Word: altar
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...will. But the other night the Army field censor was going through the unit's letters and he silently handed me one short note and pointed to the final paragraph. It was from an Ohio private to his wife: "It will be a different Christmas this year. The altar will be a fallen tree in this stinking jungle. All around there will be the stink of sweat, unwashed clothes and the fainter, sweeter smell of death. But as I kneel to pray I know you will be alongside me praying too, and that will make it a Happy Christmas...
...story is about a shell-shocked soldier (Mr. Colman) who, as "John Smith," emerges in a daze from an asylum on Armistice Night, 1918. A jolly, warmblooded music-hall actress, Paula (Miss Garson), picks him up in the fog, nurses him to health and the altar. They are happily tucked away in a little cottage, complete with baby, when "Smithy," job-bent, is jolted from his amnesia by a street accident in Liverpool and remembers he is Charles Rainier, son of an aristocratic family. Unaware of cottage, wife and child, he goes home to Random Hall to resume life...
...crying "If it's another bill I won't pay it!" At home, Father Green wore a Turkish fez; outside, a silk top hat. Impressed by Bible stories, young Julian tried unsuccessfully to offer up the topper as a burnt sacrifice, using the sewing machine as an altar. Later he managed to sit on the hat in church. "My father . . . uttered a low groan," beat Julian with a walking stick. Nothing worse had happened since Julian's cousin sat down at the piano and innocently played Marching Through Georgia...
Many a Congregational church (see cuts) now contains stained glass, a rood beam, candles on the altar, other High Church trimmings that would have sent Cotton Mather on a witch hunt...
...Hasselmann and his sister Ellie, provincial, supersensitive Americans, dwell in the uneasy revulsions of a sort of spiritual incest. They represent, respectively, the frigid, inhumane predicament of mind-without-spirit and the equally suicidal predicament of spirit-without-mind. Carl's mental drive stretches him flat on the altar he has built before a hypnotic social theorist. Ellie is impelled to sacrifice herself to the "resurrection" of an aging, rich sophisticate. The earlier phases of these relationships are ground out with a skillful, meat-grinder tenacity worthy of tougher meat...