Compass Points: How I Lived

This engaging memoir has the same plainspoken eloquence and down-to-earth intelligence that distinguish Edward Hoagland's nature and travel writing, from Tigers & Ice to African Calliope. Compass Points opens with an account of the gradual loss of his eyesight in the 1980s, characteristically detailed and utterly lacking in self-pity: blindness made it hard to grade papers or indulge his love of walking, he writes, but it was great for his sex life, and for some reason his lifelong stutter improved. Surgery finally restored his vision, and a new look at the world prompted the writer to turn toward autobiography. Lucid, frank, and funny, his recollections range from an affluent WASP childhood in New York City and its suburbs to joining the circus in 1951 at age 18, then marrying and divorcing twice as he roamed the world and discovered his vocation. Hoagland began his writing career as a novelist, and his early fiction was fairly well received, so that readers can only be grateful that he concluded, after a few books, that he was better suited to the "familiar, unassuming" tone of the personal essay. That intimate tone binds the rambling text together, as he pauses in his personal chronicle to muse on the nature of friendship (we need both the fair- and foul-weather kinds, he concludes), the burdens and benefits of aging, or some other more general topic. There's literary gossip, too--after all, Archibald MacLeish and Alfred Kazin were his teachers, John Berryman was a friend, and Norman Podhoretz was his second wife's boss at Commentary. But the focus rightly remains on Hoagland's life experiences and thoughts, in this deceptively casual but artfully organized narrative. --Wendy Smith