very worried about his future health.” There is also mention in the report of “severe chest pains … starting in his back and radiating round to the right side. X-rays show quite
considerable
osteo-arthritis in his dorsal spine.”
For Lowell, this talk of pacemakers and “bundle branch block” was deeply alarming; and in spite of reassurances from his Boston doctor—who wrote to Blackwood that Lowell looked “twenty years younger since I last saw him because he’s been off alcohol”—he continued to see himself as a victim of heart illness. In the spring of 1975 he collapsed again, in New York; the circumstances are not entirely clear, but it would seem that, in fear of a manic attack, he overdosed on lithium. Robert Giroux recalls:
We had lunch on that day in Greenwich Village, at an Armenian restaurant, the Dardanelles, that he liked. After we ordered our food (he did not ask for a drink), to my horror his head fell forward and he slumped down in his seat. I said, “Cal, you’re not well. Let me get a taxi,” but he said, “No, I really want some food. I’ll be all right, I’m just tired.” To my surprise, after he began to eat, he visibly improved and began to seem his old self. When we finished, I suggested we ride uptown together (my office is downtown), but he insisted he was all right. Late that afternoon he collapsed again, and the doctors at Mount Sinai diagnosed his condition as toxic. Food apparently was an
antidote
. Lithium requires strict monitoring, which Cal was incapable of. The doctors did not seem to understand that asking
him
to “have the levels checked” was absurd; he could not take care of himself in this way.
48
Lowell was kept in Mount Sinai for a few days’ observation, and Robert Silvers visited him there:
I saw him the night before he went in. We’d all been to the opera, and at the restaurant afterwards Cal seemed in terrible shape—exhausted, excited, incoherent. He slumped at the table drinking glass after glass of orange juice. The next day at Mount Sinai he talked in a wandering way about Alexander the Great—how Philip of Macedon had been a canny politician but Alexander had been able to cut through Asia.
49
In May 1975 Lowell was back in Boston, and Dr. Prout writes to him at 34 Cypress Street, Brookline:
A week ago, you called me because you were feeling lethargic and sleepy. You had felt unwell and thought perhaps you needed to take more lithium to prevent a manic attack, and you had gone, from your usual five, up to as many as eight tablets a day. Your blood level, at that time, was 1.5, and we consider the desirable range to be something in the order of 0.5 to 1.0. As you know, I saw you at home several times. Your heart and blood pressure continue to be good, but you didn’t feel right in the head. There was also some apprehension about the possibility of a stroke, which I helped to allay.
Perhaps, because I was overly concerned with the overdose, I
overestimated
the length of time it would take to reduce the lithium in your blood, because the sample taken on May 12 was 0.2, which is too low. I therefore asked you to go back to, and stay on, your five tablets, regularly, a day. I don’t think you ought to go above it or below it and I do think you might have this level checked in England in about four weeks.
50
In July, Lowell was writing from Milgate that apart from “coughs, pinkeye and palpitations” there was “nothing wrong,”
51
and, three weeks later, that “I don’t have sleepy sickness if I don’t mix heart slowers with lithium—not a 100 per cent answer.”
52
And in August he felt strong enough to attend a fairly drunken and contentious poetry festival in Ireland: “‘too much drinking and too many poets read,’ as someone said to me, but glorious. Three or four gates to climb from where we were staying to a salmon river—the heat had driven them into the wilds.”
53
In September 1975 he
reported
to Blair Clark that he had had “a quiet, hard working and at times American hot summer…. We go to London almost weekly, but when we see strange and numerous people are so unpractised we can hardly speak, tho I think Caroline can sometimes.” He would resume his Harvard teaching in February 1976; this time,
however, he and Blackwood would live in New York and he would “commute to Harvard as once before.”
54
As he explained also to Frank Parker: “It’s really almost easier for me to fly to classes from New York than to drive in from Brookline. I hope to have rooms in one of the houses and stay two nights a week. I count on seeing you a lot.”
55