Word: alienates
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Cozzens has lived by Joycean "silence, exile and cunning" without quitting U.S. shores. But since a writer's secrets cannot be kept from his books and hence his readers, the popular mind has perhaps intuitively felt the "outsider" in its midst. For Cozzens is really alien grain in the American corn. Americans (particularly American writers) are apt to be romantics to the point of being moistly sentimental; Cozzens is classical, dry, cerebral. Americans have a youth complex; Cozzens has an age complex. Americans are optimistic; Cozzens is pessimistic (he would say realistic). Americans like change; Cozzens accepts but deplores...
...worst of sentimental notions is that "the artist and intellectual is alien in this country. That's nonsense...
Though he will respond to Plato or Thucydides. he may find the Bible, yanked out of its cultural setting, an alien book. "The great Biblical themes of redemption and judgment in history, of freedom and grace and sin . . . seem strangely vague, far away, and unrelated to the ebb and flow of life and history as he understands it." However much the world "may have retained the institutions and outward forms of its Judaeo-Christian cultural stem, it has well-nigh completely lost the capacity to respond sympathetically and understandingly to that heritage...
...April, still keeping his Brooklyn studio, Abel checked in at Manhattan's little Latham Hotel, off Fifth Avenue, as Martin Collins of Daytona Beach, Fla. On June 21 Agent Edward Boyle, of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, ordered to make a routine arrest of an illegal alien, found Abel in his hotel room along with a short-wave radio receiver and a bankbook showing deposits of $15,000. Checking Abel's pockets, Boyle discovered $6,000 and a clothing store receipt addressed to Emil Goldfus. "Who's he?" asked Boyle. "That's me," said Abel...
Abel was quickly and secretly flown to Immigration's alien deportation center in McAllen, Texas. Abel, no doubt, hoped that he would be quickly deported, but the FBI had other plans. Breaking into Abel's cluttered studio, agents found much besides art: finely fashioned drills for hollowing out rings and cuff links and making them into message holders, a book on cryptoanalysis, maps of Chicago and Washington and upper New York State, radio tubes, high-speed film, a Hallicrafters radio (capable of receiving messages from Russia), and a variety of cryptic messages written in Russian and English...