Word: childhoods
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...contrived was not only fitted for traditional moments of comedy, it made for eerie moments of contrast. The nobleman hero's return to his family, to confess to his own guilty crime while absent and then to smoke out the atmosphere of crime and guilt that haunted his childhood, is charged with ominous Aeschylean echoes. The Greek Furies themselves still hunt the criminal down, until he is able to convert an Orestes-like fleeing from doom into a Christian pursuit of salvation. Against this search for light are placed things blind and self-centered in contemporary life-a mother...
...even today her right leg is still weak, which sometimes hampers her onstage). The polio attack and her father's absence (he returned when she was ten, left again when she was 18) left Renata desperately dependent on her mother. One of the bitterest shocks of her childhood, she remembers, was going to see Giuseppina after a mastoid operation. A surgeon had sliced through a facial nerve, paralyzing one side of her mother's face. "She went in a bella donna" says Renata. "She came out disfigured. I cursed the surgeon-I wanted to kill...
...autobiographical Black Boy (TIME, March 5, 1945), Author Wright described how, from a horrible childhood in the South, he fled first to Chicago, then New York, finally to Paris.* He was an easy mark for the Communists but eventually saw through them and earned their lasting enmity. In The Long Dream the Mississippi Negro boy is called Rex "Fishbelly" Tucker, but so far as the story's essentials are concerned, his name might be Richard Wright. Fishbelly's father, an undertaker, once taught him an important truth as he buried the mutilated body of a young Negro...
Rich Pixies. Before her rich and talented friends went, like Poet Rupert Brooke himself, "rose-crowned into the darkness," life was a fabulous affair for little Lady Diana Manners. She spent part of her childhood in the "celestial light" of Bedfordshire, where "the clouds cast no shadows," and at her grandfather's Belvoir Castle. The plumbing there was not much, but there were "watermen" to bring hot and cold water along miles of corridors, watchmen to pace the battlements by night, and a "gong man," who served as a perambulating clock. There was even an ancient serving-maid...
Lady Diana's childhood was clouded by nothing worse than an unfortunate German governess, muscular trouble (treated with galvanism), and a feeling that she was not so pretty as her sisters. Actually, she grew up to be the most celebrated beauty of London society, later impressed the U.S. public by her appearances as the Virgin and as the Nun in Max Reinhardt's 1924 production of The Miracle. She was spared the rigors of a formal education, and to this day claims that her spelling is so phonetic that when she has a cold she writes...