Word: geismar
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MARK TWAIN, AN AMERICAN PROPHET by Maxwell Geismar. 564 pages. Houghfon Mifflin...
This latest critical appreciation of Mark Twain is not without blemish, being sloppy, narrow, quarrelsome, doctrinaire, vague, repetitive and ungrammatical. But it has its virtues too. The best of these is that Writer Geismar loves Mark Twain and quotes him joyously on almost every page. Sometimes he likes a passage so much that he quotes it twice, but Twain can stand that...
...second virtue is that a reader with patience enough to mush through the swampy parts of Geismar's argument will find modest patches of solid ground. The author is right in stating that Twain is too little known and understood as a critic of U.S. society, and that the harshly satirical writing of his later years, despite recent notice, is still widely unread. Mainly in the past decade, critics have been pointing out the same thing. But for most fond readers, Twain remains a humorist and pastoral novelist...
...spring, the French Maoists firmly established themselves on the outer fringes of the lunatic left with a series of riots, bomb attacks and a daring caviar and foie gras heist in broad daylight at Fauchon, the epicures' haul grocery of Paris. Next, one of their leaders, Alain Geismar, 26, advised that they make it a "hot summer for the bourgeoisie." Shortly before he was hauled off to jail for inciting riots, Geismar made a tape recording in which he urged his comrades to camp in the gardens of private villas, picnic on golf greens and convert gambling casinos into...
...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...