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Robert Weibezahl

NonfictionBiography

Sometimes You Have to Lie

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Generations of children, and more than few adults, have embraced the antics of Harriet the Spy and its singular heroine since it was published in 1964. As Leslie Brody reports in Sometimes You Have to Lie, her absorbing biography of the elusive author Louise Fitzhugh, the classic middle grade novel sold around 2.5 million copies in its first five years, a number that is now approaching 5 million worldwide. Fitzhugh, who died at age 46 in 1974, was publicity-shy even by the more genteel standards of her day, and her literary executors have remained guarded about releasing her private papers. Faced with this estimable hurdle, Brody has succeeded admirably in reconstructing Fitzhugh’s complicated, often troubled life.

Fitzhugh was born into a well-heeled family in Memphis, Tennessee, but from the beginning she pushed against the constraints of propriety. Her ill-matched parents separated and divorced (in a scandalous trial that the local public devoured) while Fitzhugh was still an infant, and for years her imperious father told his daughter that her mother was dead. Though she eventually reunited with her mother, Fitzhugh had lifelong issues with both of her parents, and the querulous, outlier spirit that defines her most famous character would also come to drive the author herself. From puberty, young Fitzhugh knew that she was a lesbian, and by the time she dropped out of Bard College and moved to New York City to make her mark, she was already completely comfortable in her own skin.

Fitzhugh viewed herself first and foremost as a visual artist, and for much of her life she focused on her painting. She was fully immersed in the downtown New York art scene of the 1950s and early ’60s, and her bohemian lifestyle was made all the more colorful by her central place in the lesbian subculture. Fitzhugh’s circle of friends and lovers was a group of smart, talented women who largely kept their sexual orientation on the Q.T. She was less concerned with midcentury decorum than many of her peers, dressing mostly in men’s clothing, and it seems few blinked twice at her out-of-the-closet ways. When Harriet the Spy was published and became a widespread success, however, Fitzhugh’s publisher capitalized on her natural shyness to try and keep the truth of her sexuality from readers.

Harriet the Spy, with its ill-behaved, uncompromising and inquisitive heroine, is a subversive work and, in retrospect, might be read as a coded version of a gay adolescent’s experience of being different, wrestling with a reality that doesn’t match up to the norm. As the world becomes a more affirming place for members of the LGBTQ community, perhaps it will also finally catch up with the nonconforming, unsentimental, trailblazing Louise Fitzhugh.

Generations of children, and more than few adults, have embraced the antics of Harriet the Spy and its singular heroine since it was published in 1964. As Leslie Brody reports in Sometimes You Have to Lie, her absorbing biography of the elusive author Louise Fitzhugh, the classic middle grade novel sold around 2.5 million copies […]
FictionShort Stories

The Neil Gaiman Reader

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Neil Gaiman is generally categorized as a writer of fantasy or speculative fiction, but as the 52 selections in The Neil Gaiman Reader confirm, the beloved storyteller’s gifts defy neat classification. This doorstop-size volume will surely be welcomed by Gaiman’s legion of fans, but its greater purpose may be to introduce his work to those who are not yet acolytes. Spanning his career from 1984 to 2018, these stories, novellas and excerpts from novels are presented in chronological order and offer a broad overview of his talent for fiction.

When it came time to select the stories included here, Gaiman delegated the job to his fans, who voted for their favorites online. The novel excerpts, on the other hand, were chosen by the author and his editor and include extracts from some of his most popular works, including American Gods, Anansi Boys and Neverwhere. For die-hard fans who have already read his entire opus, Gaiman throws in one previously unpublished story, “Monkey and the Lady,” a whimsically philosophical fable. The end product is a hefty volume that warrants dipping into rather than devouring cover-to-cover, an approach that Gaiman himself encourages in his preface.

There is something here for nearly every taste. While the heart of a Gaiman story always contains an element of the fantastical, there is also always something rudimentarily human at its core. This quality, along with his superior narrative skills, may be what most separates Gaiman from less polished writers in the fantasy genre. A story such as “Chivalry,” wherein a pensioner buys the Holy Grail at a thrift shop for 30 pence and is then visited by an excruciatingly polite and valorous Sir Galahad, is at turns hilarious and surprisingly touching. “The Goldfish and Other Stories” brilliantly captures the vagaries and absurdities of the film business while being about so much more: quickly fading history, unexpected friendship and the cultural mythology that can be created despite documented proof to the contrary. The devastating loss of memory to senility propels “The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury,” which is also a backdoor homage to Gaiman’s masterful literary progenitor. “Snow, Glass, Apples” may leave you rethinking every fairy tale you have taken at face value since childhood.

The Neil Gaiman Reader is filled with far too many riches to explore here. In his foreword, Marlon James writes that the ghost of Jorge Luis Borges, the great fabulist, hovers over these stories, but really, Gaiman’s influences are more numerous and far-flung. Indeed, this volume provides evidence that Gaiman has transcended those influences to become the influencer himself, creating fictional landscapes that inspire and move us as much as they entertain.

Neil Gaiman is generally categorized as a writer of fantasy or speculative fiction, but as the 52 selections in The Neil Gaiman Reader confirm, the beloved storyteller’s gifts defy neat classification. This doorstop-size volume will surely be welcomed by Gaiman’s legion of fans, but its greater purpose may be to introduce his work to those […]
FictionLiterary Fiction

Inside Story

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Though this book is categorized as a novel, there is little that, on the surface, appears fictional in British writer Martin Amis’ capacious “novelized memoir,” Inside Story. The book, he writes in its opening pages, “is about a life, my own, so it won’t read like a novel—more like a collection of linked short stories, with essayistic detours.” These short stories might better be called “episodes” that congeal into a metanarrative that is largely about the author’s lasting friendships with three late writers whose deaths left various scars on his personal landscape: his dear friend Christopher Hitchens, his mentor Saul Bellow and his parents’ close friend, the poet Philip Larkin.

Amis’ account sprawls back and forth across decades and continents, shifting not only in time but also in tense and voice, interrupted by a sometimes overwhelming quantity of explicating footnotes. This intentional disregard for conventional storytelling further blurs the line between truth and imagination. The reader presumes that much of the content is true at heart, with specifics morphed by the passage of time and the untrustworthiness of memory. But which parts are made up?

Readers might suspect that the character of Phoebe Phelps, a quirky, often infuriating girlfriend from the 1970s who remains Amis’ obsession for his entire adult life, is based in truth, if perhaps wildly exaggerated. But was she really a former escort turned high-class madam masquerading as a financial executive? Who knows? Amis certainly isn’t saying, nor should he. The important thing is that Phoebe drops a tantalizing, if dubious, bombshell halfway through that provides the book’s most compelling plot twist.

In one of the labyrinthine footnotes late in the book, Amis says of Bellow, “All the dead were in his custody, and he couldn’t let them go.” These elegant words might be applied to the real-life Amis as well. Now 71, this once-young buck of the British literary scene cannot help but look death, mortality and the meaning of life squarely in the face. And he does so with a singular panache and much offhanded wit, forging through upheavals past and present: 9/11, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Trump presidency, totalitarianism, Islamism, the sexual revolution, Alzheimer’s and cancer, among many other dark realities.

Most readers will likely deem Inside Story more memoir than novel. It is certainly a sui generis work either way. Early on I christened it a “kitchen sink” book (as in, “everything but the”) and had to laugh, about halfway in, when the fictional Amis actually “poured the [drink] down the kitchen sink.” Yet whatever its hybrid status suggests, it regally caps Amis’ estimable literary career with cheeky candor and more than a touch of razzle-dazzle.

Though this book is categorized as a novel, there is little that, on the surface, appears fictional in British writer Martin Amis’ capacious “novelized memoir,” Inside Story. The book, he writes in its opening pages, “is about a life, my own, so it won’t read like a novel—more like a collection of linked short stories, […]
NonfictionPoetryEssays

The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Has there ever been a more germane time to read Audre Lorde? This trailblazing Black writer, a lesbian and the daughter of immigrants, stood unflinchingly at the vanguard of the many interlocking fights for social justice during her lifetime. More than 25 years after her too-early death, many of the issues Lorde advocated for and articulated in her work are once again capturing national attention and demanding action. The ever-thoughtful, often brilliant Lorde hasn’t always received the notice she deserves. Ideally, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, edited by one of her artistic progenies, the author Roxane Gay, will right that wrong.

For Gay, and no doubt for many others, Lorde was “a beacon, a guiding light. And she was far more than that because her prose and poetry astonished me,” Gay writes in her introduction. The works collected here are equally divided between prose and poetry, providing an excellent entry point into Lorde’s wide-ranging yet particular concerns and capturing her singular literary voice, aptly described by Gay as “intelligent, fierce, powerful, sensual, provocative, indelible.” The poems explore womanhood, motherhood and race, as well as love in its many manifestations. Her poetic style alternates between frank directness and elliptical inquiry. 

Lorde never shied away from unpopular truths, and her essays, often written as public addresses, take on not only the patriarchy but also the feminist movement, which shunted aside (or blatantly ignored) the different realities of women of color. Feminism’s failure to recognize nonwhite, non-heterosexual experiences not only harmed marginalized women but also undermined the movement as a whole, as Lorde made clear in her writings.

Racism was an inescapable companion for Lorde, and her fierce reactions to it—weariness, rage, sometimes astonishment but never acceptance—remain timely. This passage, from a 1981 piece on women’s response to racism, could easily have been written in 2020: “I cannot hide my anger to spare your guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.”

Perhaps the world is catching up with Audre Lorde at last.

Has there ever been a more germane time to read Audre Lorde? This trailblazing Black writer, a lesbian and the daughter of immigrants, stood unflinchingly at the vanguard of the many interlocking fights for social justice during her lifetime. More than 25 years after her too-early death, many of the issues Lorde advocated for and […]
NonfictionBiography

The Mystery of Charles Dickens

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Is there room on the shelf for another book about Charles Dickens? The great novelist has been endlessly scrutinized by critics and biographers, bowdlerized on stage and screen, and lionized by generations of readers since his death 150 years ago. A.N. Wilson, the celebrated British biographer of many eminent Victorians (including Queen Victoria herself), now lends his expertise and singular perspective in The Mystery of Charles Dickens.

Rather than providing a straightforward, linear biography, Wilson explores Dickens’ life and work through the prism of seven “mysteries” that shaped the elusive writer. “Dickens, as an actor and a novelist, and as a man, was a man of masks,” Wilson suggests, “who probably never revealed himself to anyone; quite conceivably, he did not reveal himself to himself.” The rich narrative begins with Dickens’ ultimate public deception: Even in the throes of death from a stroke in June 1870, he diligently kept the existence of his long-term extramarital relationship with actress Nelly Ternan from the adoring eyes of the public. Next, Wilson looks at the mysteries of Dickens’ parents—his problematic relationship with his father and his fraught feelings toward his mother—and how the depiction of childhood in his fiction reflects an ideal rather than a reality. Similarly, his disastrous marriage was marked by private cruelty that belied his magnanimous public persona. The writer’s considerable acts of charity, performed largely anonymously, were complicated as well. Wilson suggests that Dickens likely partook in the services of prostitutes even as he supported organizations tasked with setting these women on the straight and narrow.

It has long been acknowledged how much Dickens’ fiction drew on real life, both his own and the wider world he observed, but Wilson convinces readers that Dickens’ beloved fictional vision, both comic and condemning, was a creation of the writer’s imagination, not grounded in realism like Balzac. It is a romanticized picture of 19th-century reality. Wilson brings dazzling, far-reaching erudition to this study, drawing on unexpected, sometimes arcane sources to paint a portrait with impressive depth and nuance.

Is there room on the shelf for another book about Charles Dickens? The great novelist has been endlessly scrutinized by critics and biographers, bowdlerized on stage and screen, and lionized by generations of readers since his death 150 years ago. A.N. Wilson, the celebrated British biographer of many eminent Victorians (including Queen Victoria herself), now […]
NonfictionMemoirLiterature

Borges and Me

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Jay Parini, an esteemed literary biographer and accomplished novelist, calls his entertaining new book, Borges and Me, “a kind of novelistic memoir”—an apt description of a narrative that recounts decades-old memories with their “contours enhanced and distorted in the usual way by time and retelling.”

A hapless road trip with eccentric, iconic Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges anchors Jay Parini’s novelistic coming-of-age memoir.

At the center of the memoir is a series of comic episodes from a once-in-a-lifetime experience. In 1971, when he was a graduate student in Scotland, 23-year-old Parini was conscripted to look after the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, then in his 70s and blind. What transpired was a misbegotten road trip to the Highlands, with young Parini guiding the aging genius as they drove to Inverness on a dubious mission.

The journey was rife with mishaps. During a restless night spent in a widow’s dowdy bed-and-breakfast, Parini had to guide the incontinent Borges on numerous trips through the old woman’s bedroom to use her shared toilet; a capsized boat cast the pair into Loch Ness; a scary tumble landed Borges in the hospital. As Parini chronicles their misadventures with the hilarity of hindsight, he palpably re-creates his youthful anxiety and Borges’ own sometimes infuriating sanguinity.

Parini had only a vague notion of who Borges was and virtually no familiarity with his fantastical writings when he was coerced into taking care of the septuagenarian. The young American had come to St. Andrews primarily to escape the draft during the Vietnam War; during his stay, ominous letters from the draft board, forwarded from home, piled up unopened in his desk drawer, ignored but making their presence felt like Edgar Allan Poe’s tell-tale heart.

Indeed, Borges and Me, for all its charming anecdotes of the week spent with the iconic writer, is at its core Parini’s own coming-of-age memoir, as well as an acute reminiscence of a confusing time in America. The younger version of Parini wears his insecurities on his sleeve, awkwardly navigating the world of women (with persistent hopes of losing his virginity) while scrambling for a viable doctoral topic in the face of indifference from his academic adviser. His plans to study the work of the lesser-known and then still-living Scottish poet George Mackay Brown culminate in a face-to-face meeting with Brown, regrettably sans Borges.

Despite his frequent exasperation with the enigmatic Latin American author, Parini ultimately forms a special bond with Borges. (Many of the locals they encounter assume they are father and son.) Borges and Me, its title an homage to the Argentine’s own exploration of identity, Borges and I, provides a loving portrait of this singular writer, adding nuance to the legacy of the legendary fabulist’s life and work.

Jay Parini, an esteemed literary biographer and accomplished novelist, calls his entertaining new book, Borges and Me, “a kind of novelistic memoir”—an apt description of a narrative that recounts decades-old memories with their “contours enhanced and distorted in the usual way by time and retelling.” A hapless road trip with eccentric, iconic Argentine writer Jorge […]
NonfictionTrue CrimeEssays

Private Investigations

Review by Robert Weibezahl

When we talk about mystery in the book world, we generally mean a crime novel wherein a murder is committed and a sleuth, professional or amateur, figures out who done it. There are subgenres, of course—thrillers, cozies, police procedurals, even the occasional caper where no murder occurs. Yet the word mystery has much broader meaning outside publishing: a puzzle, a secret, an enigma or something unexplainable.

These latter definitions spur the 20 essays by contemporary crime fiction writers in Private Investigations, edited by Victoria Zackheim. The contributors’ assignment was to contemplate mysteries from their own lives. Some rise to the challenge with startling revelations; others take a safer route and explore why they write what they write. All engage and entertain as they share personal aspects of their lives.

Twenty contemporary crime writers leave fiction behind with essays revealing unsolvable riddles from their own lives.

The most compelling essays are those in which writers come clean about some very dark moments in their pasts. Steph Cha recalls a man who lurked in an alley and made lewd suggestions outside her apartment window, an incident that underscores the dangers women face every day. Sulari Gentill recounts discovering an uncle she never knew, locked away in an institution in Sri Lanka. Domestic disturbances also play out in William Kent Krueger’s poignant account of his mother’s experience with mental illness and Lynn Cahoon’s true tale of deception by a man who was nothing he claimed to be. The supernatural is met with some skepticism (and also some grudging acceptance) as Kristen Lepionka is haunted by a ghost and Hallie Ephron reluctantly attends a seance.

The human body is a great mystery, of course, and illness is at the center of essays by Connie May Fowler and Caroline Leavitt. What Rhys Bowen calls “The Long Shadow of War” also hangs over essays by Jacqueline Winspear and Charles Todd, who often use the backdrop of the world wars in their work. Of the essays that trace the impetus of their authors’ work, one of the most interesting is Martin Limón’s “The Land of the Morning Calm” about his love affair with Korea and its culture, which began when he was a U.S. soldier stationed there. Cara Black’s equally encompassing passion for Paris began, she tells us, by reading the Maigret novels of Georges Simenon. Like Robert Dugoni, Anne Perry writes about the “magic” of the writing process—although I, for one, not-too-secretly hoped for an account of her own murder conviction when she was a teenager, a shadowy incident she has never fully addressed.

At turns inspiring, informative and unsettling, Private Investigations will be savored by these writers’ many fans.

Twenty contemporary crime writers leave fiction behind with essays revealing unsolvable riddles from their own lives.
NonfictionMemoir

Austen Years

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Jane Austen mania has reached a fever pitch. Recently we’ve seen a television adaptation of her unfinished Sanditon and another film version of Emma. Writers both renowned and aspiring seem to write sequels or interpretations of Pride and Prejudice faster than fans can read them. It sometimes feels as if Austen, one of the greatest writers in the English canon, is valued more as source material for Regency romances than for her singular genius. Thankfully, this reductive tendency is nowhere in evidence in Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels, by literary critic Rachel Cohen, whose first book, A Chance Meeting, was a delightful study of the intertwined lives of writers and artists. Cohen’s incisive new book explores her immersion into Austen’s work during a fraught period in her personal life. Ultimately a narrative about grief, loss and resurfacing, it also provides a deep dive into some of Austen’s most penetrating writing.

This candid memoir from an accomplished literary critic seeks answers to life’s greatest challenges through the novels of Jane Austen.

“Criticism and memoir have always been near neighbors,” Cohen observes. “The gift of a pronounced personal point of view leads to deeper readings, and to new ones.” Interestingly, Cohen was not always a rabid Austen aficionado. She read Austen in high school, then moved on. Later discovering that many writers she admired had written about Austen (most notably Virginia Woolf), Cohen returned to the English author’s work. But the intersection of two major events in Cohen’s life—the death of her beloved father and the birth of her first child—prompted a period when she began to read Austen exclusively. In the pages of five of Austen’s six novels (all but Northanger Abbey, generally regarded as inferior), Cohen found entry into the uncertainties of her life as she, in her own words, “[unfolded] Jane Austen’s novels like a map.”

Cohen learned much from Austen, as will the reader of this candid memoir. Close reading and rereading grant this seasoned critic new insights into her own life, drawn from the awakenings of Austen’s resilient heroines—Elizabeth, Emma, Elinor, Marianne, Fanny, Anne—as well as peripheral characters, both female and male. From the known facts of Austen’s life story, Cohen draws conclusions about the writer’s intentions, challenges and determination, gleaning lessons for her own very different experiences two centuries later.

As a memoir, Austen Years is uncompromising and engaging, and as literary criticism, it is assured and perceptive. If these two aspects never fully coalesce, for arguably Cohen has set herself an impossible task, the book is nonetheless an absorbing pleasure that will stimulate and augment the reading of Austen for fans old and new.

This candid memoir from an accomplished literary critic seeks answers to life’s greatest challenges through the novels of Jane Austen.
FictionShort Stories

More to love from Madeline L’Engle

Review by Robert Weibezahl

This collection of forgotten short stories by the beloved writer of A Wrinkle in Time offers a fuller view of her mastery.

The discovery of unpublished work by a now departed writer is always a treat. When that writer is Madeleine L’Engle, it is undeniably cause for celebration. The Moment of Tenderness collects 18 short stories found among L’Engle’s papers by her granddaughter, Charlotte Jones Voiklis. Dating primarily from the 1940s and ’50s, all but one were written before A Wrinkle in Time made L’Engle a household name.

The stories cover myriad genres, with only a couple falling into the category of speculative fiction that we’ve come to associate L’Engle with (and oddly, these are among the least successful stories in the collection). The early stories in the book center on childhood and adolescence, and Voiklis surmises in her introduction that these—and indeed, many of the stories—are autobiographical in nature. They beautifully capture the sense of loneliness and yearning that is common to smart, somewhat isolated children. “The Mountains Shall Stand Forever” and “Summer Camp” both provide subtly chilling portraits of the cruelty children can adopt in order to run with the pack. Similarly, there is a Shirley Jackson-esque discomfort in “The Foreigners” and “The Fact of the Matter,” two of the numerous stories set in an insular rural Vermont community and narrated by a central character named Madeleine.

Before turning to fiction writing, L’Engle tried her hand at acting, and that experience informs stories about young, single women trying to make it in theater in New York City. These, like some of the Vermont stories, offer sharp slices of the midcentury American zeitgeist, when certain possibilities for women were just beginning to open up. L’Engle here enters the territory of such masters of the form as Alice Munro, John O’Hara and John Cheever. 

Some of the stories are so affecting—in particular, the elegiac title story, the aforementioned “The Foreigners” and the somewhat shocking “That Which Is Left”—that it is surprising they did not find publication in L’Engle’s lifetime. Voiklis points out that her grandmother did recycle some of this material later as episodes in novels or incidents in memoirs, a fact that provides a glimpse into the writer’s process. “You have to write the book that wants to be written,” L’Engle once said.

Due to the timelessness of her Newbery Award-winning A Wrinkle in Time, many people may think of L’Engle as a children’s author or a science fiction writer, or both. The engaging stories in The Moment of Tenderness collectively offer a different, fuller view of this talented master. 

This collection of forgotten short stories by the beloved writer of A Wrinkle in Time offers a fuller view of her mastery. The discovery of unpublished work by a now departed writer is always a treat. When that writer is Madeleine L’Engle, it is undeniably cause for celebration. The Moment of Tenderness collects 18 short stories […]
NonfictionPoetryBiography

What Is the Grass

Review by Robert Weibezahl

One of America’s most perceptive contemporary poets digs deep into the work of Walt Whitman in search of personal—and communal—signposts.

The poet and memoirist Mark Doty (My Alexandria, Dog Years) has lived intimately and intensely with Walt Whitman’s poetry for decades. As a reader, a teacher, a poet and a gay man, Doty has sought answers in the great American poet’s life and work, and through a lifetime’s deep dive into the muscular and elusive lines of Leaves of Grass, he has continually rediscovered and refined his own connection to Whitman. 

In What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life, an elegant blend of literary criticism and personal memoir, Doty positions this essential American poet in the larger framework of our national literature while chronicling his own deeply personal relationship to the writer who gave birth to new ways of looking at poetry and the world.

Doty draws our attention to Whitman’s great innovations: the invention of American free verse, the transformation of the colloquial into poetic discourse and his unabashed “open inscriptions of same-sex love.” Yet Doty, from his 21st-century vantage point, isn’t content with merely enshrining those daring advances. For him, Whitman is a living voice that reaches across time, “stepping into a readerly present with a directness and immediacy that have never lost their power to startle.” So, as Whitman’s words accompany Doty into intimate moments in his own life—often physical and spiritual encounters with lovers—they come to embody the great human embrace that the 19th-century poet propounded. Doty, of course, can be far more candid with details than his beloved forebear could have ever dared be. He notes that it was Whitman’s depictions of women’s sexuality that often got the poet in trouble in his own time, the meaning of his vibrant homoerotic imagery mostly lost on a society where same-sex relationships were not able to be openly acknowledged.

Doty calls Whitman “the quintessential poet of affirmation, celebrant of human vitality.” What Is the Grass repeatedly confirms that appraisal as Doty seeks the intersection of the spiritual and the corporeal. The details of Whitman’s sexual life remain veiled, and scholars have been reading between the lines for years to parse the truth. Doty is no exception, as he convincingly draws out the elusive meanings suggested by the monumental text. He reminds us that we can never know the whole truth about the dead (or really, about the living) but that “Walt Whitman is language now. . . . His body of work is his only body now, gorgeous, revelatory, daring, contradictory, both radically honest and carefully veiled. Its meaning resides in us,” Doty insists, “in the ways we readers use these poems as signposts, maps, temporary inhabitations—even, sometimes, dwelling places.”

One of America’s most perceptive contemporary poets digs deep into the work of Walt Whitman in search of personal—and communal—signposts. The poet and memoirist Mark Doty (My Alexandria, Dog Years) has lived intimately and intensely with Walt Whitman’s poetry for decades. As a reader, a teacher, a poet and a gay man, Doty has sought […]
NonfictionMemoir

At the Center of All Beauty

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Writer Fenton Johnson is a self-proclaimed solitary—unpartnered, living alone, at home with his inner life. In At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life, Johnson elegantly blends memoir, philosophical musings and literary inquiry as he explores how other writers and artists have faced the challenge of “solving” loneliness by converting it into solitude. Looking at what it takes to live outside “coupledom” in a culture that values marriage and family above much else, he ponders the usefulness of the solitary and seeks answers in the lives and work of some who chose to live and create their art outside the parameters of what society deems “normal.”

Johnson grew up Catholic in rural Kentucky, down the road from the monastery where the Trappist monk and mystic Thomas Merton sequestered himself. But this book moves beyond religious traditions as Johnson seeks the expression of the spiritual through art. He turns to some of the most notable solitaries of the American canon—Whitman, Dickinson, Thoreau—to mine their work for guidance in the ways of solitude, discovering that each in their own way “lost the self to find the self.” 

Some solitaries, like Whitman, and later Henry James and Zora Neale Hurston, lived public-facing lives, while others, like Dickinson, were virtual hermits. Eudora Welty returned from the crush of New York to her quiet childhood home in Mississippi, creating a life of the imagination that was enviably rich. The great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature but increasingly took shelter from the public arena. Johnson also looks at the lives and work of musical genius Nina Simone, beloved street photographer Bill Cunningham and painter Paul Cézanne to parse how they achieved their humanist visions while embracing solitude. 

Johnson concludes that these outlier writers and artists (and he proudly counts himself in their company) “understood commitment as well as or better than any marriage vow. . . . Their lifelong selfless practice rooted itself in their fecund, uneasy difference: their queerness and their solitude. These writers and artists took unbreakable vows to their art.” Through this art, Johnson finds, they show us that the solitude that many fear is an illusion.

Somewhat counterintuitively in a book about solitude, Johnson is a congenial and companionable guide, ushering us through the thicket of loneliness and into the clearing of solitude. He writes with grace, insight and humility. At the Center of All Beauty has great appeal even for those who may not fashion themselves as solitaries but who nonetheless crave more contemplation and self-awareness in their lives.

This thought-provoking meditation on solitude lifts up many writers and artists who have embraced seclusion.
FictionShort StoriesLiterary Fiction

Zora Neal Hurston revived

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Twenty-one stories—many long forgotten—from a major writer of the Harlem Renaissance come together for the first time.

Over the past 50 years, Zora Neale Hurston has been restored from nearly forgotten to a canonical writer, in no small part due to the efforts of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. One of the seminal writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston is most known today for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God and for her nonfiction works of black history and folklore. But before she published those books, she honed her craft by writing short stories. 

Between 1921 and 1937, Hurston published 21 stories, some widely anthologized but many virtually lost—until now. Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick collects all 21, including eight “lost” stories, for the first time in one volume.

Editor Genevieve West located the recovered stories in periodicals and as unpublished manuscripts, and the hallmarks of Hurston’s distinctive writing are on full display: her use of rural black dialect, the wickedly sly humor she finds in day-to-day life, the folkloric underpinnings of her many tales. The world Hurston re-creates is a circumscribed African American world, where white characters are relegated to the sidelines and rarely figure into the consequences of plot, if they appear at all. The agency that Hurston affords her community is one of the defining delights of her art, which explores identity, class and gender within the African American experience.

Many of Hurston’s stories take place among the denizens of rural Eatonville, Florida, also the setting of Their Eyes Were Watching God and the actual community where Hurston grew up. Other stories are set among urban landscapes, particularly in Harlem, where the fledgling writer moved in 1924. 

West points to “The Back Room,” one of the recovered stories, as unique among Hurston’s work for its depiction of what she calls “New Negro” life during the Harlem Renaissance. “The Conversion of Sam,” another found story, is an early effort written before Hurston’s own move to New York. It has a less defined urban setting but nonetheless depicts a migrant’s experience and explores familiar Hurston themes of sexual attraction, courtship and the interplay between men and women.

As with any collection of stories, quality varies greatly, but these narratives comprise a rich tapestry of Hurston’s matchless vision and talent. After this period as a short story writer, Hurston mostly turned her attention to novels and to the indelible folklore collections she assembled. These would prove the bedrock of her literary reputation, but these early stories are also a welcome and illuminating component of her legacy.

Twenty-one stories—many long forgotten—from a major writer of the Harlem Renaissance come together for the first time.
NonfictionBiography

Virginia Woolf

Review by Robert Weibezahl

A beguiling look at the many women who helped shape the temperament, talents and art of Virginia Woolf

Modernist trailblazer and feminist icon Virginia Woolf not only helped change the course of literature but also significantly altered the way we think about women writers and their work. In Gillian Gill’s captivating and incisive new study, Virginia Woolf: And the Women Who Shaped Her World, she refracts Woolf’s life, as the title suggests, through the facets of a distaff prism. Detailing Woolf’s fascinating maternal lineage as well as her intimate relationships with female family and friends, Gill explores the ways that young Virginia Stephen became the formidable Virginia Woolf. 

Woolf’s maternal line (the source of her wealth) was Anglo-Indian, and Gill shares the long-hidden probability that Woolf’s great-great-grandmother was of Bengali descent. Woolf was never aware of this extraordinary fact, but it underscores the unconventionality of her clan. There were seven accomplished women in Woolf’s grandmother’s generation, including her great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, the Victorian-age photographer whose exquisite images are now preserved and revered—in no small part due to Woolf’s resurrecting efforts. 

All of the women in Woolf’s maternal line were renowned for their grace, beauty and spirit—not least of all Woolf’s mother, Julia Jackson, who was named after Cameron and became one of the photographer’s favorite models. Woolf’s sometimes-fraught relationship with her Victorian-minded mother, who died when Woolf was 13, would be central to the writer’s emotional development, as much for what it lacked as for what it possessed.

Woolf’s immediate family was complicated, with two brothers, a sister and four half-siblings. Her father, the scholar and writer Leslie Stephen, had been previously married to the daughter of novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, and Woolf gained a beloved aunt and a half-sister, Laura, from that earlier union. Laura spent most of her life in an asylum, and other relatives, including Leslie himself, exhibited signs of mental illness, as would Woolf. Her half-sister Stella, from Julia’s first marriage to Herbert Duckworth, was a stabilizing influence after their mother’s premature death. Most significant was Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell, who was her closest spiritual confidante. Together they were at the center of the Bloomsbury group that revolutionized the arts and intellectual thought of the day.

Gill persuades us that, for Woolf—who grew up in a male-dominated household and, later, navigated a male-centric world—it was the women in her life who played a consummate role in shaping her revolutionary perceptions and art. This embracing and often sharp-witted study of the peripheries of a great writer’s life makes for compulsive reading.

A beguiling look at the many women who helped shape the temperament, talents and art of Virginia Woolf Modernist trailblazer and feminist icon Virginia Woolf not only helped change the course of literature but also significantly altered the way we think about women writers and their work. In Gillian Gill’s captivating and incisive new study, […]

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