Word: elyot
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Elyot Chase, Amanda's former husband and current lover a composition more likely drawn from Coward's experience than imagination Donald Cook works with much vigor. His portrayal of the decadent, effeminate male is, however, slightly overdone, and occasionally approaches the prissiness of Edward Everett Horton. Mary Mason, his uncon-summate wife, has an annoyingly shrill voice which would convincingly irritate any husband, onstage or off. Alexander Clark, as Victor Prynne, is described by his wife as "a fat old gentleman in a club armchair," and is just that...
...quartet, East Coker, there are disguised quotes from the 16th-Century Sir Thomas Elyot and from St. John of the Cross; but each is linked by appropiate transitions with what goes before and after, so that readers unacquainted with these not-widely-read authors will not be conscious of missing anything...
They are Mrs. Catherine Standish, her son Elyot and her daughter Eden. Elyot, as the blurb says, "represents death," Eden "struggles up to life," the mother "wavers between the two." They are presented, in their mutual oppositions, with considerable psychological skill. It all converges, in the long run, on sex for each. Elyot, a scholar, a "raker of dust, a rattler of bones," winds up in bed with an art-gallery Jewess as hard & cold as chromium. Eden, a sultry semi-Marxist, follows an abortion with a hot, sterile series of affairs, finds what she needs in a calm carpenter...
...working-class characters in The Living and the Dead are done as if from a Junior Leaguer's notebook. But the sterilities of Elyot, the smolderings of Eden, above all the nervous, bogus charm and climacteric rut of the mother, are very real indeed; and scene after scene is worked out with exactness and subtlety which no second-string novelist can scent, far less nail to paper...