Word: dexterities
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...TIMOTHY DEXTER REVISITED (306 pp.) -John P. Marquand-Little, Brown...
...place that was never long out of his thoughts in fact or in fiction. In 1925, before he had written anything better than hack historicals, he dusted off some old documents, ran down some dubious legends and wrote a book about a fascinating 18th century eccentric, Lord Timothy Dexter of Newburyport, Mass. Marquand was never satisfied with the effort. Now, 35 years later, Timothy Dexter Revisited gives a curious old codger...
...fast slipping its Puritan chains. The rich, the decent and the God fearing still ran things, but there was plenty of heavy drinking, and sons of the well-to-do liked to prove their nonchalance by slipping a hundred-dollar bill into a sandwich and eating it. Poor Timothy Dexter wanted desperately to break into the upper crust, but he hadn't a prayer. All he had was money, made by buying up Continental dollars for pennies when most people thought they would become worthless. Overnight a man of affairs instead of a lowly leather dresser, he was still...
Author Marquand's feelings about Lord Timothy are mixed. He grudgingly admires some qualities in a self-made Yankee who wasn't as silly as he seemed. But he admits that Dexter "suffered from senile concupiscence, he was ill-educated, and he was vulgar when drunk or sober." He sees him as a caricature of his period, but his dubious hero gives him a chance to revisit a time and a way of life that Marquand found more gracious and attractive than the "five o'clock shadow of mediocrity" that is creeping over Newburyport. It was only...
...more fascinating and a little better than other people for being Harvardmen"). In his books, the flashbacks he handled so brilliantly kept reaching farther into the past-beyond Harvard, beyond newspaper days, beyond his two marriages and divorces, eventually even beyond George Apley. His latest, unpublished book, Timothy Dexter Revisited, is a new treatment of an early subject, the story of a colonial eccentric that gave him a chance to reminisce about 18th century Newburyport, the home of his ancestors...