Memoirs of an Activist Poet

Inman has led an interesting life, but his memoir, filled with fuzzy metaphysical ruminations, is unlikely to appeal to a wide audience. Born in Wilmington, N.C., he early found his Christian faith at odds with his homosexuality and began a lifelong search for a kind of spirituality he could relate to. Disgusted by Southern racist attitudes, he became active in leftist politics, joining the Communist Party and working--unsuccessfully--to unionize the tobacco industry. Like many others, his party affiliation caused him to be called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he took the Fifth; also like many others, he left the party in 1956, after Khrushchev revealed the truth about Stalin. A poet since high school, Inman began to concentrate more on his writing and, like many a good poet of the '50s, made his way to New York City, where he read at coffeehouses, ran workshops and published a small magazine called Kauri. Inman later married (and divorced); he gives matter-of-fact descriptions of his homosexual encounters during those years--some with young boys--without recognition or analysis of pedophilia. For a poet, Inman's prose is surprisingly leaden, composed of long, meandering passages about his spiritual quest interspersed with brief anecdotes that display neither a flair for language nor any ability to distill his experiences in a meaningful way. Photos. (Nov.)