Career reinvention is a popular idea these days, but it’s really nothing new. Just ask Nick Lyons, now more or less retired at 88, who’s had multiple careers as an academic, author and publisher and braids the recollections together in “Fire in the Straw,” his memoir of work, life and love.
The subtitle of Mr. Lyons’s slender book is “Notes on Inventing a Life,” which suggests that his particular scheme of getting ahead has depended largely on improvisation. This isn’t a how-to manual for careerists looking to shift gears, since Mr. Lyons’s winding professional path seems much too idiosyncratic to easily imitate. After years in teaching, writing and book publishing, he confesses that even he’s had trouble fathoming what he did and how he did it. “Mostly these past years I have tried to cobble together bits of my fractured days, looking for hints of the pattern, the arc of it all,” he tells readers. “I have tried to find a few of its meanings . . . I am flooded with questions I can’t answer.”
Mr. Lyons, we quickly gather, came from a family that tended to make things up as it went along. He spent his first years, as he tells it, “in a labyrinthine apartment on Walton Avenue in the Bronx, my grandparents, my two bachelor uncles, my mother, and me, and the place was redolent of chopped liver and gefilte fish and pickled herring, and the sounds of Yiddish were always in my ears, and my mother was rarely there.”
Mr. Lyons’s father had died before he was born. His mother took him at the age of five to visit a boarding school, sneaking away while he was looking around and leaving him to learn he’d been enrolled there. It was a time of bewilderment and isolation, though he found solace in taking line and hook to a pond nearby the school. “At the pond I found a link to some world beyond that of my frozen affections, my anxiety, my sadness,” he writes. Fishing became a fascination that would never leave him, and proved a lifeline as his relationship with a new stepfather turned painful.
Upon graduating from Wharton with a degree in economics, Mr. Lyons seemed destined to enter his family’s insurance brokerage. But a stint in the Army shortly after World War II changed all that. To fight boredom in those sleepy days of peacetime service, he turned to books. “I read randomly, compulsively—a smörgåsbord of the slick, the silly, and the profoundly serious—Steinbeck and Jack London, Spillane, Patrick Dennis, Salinger, Poe—anything I could find that would fit into one of the top pockets of my field jacket,” Mr. Lyons recalls.
Credit: Source link
