Word: merediths
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...warp. It unfolds in contemporary England, concludes in the late 1700s and dallies in the Victorian epoch when an artist named Henry Wallis painted a dramatic portrait, now in the Tate Gallery, of the poet as a young corpse. The model for Chatterton was also an apprentice writer: George Meredith. Not long afterward, Wallis ran off with Meredith's wife Mary Ellen...
...nothing is as it seems. Wychwood's employer is an author who, it turns out, has plagiarized her books. His wife works for an art gallery where the paintings are palpable forgeries. Meanwhile, as the narrative flashes forward and back, parallel lies are occurring in other times and places. Meredith is being deceived; so are those who subscribe to the Chatterton myth...
...just as Meredith plays a part in Ackroyd's book about Chatterton, Ackroyd has a walk-on in Kaplan's. If the accretion of historical detail were + all, this would be a superlative evocation of the England of George III. But Kaplan's aim is psychobiography, and her narrative attempts to press a free spirit into a Freudian mold. She rings in a psychoanalyst to testify on mind and motive: "Those who have not been able to project their Ego Ideal onto their father . . . grant themselves their missing identity by different means, creation being one among others. The work thus...
...even a Civil War a century earlier had not bestowed. The civil rights movement from Montgomery to Memphis was an American epic, with a thousand evocations of place and name: the lunch counters of Greensboro in 1960; the "Freedom Riders" of 1961; SNCC; CORE; the March on Washington; James Meredith; Medgar Evers; Bull Connor in Birmingham; Philadelphia, Miss.; Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney . . . But race and slavery, America's original sin, came back always, and had begun to break into sporadic warfare in the Northern ghettos...
...before. "The South had always frightened me," he wrote later. "I wondered where children got their strength -- the strength, in this case, to walk through mobs to get to school." Those were heroic days in the South, when obscure and unarmed people with names like Rosa Parks and James Meredith and Martin Luther King Jr. fought for black rights on obscure battlefields with names like Selma and Neshoba County. In one of those rare cases of the right man and time and place, Jimmy was there too, organizing, encouraging, marching, helping to "bear witness to the truth...