Word: difficult
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...schmalz-artist requires more belief, more wishful thinking on the part of his audience, than better artists would dare require. Reality is as much his deadly enemy as it is the superior artist's most difficult love affair. At his best, Saroyan is a wonderfully sweet-natured, witty and beguiling kind of Christian anarchist, and so apt a lyrical magician that the magic designed for one medium still works in another. At his worst, he is one of the world's ranking contenders for brassy, self-pitying, arty mawkishness, for idealism with an eye to the main chance...
...Publishers' Ad-club dinner in Manhattan, he rose to register a protest about the ads "connected with the business of embalming authors' brains between stiff covers." To Weir, the ads for what another adman called "breast sellers" look no different from "bra advertising ... It is difficult, at times, to tell . . . whether a book is about land-development or bust-development, about seafaring or suckling ... In my opinion, book advertising trades too much upon the sensational-when it has too little of the sensational to offer. If books were food or drug products-and some of them...
...Through seductiveness, or first idea, the painter attains the universal . .. With certain painters-Titian for example-this seductiveness is so powerful that it never abandons them ... I myself am very weak, it is difficult for me to remain my own master in front of the subject...
...will soon return to Italy to make a movie for Britain's Sir Alexander Korda -based on Luigi Pirandello's difficult Henry IV. Says Welles: "So much first-rate talent is going in the direction of the literal. I don't even like the word 'documentary.' You can't go on proving that a rusty faucet is rusty and a dirty alley is dirty. They are using the camera as a recording instrument. I want to use it as an instrument of poetry...
Counterfeiters, is well-known in the U.S. -and mainly by esthetes and highbrows. It is a brilliant, difficult novel of good & evil, with plots and counterplots twisting through a choking fog of perversion. Gide himself intended The Counterfeiters to be his major work. Even so, only 45,000 copies of all its U.S. editions have been sold. Of the other 16 Gide books published in the U.S., only Vol. I of his intimate Journals (TIME, Sept. 22) has made any dent (10,000 copies sold) on U.S. bookreaders...