Gracefully Insane (21 page)

Why McLean? Because of Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. “We both recognized that Plath and Lowell had been there, and she wanted to be in that lineage,” Ames says. “The same way she wanted to be buried in Mt. Auburn cemetery, where her family was buried.” Sexton was ferociously competitive with Plath in all respects. Both had been reared in Boston’s well-to-do western suburbs. Both women were fearfully articulate, beautiful, and sexually alert. They had both committed themselves to big poetry, publishing in the big magazines (
The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly
) and with the big publishing houses (Knopf and Houghton Mifflin), and to winning the big awards (the Yale Younger Poets Award, the Pulitzer Prize). Each knew she was unstable and vaguely understood that psychological torment somehow produced good poetry.
Both saw themselves—correctly—as future suicides. Meeting in drunken martini klatches at the Ritz Hotel following Lowell’s Boston University poetry seminar, the two femmes fatales even discussed killing themselves. (Sexton on Plath: “She told the story of her first suicide in sweet and loving detail.”) The conversation was never hypothetical. When talking about suicide, Plath and Sexton were not interested in questions of “if” or “when” but of “how.” After Plath died, Sexton published a bitchy essay/poem, griping that Plath had trumped her in their mortal combat:

The experiences of Lowell, a mentor of sorts, weighed heavily in Sexton’s thinking too. Although deeply versed in classical poetry, Lowell wrote in a beautiful American vernacular, and he wrote about life as he found it, whether it be an uncompromising portrait of his ineffectual father (“Father’s death was abrupt and unprotesting”) or a heartrending description of returning to his wife and daughter after a few months in the “bin” (“I keep no rank nor station / Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small”). As a student in his class, she could not help but notice that he disappeared around Christmas time, sometimes to McLean, when his mania overwhelmed him. One of Sexton’s first recognized poems describes the ungainly Lowell, “like a hunk of big frog,” leaving his crowded poetry seminar to make the trip to the hospital grounds in suburban Belmont: “I must admire your skill,” Sexton wrote. “You are so gracefully insane.”

By the time he first checked in to McLean in 1958, Robert Lowell was, as
they say in the consumer-products field, a repeat user. Forty-one
years old, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and one of the country’s most respected poets, Lowell experienced uncontrollable manic surges and had been institutionalized before. To the astonishment of those around him, he would swell up with power, anger, and delusion. He would shower his closest friends with bitter, mocking curses or proclaim undying love to an airline stewardess and insist on leaving the plane with her to start a new life. He was capable of delivering a gibbering lecture lauding Adolf Hitler. Some stereotypes are true; there are people in mental institutions who want to assume the power of Napoleon or Jesus Christ, and at times Robert Lowell was one of them.

Robert Lowell was the uncrowned poet laureate of McLean just on the strength of his magnificent poem “Waking in the Blue”—excerpted at the front of this book.

“Waking” was included in the book
Life Studies,
which many Lowell scholars believe to be his best book. It is intensely autobiographical and unsparing of his immediate and extended family. One of the poet’s cousins, Sarah Payne Stuart, has recently suggested that the family’s hostility to the poems may have precipitated a breakdown that landed Lowell back at McLean. After reading a prepublication copy of the book, Lowell’s formidable aunt Sarah Cotting announced that “I’ve just read what Bobby wrote about [his parents] Charlotte and Bob, and it’s just awful.” From her Beacon Hill town house, she marched downhill to Lowell’s home on nearby Marlborough Street and gave her nephew a piece of her mind. (This was the same aunt who once mused, while sitting on her yacht: “Why doesn’t Bobby write about the sea? It’s so pretty.”) “I’m sorry you didn’t like it,” Lowell answered softly. “I thought it was rather good.” A few weeks later, when
Life Studies
was formally published, Lowell was at McLean.

Because he was born into the Boston aristocracy, Lowell understood instinctively who was in McLean and why. He had grown up with the “Mayflower screwballs”; the “thoroughbred mental cases”; “these victorious figures of bravado ossified
young.” No nuance of Boston snobbery could escape him, not least that he hailed from the line of thin-blooded—that is, creative—Lowells as opposed to the broad-shouldered, industrialtitan Lowells who enriched themselves from the textile mills along the Charles and Merrimack Rivers. Ralph Lowell, the downtown banker chairman of McLean’s trustees, was a “real” Lowell. Robert and his family, although they lived quite comfortably, were comparatively poor relations. Robert’s father, Robert Traill Spence Lowell III, was a middle-ranking naval officer who had made a good match. His wife’s family, the Winslows, proudly traced their ancestry back to the Mayflower. The venerable names attached to the McLean halls—Wyman, Appleton, Higginson, and Bowditch—were the names of family friends. Robert had attended St. Mark’s School with them, and they had gone on to Harvard too. Writing to his friend the poet Elizabeth Bishop, Lowell read the hospital like an open book, in this case the book being a crazy salad of a Marquand novel, the Harvard faculty directory, and the Social Register:

Lowell visited McLean four times over the course of eight years. Like Plath, he left a paper trail of letters with the distinctive return address “175 Mill Street, Belmont, Massachusetts.” He is possibly the only patient to have exchanged letters from the wards with Jacqueline Kennedy; she thanked him for a book he had sent her and congratulated him on getting away for the holidays. Lowell also corresponded with the poet Theodore Roethke, who had his own struggles with mental illness (Lowell: “I feel great kinship with you”), and mailed a letter from Bowditch to Ezra Pound, who had been locked up in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. “Do you think a man who has been off his rocker as often as I have could run for elective office and win?” Lowell inquired of Pound.

There is no trace of a reply.

Many of Lowell’s students, some of whom became noted poets in their own right, trooped out to Belmont to visit their mentor. Some days, Lowell was very clear and his students would read to him from books he had requested, or they would share poetry, occasionally attracting a small crowd of not-very-aware patients. On other days, Lowell was in the mania, reworking famous poems in his copy of the
Norton Anthology
or retranslating, for naught, works from Greek and Latin. The students were suffused with sadness, seeing their brilliant teacher temporarily defeated by mental illness.

Poet Frank Bidart, a former student who became Lowell’s friend and literary executor, recalls one visit:

Just before Alfred Stanton took over as psychiatrist-in-chief
at McLean, Franklin Wood admitted a young woman who would become the hospital’s first mass-market celebrity patient: an intelligent, troubled Smith College junior named Sylvia Plath. Writing about her suicide attempt in her novel
The Bell Jar,
Plath informed a generation of young women that one could suffer a nervous breakdown and live to write about it, in theory, at
least.
¹⁷
Three weeks after its publication in Britain
,
in 1963, Plath killed herself. When it appeared in America eight years later, with its vivid descriptions of life on “Wymark” (Wyman) and “Belsize” (Belknap) halls, it became must reading for young girls, in the same way that J.D. Salinger’s classic
Catcher in the Rye
was being devoured by moody, adolescent boys. In
The Bell Jar,
thousands of American teenagers were getting a firsthand look inside McLean, which, the twenty-one-year-old Plath told a friend, was “the best mental hospital in the U.S.”

The story of Plath’s stay at McLean has entered the literary canon not only by way of
The Bell Jar
but also from the pens of numerous biographers and memoirists. The consensus tale runs like this: Plath, a sensitive, erudite, and hard-working young woman from a conventional but not particularly happy family in Wellesley, Massachusetts, experienced mild depressions while studying at Smith College. As versed in Freud as any budding intellectual of her generation, she thought she had “penis envy” and suffered from “schizophrenia.” After winning a prestigious national contest to work at
Mademoiselle
magazine in New York during July 1953, she suffered a rare career setback; she was denied admission to a Harvard summer writing seminar. Trapped at home in August, drained of energy, she began to contemplate suicide. After a half-serious attempt to drown herself during a beach picnic, Plath swallowed an overdose of her mother’s sleeping pills and hid in a crawl space underneath her parents’ home. She very nearly died. (“Beautiful Smith Girl Missing at Wellesley” and “Top Ranking Student at Smith Missing from Wellesley Home” were two of the front-page headlines in the Boston papers.) Her family and doctors properly concluded that her attempt exceeded the classic suicide gesture and packed her off to McLean.