Word: bellum
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Whoops-am afraid that TIME'S ever-diminishing pretenses to sophistication took yet another dip by way of its reviewer's baffling determination to employ ante-bellum terminology in his incoherent notation on the movie [Raisin in the Sun]. I don't have any idea what "Mammy" and "blackface" adjectives have to do with reviewing a motion picture, but save your copy; it is believed, in some quarters of the world, that the Herrenvolk may rise again...
...frontier boy in ante-bellum Kansas, Cody seems to have gone to five schools, to none for very long, fell into the company of badmen called the Jay-hawkers, stole horses, developed a taste for "tanglefoot," and woke up with a hangover in the Union Army. Scholar Russell is well dug in behind about 500 footnotes and a bibliography of 259 items, but perhaps the reader should look for the odd bits: the unforgettable character who used his slain enemy's ear as a watch fob; the horse thief who won Bill's admiration by running 18 miles...
...crying jag. The tears are shed for life as a lost cause. Such a melancholy viewpoint seems to come naturally to the Southern school of U.S. writers of which Virginia's William Styron is an unevenly talented member. Characteristically, most Southern writers equate the post-bellum fate of their region with the universal fate of man, and identify decline with tragedy. Amid romanticized passivity, violence erupts in Gothic melodramas of rape, murder and madness. Among the few exceptions: some of William Faulkner's Negroes, who achieve the dignity of stoic endurance. Unfortunately, the passion seems to be draining...
Despite its manifold wit and moments of wisdom, the plotless Heartbreak House drifts along with its people, and at times reflects their languor. This is partly because Shaw's ante-bellum England is not in itself a theme, but only a framework for one. Where Chekhov portrayed something dramatic, the death-indeed the suicide-of a class, Shaw caught, at most, the malaise of a country. Moreover, his characters are all so busy explaining what they suffer from that though they convey a forcible sense of diagnosis, they give off only the most feeble sense of disease...
With the ante-bellum plantation mansion, the Old South evolved an ideal house for leisurely and elegant living. Rooms were high, with tall windows that could be opened to the breezes; the broad verandas, ennobled by stately Grecian porticoes, were a prototype of indoor-outdoor living. The New South, too, is fast on its way to evolving its own concept of modern comfort. Last week the American Institute of Architects, announcing the winners of a competition that drew 135 entries from the ten Gulf and Southeast Atlantic states, found that the New South still cherishes its breezeways, highceilinged rooms...