Word: anarchistic
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...more wishful thinking on the part of his audience, than better artists would dare require. Reality is as much his deadly enemy as it is the superior artist's most difficult love affair. At his best, Saroyan is a wonderfully sweet-natured, witty and beguiling kind of Christian anarchist, and so apt a lyrical magician that the magic designed for one medium still works in another. At his worst, he is one of the world's ranking contenders for brassy, self-pitying, arty mawkishness, for idealism with an eye to the main chance, for arrogant determination to tell...
...Princess will startle readers who think of James, the expatriate, as the man who was saddened because his own U.S. had "no sovereign, no court, no aristocracy . . . nor manors, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins." It is a novel of explicit social significance, about London's anarchist workers and their starry-eyed aristocratic sympathizers. Columbia Professor Lionel Trilling, in a 15,000-word introduction to The Princess, credits James with "a first-rate rendering of literal social reality." But the reader will probably feel that for all James's intentions, his poor are specimens under-glass, people...
...destroying the social order. It is this change of mind that becomes the central development of the novel. Ironically, it is the princess who has given him a taste for the culture that revolution would destroy. In the end, he sees the princess give herself to his best anarchist friend. Overwhelmed by the ironies that smother him, Hyacinth commits suicide with the bullet that was meant for the duke...
Discussions. The second book, The Anarchist, is better. Laid in 1903, it is the story of Esch, a short, red-faced, powerful bookkeeper who in a phlegmatic, almost indifferent way: 1) gets mixed up with the Social Democrats when his friend is jailed in a shipping strike; 2) becomes a partner in a theatrical venture featuring lady wrestlers, his task being to recruit the wrestlers; 3) seduces, or almost takes by assault, a middle-aged widow who owns a restaurant, and subsequently marries her. The book is a succession of drab quarrels over boardinghouse tables, dull arguments over money, cynical...
...Boswell was both a kind of genius and "a tissue of contrarieties." The man who rushed off to a brothel on hearing of his mother's death "was both cocksure and uncertain of himself; painfully self-searching yet comically self-deluded; a Tory in his beliefs and an anarchist in his behavior; unable to curb any of his physical cravings, yet capable of the stupendous discipline needed to complete the Life; romantic about love yet rakish about women; an inflexible snob and a born mixer; irrepressibly gay and morbidly gloomy. ... A character no novelist would have the audacity...