Books: Poetic Autobiography

14TH STREET—Percy Shostac—Simon & Schuster ($2.50).

Poet Shostac has less to say about Manhattan’s 14th St. than about himself. He writes this segment of autobiography in unrhymed, uneven lines that read well and easily. Not particularly quotable, never reaching a high poetic plane, never distinguishing between the vocabulary of poetry & prose, his novel in verse has considerable cumulative effect.

I’m cracking no bromidium for a laugh When I say

That woman’s place is in the home. Is this thing called motherhood the

bunk?

Are men mothers?

Bah to your equality,

To your sameness of man and woman.

Is a rooster the same as a hen?

Lucy Stoners look to your anatomy.

Percy Shostac, 27, a Russian East-Side Jew, onetime instructor in English, is by profession a stage-manager. He writes plays on the side, “pretty heavy stuff laid in the Middle Ages.” He fell in love with a 30-year-old married woman, living in a New Jersey suburb. Small (5 ft., 6 in.) but fiery, he persuaded her to leave her husband, come live with him on 14th St. When their money ran out, disillusion began to set in. She left him, went back to her husband. He set to work to exorcise her magic by writing this record of their love-affair, his subsequent adventures as stage-manager, playwright, carpenter bohemian. His intensity, his uncompromising honesty have saved his subject from being either offensive or uninteresting.