Word: friendly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...full title of Richard Sommer's poem is "To Speed and Greta: A Word About Your Friend, Dead in Ambush; Algeria, November 1, 1957." It is a kind and wise, but realistic "Word." Sommer talks in verse about the memory of a dead friend and troubling inadequacies of memory. The metaphor of "masks" and "manikin" creates a speculative whole that reveals with emotion the sense of emptiness a death creates. One or two lines are too harsh for the general tone of the poem, however...
Animals are nice, dogs especially nice. Ask anyone they'll tell you the dog is nicest of all. Man's best friend in fact, or so they say. We think dogs are nice, too, nice in the home, before the roaring mid-December hearth, playing with the children. But dogs snarling at depositors in the Cambridge Trust are hard to take, and St. Bernards who challenge the road-rights of Massachusetts Avenue automobiles and pedestrians hardly help solve the problem of traffic in the Square...
Tony Richardson's direction is skillfully contrived to keep Jimmy's negative qualities from becoming annoying. The performance is nothing if not athletic: Jimmy and his friend Cliff bounce and jump and wrestle with a disarmingly youthful abandon. Because the long speeches are unobtrusively broken up with movement, and because they are delivered brilliantly by Kenneth Haigh as Jimmy, there is never any suggestion that they are formal setpieces, or that Jimmy is a windbag. Mr. Haigh, who created the role in London and New York, is an emotional actor of considerable power, with an almost impish charm that takes...
...environment, but that they are fated by a small, icy crack in his being. The reader is forced to look backward over the story and to revise-what seemed love is suddenly revealed as the very inability to love, what seemed a wise or manly action toward a friend is seen as the fatal inability really to be close to anyone. Eaton achieves futility and failure in his middle years as others by hard work and determination achieve success. In a memorable finale, Alfred Eaton, the poor little rich boy of 50, is pictured killing time at the fashionable...
...once lived with a British diplomat husband.) The "visitors" of the title -Americans and Britons engaged in the black art of propaganda-never had it so good. Larry Purdoe is editor of the Voice of Britain, his assistant is a non-U type called Herbert Wragg, and their American friend is a newspaperman named Abe Schulman ("definitely a good type"). They have the whisky, the candy, the penicillin and the supreme good luck of not being totally at the mercy of the people's police...