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the boisi center interviews no. 28: November 19, 2008 paul mariani is a professor of English at Boston College and the author of such literary biog- raphies as Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life (2008) and The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane (1999). He spoke with Boisi Center associate director Erik Owens before his presentation on writing biography at the Boisi Center. owens: So, one of the things that has For a time in the 1940s, Lowell was a At least four of the poets I’ve written struck me about the subjects of your convert and then had—after his di- about did suffer from manic depression, biographies in the past—William Carlos vorce—left the church, and a kind of exis- or what we call now a bipolar disorder. I Williams, Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, tential nihilism came to take its place, so wonder how many people, though, don’t Hopkins and Berryman – is that most, that his vision of the world and of the self experience some kind of deep depres- if not all of them, suffered from depres- got darker and darker. Poetry served as sion in their lives. I think we all, at some sion of some sort. Is that a poetic license point, experience a sense of major loss, of sorts? Is that an affliction that poets etc. And there are points where we feel deal with more than other people? In ebullient, too. I’m not saying that that’s your biographical work, how do you see clinical manic depression, but at least the relationship between depression and we understand something of what those creativity? states are. mariani: What I think happens is that owens: Does the creativity precede or those who are creative and also are prone stem from these periods—the depression to manic depression find in poetry or and recovery and ebullience that you writing or art or music a way of stabi- speak about? Are they tethered together? lizing that. It becomes a help for them, For me, to the extent that I’ve felt those and it evens out the effects of some of emotions, it hasn’t resulted in an extraor- their highs and lows. There are levels dinary flourishing of my own creative of manic depression, some more severe work. than others. Lowell, of the five that I’ve mariani: That’s well put. What I’m done, suffered the most the highest man- talking about here are writers. The ic episodes and the lowest depressions. urgency of creativity has to be there. In Once he underwent medical treatment, his mainstay. If he couldn’t have religion, each case, of course, these were writ- he would struggle courageously to get at least he had poetry and could shape an ers before the onslaught or the visible out from under the depression, and that’s inner order for himself. This is what he onslaught of manic depression episodes. when a lot of the poetry came to be writ- tried to do over and over again, including Lowell was already writing for a number ten. It was a way of stabilizing himself writing a book of blank verse sonnets of years before he suffered his first manic by profoundly searching himself. If you modestly called History. In it he asks: depressive bout, and I think that’s true of were to put it into spiritual terms, it was how do I shape human history? How do I all of these. Hopkins speaks of melan- a kind of kenosis or emptying of the shape it from a perspective which seems cholic fits. Hart Crane and Berryman self and then trying to fill that void with true to my own experience? It’s a very of being in hell and part way back. The something larger than one’s self-preoccu- dark perspective, but there it is. thing is, they ask, is this: how can I use pations. this ordering of words to order a world 1 the boisi center interview: paul mariani vertiginously and terrifyingly going out example, the life of Hopkins or Emily that might not be progressive, that may of whack? Dickinson or Wallace Stevens, where a be instead somehow random? great deal is happening, but in the inte- I don’t know if you’re born a writer, but mariani: You know, I’m not so sure rior space of the mind and the heart. On these five were writers before they experi- that the Beats really did live random lives. the other hand take Villon or Rimbaud or enced these manic episodes. Now, a clini- If you look at Ginsberg or if you look at Hart Crane or Berryman or Dylan Thom- cal psychologist might say that the manic Kerouac or if by extension Robert Creeley as or Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath or depression or the bipolarity was there. or if you look at Gary Snyder—I’m not Anne Sexton, where much of the drama That it just hadn’t manifested itself in a sure which ones you want to go with unfolds out there, on the streets of New clinically recognizable form yet. I don’t but—Beat doesn’t just mean a kind of York or Paris in the 1920s, or Mexico City know the answer to that. Was it there in empty vacuity. You get that with minor in the 1930s, to be set down and record- some nascent form, perhaps? The thing figures, but for them the word is in- ed. Those poets are living on the edge, is that they are poets and identify them- formed with the sense Kerouac gave it: of selves as poets, and then they have to find a kind of beatitude. So, there’s a kind of a way to deal with their condition in and journey implied there, towards Nirvana through their poetry. or some safe haven. owens: One of the things that struck “I think most Now, at one level the journey may be that me in some of your work is that you have people have a you get in a car with Kerouac and Cassidy such a thoughtful perspective on the and you drive from New York out to the art of biography. It makes me wonder sense that they’re West Coast. When you get out to the West if you—as a religious person and as a Coast, what can you do but drive back to biographer—have a trajectory or a tone to on a journey the East Coast. But I don’t think that’s your way of seeing? Like colors that work of some sort, the deepest Kerouac. That’s certainly not together in a large canvas to present some the deepest Ginsberg. There is a sense sort of a coherent or meaningful picture that their life is of a journey, of an unfolding. Now, I or a feeling or a meaning to a life? Is can’t say specifically or deeply what it is there in fact coherence to a single life that unfolding into in each of those cases. I would have to can be seen only by someone else looking spend a lot of time before I felt confident back over that life, when in fact it is the something like to say what that journey was, but I’ll tell very lack of coherence that constitutes the a recognizable you this. In all five cases, in all the biog- human condition on a day-to-day basis? raphies that I’ve done, I have found that there was a journey, a sense of journey. mariani: Wow! I think most people shape...that’s Surely in the directions they saw their have a sense that they’re on a journey of why stories are poetry unfolding. some sort, that their life is unfolding into something like a recognizable shape, or important to us.” The biographer can articulate that. The so they would hope. That’s why stories biographer can stand back. He can see, or are so important to us. Everybody wants she can see, what’s happened in 20, 30, to tell his or her story, or—if not their 40 years and see a trajectory. Is the trajec- and we find their broken, Romantic lives own—then the stories of others. Moses, tory nothing more than a rocket burst in pulling us after them. Most people think David, Achilles, Ulysses, Julius Caesar, its randomness? I don’t think so. Cer- of such lives as a kind of journey, even Jesus of Nazareth, Paul of Tarsus, Au- tainly what the poet wants is to be able if a journey over the edge into the abyss. gustine, Joan of Arc, Abraham Lincoln, to write the lines that need to be written, If you lose the sense that life is worth Jesse James, Teddy Roosevelt, Eleanor and written with an urgency most people living, if the quotidian becomes a dizzy- Roosevelt, McCain, Obama. We never get will not understand. But those lines are ing randomness for you, if it really does tired of stories, do we? And some of the what give the poet the sense that some- devolve like a flushed urinal into chaos, stories are really way out to lunch, like thing significant has been said. Even there’s a very good chance that you’ll go the stories of mass murderers or serial when Berryman didn’t feel as comfort- down with it. killers or con men or flesh eaters, and able with his later work as he had with then there are other stories that from owens: So, how does this relate to the the best of his Dream Songs, he needed the outside look as if nothing happened, Beat mentality in terms of a journey in something, it was very important that he where it’s all an interior drama.
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