Word: gothic
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...tomb as his model. The present building, completed in 1941, was designed to hold 932 inmates. In 1970 there were 2,000. Now, with a population of only 530, conditions remain so appalling that the New York board of corrections began hearings last week to decide the gothic jail's fate. The most likely verdict now appears to be to destroy the Tombs. Its passing will not be mourned...
...jail. Her Manets are grouped in one tiny, overcrowded room where they compete with William James's portrait of his literary brother, while an entire long hall is given over as a showplace for a Spanish dancer, painted by Sargent. The portrait Sargent did of her sits in the Gothic room on the third floor. Stained glass windows flank her, and a carved chest topped by a huge Bible lies before her like an altar. And, with an amazing amount of stupidity, she placed the only Vermeer in New England perpendicular to a window. The light shines...
...world's leaders, including Britain's Prime Minister Harold Wilson, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, Japanese Premier Kakuei Tanaka, Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny, Queen Juliana of The Netherlands and the Duke of Edinburgh, flew to Paris to pay him final tribute. There, in the Gothic splendor of Notre Dame Cathedral, Francois Cardinal Marty, Archbishop of Paris, celebrated the memorial Mass. Among the dignitaries was President Nixon, who stayed on for a day to meet with European leaders, notably Brandt and Wilson, on the status of U.S. relations with the Atlantic alliance...
...point: the very old are as invisible a group today as the blacks used to be. But Miss Douglas has composed far more than an old people's brief in fiction. A native Mississippian herself, Ellen Douglas has made her argument palpable in her milieu. The Southern-Gothic setting-decaying classical porticos plus mazes of wisteria and Confederate jasmine-closes around the reader and, like a perfect symbol, becomes the substance as well as the metaphor for the author's theme of human dissolution. The politics of old age turns into the poetry of mortality...
...presence of these active forces of anti-life, as well as the passive bystanders-Martha's relatives-Miss Douglas refuses to write a happy ending to her fairy tale. Martha and Lucas go up in the sort of gorgeous ritual blaze of self-destruction that besets Southern-Gothic houses in Southern-Gothic novels. But Martha and Lucas qualify, in Miss Douglas' phrase, as "celebrators of life"-and so does she, dramatizing with all the reason and passion at her command the bland and heinous modern crime of burying one's ancestors before they are dead...