Nothing Gold Can Stay: A Memoir by Walter Sullivan (deceased)

By Walter Sullivan (deceased)

  In his enduring fiction and feedback, Walter Sullivan has invited readers to percentage the innovations of a penetrating, modern intellect. Now he turns his pen on his personal lifestyles to forge a stirring memoir that fondly recounts the lifetime of the brain.             From early life in Nineteen Twenties Nashville, the place his father died 3 months after he used to be born, to the halls of Vanderbilt collage, the place he taught artistic writing for greater than fifty years, Sullivan recollects key episodes in his life—often pausing to examine why a few stories of possible trivial occasions persist whereas others, likely extra vital, have pale from view.  As witness to a chain of social and cultural moments, Sullivan passes on his sharp observations approximately melancholy and struggle, southern renascence and civil rights. He additionally contains energetic anecdotes and sharp personality sketches, with personalities starting from his grandmother “Chigger” and Sally Fudge—who had lived throughout the Civil conflict and was once acknowledged to wait the funerals of individuals she didn’t know—to Mrs. Gertrude Vanderbilt, with whose eccentricities he occasionally needed to contend. Readers will find a treasure trove of insights, as Sullivan’s perspectives of educational existence are complemented by way of remembrances of vital writers: John Crowe Ransom, Robert Lowell, Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, James Dickey, Flannery O’Connor, and a number of others, mixing the formal and generic in a method befitting a lingering southernness. He additionally recollects his surprise at being branded a racist through Kingsley Amis and addresses problems with race in academia and southern culture. Throughout his profession, he sees himself as a dad or mum of misplaced factors, carrying on with to educate an appreciation of literature within the face of encroaching post-structuralism and political correctness.             Laced with humor whereas preserving a profound seriousness approximately what rather concerns in lifestyles, not anything Gold Can remain is a full of life narrative of a lifestyles good lived that may appeal any reader attracted to American society in the course of and after the nice melancholy. Graced with emotional coherence completed through a virtually ironic tone that's sustained from first sentence to final, it's a ebook within which a uncommon author considers his world—and his personal mortality—and leaves us richer for it.