Word: authorative
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Pity for Women, to tell the love story of worldly, malicious, 34-year-old Pierre Costals and pretty, innocent, 21-year-old Solange Dandillot. Author de Montherlant begins by giving pages of letters written to Costals, a successful novelist, by his feminine admirers. He writes a lugubrious essay on matrimonial advertisements (''Behind every one of these advertisements a face, a body, an unknown something that, after all, may well be a heart...
With their attention distracted by Author de Montherlant's byplay, readers may not notice how shrewdly his characters are drawn. A libertine, indulgent, temperamental, Costals undertakes the amorous education of Solange with a patience that astonishes even himself. He raves about her legs, her eyes, her hair, her ears, her wrist watch, her vaccination marks, her manners and the fact that she does not read his novels, "When she blows her little nose," he exclaims, "it's always behind a newspaper (moderate in its views) so that I shan't see her do anything...
...walks the legs off her when she visits him in Paris. Although he gets Solange, and gets Andrée, both triumphs cost so much misery that even male readers are to have a low opinion of Costals by the time wins them. Their opinion might be even lower, Author de Montherlant implies, were they unable to find comparable cruelty somewhere in the history of their own love affairs...
Contemporary historical novels like Anthony Adverse carry a lot of philosophical baggage. Compared with them the historical novels of Cecil Scott Forester travel light. Last year Author Forester caught the attention of a few adventure-minded readers with his fast-moving, lightly-laden Beat to Quarters. That book revolved around a romantic hero, Captain Horatio Hornblower, a shy, dignified, portly British sea dog of Napoleonic times, master of H.M.S. Lydia, who pitted his 36-gun frigate against ships twice as strong. Last fortnight, when he continued Captain Hornblower's story in Ship of the Line, it seemed likely that...
...ship. .. . . That was the sort of broadside which won battles. That single discharge had probably knocked half the fight out of the Frenchmen, killing and wounding a hundred men or more, dismounting half a dozen guns." With little philosophizing about war and man's fate, Author Forester, competent and unpretentious, hurries his story along, wastes no words as he makes Captain Hornblower a hero, follows him brisky to defeat and to prison from which, presumably, another fast-moving story will be required to free...