These journals are in no way a substitute for the autobiography Wilder never wrote but, on the 10th anniversary of his death, they provide an engrossing journey through the landscapes of one of America's most wide-ranging literary minds of the mid-20th century. In these leisure-time jottings Wilder recorded his observations on America's cultural heritage, on concepts for future projects (all too frequently works later abandoned, but which sometimes sprouted as brief segments of others), on his evaluation of contemporary writers, on the basics of a novel, and so on. What these journals lack is the usual stuff of diaries: the I, the who I met, the where I was. We never learn what Wilder is doing from day to day, only what he is thinking. He pops up in mundane and exotic locales: Saratoga Springs, Daytona Beach, Quebec, St. Moritz, Spain. He doesn't tell us the purpose of these travels, nor his impressions of the places he visited and the people he met. (Vivian Leigh gives him a fresh insight on Anna Karenina. So much for Vivian Leigh.) But if they lack anecdotes, gossip or local color, the journals are mentally evocative and wonderously readable. While working on The Skin of Our Teeth, he mulls over the age-old convention of regarding the actress as "courtesan," a phenomenon he attributes to the fact that, by appearing on stage, the actress violates society's taboos against women presenting themselves as "accessible" and "inviting." The actress "is delivered into the hands, into the thought-impulse life of the audience by the fact that she is on stage. . .as Woman, as prey, victim, partner, and connivance. . ." He concludes this entry with: "The above written while mildly drunk on a quart of Bordeaux." Following WW II service, Wilder devoted considerable thought to the series of lectures on American literature he had agreed to present at Harvard. Here we see Wilder as literary historian, evaluating and re-evaluating Melville, Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, et al.—gnawing over his concepts, reworking them, worrying. After completing the text of his Thoreau lecture, he writes: "I reap now the whole harvest of my presumption in embarking on such a large subject. . . Are those ideas (in my hands) not ideas but little grabby maulings of notions that completely elude me?" Opining that "most of the time Melville is an atrocious writer," he adds: "At the bottom of it all is an extremely disordered man, living in an age and environment which offered him nothing he could understand except the vastness of its life-engagement—and that he misunderstood." Many of these entries involve Wilder's struggles with works he never completed, most notably his metaphysical drama The Emporium. He writes, rewrites, exalts, criticizes and despairs. It is not likely that Wilder's journals will stir much interest among the rank-and-file of readers. For the Wilder specialist, however, they will provide a rich lode of new information to mine and assay. And for those readers who have enjoyed his writings, the sound of his clear, literate voice speaking once again from the page should be a welcome reunion.
Pub Date: Sept. 18, 1985
ISBN: 0300040547
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1985
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
