2008 Criticism Finalist The Men in My Life, by Vivian Gornick

by Eric Banks | Mar-07-2009

Each day leading up to the March 12 announcement of the 2008 NBCC awards, we highlight one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Eric Banks discusses Vivian Gornick’s The Men in My Life (Boston Review/MIT Press).

The collection of male writers that Vivian Gornick gathers for consideration in The Men in My Life—book-ended by the neurotically wounded novelist George Gissing and the twined figures of V.S. Naipaul and James Baldwin—seem surprisingly motley at first. One wouldn’t necessarily see a connection between Loren Eisley and H.G. Wells, or Andre Dubus and Allen Ginsberg, or find the critical arc joining Randall Jarrell and Richard Ford. But in this fine selection of essays, Gornick’s adhesive interpretive gesture examines these men in terms of their often awkward, even painfully situated selves as they struggled against at times debilitating demons. The terms of those struggles and their fraught resolution make aspects of her subjects’ literary creation all the more terrific and offers them as exemplary figures for delving into what Gornick calls the “intimate relation between literature, emotional damage, and social history.”

That troika is one dear to Gornick’s own critical autobiography, she notes in the preface, where she summons her youthful sense of being torn between the outward-looking activist’s attention to politics and social injustice and the inward-gazing love of the novel and its universe of interiority. A stalwart second-generation feminist, Gornick began to think the two together, never losing sight of the “emotional imprisonment of mind and spirit to which all human beings are heir.” Literature, or at least what she calls the greatest literature, became for her a record of the “effort required to attain any semblance of inner freedom.”

Some of the men in The Men in My Life (Gissing, Eiseley, Jarrell) are maestros of self-doubt and hard-won loneliness who provide especially perspicacious views of the literary landscapes they purvey. Others see their early and laborious efforts to wrangle self-contradiction and outsiderness devolve over time into mangled creations; her lengthy essay on Bellow and Roth salutes their onerous act of finding the voice of the Jewish-American writer where none was given, much less welcomed, before the descent into steaming fits of misogynistic anger, where the awful work of recuperating the self coupled with the shifting fate of postwar Jewish identity became perilously entwined with a rage against women that allowed them to keep the writer’s wound open: “The entrenched love-hate attachment to one’s own outsiderness, inexplicably linked to the war between the sexes, would now be nailed for all time.” In Baldwin and Naipaul, the double bind of racial identity and displacement produces two vastly different literary sparks. Where Baldwin in Paris turns inward to understand the world through the way that the world has formed him, Naipaul is nearly “consumed by the raging self-hatred that powers his work.”

None of the writers Gornick considers come out unscathed for their struggles—their tasks of self-understanding and misunderstanding are always too perilous, which is one of the reasons that there is a heroic dimension to their efforts. What they produced makes for fascinating literary history and, in Gornick’s essays, compulsively readable criticism. These are essays, written in an engaged manner that feels fresh with reaction to the books at hand, that amount to a memoir of reading and rereading. When Gornick writes that she revisits H.G. Wells’s Experiment in Autobiography annually, the first reaction may be one of bemused astonishment (what does she see in him?); by the end of her essay, one feels acutely jealous of the quality of her literary relationship with her long-dead friend.