He remembers the houses with high ceilings, Dresden china chandeliers and suits of armor in the corners; the men in creaking shirts; the Sunday roasts; the Harvard-Yale football games; the bustling of supernumeraries. American literature has been there, and done that, yet Lowell freshens the eye.
Lowell revered his mother’s father, a handsome, raffish, self-made and “moose-shouldered” man, a half-mothballed warship, because “he was all I could ever want to be: the bad boy, the problem child, the commodore of his household.”
His own father, on the other hand, was a perpetual letdown. “Memoirs” contains one of the most systematic takedowns of a father in American literature. Lowell’s father was a mumbler; he looked bad in clothes; he was balding; he couldn’t properly carve a roast; he resembled, when he gained weight, “a juicy land beaver.”
He lacked that WASP knowingness; his son cringed at the books he read, with titles like “How to Play Tennis” and “How to Sail.” The family’s anarchic instincts were dormant in him.
Lowell quotes an aunt who said of him: “Bob hasn’t a mean bone, an original bone, a funny bone in his body!” She wanted to lobotomize him and “stuff his brain with red peppers.” Lowell writes: “In his 40s, Father’s soul went underground.” He adds, in a particularly brutal sentence: “He was post-Edwardian, post-Teddy Roosevelt, post-horsemanship, post-panache, post-personality and post-World War I.”
Those engaged to be wed take note: Lowell is convinced his parents’ choice of honeymoon location, the Grand Canyon, doomed the marriage from the start. “The choice was so heroic and unoriginal that it left them forever after with a feeling of gaping vacuity,” he writes. He adds:
I have never thought our lives determined by the stars and yet at idle moments I could imagine myself stamped with the mark of the Grand Canyon, as if it were a sticker on an automobile.
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.
