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As if anticipating the question “Who should write a memoir?” Robert Pinsky devotes a chapter (titled “Magic Mountain”) to a consideration of
fame. He mentions a conversation on a plane with a passenger who remarks, seeing him reading a book by Robert Lowell, recently deceased, “He seems like someone who should be famous.” Pinsky then describes the rescheduling of a meeting with Robert Hass, himself, and Czeslaw Milosz about translations. Between a second and third change of schedule, Milosz had won the Nobel Prize, which changed their communications. Pinsky mentions the fame of Edgar Guest in his day and the relative obscurity of Elizabeth Bishop, and the reversal of that status today.
To me this chapter reveals some anxiety in this important man of letters, a former poet laureate, about how he will be remembered and if he should be writing a memoir at all. It would seem, however, that Pinsky believes that the famous, or at least the accomplished, need no rationale for writing a memoir. And yet the less than famous have often written compelling memoirs. What draws a reader to a memoir that comes without the advertisement of fame? A reader should have some clear expectations of what's in store. Kate Daniels, for instance, is an important American poet but with a reputation more limited than Pinsky's. She recently wrote (and I reviewed in JAPA 70/4) a memoir titled Short Fuse of the Possible: A Memoir in Poetry and Psychoanalysis. Her title sets expectations, which the memoir compellingly delivers—a quote from Emily Dickinson and a focused account of exploration of poetry and during her psychoanalysis.
It's not clear what expectations are set by Pinsky's title, and that, to my mind, undermines the memoir. First, Jersey Breaks—we'll learn something about New Jersey. “Breaks” is a poetically vague word. Has the state given him a break? (An epigraph to the book reads, “Gimme a break”—Folk Saying.) Was everyone there waiting for a break? Was poetry his break? Is there so