Word: connor
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Soft Bed in Berlin. Instead, the broadcasts convinced Britain's government that Jeeves's erratic inventor had turned traitor. To repudiate Wodehouse, choleric William Connor-author of the Daily Mirror's Cassandra column-was drafted by the Minister of Information. In a virulent attack broadcast by the BBC, Connor castigated Wodehouse as "an old playboy" who had "fallen on his knees and worshipped Hitler." Roared Connor: "It is a somber story of self-respect, honor and decency being pawned to the Nazis for the price of a soft bed in a luxury hotel...
Last week, long after most Britons had forgiven or forgotten Wodehouse's broadcasts, the controversy flared back with much of its wartime acrimony. It was ignited by Fellow Novelist Evelyn Waugh. In a BBC broadcast on the 20th anniversary of Connor's explosion, Waugh offered "An Act of Homage and Reparation," designed to "express the disgust the BBC has always felt for the injustice of which they were guiltless and complete repudiation of the charges so ignobly made." A far-right Tory himself. Waugh declared that attempts to brand Wodehouse a fascist were part of a wartime conspiracy...
Dodderers & Bashi-Bazouks. In the Mirror, Bill Connor staunchly defended his handiwork: "My denunciation was harsh and bitter, for those were the harshest and bitterest days in a thousand years of our history." He disclosed that the script had even been criticized as "too mild" by a man with a reputation "more weighty than that of the author of Vile Bodies"-Winston Churchill himself. On the other hand, he argued, Waugh's "Ceremony of the Opening of the Wounds" could only hurt Wodehouse. Snapped Connor: "Now Mr. Waugh, in the role of an eager exhumer, disinters the corpse...
Cache sans Craft. A kind of nostalgic gallantry accounts for this whole maimed and meandering book. Author O'Connor is less concerned with the fates of Charlie Carmody and Father Kennedy than with the fate of the entire Irish-American community in an unnamed city that is obviously Boston. What he feels elegiac about is the death of a separate ethnic cultural identity. While he prizes the U.S. melting pot, he dreads the homogenized young American to whom a wake is about as dated as a brogue. And so he tries to capture not only the wakes...
Author O'Connor stores up these charming, nutty items like a squirrel, but unfortunately he lacks the craft for his cache...