Word: memoirs
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MEAN STREETS. Martin Scorsese's kinetic memoir of growing up in New York's Little Italy. A movie with perspective, compassion, some good actors (Robert DeNiro, Harvey Keitel) and a lot of street smarts...
...soon after his mother's death, their son Nigel Nicolson, by then a London publisher and M.P., unlocked a Gladstone bag hidden in Vita's tower writing room. In it he found her 1920-21 memoir of an intense three-year affair with Violet Keppel, an iconoclastic redheaded girl whose mother had been the mistress of King Edward VII. The occasionally purple memoir, written when Vita was 28. makes up about a third of this book. Along with it Nigel Nicolson offers biographical annotations and an elaborate tribute to his parents' "perfect marriage...
Gladstone bag and all, the book has become a delicious and gossipy literary event in England. But what should be said is that the memoir has an honesty and self-awareness quite unmatched by Vita's other writings. It is more touching, moreover, in its swift portrait of Vita's childhood world than in its moments of passion: "Mother did not cry; she always tries not to cry because it gives her headaches." Vita remembers herself as a cruel, lonely tomboy roaming around Knple, one of the last great private estates in England. Her only affectionate companionship came from...
...precisely such gossip that lubricates Vidal's fictionalizing of revisionist history. The novel's form is a memoir within a memoir, somewhat mechanical but well-suited to Vidal's didactic purposes. Only two characters are pure invention. William de la Touche Clancey is a mischievous and gratuitous bit of satire whom followers of Vidal's TV errors and trials should have little trouble identifying. Charlie Schuyler is, according to the author, a young opportunistic journalist "based roughly on the obscure novelist Charles Burdett." This is a flimsy bit of deception. Burdett was so obscure a novelist...
...writes Hannah Tillich, now 77, second wife of Paul Tillich, who died in 1965 properly honored as one of the century's great theologians. Hannah's reminiscences of Tillich are being published this week in a curious book called From Time to Time (Stein & Day; $7.95). The memoir barely mentions the theologian's pioneering work in existential theology. Instead, interspersed with third-rate poetry and erotic fantasy, it hovers between bitterness and love for a husband whose passion for life seemed to express itself often in the courtship of other women...