Word: decay
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After 56 years the Italian Socialist Party had returned to its birthplace, Genoa's 16th Century Palazzo Ducale. Its drafty corridors bore the scent of political decay. Had Italian Socialism, corrupted by its alliance with the Communists, come home to die? Its leaders said not-but their expostulations carried little conviction, even to one another. Last week, the evidence of death was strong enough to warrant interment...
...look at Eugene Berman, a bald, plump, cheerful little man, you would never guess that his paintings are meticulously composed glimpses of ruin, misery and decay. A Thomas Traddles among painters, he pictures philosophers asleep under Paris bridges and ragged princes mooning among the ruins of their family palaces; his work fairly groans with heartache. But Berman himself, whose painted gloom has earned him a solid reputation throughout Europe, has claimed to be "divinely happy" ("It's just that I enjoy melancholy things...
...have also a decay of the power of conviction or mastery; we permit ourselves everywhere to be overwhelmed by the accidents of our massive ignorance and by the apparent subjectivity of our individual processes ... It is a world alive and moving but which does not understand itself . . . Shaw is as difficult as Joyce, Mann as Kafka, if you really look into them. The difficulties arise . . . partly because of the conditions of society . . . The audience is able to bring less to the work of art than under the conditions of the old culture, and the artist is required to bring more...
...trouble is that the play has only a few--moments intensive enough to show the decay of the two women, diffusing its too slight self otherwise in side issues like the drunkenness of the husband. Grace Tuttle gave a concentrated, touching performance as the younger woman, her half-hearted southern accent being only a small fault...
...good and that weaklings and no-goods cause trouble'? Granted. But is that sufficient ground for implying, as this novel clearly does, that the partisans' original attitude was morally right, that passivity is preferable to active resistance to tyranny? The Dreader may wonder what is the decay of values, the spiritual malaise that leads so talented a writer to write so morally ambiguous a novel...