Word: graved
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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DARK AS THE GRAVE WHEREIN MY FRIEND IS LAID by Malcolm Lowry. 255 pages. New American Library...
Tormented Transit. Typically, it all started with notes that Lowry, an inveterate journal keeper, took during a trip to Mexico in late 1945 and early 1946. "By God, we have a novel here!" Lowry cried on first rereading them. Editor Day more accurately describes Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid as "a notebook on its way to becoming a novel." Yet this fragmented, compulsively self-centered, brilliant half book does not at all misrepresent its author. For Lowry was less a novelist than, in Day's words, "a diarist, compulsive notetaker, poet manqué, alcoholic, philosophizing...
Dark ax the Grave is the story of a Dantean pilgrimage into the inferno of the past with Lowry transparently disguised as Sigbjorn Wilderness, a hard-drinking and "monumentally unsuccessful" novelist. A man given to "making up his life as he goes along," Wilderness is not sure whether his journey is in search of salvation or some ultimate bonfire of damnation...
...passion, despite the fact that he considered it "rather a second-rate ambition to be an optimist." Lowry could no more round off his hope than his book. But at a time when the fashion for the novel is basic black-when despair has gone slick-Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid once again gives the struggle between good and evil the dignity of an even match, and the excitement of a metaphysical cliffhanger...
...public at least, Ethel Kennedy remained gallantly cheerful. Even when parades of strangers appeared at the McLean, Va., estate to pay their respects, Ethel talked to them all. Almost daily, accompanied by her son Joe, 15, and often by two or three other older children, she visited the grave at Arlington, knelt, prayed, then returned to their 15-room house still radiating youthful life...