Word: meredith
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...tells the story of an American family living in Italy. David Meredith is a writer whose books sparkle but lack proportion; his children, left to grow wild like unclipped weeds, are something like his books. There is Frances, an intense, mixed-up young girl; Louis, who flirts with Fascism out of boredom and an ignorance of life that parades as cynicism. Even four-year-old Leonora is spoiled...
...Humorist's Handicap. Born in 1828, the son of a tailor and naval outfitter, Meredith was redheaded, hardworking, and fond of boxing. At 21 he married a daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, whose novels are minor classics of his time. His wife was a poet, brilliant, beautiful, and six and a half years older than he. After bearing him a child, she ran off to Capri with a painter, returned in due time with another child in her arms...
...Meredith refused to forgive her, a circumstance that led his early biographers to consider him hardhearted. Mary Meredith wandered from place to place, unhappy and alone; her husband was relentless until just before her death, when he allowed their son to visit her. Out of the tragedy of their life, Meredith fashioned the stylized poetic sequence, Modern Love, fifty 16-line sonnets of what Sassoon calls "highly perfected workmanship, constructed as a finely woven monodrama, and abounding in memorable passages and variety of mood." Poet Sassoon had thought that it must have taken him at least three years to finish...
Novelist's Poetry. Meredith's career was full of such prodigies of creation. He sometimes had two or three novels going at once, while he also read manuscripts for the publishing house of Chapman & Hall (he was their chief reader, and discovered Hardy), wrote poetry, and lived a reasonably full social life. His friends were critics and editors, poets like Swinburne, naval heroes like Admiral Frederick Maxse, or permanent officials in the Treasury, like Sir Alexander Duff Gordon. "Socially, they were swells; but they were unaffluent and unconventional swells...
...Meredith lived in his little house at Box Hill near London, climbed the hill at dawn to watch the sunrise, went to the City one day each week to his office. When the authors whose manuscripts he accepted talked over their books with him, they were never told his name: he was referred to at his publishers' as "the reader." His first 16 books (until Diana of the Crossways) were failures...