Harp:

...artilleryman in Germany in 1956...

...In Harp, Dunne reports that he has "lunch" with a "local painter" named "Hector," grandson of a "mass murderer of another era," who is "a homosexual...

...And, within a few weeks I would be in the mountains of Peru on one of those trips a writer takes not knowing precisely why, except to see a friend and to have one more experience about which one might write...

...Though married for twenty-five years and regular collaborators on screenplays, such as the adaptation of Dunne's novel, True Confessions, they are neither a "team" nor competitors...

...Hector uses his role as a primitive art dealer to attract boys, and his mother, who is four-and-a-half feet tall with huge moles on her breasts, spies on Hector and his boyfriend...

...In Stokestown, Ireland, he finds no record of Dominick Francis Burns, but in Ros-common he wanders into two funeral Masses in Sacred Heart Church for the same woman, Hanoria Dufficy, who died at ninety-eight though, says Father Ned, "the whole town was pulling for her to make a hundred years young...

...I remember that when I arrived in Germany in January 1956, our battalion commander told us there was a reasonable chance that the Russians would attack that winter...

...When an acquaintance writes to describe Dunne's novel, The Red, White and Blue, (correctly, in my judgment) as "the most hate-filled, death-filled, contempt-for-humanity work I have ever read," Dunne sends an admittedly mean-spirited reply...

...In Joan Didion's essays, John Gregory Dunne hovers off camera as a barely visible traveling companion referred to as "my husband...

...He is now no more or less a "harp" than he was then...

...humor and its pain...

...In Salvador, Didion reports that she has dinner with the Salvadoran painter, Victor Barriere, grandson of a dictator who had killed up to 30,000 of his citizens...

...A writer's life," says Dunne, "is his only capital, his alone to invest, and to imagine, and to reimagine...

...centers around Dunne's discovery in 1987, through an EKG, of a "critical lesion" in his left anterior descending artery-what his good-humored cardiologist refers to as "the wid-owmaker...

...When the young man who strangled Dunne's niece does not receive the death penalty, Dunne hopes he will be sodomized in prison and die of AIDS...

...then they become buried treasures, like the forgotten photographs, which the journalist-novelist might milk for one more story...

...Joseph's Cathedral School in Hartford like steelworkers...

...his travels with "his wife" to El Salvador and the West Bank, and then their 1970 quiet New Orleans visit with Walker Percy, sitting by the bayou drinking whiskey and gin and tonics as the light rain fell...

...Cleaning out his files, he rummages through and discards old letters, notes, and rejected story ideas, recalls his parents' deaths-his surgeon father of a heart attack in 1946, his mother of cancer in 1974-the Sisters of Mercy who ran St...

...my mother on the Georgian Court College basketball team in the 1920s and as a teacher and civic leader-Red Cross drives and Mount Carmel Guild-during World War II...

...Barriere refers to former Ambassador Robert White as a "jerk" and Archbishop Oscar Romero as a "bigot...

...For now, I just want to get through the next book-that's all you can hope to do," he told an interviewer seven years ago...

...Reprieved by an angioplasty (a procedure by which a balloon on a catheter dissipates the plaque), but heavy with the suicide of a younger brother, the cancer deaths of two sisters, the murder of a niece, and the death at ninety of a maiden aunt, the writer reorders his life...

...my HARP John Gregory Dunne Simon & Schuster, $18.95, 235 pp...

...his Frankfurt whoring and NATO alert exercises as a Pfc...

...He is a middle-aged married man on a journey with a notebook and the courage to share the journey's humor and its pain...

...I had spent a day in Trenton, where I grew up, reviewing with my mother and brother near-forgotten photos: my grandfather John Schroth, the Trenton bottler, posed stolidly with his workmen in the 1890s, flanked by their cartons of root beer and sarsaparilla...

...But he resurrects the memory of another death, the buddy killed on alert when his truck overturned, and discovers a "new" army, soft with egalitarian-ism- What if the Russians attack while the brigade colonel is serving his turn as school bus monitor?-and middle-class values...

...but a reader who follows their work really has to make comparisons...

...He and his wife (he never gives her full name), after twenty-four years in Los Angeles, move to New York...

...ar...

...Barriere has a "fluted" voice, and has brought along an eighteen-year-old young man he is "teaching to paint," and he lives with his mother, "a diminutive woman...

...Dunne returns to the scene of these dramas hoping the writer in him will recover from this most formative period, when the boy learns the rawness of the man's world, some clue to what he has become today...

...To the artist, the probe is, at that moment, partly a literary exercise, but it is also a stocktaking: a gathering and bottling of those creative juices on which one can call for the rest of one's life, which now seems shorter than one had planned it to be...

...my father in 1918, his serious face under a straw hat towering in the back row of a crowd of young men who had just enlisted in World War I; on my mother's side, the Bordentown Murphys, the lined, wise, Irish octogenarian faces of my grandmother's card club...

...Dunne ends his memoir as gently as he can, his deep-but unexamined-anger perhaps muted and tempered by the beauty of some of the lives he has recalled, particularly his Aunt Harriet's, and with an unspoken sense of himself as a survivor...

...Though Princeton educated, his vocabulary, particularly his addiction to one four-letter word, seems arrested at the level of his drill sergeant's...

...Although Dunne told a New York Times interviewer in 1982 that he still starts to bless himself when he hears a fire engine, he long ago rejected his Irish background and his Catholic faith...

...Most of the momentum of Harp comes from two journeys in search of the past, both failures: one to his old army barracks in Wertheim and the other to Ireland in search of his maternal grandfather's baptismal record, which would make Dunne eligible for an Irish passport...

...I read John Gregory Dunne's memoir, Harp, between two very Dunne-like experiences...

...rather than integral to his identity, they seem to have been burdens which the writer shed as he moved from West Hartford to Princeton to Frankfurt to Los Angeles to New York...

...What stands out, aside from the minor discrepancies, is Didion's preference to imply what Dunne virtually shouts-or Dunne's harshness...

...with such an incentive, our combat alert exercises-everyone on the road and ready to roll within an hour-took on a new level of drama...

...BOOKS A devotion to rough edges ometimes a memoir-as distinct from an autobiography, which makes heavier intellectual and emotional demands-is best read, as well as written, in midlife, when both the author and the audience, perhaps moved by an unexpected brush with mortality, are just beginning seriously to probe their pasts-with an eye for pattern, for chance, for lost options, for taken-for-granted blessings...

...Indeed, Dunne's devotion to his own rough edges is a trademark...

...Raymond A. Schroth brother Dave and I with our horses and dogs, I on army artillery maneuvers in Germany in 1956...