Jamison eschews a conventional biographical outline and approaches her subject circuitously. She divides her book into five segments: Origins, Illness, Character, Illness and Art, and Mortality. Using Lowell’s copious descriptions of his manic and depressive states and having full access to his medical records, Jamison attempts to juggle a clinical narrative of Lowell’s manic depression, a description of how his disease shaped his life and work, and a potted history of manic depression dating back to the ancient Greeks and Hippocrates.

Robert Lowell, born in 1917, was the unwanted son of two impeccably credentialed Boston Brahmins. His mother, Charlotte, was a cold, selfish hysteric, inordinately proud of her patrician Winslow heritage and contemptuous of her weak-willed, ineffectual husband, Robert. Like his mother, Lowell was haunted by his ancestors. In History he writes: ‘They won’t stay gone, and stare with triumphant torpor, / as if held in my fieldglasses’ fog and enlargement.’ He writes movingly about his close relations – grandfather, uncle, children. Perhaps his most tender and loving poem is ‘Fourth of July in Maine’, dedicated to his beloved cousin Harriet. But he also frequently calls up others from his distinguished family tree. In ‘Origins’, Jamison covers these, but, as someone who has written much on the genetic links of manic depression, she is mainly interested in tracing the ‘Mayflower screwballs’ among his forebears. This section also reveals the book’s main problem: the lack of a strong editorial hand. Jamison does not appear to have come across a detail or a quotation that she feels she can leave out. We begin in 1845 with poor Harriet Lowell being carted off to the McLean Asylum for the Insane, where her great-great grandson would later receive treatment. Before we know it we have been whisked away to the Orkney Islands and a discussion on the first inhabitants of Skara Brae, on an expedition to track down a distant ancestor.

As well as being swamped with examples, the reader has to contend with much repetition. As anyone who has lived with manic depression, or has been close to someone who does, knows only too well, one of the most dispiriting, one might even say tedious, aspects of the disease is its repetitive nature. Along with the stress involved comes a dreary sense of déja vu. For Lowell, the pattern was invariably the same. Hypomania, or a state of heightened energy and flow of ideas coincided with some of his most productive spells, work which Jamison says became ‘the rough material for later and great poems’. This led into a severe manic state with complete lack of inhibition, delusions, and paranoia, followed by a deep depression. In ‘Home After Three Months Away’, written after a major attack, Lowell describes himself as ‘Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small.’ Jamison includes a huge number of medical reports from the various hospitals and clinics to which Lowell was admitted, all of which say essentially the same things. Most of these could usefully have been placed in an appendix.

Robert Lowell
(photograph by Faber Books, via Flickr)Jamison is at her considerable best when writing about the devastating effects of Lowell’s illness on his life, his relationships and his work. Even in his sane periods, Lowell was constantly under stress, dreading the return of mania. Jamison quotes his third wife, the heiress, alcoholic, and serial muse Caroline Blackwood. ‘I don’t think people generally realized the terror he was in that he might lose his mind minute by minute.’ Jamison writes well about Lowell’s second wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick, with whom he shared a twenty-three-year marriage which ended when he deserted her for Blackwood. ‘He was the most extraordinary person I have ever known’, Hardwick said. But she also had to come to terms with the fact that Lowell’s manic behaviour ‘cause[s] me and other people real suffering. And for what?’ Jamison describes with deep understanding the fortitude with which Lowell faced the shame and guilt in the aftermath of his manic episodes. ‘Lowell endured the kind of suffering that brings most to their knees or to suicide. And, more remarkably, he did it without irredeemably ceding his work, dignity or friendships.’ Reading the poetry through the prism of Lowell’s madness, Jamison accentuates his resolve. Unlike the ‘confessional’ poets who followed in his wake, Lowell’s poetry never descends to self-pity.

Having been overpraised in his youth, after his death Lowell’s reputation went into a decline and the literary sharks, led by Ian Hamilton, whose 1983 biography ‘[taught] the rest to sneer’, smelling blood in the water, circled around to finish it off. In Robert Lowell: Essays on the poetry (1986), edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Helen Deese, Marjorie Perloff moves in for the kill. In an essay astonishing for its reverse snobbery and almost wilful underplaying of Lowell’s illness, she describes ‘a cult of madness ... certifying poetic power ... giving evidence of greatness’, as though Lowell’s mania were a deliberate performance. Perloff quotes the dancer Vija Vētra, to whom Lowell, in the throes of mania, declared ‘undying love’, only to abandon her. ‘Heartless, absolutely heartless’ was Vētra’s understandable reaction. Perloff scoffs that Vētra ‘did not know who the Lowells of Boston were and did not appreciate that her lover was a Great Poet’, as though Lowell were callously committing droit de seigneur. Such facile opinions were common at the time, though they have faded somewhat; even Perloff has managed some grudging respect for Lowell in later writings.

The true toll of Lowell’s manic depression has never before been fully explored. Jamison’s book, in spite of its divergences and repetitions, conclusively puts paid to these reactions and gives us the flawed, courageous, resilient poet Robert Traill Spence Lowell.