Word: griffins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Having lived in the South all my life-Georgia, Florida and Louisiana-I, like most true Southerners, deplore such conduct as depicted by John Griffin [March 28]. Over the years I have had a great deal of contact with Negroes in various business relations from laborers to managers and I have never seen them treated so inconsiderately or disrespectfully. The present explosive conditions existing in the" South are not normal, and the pity of it is that our friends in the rest of the country who seek understanding of the problem are denied the benefit of our views...
...Virginia white, I say congratulations to John Griffin. I hope that my relatives see the article...
SOMETHING OF AN ACHIEVEMENT, by Gwyn Griffin (284 pp.; Holt; $4.95), suggests, as do a great many other contemporary British novels in this, the sahib's foulest hour, that the Pax Britannica was kept by boobs, boors and brutalitarians. British Novelist Gwyn Griffin is a onetime army officer in Africa who showed in By the North Gate (TIME, April 20, 1959), that he can turn his major dislike into minor but flawless literary art. Now he returns to the attack with the story of Cecil Spurgeon, a tired, self-pitying status-keeper in a coastal enclave of empire...
...introduce his bride into the pukka colony (her first appearance on the tennis courts is a satiric fiasco) and his maneuvering for a promotion. There is taut melodrama involving the escape of a couple of interned Palestinian terrorists, who call Cecil "Spurgeon the Virgin" (possibly the reason why Author Griffin gave him this family name). At novel's end-complacently unaware of the tragic mess he caused, including the inadvertent killing of his wife-Cecil is scrawling a letter to his old school paper, announcing his promotion to deputy commissioner and his unfailing devotion to the school motto...
...Author Griffin's insight into the gradations of genteel snobbery and the petty power ploys of aspiring bureaucrats reduces most sociological studies to the rank of kindergarten scribbling. Still, the sahib at sunset, whatever his stupidities, retains some of the pathos of an old family retainer sacked after a lifetime of bumbling but single-minded loyalty...