Robert Lowell, Kay Redfield Jamison Will See You Now
Kay Redfield Jamison's biography of the poet infamously dogged by mental illness, Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character, delves into territory previously unseen by the bard's biographers: his medical records. Yet, Jamison is no ordinary literary biographer. A professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Jamison wrote about her own struggle with mental illness (bipolar disorder) in her memoir, An Unquiet Mind. To contextualize the importance of this new resource for Robert Lowell scholars and fans, Matt McCarthy of USA Today writes "Lowell's struggles with mental illness have been well documented, but this volume offers something unique: a detailed review of his medical records. It’s the first time such information has been made publicly available." In addition to presenting documentation about his illness as recorded by doctors at that time, Jamison presents contemporary analysis. McCarthy:
In her new book, we discover that Lowell was an unwanted child. His mother said she wanted to die when she discovered she was pregnant with Robert, and maternal rejection would become a recurring theme in both his extensive interactions with psychiatrists and in his writing.
Charlotte Lowell was a source of great pain and consternation for the young poet; she was prone to bouts of hysteria, mania and amnesia. For an entire year, she inexplicably took on the lifestyle and habits of Napoleon. (The apple doesn't fall far from the tree: Robert Lowell was similarly obsessed with the French emperor.)
Translating experience into verse, Lowell mined rejection to expand the language of suffering. His prose is both illuminating and exhausting; it's hard to read more than a few stanzas about his relationship with his mother without needing a break.
The sole weakness in Jamison’s nuanced, sympathetic portrait is her presentation of mental health research. Complicated data is shoehorned into the story, disrupting the narrative, while sophisticated concepts such as genome-wide association studies are glossed over, presented without explanation, preventing the reader from truly understanding the extraordinary advances that have been made in the study of bipolar disorder.