Memoirs

by Robert Lowell, Steven Gould Axelrod (Editor), Grzegorz Kosc (Editor)

A complete collection of Robert Lowell's autobiographical prose, from unpublished writings about his youth to reflections on the triumphs and confusions of his adult life.



Robert Lowell's Memoirs is an unprecedented literary discovery: the manuscript of Lowell's lyrical evocation of his childhood, which was written in the 1950s and has remained unpublished until now. Meticulously edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc, it serves as a precursor or companion to his groundbreaking book of poems Life Studies, which signaled a radically new prose-inflected direction in his work, and indeed in American poetry.

Memoirs also includes intense depictions of Lowell's mental illness and his determined efforts to recover. It concludes with Lowell's reminiscences of other writers, among them T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Hannah Arendt, and Sylvia Plath. Memoirs demonstrates Lowell's expansive gifts as a prose stylist and his powers of introspection and observation. It provides striking new evidence of the range and brilliance of Lowell's achievement.

Includes black-and-white photographs

Genres: Memoir, Poetry, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir

400 pages, Hardcover

First published August 2, 2022

About the author

Robert Lowell, born Robert Traill Spence Lowell, IV, was an American poet whose works, confessional in nature, engaged with the questions of history and probed the dark recesses of the self. He is generally considered to be among the greatest American poets of the twentieth century.

His first and second books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, at the age of thirty), were influenced by his conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism and explored the dark side of America's Puritan legacy.

Under the influence of Allen Tate and the New Critics, he wrote rigorously formal poetry that drew praise for its exceptionally powerful handling of meter and rhyme. Lowell was politically involved—he became a conscientious objector during the Second World War and was imprisoned as a result, and actively protested against the war in Vietnam—and his personal life was full of marital and psychological turmoil. He suffered from severe episodes of manic depression, for which he was repeatedly hospitalized.

Partly in response to his frequent breakdowns, and partly due to the influence of such younger poets as W. D. Snodgrass and Allen Ginsberg, Lowell in the mid-fifties began to write more directly from personal experience, and loosened his adherence to traditional meter and form. The result was a watershed collection, Life Studies (1959), which forever changed the landscape of modern poetry, much as Eliot's The Waste Land had three decades before.

Considered by many to be the most important poet in English of the second half of the twentieth century, Lowell continued to develop his work with sometimes uneven results, all along defining the restless center of American poetry, until his sudden death from a heart attack at age 60. Robert Lowell served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1962 until his death in 1977.

Reviews

[Steve Donoghue]

A terrific and exhaustively annotated collection of Robert Lowell's nonfiction, including a great deal of autobiographical writing that's never been printed before - my full review here: https://openlettersreview.com/posts/x...

[Peter Allum · Rating 3 out of 5]

Best-suited to those familiar with Lowell and his peers.

Following an enthusiastic review of Robert Lowell’s “Memoirs” (I don’t recall which journal), I suggested to my wife it could be a welcome Christmas present. In retrospect, it was a bit of a stretch. While sporadically “poetry-curious”, I have not read Lowell’s work nor that of his peers and found myself rather lost in the Memoirs. I sometimes struggled with Lowell’s poetic prose and was at sea when reading about his fellow poets.

Autobiographical sketches

The Memoirs are a grab bag of Lowell’s prose writings, some previously unpublished. It opens with a series of autobiographical sketches developed as part of his psychiatric treatment when hospitalized for bipolar disorder.

We find that the New England Lowells were a distinguished lineage, with a President of Harvard (A. Lawrence Lowell), a couple of poets (James Russell Lowell, Amy Lowell), and an astronomer (Percival Lowell). Indeed, given his privileged background, some were suspicious of Robert Lowell’s seriousness as artist.

The autobiographical contributions are short, some just a couple of pages. They have been ordered into a rough chronology but don’t provide a complete story; rather, they are perspectives or recollections that occurred most forcefully to Lowell at the time.

Lowell is dismissive of his father, a rather characterless navy man, and his mother, more forceful, seems to have been persistently pushing against her husband’s career so that the family could return to her native Boston. Lowell’s strongest connection was with his maternal grandfather, Arthur Winslow, of whom there are multiple recollections. Lowell does not sugar-coat his youth. By his own admission, he was self-centered, willful, a bully, and several times in trouble for theft.

While Lowell’s autobiographical writing is often strong, it would not hold its own against the best memoirists. The appeal is mainly that these are the previously unpublished writings of the great poet. So, if, like me, you had not been aware of Lowell’s greatness, the sketches do not particularly dazzle.

A Life among Writers

The collection also includes reminiscences of poets and other writers, some prepared as Lowell’s introduction to their publications, others as memorial contributions to journals following their deaths.

These pieces draw on Lowell’s extensive network of connections with literary forebears and peers. “By his mid-thirties, he was friends with, among others, Eliot, Pound, Williams, Frost, Santayana, Tate, Ransom, Warren, Jarrell, Bishop, Berryman, Mary McCarthy, J.F. Powers, Peter Taylor, Theodore Roethke, Delmore Schwartz, and Flannery O’Connor.” (NYRB, June 2005)

Lowell’s drive to build these connections early in his career was astonishing. As a twenty-year old, Lowell visited Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon, finding their southern hospitality already strained by the presence of Ford Madox Ford, his wife, and secretary. Lowell offered himself as an additional house guest but was politely declined, with Tate indicating that there was no room for him unless he pitched a tent on the lawn. Blithely, Lowell returned a few days later with a tent and stayed three months.

Lowell’s recollections are fascinating (or would be if I were more abreast of the writers he eulogizes): Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Ford Madox Ford, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Randall Jarrell, Robert Penn Warren, John Berryman, Hannah Arendt, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and (the lone writer with whom I am familiar) William Carlos Williams.

Quotes

Lowell speaking of his father’s graduation from Annapolis Naval Academy: "He had reached, perhaps, his final mental possibilities. He was deep—not with profundity, but with the dumb depths of one who believed in statistics and was dubious of personal experience. In his forties, Father’s soul went underground: as a civilian he kept his high sense of form, his humor, his accuracy, but this accuracy was henceforth unimportant, hors de combat.” (p.62)

And again on his father: “Always, he seemed to treat me as though I were some relation of Mother’s who was visiting and he was waiting to be introduced. He had been told my Christian name and even my nicknames, but somehow or other my surname had escaped. He would rather have had his fingernails pulled one by one than have said anything to me that was impolite, called for, or fatherly.” (p.99)

And again…"He was post-Edwardian, post-Teddy Roosevelt, post-horsemanship, post-panache, post-personality, and post-World War I.” (p.117)

On his maternal grandmother: “[She] wanted the house kept at 80. Warm, small, charming, she came from North Carolina. Ruined by Sherman and brought up on plantation stories, she looked on New Englanders as Vandals and witch-burners.”

On a childhood friend: “Buddy reminded me of the three most exciting objects in the world—(1) Napoleon, as he looked during his Italian campaign, say at Arcola, long-nosed, transparent, mask-like; (2) a girl; and (3) an orangutan.” (p.132)

On Hannah Arendt: “Her imperatives for political freedom still enchant and reproach us, though America has obviously, in black moments one thinks almost totally, slipped from those jaunty years of Harry Truman and the old crusade for international democracy. We couldn’t know how fragile we were, or how much totalitarianism could ameliorate, bend, adulterate itself, and succeed.” (p.307, written 1976)

NYRB, June 2005

“Robert Lowell’s star has waned very considerably since his death in 1977, when his obituarists treated him, along with Yeats, Eliot, Auden, and Wallace Stevens, as one of the handful of unquestionably great twentieth-century poets. The publication two years ago of Frank Bidart and David Gewanter’s massive edition of the Collected Poems did much to restore his work to public and critical view, but even now Lowell’s poems are, I would guess, less widely read, taught, and anthologized than those of his two friends and contemporaries Elizabeth Bishop and John Berryman—a judgment, if that is what it is, that would have astonished serious readers of poetry between the 1950s and the 1970s.” (Jonathan Raban)

[David Curry · Rating 5 out of 5]

We can be grateful that Robert Lowell’s MEMOIRS did not continue to languish in typescript on a shelf in the Houghton Library at Harvard and that Farrar Straus and Giroux brought it out in 2022 as meticulously edited and prefaced by by Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc.

The section titled “91 Revere Street” had been seen before, as published in Lowell’s LIFE STUDIES in 1959. Like that, the new material is engaging and moving throughout, thanks to Lowell’’s keen eye and ear and his ever fresh and vivid language. Here is is writing of wives who invade a New England spot every year as “summer perennials”: “Their solid and prudent gossip seldom missed the target.”

As he remembers his bright, complex, proud and difficult mother, you may find yourself wanting to put her on a stage. Here she is performing charades for guests, a la Katherine Hepburn, at home in Boston, the beloved city she resented ever having to leave:

“A few of Mother’s skits have been remembered. There was Percival Lowell, the brilliant but unsociable astronomer, who looked through the wrong end of my grandfather Winslow’s telescope, and said, ‘I have discovered Percival, the minutest living planet.’ Then there was mother, all padded out with pillows and laundry bags, and with a clothespin in her mouth, pretending to be Amy Lowell, and exclaiming, ‘Behold me, John Keats, I am as light as the Lusitania.’ (A footnote explains that the clothespin represents Amy Lowell’s habitual cigar.) … There was the the legendary Augustus ‘Awful’ Lowell, the cotton plutocrat, who earned more money yearly than the government adding machines could add, and was therefore decorated with the blue ribbon that had hitherto belonged to Mother’s Scottie, Mac. … There was Guy Lowell, the architect, being consulted on a building for the Boston Fine Arts Museum. He was hold ing up photographs of St. Peter’s, the Pitti Palace, the Taj Mahal, the Parthenon and the Eiffel Tower, and saying, ‘Take your pick.’ “

And here’s Lowell’s father, who under pressure from his ambitious wife resigned from being a naval officer to work, not particularly successfully, for the Lever Brothers soap company:

“My father’s favorite piece of den furniture was his oak and ‘rhinoceros hide’ armchair. It was ostentatiously a masculine , or rather a bachelor’s, chair. It had a notched, adjustable back; it was black, cracked, hacked, scratched, splintered, gouged, initialed, gunpowder-charred and tumbler-ringed. It looked like pale tobacco leaves on dark tobacco leaves. I doubt if Father, a considerate man, was responsible for any of the marring. The chair dated from his plebe days at the Naval Academy, and had been bought from a shady, shadowy, roaring character, midshipman ‘Beauty’ Burford. Father loved each disfigured inch.”

Lowell’s most affectionate recollection is of his maternal grandfather, a kindly eccentric who served as a kind of bulwark against Lowell’s manipulative mother and diffident father.

In the section of the memoirs written during and/or about Lowell’s bouts with bipolar disease, including stays in psychiatric hospitals, I was struck when he arrived at a sudden basic human statement and cry: “My father was a gentle, faithful, dim man. I don’t know why I was so agin him. I hope there will be peace.” (Lowell’s final resting place is beside his parents’ graves.)

In the section of essays on other writers, I was particularly taken with what Lowell had to say about my man William Carlos Williams and “his part in the air we breathe and will breathe.”

Sometimes the only remotely satisfying approach to a conundrum is to at least get it stated clearly. Here’s Lowell in 1977 in “After Enjoying Six or Seven Essays on Me”: 

“Politics? We live in the sunset of Capitalism. We have thundered nobly against its bad record all our years, yet we cling to its vestiges, not just out of greed and nostalgia, but for our intelligible survival.”

At mid-century — say, at the time Lowell published FOR THE UNION DEAD — it could be stated, with little significant argument to the contrary, that Lowell was the dominant living American poet. Since then, he has fallen into comparative oblivion, with no consensus as to who might be considered his successor. I wish I could remember who sharply observed around a quarter century ago that if you were to survey poets and teachers, students and critics of poetry and ask them to name the leading American poet, the winner would be John Ashbery — with two percent of the vote.

I ordered this book from Daedalus Books for a mere $7.95, with my fingers crossed that my copy would not bear a remainder mark. No such luck. I’m telling myself that a good private collection should include at least one example of everything and that this is my example of a remaindered book. (I briefly entertained the notion of asking my dentist if he might be able to polish the splotch off the top edge, the way he polished stains off two of my front teeth, but then I thought better of that.)

I don’t know what it may say about the current state of book publishing in America that a house as distinguished as Farrar Staus and Giroux remaindered this important title a little less than one year after it was originally published.

The photo of Lowell at the age of 13 on the book’s dust jacket is nothing like a picture of youthful ease. He appears hurt and resentful.

Can anyone explain why there are Roman numerals above the three elements of the typography on the dust jacket cover? Were they notations for the printer by a layout artist, and should they have been eliminated before final printing? These plus that remainder mark on one book are more than I can readily handle.

[Tauwan Patterson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Posthumous releases of unfinished work and loose tea leaves are often nice in theory but don’t add much to all that was given unto us readers by an artist during their lifetime. This is not one such book. I’ll admit upfront that, yes, possessing an affinity for Mr. Lowell, his writings, and way with language, not to mention, retellings of certain classes and time long gone in New England adds to one enjoyment of the works contained within. (I am currently deep into his Collected Poems alongside reading this.) Yet another glimpse into the forever roaming and active mind that was Robert Lowell’s that helps round out many of his poetic works if you are familiar.

[michal k-c · Rating 4 out of 5]

For the major Lowell fans, that's for sure. The kind of book that feels like the result of a dissertation (in that sense it reminds me of Wittgenstein's diaries that were published not too long ago). The actual fragments of the memoirs here though are so fun and full of vital prose, if not occasionally meandering and wanting for meaning or insight. But his cracked poetic persona shines through always.

[Parker Richards · Rating 3 out of 5]

At its best, this is lovely — poignant, evocative, and deeply self-aware. At its worst, it's a collection of writings that clearly weren't published for a reason. But I suppose that's the nature of publishing collected fragments. The editors paint a relatively clear portrait of parts of a life, but they do seem to miss a whole. I almost wonder if this would not have worked better interwoven with biography and scholarship more robustly.

[Eliza · Rating 4 out of 5]

9.25.22: This collection is tough going, if fascinating. The first third is fragments of memories of Lowell’s childhood, written in a hospital as part of therapy, years later, while he was recovering from a breakdown. Then a chunk of journal, written during another hospital stay. Then a series of essays about other poets, all people he’d known, after they’d died. These are in various stages of completion, which makes them somehow both boring and interesting. Mostly what stands out is how sane they feel, after the first two sections.
I read this for my book club, and I am stubborn about completing our assignment, so I made it ALMOST ALL of the way through. I’m glad I persevered, though I also know that I would never have done so had it not been the group’s pick. And, as always, I got so much from the book discussion that it was all worth the effort!
P.S. there is no poetry of Lowell’s in the book...and I’m not familiar with his work. In retrospect, I wish I had read some before reading Memoirs!

[Ismail Ibrahim]

See my review here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newy...

[kerrycat · Rating 4 out of 5]

lowell: 5
editorial decisions + footnotes = 2.5

[ASC Library]

811.52 Low