Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell. - book reviews

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 17, 1994 | by Tom Clark

The second half of Lost Puritan goes more slowly. Mariani's faithful catalogs of Lowell's manic-depressive episodes (replete with straitjackets and shock therapy) and of his various religious rebirths and renunciations (a devil behind every potted fern) are interspersed with an inventory of public appearances and professional engagements, political involvements, romantic infatuations and cast-off wives and lovers. Without much thematic sorting, Mariani's narrative becomes diffuse in the sheer referential miscellany of it all, somewhat dissipating the intrinsic drama of Lowell's sad personal decline.

As to the multitude of unresolved contradictions in the character of this eccentric, tortured, oddly divided man - Puritan and Catholic, atheist and believer, aristocrat and rebel, pacifist and belligerent - Mariani allows us to draw our own conclusions. Wary of interpreting, he offers instead a conscientious retrieval of diverse, interesting particulars from that strange, often dark, "swirling aphasic river of daily events and language" that was the poet's life.