With gentle notes of lyrical sadness, Sullivan, an English professor and novelist (The Long, Long Love
), sums up his life by reviewing his hardscrabble childhood in 1920s Nashville, beginning with his father's death three months after the author's birth, through a long series of other deaths, including those of his grandparents and his beloved Auntie, before his departure for the Marines in 1943. "How grisly this seems now, eating the fruit of the trees that were nourished by the bodies of the dead, my father's included," Sullivan writes of the persimmon trees that shaded his family's cemetery plot. The memoir is warm and agreeable, especially when Sullivan speaks of his years as a student at Vanderbilt, his Marine training at Parris Island and his friends in the writing community, among them Eudora Welty, Robert Lowell, Robert Penn Warren and Flannery O'Connor. These solid friendships served him well upon his return to Vanderbilt and later at the University of Iowa, surviving even a bitter charge of racism from visiting British writer Kingsley Amis. Sullivan, now nearing death (he has an incurable melanoma), succeeds in illuminating a Southern literary life. (Feb.)
