Word: benchley
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FLASHMAN AND THE DRAGON, George MacDonald Fraser THE GARDEN OF EDEN, Ernest Hemingway THE INHUMAN CONDITION, Clive Barker THE LAST BLOSSOM ON THE PLUM TREE, Brooke Astor MONKEYS, Susan Minot "Q" CLEARANCE, Peter Benchley...
...mention composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein '39 and cellist Yo-Yo Ma '75, writers John H. Updike '54 and Peter B. Benchley '61, poets T.S. Eliot '10 and George Santayana '99, and a multitude of others...
With his second wife, Gwyn, whom he married in 1943, Steinbeck went in for Manhattan town houses, and New York literati like John O'Hara and Nathaniel Benchley were favorite guests. As he approached 50, Steinbeck and his third wife, Elaine, moved to Sag Harbor, a resort and fishing village on the eastern end of Long Island. All along, his life was like a badly made play; none of the people or places quite seemed to fit the man, any more than did the costume he sometimes affected: black cape, cane and broad-brimmed...
...Quinze. He ransacks old collections and ranges through the century, from Stephen Leacock to Fran Lebowitz. Anything that smacks of adolescence is jettisoned: "You will meet with no Dorothy Parker here... I found her comic stories brittle, short on substance." And nothing mild is allowed: to go through Robert Benchley's work is "to discover a good many of his sketches astonishingly bland, disarmingly gentle." The 65 pieces that pass Richler's scrutiny are trenchant, acrimonious and sharp. Most of them are also funny. But they are no more mature than the Falstaff put down by Prince...
Half of those who divide quote Benchley and his fellow aphorists. The other half prefer proverbs. And why not? The aphorism is a personal observation inflated into a universal truth, a private posing as a general. A proverb is anonymous human history compressed to the size of a seed. "Whom the gods love die young" implies a greater tragedy than anything from Euripides: old people weeping at the grave site of their children. "Love is blind" echoes of gossip in the marketplace, giggling students and clucking counselors: an Elizabethan comedy flowering from three words...