Word: aunts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...thrown out of prep school in Bombay because the phonies thought he was trying to burn down the school. A very big deal. I mean all he did was drop a match in a pile of wood shavings in the carpentry shed. Then my literary aunt and uncle packed him off to military school. Way off in the Himalayas, for Chrissake...
Alienated. What really knocks me out about old Joe is he is a moron just like I was when I got the axe at Pencey Prep. I mean he's really irresponsible. My Aunt Nina wants him to be a Disraeli or something, but Joe's ambition is to be a khutmul Mao. If you must know, that's a person rich Hindus hire to lie in their beds at home while they go on holiday so the bedbugs will have somebody to bite. Joe's a terrific liar, so you never know when...
Like Joyce, Strick doesn't follow a conventional, chronological narrative line. We are accustomed to flash-backs, but not to such brief flashes as those Strick introduces in his first scene: at the Martello tower, Buck Mulligan says "The aunt thinks you killed your mother," and Stephen sees, and we see, his mother's deathbed, an image that recurs in the drunken hallucinations of Nighttown. Except for Resnais's films, we are not at all accustomed to flash-forwards, and Strick uses them liberally: as Bloom leaves home in the morning, he imagines Blazes Boylan, his wife Molly's lover...
...Dotty Aunt. Bertie was born destined for great things, but what things? Grandfather Lord John Russell had been Prime Minister, and his mother was a Stanley-one of a rich and titled tribe that took a hand more than once in governing England. His father, Lord Amberley, was a freethinker; his mother an even freer one. They died in Bertie's infancy, leaving him to be brought up by two atheist tutors. Mother had been sleeping with one of them, but on the highest principles: poor fellow was a tubercular, and it was then thought that he should have...
...grandmother, Lady Russell, who had been a lady in waiting to Queen Victoria and was a Scotch Presbyterian of dour principles. Bertie was judged too sickly for school (actually he was strong as a horse) and was sketchily educated at home by tutors or a slightly dotty aunt. He had no way of knowing until much later that he was one of the cleverest little boys who ever lived...