Mad, good and dangerous to know

‘Tomorrow morning some poet may, like Byron, wake up to find himself famous,’ wrote Randall Jarrell, ‘for having written a novel, for having killed his wife; it will not be for having written a poem.’ Jarrell’s cynicism is too slick, too rueful; but it does snag something in Robert Lowell, as it does in several of the American poets of his generation. Lowell was, at his best, a towering poet, but his public fame often rested on other things: that he was Boston posh; that he publicly thumbed his nose at the government; that he was, above all, mad.

He was all these things, and a great poet, too. It’s easy myth-making to say that Lowell’s genius and his madness went hand in hand, but it’s certainly the case that they took turns at the helm. At one point, he writes to Pound that the writer’s colony Yaddo is ‘a sort of St Elizabeth’s without bars’ (history doesn’t record whether Idaho Ez found that funny); later, Lowell reports of his own psychiatric hospital that it is ‘not unlike Yaddo without race courses, night life and literati’.

The cycles of his manic-depressive illness steal through the notes to the letters. ‘Possibly written while mildly manic,’ will preface one note. ‘Written during an acute manic episode,’ will head the batch that follows — urgent telegrams breaking appointments; staccato notes of wild enthusiasm; effusive love-letters to unannounced women. Then come the recantations, the apologies, the wretchedness of recovery. And a sense, between the lines, of the terrible, terrible hurt done.

Breakdowns? Everyone was at it. As Randall Jarrell cracked up, or John Berryman suffered an alcoholic collapse, or Theodore Roethke underwent another manic episode, the letters and the lacunae in the letters tell the story. Thus Roethke: ‘Well, it’s happened again! Same old routine: 4 or 5 city police (as the boogs say) dragging me off to the same old nut-bin.’