In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Missouri Review 28.1 (2005) 128-162


[Access article in PDF]

The Letters of Robert Lowell


Click for larger view		 Figure 1
Source: Alfred Eisenstaedt, Time & Life Pictures
[End Page 128]

Introduction

The following letters, written by one of America's greatest twentieth-century poets to a gallery of well-known literary figures and dated between 1936 and 1974, are excerpted from Saskia Hamilton's forthcoming book, The Letters of Robert Lowell, to be published in June by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. (Copyright 2005 by Harriet Lowell and Sheridan Lowell. All rights reserved.)



The letters give us Lowell's life as he lived it, inside out. We find him not just in history but in his house, on a particular morning, taking a break from his other work to write for a friend's ear. "It's an iron-black warm New York morning that reminds me of Europe," he writes to Elizabeth Bishop. "With the heat turned off in my study, I hear the great huffle of nature outside and almost feel I were voyaging off into the Atlantic, till I look up and see the stationary skyline of little sky-scrapers and wooden water towers."

The just-starting quality of thought, the mixture of tones—warm, playful, testing—are typical of Lowell's correspondence, the excitement of his intelligence and the liveliness of his prose. Although Lowell was an intrepid and compulsive reviser of his poetry, his correspondence was rarely drafted. Written on the fly, glancingly corrected, the letters are grammatically and visually messy. The paper often looks like a worksheet. They are composed in his distinctive prose—odd, intricate, sinewy sentences that seem to run several syntaxes together.

Some of the letters were written during manic episodes; many more were written during periods of depression. "Unreal" seems to have been code in his marriage for his illness. In manic states, Lowell was lost to his family and his society in allegories of interconnecting symbols, texts and characters. Whether that world was real or unreal was an open question to him and to [End Page 129] others. People who witnessed his manic episodes were often puzzled by his erratic behavior, trying to determine what was due to his illness and what was not. In "mixed mania," which seems to have been a feature of Lowell's form of the illness, mania and depression arise together, making a patient feel simultaneously elated and lethargic. A friend described what Lowell's descent into illness could be like:

At the beginning the horror was when he started to say awful things about people he was really very fond of. And when Cal said awful things about people they were always spot on, so people sort of quailed, and got very angry. He'd say it absolutely direct to them. . . . Eventually he'd go to bed and he'd wake up earlier and earlier in the morning just collapsed by remorse. Because Cal had an extremely kind character in most ways. So he'd wake up horrified by what he'd said.

Lowell's friends struggled to understand what happened to this "extremely kind character" who was so changed and yet seemed aware of his own behavior. In the interviews Ian Hamilton conducted for his biography shortly after Lowell's death, many people who knew him judged his manic behavior as a moral failing, as if the manic Lowell were the "real" Lowell, as if a mask had dropped, revealing his true character. Others, including his family and closest friends, thought that his "real" self was the person they knew when he was well.

The letters Lowell wrote in the spring of 1954 after the death of his mother in Italy document most fully what happened to his mind during a manic episode. Letters to Giovanna Madonia, a woman he knew slightly and with whom he took up while arranging to ship his mother's body back to America, show many signs of mania. But despite his increasing volubility, his occasional aggressive asides, letters to others seem lucid and controlled. While instigating a separation from his wife, he wrote...

pdf

Share