Word: childhoods
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Milligan's multiple personality, like others, is a desperate attempt to handle conflicting emotions by parceling them out to different "people" and is associated with a severely warped childhood. The illegitimate son of two Florida entertainers, Milligan was three when his father committed suicide. His stepfather physically abused his mother and sodomized young Milligan, threatening to bury him alive if he told. As a teen-ager in Ohio, Milligan fell into trances and walked the streets in a daze. He was incarcerated twice, once for rape, once for robbery, and failed at every...
...CHILDHOOD: THE BIOGRAPHY OF A PLACE...
...Childhood, Crews turns to non-fiction and grants his landscape something it never had before - credibility. The place is Georgia; the time, the Depression, when "there wasn't enough cash money in the county to close up a dead man's eyes." His people are the forlorn, gaunt sharecroppers fixed in the grim photographs of Walker Evans. James Agee, whose Let Us Now Praise Famous Men accompanied Evans' work, portrayed his subjects with the sympathies of an outsider; Crews evokes them with a familial intimacy...
Crews' penchant for the bizarre has been subdued in A Childhood. His father, whom he could not remember, becomes in retrospect a heroic if desolate figure, "fond of lying out with dry cattle" - that is, women who had never given birth. The minor characters are equally memorable: Willalee Bookatee and his family, their black neighbors; the Jew, a peddler whose wagon was crammed with exciting goods; Mr. Willis, the stoic hired hand, who "moved as slow as grass growing" and once extracted a tooth from his own mouth with a pair of pliers. Even the animals - Daisy the mare...
Inspiration, it would seem, consists in memory and a will to escape the sorrows of childhood: "The only way to deal with the real world was to challenge it with one of your own making." As a boy, Crews created a country drawn from the photo graphs of models in Sears, Roebuck catalogues, and the characters he conjured up were no doubt precursors of the people who dwell in his novels. But this memoir depicts them as they truly were and situ ates them in that inexhaustible literary arena, the bitter, impoverished South...