Word: gracing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Readers may reject this message, along with the violent pre-Christian trances of its telling, but few will deny its capacity for troubling the imagination. For to Lagerkvist, God's curse and God's grace are very nearly the same-blows from one awesome hand...
...fellow who disagrees with you regarding something neither of you knows anything about." Or: "Marriage is, perhaps, the only game of chance ever invented at which it is possible for both players to lose." Against religiosity, he thrust: "Too many people presume that they are full of the grace of God when they're only bilious." When readers complained that he was too harsh, he had a ready riposte: "I have not yet mastered the esoteric of choking a bad dog to death with good butter...
Brann kept his sharpest sting for "the blatant jackasserie" of Waco's entrenched Baptists and their "storm center of misinformation," Baylor University. He needled the local Baptist press for "ladling out saving grace with one hand while raking in the shekels with the other for flaming advertisements of syphilitic nostrums." He riddled one proposal that Baptists do business only with Baptists. He ridiculed Waco's Sunday blue laws, mocked how the town fretted about liquor sales while it licensed prostitutes. He seized avidly on the scandal of a 14-year-old Brazilian girl who, studying at Baylor...
Peyton Place (Jerry Wald-20th Century-Fox) cuts some of the sex and violence from Grace Metalious' hugely profitable peeping tome (300,000 hardbound, 3,000,000 paperback copies sold) about low jinks in old New Hampshire. The novel's small-town citizens were guilty of murder, suicide and such richly varied venery as nude swimming, bundling in convertibles, bastard-getting and incestuous rape. The film script tidies up a few of these sensations, softens a calculated abortion to an involuntary miscarriage, and lets a couple of villains become last-reel good guys. But there is still...
Most tourists believe in love at first site. Hurrying and scurrying about, they rarely stop to court an insight. Three unhurried tourists currently grace the book counters with travel accounts that are wise, witty and uncommonly well-written. Laving their individual sensibilities in the "implacable light" of the Mediterranean littoral, these writers perceive and share the region's Antaeus-like grip on life for life's sake...