Manhattan, When I Was Young by Mary Cantwell Modern American Memoirs edited by Annie Dillard and Cort Conley
Marget, Madeline
BEING AROUND WORDS Madeline Marget Mary Cantwell's intense and generous memoir is about marriage, motherhood, work, Manhattan's aura, and the needs and consequences of a sensitive person's...
...Manhattan, When I Was Young implies that she has taken that advice...
...Manhattan, When I Was Young continues the story of family, place, and identity and is richer than the earlier, also excellent, book"perhaps because this one deals with a period of social as well as personal stress and change...
...Social, sexual, and psychological expectations are the source of great unhappiness...
...The best of two worlds...
...Despite the small size of the book, it does all this in depth: it's a true story, though just as real as serious fiction...
...BEING AROUND WORDS Madeline Marget Mary Cantwell's intense and generous memoir is about marriage, motherhood, work, Manhattan's aura, and the needs and consequences of a sensitive person's spiritual and emotional life...
...Many of these memoirs are striking and memorable despite their brevity...
...Henry Louis Gates's Colored People...
...She suffers great and lasting pain when B., about whom she writes with loving respect, leaves her for another woman...
...After her first child is born, she suffers a breakdown...
...Hats off to Dillard and Conley for narrowing their excerpted selections to a mere three dozen...
...The result is that I now have a lifetime reading list...
...in the book), because she had slept with him, Cantwell started her life in New York...
...Cantwell gives no simple happy ending...
...Manhattan, When I Was Young offers a fuller, multi-layered acquaintanceship...
...On one level, Manhattan, When I Was Young is about New York...
...Ralph Ellison tells of circulating a petition to right a social wrong in the 1930s and in the process coming upon a group of rough-spoken African-American men, working as "coal heavers" in an apartment house's basement, and arguing loudly and with intimate knowledge about opera"they often worked as extras in Metropolitan Opera productions...
...She is torn between the desire to stay home with her children and the need to have a career"a real New Yorker must work...
...Diana Trilling's The Beginning of the Journey...
...She evokes the scenery and feel, and sometimes even the smell, of her New York, and the picture of the work she did as a young woman is both entertaining and chilling...
...My only quibble with Modern American Memoirs is that the selections aren't long enough...
...And, perhaps because of her understanding of church teaching (during the period covered in this book she is a lapsed Catholic), she does not like sex, except when the purpose is to conceive a child...
...During sleepless nights, Cantwell talks to the woman she used to be, saying she doesn't know or understand her...
...When Cantwell asks two priests" one in New York and one in Amsterdam"for absolution, they don't give her the formula she expects, but instead tell her to go easier on herself...
...She implies that one of her children has had serious emotional problems...
...Cantwell's addresses, changing over the years but mostly in Greenwich Village, divide the book into sections, and are landmarks in her life...
...Remember Graham Greene's A Sort of Life, and Ways of Escape...
...Readers can be grateful...
...In 1953, newly graduated from college and feeling herself to be already committed to the man she was to marry (called only "B...
...Modern American Memoirs is a good introduction to many wonderful writers...
...All the same, this is not a sad book...
...Modern American Memoirs gives us thirty-five excerpts in 449 pages, and the editors give the titles and authors of almost two hundred books as additional personal favorites...
...The pages from Reynolds Price's Clear Pictures give a sense of that writer's ability to encapsulate experience with beauty and soul...
...However, the most striking and valuable quality of this fine book is the author's remarkable ability to see herself both intimately and objectively...
...Cantwell is glad to follow the lead, if not the orders, of her husband"who is an emotional stand-in for her lost father, whom she always wants to please, and for whom she constantly grieves...
...Cantwell worked for fashion magazines, first Mademoiselle and later Vogue, places where trivia and temperament reigned, and where no one thought a young woman needed to support herself...
...Of course, if I had been given more, I would then be faced with pages enough to fill several sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica...
...Hamlin Garland unsentimentally presents his boyhood on a farm as an experience in a pastoral paradise...
...Cantwell, now on the editorial board of the New York Times, writes with self-assurance and with love: For her children, for B., for the world she has chosen to show, and for her work...
...Melancholy is a persistent tone...
...Cantwell also reminds us of the era's totems: dinners at which boeuf bourguignon was the main course, and, the topic of competitive conversation was likely to be one's literary tastes (" Any thing by Graham Greene...
...Afterwards, though she has recovered her sanity, her love for her child frightens her...
...American Girl, Cantwell's previous memoir, told of her childhood and adolescence in Bristol, Rhode Island...
...Despite the nostalgia her title announces, and the regret she mentions, her writing also reveals a life of hope, accomplishment, and meaningful self-knowledge...
...I have never wanted to be anyplace but around words," Cantwell says...
...The subject of their contention confounded all my assumptions regarding the correlation between educational levels, class, race, and the possession of conscious culture/' Cynthia Ozick sits reading, looking, and listening in her parents' pharmacy as an aspiring artist and intellectual...
Vol. 123 • April 1996 • No. 7
