Anouilh once said "When you're forty, half of you belongs to the past — and when you are seventy, nearly all of you." Mr. Wilson's retrospective belongs wholly to that past and, except for the initial section dealing with a still earlier one, it is based on the diaries he kept during the last twenty years which he has converted here into a book — "a last effort to fill a vacuum"? In the beginning all seems lenitive and harmonious as he writes about the upstate New York countryside, "beautiful but now empty," with perhaps a "cold storage" quality but still the house and landscape where he belongs — it is his "pied a terre in stability." At the end too there are spot touches which are reciprocally saddening as one contemplates the reductions of old age (his heart, his hearing, and of course his teeth), his estrangement from the small community in which he lives, and his difficulties with so many people, even Elena his friend of twenty years on whom he is admittedly dependent. In fact Mr. Wilson is often unpleasantly contentious with apparently very few "raisons que la raison ne connait pas." He is uncharitable toward almost all the friends and compeers of his life: nitpicking with Nabokov whose arrogance he shares; commenting on the death of Hemingway "absurd and insufferable though he often was," and Thurber's after his "vastations"; he is even minimizing about his other very good friend Helen's cancer; and of course sometimes he is wickedly funny — Walter Edmonds reading only historical novels "as if following the stock market of his own investments." At the outset there is a tribute to his cousin, Dorothy Mendenhall, who became one of the first woman doctors and she is heard saying "the worst thing about old age is the rapidity with which your periphery shrinks." Mr. Wilson is aware of it even if he makes few concessions to that diminishing world of his experiences and relationships. You will find him antipatico which is just where the tattletale quotient of this memoir is heightened; but then, after faulting Van Wyck Brooks for paying too much attention to all the reviews of his books, you will find it depressing to think of Mr. Wilson getting up at four o'clock in the morning to read "old reviews of my books.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1971
ISBN: 0815624999
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1971
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
