Word: simpson
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...Eileen Simpson, who wrote Poets in Their Youth (1982), an admirable memoir of her marriage to the poet John Berryman, was an orphan too, but what she calls a "lucky one." Some luck. When she was eleven months old, her mother succumbed to tuberculosis; her father later put her and her older sister in a Catholic convent school, and she learned at the age of six that he had suddenly died of ptomaine poisoning. Convent life was benign but austere. Three winters in a row she suffered pneumonia so severe that a priest administered Extreme Unction...
...iron discipline. And then by her stiff-necked guardian, who lectured her on her father's improvidence and insisted on a budget for her 25 cents weekly allowance: 5 cents for school supplies, 5 cents for the church and 15 cents for savings. Not until years later did Simpson learn that her father had left her an ample bequest, that her guardian had not only hidden it but had dipped into it himself, and that he had gone to court to keep this spiritually starved child separated from her mother's side of the family...
...Simpson calls herself one of the lucky ones because she had an older sister to help her survive the crippling emotional deprivation of orphanhood. And so she grew up and got married and became a psychotherapist. It was only when her second husband died of cancer that the sense of loss suddenly reawakened, that the "black ink of anxiety spilled and spread, saturating the fabric of my life...
...comparing herself to other orphans, real and imaginary, Simpson tells many touching tales: how Rousseau was so devastated by his father's disappearance that he abandoned his own children; how Jane Eyre was scorned by Mr. Rochester in the cruel words "Who in the world cares for you?" Simpson's efforts to sketch from these case histories a kind of psychology of orphanhood, however, do not get much beyond repeated cries of suffering and loss. Thus Bertrand Russell: "The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain -- a curious wild pain -- a searching for something beyond what...
...installed at his suburban Virginia house, a setup that was paid for by Major General Richard Secord. North delivered a magnificent aria in which he described how the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal had targeted him for assassination. He told how Nidal's group had brutally murdered Natasha Simpson, 11, daughter of an American journalist, in the Christmas 1985 massacre at the Rome airport. "I have an eleven-year-old daughter," said North, melodramatically. He offered a challenge. "I'll be glad to meet Abu Nidal on equal terms anywhere in the world, O.K.? But I am not willing to have...