Word: blisse
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...turn of the century, Professor Bliss Perry referred to the department in quoting the words an old lady had once spoken in reference to a lecture of Emerson's. "It had no connection," she said, "save in God." And Chairman Bate today adds, "Perhaps our frail, earthly unity is also provided by this strange, old building...
...Warren mystique reaches far and wide. At this point even book salesmen ask to see the trap-door and the room where Kittredge, Lowes and Bliss Perry once examined. Visiting chairmen of other English departments return to see the house which gave birth to their scholarly careers. Everyone agrees that something intangible contributes to making Warren House the indispensable institution it has become. Perhaps one professor best summed it up in quoting Santayana's description of Concord: "External humility and inward pride." ir?-, iohkRCcotkle
This novel has more combinations than the daily double. Against a quarter-century backdrop ('30s to mid-50's) are staged three separate plots: 1) the life and loves of Geoffrey Bliss, a brittle-witted English playwright and "four-letter person"; 2) the struggle of adulterous peeress v. straightforward secretary to find bliss with Bliss; 3) the tea-and-sympathy schooling by the secretary of Geoffrey's sexually insecure son Ludovic, whose mother is the peeress...
Heroine Alex Wharton is an aspiring girl who leaves her father, a devout, unaspiring Church of England priest, for the dazzling world of the London theater. Inevitably, Alex steps through Playwright Bliss's looking glass, when she goes to work for him as his secretary. Bliss is an homme fatal, one of those men three-quarters of whose present consists of past. But Alex keeps calm till Geoffrey casts a luscious peeress, Lady Perdita Carne, in his medieval spectacle play Ludovic II. The soap operantics of Ask Me No More are made palatable by a knowing re-creation...
Rather, he passed day after day of unimpaired bliss, blithely assured that even if all was not well he at least walked in the sunlight. He didn't complain when his bus was late, when it poured on his way to Longfellow, or when he was trapped in Filene's revolving door. And the time his date's heel caught and broke in a streetcar track he cheerfully carried her home. He enjoyed House food, loved breakfasts at 8:15, and even liked the Lowell House bells. He read Thurber, collected Charles Addams, and was content to sit alone...