Word: beverley
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...happy day for Beverley when the Dispatch dispatched him on an interview with Prima Donna Nellie Melba, to get her views on a currently newsy murder. They became good friends; she introduced him to high society, and he, in return, tried to write her autobiography for her. He found it hard sledding...
...Beverley soon realized that he was writing the wrong autobiography; he wrote his own instead. Twenty-Five was jampacked with caviar and champagne. It made Beverley one of London's most popular society reporters...
Havoc & Confession. Thereafter, Beverley met everyone, from Gertrude Stein (like "seeing Gibraltar at dawn") to Queen Elizabeth (he played her a Chopin étude when she was Duchess of York). But the person who turned his glamorous life upside down was Journalist Dorothy Woodman (wife of New Statesman Editor Kingsley Martin), who convinced him in the twinkling of an eye that war was just "a racket." Beverley had found the "cause" he needed to balance his "idiotic life" as a bright young thing. The book that resulted from his conversion, Cry Havoc (1933), proved to be one of the influential...
...Beverley himself became conscious of a religious urge, and found his way into Dr. Frank Buchman's "Oxford Group." Beverley was not impressed by Leader Buchman, who was "so slick and starched and glossy that he suggested an American dentist: one felt he was always on the point of saying 'Open wide!'" But he fell for the Groupers' open-wide habit of confessing their sins to each other-until the disillusioning day when he himself tried to confess to a young lady-Grouper. With a scream of "Oh, really!" his confessor "shot away like a frightened...
...Hatlike Hothouse. With "great sobs tearing me to pieces," Beverley was soon carted off to a mental home, suffering from a nervous breakdown. He feared he was going mad-"But if I am . . ." he assured a friend, "I might as well do it with a certain amount of chic." Instead of going mad. he took the more dangerous course of hunting up a new cause, which he found in the "underdog" condition of the British proletariat. "In the old pacifist days I wanted to blow up the War Office . . . Under the ... Oxford Group I wanted to drag people to church...