I first encountered this idea when I took Humanities 101 as an undergraduate from Michael Williams, a writer himself. He once mentioned in class (in the context of his own writing life and Tolkien's) that he believed that every writer must have had a period of lonely convalescence as a child which necessitated her withdrawing from the world for a time completely into herself, thus catalyzing the nascent writer within. For Prof. Williams, I believe, he broke his leg one summer, if I'm not mistaken.
Well, I took those words to heart and have pondered them since. And recently Thomas mentioned to me an article he read in some English journal a proposal of similar kind, "coincidentally." Furthermore, this idea has been especially on my mind because Thomas and I are reading Proust together--we're just about 80 pages into the second book of Remembrance of Things Past. At the same time, I'm taking a translation class in the Spanish Department this semester, and my homework this week is to translate some Julio Cortázar. In doing a little preliminary look into his background, I discovered this, just 2 paragraphs into his Wikipedia entry:
Cortázar spent the rest of his childhood in Banfield, near Buenos Aires, with his mother and his only sister, who was one year younger. He never saw his father again. His childhood home, with its backyard, was a source of inspiration for some of his stories. Despite this, he wrote a letter to Graciela M. de Solá (December 4, 1963) describing this period of his life as "full of servitude, excessive touchiness, terrible and frequent sadness." He was a sickly child and spent much of his childhood in bed reading. His mother selected what he read, introducing her son most notably to the works of Jules Verne, whom Cortázar admired for the rest of his life. In the magazine Plural (issue 44, Mexico City, May 1975) he wrote: "I spent my childhood in a haze full of goblins and elfs, with a sense of space and time that was different from everybody else's."
Qué casualidad... or not.
