Word: bunyan
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...wait until he was 21-or longer, if he happened to be pale-complexioned. Those stalwarts who managed to abstain until they were 27 were to be paid homage at a public gathering, where hymns were sung in their honor. In John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, the voyager Christian can reach the Celestial City-which 17th century artists sometimes pictured as a snugly fortified medieval town-only by conquering the fleshly temptations celebrated by today's turned-on idealists. Sidestepping sleepy-eyed Sloth and Presumption, Christian gains Utopia, or Paradise, by following the directions...
...linear description of any overwhelming emotional experience, as anyone will know who has rashly attempted to describe even so much as a disturbing dream. Gallantly trying to explain "the marvel of his experience . . . fitfully glimpsed, inadequately expounded but ever present," Muggeridge vainly invokes Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Blake and Bunyan, St. Augustine and Simone Weil. We respect but may not share his feeling that Christ himself once was with him and the BBC television crew on the road to Emmaus. His epigraph from George Herbert perhaps speaks most adequately for him: "O that Thou shouldst give dust a tongue to crie...
This should be daft, glorious stuff, and West ought to lurch into life as a monstrously American folk villain, the match of such folk heroes as Paul Bunyan and Davy Crockett. If Minnesota's lakes are the hoof-prints of Bunyan's blue ox, why can't Warren Harding, Al Capone and Joseph McCarthy be the droppings from Eddie West's cigar...
...debunkers have gone too far. A Western buff who lives in England, Rosa has written a well-informed and lively book that tries to make a balanced revaluation of the six-gunslinger in the making of America. Rosa ends by according him a special status, halfway between John Bunyan and outright bum, as a marked-down culture hero who created for his epic era a flawed but salient image of the male...
Insistence on that point is not new for Cheever. He has always been something of a Christian soldier in mufti, a man more kin to John Bunyan than to John Updike. Cheever's formula for circumventing disorder and the Devil has never strayed far from the New England legacy of his first full-length character, old Leander Wapshot. "Bathe in cold water every morning," Leander counseled his sons. "Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the Lord." Yet literary means, like wars and prices, tend to escalate. In Bullet Park, trying to cope with up-to-date...