Word: bookmanship
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...pointed out in Rome last week, is that "you don't have to read the books you take with you." One of his own favorite unopened authors is Toynbee. Rule No. 2 is that you don't have to finish anything. Indeed, half the charm of vacation bookmanship is in returning to the same unconquered magnum opus as if to Everest. A Madison Avenue executive back from Martha's Vineyard this month confessed that he had attacked Dante's Divine Comedy for the fifth straight year, only to bog down once again in the first canto...
...Significance. Here, exhibited with simple declarative irony much like that with which Author T. F. Powys has exposed the rotten boroughs of England, but without that writer's bookmanship, are the hill and village folk that made possible in this land and century the preposterous "monkey trial" at Dayton, Tenn. Following no plot, pointing no moral, it is simply a contemporary pageant of ignorance masquerading as "smartness," bigotry as uprightness, mob violence as morality, pleasure as the unpardonable sin, among isolated people whose surroundings seem to have become a spiritual wasteland, stunting and evaporating in them all but their...
...rich, complete personalities, its sure, translucent substantiation of subtle motives, its warm humanity, its rare good taste and rarer good humor, this is as fine a book as one might ask for. The dignity of mind and manner are those of a gentlewoman; the cool, easy prose and the bookmanship are those of a gentlewoman of letters...
...irritable race" -a writer. When Jill Wetherell, aging nymph, snares Pendleton in one of his "misunderstood" moments, Nelly vengefully becomes Mrs. Paramor. Ultimately, both Nelly and Pendleton revert to type and the story closes with a coo. It is all very country-clubby and insipid, but the bookmanship is flawless-a Jack for every Jill. And occupants of porch chairs who read Mrs. Paramor will surely spend many a more boring Summer afternoon...
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