Word: gian
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...bought Elephant and Castle last week and have reached page 163 ... but already your reviewer [TIME, Feb. 21] has dulled the edge of my enjoyment. Not because he found the novel boring (everybody to his own taste), but because he ... disposed of all the drama in one sentence: "Gian's nutty old father . . ." Your reviewer has spoiled everything for me. Had he broken into my apartment and made off with [the book] I could call the police. But he has done worse than that . . . He has robbed me of anticipation, conjecture, apprehension, fear, dismay. The unopened book...
Take a well-bred young English lady named Armorel Cepinnier and bind her in matrimony to Gian ("Toughie") Ardree, an Italian-born bricklayer with quick fists and a slow brain, and you can have a nice stew of social and psychological problems. Set the uplift-minded Armorel and the hairy-chested Toughie to living in one of the meanest streets of one of London's slums, and the stew is likely to become too thick to stir...
...include an explanatory list of them. His dialogues range from the chirpings of Armorel's ultra-refined relations ("Cousin Freddie, don't you think it's awful for Mums, seeing the last little chick fluttering away from the nest?") to the Anglo-Genoese babblings of Gian's momma ("Ayee! Serris my Gian . . . allo, mi' picciolo!"). But Elephant and Castle is still a dreary stew of tragedy, haphazardly spiced with a few onions of Cockney humor that don't always mix too well with the rest...
When Armorel falls in love with Gian she devotes her life to improving him, passionately believing that under his simple-simian surface he has a heart of gold (which is true) and a fine intellect (which is not). She goes about her miscalculated mission with such iron ferocity that toward the end of the book some readers will want to liquidate her. They will not have to worry; Gian's nutty old father does that job admirably by slitting her throat, and Gian is convicted of the murder and hanged...
Last week, Thomson-and many another opera fan-had what he asked for: modern, medium-sized opera. On Broadway, where Gian-Carlo Menotti's terrifying but tuneful The Medium (TIME, June 30, 1947) was holding spooky seances for sellout audiences, Benjamin Britten's pocket-sized opera, The Rape of Lucretia, opened in Billy Rose's Ziegfeld Theater...