Word: essayistic
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Unlike James Joyce, who refused to read Freud, or Dylan, who could not listen to Sgt. Pepper, novelist-essayist-poet and Joyce disciple Anthony Burgess has read everything. The prolific Englishman, author of thirteen books since 1949, has thrown it all into his latest tale of a lonely antihero dragging his dyspeptic way through the exoticisms of the Great Mundane. Burgess's greatest creation is Enderby, a wheezing, farting, belching bachelor poet who writes in the lavatory of his filthy flat. Enderby is a Mad Magazine version of Leopold Bloom; he sentimentally feeds gulls and innocently offends all the local...
...Familiar. Too often, however, the contributors to this book are simply blinded by their own racism. The fact that Styron is a Virginia-born white seems to discredit him instantly in the eyes of more than one essayist. Rather typically, Political Scientist Charles Hamilton (Black Power) peevishly sees Styron involved in a white man's plot to divest black people of their "historical revolutionary leaders." Novelist John O. Killens ('Sippi) writes: Styron "is like a man who tries to sing the blues when he has not paid his dues." And several essayists, without even the leavening grace of black humor...
...story to illustrate it. When this happens, a deadening air of calculation clouds his writing. It is almost as if his critical faculty overwhelmed his creative instinct, for Elliott, at 49, is not only a novelist (In the World) and poet (From the Berkeley Hills) but also a provocative essayist on social and literary issues (A Piece of Lettuce...
Wakefield is an incurable essayist. He takes the sting out of his reporting chapters with neatly balanced explanations of the self-evident. An absurdity is either absurd or it is not; a horror brings on the gag reflex or it does not. What reporting there is seems true enough, though Wakefield's modest conclusions will startle few ordinarily demanding readers. But a competently drawn nostril, ear lobe and eyebrow do not add up even to a sketchy portrait; the well-fed, worried face of supernation deserves a better effort...
Despite Strachey's reputation as perhaps the most brilliant of the Apostles, he was denied a fellowship by Cambridge, took only second-class honors, and left the university in 1905 to begin 13 years of scratch-penny frustration as a book reviewer and minor literary essayist. Then in 1918, after two years of fierce work in defiance of his chron ically miserable health, he brought out the four devastating historical essays-on Dr. Arnold, Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale and Chinese Gordon-that shredded all lingering pretensions of Victorian moral eminence. "The his torian of Literature," Strachey had once written...