Word: childing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...this fond biography of her grandmother. Author Ellin Mackay Berlin tells how Louise made the leap from being a tenement child to becoming the 19th century's hostess with the mostes'. The child of a Manhattan barber and his seamstress wife. Louise used to deliver her mother's embroidery to the fine houses on Washington Square and St. John's Park. Her one ambition was to break into that glittery world and call it her own. She made it. Today more and more social climbing is merely the ascent from one suburban foothill to a slightly...
...muleback. At 16, pretty, dark-haired Louise made a disastrous marriage to a local doctor who was as calamitous a speculator as her father. When he was found dying at Poverty Hill, Calif., riddled by drugs and alcohol, 22-year-old Louise was left penniless with a crippled child to support. Like her mother, she became a seamstress...
When disaster causes the familiar ground to shudder beneath the feet of a child, a neurotic is sometimes born, or a writer, and often both. Mary McCarthy became a writer. Now 44 and looking down at the fallen arches of the years, Novelist-Essayist McCarthy has told some true tales about herself which on other lips might be mistaken for nostalgic prattle. The wary reader might also be scared by the admission that some of these stories have appeared in The New Yorker-which specializes in such stuff to the point where its pages are as snarled up with...
...brothers were condemned to razorstrop beatings in the downstairs lavatory by a hated uncle. Her Uncle Myers is now dead, but the narrative of life under his hateful roof (presents were taken away because they were "too good'') should serve as a reminder that a child's eye sees more than its guardians think...
...because they suggest something about reminiscing intellectuals in general. Those who fall out of a cradle do not merely scream; they see and live to tell. The Fear of the Fall-in the theological as well as the Freudian sense -is expressed in these tales by a seeing-eye child. In her precarious progress between generations and classes. Author McCarthy developed a sharp sense of reality undeceived by either the sentimentality of Utopia or the sentimentality of cynicism...