The Gimlet Eye
By
GUY TREBAYPublished: December 21, 2010
WHAT is it about the holidays that so particularly illuminates the architecture of families? Just as the twinkling lights of a Christmas tree, flashing on the faces that surround it, can alternately bathe them in a warm glow or render them macabre, the season seems to cast the structures of family into weird relief. This is true of all families, no matter where they lie on the scale of class or economics, or so a recent conversation with Ivana Lowell suggests.
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Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times
Ivana Lowell, daughter of a Guiness brewery heiress, at her Sag Harbor home.
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Lady Caroline in the garden of Castletown with her third husband, Robert Lowell, 1978.
Ms. Lowell is the author of “Why Not Say What Happened?,” a coolly told and critically praised memoir of a childhood whose outlines were, even by the standards of contemporary pathography, baroque. The youngest daughter of Lady Caroline Blackwood — herself the eldest child of Basil Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, the fourth marquess of Dufferin and Ava, and the brewery heiress Maureen Guinness; and also a journalist, novelist, man killer, muse, alcoholic and parent whose approach to child rearing was bizarre — Ms. Lowell was raised in an atmosphere of what one might call plural paternity.
Ms. Lowell grew up thinking that her father was the composer Israel Citkowitz, her mother’s second husband (the painter
Lucian Freud was the first). Only in adulthood did she discover her conception was a result of an affair her mother had conducted with the English screenwriter Ivan Moffat, known for his adaptation of “Giant.” In the meantime, the practicalities — if practical is the word — of fatherhood were taken up by Lady Caroline’s third husband, the manic-depressive poet
Robert Lowell, and her good friend Robert Silvers, a founder of The New York Review of Books. She was reared in a variety of places, including London; Castletown House in Ireland; Mr. Lowell’s pile in Brookline, Mass.; and Clandeboye, her grandmother’s fabled Georgian mansion outside Belfast, Northern Ireland.
A memoir littered with the names of the rich and the titled, “Why Not Say What Happened?,” published in October, is a genetic whodunit. Yet Ms. Lowell’s true achievement may lie in the unassuming way she communicates the resilience of a woman whose trials — she was sexually abused at 6 by her nanny’s husband, was severely burned in a childhood kitchen accident and has struggled for decades to conquer alcoholism — might have done in most people.
Last week, Ms. Lowell came to Manhattan from her home in Sag Harbor, N.Y., for an annual
Christmas lunch with her 11-year-old daughter’s godparents — aptly enough, given the glistering web of family connection, they are Mr. Silvers and the socialite and philanthropist Mercedes Bass. She sat down after at the bar of the Plaza Athénée hotel to discuss, among other things, the role of holidays in a childhood that she maintains, somewhat improbably, was a happy one.
“The writing process was four years” for the book, said Ms. Lowell, who, after ordering a pot of Earl Grey tea, spirited a bottle of kombucha, a fermented medicinal tea, from her handbag, explaining that it is her beverage of choice since her return from one of several stints in rehab. (“Some people go to Yaddo,” the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. “I go to rehab.”)
A visit to a new psychotherapist started her on the book, she said. “When I launched into my life story, as best I could, and talked about being burned and about my father and stepfather — and... well, I had so many fathers, I wasn’t sure which one was the one I should be talking about — after the first five minutes, the therapist said, ‘My God, you’ve been so battered and shunted around, it’s amazing you’re still standing.’ ”
Ms. Lowell laughed as she spoke; her laugh is light and easy. She has the retroussé nose that is a trait common to her family of beauties (her mother and grandmother were both famed for their looks; her cousin is the fashion apparition Daphne Guinness), and high, almost Slavic cheekbones that accentuate her large and slightly slanted eyes.
“Strangely,” Ms. Lowell continued, “I had the sense that mine was a happy childhood. I know it makes no sense.”
Shuttled as a child from one country to another, she often had the impression, she said, “that, really, we were the poorest, saddest people, and that everyone else was really rich and grand and we were the poor persons in the big house.”
There was no central heating in the large house where she spent much of her childhood. Her mother considered automobiles too middle-class to be bothered with owning one. In her version of alcoholic haute-Bohemia, it was also somehow “common” to trouble oneself with trivialities like regular meals. “We didn’t have food for dinner,” Ms. Lowell said. “When I visited friends at their houses and people sat down for dinner, I thought they were so grand. I thought, They really know how to live!”
Enlarge This Image Photograph courtesy of Ivana Lowell.
Ivana Lowell’s mother, Lady Caroline Blackwood, with her first husband, Lucian Freud, in Paris around 1949.
Enlarge This Image Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Robert B. Silvers of The New York Review of Books.
It was not, Ms. Lowell insisted, so much that her mother was cruel as troubled and deeply eccentric. Far from being domestically inept, she was, in addition to her talents as a journalist, novelist, muse and consort to men of genius, skilled in the kitchen. “She had once been a very good cook, and was particular about food,” said Ms. Lowell. “She brought her own food everywhere, to restaurants, always a clove of garlic in her purse because she felt restaurant cooks never added enough.”
Among her quirks was a distaste for vegetables or anything that got in the way of a dinner’s principal course, a prejudice that became especially pronounced at holidays. “At Christmas, we were never allowed turkey, only goose or Muscovy duck,” she said. “We were not allowed side dishes, so we begged and pleaded, ‘Couldn’t we please make some brussels sprouts.’ ”
A small
salad to accompany the goose was Lady Caroline’s concession to the season — that and Christmas pudding doused with brandy butter and set alight. “Emphasis on brandy,” Ms. Lowell said.
In Sag Harbor, where she lives now in a big house inherited from her mother, she will have a Christmas tree this year, she said, and hang stockings and prepare a large dinner with friends and play Santa for her daughter, Daisy, who is still “at an age where she wants to believe.”
Ms. Lowell will not fall down drunk as she attempts stealthily to haul a pillowcase of presents down the staircase, as her mother once did. “We heard her voice saying, ‘Damn it!’ ” Ms. Lowell said, referring to herself and a sister who would die of a heroin overdose in her teens. “When we called out ‘Who is it?’ her voice came back: ‘Oh, darlings, it’s
Santa Claus. Shhhh!’ ”
At Christmas, Ms. Lowell said: “There is such a multitude of opportunities to mess up, to get everything wrong. The clothes one buys for men, for instance, are always too big.
“My grandmother perennially gave joke presents,” she said, referring to the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. “Novelty gifts like plastic dog turds and wind-up penises. My mother was always in a state of rage. ‘Every year something insulting,’ she said. ‘Every year!’ ”
As it happened, Lady Caroline herself, while in no obvious ways an emotionally ample person, had an unexpected streak of generosity when it came to giving gifts. “She pretended she was not good at it and never wrapped anything, except perhaps in some crumpled newspapers, and would always say, ‘Oh, these are just some pathetic little sags,’ which is what she called the antiques shops in Sag Harbor — Pathetic Sags.”
In truth, her gifts “were thoughtfully chosen — a lamp, a nice print — and not pathetic at all.”
Until the last year of her life, Lady Caroline took on the role of Santa at Christmas. “At the end, when she was dying of cancer, she could not do it anymore,” Ms. Lowell explained. “Still, we were all together, and miraculously the holiday came off without anyone having a histrionic fit.”
The mother who, in Ms. Lowell’s telling, had never been much of a mother could barely eat by then, her disease was so advanced. And the alcoholic famous for throwing away the cap of a vodka bottle after opening it could no longer drink as lavishly as she had. “She could only hold down a bit of sake,” Ms. Lowell said. Still, they had a Christmas feast in 1995, two months before Lady Caroline’s death: no turkey or trimmings but also no battles royal. “Perhaps we should have had a last big fight to keep tradition,” Ms. Lowell said.
That the day came off sweetly, as does her memoir, and that it was not tinctured with bitterness owes to a particular strain of stubborn fortitude and realism that runs in her otherwise unconventional clan, she explained. “The women in my family are very strong,” she said. “They always have the sense that, even when horrible things happen, you have no option but to carry on. Publicly, my mother was a complete pessimist, total doom-and-gloom. Yet until the end, she retained her curiosity, an eagerness to see what might be next.”
Even if you cannot eat the goose that you yourself cooked, she added, “you can always look forward to who is coming to lunch.”
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