Alan Williamson: Looking back at Robert Lowell -- Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell by Paul Mariani / Robert Lowell's Life and Work: Damaged Grandeur by Richard Tillinghast

American Poetry Review, The, May 1995 by Williamson, Alan

But I suspect the main reason Lowell inspires resistance, now as in his lifetime, is the sheer grimness of much of his subject matter. The fact of insanity--that we can be plunged from talent, success, vibrant engagement with life, into obsessive circles of nightmare, misjudgment, the feeling of nonexistence, with no external cause--is one of the great terrors of fate, not least because it is the dark side of that human capacity to transform reality which is the root of most of science, and art. Sometimes we defend ourselves against this dark truth by suggesting that poets romanticize madness; that they could teach us how to be healthy, if they only wanted to. But I suspect this is less often the case than is believed. Even the adolescent, who identifies with Rimbaud or Dylan Thomas (or Robert Lowell), is probably trying, in an oblique way, to master something that genuinely frightens him in his own psyche, by associating it with dignity and achievement.

In fact, some recent studies suggest that Lowell's particular illness, bipolar mood disorder, is much commoner among writers and artists than in the population at large. If this is so, it may cast a totally new light on the whole vexed question of neurosis and art. The critic Thomas Caramagno argues as much, in a fascinating study of Virginia Woolf's manic-depression, The Flight of the Mind. The bipolar artist, having a peculiarly acute apprehension of the subjectivity, the unreliability, of all world-views, tries in his or her art to balance the manic and the depressive perspectives. The theory has two immense advantages over the old, never very satisfactory, Freudian view of art as symptom or sublimation. It allows us to see art as springing, not from compulsion or daydreaming, but from the mind's highest level of insight and mastery; and it allows for the vividness of the creative experience, whereas neurotic symptoms are by definition blunter and duller than the energies they disguise.

The whole arc of Lowell's career, it seems to me, is fascinatingly susceptible to Caramagno's theory of a balancing-act between competing truths. Lowell's manic truth was that the world was alive, was God, and that this aliveness could be embodied in an apocalyptic politics, Christian socialist in the 1940's, New Left for a few brief exhilirating moments in the 1960's. "I am a red arrow on this graph/ Of revelations." When Lowell was young the Holy Ghost spoke to him in the bathtub; he could tell the devil was present in a restaurant by the smell of brimstone. In his more agnostic fifties, he haunted the London Dolphinarium, wishing to make contact with another kind of conscious Otherness, "bigger-brained than man and much more peaceful and humorous." But Lowell's depressive truth was his Calvinist ancestor Jonathan Edwards, inflected by Darwin. The world was simply its physical self, a predestined machine of material causes grinding down through entropy to annihilation. The manic truth seemed obviously preferable, yet in practice it often led to violent, hurtful behavior. The depressed truth, while sapping Lowell's faith in life, restored his ethical grip. Hence his political vacillations: radical (or apocalyptic reactionary) to ultra-scrupulous liberal.