Word: geismar
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Steinbeck's 16 novels, The Grapes of Wrath was the strongest and most durable. It suffered from the flaws that Critic Maxwell Geismar found in much of his writing: "Simplification has been the source of his inspiration. Handling complex material rather too easily, he has been marked by the popularizing gift. Here is an urbanity of psyche bought a little easily." His eighth novel, the book was published in 1939, after Steinbeck made the westward pilgrimage with a caravan of Oklahoma farmers. Part exposé, part tract, Grapes was a concentration of Steinbeck's artistic and moral vision...
...TWENTIETH CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). Dwight Macdonald, Maxwell Geismar, and John Houseman discuss the role of the artist during the '30s and show films of some of the '30s' greats: Carole Lombard, Thomas Wolfe, Sherwood Anderson, George Gershwin, etc. Repeat...
...example, when James visits Ellis Island, he charms us with his personal touch ("Let not the unwary, therefore, visit "Ellis Island") and at the same time makes us aware both of our own situation as Americans and of the irony in James's own special half-alien situation. Geismar pays no attention to this aspect of the book...
...other hand, the Jamesian experience sometimes becomes too artificial, too obviously fudged to be convincing. James's "experience" in The American Scene often seems little more than a deliberate rehearsal of performing sensibilities. Yet Geismar would have more effectively re-evaluated James if he had taken a kindlier attitude toward these failings and admitted James's virtues as well. Instead, he awkwardly raises a most bane question for literary critics--in a piece of art to be judged apart from the artist who made it?--and never answers...
...last quibble--Geismar's style. People who read much James tend disastrously to write like James, subjecting us unnecessarily to numerous syntactical Clearings of Throats, verbal blinkings of eyes, italicized emphasis, and such careful distinctions as capital and lower case letters may afford. Geismar is no exception...