Word: memoirists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Garson Kanin, playwright (Born Yesterday), novelist (The Rat Race) and Hollywood memoirist, is wooden in his overall structure but energetic in his scenes. The Fatty Arbuckle party that led to his sex scandal, trial, ruin and censorship; Greta Garbo's slow but sure rise to stardom amid the "ah-rintch" groves, and the pandemoniac search for an actress to play Scarlett O'Hara. Much space is devoted to a novelization of the rise and fall of Marilyn Monroe. Farber's conclusion: Hollywood did not kill her; "it was just a case of bad luck, mismanagement...
...They were not me and I could never be them." This wholly false conclusion is drawn by the author on his self-styled "voyage" backward through memory, history and time itself. "I" is Michael J. Arlen, the New Yorker critic and memoirist; "they" are Armenians, an obscure folk of Asia Minor who happen to be his blood relatives. For despite an elegant Anglo-American breeding, despite the aristocratic postures of his father, Michael Arlen is the son of Dikran Kouyoumjian, few generations removed from the peasant villages of Transcaucasia...
...first name and patronymic "Vadim Vadimych" do not exist in Russian, but they could, the memoirist feels uneasily, be blurred rendering of "Vladimir Vladimirovich." As to his own surname, poor Vadim cannot remember it, though he feels fairly sure it begins with "N" -Naborcroft, he wonders? Nablize? (The experienced reader, meanwhile, notices that Vadim's pseudonym "V. Irisin" sounds a lot like "Sirin," the pen name of one Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, an émigré Russian of illustrious but not aristocratic background who wrote in Berlin, not Paris, after the revolution. This Sirin, Nabokov has been heard to assert...
...Time Inc. gave all 180 hours of tape recordings and nearly 800,000 words of transcripts to the Oral History Collection of Columbia University. In announcing the acquisition of the material, Director Louis Starr said that the Khrushchev archive "is the most voluminous body of material by a foreign memoirist" in the collection. A team of experts at Columbia is now cataloguing the tapes and indexing the transcripts, which will be available for scholarly research...
...critic but a dazzling one-man symposium. Devils represents Wilson the percipient tourist (in an essay on Italy's 16th century garden of sculptured monsters at Bomarzo), Wilson the memoirist and literary gamesman (in a record of his friendship with Novelist Edwin O'Connor), and Wilson the reviewer-who-was-there...