Unframed Originals: Recollections

Normally, I don't find memoirs that start in early childhood and end shortly after adolescence to be very interesting. They are almost always long on trivia and short on meaningful thoughts and/or observations. However, in the hands of a skillful writer, they can open the portals to times past in a much more direct and readily approachable manner than ordinary history books. The first part of Stefan Zweig's The World Of Yesterday does an especially fine job of conveying the reader into the world of a schoolboy and precocious young intellectual in fin-de-siecle Vienna. (I have heard that the untranslated version of Marcel Proust's great novel The Remembrance of Things Past, A LA Recherche Du Temps Perdu (French Edition), is equally evocative of the same period in France; but I have not been impressed with the English translations to which we monoglots are restricted.) Through his skillful use of the poet's talents of condensed detail, empathy and lyricism, W. S. Merwin introduces us to the world of his childhood (and slightly later) in a remarkably vivid and immediate manner. While the world of the working class mechanics and yeoman farmers of rural western Pennsylvania, from which his family came, was very far from the precious sensitivity, intellectualism and aestheticism of the Parisian and Viennese salons during the same period, apprehending its unfamiliar world-view widens our knowledge and appreciation of the total human experience Whereas the expansive world-view from the salons of cosmopolitan and educated Europe was widened and deepened by their great knowledge of other times, other places and other cultures, the view of the working class American at the turn of the century was greatly constrained by relative poverty and ignorance. Working class children left their one room school (usually taught by someone with a 12th grade education) somewhere around the 6th grade to go to work on the farm, the mine or the factory. Most farmhouses had two books: The Bible and the Sears-Roebuck Catalog. Merwin's father was considered a success because he had some college, was able to become a Presbyterian minister for small congregations in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and could afford to buy a car. The memoir is peopled by a variety of characters, some kind and thoughtful, some mean and self-absorbed, some stable, some unhinged to a greater or lesser degree, some clever, some dull - but all brought to life by the author. Whether or not you find entering such a world interesting will depend largely on your own background and age. Since my immediate ancestors were of the same class and period (slightly more to the west and the south geographically), I recognized the milieu and the personae. And I have many unframed photographs of rough and simple relatives, uncomfortable in the brave new world of automobiles, electric lights, telephones, the wireless, store-bought clothes and noisy, crowded streets. Even if your family's story is different, a