Word: childhood
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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American readers know Rezzori mainly for two richly convoluted memory novels of Europe before and after World War II, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (1981) and The Death of My Brother Abel (1985). The Snows of Yesteryear looks back before their time frame, to the childhood and, implicitly, the formation of a writer. It leads into a world now irretrievably lost, its values blown away by World War I and its fortunes wrecked by the inflationary '20s -- "For the class to which my parents belonged . . . a fall into chaos, into impotence and deprivation...
...Austro-Hungarian Empire near Czernowitz in the Bukovina, which became part of Rumania in 1919 when Rezzori was five, and was later swallowed by the Soviet Union. Rezzori's tale is not a continuous narrative but a group of character studies of five people who presided over his childhood and youth -- pillars of the writer's adult imagination around whose base the boy's life was lived...
...bother to label Mamet a liberal or a conservative. He is a free radical attaching himself to whatever particle of reality promises further knowledge of the whole. At times he can be -- well, freakish. How about an interpretation of Superman as the most vulnerable of beings because his childhood had been destroyed? Outre? You bet. But as Mamet confesses, "I've always been more comfortable sinking while clutching a good theory than swimming with an ugly fact." R.Z.S...
According to Eileen Simpson, poet John Berryman's widow, the seeds of the poets' destruction were sown early in their childhood. For example, Berryman's crippling emotional problems were caused in part by his difficult relationship with his mother, she writes in her book Poets in Their Youth...
Berryman was not unique among the earlier poets in having a troubled childhood. Delmore Schwartz's relationship with his mother was also occasionally explosive, Simpson writes. And Robert Lowell hinted at the sadness of his childhood in his later confessional poems, one of which describes his fictional stay in a mental asylum where all the patients were from Harvard and all the monitors came from Boston University...