Word: life
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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There is no glossing over the facts of Lahr's private life, for instance. But it is so flecked with tragedy as to seem almost unreal. This is how it went: At the start, a poor Bronx childhood, dropout from school, succession of odd jobs and petty thieving. Then Lahr tries burlesque just for fun and is hooked ("I would have done 20 shows a day. It was like a shot of -dope? Adrenalin?"). He rises to vaudeville, lives with and eventually marries his act partner, reaches Broadway while at home his wife is going insane ("She laughed...
This chronicle is often retrieved from corniness by touching moments and memories that allow young Lahr to mold humanity around the trite-tragic skeleton that his father's life seems to have been. For instance, there is Lahr as a budding vaudevillian putting makeup on his collar even when unemployed so everyone will know he is in show biz. One is touched by the physical fact that his left wrist was permanently larger than the right from breaking repeated pratfalls. And a fine moment comes when a wino outside the theater holds out a dollar saying "Here, Bert...
...then back to his own wife and child, whom he has neglected, and finally back to an exploration of himself. Hind, self-consciously tall at 6 ft. 7 in., does not know his own parents and was brought up by a guardian whose strict moral precepts still order his life. Perhaps this is why Hind gradually comes to think of himself as the savior of what McElroy calls the "placental" city. Hearing the police emergency siren, Hind "imagined vehicles fading to the side to give way, his own long arms stretching over the heights and depths of the city...
Hind becomes the almost ludicrous pursuer of a lost cause whose tangled effects obfuscate his thinking. Clues ravel in his memory until the past becomes present and all of life is poured into one densely occupied moment. "Hooked with a wood into the forest, it will lead you well beyond the pier," states one clue. Does it refer to the golf course owned by Hind's friend Ashley Sill, where one may hook the ball into the trees? Or does it mean the huge fishhook stuck in the ironwood outside the Laurel home, from where Hershey was taken...
...this "moment of mania," and plunges back into the wilderness-America's Garden of Eden-to retell a primal myth. In a sequel of seven comparatively short poems, he takes Naturalist and Bird Painter John James Audubon as a kind of frontier Adam, sketching in his 19th century life as a drama of innocence, guilt and final redemption...