A vivid account of childhood, depression and the postwar American literary scene, from the author of Life Studies
In 1975, the poet Robert Lowell wrote to his friend Elizabeth Bishop: “How different prose is; the two mediums just refuse to say the same things.” Lowell explained that he’d been working on an obituary for the philosopher Hannah Arendt, but “without verse … I found it hard, I was naked without my line-ends”.
In Memoirs, a compendium of Lowell’s autobiographical prose, you expect to find Boston’s finest poet in all his unadorned glory, one naked paragraph after another. And sure enough, the collection includes an unpublished gem: My Autobiography, a 150-page memoir composed in the years before he began work on Life Studies, his landmark volume of poems from 1959. Those familiar with the poetry will recognise the common characters: Lowell’s maternal grandfather, a retired mining engineer, who sits “like Lear at the head of the table”; Lowell’s mother, who’d been happiest when she was engaged but not yet married, when she was still her father’s favourite daughter; Lowell senior, an unassuming naval officer, always relegated to the corner of family portraits.
Continue reading...