Word: aristocratic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...couple of years back in The Go-Between. Once again, as in The Go-Between, class consciousness induces a terse, desperate kind of sexuality, then thwarts it. But there the similarity ends. Robert Shaw portrays a stolid, ambitious owner of a small hired-car firm. Sarah Miles the balmy aristocrat whom he chauffeurs and who drives hi, in turn, to excess es of frustration. Miles' meager talents, her shrill, spindly posturings, have lost through incessant repetition the small novelty they might once have...
Read's Heathcliff is not a stableboy but a contemporary Yorkshire parson's son who sulks because God did not make him an aristocrat. At times, an American reader is hard put to take Hil ary Fletcher's miseries as solemnly as he does himself- even if one grants that a second-rate British public school is "worse than prison" and that hell knows no torment like an Englishman at the hunt ball whose jacket fails to fit. Alas, The Upstart stipulates that exactly this sort of class embarrassment can still drive a dated Angry Young...
Almost universally, people who see Sorrow and Pity come out with admiration and respect for Christian de la Masiere, a French aristocrat who fought in the Waffen SS for the Nazis on the Eastern front against Russia--in retrospect hardly the most justifiable position for a Frenchman during World War II. Ophuls himself said "I feel I have the right to judge Fascists" like la Masiere, and judge them severely. Yet we are unable to judge this man harshly--his principles, yes; his person, no. And this fact has confused many people who have tried hard to tease...
When the curtain first rises, you are plunged into a thickly tangled plot that may take you the whole first act to unravel. Basically, the main character is not really the medieval German emperor, (sigh of relief from those who hate historical plays), but a twentieth-century Italian aristocrat who suffered a fall from his horse during a mock-medieval pageant and remained convinced that he was actually Henry IV. In order to humor him, his relatives have totally recreated Henry's courts, with servants in medieval dress, oil lamps instead of electric lights, visiting abbots and monks--the works...
...pieces Vidal has ever written. He turns what is ostensibly a book review (of Joseph Lash's Eleanor and Franklin) into one of the best thumbnail biographies since Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. To Vidal, F.D.R.'s widow is the finest example of the Christian Puritan aristocrat, dedicated to improving the lives of the masses. In recalling her funeral, he concludes with a passage that out of context seems embarrassingly sentimental but actually reveals a great deal about this "tremendous hater and tiresome nag": "As the box containing her went past me, I thought, well, that...