Word: arthur
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...Arthur Crew Inman was born in Atlanta in 1895, the son of old money (cotton). Midway through Haverford College, in 1916, he collapsed, mentally and physically. "Slipping joints" was prominent among his litany of miseries, and his search for osteopathic relief led him to Boston. Eventually he settled into Garrison Hall , a seven-story residential hotel in St. Botolph Street. Back then it was the sort of place where you could hire a room and a woman instead of having lunch...
Inman, whom Aaron calls Arthur as affectionately as you would an old uncle just stepped away for tea, seems to have won his editor's respect with his lifelong refusal to pretty himself up, much less anyone else. The diarist would look at scribblings 20 years old, realize what a creep he had been when he had written that, yet reject his right to excise a word. His own wife was "a pathetic little wren," though at another time she was his "treasure girl with a heart of gold," but then again she was "homely as a stump fence built...
...diary fall open of itself to any passage, and most likely something reprehensible lives upon the page. Yet, Aaron says, read as a whole, one finds the self-deception. Arthur contradicts himself. He is a blowhard. He knows it. Then something happens. Blam! He blows harder...
Squeezed into eight relatively succinct hours, Arthur Hopcraft's adaptation tidies up the sprawling novel a bit. One regrets the loss of a few of Dickens' colorful minor characters, along with much of his humor. (Where, for instance, is Mrs. Jellyby, that ardent philanthropist who ignores her sorry children while campaigning to help the natives of Borrioboola-Gha?) Bleak House was, perhaps, not meant to be quite as bleak as this...
Fraudulence and self-delusion are strong themes in Wolff's work, as they are in books by his brother, Geoffrey Wolff, whose Bad Debts and The Duke of Deception deal with the misdeeds of the authors' con-man father Arthur Samuels Wolff, alias Arthur Saunders Wolff III, alias Saunders Ansell-Wolff III. In The Rich Brother, Tobias handles raffishness with affection. The hustler wearing the red blazer and Roman-emperor toupee, who hitches a ride with a Century 21 realtor and his blissed-out brother, is in the grand American tradition. "'I am by training an engineer,' Webster began...