Word: genteel
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...only leg he can really count on. Fonsia (Tandy) is encased in a mummy sack of a housedress, and she seems too utterly drained of strength to lift her frowzy bedroom slippers from the floor when she walks. Their mutual terrain is a porch that is peeling in genteel decay. They know all about decay; they are waiting-desperate, lonely, trapped-to find out about death...
Such natural dignity befitted Lowell's New England background. His ancestors included Great-Granduncle James Russell Lowell, Cousin Amy Lowell and relatives on his mother's side who date back to the Mayflower. More combative than his genteel forebears, Lowell was fascinated by power. He often chose for his theme the doomed great in history: Racine's Phaedra, Mary Stuart and Cleopatra, and Alexander, "double-marching to gain the limits of the globe." Classmates at his prep school, St. Marks, called him Cal, after the despotic Roman emperor Caligula, because he was so imperious. The name stuck...
Daniel Martin, the novel's hero, is aware of this dilemma and of his fortunate position in the world. Raised in the Edenic splendors of the Devon countryside before the war and educated in the genteel bower of Oxford afterward, he falls into an existence in which occasional bumps are easily cushioned by his status and talent. His marriage fails and his brief career as a London dramatist is not the roaring success he had hoped for. But Martin's skill at writing dialogue lands him movie jobs, money, amorous actresses and, eventually, a well-heeled expatriate life...
Devotees of cricket consider it to be less a game than a pinnacle-perhaps the last remaining one-of genteel civilization. In the past few weeks, most of them were reacting as if a hairy Visigoth had strolled onto one of the sport's immaculately manicured pitches. Reason: an upstart Australian entrepreneur had signed up 51 of the world's best players, and was threatening to turn the hallowed institution into-gad, Sir!-another vulgar spectator sport. Quipped London's Guardian: "The world as we know it is about...
...this genteel anonymity is about to end. Controversy, if not quality, bids fair to make The Public Burning a major publishing event. An excerpt from the novel that ran last fall in American Review alerted readers to its incendiary subject: the June 19, 1953, execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. In Coover's fiction, the convicted atomic bomb spies are transferred from the death house at Sing Sing to a public stage in Times Square for their execution. Word began circulating that several publishers had considered the manuscript and decided not to risk legal repercussions. The question naturally arose...