IN SPITE OF MYSELF: An Autobiography

by Winthrop Sargeant ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 17, 1970

Mr. Sargeant wrote this memoir twenty years ago and it was not intended for publication: discreet in tone, it remains essentially a very private audit, reflecting inevitably the uncertainty and the diffidence of the man who lived so much alone in spite of two marriages and two subsequent breakdowns. With a certain candor which still keeps its distance, he records his childhood with a dominant mother who wanted him to become a violinist--achieved at eighteen when he played with the San Francisco Symphony. Always there are the discrepant rifts between his chivalric concept of love and its reality as experienced in two marriages (one to a maternal-protective woman he did not love; the second to a forbearing casualty of his neurosis) and their attendant depressions, the second one entailing a paralytic writer's cramp. In between he writes interestingly about his criticism--he has been for many years The New Yorker's music critic and before that worked for Time and Life. All of it is modulated by taste and insight however inner-directed.

Pub Date: July 17, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1970

Categories: NONFICTION