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PARTISAN REVIEW
Because the raw facts of his personal odyssey are so compelling we risk
overlooking a more obvious truth-namely that Horowitz is a superb writer.
James Atlas was not wrong when he characterized
Radical Son
as a "work of
literature" for that is precisely what one feels in the shape and ring of its
paragraphs. Put a slightly different way, Horowitz's painful narrative is more
honest-and to my mind, more important-than other memoirs of those
times, those places. He not only sees with unblinkered eyes but also writes
with an ear finely tuned to human frailties that dare not speak their nanle.
Ultimately,
Radical Son
is about uneasy reconciliations-with a radical father
as well as with oneself. We expect our best novelists to do such work. In this
case, however, it comes wrapped in the folds of an extraordinary memoir.
About this, even those who do not share Horowitz's current politics will
find themselves nodding in agreement.
SANFORD PINSKER
How To Begin?
MAJESTIC INDOLENCE: ENGLISH ROMANTIC POETRY
AND
THE WORK
OF ART. By Willard Spiegelman.
Oxford University Press. $55.00
THE TITLE TO THE POEM. By Anne Ferry.
Stanford University Press.
$39.50
I am wri ting this in bed, and the books under review I have read here
too. I'm sitting, propped on pillows, under a black down duvet, with heavy
brocaded curtains pulled over the daylight, wallpaper (a dark cocoa whose
froth is a pattern of faint tarnished-gold stars) that covers the ceiling too, a
CD purring from hidden speakers, and a single dusty shaft of intense light
on a text: the bedroom is my lair, the memory of my father's lap, my shel–
tered cave of making. I read and wri te here because of the singular privacy,
the vaguely erotic stillness, the languid trace of dreamwork a bedroom
allows. It's here I can both withdraw and engage. I wonder if Elizabeth
Bishop didn't have her bedroom in mind when she wrote of her peculiar aes–
thetic ideal: "What one seems to want in
art,
in experiencing it, is the same
thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless con–
centration." Of course, to write about this idleness, to pursue this languor,
requires a great deal of spirited concentration, an informed subtlety quick to
