First Loves: A Memoir (review)

At first glance, Ted Solotaroff's First Loves: A Memoir appears to be primarily about his unhappy first marriage to Lynn, a woman whose potential is thwarted by her mental illness and the social climate of the late 1940s and 1950s, both of which encouraged dilettantism, rather than the perseverance then expected from a man. The picture on his book jacket shows her, a waifish yet smiling mother with her eyes closed, a figure who evokes a happier version of Liza Minnelli's character in The Sterile Cuckoo rather than Fifties images of girdled and permed domesticity, however ethnic or urban. Then again, this memoir tells the story of the author's efforts to become a short-story writer and a college professor, to persevere in spite of the economic and cultural obstacles thrown in his way as a first-generation academic escaping from his immigrant father's contempt and his mother's neediness. These distinctions are important. The picture on his book jacket depicts his family at the University of Chicago, the place where Solotaroff began to find his way as a public intellectual and adult. His memoir is not titled First Love but First Loves, implying that he is writing about more than one kind of love and that most of these loves will not last.

The book's narrative binds together both main strands, his grueling relationship with Lynn and his attempts to establish a satisfying career, so that each serves as context for the other. The hesitant beginnings of their relationship when he is not sure whether to call her Lynn or Marilyn or Mickey exist alongside his indecision whether to become a union lawyer or study the classics under "the inspiring Irving Copilowitch" (p. 28). A Jewish professor who had discarded radical politics for literature and philosophy, Copilowitch embodies an alternate path for his young student. Solotaroff's efforts to write literary fiction and to make love to Lynn also complement each other, underscoring the demanding nature of both callings as well as his attempt to be someone other than who he seems fated to be as his parents' son: someone who cannot compete in the "real" world. Ironically, in his first and most successful short story, he uses what he has learned from Hemingway and postwar Italian film to translate his story's main character into a more conventionally acceptable version of a little boy. Similarly, after learning that Lynn has been obsessed with her "Very Gentile" [sic] (p. 141) philosophy professor, he must imagine himself as that "virile and masterful" (p. 143) man in order to satisfy both her and himself for the first time.

Solotaroff's work as a waiter is another distinct thread in this narrative; this job introduces him to peers who encourage his ambitions and to Lynn; enables him to pursue his writing and graduate studies when, unlike a pianist friend's more conventional wife, she refuses to sacrifice her ambitions for his; and simultaneously represents the agonizing distance between his dreams and his reality. This distance grows especially after he befriends Harvey, a high school teacher whose Communism has exiled him from the classroom. However, with the birth of a son and the family's subsequent move to Chicago, Solotaroff begins to find ways to bridge this distance. Other distinct threads are his earlier work with the mentally ill; his efforts to write for very different, mostly WASP professors, among them Norman Maclean; and Lynn's own attempts to find a career in acting, clinical psychology, art history, and, ultimately, translation. This memoir is very much about first loves, false starts, and the old skins the author has shed along the way to becoming who he is today: a memoirist and editor whom Forward critic Leonard Kreigel has described as "important to the health of [late twentieth-century] culture," a husband and a father.¹ The...