Word: deviling
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...after it was written, and ran for less than a week. In it the author of A High Wind in Jamaica had written a folksy Welsh fantasy involving a virtuous village clergyman (Eddie Dowling), his wooden-legged wife Minnie (Josephine Hull), a young girl in the employ of the Devil, and the high-kicking flesh & blood leg that Minnie suddenly sprouted. The whole thing was a frisky parable in which good & evil did not wrestle so much as tickle each other with straws. Generally tame and frequently tedious, Minnie owed its gayest moments to the bouncy charm of Actress Hull...
...Tech, Oppie had been at home with the blackboard and the slipstick. At Los Alamos he proved that he could direct experimental physics. And he had the capacity to make prima donnas pull together, and ordinary people work like the devil. He worked like the devil himself-sometimes as much as 20 hours a day. A six-footer, he shrank...
...ghost. Then she realized that she was one. For a while, Lester and her sniveling girl friend Evelyn (they had been killed by the same crashing plane) were lonely in the soundless, deserted London they haunted. But then they got involved with a gaunt, ascetic emissary of the Devil named Simon Leclerc (he was disguised as a popular religious leader and preached about Love...
...good deal of it reads like Mann's heaviest formal essays. To those who look for it, however, the book offers a masterful explanation of those sides of the German character that welcomed Hitler. Most readers will see a symbolic parallel between Adrian's bargain with the Devil and Germany's similar sellout...
Mann himself doesn't think that parallel should be pushed too far. Said he in Los Angeles: "Both sold their souls to the Devil, but my hero is much more representative of the tragedy of the times." Mann, now 73, has been carrying the Faustus idea around for two-thirds of his life ("I wrote the first little note for it in 1901"). His preoccupation with illness goes back at least that far. Mann does not believe that illness is a source of artistic activity, "but if genius already exists, it stimulates it. It depends on who is sick...