Memoirs by Robert Lowell

Robert Lowell: Memoirs
Edited by Steven Gould Axelrod
& Grzegorz Kosc 
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2022

Farrar, Straus and Giroux continues its years-long project of providing readers with the complete works of the poet Robert Lowell with this latest volume, which features a cover photo of a very young and very creepy Lowell-as-teen-psycho and draws together in one place a large amount of the author’s autobiographical writings, many of which have never been published before. Fans of the poet and completists of his works will zero in on this book fairly automatically. 

Casual or more generalist readers might encounter some rougher sledding, since the only two people who seem to care more about the minutiae of Lowell’s distant ancestors twice removed than Lowell himself are his two editors this time around, Steve Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc. The first section of this volume, titled “My Autobiography,” is thickly padded with footnotes like this:

Charles Frederick Morris Stark (1847-1934), a second cousin to Cameron Winslow — that is, they shared great-great-grandparents Major Caleb Stark and Sarah Stark. The couple had three daughters: Sarah Stark (Cameron’s grandmother), Elizabeth Stark (Charlie F. M. Stark’s grandmother), and Charlotte Stark.

Fortunately, no matter how many Noah’s Arks of Starks we get taxonomized in such clarifications, and no matter how often Lowell himself makes the same mistake all memoirists do — presuming their life is interesting — virtually every page of this fascinating book has the same saving grace: Lowell’s brilliance as a writer. Long-time readers of his poetry will already be familiar with the sometimes oddly shuffling prose-like tempo that infuses so much of it. Now those readers and everybody else can read 400 pages that prove what they must already have suspected, that the same is true in reverse: even at a young age, Lowell could put the sheen of poetry’s incipience on even the most humdrum prose patches, as when he’s recalling the time his father, sick with the flu, insisted on removing himself from the master bedroom and parking himself on a couch (in his carpet slippers) out in the hallway:

In his quiet, smiling, feverish banishment, he meant to be an ideal husband whose demands were infinitesimal. But, nevertheless, every time we moved we stumbled gracelessly upon the unselfish invalid. The strain brought about by his effort to make himself heroically nonexistent was extreme; all was hushed, vexed and ajar. 

Most of the material in this volume that readers have been able to see before is deadline work, the literary essays and profiles the poet wrote about other writers over the years. Some of this stuff was collected in a Lowell prose volume by Robert Giroux thirty years ago, but everything here is worth revisiting, in large part for the superb blending of insight and cattiness that likewise filled the enormous Letters of this author edited by Saskia Hamilton fifteen years ago. In a profile of Ford Madox Ford, for instance, we get:

I remember Colorado when he was lecturing at Boulder at the college. He said he was going to give a dinner with venison, which was illegal at that time, and the dinner was arranged, and I think it’s still the best I ever had. The wines were balanced, and every course came as it should, and the venison came, and we ended with syllabub, and you felt in Paradise at the end. You never realized that the venison was mutton that Ford had cooked.

(The widely-read Ford might have anticipated a lesson learned by the Roman emperor Augustus two thousand years earlier: If you invite a great poet to your table, remember that a) people will be reading about the meal in states unborn and accents yet unknown, and b) boorish ingratitude is a professional requirement of the poet’s craft.)

The publication of this Memoirs volume leaves very little of the Lowell barrel yet to be scraped, and what a pretty, endlessly interesting set all these volumes make: the collected letters, the collected prose, the collected autobiographical writings, and of course the only thing that really matters, the collected poems. And if the bored, bit-drill eyes of the little twerp on the cover promise trouble, well, that, too is a professional requirement, if the poet’s any good.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.