Second life of Henry Miller reviewed this issue (see Mary V. Dearborn's ``The Happiest Man Alive'', above), this one longer, more richly detailed, with bigger critiques of Miller's works. As portrayed by Ferguson (Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun, 1987), Miller turns out to be a two-sided writer, showing himself in his autobiographical fiction to be ``the happiest man alive'' despite the depths of his lifelong suffering. A charismatic of superhuman generosity, with a great gathering of ``friends.'' Miller nonetheless drew these friends harshly in his novels, so much so that one old school friend from Brooklyn wrote his own ``honest and warm'' memoir of Miller and called him hard, unfeeling, vicious, and monstrously cruel. Dearborn and Ferguson split on whether or not Miller fathered Anais Nin's stillborn daughter (Dearborn says you can't tell, but Ferguson makes very dark assumptions). Once Tropic of Cancer was published (1934) and Miller as 45 began to become ``Henry Miller,'' he also drank more, became boisterous and boorish in mixed company in order to live up to his satyr image, and enjoyed ragging friends and stealing from them. This image also fostered his famous begging letters; he saw himself as a beggar 25 years later even after the riches flowed in f rom the Grove Press editions of his banned novels: begging showed who his friends were. Once Miller became ``Henry Miller,'' Ferguson says, ``the ability or the desire to ridicule his own pretensions was largely gone,'' and he became a guru to the Beats with a foggy grasp of cosmology and philosophy. His ``autobiographical fictions...do not profit from repeated reading. They are not like symphonies or great novels that offer more with each successive experience of them. Rather they offer less...'' Ferguson shows Miller full-tilt in violent rebellion against the puritanism and materialism of his era, deep in suffering one moment, a great prancing goat the next. The last years are quite sad.
Pub Date: May 27, 1991
ISBN: 0-393-02978-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
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
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