INTRODUCTION
IN OCTOBER 1954, Robert Lowell wrote to his friend John Berryman: “I’ve just started messing around with my autobiographical monster.”1 In April 1955, he signed a contract for this work with Robert Giroux of Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. At about the same time, he wrote to Peter Taylor: “I want to invent and forget a lot, but at the same time have the historian’s wonderful advantage—the reader must always be forced to say, ‘This is tops, but even if it weren’t it’s true.’”2 Lowell continued to work on the project until early February 1957, when he told Elizabeth Bishop that he was “stalling.”3 After six months of troubled silence, he began to write autobiographical poems instead. These poems would appear as the “Life Studies” sequence in Life Studies, published in 1959. Lowell ultimately published only one chapter of his prose memoir, “91 Revere Street,” which saw print first in Partisan Review and then in Life Studies.4
Lowell’s initial intention to write a book about his childhood reflected his experience with psychoanalysis during an extended stay at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in the summer of 1954. He hoped he could use that immersion into memory as a way to overcome the writer’s block that had been haunting him. The project gained added resonance in late 1955 when he and Elizabeth Hardwick purchased a house on Marlborough Street—“a block from where I grew up,” as he wrote to William Carlos Williams.5 Although Lowell later implied that his memoir merely prepared the way for Life Studies, it is a powerful text in its own right. He kept “bits” of it in his desk for years, and as late as 1972 he dreamed of completing it, “if I can find a new form that will let me write at greater length.”6 With relatively few overlaps, “My Autobiography” and the “Life Studies” sequence illuminate and challenge each other, and reveal the opportunities and limitations inherent in their different genres.
Lowell originally planned to begin his memoir with his birth and conclude in the summer of 1934, when he was seventeen and attending St. Mark’s School. The text would end with “a period of enthusiasm,” which occurred a few months before he “found” himself, presumably as a writer.7 “My Autobiography,” however, does not follow through with this plan. For one thing, it includes a chapter depicting his parents’ courtship (“I Take Thee, Bob”), which occurred before his birth. Presented almost as if Lowell witnessed the events, and written in a style that mimicked his mother’s “exaggerating humor,”8 this chapter breaks with memoir convention and prepares us for the extent to which fantasies, imagined voices, and secondhand stories will contribute to the text: that is, the extent to which Lowell’s narratives are as much a dream of the past as a recounting. Moreover, “My Autobiography” does not carry us into 1934 but instead stops, or almost stops, in 1930 as the young Lowell, aged thirteen, apprehensively prepares to enter St. Mark’s School. Skipping over his boarding-school years entirely, the story then jumps to his bittersweet last meeting with his grandfather, Arthur Winslow, in December 1937, when Lowell was twenty.
Despite its deviation from the initial plan, “My Autobiography” seems roughly complete. The first eight chapters articulate the social world of Lowell’s early and middle childhood. This initial sequence resolves in the most sustained chapter of the memoir, “91 Revere Street.” In this chapter, the young boy, now eight, demonstrates characteristics that are to stay with him a lifetime: intelligence, keen observational powers, rebelliousness, impulsiveness, inner turmoil, and creativity. One might consider the next sequence of nine chapters, from “Pictures of Rock” through “Arthur Winslow V,” to be Lowell’s pastoral. They focus on his experiences with his grandfather in mostly rural settings, even as Lowell’s father is experiencing disastrous career reverses back in the city. Then “My Autobiography” shakes off the leisure of middle childhood in two climactic chapters: “My Crime Wave” and “Entering St. Mark’s.” These chapters return us to the urbanity of Boston, without the daily protective presence of Grandfather Winslow. Lowell is now entering early adolescence, a time of considerable perturbation. Grandfather Winslow returns in the memoir’s coda, a poetic evocation of the last meeting between the old man, now dying, and the grandson, now approaching adulthood. Transitioning from patriarch to angel, Winslow has an effect that is both paralyzing and soothing. “My Autobiography” concludes with a vision of the grandfather as a “white blur,” presiding over memories that are themselves fading to a blur.
Lowell never showed this memoir to Giroux. He apparently shared it only with his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, who read at least one chapter, “Entering St. Mark’s,” and suggested some word changes. When Lowell moved on to Life Studies in August 1957, he left his prose memoir behind. He wrote to Giroux in October: “My autobiography is on the shelf (or rather in my desk-drawer where I have a hundred tousled pages) for the moment.”9 Despite the implication that he would return to this work, he never did. He explained that “working out transitions and putting in things that didn’t seem very important but were necessary to the prose continuity” became “tedious.”10 Writing to Richard Tillinghast in August 1969, he mentioned several other issues as well—“a dread of more of the same, impossibility of honestly showing the living, at loss for a plot to pass beyond childhood”—yet he continued to insist that it was the tedium of plugging holes and retyping pages that ended the project.11 In fact, he had nearly completed a first draft of his childhood recollections. He could have asked an editor or Hardwick to help him with the revisions. Perhaps the strain of scrutinizing his life in such harrowing detail finally overwhelmed him. He later said, “In Life Studies, I caught real memories in a fairly gentle style,”12 and so he did if you compare the poems to the prose memoir.
Although Lowell never published “My Autobiography,” he kept the typescript safe for seventeen years before selling it to Harvard in 1973, along with a good portion of his archive. There it sat, in the stacks of the Houghton Library, rarely disturbed for more than forty years. Now it appears to us from out of the past, a moving work by one of our great writers.
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A memoir always highlights the passage of time. Lowell’s “My Autobiography” does so with rare plangency. From its opening citation of The Education of Henry Adams (1918) to its stylistic allusions to Henry James’s A Small Boy and Others (1913), Lowell’s memoir acknowledges the self-representational strategies of two early modern masters. In its resemblance to Elizabeth Bishop’s autobiographical story “In the Village” (1953), which Lowell thought “wonderful,”13 “My Autobiography” also connects to midcentury discourses of traumatic memory. Whereas Adams and James evoked their own nineteenth-century development from the standpoint of an emergent modernity, Lowell sought to half recover and half create early modernity itself.
Time is embedded in each of Lowell’s chapters. The first, “Antebellum Boston,” begins with his birth. The sequence of chapters loops back to the courtship of his parents, and then rushes forward to his infancy, his middle childhood, his unhappy pubescence, and finally his last meeting with his dying grandfather—a vision in white underwear, part specter, part angel, and part object of desire. Each chapter presents a subtly different view of Lowell, his family members, and their social milieu—each new perspective an ironic commentary on the hopes and disappointments that have come before.
Anxieties about time contributed to the composition of “My Autobiography” in the first place. Following the death of his mother in 1954, Lowell became severely manic and was eventually committed to the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in New York. He described himself spending the next two years dreaming at night that he was like one of Michelangelo’s statues that can be “tumbled downhill without injury,” but feeling in the morning as though he “had been flayed, and had each nerve beaten with a rubber hose.”14 He added: “I am writing my autobiography literally to ‘pass the time.’ I almost doubt if the time would pass at all otherwise.” Thus, he composed “My Autobiography,” which narrates the passage of time, because he felt that time had come to a standstill. He needed to restart it discursively in order to feel it again in his mind and body. He intended the story of his birth and growth to foster a rebirth and new growth as he entered middle age: “I also hope the result will supply me with my swaddling clothes, with a sort of immense bandage of gauze and ambergris for my hurt nerves.” A movement backward into his painful past might regenerate his barely existent present, like an electroshock, and might regenerate his movement into the future.
In “My Autobiography” Lowell wrote about himself as a small boy in the company of nearly unfathomable others. Most important among these were his self-important yet affectionate grandfather; his gifted, frustrated mother; and his increasingly withdrawn and deflated father. As Lowell wrote, “My grandfather, mother, father, and I were those that mattered, the rest of the world was allegory.”15 It was the Freudian Oedipal triangle plus one; the family romance spread out across three generations; an Oedipal quartet. “My Autobiography” provides a Künstlerroman of a complicated and, in many ways, unlikable young person surrounded by a triad of similarly difficult elders—controlling giants restraining their inheritor, who wants to be a controlling giant too. The dynamics among these four main characters, and the more peripheral family members, friends, and servants who drift through the pages, dominate the text’s vision of the past and its diagnosis of pain.
Young Lowell’s orderly movement from infancy to adolescence and beyond is impeded by the egotistical and evanescent quality of the love offered by his elders, and also by his own combination of creativity and “psychoticism”16—that is, by his extraordinary involvement with language and fantasy in alliance with his aggressive and hostile impulses. “My Autobiography” is an act of recollection, and to that extent seems to confirm Lowell’s late lament that “sometimes everything I write / with the threadbare art of my eye / seems a snapshot.”17 Yet the narrative frequently portrays times when his fantasies take hold of him and won’t let go. It also shows the memoirist recalling events he couldn’t possibly have witnessed, or telling the same story twice, in different literal circumstances. We see in this text not the aging poet who feels walled off from “something imagined” but the reverse: a writer vivified and possessed by things imagined.
At the same time as “My Autobiography” focuses on four unique individuals, it re-creates a lost time and milieu: the fading grandeur of an Anglo-American family endowed with wealth and privilege, in rough contact with a wider society of immigrants, the poor, subalterns, and emancipated women, all attempting to rise in the world. The story concerns more than a family; it provides a portrait of social change and resistance, the sense that one’s privilege is never enough. The declining yet still powerful white aristocrats of this text insistently disrespect people who are not “of the right sort.”18 They call both Native Americans and citizens of India “Injuns.”19 They place Boston’s “Irish, Negroes, Latins” on the same discursive plane as “grit, litter.”20 They pair “Bravas” (mixed-race immigrants from Cape Verde) with “children”; consider Portuguese Americans “exotic”; call Chinese Americans “Chinamen”; and divide Italian Americans into grades A and B.21 Even insults aimed at other white men serve to police the margins: “anile,” “quee-eers.”22
At the same time, a constant fluidity of identity threatens these hierarchic attitudes. Under the slightest pressure, the structures of white heterosexual selfhood begin to crumble, revealing uncertainties about gender, sexuality, and ethnic otherness. In “91 Revere Street,” it is revealed that Lowell’s family tree includes at least one “swarthy” Jew. “My Crime Wave” explores not only young Lowell’s compulsive need to perform violence on a male Jewish body but also his romantic yearning for a second Jewish boy, whom he thinks of as a “girl.” The young Lowell not only wishes he “were an older girl,”23 his phallic mother half-heartedly beseeches his father to be a man, his father fails to be the man his wife demands (but doesn’t want), and his bad-boy grandfather joins with his grandson in a sort of homosocial coupling. Seemingly solid identities tremble and break when the memoirist casts his cold eye on them.
“My Autobiography” vibrates between comedy and tragedy, critique and compassion. It reveals the degree to which Lowell himself participated in the flawed behavior depicted, with the consolation that the troubled boy portrayed in these pages grew up to be the brilliant ironist who wrote them. Lowell wanted to both mock and mourn his family, his social world, himself. He wanted, in his famous phrase, to “say what happened,”24 and he wanted to say what he felt and imagined. Most of all, he aimed to turn his memories into art.
A NOTE ON THE TEXTS
LOWELL’S “MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY” has twenty chapters, seventeen of which appear here for the first time. The texts derive from the typescripts in the Robert Lowell Papers at the Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Of the three chapters that have been previously published, the best known is “91 Revere Street,” which appeared for the first time in the fall 1956 issue of Partisan Review and then as Part 2 of Lowell’s Life Studies in 1959 (though not in the Faber and Faber edition). The Life Studies version included sixty-seven small changes in the text, most of them improvements. We have used that version here, correcting only obvious errors. Thus, we replaced “cameraderie” with “camaraderie” and “patroling” with “patrolling.” Some (though not all) of these corrections also appear in the Vintage Books edition of Life Studies (1959) and in Robert Giroux’s edition of Lowell’s Collected Prose (1987)—but not in Lowell’s Collected Poems (2003) nor in Selected Poems: Expanded Edition (2007).
The other previously printed items are “Antebellum Boston” and “Philadelphia.” Giroux’s edition of Lowell’s posthumous Collected Prose printed both chapters, combined into one and titled simply “Antebellum Boston.” We have returned to Lowell’s typescripts, omitting Giroux’s editorial interventions and presenting the two chapters individually, as Lowell wrote them.
The purpose of our edition is to provide a version of Lowell’s “My Autobiography” that is as complete, as readable, and as close to Lowell’s intentions as possible. We have arranged the chapters in the chronological order of the scenes portrayed, as was Lowell’s design. He left some of the chapters—for example, “Antebellum Boston” and “Washington, D.C.”—in single, well-edited typescripts, virtually ready to go to press. But he left other chapters in multiple versions, often with further changes inserted in his sometimes illegible script. As a rule, we chose the latest, fullest version of each chapter. In “Forty-Four West Cedar Street and Barnstable,” “Arthur Winslow V,” and “Entering St. Mark’s,” however, we inserted one or more paragraphs from another version (or several other versions) into the main one, footnoting the location of the added material.
We have provided titles for seven chapters that Lowell left untitled: “Philadelphia,” “Arms-of-the-Law,” “The House at Rock,” “Arthur Winslow II,” “Uncle Cameron,” “18 Chestnut Street,” and “Arthur Winslow VI.” Although Lowell indicated his intention to number the Arthur Winslow chapters, he only numbered the first. We arranged and numbered the rest.
If Lowell omitted, misspelled, or mistyped a word, we made a silent correction. If we felt an irregular spelling served a purpose (for example, “Hindoo” in “I Take Thee, Bob”), we left it alone. We also lightly regularized Lowell’s punctuation. We use standard capitalization and hyphenation of family titles, except in “91 Revere Street,” where we occasionally adhere to the text published in his lifetime in Life Studies. If he crossed out a word or phrase and penciled in a legible substitute above it or in the margin, we chose the substitute. If he proposed an alternative word or phrase, but did not cross out the original, we made our best effort to choose the word that seemed most likely to be the one he would have chosen. In the few instances where we added a word or phrase to improve comprehensibility, the addition appears in square brackets. In several chapters, Lowell began new sections by retyping sentences from an earlier section, seemingly to keep himself focused. We deleted these repetitions, indicating their absence with bracketed ellipses.
Elizabeth Hardwick made a number of corrections in the only surviving typescript of “Entering St. Mark’s.” The corrections range from commas and disambiguated pronouns to extra phrases and additional sentences. She also crossed out some sentences. We adopted these changes selectively, more often preferring to return to Lowell’s original wording.
We have lightly annotated people, events, and contexts when such information would be difficult for readers to find on their own. In general, we have let Lowell tell the stories he wanted to tell, in the words he wanted to use. To facilitate reading, we have provided genealogical charts analogous to the ones Lowell developed to assist him in composition, and we have also supplied a biographical time line.
Antebellum Boston
LIKE HENRY ADAMS, I, too, was born under the shadow of the Boston State House, and under Pisces, the Fish, on the first of March 1917.1 America was entering the First World War and was about to play her part in the downfall of five empires: the Austrian, the German, the Russian, the French and the English. At this moment, the sons of most of the old, aristocratic, Republican Boston families were waiting on their doorsteps like spent Airedales or poodles. They were, these children and parents, waiting and hoping for a second wind. James Michael Curley was out of jail and waiting for a mandate from the people to begin the first of his many terms as mayor of Boston. Nothing from now on was to go quite as expected—even downhill.
My grandfather Winslow had chosen to live at 18 Chestnut Street, high on Beacon Hill. In his doorway were two loutish, brownstone pillars copied from the Temple of the Kings at Memphis.2 Here, each afternoon, my grandfather would pause for a few minutes at four o’clock and finger his cane, inscribed with the names and altitudes of mountains in Norway which he had climbed. Looking about, he took satisfaction in seeing himself surrounded by neighbors whose reputations had made state, if not universal, history. When these people died, their houses, resting on the solid brick of their names, were starred in the guidebooks. Across the street Edwin Booth had lived; across the street Julia Ward Howe still lived; across the street Ralph Adams Cram had lately settled.3 Edwin Booth had been so famous one could forget he was an actor; Julia Ward Howe was so old and so distinguished one could forget she was only a woman; Cram, he decided, went rather fatiguingly far afield in his search for old ways of building new churches. Grandfather was not content with Cram, yet he kept Cram drawings scattered over the wormy desk he had brought home from Palermo—thus enjoying the exalted ceremonial of seeing his own just derision continually defeated by his good nature. Twenty houses down Chestnut Street stood the house that had belonged to Francis Parkman, and near was the house in which Oliver Wendell Holmes had lately died, another in which Percival Lowell had also lately died.4 My grandfather was a Boston boy who had made good as a mining engineer in Colorado. He was proud of being self-made. He was proud, too, of his descent from New England Winslows who had supported George the Third in the eighteenth century, just as furiously as they had supported Cromwell a century earlier. These Winslows had been ruined and even, temporarily, exiled to Canada during the American Revolution. My grandfather wanted everyone to be pre-revolutionary and self-made. In the mornings he would declare that everyone in Boston was an opportunist and a parvenu; in the evenings he would glumly suggest that his neighbors were decadents who lived on their mere names. In 1917, my grandfather was well satisfied. Yet from time to time, something of the poison of his later agony would show; his vitals burned and he looked out with a pale, aching eye.
From my mother’s scrapbooks and from her reminiscences, I can imagine scenes that took place in 1915. Perhaps it is fraudulent for me to describe recollections of things I did not see. Nevertheless, the two years before my birth are more real to me than the two years which followed. America entered the war and my mother entered marriage in the two years after 1915. I was often glad I could not be blamed for anything that happened during the months when I was becoming alive.
When I was three or four years old I first began to think about the time before I was born. Until then Mother had been everything; at three or four she began abruptly and gratingly to change into a human being. I wanted to recapture the mother I remembered and so I began to fabricate. In my memory she was a lady preserved in silhouettes, outlines and photographs; she sat on a blue bench; she wore a blue serge dress; she smiled at my father, a naval lieutenant in a collarless blue uniform. Blue meant the sea, the navy, and manhood. Blue was the ideal, defining color Mother had described to Father as his “Wagnerian theme,” the absolute he was required to live up to. I was a little doll in a white sailor suit with blue anchors on the pockets, a doll who smiled impartially upon his mother and father and in his approbation thus made them husband and wife. But when I was at last three years old all that began to change. I could no longer see Mother as that rarely present, transfigured, Sunday-best version of my nurse. I saw her as my mother, as a rod, or a scolding, rusty hinge—as a human being. More and more I began to try to imagine Mother when she was happier, when she had been merely her father’s favorite daughter, when she was engaged but unmarried. Perhaps I had been happiest then too, because I hadn’t existed and lived only as an imagined future.
I found that all I had to do was to hold my breath when Mother talked about her girlhood and then it all came vividly to me. The large houses, the staff of servants, the immense house parties, the future—I was there, living it all. One day I held my breath longer and longer and more perfectly than ever before. I found myself breathing with ponderous, earthy effort. I found I was ill with croup. I could, in reality, hardly breathe. I lay staring at my black fingernails outlined against the white sheet. “You are a design for mourning,” Mother said. “If you try to clean your fingernails, you’ll have to dig in up to your elbows. You’ll come out on the other side of the earth, in China.”
Copyright © 2022 by Harriet Lowell and Sheridan Lowell
Copyright © 2022 by Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc
