Still Life at Eighty
A Memoir
Novelist, critic, essayist, screenwriter, teacher, traveler, and art aficionado, Nicholas Delbanco has here compiled a mosaic of his life as he glances backwards and forwards from the vantage point of his eightieth year. Each home relocation with its inevitable remodeling becomes a metaphor for the reconstruction of the self over his lifetime. In episodic riffs, Still Life at Eighty revisits seven houses where Delbanco welcomed a panoply of literati, such as Mary Ruefle, Mary Lee Settle, Mary Robison, John Ashbery, John Cheever, John Irving, and John Updike. Each abode becomes a receptacle of memory, as he recalls his friendships with the likes of James Baldwin, Grace Paley, Frederick Busch, Donald Barthelme, and Russell Banks.
Still Life at Eighty is saturated with artistic appreciation, which colors Delbanco’s life from early childhood to his eightieth year. The grandson of collectors (whose paintings were plundered by the Nazis), nephew of a London gallerist, son of an accomplished painter, and a collector himself, Delbanco summons his reminiscences of art, artifacts, and artists as he pivots from a youthful artistic apprenticeship to become a prolific professional writer, sustained, and inspired by his wife of fifty-three years, Elena; his daughters, Francesca and Andrea; and five granddaughters.
Delbanco finds solace in the things of this world: a Biedermeier desk, an Ekoi mask, and an instrument case that held the fabled Countess of Stanlein ex-Paganini Stradivarius Violoncello of 1707—all reminders of a treasured past. Together with these cherished artifacts, former homes, and the myriad writers and artists who slip in and out of this erudite memoir, Still Life at Eighty makes readers privy not only to Delbanco’s rich experiences, but also to the vast aesthetic wealth of his long life.
Nicholas Delbanco is the author of more than thirty works of fiction and non-fiction. At the University of Michigan –from which he retired as the Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor in English—he was Director of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program and, for twenty-five years, the Hopwood Awards. As the founding Director of the Bennington Summer Writing Workshops, he created the low-residency MFA program. Delbanco is a recipient of the J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and twice awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Prose Fiction. He has served as Chair of the Fiction Panel for the National Book Awards, and as a judge for the Pulitzer Prize. With his wife, Elena, he divides his time between Manhattan and Cape Cod.
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