cover image Youthful Look (C) a Memoir, 1947-1952

Youthful Look (C) a Memoir, 1947-1952

Judson Jerome. University of Arkansas Press, $30 (309pp) ISBN 978-1-55728-208-8

Rebelling against the conformity he found in the Midwest in the early 1950s, poet Jerome, then a graduate student, embarked on a group marriage uniting his wife and another couple in ``some vague cohesion of spirit.'' The journal he kept in 1952 recording his experiment in communal living is a dragging, laborious self-analysis of a marital stew of tensions, studied openness, jealousies and fumbling sex, which ended when the foursome collapsed and the other couple separated. The late Jerome, poetry columnist for Writer's Digest , acted as father-figure for his younger brother, who at one point seemed on the verge of making it a fivesome. Jerome and his wife subsequently had one other group marriage and several relationships that came close to it. In contrast to his tedious journal, the first section of this memoir is a sharp, vivid, self-deprecating account of his migration from Oklahoma to Chicago in 1947 and his formative years as an anarchist intellectual. Many poems are interwoven throughout. Photos not seen by PW. (Jan.)