Volume 29, Number 12 · July 15, 1982
Good Poems, Sad Lives
By Howard Moss
Poets in Their Youth: A Memoir
by Eileen Simpson
Random House, 272 pp., $15.50
Memoirs that commemorate the dead belong to a genre that requires more trust than any other; self-interested justification, the need for revenge, and the risk of exploitation are real. Worse is the possibility of subtle distortion; memoirs are not objective accounts but the case as presented by so-and-so. Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth—which takes its title from Wordsworth's lines, 'We poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness'—is a record of her life with John Berryman. (Married in 1942, separated in 1953, and divorced in 1956.) We never doubt the truth is being told of those dozen or so years of intimacy, but we never doubt, either, that the truth is partial.
Review, 4086 words
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