The American poet Robert Lowell (1917-77) was a so-called ‘Boston Brahmin’, a Lowell of Boston, where, in the widely known distich, ‘the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God’. (In 1923, when one Harry H. Kabotchnik, against furious protests from the Cabots, succeeded in getting his name changed, this briefly became ‘and the Cabots speak Yiddish, by God’.)
It was this mostly rarefied background, seething with Lowells and Starks and Winslows and Devereux (though both his parents, like himself, were only children, so they feel like an unhappy nuclear family in the embrace of a clan), that the poet tried many times to elude: by leaving Harvard for Kenyon College in Ohio; by converting to Catholicism; by becoming a conscientious objector in the last year of the war; by marrying young, and divorcing and remarrying; in his recurring episodes of mania and depression that caused frequent hospitalisations; and not least in his personal and reportorial and factual poetry. This regrettably acquired the foolish label ‘confessional’, and seems to set him up as the granddaddy of present-day identitarian writers, though he was always more interesting, more humorous, more ironic and, above all, less mawkish than that.
His great book, Life Studies, from 1959 – perhaps the last indispensable book of poetry from an American writer – has Lowell bouncing among three more or less comparable institutions: university, hospital and prison (for being a C.O.) He learned obliquity and the speaking detail from the prose he was teaching – Flaubert and Chekhov – and from his American contemporaries, the likes of Saul Bellow and J.D. Salinger, who ‘got’ the country in their work in a way none of the poets did, or even thought to do. Life Studies is full of brief, suggestive summations, adventitious but somehow unerring:
I hog a whole house on Boston’s
‘hardly passionate Marlborough Street’,
where even the man
scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans
has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,
and is ‘a young Republican’.
It also has a 30-page section of prose memoir, ‘91 Revere Street’, the Boston address where the Lowells lived when the poet was eight and nine. The thing bristled with particulars like head-cheese. For many years, accordingly, I gave it a miss; I might as well have kept the pages stapled together. Perhaps this was Mallarmé’s celebrated ‘style that made writing impossible’. Certainly it made reading impossible. Then one day, when I suddenly found I could read it, I mysteriously no longer understood my trouble with it. Yes, it was highly, deeply, densely, subtly descriptive, but once you acquiesced in the description, it was full of sly interest.
The tripod is supposed to be a stable structure, but this one, the young Lowell’s family, was wildly unstable: the surly, burly, curly, rather unpleasant boy in Brimmer, his girl’s school, ‘its tone, its ton […] a blend of the feminine and the military’, under the direction of one ‘Miss Manice’; the mother still besotted with her father, or else with Napoleon; the father poring over his carving manuals on Sunday mornings, trying, in effect, to teach himself manhood, one cloudy or crumbling slice at a time.
Commander Lowell (the rank sounds bleakly ironic), the poet’s poor, put-upon navy father, is identified with his favoured ‘oak and “rhinoceros hide” armchair’ in his ‘den’. This is encrusted by Lowell with a positively fetishistic level of bulbous detail:
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, initialled, gunpowder-charred and tumbler-ringed. It looked like pale tobacco leaves laid on dark tobacco leaves.
How the poet’s mother must have hated it, one thinks, flinching. He had stumbled upon his father’s super-id.
‘91 Revere Street’ was part of a memoir written as ‘occupational therapy’ in the Payne Whitney Clinic, to which Lowell had been committed in 1954 after a manic attack. He signed a publishing contract for such a book; it was never delivered. (Some of the prose was cannibalised for the poems in Life Studies, ‘Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow’, ‘Terminal Days at Beverly Farms’ and others.) Memoirs, almost 70 years later, is this book, with other personal writing, and writing about writer friends and contemporaries, thrown in. There is nothing either mad or unprofessional about it anywhere.
Perhaps the most taxing thing for the reader is the absence of signalling or ranking – this is important, this here matters less. There is something endlessly and equally attentive about it, but one doesn’t know why. The prose has no agenda, it is all grinding but no axe. The orchestra plays, but there is no conductor to cue the entrances, set the pacing, the mood, the expectations. Lowell recalls:
I huddled under dull mustard-coloured army blankets. Whenever my grandfather looked at me, I held my breath, pretending to be asleep. I whitened. The antiquated brass balls and rods of my bedstead stood out shivering. If I lie low, I’ll outlast him.
The cueing comes, when it does come, in the poems, in the form of occasional blunt but helpful clauses, in such lines as ‘In the mornings I cuddled like a paramour/ in my Grandfather’s bed,/ while he scouted about the chattering greenwood stove’ (in ‘Dunbarton’), where the detail is bunched and organised, selected and pointed. It is the difference between five fingers and a fist.
Reading Memoirs is like taking a tour of Lowell’s family tree represented by way of the heirlooms in an antique shop. It’s all there, remembered, objectified, expressed. Lowell can write sumptuously, but he has his quarrels with prose, and I doubt he was a natural at it. He remarked in an interview how ‘it got awfully tedious working out transitions and putting in things that didn’t seem very important but were necessary to the prose continuity’.
But these are the very things Lowell doesn’t do – that seem beyond him. His writing is rapt, clotted, airless, excessive, until either he or the subject is exhausted; then he goes on to the next thing. Poetry was an answer to his conundrum, to his limitations. Rather than flogging himself round and round the track, it was enough if he flew – just once.
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