Word: boyhoods
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...mass white public, starting as far back as 1955 with his hit record, I Got a Woman. In more recent years, a string of others have come along behind him. Lou Rawls, for example, is a former gospel trouper who spices his blues songs with reminiscences of his boyhood in Chicago's South Side slums. He used to work only in the Negro nightclub "chitlin circuit." As for radio, Rawls says, "I never got played on the top 40 stations because they said I was too, uh?well, not too 'limited,' but too . . ." Black? "Yeah." Now Rawls's albums sell...
...other James Baldwin is the questing novelist, the private man loaded down with personal problems that he must defeat-or be defeated by. This is the Baldwin who with his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, marvelously evoked a Harlem boyhood nurtured in a storefront church. It is the Baldwin who, with post-Gide candor, courageously rendered the homosexual experience in his second novel, Giovanni's Room. But this is also the writer who six years ago turned out the deeply disappointing novel, Another Country, a lengthy excursion into the world of bisexuality...
...this time a handsome, slightly built 39-year-old actor, Leo Proudhammer. The dramatic high point occurs on the very first page, when Leo suffers a heart attack onstage. From then on, the reader must bear with him through a convalescence plagued by interminable flashbacks. There is a Harlem boyhood that includes an incestuous homosexual interlude with his older brother. This is followed by a pre-hippie East Village adolescence during which Leo begins to forge a lasting black-brother, white-sister relationship with Barbara King, a Kentucky-born actress. And finally comes the highly satisfactory love affair with Christopher...
...Esquire under the title A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis. It is a short, tame outline of Portnoy's problems. Things loosened up in a hurry with the 6,000-word installment published last August in Partisan Review; called Whacking Off, it is a frantic confession of boyhood sin. Portnoy recalls how, as an adolescent, he always had to please his parents publicly, while he privately and obsessively masturbated to please himself; this experience sentenced him to a chronic condition of shame, which he begs his analyst to cure. The Jewish Blues, which reveals the Portnoy family guilts...
Still another totally recalled English boyhood? One more sensitive child of privilege weaning himself from old Nanny and stumbling gamely onto the fields of Eton? Not at all. V.S. (for Victor Sawdon) Pritchett's brilliantly belligerent account of his first 20 years is about as far as a memoir can get from the usual look-back-in-languor...