In Robert Lowell’s ‘Memoirs,’ Mental Illness, Creative Friends and a Takedown of Dad
He remembers a house with high ceilings, a ceramic chandelier in Dresden, and an armor suit in the corner. A man in a squeaky shirt. Sunday Roast; Harvard-Yale Football Game; Extra Lively. American literature was there and did it, yet Lowell refreshes his eyes.
Lowell respected his mother’s father, a handsome and rough fish, a self-made “mousse shoulder” man, and a half-mothball warship. Of his family. “
Meanwhile, his own father was an eternal disappointment. The “Memoir” contains one of the father’s most systematic deletions in American literature. Lowell’s father tweeted. He looked bad in his clothes. He was bald. He couldn’t carve the roast properly. When he gained weight, he resembled a “juicy land beaver.”
He lacked knowledge of that WASP. His son was fascinated by the books he read with titles such as “How to Play Tennis” and “How to Sail”. The chaotic instinct of the family was dormant in him.
Lowell quotes an aunt who said about him: “Bob isn’t the average bone, the original bone, the funny bone of his body!” She robotomied him and “stuffed his brain with red pepper. I hoped that. Lowell writes: “In his forties, his father’s soul went underground,” he adds, in a particularly brutal sentence: “He was after Edwardian, after Teddy Roosevelt, after horse surgery, after Panash, after personality, after World War I.”
The fiancé is careful. Lowell is convinced that her parents chose a honeymoon location, and the Grand Canyon was destined to marry from the beginning. “The choice was so heroic and not original that they left forever after feeling emptiness,” he writes. He adds:
I never thought that our lives would be determined by the stars, but at the moment of idol, we could imagine that the Grand Canyon mark was engraved on it, just like a car sticker.
The book’s editors, Stephen Jay Gould Axelrod and Guzegorz Kosk, silently and skillfully correct many small factual mistakes in Lowell in footnotes, pointing out where he appears to have invented the character. I am. There are many other books in the footnotes.
