Word: genteelisms
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...well-oiled company controlled by men who, because they run the big corporations, think they ought to run the country." Again and again he cried: "It is time to take the government away from General Motors and give it back to Joe Smith." But somewhere beneath his genteel belligerency there still lurked the elements of the enigma of 1952. "The tide is rising," said he in Newark, after a day of small and disappointing crowds in Democratic sections of New Jersey. "I only hope...
...dialogue is Lewis Eliot, a middle-aging, upper-echelon British bureaucrat and the grimace-and-bear-it hero of this sixth of Author Snow's projected ten-volume Forsyte-ish saga. C. P. (for Charles Percy) Snow, 50, is a latter-day Galsworthy, precise, ruminative, articulate, but decorously genteel to the point of inaudibility. Critics who for more than a decade have touted him as a new Stendhal are simply chasing the wrong literary genealogy. In the Snow-Galsworthy vision, the middle class can have no Stendhalian tragedies, only troubles. The scent of Homecoming is well-bred but unmistakable...
...previous novels of the series, Lewis Eliot has lifted himself from the pit of shabby genteel poverty, taking a fling at law and teaching, and played the good Samaritan to a headstrong younger brother. When the present novel opens in 1938. Eliot is trudging home to a wife with a "schizoid chill." He has married her out of the weakest virtue, pity, but since he himself has never surfaced emotionally, he can bring her no love. In nagging misery, she commits suicide...
Eastbourne (pop. 58,000), where geraniums hang from lampposts, is Britain's most genteel seaside resort and a mecca for wealthy widows who await death in its pleasant Victorian surroundings. For years the teacups buzzed with talk of a local doctor with a large, loyal practice, who doted on his aged patients. He met them at the station after their visits to London, took them for drives in the country, rushed to the bedside at any hour with soothing words...
...Angoff skirts his lasting impact. Mencken, who detested democracy, ironically democratized U.S. life and art. He made Babbitt-land so culture-conscious that Babbitt disappeared. He lampooned frauds in high places so lustily that no public figure has been sacrosanct since. Partly because of his blasts at the prissy genteel tradition, much of American fiction became as unblinkingly honest as fact. His vitality seems to have been reasserted with his death early this year. Angoff's "portrait from memory," for which the author must have started scratching notes on his first day of work in the Mercury office, follows...