Mad, Bad and Dangerous

...In fact, Robert managed to combine the kind of intellectual perceptions that made James famous with some of Amy's flamboyance...

...Initially his masters were the Southern "Fugitives," John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate—reactionaries against the experiments of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams...

...Yet the evidence actually presented bares instead a record of alcoholic self-delusion, lies, betrayals, and compulsive destructiveness toward himself and those close to him...

...Lowell's last two collections, The Dolphin (1973) and Day by Day (1977), are more brilliant, but by that time his disease had returned, despite the medication...

...But in Robert Lowell (Random House, 527 pp., $19.95) Ian Hamilton describes one who was a prisoner of cyclical breakdowns...

...Haffenden has evidently done exhaustive research, for he can gloss practically every reference in The Dream Songs to some biographical happening...

...Lord Weary's Castle (1946), written shortly after his conversion to Catholicism, displays an intense vision of a broken world on the brink of judgment...

...Hamilton wisely recognizes that it is too early to try to evaluate Lowell's stature...

...He said 'I have enjoyed writing about my life more than living it.' " J^ohn Berryman was another prisoner of his emotions...

...During his manic attacks, the kindly humanist became another character who was violent, prone to religious fanaticism, an admirer of such dictators as Napoleon and Caligula—from whom Lowell derived his nickname, Cal...

...My other side is deeply conservative, wanting to slow down the whole modern process of mechanization and dehumanization, knowing that liberalism can be a form of death too...

...Obsessed by his father's suicide and his own alcoholism, he drove himself to excess...

...Furthermore, Haffenden's clumsy prose often detracts from the force of his points...

...Where Hamilton illuminates Lowell's poetry through a profound understanding of the life, Haffenden oversimplifies and frequenty reduces Berrymen's art to a mishmash of biographical irrelevancies...

...But he'd quickly get bored—[the girl friends] wouldn't understand what he was talking about...

...Thirteen years later he did an about-face with Life Studies, a collection of "confessional" poetry employing colloquial speech to convey many private references...

...At 57, he killed himself by jumping off a bridge near his home in Minneapolis...

...Lowell himself once observed in a letter to his friend, John Berry-man, "What queer lives we've had, even for poets...

...Neither his Boston Brahmin family nor his critics were going to let him forget that his impeccable New England heritage contained two notable poetic forebears: James Russell Lowell, that consummate literary politician, and the cigar-smoking Imagist, Amy Lowell...

...Berryman played "poet"to the hilt...

...He associated his "normal" behavior with the liberal...

...Daringly, Hamilton maintains that another significant factor?but to be thought of with the utmost caution—was the effect of the drug lithium, which Lowell had begun taking in the spring of 1967...

...Ultimately, Haffenden declares that the "oversensitive and profoundly frightened [Berryman...

...Rather, like the Ulysses of one of his last poems, he appeared about to embark on one more journey into unexplored areas of his craft...

...As a friend put it, "Cal had to be 'in love.' Poets were always in love...

...No success could alter his conviction of defeat, however...

...A third transformation became evident with Notebook 1967-68, a series of "unrhymed sonnets" dwelling on current events and Lowell's family...

...One side of me," he claimed, "is a conventional liberal, concerned with causes, agitated about peace and justice and equality, as so many people are...

...Often poets fall under its malign spell, too, and feel they must live up to the part...

...Thus Lowell's elegy for George Santayana, written in the summer of 1977, is presented as a personal testament: "Hehadspenta lifetime trying to drive back the New England he had been born to, its fashions, its morals, its reigning minds...

...Under this formalist tutelage, Lowell honed his gift for rhetoric to a savage cutting edge...

...22.50...

...The rebel in Lowell kept turning against his past styles, so that those who praised one book were often dismayed by his latest metamorphosis...

...There seems something generic about it, and determined beyond anything we could do...

...This makes for heavy going as one plods through catalogs of Berryman's students, women, enemies, and evasions along the sorry downward spiral...

...His madness constantly intruded, making him a colorful figure against his will...

...There is a careless immediacy here reminiscent of journalism, not to mention some downright dull writing, unimaginable in Lowell's previous work...

...Hamilton thinks Notebook was partly influenced by similar techniques in John Berryman's Dream Songs...

...Hamilton is a gripping narrator...

...Nevertheless, he produced several outstanding volumes: Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956), the "Henry" poems of 77Dream Songs (1964) and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968...

...He lurches from the gush of "She thrilled to his teaching...

...They were too hateful, and in a way too cherished, for him to quite deny their existence...

...The biographer reads Life Studies as an attempt "to face the crippling and destructive 'side-effects' of his recurrent mental breakdowns...

...Day by Day still seems to me a bridge to yet another stance in a career of "surprising conversions...

...Over the years he married three remarkable women...

...His first and third marriages, to novelist Jean Stafford (1940-47) and to Lady Caroline Blackwood (1972-77), ended because they could not adjust to his sickness...

...Although the stabilization gave Lowell and his family a temporary respite, the works of this period show a "slackening of grandeur and ferocity," with something "glazed and foreign in their manner of address, as if they sense an audience too far-off, too blurred to be worth striving for...

...Both Lowell's work and Hamilton's chronicle reveal the scion of Calvinist Boston constantly at war with the wild-eyed romantic for whom illness, political idealism and messy love affairs were the raw materials of inspiration...

...I am disappointed, therefore, by Hamilton'saccepting Caroline Blackwood's interpretation of a "suicide of wish" to account for Lowell's death, and his concluding that the poet had "perhaps properly completed both his life and his life's work...

...to such awkward pedantry as " It would appear that at that time there occured a ruction between Berryman and his mother of even more than usual profundity...

...There is evidence that Lowell believed he had finally been 'cured...

...Nevertheless, devotees of early Lowell continue to bemoan the move away from the condensed power of his more structured verse, even as modernists prefer the weary honesty of "Man and Wife" or the impressionistic portrait of depression in "Skunk Hour...

...He was by no means at the limit of his powers...

...Although the facts of Haffenden's account do manage to evoke pity at the waste of genius, a convincing biography of John Berryman remains to be written...

...Near the end, his "displays of temperament had turned into a stock in trade, "John Haf fenden tells us in The Life of John Berryman (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 451 pp...

...Lowell swung between extremes...

...As he explained from his hospital bed after one of his many collapses, "It's simply my mind tearing my body to pieces...

...responded to every challenge in his life like a firework of invention and resourcefulness...

...Many of the sordid details of Berryman's decline left me feeling as if I had been forced to listen to embarrassing revelations that were none of my business...

...Like Shelley, Lowell periodically fell in love with other women, usually during a manic phase, and he often wanted to arrange a menage including wife and mistress...

...This is too pat for a nature as involved and riven as Lowell's...

...he also returned to her shortly before his death...

...Unfortunately, much of the information is passed on to the reader because it is there, not because it clarifies anything...

...His second wife, critic Elizabeth Hardwick, was with him for 21 years...

...He lived a literary life as complex as his personality, with all his contradictions deliberately reflected in his verse...

...Lowell died suddenly of a heart attack shortly after its publication...

...So far, only Berryman himself has done justice to the rangeof hissly artistry—by creating an alter-ego, "Henry Hankovitch...

...Certainly, by Christmas, 1967, he knew that he had escaped his annual breakdown and was writing friends praising his new medication...

...Indeed, one of the virtues of this book is that it so often lets its subject speak for himself...

...His subject's history unfolds in these pages with the relentlessness of Elizabethan tragedy, punctuated by wild scenes and grand public gestures —including imprisonment as a conscientious objector during World War II, demonstrations against the Vietnam War, and involvement in the Presidential campaign of fellow poet Eugene McCarthy...

...One consequence is that he no longer trusts his old intellectual vehemence and he knows that others trust it even less: His verbal brilliance they associate with 'the kingdom of the mad—its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye...

...In addition, Lowell's critical mentor and superego, Randall Jarrell, had just died, perhaps freeing Lowell from "the idea of some absolute critical authority, a 'breaking loose' from the requirement never to write badly...