Word: belletrist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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DIED. Frank Swinnerton, 98, novelist, belletrist and chronicler of English literary life for 70 years; in Cranleigh, Surrey, England. Born outside Victorian London, Swinnerton turned out 62 uneven but cheerfully unpretentious books. His intricately plotted, somewhat Victorian novels included Nocturne (1917) and Death of a Highbrow (1961), a book that he and his critics regarded as his best. The agreeable Swinnerton had a gift for making extraordinary friends (among them H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, G.B. Shaw and Aldous Huxley), whose lives he recounted in several spirited but gentlemanly memoirs...
...this shattering climax, Good achieves a high pitch of luminous moral gravity. Venturing beyond easy and merely plausible answers about how a good man succumbs to evil forces, Playwright Taylor has etched the profile of an insidiously disarming process. That process was perhaps best described by Britain's belletrist of metaphysics, C.S. Lewis: "The safest road to Hell is the gradual one-the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts...
Neither the author's older self nor anyone else has mounted a convincing challenge. Updike belongs to the minority that takes his serious poetry seriously. As for the rest, he has his peers, perhaps betters, as a novelist, belletrist, essayist and short-story writer, but they are different people in each case. Updike's versatility has been achieved at some cost. The rules governing his work have remained consistent and deliberately circumscribed. Wit dominates passion; irony mocks the possibility of tragic grandeur. The feelings most likely to seize Updike's comfortably situated people are nostalgia and lust...