Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character by Kay Redfield Jamison (review)

Should artists be enabled in order for the public to experience their art? That question begs in Kay Redfield Jamison's study of imagination and manic-depressive illness, which she instructs "is not a biography" but "a psychological account of the life and mind of Robert Lowell." Her "interest lies in the entanglement of art, character, mood, and intellect"; consequently, she concludes that "[s]tudying the influence of both normal and pathological moods on creative work is critical to understanding how the mind imagines" (5). Mania, though, is the thread that ties together the chapters of her book. She characterizes it as "an unstable and complex state. It is seductive and blinding … laden with risk and energy." Moreover, it "insinuates its way into its hosting brain: intoxicating enough to be dangerous, original enough to be valuable" (5). It also insinuates its way into the relationships artists have. Jamison typifies the harm that mania can cause when the young Lowell, "gored and raging" (72), knocks his father to the ground for interfering with his son's affairs at college. She concludes: "He would need to come to terms with rash acts not always under his control, acts for which there would be, and he would feel, moral culpability" (74). The guilt Lowell feels Jamison abundantly covers, but the culpability demurs behind the central question of whether or not art excuses those who use illness as a driving force in creation.

Not always under control does not suggest that Lowell's treatment was efficacious. His frequent hospitalizations from manic delusions, well documented by Jamison, illustrate a poet who has convinced himself that his work results from the very curse that impacts his behavior, particularly his personal relations with women and his self-medicating with alcohol. Jamison's book profiles that he did not come to terms with rage, offspring of irritable mania, but that he used the early stages of hypomania to form the crux of his creative bursts and subsequently in large part, his poems. In Chapter V, she argues that mania might be the thread that leads to greater understanding of imagination.¹ But even after being prescribed lithium—and excepting for a three-year stretch—Lowell never mastered his illness. A fundamental reason for his failure to learn his illness and particularly triggers for mood episodes, it would appear, is that Lowell's poetry provided an excuse to avoid the heavy lifting of symptom management, and his status provided a safety net.

Jamison begins with a "Prologue": a brief narrative from 1845, in which she describes Lowell's great-great-grandmother, Harriet Brackett Spence Lowell, institutionalized for insanity in McClean Asylum for the Insane in Somerville, Massachusetts, a facility that would also house Robert Lowell nearly a century later. She describes Harriet Lowell's arrival in a "very irritable state," as attributed to the clinical notes, included in copious end notes but which are not directly attributed in her text. The process might be somewhat cumbersome at times, but the study reads well in the absence of such direct interference, if at times it might be time-consuming to consult. A bibliography would have helped. The remainder of the book, totaling 403 pages, with an additional hundred pages for three appendices, notes, and index, includes six chapters: "I: Introduction—Steel and Fire," "II: Origins—The Puritanical Iron Hand of Constraint," "III: Illness—The Kingdom of the Mad," "IV: Character," "V: Illness and Art," and "VI: Mortality."

The purpose of this "Prologue," however, seems clear enough. Robert Lowell suffered from severe manic-depressive illness, and it is the pedigree described in his forbears that directly descends to him and on which Jamison focuses. Mania also forms the crux of his creative prowess, and his personal history of New England serves as the material and background for his work.

In the "Origins" chapter, Jamison continues from the...