Word: fadiman
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...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...
...persuaded a skeptical Ross to introduce the magazine's excellent World War II coverage, and to devote an entire issue to John Hersey's report on Hiroshima. Shawn is now handicapped by the fact that most of the writers (Thurber, E. B. White, Wolcott Gibbs, Clifton Fadiman, Joel Sayre, Alva Johnston, et al.) and cartoonists (Peter Arno, Helen Hokinson, O. Soglow, Gardner Rea, et al.) who made The New Yorker famous have either died, wandered off to the exurbs, or become infrequent contributors. E. B. White's civilized despair and gentle celebration of nature is now rarely...
Still, the core of the list is the heart of the West's wisdom and genius. And the information in Fadiman's bibliography and introduction is helpful. Unfortunately, the sheer pomposity of any such program of cultural pushups is enough to send many readers scuttling to the pages of Agatha Christie. Perhaps Fadiman should have totted up an auxiliary list of 100 works that are MERELY GOOD (Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Pope's Essay on Man-) and another of volumes FRIVOLOUS BUT CHARMING (Petronius' Satyricon, Cummings' Collected Poems...
Dissenters will find another complaint: Fadiman paints the glories of the written word in a style that is as flat and as patronizing as a high school history text...