"Most of us live like stand-up comedians on a vaudeville stage — the way an essayist does — by our humble wits, messing up, swallowing an aspirin, knowing Hollywood won't call, thinking nobody we love will die today, just another day of sunshine and rain," writes Edward Hoagland in this memoir. The novelist, essayist, naturalist, and travel writer is a master of the improvised riff — where he takes a theme and plays many incongruous variations on it.
It is refreshing to learn that Hoagland, who is enchanted with nature and the denizens of the wild, also has a special place in his heart for urban living: "Embracing the fizz and seethe of a metropolis . . . Rubbing shoulders with thousands of people, my spirits surge." He adds: "I find diversity a comfort in the wilds and in the city — that there are more species than mine, more personalities than me." Hoagland calls himself "a whirlwind walker," and I believe him when he writes about going to a Yankees game in the Bronx and then walking all the way home to the East Village — 180 blocks.
Hoagland, who now lives in Vermont, where he has taught at Bennington College since 1987, begins with a temporary bout with blindness in the 1980s and what he learned from the experience. He writes about his respect for Archibald MacLeish and Alfred Kazan, two of his illustrious teachers. The author reminisces about his friend John Berryman, the poet who lived by his own code and then committed suicide. And Hoagland muses over two marriages and divorces along with his erotic pleasures.
The author seems most relaxed sharing his memories of the circus he joined when he was 18 years old and what it taught him about "how to wake up in the morning and live with stamina and faith and joy — how to pick yourself up when you fall, hide your limp, take a punch, yet drive yourself on, and do what you're best at with verve and panache being at home anywhere, west or east."
Compass Points by Edward Hoagland is a soul-satisfying memoir by a writer who revels in zigzags rather than straight lines.