Word: gills
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...BRENDAN GILL...
...Gill sometimes strays from his chronicler's path to give us more autobiography than he should. The gossarrier good times at the magazine, the lunches at the Algonquin, the practical jokes and graffiti don't need any more depth than Gill provides, but his life can't have been as shallow as he gives us to believe...
...Gill's narrative is broken (at no stylistic loss, in what is a string of vignettes anyway) by some memories of his prep school years, and some from the years at Yale, where the teachers had twinkles in their eyes. A chapter begins with "The reason I waited to marry..."and sidles into a glib and superficial commentary on sexual attitudes in the thirties, a commentary that is all the more awkward for being offered as revelation ("I perceive now that my unmarried teachers at Yale were probably less chaste than the rest of us.") And there are hints...
...RELIEF when Gill returns to the perfunctories of who he married and where they lived and how much they made when they resold the place; and then back to the interesting idiosyncrasies of New Yorker writers and artists. Gill is comfortable with a voice that he has smoothed and polished for 40 years, and there are things that can't be said without a rough edge that he has lost. (It is a tribute to Gill's mastery of New Yorker style that the seams don't show when part of an obituary published in the magazine is sewn into...
When he quotes Edmund Wilson's definition of the man of letters--"one who can accomplish any literary task that happens to come his way"--Gill describes himself as well. He is our best drama critic, and he arrived at that position only lately, having proved himself at profiles and obituaries, fiction and all manner of criticism. When he writes the autobiography that shines through the cracks in this book, he will need to put The New Yorker aside for a time...