Word: geismar
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...they allowed her to die a natural death." There is a large, timid, hardly vocal class of people who feel the same way about Henry James. Those who have struggled unhappily through the lessons of the Master will find comfort at last in the breezy iconoclasm of Maxwell Geismar's Henry James and the Jacobites...
Unfortunately, they will find little more. Geismar's book is knowledgeable and occasionally witty--but it is also badly written, ill-tempered, and blased out of all proportion. His point, reiterated throughout the book, is simple enough: he doesn't think Henry James is a great writer and he questions the judgment of any one who does. Consequently, the book is unrelieved polemic against James and his critics...
About two weeks later I encountered the image once again. It was at a Town Hall rally in New York for the 59 students who went to Cuba. Town Hall was packed with young and middle-aged radicals. One of the last speakers of the afternoon was Maxwell Geismar. I was surprised to see him there. He had been, I knew, an important liberal critic in the 1930's, and his literary criticism remains founded in social comment. Still, I had never seen him at a rally before...
...This is the most exciting group of people I have seen in years," Geismar told his audience. There was good reason: "In fact," he went on, "yours is the first meeting like this I've been to since the late 30's, I'm delighted to see you all here...
...course the Town Hall meeting was not the first--nor the most exciting--political meeting since the 1930's. But Geismar may be right in guessing that there had taken place in the last few years an American political reawakening...