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 And sure enough, the collection includes an unpublished gem: My Autobiography, a 150-page memoir composed in the years before he began work on Life Studies, his landmark volume of poems from 1959.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.
The young poet, Bobby to his parents, is besieged from his earliest waking moments by the sense of having been born late in an aristocratic New England household: “Nothing from now on was to go quite as expected …” Once, his mother chided him when he was sick for being “a design for mourning”. Decades later, he would end up as the family’s designated mourner.Bobby escaped the monotony of his parents’ ill-suited marriage by pretending to like everything his mother didn’t, and by running away on weekends and holidays to his grandfather’s sprawling farm south of Boston. Impressions come thick and fast in this account of a fairly unmomentous childhood. Commander Billy Harkness is a frequent guest, who likes nothing more than to sprawl back on an armchair with a drink and recount his seafaring exploits. The unmarried Old Aunt Sarah is the “loveliest person in the world”, but sometimes locks herself in her bedroom to memorise a chapter from The Count of Monte Cristo. Above all, there is asthmatic little Bobby, who half-listens to his father fret about stepping down from his naval role, or stares up at his Mayflower ancestors’ portraits above the dining table, and wants excitedly “to make life stop”.
Lowell’s memories are at once vivid and listless. Sentences are tinged with the desperation of a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, holding on to flashbacks of more placid days. All through his life he experienced spells of mania and depression and was hospitalised multiple times. Another portion of memoir, The Balanced Aquarium, describes his stay in a psychiatric facility in New York weeks after his mother’s death. The tribulations of his fellow patients are interspersed with painful images from his parents’ final moments, and older snapshots from his idyllic boyhood, now cast in a tragic light. In his poem Sailing Home from Rapallo, Lowell describes his mother’s last name being misspelled on her coffin. He recounts the same episode here, but the moment feels just as shattering without line breaks.
The book is rounded out by a dozen or so vignettes of fellow poets and friends. Lowell seems buoyant and chattier in these pieces, unburdened by the weight of being custodian of his family’s secrets. At the same time, each essay becomes an occasion for a new self-portrait. We encounter Lowell as the apprentice writer who once pitched a tent on a lawn outside the poet Allen Tate’s house in rural Tennessee and stayed for three months; then as the professor who counted among his students a twentysomething Sylvia Plath, and later observed in her posthumous Ariel poems a precision so overwhelming it made him want to give up writing at once.
In Lowell’s obituary of Arendt, which he had agonised over in the letter to Bishop, he regretted not speaking up while her book Eichmann in Jerusalem was accused of “victim-blaming” in New York literary circles. Arendt’s exhortations were, in the end, “too heroic to live with, for nearly all of us are cowards if sufficiently squeezed by the hand of the powerful”. Lowell wasn’t much of a stickler for political clarity – in himself, or in his acquaintances. On his first visit to Tate’s house, he noticed a Confederate flag hanging over the fireplace, but that didn’t stop him from returningto camp on his lawn a second time. He didn’t see the antisemitic Ezra Pound “as a bad man, except in the ways we all are”. He recognised the polemical underpinnings of the Cantos, but still felt it was Pound’s best work. Again and again, Lowell seems reconciled to the idea of art being as necessarily contradictory and compulsive as the artist. “It is easier to write good poems,” he observed, “than inspired lines.”
• Memoirs is published by Faber (£40). To support the Guardian and the Observer order a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
