Word: hartley
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...attractive blur of Impressionism vanishes from his oils. The light flattens, shadows are sharper and more sculptural, forms grow increasingly solid and defined, as in The Dories, Ogunquit, which suggests that Hopper might even have picked up a notion or two from his contemporary, Marsden Hartley. But his paintings did not find customers. He sold one as a result of the 1913 Armory Show, but it took ten more years to sell and he was over 40 before he sold the second. He rubbed along doing magazine illustrations, and at one time had almost given up serious painting when...
...after all this time to deliver a final message. What the message is-and to whom-is the kind of 19th century plot flourish that is spoiled by revelation. It is also too facile and hollow a device, which Losey and Pinter chose to retain from the original L.P. Hartley novel. One can feel affectionate toward this kind of artifice without fully accepting it, a response that may be equally valid for the film as a whole...
...still playing his role-switching games, as if the changing of narrators could create meaningful ambiguity where his sympathies are all too clear. Egomania has overcome Jones' perspective, and he creates only caricatures which, taken all together, add up to a jig-saw portrait of Jones himself. The Jack Hartley who tells this story of sexual gamesmanship set in Paris during the May '68 strike is Jones masquerading as sophisticated literary figure, editor of "The Two Islands Review" (founded after "George's" Paris Review went soft), and Boswell to an American expatriate named Harry T. Gallagher. Gallagher is Jones...
...does Jones), and his apartment becomes a kind of command post from which expatriates uneasily sally forth to see the carnage between the kids and De Gaulle's cops. On Jones' track record one might expect Harry to be hero-protagonist. Instead, the book produces Jonathan James Hartley III, a creaky, equivocal observer-narrator who could easily have been borrowed (in intent if not execution) from Henry James or Glenway Wescott...
...failed poet, a failed novelist, and a drop-out husband," Hartley has a mistress but he remarks with a straight face that female bodies interest him "less than female minds." Like many Jones characters he suffers from acute typecasting. As narrator, moreover, Hartley can be tiresomely chatty when extolling food or explaining that a beer at the Brasserie Lipp is called un serieux. But what weary reader will not thank him for such mercifully brief love-making moments as this: "I suppose we did just about everything that two people do together...