When walking I listen to a variety of podcasts. A new favorite is the smart Lost Ladies of Lit by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes. These two podcasters reacquaint modern readers with forgotten or overlooked women writers from the past.
Discussed recently was the main character portrayed in Mrs. Lowe-Porter, a biographical novel by Jo Salas about Helen Lowe-Porter, the woman who translated Thomas Mann’s novels into English.
I was keen to read Mrs. Lowe-Porter after enjoying The Magician by Colm Tóibín, a fascinating biographical novel about Mann, one of the world’s great twentieth century novelists. A hundred years after Mann wrote his first novel, Buddenbrooks, Mann remains a well-known figure, famous in part for winning a Nobel prize for literature in 1929. Helen Lowe-Porter, however, seems to have drifted into obscurity.
Mrs. Lowe-Porter opens in Munich, Germany in 1906. Helen Tracy Porter, an American, aspires to be a novel writer. While studying at university she meets Elias Loew, an attractive Jew, also from the United States. Loew is working on a doctorate in paleography. Affection between the couple ignites a passion that captivates Helen. To her, Elias is sophisticated, bold, and carefree, everything Helen imagines she is not but would like to be. With Elias, she feels liberated emotionally and sexually.
In the photo below is Helen on a camping trip in Bavaria with Elias Loew in 1907, a picture that inspired Chapter Two in the novel. According to author Jo Salas, Elias documented the camping trip in his diary.
In time, marriage follows, and Helen finds herself pregnant, altering the trajectory of the artistic life she has envisioned for herself. Motherhood, along with being married to a man like Elias, who likes to stretch the boundaries of marital commitment, consumes all of Helen’s energy. She has no time to write.
Adding insult to her sadness, Elias refuses to take Helen’s desire to write a novel seriously. “Women’s great talent is nurture, not to create,” he says in the novel. “Genius is the province of men. It is self-evident. Where are the female Shakespeares and Miltons? The female Rembrandts?” You get the point.
A youthful Elias Loew
Helen doesn’t agree with Elias’s assessment of women’s intellectual or creative powers, nor the role he thinks women should play at home or in society. Still, she helps him with his paleography papers. On the side, she translates German to English for pay, enabling her to augment the family budget, which Elias doesn’t object to for obvious reasons. The couple is young, and finances are tight.
Below the surface, Helen seethes. In a matter of a few short years, she wonders, whose life is she really living? Meanwhile, World War I is prompting discrimination toward people with German-sounding names. Elias changes their surname to Lowe to Anglicize it.
Life takes a new turn for Helen in 1923 when Alfred Knopf of the American powerhouse publishing company bearing his name engages her to translate Thomas Mann’s novels into English. “It was like being asked to bring Shakespeare to readers who did not yet know him. An overwhelming honor. An enormous task. And irresistible,” Helen thinks in the novel. Her assignment: start by translating Buddenbrooks.
In a quiet act of defiance, she resurrects her maiden name. Helen Tracy Lowe becomes H.T. Lowe-Porter. (Hence the name Mrs. Lowe-Porter.) By taking back her maiden name, Helen is asserting a measure of independence from Elias. By using her initials, she is refusing to allow the world to minimize her.
Upon opening the copy of Mann’s Magic Mountain that sits on my bookshelf, excitement stirred in me. There she was: H.T. Lowe-Porter. Her translator’s note at the beginning of the book reveals Helen’s modesty. In a single sentence, she described her translation as, “...the version in all humility here offered to English readers, inadequate though it may be...”
Mrs. Lowe-Porter is an outstanding novel, well-written and imaginatively plotted. Drawing readers into Helen’s orbit is Jo Salas’s deft hand in presenting a dual timeline. Helen’s voice is full of life as the story flows between her present and 1963 when Helen is an old woman. These diametric sides of her enable a rich character arc to unfold.
To be clear, Mrs. Lowe-Porter isn’t only a story about a woman who translates books. It is the much deeper tale of a woman with longings out of sync with the strictures of her time. Like many talented women who aspired to live independent, creative lives during the first half of the twentieth century, Helen Lowe-Porter went about her days in quiet desperation. An ironclad, male-dominated hierarchy that kept women subservient stymied Helen, making her symbolic of simmering women people like Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir would write about decades later in books like The Feminine Mystique and The Second Sex.
Helen, however, is not a woman to be pitied. Reading the novel, you will admire her for her ability to find her voice in unsuspecting ways as she represents every woman who has tried to balance career and family, who has suffered heartbreak, or who has struggled to find her place in the world.
So, who was the real Helen Lowe-Porter?
To find out more about Helen Lowe-Porter, I encourage you to read Mrs. Lowe-Porter. Typically I summarize biographical details about the charcter in the book under review. But to do so here would spoil the story for you. The novel closely follows the historical record of Helen’s life.
Instead, I wanted to examine up close what went into writing about Helen. Though she never met her, author Jo Salas is married to one of Helen’s grandsons, placing Salas in a unique position to bring Helen’s story to light. Writing about family, however, even in a historical novel, can be tricky.
Curious to find out how Salas approached the intricate task of writing about a family member in historical fiction that is biographical, I contacted her for a phone interview. When I asked how she walked the fine line of blending fiction with family lore, Salas said respecting family privacy yet remaining true to Helen’s lived experience was at the core of her writing. “I was always concerned about what family members would think, and I felt some responsibility, not quite an obligation, to my mother-in-law [Patricia], who wrote about her parents. She and I talked about it a lot.”
Salas's mother-in-law, who is no longer living, published her collected thoughts about Helen, but Salas said they were briefer than what she aimed for. “I felt that she would have wanted me to finish what she had started, and I didn’t want to write a biography.” Salas did, however, want to tell Helen’s story in a way that gave readers access to the real Helen. This sometimes meant competing with what Patricia had started, leaving Salas with “slightly conflicting obligations to Helen and Patricia.” For an author, this can be an unenviable place to be, especially when people who knew the person about whom you are writing are still living. Individual memories often recall the same event or the same people differently.
Salas said her husband was very supportive of her writing Helen’s story, however, even if it meant revealing certain private aspects of Helen and Elias’s relationship. Exposing family secrets caused some initial consternation among other family members. Salad found she had to put aside possible objections. “My imagined relationship was with Helen,” she said, which influenced her decision to use Helen’s and Elias’s real names. “It was a huge step to do that. It gave the story more edge.” Although Salas used Helen’s and Elias’s real names in the novel along with other well-known figures like Alfred and Blanche Knopf, Albert Einstein, who was a friend and neighbor of Helen and Elias, and a few other close associates, Salas stated the novel does not represent the lives of Helen’s children or grandchildren.
With Patricia Lowe’s work as a place to start, along with a biography of Helen that provided “connective tissue” for Salas to stitch Helen’s story together, Salas also had the rare opportunity to gather family members’ written and verbal recollections and examine some of Helen’s own notes, although according to Salas, Helen didn’t write much about her inner world. “She didn’t keep a diary like her husband [Elias] did, so you need these leaps of imagination to connect the dots. I felt humbled and apprehensive about going into that arena. I had thoughts like Helen might have had. Am I allowed to do this?” Without Helen’s more personal details, to get past what might have stopped other writers, Salas decided, “I needed to fictionalize the story to allow myself space to write.”
Helen Lowe-Porter 1910
Not surprisingly, within even a small cache of source material, Salas ran across conflicting information. “Forbidding,” is what Helen’s grandchildren described her as when Patricia Lowe once asked them what they remembered about Helen. Said Salas, “That was such a strange reality when I put that beside what Helen wrote about her grandchildren…It [Helen’s writing] was with such love and engagement.” About her children, “Helen wrote with such affection and with such details while Elias was away. It was so clear how she enjoyed them. So I rendered her as a loving, engaged mother and grandmother.”
As a person, Helen was more than these roles. She was a woman as well, with inner hopes and big dreams. But according to family members, Helen spent her life in self-doubt. “Like many women who have a strong interest to create,” Salas said, “we have voices inside that tell us we’re not good enough. She constantly said things like, ‘I’m sure I made mistakes,’ but another part of her had a very strong calling to writing and translating…Most women today would be able to relate to those kinds of doubts. How many of us wish we had more hours in a day? It is this, and so many other things, which makes Helen’s story timeless.”
In the novel we see Helen’s self-doubts masterfully on display in Salas’s prose. For example, Helen spends years working on a novel, one in which the main character periodically interacts with Helen, a brilliant device for revealing Helen’s deepest fears and recriminations. Through those exchanges, readers see how torn Helen is between desire and obligation, how she chastises herself for her perceived shortcomings. In other parts of the novel, we cheer as Helen picks herself up, dusts herself off, and moves forward with grace and determination.
What does Jo Salas most want people to remember about Helen Lowe-Porter? “First,” she said, “is the scope of Helen’s work as a translator.” As it turns out, quite a few people have written to Salas to express how well the novel shows what a translator really does, me included. It’s easy to take for granted the contributions of those working behind the scenes of successful people, be they men or women. In Helen’s case, Mann’s surge as an author took place in part during and after World War I when anti-German sentiment was rampant. Without her artful conversion of Mann’s erudite, sometimes dense prose, into English, would he have risen to prominence to the degree he did beyond the German-speaking world? It’s hard to say. Jo Salas thinks Helen played a significant part. What I leaned reading Mrs. Lowe-Porter is that translators don’t simply convert prose by exchanging words from one language to the next. A bit of story magic is required. When done well, translations have the potential to amplify the prose. Never again will I read a translated book without thinking of the translator’s influence.
Second, Salas wants people to remember “Helen’s talent, her gifts, and her drive as a writer in her own right and the obstacles she faced.” As stated earlier, the time in which Helen lived was not friendly to women whose spirits resisted the norms thrust upon them. In her own way, Helen broke through barriers that would have defeated a less determined woman. And third, Salas wants people to see Helen as a family woman. “Her children and grandchildren were very important to her…Many, many women have parallel challenges in their life—managing work, career, and self. There was, and there still is, a different experience for women in these elements as there is for men.”
I couldn’t agree more. My deepest thanks to Jo Salas for her interview. Her book pays great tribute to her grandmother-in-law, a woman who left her indelible mark in history for all to see.
For more about Helen Lowe-Porter or Jo Salas, check out the articles below. Meanwhile, listening to Lost Ladies of Lit, my to-be-read list grows…
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Continued Reading about Helen Lowe Porter
New York Times article: “The Secret of Thomas Mann’s Translator”
Anothet remarkable choice in a world of woman writers waiting for their due. Insightful commentary.