Memoirs
A new miscellany that includes depictions of his mental illness, reminiscences of peers including Anne Sexton, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, Allen Tate and Hannah Arendt, and other twigs and seeds, many seeing print for the first time ... Does the world need Memoirs? ... The argument I will make for Memoirs is this: It’s densely yet nimbly written, and you sense Lowell’s judgment and discrimination in every paragraph. As with nearly everything he wrote, there’s a sense of wheels within wheels ... Memoirs is evocative, and sly, in its assessment of Lowell’s Boston Brahmin family ... This book’s editors, Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc, silently and deftly amend, in their footnotes, Lowell’s many small errors of fact, and point out where he seems to have invented characters. There’s a whole other book going on down there in the footnotes ... Reading Memoirs is like finding a roll of undeveloped film from 1954. Lowell rode these sentences into new ways of thinking and writing. There were riddles of existence that, clearly, he was only beginning to shake down.
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Something of a grab bag ... The new volume includes a large gathering of literary portraits, as in the earlier book, and a previously unpublished gathering of odds and ends, mostly memoir material from manuscripts ... Memoirs is anchored by 'My Autobiography,' which takes the reader to Lowell’s early adulthood ... It makes for excellent reading, whatever your feelings (or lack of feelings) about the poet or the man ... 'My Autobiography' makes up about 40 percent of Memoirs and is easily the best writing in the book. Lowell was always a capable prose writer, but the language on display in this childhood memoir is a good deal more than that. Lowell could be a superb portraitist when he chose to be, and the parade of characters passing through his household (several of whom appear separately in his poems) is memorable and delightful ... Were Lowell nearly as cruel in his rather anodyne and flattering portraits of his literary mentors, friends and epigones, the 'Life Among Writers' section of Memoirs would be immeasurably more interesting ... 'My Autobiography' sat in Lowell’s desk drawer for decades, unpublished and unread until Giroux plucked two more of its chapters and combined them for an essay in Collected Prose. It deserves a wider audience. Taken as a whole, 'My Autobiography' is nothing less than a treasure in the literary memoir genre.
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Much of what appears in Memoirs is a result of being encouraged, while at the clinic, to write autobiographically — evocative descriptions of his childhood that have remained cloistered in archives until now ... Along with these recollections of his past are striking portraits of the effects of his bipolar disorder ... In the book’s final section are found eloquent portraits of his contemporaries ... Aside from the sheer beauty of the writing — the poet’s naked confrontation of his own pain, the honesty with which he portrays a family dynamic, should strike any reader to the heart ... Memoirs is also proof that Lowell remains an artist for the present moment ... Robert Lowell’s wisdom, his close observation, is as vital now as it was in his lifetime.
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