MOSS HART’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Act One, Moss Hart’s entertaining theatrical autobiography, is full of Dickensian coincidences and characters who’ve stepped straight out of the pages of a Dickens novel. Here’s a short extract that refers to Dickens:
The great pleasure of my grandmother’s life was to have my grandfather read aloud to her in the evening. Charles Dickens was at the height of his fame then as a novelist and his works were her abiding passion.
My mother has told me that there were difficult times when my grandmother seemed to survive only for the evenings, and the most vivid recollection of her own early childhood was my grandfather’s voice reading Dickens aloud, and later on her most terrifying memory was when he would not—and the house would be completely silent, for when he was in a rage or fit of depression he would punish my grandmother by not reading for days and sometimes weeks at a time and would sit evening after evening without uttering a word. There would be silence throughout the evening meal and complete silence afterward, for he would talk to no one and would allow no word to be spoken by his wife or daughters. He sulked until the fit was over.
Worse still, he would never pick up where he had left off. Dickens was published serially in America in those days, and he would start the reading again with the latest installment, so that my grandmother was forever in the dark about large portions of David Copperfield’s life and did not know until long afterwards what happened to Little Emily.
