Word: doomful
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...that kind of woman, really?" Instead, Verrett was childish, beautiful, desirable -the kind of woman other women like despite her sexual superiority. "Then when she gets angry at Don José in the third act, it's a different character," Verrett explains. Lighthearted before, Carmen now senses only doom in her affair with José. It is a difference that points logically to her murder in the fourth...
More receptive, perhaps, than even Krock would welcome. The nation is, as he describes it, quite obviously torn and tormented by the problems of an age more complex than man has ever known. Yet not even Krock is convinced that his rumblings of impending doom should be taken full strength. With the innate humor he seldom displayed in 60 years of portentous prose, he recalls in his memoirs the advice once offered him by Franklin D. Roosevelt: "Cheer up, Arthur. Things have seldom been as bad as you said they were...
Even this grisly story is lightened by comic touches. Charley's family gathers gloomily around the radio and hears Gabriel Heatter, the doom-laden commentator, warn "of dreaded pyorrhea." On another occasion, Charley, in adolescent bravado, adds "the suicide caper to his repertoire of small talk, using it to fascinate women." Alas, it only bores them. As a companion piece to Factory, the story sharply emphasizes Sheed's overall theme: the harmful consequences of clutching at visions of the past, whether they are mythical but life-sustaining visions like Jimmy's or real but death-dealing ones...
Like Stanley Grant, Behrman went to Salzburg in 1937, and the memory of a doom-laden summer started him on the book, the only novel he plans to write, nearly two decades later. "I knew what was coming," he said. "The streets were choked with Mercedes full of Nazis. But all that those dear people talked about was whether Mahler or Bruckner was a better composer-that was the big debate then. To this day I don't understand why they didn't see it and get out; but the sad truth is that no matter what public...
...nothing else, this novel shows that literature is perhaps the most Victorian of arts, the most difficult to mold into new patterns, the hardest to fake. Despite prophecies of the novel's doom, it may be that the old-fashioned virtues of story, characterization and dramatic prose exposition will keep it alive even after that millennium when TV is wired directly into everyone's skull...