Robert Lowell (1917–1977) – the poetic genius with manic-depression – is the latest subject for this in-depth analysis by world expert on the disorder, Kay Redfield Jamison. The US-based professor, herself a fellow sufferer of bipolar illness, has used a variety of uniquely available sources to produce a deeply insightful account of the highly acclaimed poet's life. Drawing from interviews she conducted with many of those most affected by Lowell – including his daughter who also granted access to her father's psychiatric records – Jamison offers a fascinating picture of a genius whose life was punctuated with destructive mania.
Jamison was introduced to his work through a gift of For the Union Dead from a teacher when she was in the throes of adolescent bipolar mood swings. She has lived through her own challenges in his shadow and confronted the same stigma.
This is a long work of great scholarship and joyous empathy. Like Lowell she is a commander of metaphor and we read about his mania in a rich vocabulary – mania intoxicating to experience but heart-breaking to witness.
Her study of Lowell's forebears (a Boston pedigree from the Mayflower) is remarkable for the extent of both mental illness and civic achievement. Lowell studied at Harvard, which his ancestors had helped to fund, and was hospitalised in 1967 in the same Boston institution (McLean) in which his great-great-grandmother had been insane in 1845. His inheritance produced a tension between puritanical discipline and restraint, and pure wildness. His education and reading made him close to the great writers of the past and to historical and mythical figures with whom he identified when ill – Achilles, Shakespeare, Napoleon (a childhood idol whose battles he loved to recreate) and Hitler.
The pattern of his illness was recurrent cycles beginning with intense writing – ‘messy spurts’ – (to be revised later when depressed or better), infatuation and infidelity, wild overactivity and paranoia, hospitalisation with psychotic grandiosity followed by exhaustion, depression and a struggle to reconstruct damaged relationships and to face the certainty of another episode – but not self-harm. In 1967 having had at least 13 admissions for mania and years of psychotherapy, he started lithium and his illness improved.
The theme of manic destructiveness (‘brutal words’) and the courage to recover (‘character’) is explored with reference to soldiers in World War I, described by Lord Moran. Jamison weaves a web linking the poet's illness and character to his much admired writings, teaching and activism.
His final years were spent in England, including fellowship at All Souls Oxford and marriage to his third wife, to whose portrait by her previous husband Lucian Freud he was clinging when he died of a heart attack in a New York taxi returning to his second and most stabilising wife, the writer and critic Elizabeth Hardwick.
His life illustrates the changed relationships that followed the willingness to talk more openly about mental illness that he encouraged and the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
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