Word: bastardizes
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Education: Public school in Monroe and Portland, Ore. Joined Oregon National Guard in 1916 "without asking the old man" because "I liked to shoot." Won the Oregon National Guard's only appointment to West Point, graduated (1918) after 18 months with the accelerated "bastard class of World War I." Graduated infantry school (1920), advanced flight training (1924), Air Force tactical school (1936), Command & General Staff School...
Papal Carpetbagging. Lucrezia's big trouble was her family. Her father, Rodrigo Borgia, a crafty, sensual and deceptively charming Spaniard, got himself elected Pope in 1492 as Alexander VI. Alexander was an unashamedly worldly pontiff who made no effort to conceal Lucrezia and his seven other bastard children - indeed, thought nothing was too good for them. For eleven years, in one of history's most painstaking carpetbagging expeditions, he virtually turned the papacy and its pos sessions into a family preserve...
...Sforza, of the powerful Milanese Sforzas. But for her father, this was just the beginning. Four years later he forced Giovanni to an annulment on the pretext (scandalously false) that the marriage had never been consummated. Soon Lucrezia was sent higher up the political scale by marriage to the bastard son of the powerful King of Naples. This one lasted two years. Then Cesare had the fellow murdered, and husband No. 3 was found for Lucrezia : Alfonso d'Este, son of the even more powerful Duke of Ferrara...
Professor Tracy gives many examples of Savage's poetry in The Artificial Bastard, and his well reasoned interpretations of such passages show the stages of his subject's mind. In the Wanderer, Savage imagines himself a divinely inspired poet. The Bastard glorifies his illegitimate birth. Much in the same vein as Edmund in King Lear, he cries," Blest be the Bastard's birth! He lives to build, not boast, a generous race; no tenth transmitter of a foolish face...
Because The Artificial Bastard attempts to bring into one small volume all the known data about Richard Savage, it is slightly fact-heavy. But Clarence Tracy's straightforward, clear prose style does much to counterbalance this, and the facts are by no means jumbled. Sometimes, his dispassionate manner gets away from him, and he understates almost ludicrously. "If this charge had been proved it would have gone hard one Savage, in that age of disembowling...