Robert Lowell: A Biography (54 page)

Lowell’s medical treatment up to 1967 seems always to have
combined
“drugs” (one or another of the phenothiazines) and “
therapy
”; that is to say, supportive talk sessions with psychiatrists. Although he had had brushes with analysts, he had never “gone into analysis.” The probability is that even had he wished to be analyzed, it would have been hard to find someone willing to accept a patient with his history of psychotic illness. In 1954 it had been thought that Thorazine (chlorpromazine) was the “wonder drug” that would stabilize him, but thirteen years later it was evident that Thorazine had no preventive function.

In 1967 a new wonder drug made its appearance: lithium
carbonate
. First tested in Denmark, it had shown remarkable results with manic-depressive patients: its effect was to balance the
sufferer
between the two poles, as it were, of his affliction—between the extremes of elation and depression. And it seemed to have none of the physical side effects of Thorazine: lithium users did not become sluggish, dazed, somnambulistic. Rather, they might appear suspended, uninvolved, disinclined to “follow through” their feelings: above the battle, they might sometimes seem to be striving for the old intensities, but it would be as if they were always being tugged back to “safety,” to the middle ground; such “side effects,” however, would probably be apparent only to the patient’s closest friends.

The drug itself is a salt formed by reacting the metal lithium with carbonic acid. The theory is that manic-depressives are deficient in this salt; regular blood tests will establish the extent of the deficiency and the appropriate lithium dosage will correct it. The prognosis is that properly monitored lithium treatment can keep a patient
stabilized
for life. Lowell was at first cautious and whimsical about his new treatment, which seems to have begun shortly after his
discharge
from McLean’s in the spring of 1967. Perhaps he had been told that the metal lithium was sometimes used in cooling systems for nuclear reactors (though not often, because of its corrosive
tendencies
) or that, rather poetically, “it burns in air with a brilliant white flame.” But he was ready to give almost anything a try. In June 1967 he wrote to Peter Taylor:

Since March, he told Taylor, he had been “on the run”—a
performance
of his
Phaedra
in Philadelphia and a visit to London for the opening of
Benito
Cereno
—“the reviews were lousy,” he said. “There were a lot of complaints about it being too short.” Perhaps in order to enliven his brief visit, he announced to the British press that he might now write plays about either Trotsky or the recently killed Malcolm X: “I could probably get him talking. But all the Negroes around him,—I don’t know how they’d talk.”
2
His worries on this score were respectfully reported in the quality London papers.

Jonathan Miller had again directed
Benito
Cereno
,
and during Lowell’s visit the two of them discussed their next joint project: a Yale Drama School production of Lowell’s adaptation of
Prome
theus
Bound.
The National Endowment for the Arts had provided Yale with a $25,000 grant; $10,000 of this would go to Lowell, so that he could attend rehearsals and also hold occasional classes with the Drama School’s “student playwrights.” Lowell wanted Miller to direct, and Robert Brustein, the school’s recently
appointed
dean, was thoroughly in favor; after all, as drama critic of the
New
Republic
,
Brustein had been the most fervent champion of Lowell’s “prose style” in
Benito
Cereno.
Prometheus
did not
pretend
to be in verse. Brustein has written of the Lowell/Miller
partnership
:

(Lowell’s mental state in April 1967 can be judged by Brustein’s distribution of adjectives—a few months earlier his description of Miller might happily have fitted Lowell.)

According to Brustein, the production of
Prometheus
at Yale
almost
faltered at the outset:

President Johnson, though, could hardly have seen the text of
Lowell
’s
Prometheus
, since it was not finished until the last moment; nor is it likely that he had heard rumors that Lowell’s Zeus, in his more dangerously potent moments, might easily be seen as a cartoon of LBJ.

Opening night was on May 9, 1967, and according to the New Haven newspapers, it was “a major social and literary event.” The contingent of notables from New York included “David Merrick, Robert Motherwell, Stephen Spender, Philip Roth, George
Plimpton
and Susan Sontag.” Opinions afterwards were mixed: there was some complaint about Miller’s decision to set the play in what seemed to be a ruined seventeenth-century castle, and also some uneasiness about Lowell’s “manhandling” of the original. He had, it was complained, turned Io into a dominating mother figure and Prometheus into a mumbling victim of “radical intellectual
anxiety
.” This last phrase came from R. W. B. Lewis, Yale’s professor of English and American Studies, who also thought that Lowell’s Zeus was “at once vaguer and more frightful than President
Johnson
”; it was more plausible, he thought, to see the dreadful god as “the true and demonic begetter of the fiercely muddled emotions that Johnson more or less accidentally arouses in us…. the result
is a heroic demonstration of the near-impossibility of composing drama under the contemporary circumstances.”
5

*

“It is impossible,” says Lowell’s Prometheus, “to think too much about power,” and Lowell’s own nonmanic reflections on this topic had been aired in an interview with the
Observer
during his March visit to London:

Optimistic musings of this sort occasioned Lowell’s next appearance in the headlines of the
New
York
Times.
On May 17, 1967, he
introduced
a poetry reading by the Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky, and announced that “both our countries, I think, have really terrible governments. But we do the best we can with them and they’d better do the best they can with each other or the world will cease to be here.” The
Times
reported an “audible sharp intake of breath” from the audience; Lowell, they said, had not been available for further comment and “Mr. Voznesensky, who has avoided
mentioning
the Soviet and United States governments during his tour, turned away when asked to comment on the American poet’s
remarks
.” Lowell, however, had gathered that “Russian writers loathe Mao and couldn’t care less about Ho and what we are doing in Vietnam” and had genially added to his platform speech: “One wishes that in another year there would be a third poet here—a Chinese and a good poet, and one more detached than Chairman Mao.”
7
But no one seems to have been much amused.

In June 1967 Lowell was in the newspapers again. He had
declined
to sign a public appeal to President Johnson to support Israel in its war with the Arab nations. The organizer of the appeal, Charles E. Silberman, explained that “Mr. Lowell’s reason was
opposition
to all war,” but Lowell swiftly corrected him: “I thought we should have guaranteed the boundaries of Israel and, if
necessary
, helped to defend them. I did not think the United States should have forcibly opened the Gulf of Aqaba.” He went on to praise Johnson’s neutral stance as “correct and humane” but added, “This war should never have happened; for this Russia and America, the suppliers of weapons, are to blame.”
8
But privately he wrote to Peter Taylor: “I am pretending my great-grandmother Deborah
Mordecai
was a Syrian belly dancer.”
9

The real issue for Lowell, though, in 1967 was Vietnam, and throughout the year he was in demand as a speaker and petition signer. He was vehemently opposed to the war, but equivocal about being identified too closely with the “peace movement”: there were many views he did not share with the more fiery of the “peaceniks” and it was not in his nature to join movements that he had no wish to lead. His friend Esther Brooks recalls an occasion in Cambridge that seems aptly to dramatize his general stance:

In September 1967 Lowell was one of three hundred and twenty signatories to a statement pledging “to raise funds to aid youths who resist the draft and the Vietnam war.” The statement, published as an advertisement in the
New
York
Times
and
New
Republic
,
called on “all men of good will to join us in this confrontation with immoral authority.” And on September 21 it was announced that “a sizable number” of the signers of the statement would take part in “an act of civil disobedience at the Department of Justice on
October
20.” Lowell was one of this number, and his participation has been memorably described by one of his co-protesters, Norman Mailer, in
The
Armies
of
the
Night.
11
Mailer doesn’t just report the event: he also has some shrewd insights into Lowell’s personality—shrewd enough for Lowell later to describe the book as “one of the best things ever written about me.” At first, Mailer presents Lowell as a superior, strangely wounded spirit, a man of high, aristocratic guilts and cosmic sorrows, disdainful of the swirl of opportunism and radical overeagerness in which his ideals have, for the moment, trapped him—but determined, nonetheless, to see the whole thing through.

On the night before the draft-card demonstration there is a public meeting in Washington at which Mailer, Lowell, Dwight
Macdonald
and Paul Goodman are scheduled to appear. Mailer gets very drunk beforehand, and insists on appointing himself master of
ceremonies
; he then harangues the audience with obscure jokes and vivid obscenities. Lowell sits on the platform and on his face there is “the expression … of a dues payer who is just about keeping up with the interest on some enormous debt…. I am here, but I do not have to pretend to like what I see.”