Revealing a Real Life in Historical Fiction: Writing Helen Lowe-Porter
Helen Lowe-Porter was the translator of Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize-winning German novelist. She was also a committed writer herself, striving all her life to fulfill her own artistic ambitions while translating 22 of Mann’s books and raising three daughters. Her marriage to the distinguished scholar Elias Lowe brought passion but also trouble into her life.
(5 Research Tips for Writing Historical Fiction.)
Like so many high-achieving women of her time (she lived from 1876 to 1963), Helen’s work was often overlooked, or, when it was noticed, unfairly criticized. The critic Harry Levin accused her in print of laziness and incompetence for omitting a difficult passage in Doctor Faustus—an omission requested by the author himself, who sympathized but refused to defend her publicly.
In her late 70s, Helen retired from translating to focus on her own writing—producing, to her own wonder, a novel called Sea Change. Despite admiration from Mann and attempts by her agent, the novel was never published. It was a final, devastating disappointment.
My mother-in-law, Patricia Lowe, was Helen and Elias’s daughter. In her own old age, Patricia—a gifted writer herself—began to write a memoir about her illustrious parents. When she died, her work unfinished, I inherited her research. Reading Helen’s letters, her erudite, humble introductions to Mann’s novels, her illuminating essays about translation, her poetry, I heard the echoes of other women artists, then and now, torn between their creative vision and their devotion to family and profession.
I too felt passionately committed to writing at a young age. But I lacked Helen’s persistence and conviction. In the early years of marriage and child-rearing I wrote only occasionally, almost surreptitiously. No one ever saw what I wrote.
But then I began chronicling the new theatre work, called Playback Theatre, that my husband and I had created along with our fellow pioneers. I wrote what I saw, what I thought, reaching for artistry as I crafted my words. It was like riding a horse again, my body instantly familiar with the rhythm, the exhilaration. I knew what to do. I knew how to evoke and explain this remarkable theatre practice based on real people’s stories. My first article was quickly accepted by a major theatre journal.
I kept writing, mostly about Playback Theatre. My books and articles, often in translations, served our growing community. I had an audience. But I knew there was more.
For years I resisted the temptation to write fiction. Fiction was neither pragmatic nor altruistic. The world does not need more short stories, I thought. I said as much to a writer friend, and she scolded me sharply. That’s not for you to judge, she said. If you have stories to write, you must write them.
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And eventually I did. I loved the freedom to invent worlds, summon characters, forget about utility. Seeing my fiction in print brought a different satisfaction: the knowledge that the stories, with their embedded perceptions of reality, reached and spoke to strangers.
Reading through Patricia’s files after her death, I was struck again both by Helen’s brilliance and her frustrations. She wrestled constantly with the treatment she received from Mann and his publisher Knopf, and with the obstacles to finding her own literary success. I knew that Patricia would have wanted me to finish the memoir that she had started. (I did edit and publish the chapters she had completed, together with some of her poetry and short stories. The launch of this little book when she was 90 was a great joy for her.)
I didn’t want to write a memoir or a biography. But Helen’s story held me. I let myself imagine a moment in her last days, looking back at her life. It grew into a short story, then something more, and finally I admitted that I was writing a novel. I worked on the book for a long time, researching Helen’s life, her relationships, and the times that she lived through, including the suffrage movement and two world wars. I visited Oxford, where she and Elias raised their family. I spent hours in the Morgan Library with Elias’s tiny pocket diaries, uncovering secrets. I shaped a narrative around the milestones of Helen’s life, expanded with imagined episodes and characters.
I was afraid all along that my novel, called Mrs. Lowe-Porter, would meet the same fate as Helen’s Sea Change. My fiction-publishing history is thin. Would I, like Helen, face a thumbs-down verdict on the literary aspirations of an aging writer?
In this respect I had better luck than her. After much effort, and with essential help from others, I found a dynamic small publisher who loved my book.
Helen, at least in my imagining of her, is no longer the almost-invisible “H. T. Lowe-Porter,” as all her translations were credited. She speaks in my pages, a brilliant, forthright, tender, politically engaged woman who deserves the spotlight at last.
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