Word: fascism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Night, was mostly a triumph of mien over message. When he wrote the play (a Broadway flop in 1942), Odets said he was trying to show "how men irresponsibly wait for the voice and strong arm of Authority to bring them to life and to shape ... So can come Fascism to a whole race of people." But TV Adapter William F. Durkee Jr. chose to tread the simpler level of the story-the interplay between a clod husband, a deceitful lodger, and a restive wife who dreams of escape from the back stoop of life. Ironically, the portraits seemed...
What distinguishes all this from other purposeful literary nightmares that professed to see the ghost of fascism on the American scene during the '30s is that West brought enough invention to one page for most novelists to spread thin over a book, and a style as lean and resourceful as a hungry wildcat. Above all, West was not parochial, did not advocate political or social systems. He was one of those men in whom pity must take the form of anger, but his anger was not anything as simple as anti-American or anti-Babbitt; it was anti-human...
...extreme situations: "Romanticism in a political context I would define as an irrational capacity to become inflamed by interests and causes that are not one's own, that are outside oneself. When we shop around for an outlet we find there is nothing in stock: no Spain, no Fascism, no mass unemployment...
More than anything else, For Whom the Bell Tolls shows the amazingly imperceptive sort of propaganda that can pass for art in wartime. It would have been better for all concerned if the film had been left to die with the demise of fascism, or at the most resuscitated for the Late, Late Show...
Wagner's book covers the various fields of Lewis' attacks with scholarly care. Lewis' distaste for democracy ("a democracy necessarily is a corrupt and disorderly type of government") and his sporadic enthusiasms for fascism are well discussed, as are his quarrel with the cubist school of painting, his feud with Joyce, and his vigorous anti-Bergsonism. His own books are also discussed in considerable detail...