Word: grimness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Measuring with the Feet. Grim was the only word for the two-day meeting round the green-clothed, rectangular table in Room No. 49 of the Dutch Foreign Office. Britain's Ernest Bevin was unsmiling and the nervous twitch at the right corner of his mouth was more pronounced than ever. France's Georges Bidault (about to lose his job, partly because he had lost popularity by going along with the U.S. on a program of German recovery) made his points tensely, striking the table with the edge of his hand. The Dutch host-chairman, Baron van Boetzelaer...
...fluttering of thousands of cardboard fans gave the effect of a wheatfield in a freakish wind, across which photographers' bulbs flashed like heat lightning (see PRESS). Then a grim-faced Negro loomed on the platform...
...Honest Youths. This san-pu-kuan stretch is nearly ten miles long. Then the refugees enter Communist lines. They are inspected by the Communist Children Corps, grim-eyed, incorruptible teen-agers clad in drab uniforms and armed with red-tasseled spears. The juvenile corpsmen reject all wheedling words or hints of bribes. "We Communist youth are honest," they chant. "We don't go for sly words in our liberated territory...
...tangled, crisscross abstraction by Mark Tobey. There were the sanitary surfaces of Georgia O'Keeffe, the fluid mists of John Marin, a pasteboard street scene by Stuart Davis. A few canvases with less familiar trademarks made gallery-goers look twice: Joe Jones's "Departure" from a grim and desolate wasteland; Henry Koerner's tired old couple, huddled in a cart, gazing numbly at the ruin about them; Theodore Lux Feininger's old-fashioned engines, squatting eerily on old-fashioned tracks, like ghosts in the night...
...Victorian etiquette at its most pompous ("Will you rise with your unconscious grace and ring the bell?" they say). They talk thus even when they are planning murder, fraud and forgery, or saying aloud the thoughts that living people are most careful not to say. They do their grim talking in dining rooms and nurseries which the author hardly ever describes, but which Critic Edward Sack-ville-West has neatly termed "embowered, rook-enchanted concentration camps." The persevering reader will find that the sum total of all this artifice, melodrama and incredible behavior is a warm, witty, profoundly tragic portrait...