Word: childhoods
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...father's friend soon dropped out ("I think he was a little annoyed at having his serious conversations with Paul come to an end"), and the talks became steadily longer and "more frivolous." They talked about their favorite authors, especially Thomas Mann, their health, their childhood-intimacies trudgingly told. One day Paul idly asked Florence how she was dressed. She described her clothes, was playfully beginning a description of her underwear when Paul began stamping heavily on his cell floor. Thumped he: "I won't have my future wife discussing her underclothes in the presence of strangers." After...
...They reveal little about the outward appearance of the numerous women who have responded to Picasso's own vitality, but they clearly record Picasso's own often savage counter-response. With children (he has four) Picasso has almost invariably used distortion sympathetically to reinforce rather than mock childhood's peculiar and perilous excitement...
These words, written by a Belgian nun in the register of St. Catherine's Female Academy at Benicia, Calif., were as important to Louise Hungerford as if they were inscribed in the Almanach de Gotha. They were her cachet of respectability, her inner answer to the poverty of childhood and the gossiping envy that surrounded her later life. Her father could afford to keep her at St. Catherine's for only a single term. But it was enough. In her 85th year, when she had been a friend of the former Queen of Spain and the Prince...
...become aristocratic, she herself outraged her Roman Catholic family in 1926 by marrying Songwriter Irving Berlin, son of Russian Jewish immigrants. She notes with wonder that her grandmother was born in an East Side slum only a few blocks away from where, 50 years later, Irving Berlin spent his childhood. With just such a sense of place she moves competently from the mining disasters in the Comstock to the horrors of fire that time and again leveled the ramshackle towns of the West. In contrast there are the glittering balls in London's Marlborough House, yachting at Cowes...
Author McCarthy's Memories are sometimes tinily footprinted, particularly when she is talking about her suitably eccentric Jewish grandmother. But the whole thing is not like that. In early childhood, everyone's parents are taken for facts of nature; judgment or love or forgiveness may follow later, in a lifelong search for identity. In that sense Mary McCarthy's art-wearing no makeup here, and armed with little of her famous wit-contrives to make her apparently simple material the story of a search for herself...