Will Mrs. Major Go To Hell ? - The Collected Works of Aloïse Buckley Heath

Description

This volume is a collection of most of Aloïse Buckley Heath's published work, and most of what she wrote and never submitted to a publisher. The impact of her work on the quiet people is imperishable. The impact of this book on the scanners who view the American literary scene in search of imperishable talent is likely to be the same. "Will Mrs. Major Go to Heck?" is offered by the publisher as a work of a major American humorist whose self-effacement should not stand in the way of her achievement. -------------- Mrs. Heath, the sister of William F. Buckley, Jr., died suddenly and tragically in 1967 at the age of 48, as the result of a massive cerebral hemorrhage, leaving behind ten children. ----------------- Brilliantly witty, a little in the vein of Life Among the Savages, but perhaps more Cheaper by the Dozen - two generations of extremely intelligent parents raising precocious children. Some bits are less relevant now (the current events and politics), some are timeless (kids are ever kids the world over), and some fall in between (in our house, Cuisenaire rods and the Trapp Family holiday traditions are not passe, though we recognize that mention of these will confound many readers). This book revels in the wonders of the carpool, of the child who has locked himself in the bathroom, and in the joys and travails of Christmas. ------------ It's a tragedy that ABH died before age fifty. One finds death quite a bit in this book, including a very touching note intended for a book about her sister Maureen, who died at age thirty-one. As it is a compendium of magazine articles (both published and unsubmitted), it lacks the continuity and focus of a dedicated book, but it is nonetheless thoroughly enjoyable. -------------- She was the older sister of William F. Buckely, Jr., and arguably a better writer, which is saying a lot. Heath was a notoriously dilatory author, with most of her output limited to an annual piece for the young National Review. One or two of those in this collection are political, but the rest are memoirs of her childhood, parents, sister who died young, and above all, the trials and tribulations --- but mainly the hilarity --- of raising a large Catholic family in the 50s and 60s. Her children were sort of anti-Von Trapps. Heath's description of the year she attempted a Von Trapp Family Christmas, doomed when she overheard her older children discussing how many more presents they would get if they could only get rid of the younger, and the utter failure of the Christkindl experiment, is alone worth the price of the book.