Word: despairful
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...motivated by a love of real estate?" Queen Eleanor demands. All this verbal carnage must have deeper roots. Like light glinting off the edge of a steel knife, appearances in The Lion in Winter are blinding. The viciousness and deceit, the shell of anger and the hollowness of despair are masks the royal family wear to cloak the more profound hurt of rejection. If they cannot have love, Henry, Eleanor and their three squabbling sons will have hatred--not merely hatred, but complete and utter decimation of their victims and tormentors...
...lions, essentially masks a dramatic landscape as bleak as a snow-embalmed mountain. In this world, mistakes trigger others in an avalanche of errors, which makes retreat to hope and love impossible. "We can't stop and we can't go back. There's nothing else," Henry cries in despair. But even a drama of despair can offer testimony to the power of human endurance. At the end, when Henry and Eleanor re-mask, confronting the wreck of their lives with equanimity, they score a small triumph--a triumph in which the Leverett House company richly shares...
...worries over "his failing life, / his whiskey curse, his problems with his wife." He watches his young daughter grow older and thinks: "This is the end of Daddy, the shallowing of the depths of her childhood, when bearded Daddy was any." Though Berryman could movingly record Henry's despair at the deaths of friends, the poet could also tease his own creation...
...dancers, jockeys and sultry bathers sculpted over and over, ultimately sum up lives of hard work, frustration and all-too-frequent boredom. They suggest a sense of physical inadequacy to do justice to abstract ideals of ballet, horse-racing or even bourgeois femininity. Degas expressed this despair with regard to his artistic ambitions, when, in old age, he told the painter De Valernes: "I felt myself so badly made, so badly equipped, so weak, whereas it seemed to me that my calculations on art were so right. I brooded against the whole world and against myself." But if Degas sulked...
...World of Apples (1973), Cheever took middle-class innocence and evil about as far as possible. What, after all, are the transgressions of alcohol, adultery and the idolatries of affluence when judged against the world's unrelenting slaughter and injustice? Cheever's visions of guilt, despair and hope clearly needed a more extreme situation. For his new novel, he has found one in the image of a modern penal institution...