Intellectual Equals: Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell

“Here for a little while my heart is quiet inside me;
and when the wind lifts roughing through the trees,
I set about comparing my silence to those voices,
and I think about the eternal, the dead seasons,
things here at hand and alive,
and all their reasons and choices.
It’s sweet to destroy my mind
and go down
and wreck in this sea where I drown.”
-The Infinite

A History of Illness

In Robert Lowell’s family, mental illness can be traced as far back to his great-great-grandmother Harriet Spence Lowell, who was classified with a diseased mind and spent the last five years of her life institutionalized at McLean Asylum. Her husband Charles wrote about his own depression and melancholy, and two of their five children had mood disorders. Rebecca inherited a more severe and violent form of her mother’s illness while James once put a pistol to his head.

The Spence-Lowells were a prominent Bostonian family. Lowell’s great-grandfather was a writer and poet. His cousins authored numerous books and one even won a Pulitzer. Lowell, the only child of a controlling mother and taciturn father, turned to literature. He read Hawthorne and Melville, Dante and Homer. Entering into imagined worlds would become a lifelong and uncontrollable habit.

Poetry and Madness

Prone to hysteria and amnesia, Lowell first saw his mother’s psychiatrist when he was fifteen. At twenty, he began to succumb to dissociative spells and hypnotic trance interspersed with periods of creativity he used to write poetry. His subjects were dark – death and grief, moral decay and retribution – but professors acknowledged his talent early on.

“The loneliness inside me is a place,
Harvard where no one might always be someone.
When we’re alone people we run from change
to the mysterious and beautiful—
I am eating alone at a small white table,
visible, ignored…the moment that tries the soul,
an explorer going blind in polar whiteness.”
-Eating Out Alone, Robert Lowell

His first marriage was marred by alcoholism and violence. His wife, the novelist Jean Stafford, suffered repeated suicidal breakdowns and Lowell often went into fits of rage and jealousy, twice breaking Stafford’s nose – once in a car crash and again in an argument. Soon after the marriage ended, Lowell was hospitalized in 1949.

He was diagnosed with manic depression (what would later be termed bipolar disorder). At that time, the only treatment was electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). After six sessions, his mania stopped but he plummeted into severe depression. He was unable to concentrate, his speech slowed, and he told his doctor he wished to die.

It was the first of many episodes. Throughout his life, Lowell would be institutionalized twenty times, even staying in the same hospital as his great-great-grandmother a century earlier. The episodes were cyclical, marked with the onset of frenetic, fiery writing, then a spike of mania before crashing into another deep depression.

“It has taken me time since you died
To discover you are as human as I am…
If I am”
-Grass Fires, Robert Lowell

Psychiatrists have found that bipolar disorder and depression occur with staggering frequency in artists, especially writers and composers. In 1987, the University of Iowa published a study on writers, in which 80% exhibited mood disorders and 50% fit the criteria for bipolar disorder.

Poets seem most susceptible. Their writing relies on grand illusions and sometimes even a disconnection from reality. But despite his constant fear of recurring episodes, Lowell learned to harness his bouts of mania and hypersensitivity. He wrote brilliantly about his illness, spun metaphors from the dark, deep regions of his mind, and penned poems that could run to over 900 lines.

“I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor’s jersey
before the metal shaving mirrors,
and see the shaky future grow familiar
in the pinched, indigenous faces
of these thoroughbred mental cases,
twice my age and half my weight.
We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.”
-Waking in the Blue, Robert Lowell

A Marriage of Minds

Elizabeth Hardwick first met Lowell at a party in Greenwich Village in 1947, the year he won the Pulitzer for Lord Weary’s Castle. Though he was greatly admired as a poet, pioneering the genre of confessional poetry, her friends tried to dissuade her by recounting his history of mania and abuse. Allan Tate, a poet and common friend, warned her, “He is dangerous. You must not let him in your apartment.”

A year later, they crossed paths once more at a writers’ colony in Saratoga. She not only let him into her house but into her life. Hardwick was an accomplished writer. Her first novel, The Ghostly Lover, and subsequent stories dealt with intelligent, independent women searching for a place in the world. And in Lowell, she found the rarest of traits – an intellect equal to hers.

They married in July 1949, just two weeks after his release from the hospital. It was a marriage of minds. As she once told an interviewer, “The quality of his mind – quite the most thrilling I have known.” But it would also be a marriage of trials and heartbreak. Manic depression is an ancient disease, described by Hippocrates as far back as 500 BCE, and for which there is no cure. As with most patients, Lowell’s episodes became more frequent, more prolonged, and more difficult to treat as he got older.

Man and Wife

Hardwick stayed by his side with unwavering, saintly loyalty. She researched his illness, dealt with his doctors, and kept a constant lookout for his symptoms. When antipsychotic drugs became available, Lowell was sometimes able to prevent hospitalization if he took them in the earliest stages of his mania. But many other times, the onset was fast, severe and unavoidable. In the poem Man and Wife, Lowell places himself in Hardwick’s shoes –

“All night I’ve held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad—
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye—
and dragged me home alive. . . .
Now twelve years later, you turn your back.
Sleepless, you hold
your pillow to your hollows like a child;
your old-fashioned tirade—
loving, rapid, merciless—
breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.”
-Man and Wife, Robert Lowell

In between are periods of calm when she would again be taken by his passion for writing and literature. They spent perfect summers in Castine in a house overlooking the coast where they could write all day. They travelled to Europe where Lowell was often hired to teach and lecture. He was tender and apologetic – always aware of the pain he caused others. But although he was acutely aware of his madness, he was unable to ever control it.

He had a gift for regeneration. While his episodes worsened, his narrative became more lyrical, and he wrote poetry in and out of it every time. Even the onset of his mania could be mesmerizing. He would become even more productive in writing and could lecture profoundly on Greek tragedies and Roman poets. His illness – a dark, complex, incomprehensible, overpowering place in his mind – was also the source of his rare genius.

“What can be salvaged from your life? A pain
that gently darkens over heart and brain,
a fairy’s touch, a cobweb’s weight of pain,
now makes me tremble at your right to live.
I live your last night. Sleepless fugitive”
-Caligula, Robert Lowell

But soon Hardwick would notice he was on the edge of a breakdown and his illness was inescapable. For 30 years, he was in and out of hospitals. Once, he had to be treated in Germany and Switzerland before even being well enough to travel back to the U.S. to continue treatment.

Every time, it was his intelligence and poetry that carried her through. It was also among the reasons he loved her – as his intellectual equal. Unlike many male writers of his generation, Lowell sought his female counterparts. She was thoughtful and witty – as he was ingenious and poetic – and a brilliant writer in her own right.

Seduction and Betrayal

“They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.”
-Seduction and Betrayal, Elizabeth Hardwick

The beginning stages of Lowell’s illness were often marked by frantic writing, excessive drinking and shameless flirtation with other women. Numerous times he confessed to Hardwick of having fallen in love with one of his students. He seduced, possessed then discarded his lovers and muses too frequently to track, but at least they were fleeting, usually gone with the next illness. He knew Hardwick was his true north.

“When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body
caught in its hangman’s-knot of sinking lines,
the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . .
I have sat and listened to too many
words of the collaborating muse,
and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,
not avoiding injury to others,
not avoiding injury to myself”
-The Dolphin, Robert Lowell

This changed in 1970. After Hardwick flew back from their holiday in Rome, Lowell went to teach at Oxford, soon met Caroline Blackwood and instantly took up a passionate affair with her. Hardwick would not find out for another two months. They would divorce so he could remarry. In the following seven years, they would write countless letters across the Atlantic to each other.

Hers were sometimes angry, but more often caring – worrying about his health, wondering about his writing, and making sure he had enough books to read. There were frantic phone calls when she would plead for him to come home and words of apologies afterward. He was just as torn, “I swear I never in all this business have wanted to hurt you – the very opposite.” In her absence came the realization of his inability to do without her. Blackwood, an heiress and writer, but also an unstable alcoholic, was incapable of dealing with his illness and distanced herself during those times.

“We feel the machine slipping from our hands
As if someone else were steering;
If we see the light of at the end of the tunnel,
It’s the light of an oncoming train.”
-Since 1939, Robert Lowell

The epistolary drama inspired the most productive periods in their writing. Lowell published four books of poetry and won another Pulitzer in 1974 for The Dolphin, which traces the breakdown of their marriage and even uses some of Hardwick’s letters verbatim in his poetry. The dual betrayal of her love and words almost drove her to suicide. But instead she immersed herself in publishing critical essays and became more active in feminist and social causes.

By 1975, Lowell’s marriage to Blackwood was falling apart under the dual constraints of his mania and her alcoholism. He and Hardwick would still spend time together. Although it was only out of friendship and not romance, her devotion and love for him never wavered. Without her, he would have succumbed to his illness long ago and would never have found a way out.

In September 1977, in a taxi on his way from the airport to visit Hardwick after a disastrous holiday in Ireland with Blackwood, he suffered a massive heart attack and was pronounced dead at the hospital. In his briefcase was a copy of Day by Day, his latest book of poetry published just a month before. The inscription read –