Weights and Measures

Page 10 American Book Review Weights and Measures Jack Smith Author of the prize-winning novel The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts (2001), editor of several literary anthologies and numerous essays and stories published widely in literary magazines, DeWitt Henry is perhaps best known as the founding editor of Ploughshares. This memoir, packed with Henry’s personal life and growth as an artist, also traces the launching and the daily struggles of one of America’s top literary magazines. But this is more than memoir—it’s also a philosophical work, a speculative work. It’s above all a masterpiece of form and style. Henry is the consummate craftsman, his eye out for the right word, his pulse tuned to the right mood. I think of this memoir as a fine piece of orchestral music, enriched by its different movements and moods—everything building, everything contributing to a pleasing harmonic whole. The memoir begins with Henry’s childhood years, his growing up in an affluent neighborhood in suburban Philadelphia with his three older siblings ; his work-driven, morose, brooding father, a former alcoholic, diabetic, extremely overweight, lethargic, often napping; his self-sacrificing mother. Childhood was a time of mystery, of sexual awakening . Adulthood was the time of growth, pursuit of ideals, indefatigable striving: earning a Ph.D. at Harvard; attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; co-founding, editing, and developing funding for Ploughshares; writing and marketing his novel; teaching adjunct. Meanwhile, various professional hurdles to overcome—the job market drying up in the humanities, frustrations over publication, administrative conflicts with the co-founder of Ploughshares, struggles at Emerson College with cut-throat departmental politics, once he was finally full-time.Add to this, the stresses, pain, confusion of ordinary human existence: ambivalence in his marriage over the prospect of children, deaths of parents, death of his son’s best friend due to cancer, a college-age daughter whose rebellious habits disturb and frighten him, a beloved pet beagle that adamantly resists pottytraining , Henry’s mentor and good friend Richard Yates suffering serious emotional breakdowns. What happens, what is felt, what is deliberated on, is told with unflinching candor, the text laid bare for anyone, everyone, including all those who people this book to pick at it, to argue with it, to remonstrate—which is always, of course, the risk, the sensitive point, with a memoir, at least with a completely frank and honest ones—as is this one. This memoir is like a fine piece of orchestral music, enriched by its different movements and moods. What makes this a particularly compelling work, though, is the way in which Henry creates from the grounds of personal experience a work of larger proportions, a philosophical work, a speculative work—seeking out what’s down-to-the-bone true of our human condition. Abstract ideas are linked to concrete experiences, mostly by indirection, making the reader work for meaning. One might recall Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude (1988)—the second part, “The Book of Memory”—the way in which Auster explores abstractions in a style that is often disconnected, highly analogical, discursive at times, yet brilliantly dramatic. I find a similar approach in Henry’s work when he breaks from the straight narrative path. Prose style alternates between straight and elliptical, heightening the meditative mood. Following a chapter called “Bungee,” where Henry narrates his inaugural Bungee jump at the Squaw Valley Writers’ Community, he writes in “Gravity”: “I think of weight, of burdens, of things we carry; of freedom birds, carrying us home.” In this chapter, drawing on a mix of personal and public experiences, Henry imaginatively explores the meaning of gravity, from the literal to the metaphorical. Weight versus weightlessness. I couldn’t help but be reminded of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). While there is freedom and excitement in weightlessness, life to be meaningful requires weight—all those things which tie us to others weigh us down with heavy purpose. We feel this heavy purpose in Henry’s own life, in the lives he touches, and the ones that touch him—his family, friends, his wife’s friends, his children’s friends—with their wants, needs...