Word: fictioners
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Life in the pages of a Damon Runyon story is a happy affair, but Harry the Horse. Dave the Dude, Light-Finger Moe and many other guys and dolls seem to have been less engaging in fact than in fiction. When Runyon brought one of the real-life models of his characters home, his wife broke up the party by shouting: "Get that bum out of here...
...science fiction off its rocket? Definitely, says Cleveland's Robert Plank, a psychiatric social worker, in a current medical journal. Argues Plank (in International Record of Medicine and General Practice Clinics): many science-fiction plots betray "schizophrenic manifestations" in the minds of their authors, who work out their fantasies by literary catharsis. Similarly, he concludes, readers release the steam from their own unconscious by reading the fantasies...
...individual-or, more productively, a fertile couple, "Far from being a byproduct of atomic fission," Plank contends, this theme goes back to Greek mythology and "grows from the fertile soil of unconscious drives." Such standard schizophrenic symptoms as delusions of grandeur, of persecution, and of superhuman influence are science-fiction staples...
Psychologist Plank would not go so far as to say that science-fiction writers are "crazy" because they reflect schizophrenic trends. Rather, he argues, these signs are becoming more conspicuous in a mechanized civilization. Science fiction may be bad science and worse fiction, but to a good wig-picker it "is a sensitive barometer of our changing mental climate...
...Emily happily married to young Architect Edwin Lutyens. (She is now 80 and edited the letters herself.) To read A Blessed Girl is to understand the why and wherefore of the Victorian novel, with its passion for brazen scoundrels, innocent girls and rescuing heroes. Such conflicts were not mere fiction; they were the very spice of Victorian life. Emily herself found it hard to decide whether her reaction to her tragedy was "happiness or misery," but her mother, respectable Lady Lytton, was not undecided at all. Wrote Emily: she was "bitterly disappointed that it has all come to nothing...