Word: comptons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...varsity crew won the Compton Cup Saturday, but narrowly lost the boat race to the midwestern brawn of the University of Wisconsin...
...watercolors are on the whole less inspired, with the exception of Katherine Compton's bold, stylized head "Medusa" and Margaret Philbrick's "Willard Brook." Charles Demetropoulos demonstrates his usual skill in the treatment of reflections; a very wet wash catches the slick rain-swept pavement outside the "Museum of Fine Arts." Unfortunately he is not so meticulous in the overall composition...
Pritchett that she is "the most original novelist now writing in English." Author Compton-Buinett is old-fashioned only in the sense that she writes out of a past in which the center of life is still the big family household-including servants, "companions." nurseries, long corridors, enormous rooms. But her characters are no more untrue to life for this than Oedipus would be for driving around in an automobile instead of a chariot. In Mother & Son, middle-aged Rosebery is in just the same fix as Oedipus: he cannot escape from life with mother. Aged Miranda is seeking...
...hearing this, Miranda drops dead-and the slaves are suddenly free. Or rather, they have that illusion, for Author Compton-Burnett devotes the rest of Mother & Son to hammering home a vital truth: those who consent to live under tyranny can never be released from it, not even by the death of the tyrant. The bereaved men make desperate proposals of marriage; eager spinsters hurry to accept them; but it is no use. By the last page, everything is just as Miranda would want it: both her men have proved unmarriageable, bound by force of habit and inclination...
...strength and weakness of Mother & Son lie, as always in a Compton-Burnett novel, in the long dialogues in which characters of every age vie with one another in calling a spade a spade, thereby turning it into a hatchet. Sometimes the talk is mere tasty acid drops ("I have not the courage to live on charity ..." "I have the courage but not the chance"); sometimes it is compactly expressive of universal human attitudes ("Let me persuade you to try our fruit. We can buy much better, but we take a pride in our own"). Many of the remarks...