Poets in Their Youth: A Memoir (review)

Abstract

276 biography Vol. 6, No. 3 memory, to allow the self, as Picasso once put it, to begin at zero with each new creation. She spoke for those writers of autobiographical fiction who were, indeed, trying to create an identity as a writer but who were not trying to write a story of their own life, and who rejected identity rooted in history. Spengemann defends ahistorical autobiography ; but it may seem to some readers that autobiography divorced from history is impossible. As an introduction to autobiography as genre, Spengemann's book, however, is valuable both for its sensible reading of major texts—Grace Abounding, The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Prelude, for example—and its willingness to deal with the problem of modern autobiography . A most important contribution is a lengthy (more than seventy pages) bibliographical essay which offers a critical overview of standard and recent works dealing with autobiography in general, and an extended discussion of works pertaining directly to the texts Spengemann explores. Linda Simon Emory University Notes 1. In Gertrude Stein, Writings and Lectures 1909-1945, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz. Baltimore : Penguin, 1974, pp. 148-56. 2. "Portraits and Repetition," in Meyerowitz, op.cit., p. 102. Eileen Simpson, Poets in Their Youth: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 1982. 262 pp. $15.50. In Life Is Elsewhere Milan Kundera paints a decidedly cynical picture of the genesis of a poet. According to Kundera, the moment this young Werther's vocation is born can be pinpointed precisely: It was turning dark, Dad was not coming home, and it occurred to Maman that Jaromil's face was full of a gentle beauty which no artist or husband could match. This improper thought was so insistent that she could not free herself of it. . . . Then she told him that literature had always been her greatest love. She had even gone to the university mainly to study literature and it was only marriage (she did not say pregnancy ) that prevented her from devoting herself to this deepest inclination . If she now saw Jaromil as a poet (yes, she was the first to pin this REVIEWS 277 great title on him), it is a wonderful surprise, and yet it is also something she had long expected. They found consolation in one another, these two unsuccessful lovers, mother and son, and talked far into the night. The crucible—read womb—of art for Jaromil lies in his mother's suffocating devotion. And he, a classic Puer aeternus, returns this hothouse love in kind, obligingly dying young—that is, before he has had a chance to be thoroughly unfaithful—to please her. You don't have to be a graduate of the C. G. Jung Institute to spot that the young poets of Eileen Simpson's memoir—principally, John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, and Robert Lowell—were all men either devoured by or hopelessly consecrated to (pick your favorite guilty party) their mothers. This shared psychological orientation, it seems clear, and not the travails of serving a Romantic muse, produced three difficult, prematurely ended lives as well as the alcoholism and madness that accompanied them. Simpson, who was married to Berryman, has created a muted, pastel word sketch of these men—one which might have disappointed her subjects (themselves so avid to hear the worst about their literary heroes) by its studious avoidance of voyeuristic detail. The book is so tasteful, in fact, that it is difficult at first to understand why Eileen Simpson has written it. Surely not as exorcism: feelings are described, not evoked; one senses that key scenes have been censored, much ugliness glossed over (though who, having loved a person going slowly and hopelessly mad, has the superhuman strength to retrace every step of that sad lost footpath now filling up with dead leaves?) Ultimately, however, Simpson divorces her emotions so totally from the painful episodes of the past that a reader feels no sense of catharsis, only a trailing off, by book's end. Did she write it, then, to set the record straight? Character is portrayed sporadically and mostly by anecdote; since none of the lives is followed through completely, no fully developed portraits—not even the one of...