Word: driftwood
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Canada-born Lawrence Earl is a good storyteller (Yangtze Incident, TIME, July 23. 1951) with a weakness for pretty prose. To Earl, a woman's waist is a "sweet, inward curve," and a hunk of driftwood can be "ductile to the heaving flood." So when Earl ran into an African crocodile-hunter named Bryan Herbert Dempster, he noted that 28-year-old Hunter Dempster had a "hard challenge in his bright, sapphire eyes [that] had come of something more peremptory than time." But Author Earl picked up a good story...
...passenger on the Hong Kong-Macao ferry last week was as weather-beaten, ageless and nondescript as a chunk of driftwood. Like the driftwood, he seemed doomed to float from shore to shore on the China Sea forever. He had no passport. His name, he said, is Michael Patrick O'Brien, but he readily admitted: "Back home in Washington and Oregon, they call me Steven Stanley Regan." He never knew his father; his mother was Hungarian; the only identification he possesses is a Red Cross certificate which calls him "a stateless Irishman...
Lattimore called McCarthy the "Wisconsin whimperer ... a graduate witch-burner." He raked Budenz as perjured and immoral, Stassen as "irresponsible," the Nationalist Chinese as "driftwood on the beaches of Formosa." He even flailed away at people who had not appeared before the committee; for California's Senator William Knowland, who believes the Nationalists should get more U.S. support, Lattimore picked up a Communist-favored sneer, "The Senator from Formosa...
...attorney, flimflamming explorer, dissolute college president, amoral private eye, cozening operatic entrepreneur, horse doctor posing as a fashionable neurologist ("Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped"), bogus Emperor of France?using such aliases as J. Cheever Loophole, Captain Spaulding, Professor Wagstaff, Detective Sam Grunion, Otis. B. Driftwood, Wolf J. Flywheel and Napoleon. Whatever the alias or whatever the rascality, he was always the same rascal, the con man who made no bones about the disdain he felt for the suckers he was trimming...
Sweet Gum & Burnt Cork. On the Pacific Coast, nights had turned cold, and beachcombers gathered salt-crusted chunks of driftwood to add color to the flames of the winter's fireplaces. The salmon fisherman clumped along river banks for the fall run, and hunters, oiling their deer rifles, anxiously eyed the .forest fires that crackled in the summer-dry mountains. To the south, Los Angeles sweltered in 92° heat and awaited its first sight of a World Series by television...