THOMAS LARSON

(San Diego Union-Tribune December 22, 1989)

Picasso of the Stage

Singer, dancer, comedian, actor, expatriate, heroine of the French Resistance, civil-rights worker, mother to a dozen adopted children, la belle dame of the Parisian stage for over five decades: Josephine Baker had nearly everything in Europe that she could never have had in the United States. Baker, an African-American, was one of the lucky ones.

Living fifty of her seventy years in France, thereby escaping the racism of her St. Louis upbringing, she was the darling of an adoring music-hall public which never tired of her provocative performances. She was as famous as Chevalier, as patriotic as de Gaulle, as sentimental as Piaf and, at death, as lionized as Napoleon.

To reveal why Baker's star shines in such a constellation, biographer Rose (her previous work includes a life of Virginia Woolf) has fashioned her ode to the era—continental culture between the wars—as well as to the woman. "In Her Time" reads the subtitle.

(San Diego Union-Tribune November 10, 1989)

The Moment of Love

At 60, Peter Davison has added another achievement to his eight previous volumes of poetry, the first of which won him the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1964. A lyricist like his beloved Robert Frost, he has been praised consistently for his cadenced lines, his deep images and his didactic, elegiac tone.

These powers again serve a poetry of personal illumination in The Great Ledge. Davison's topics are many, but a number of poems revisit the loss of his wife in 1981. He navigates the sorrow with a clear-eyed memory.

"Equinox 1980" recalls a last outing when "we two/ paddled a noiseless boat/ before a wakefall across/ a bay smooth as a mirror."

Memory awakens Davison, not to pine helplessly for the past but to declare the simple, pinnacled moment of their love.

(San Diego Union-Tribune October 6, 1989)

A Journey Through Plath's Inner World

No other American poet had anything like Sylvia Plath's meanness in language. Her words are astringent, vengeful, terrifying—the poetry hurts, as it seems intended. She will forever be the Queen of Blame—hating family, father, and self with equal rancor.

Since her death by suicide in 1963, the narcissistic exhibitionism of her work—best known from the Ariel poems and the novel The Bell Jar—has attracted a caldron of worship. Criticism and biographies arrive regularly, fueling the Plath cult. Of course, she meant to turn the oven on and stick her head in. But why? With her talent? Successful suicides (which, when done with craft and imagination, are strangely beautiful) create eternal enigmas. Such has mythologized her pain more than her poetry, which was obviously good and didn't "warrant" death.

(San Diego Tribune August 18, 1989)

Reynolds Price always felt that writing novels about small-town life in his native North Carolina was occupation enough. In good time he would write a memoir of his early years. He thought he'd linger, "betting on a long life," and begin nearer its end. That end got nearer quickly when five years ago Price nearly died from a spinal tumor that, removed, left him a paraplegic at 51.

It was time.

The rest of the review is available here (opens a PDF).

(San Diego Union-Tribune June 30, 1989)

Farewell Ray

When Raymond Carver died in 1988, America lost one of its great writers.

He was widely admired as a master storyteller, his five collections clearly expressing the ambiguities of modern existence.

His characters, usually working-class people, often waged an inner, seemingly passive battle with life.

Their triumph—and Carver's brilliance—shone in the communicative potential that his men and women found in themselves when trouble ruled. But it was with poetry that Carver began his literary career.

(San Diego Union-Tribune June 9, 1989)

Technology Will Save Us, Right?

In 1909, the second year the Model T lumbered down the assembly line, a new one emerged every 12 1/2 hours.

In 1925, still in production, a new tin lizzie zipped off the track every 30 seconds.

The later cars were every bit as good as the first. What do we call this remarkable ingenuity to produce quality goods and make the production systems themselves continuously more efficient? Call it Thomas Edison, Elmer Sperry, Henry Ford. Call it the American century, 1870 to 1970, an era University of Pennsylvania professor Thomas Hughes lauds as the heyday of the inventor, the systems builder, the managerial genius.

(San Diego Union-Tribune April 14, 1989)

I Am What I Read

One handout I have routinely given students in literature classes I teach at San Diego City College ends its discussion about searching for the moral ideas in fiction with this ambiguous phrase: "and, for once, be happy that you're lost."

Quite a few resist the assignment. They fear that being lost while reading novels may mean gaps will appear, down the road, in their cultural literacy.

Test us, they say, on the elements of literature—like personification and catharsis, synecdoche and the unreliable narrator. Why boggle our minds with what are, at best, relative moral judgments?