A few weeks ago, The New Yorker ran a piece by a writer I'd never heard of, Sarah Payne Stuart, about buying houses in the old, history-drenched town of Concord, Mass. One of our most memorable vacations included a stay in Concord, where the first shot of the Revolution was fired, and where Emerson, Thoreau and the Alcotts lived. Stuart delighted me with her lilting, ironic-funny voice. I did a Google search and discovered that she was a member of Robert Lowell's family and had written a memoir about him and his relatives called, "My Cousin, Once Removed."
I ordered the book on Amazon; sorry, independent booksellers. Despite its unimaginative, vanity press-sounding title. the book is a valuable contribution to Robert Lowell studies. As a longtime lover of Lowell's poetry, fascinated by his tortured, manic-depressive life, I savored each word of Stuart's memoir. Along with a sympathetic-repelled portrait of Lowell, she also amusingly slices up Thoreau's work, along with the Concord tourist hype surrounding him. I'll never think of Thoreau in the same way again. Her wry resistance to Walden romanticism is a bracing, if eventually secondary, part of the book.
Stuart, whose claims of not understanding Lowell's poems are a frequent refrain, deftly devastates his work, especially his early, clotted poems. While highly affectionate about Lowell, picturing him as an emotionally pampered, fragile genius at family gatherings, she shows "Bobby" as a perpetual lost adolescent, if that far advanced emotionally. While she shows glimpses of Lowell, nicknamed "Cal" for either Caligula or Caliban, as the self-centered bullying brute oft depicted, her final passages reveal him as a tender, compassionate man, especially with female members of his family. He is shown having a particular kindness to younger kinfolk, such as Stuart herself.
The author's subtitle about madness, money and Lowell's family is apt; money and madness are the poles of the family's long decline, although Stuart's generation, while losing the family inheritance, shows a new creative energy. Lowell's often incapacitating disease was a family curse, at least of the old New England Lowell and Devereux families, if not of the Winslows who married into them. Stuart gives fascinating glimpses through generational studies of all three interconnected families. Stuart's own mother, Lowell's first cousin, like Lowell also spent time in mental hospitals, and Stuart's brother also inherited the mental imbalance. Along with bittersweet laughter, Stuart shows the pathos of such gifted people continually struck by crippling mental breakdowns. Her brother, called Johnny here, is the gifted musician John Payne, who played on Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks," and performed with other musicians and now operates an innovative music-education center in Brookline, Mass. Johnny, who shared time with Robert Lowell at the upper class mental hospital McLeans, was later thrust into the crueler public hospital Mass. Mental. A series of electric shock treatments ended Johnny's breakdowns, along with his higher creativity; when Stuart points out that Lowell's breakdowns continued until his early death, I wondered why electroshock wasn't tried on him, although it might have crippled his late burst of poetic power.
Along with her brilliant insights into mental illness, Stuart shows deep understanding of the dynamics of "old money." Most of the money in the book belongs to the eccentric "Uncle Cot," who married Stuart's Aunt Sarah, a major character in the book. "Uncle Cot" is not a blood member of the family, but is a central figure in its existence. With Stuart's mother achieving a personal liberation through opposition to the Vietnam War, and Stuart and her brothers showing a 1960s swing to the left, Uncle Cot ends up leaving his fortune to a museum instead of the new generation, although the museum keeps most of his artwork and furniture in storage. Stuart gives a heart rending cry about the loss of the family wealth: couldn't we have said to Uncle Cot that we were just kidding?
The history of the tragic-comic families, if sometimes confusing with all of the similar first names, is a fine corollary to Lowell's own "Life Studies." Stuart, a novelist, gives a memorable gallery of characters, especially the families' strong-willed, eccentric women, particularly Aunt Sarah and Lowell's mother, Charlotte. Stuart's mother, Jackie, is another heart-rending force in the narrative. New England and Boston society and its long decline are memorably reflected in the personal lives of Stuart's relatives, with whom she ruefully claims kinship. The author expertly balances the inner geometries of different marriages, including her own, and father-daughter-son relationships. While deftly skewering her family's pretensions and personal foibles, she also shows a fierce loyalty, borne of long traditions and culture as well as blood.
Stuart is one of the all-too-rare writers these days who understands the power of understatement, the well-chosen right word. At the end of summer, I'm happy to have discovered a new writer whose work I'll continue to anticipate. Her final paragraphs are one of the most beautiful, heart-breaking endings I've encountered in quite a while. Stuart's portrait of Lowell, his tortured wives Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick and Lady Caroline Blackwell, and his family will make re-readings of his poems even more enriching. Published several years ago, and recognized as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Stuart's book deserves recognition as a classic family history and memoir.
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