Word: genteelism
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Writing in the current issue of Commentary, this eminent son of a rabbi finds "American Jewry . . . aiming at a confused third way which is neither philosophically tenable nor socially practicable" -a "genteel" watering-down of Judaism to conform to U.S. cultural standards...
...Williams; produced by Cheryl Crawford) is laid, like most Tennessee Williams plays, in the South-in a village on the Gulf Coast. But its characters are rowdy Sicilian immigrants, and its tenor is life-loving and affirmative. Playwright Williams has cast off unnaturalism for primitivism, neurosis for fulfillment, the genteel nymphomaniac for the savage one-man woman. But though he has reversed his basic theme, introduced some livelier and trashier tunes, trilled a bit less and banged more, Williams has never seemed so blatantly himself...
...route in a pretty lumbering conveyance. The Scotland Yard man furthermore insists on going over every inch of the way; and the lovers, both of whom are understandably suspect, become understandably and loquaciously suspicious of each other. The whole thing is blameless enough. But it remains a terribly staid, genteel British whodunit that almost never sets the brain aracing, the spine atingle or the mouth agape...
Almost two-thirds of the anthology is devoted to poets who lived into or wholly within the twentieth century, and many of the old standbys of the Genteel Tradition are given much less space than they have been accustomed to in the past. ("I have tried to wring the neck of the kind of rhetoric that overflowed into poetry from the oratory of the day, and that was fulsome even there. Holmes, Whittier, and Lowell were the worst offenders...
...jacket and knickerbockers, the diabolical twist to the eyebrows and, later on, the dinner jacket into which he changed every evening during the war, when no one wore such a garment, are obdurate vestiges of dandyism. But the shocking London of the '708 was too much for the genteel and moral Irish Protestant, who had worked as an accountant and claimed to be kin to a baronet. He heard the Biblical and warlike voice of Marx. Its despotic sound, its subversiveness, its talk of the continuous war of classes, its protest against poverty, the passion of its economics, lastingly...