One Hundred Autobiographies

by David Lehman

Overview

In One Hundred Autobiographies, poet and scholar David Lehman applies the full measure of his intellectual powers to cope with a frightening diagnosis and painful treatment for cancer. No matter how debilitating the medical procedures, Lehman wrote every day during chemotherapy and in the aftermath of radical surgery. With characteristic riffs of wit and imagination, he transmutes the details of his inner life into a prose narrative rich in incident and mental travel. The reader journeys with him from the first dreadful symptoms to the sunny days of recovery.

This "fake memoir," as he refers ironically to it, features one-hundred short vignettes that tell a life story. One Hundred Autobiographies is packed with insights and epiphanies that may prove as indispensable to aspiring writers as Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet.

Set against the backdrop of Manhattan, Lehman summons John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Edward Said, and Lionel Trilling among his mentors. Dostoyevsky shows up, as does Graham Greene. Keith Richards and Patti Hansen put in an appearance, Edith Piaf sings, Clint Eastwood saves the neighborhood, and the Rat Pack comes along for the ride. These and other avatars of popular culture help Lehman to make sense of his own mortality and life story.

One Hundred Autobiographies reveals a stunning portrait of a mind against the ropes, facing its own extinction, surviving and enduring.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501746451
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	10/15/2019
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

David Lehman is a poet and writer whose many books include New and Selected Poems, The Daily Mirror, and Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World. For A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, he won ASCAP's Deems Taylor Award. Lehman is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry and the series editor of The Best American Poetry. He divides his time between Ithaca, New York, and New York City.

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Execution Poem Expert
2. Spots of Time
3. Café Loup
4. No Big Deal
5. Cancer Alley
6. The Crisis
7. The Aftermath
8. The Procedure
9. The Protocol
10. The Good Kind
11. The Diarist
12. None But the Strong
13. Tropic of Cancer
14. Hospitals and Airports
15. Back to the Waiting Room
16. "Hurry up, please, it's time"
17. Why 1963?
18. Good Friday
19. Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate!
20. The Weekend Before
21. "Bladder cancer: Isn't that what Sinatra died of?"
22. In a Technical Sense
23. Five O'Clock Rush
24. A Heart Event
25. Good Show
26. Metaport
27. If You Were an English Poet
28. The Regimen
29. A Few Beacons in the Quicksand
30. What's the Story?
31. Time Is on My Side
32. Rush Job
33. Final Call
34. And Then You Crash
35. Chemo
36. Roid Rage
37. Under the Garden
38. The End
39. Falling in Love Again
40. Nothingness
41. Syllabus
42. Commencement Speech
43. The Exquisite Corpse
44. The Editorial "We"
45. Oblivion
46. Dostoyevsky
47. The Spiritual Connection
48. "Myself, When Stoned"
49. Bloomsday
50. Tom Collins
51. The Admissions Officer
52. Columbia
53. Classic Koch
54. The Poem Team
55. Shakespeare's Birthday
56. Recovery Room
57. The Rebbe
58. Life Beings at Forty
59133. Search for Meaning
60. The Old Religion
61. The Problem of Evil
62. Dean Martin's Hat
63. 740 Francs
64. Shalom Aleichem Rides to the Rescue
65. The Arrival of the Messiah
66. Sabbath Services
67. A Complicated Guy
68. The Patient Next to You
69. Cambridge
70. Armistice Day, 1970
71. The Sublime Pain of Being
72. The Glass Skeleton
73. Why Does the Bridge Not Progress?
74. Q & A
75. Ludlowville, 1981
76. Bio Note (Alt.)
77. Wedding Ceremony
78. Moscow, 2007
79. Group Therapy
80. Fort Tryon Park
81. Fine Invention
82. Identity Theft
83. A Routine Visit
84. Doctor Jew
85. "Except for the cancer..."
86. The Heart Knows
87. A Black Dress
88. Heisenberg as Hero
89. Cheers!
90. Walter Lehmann
91. Rowing in Eden
92. I Remember Mama
93. No Regrets
94. If I Could
95. The Scar
96. The Secret
97. Like a Hurricane
98. In the Eyes of the Beholder
99. Champagne Cocktails
100. In the Swim

What People are Saying About This

Robert Siegel

David Lehman's One Hundred Autobiographies is the tale of his many lives, told with wit, insight, and the gifts of a natural storyteller. While illness forces him to confront his own mortality and to recall the people and events that shaped him, there is no shutting out the banal soundtrack of everyday life. David is an eloquent, playful seeker of the truth who, when that treasure is too well hidden to be found, will settle for a good joke for the time being but never give up the search.

The American Scholar - Robert Wilson

The microessays in David Lehman's compelling book display a lively mind and livelier imagination in mortal combat with a frightening debilitating illness. That Lehman wins this battle is no surprise; neither is his unconquerable allegiance to the healing power of putting words together.

Editorial Reviews

★ 07/15/2019

Poet and critic Lehman (Poems in the Manner of...), who was treated for bladder cancer in 2014, brilliantly captures the despair, uncertainty, and anger he felt in these 100 short reflections on life, death, and writing. Likening his ordeal to the plot of a novel, he declares, “the road connecting memory and desire is not linear... one lesson of any brush with death is that time is finite.” He muses on why he writes: “I write to assert my will to live. To prove I exist.” Throughout, he reflects on literature and pop culture figures to tell his story: arriving at the hospital for treatment wearing his fedora, Lehman recalls the movie Some Came Running and Dean Martin’s hat, “which he wears even in bed, even in a hospital bed.” After reading John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Lehman ponders the concept of evil: “the real question is not whether you believe in god as such but whether you believe there is such a thing as evil.” In his final reflection, being in excellent health—though, like many cancer patients, he acknowledges that this might just be a reprieve—he advises that “even on bad days, there are pleasant hours,” and “it is amazing how much pain the body can withstand.” Lehman’s exquisite essays illustrate the ways that beauty can flow out of pain. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

While in throes of fighting cancer, David Lehman wrote every day he could, as a way of imaginatively affirming his existence and escaping the terrible ordeals of pain, dread, and emotional chaos. First of all figuring out a formal strategy, as expert poets do, Lehman then crafts a brilliant, inventive portrait of a mind, in language in which everything counts. The book's moral seriousness and theological and ancestral powers provide extreme aesthetic pleasure—Lehman's forms of language are forms of life, always life. One Hundred Autobiographies teaches and instructs its fortunate readers, like all great literature, which it is.

Literary Hub

Lehman's memoir pulses with life and memory.

The New York Jewish Week