Bizarre Brahmins Lives Revealed: Cousin Tells All

MY FIRST COUSIN ONCE REMOVED: MONEY, MADNESS AND THE FAMILY OF ROBERT LOWELL

By Sarah Payne Stuart '73

HarperCollins

$25, 244 pp.

"You're neurotic, but neurotic's good!" quips Sarah Payne Stuart's family psychiatrist in Stuart's My First Cousin Once Removed, a painfully funny and poignant memoir about life in the Boston Brahmin Lowell clan (known best as a family running short on both money and sanity). The book centers specifically on the neurotic and manic depressive genius of Robert Lowell, the Pulitzer Prize-winning confessional poet-cum-activist and titular "first cousin" of the author's mother (hence the author is "removed" from him by one generation). Sarah Payne Stuart '73 treats "Bobby" (as the family called Robert Lowell) as both a biological and literary predecessor, confronting the very madcap hypocrisy running through her bloodline that Lowell did in his poetry--the very hypocrisy that drove the latter many times to violently manic depressive breakdowns in various mental hospitals along the East Coast. However, Stuart sees the situation not as mentally debilitating but as a forum for exploiting her established sense of wry humor and caustically tongue-in-cheek comedy. In a sense, the psychiatrist's diagnosis at the end of the book is actually an excellent summation of the significance Stuart is searching for throughout the course of the book: the Lowell family may be wacko, but it's the only family she's got.

Thus, woven into the story are amusing but nevertheless tender accounts of what it meant to grow up in a world built entirely on a pretense of keeping up appearances. But just like all those lost and mentally unstable Lowells and Winslows (the author's equally snobbish relatives on the paternal side), Cousin itself is never quite sure what it is. At times it is a barrage of various bildungsroman tales, the coming-of-age stories of various Lowell and Winslow family scions. At other times it is a relentless catalogue of family members moving in and out of prep schools, relationships, asylums and even the hallowed halls of Harvard itself.

It is in these catalogues that the book isweakest; the chapters recounting the nomadicwanderings of Stuart's aunts and uncles--up anddown the East Coast, back and forth across theAtlantic--are entirely forgettable. Of marginalinterest in these lengthy dives into the past arethe glimpses of recent and not-so recentHarvardiana: contempt for the ghettos of NewHaven; romantic entanglements shot to hell over asquash game in Adams House; a complete mentalbreakdown in Lamont Library; a tour of a chintzyQuincy House bachelor pad belonging to her famedcousin; and of course standard turn-of-the-centuryRadcliffe gripes about having to settle forhusbands from the A.D. rather than those covetedtreasures from the Porc.

What these not-so-subtle potshots at Harvardshow is that Cousin shines most and isultimately a completely satisfying read not as acoming-of-age story, a literary analysis or atravelogue, but as the hilarious personal memoirits madcap opening (in which Stuart races tofinish her application to Harvard the morning it'sdue) purports it to be. This opening also showshow her humor is mixed in with bittersweetrecollections of a life among unfounded arroganceand neurotic quirkiness: the problem Stuart facesin writing her essay--of defining herself based onher own merits and the merits of her first cousin(once removed) Robert Lowell-soon becomes thecentral focus of the book. The book is Stuart'sattempt to make some sort of order out of herchildhood among countless generations of twoprominent Boston Brahmin families, and to have ahell of a lot of fun while doing it. In thisprocess she latches on to the iconoclastic rebelfigure of her cousin, who tried to exorcise thesame Back Bay demons in his Life Studies asStuart is trying to confront in My First CousinOnce Removed. Stuart admits that she is notwriting a lyric masterpiece on par with any ofLowell's work, but manages in her genealogicalspelunking to be simultaneously funny, scathingand meditative about her life as a Winslow andLowell.

Indeed, Stuart's frank and biting insight andits manifestation in her writing is what savesMy First Cousin Once Removed from the fateof countless similar books before it--that ofeither just another whiny pseudo-Freudian accountof a life ruined by wealth or some tangentialbiography of a prominent man of letters. Stuarthas come to terms with a conflict that allfamilies face regardless of whether their addressis on Beacon Hill, Fifth Avenue or Skid Row: it'sfamily, after all. Both Robert Lowell and SarahPayne Stuart's stories of growing up run parallelin that both writers hold the vacuous andhypocritical snobbery of the family in totalcontempt but constantly seek the validation of thefamily in all they do. Thus even though RobertLowell would come to publish book after bookflagrantly railing against the Winslows and theLowells, he would as a child constantly seek theaccolades of his grandfather Arthur Winslow. Yearslater, Stuart in desperation decides to fall backon her sense of family honor so ritualisticallyingrained and return to her family's homestead inConcord, to a house near Walden Pond. Here sheexpects her children to learn to swim at the famedlocale. The children desert the pastoral settingfor a local pool, and Stuart out of some sense ofrestitution, a keen sense of the absurd and justflat out love of a story, is alright with this andin fact with all that goes on in the novel.

For Stuart is, as hokey as it may sound,necessarily honest to the reader and to herself.From this self-awareness stems her charming wit,uproariously deadpan delivery of madcap WASPmaneuverings and an impeccable sense of comictiming, matched with a poet's (or at leastrelated-to-a-poet's) awareness and a mother'stenderness. She is quick to admit to the bigoted,petty and, yes, manic shortcomings of hermuch-institutionalized family, but just as quickto admit her own shortcomings and accept them all.As this first cousin knows, being neurotic isgood, but knowing you're neurotic is even better

It is in these catalogues that the book isweakest; the chapters recounting the nomadicwanderings of Stuart's aunts and uncles--up anddown the East Coast, back and forth across theAtlantic--are entirely forgettable. Of marginalinterest in these lengthy dives into the past arethe glimpses of recent and not-so recentHarvardiana: contempt for the ghettos of NewHaven; romantic entanglements shot to hell over asquash game in Adams House; a complete mentalbreakdown in Lamont Library; a tour of a chintzyQuincy House bachelor pad belonging to her famedcousin; and of course standard turn-of-the-centuryRadcliffe gripes about having to settle forhusbands from the A.D. rather than those covetedtreasures from the Porc.

What these not-so-subtle potshots at Harvardshow is that Cousin shines most and isultimately a completely satisfying read not as acoming-of-age story, a literary analysis or atravelogue, but as the hilarious personal memoirits madcap opening (in which Stuart races tofinish her application to Harvard the morning it'sdue) purports it to be. This opening also showshow her humor is mixed in with bittersweetrecollections of a life among unfounded arroganceand neurotic quirkiness: the problem Stuart facesin writing her essay--of defining herself based onher own merits and the merits of her first cousin(once removed) Robert Lowell-soon becomes thecentral focus of the book. The book is Stuart'sattempt to make some sort of order out of herchildhood among countless generations of twoprominent Boston Brahmin families, and to have ahell of a lot of fun while doing it. In thisprocess she latches on to the iconoclastic rebelfigure of her cousin, who tried to exorcise thesame Back Bay demons in his Life Studies asStuart is trying to confront in My First CousinOnce Removed. Stuart admits that she is notwriting a lyric masterpiece on par with any ofLowell's work, but manages in her genealogicalspelunking to be simultaneously funny, scathingand meditative about her life as a Winslow andLowell.

Indeed, Stuart's frank and biting insight andits manifestation in her writing is what savesMy First Cousin Once Removed from the fateof countless similar books before it--that ofeither just another whiny pseudo-Freudian accountof a life ruined by wealth or some tangentialbiography of a prominent man of letters. Stuarthas come to terms with a conflict that allfamilies face regardless of whether their addressis on Beacon Hill, Fifth Avenue or Skid Row: it'sfamily, after all. Both Robert Lowell and SarahPayne Stuart's stories of growing up run parallelin that both writers hold the vacuous andhypocritical snobbery of the family in totalcontempt but constantly seek the validation of thefamily in all they do. Thus even though RobertLowell would come to publish book after bookflagrantly railing against the Winslows and theLowells, he would as a child constantly seek theaccolades of his grandfather Arthur Winslow. Yearslater, Stuart in desperation decides to fall backon her sense of family honor so ritualisticallyingrained and return to her family's homestead inConcord, to a house near Walden Pond. Here sheexpects her children to learn to swim at the famedlocale. The children desert the pastoral settingfor a local pool, and Stuart out of some sense ofrestitution, a keen sense of the absurd and justflat out love of a story, is alright with this andin fact with all that goes on in the novel.

For Stuart is, as hokey as it may sound,necessarily honest to the reader and to herself.From this self-awareness stems her charming wit,uproariously deadpan delivery of madcap WASPmaneuverings and an impeccable sense of comictiming, matched with a poet's (or at leastrelated-to-a-poet's) awareness and a mother'stenderness. She is quick to admit to the bigoted,petty and, yes, manic shortcomings of hermuch-institutionalized family, but just as quickto admit her own shortcomings and accept them all.As this first cousin knows, being neurotic isgood, but knowing you're neurotic is even better