Word: fadiman
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...land, defying time in its blinding bursts of change, Los Angeles nonetheless maintains an easy, vacation-like atmosphere that is foreign to the East. When Lincoln Steffens, a native Californian, visited the Soviet Union in 1917, he exclaimed: "I have seen the future, and it works." Retorts Author Clifton Fadiman, a confirmed Angeleno: "We have seen the future, and it plays...
...fairly good rule of thumb to avoid books that come in cardboard slipcases, just as a practiced reader automatically avoids the memoirs of actresses, novels described by their publishers as heartwarming, and books given prepublication endorsements by Clifton Fadiman. The rule is not absolute, but more often than not the contents of a slipcase either have calcified into the classic condition or are so fragile that they need an especially strong container to keep them from crumbling. Most of Janet Frame's stories, sketches and fables in these two prettily boxed booklets fit the second case...
Apparently having nothing new to say about bullfighting, Barnaby Conrad, the ex-matador (now a 39-year-old man of letters), has collected the dying speeches, curses and quips of the great. As books of this kind frequently do, the volume has a preface by Clifton Fadiman, containing his own favorite examples of words uttered while the toes turned cold (and thought up, one suspects in some cases, well ahead of time). Samples...
...STORY OF YOUNG KING ARTHUR (by Clifton Fadiman, illustrated by Paul Liberovsky; Random House; $1.50). Like the actor who plays Hamlet, no author can wholly fail when telling the Arthurian saga. While no Malory or even a T. H. White (The Once and Future King) Author Fadiman is a cut above Lerner & Loewe (Camelot). His grave young hero seems to sense that he is on the threshold of a mythic destiny. Fadiman's Merlin is a wiser Polonius. His courts and tourna ments are a pageant of medieval glory as if they had been clipped from the film sequences...
Deliberate Confusion. Parody shows its proudest paces when matched with the trend-setting writers. Thomas Wolfe's uncapped autobiographical gushes ("I, or me, the youth eternal, many-visaged and many-volumed") are shown in all their wonderful but wobbly workings by Clifton Fadiman, whose irresistible caricature should make any further sheep think twice before they don Wolfe's clothing...