Word: brinnin
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Long after they have left, Brinnin's studies will remain, his characters frozen in their illusions and their delusions...
...year later," Brinnin writes, "I heard what I wanted to hear. 'Your book,' she wrote, 'was a great and successful undertaking.' That she then thought I was a Mr. Binner, that the book had got (sic) confused in her mind with the whisky called Four Roses, that she addressed her letter to a street on which I had never lived, were, as I squinted at that spidery scrawl, matters of no consequence." The study revolves around Stein and Brinnin; Toklas has become the foil...
TAKING AS HIS SUBJECT this lesser half of a noted pair, this shadow of a shade, Brinnin is unable to sustain the same degree of focus and self-effacement he shows in his other studies. He does not have the same interest in Toklas as in Capote, and he does not pretend to. Rather than follow a character's progress and transformation, because of a simple curiosity and fascination for that character's doings, he ignores the character at hand, striving to reach through and beyond Toklas, to Stein. Brinnin's goal, the biography, undermines his intent to depict Toklas...
...When Brinnin's biography, The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and her World, appears, eight years after that first meeting in Paris, Toklas' health has deteriorated...
...THERE IS a surreal quality to the people Brinnin has assembled. Flitting in and out of each other's lives with a bewildering ease, alluding with cryptic statements to another part of their lives, outside the bounds of Brinnin's knowledge: These are not real people, but characters from another time. On the verge of recognition or oblivion, they appear briefly to impart a glimpse of their lives, haunted, driven, fleeting...