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makes me feel devout, part of a spiritual system. It is the closest I
can come to God.» The professor's fears for his children as they move
through a world of dangers are reminiscent, perhaps, ofJohn Irving's
Undertoad. But where Irving was coy and ingratiating, DeLillo is
serious and moving. It is a shock to learn after reading his book that
DeLillo has no children. All his terrors, his affections, are imagined .
DeLillo can keep one up at night.
PICO IYER
THE EYES IN HIDING
LOUISE BOGAN: A PORTRAIT. By Elizabeth Frank.
Alfred A. Knopf.
$24.95.
Louise Bogan's life proceeds, in this biography, with an
odd headlong zoom. The childhood, spent in a series of New
England boarding houses, is a bleak, puzzled time: Bogan's mother
conducted a series of mysterious extramarital affairs . Adolescence in
Boston is skimpily evoked: youthful Swinburnian poems, crushes on
one or two teachers who were soon to be toppled from their pedestals
by the idealistic young woman. Adulthood arrives in a rush: after a
year in college, Bogan marries at nineteen and is a mother at twenty .
The marriage doesn't last; by the mid-twenties Bogan is living in
New York City, writing and publishing poems, in love with the man
who will become her second husband and friends with the likes of
Edmund Wilson, Rolfe Humphries, and Margaret Mead. Simply
by recounting the facts, Elizabeth Frank's book seems to have gotten
ahead of itself, so much has happened so fast.
Then, mercifully, the pace slows: life and book catch their
breath. Tightly packed and poorly understood experience fills the
first twenty-odd years of the former and fifty pages of the latter, but
Bogan lived to be seventy-two, and the book extends to 460 pages.
The acquisition of control, of pace, is somehow both refreshing and
tedious.
The impulsive girl matured into a contemplative and indepen–
dent woman. In 1935 Bogan wrote that she was:
