Word: hermit
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...SCHORER'S second novel, "The Hermit Place," is a brilliant presentation of certain characters and the doom they brought upon themselves by their own falsity. They all deserved to be damned; indeed they carried their damnation with them. But the book does not belong on the shelf of modern pessimism. It is neither nihilistic nor gloomy. These people are only one set, a segregation of incorrigibles. They have worldly circumstance in their favor, but their destruction comes from within. They live and breathe--Mr. Schorer's powers of characterization are extraordinary--but luckily they are only a segment...
...Tokugawa Era, which began in 1600, Japan withdrew into its shell like a frightened hermit crab. Feudalism was established; foreigners were driven from the country or tossed from mountaintops; Japanese were forbidden to leave Japan. This period, in many ways Japan's greatest and in many ways the shape of things-to-come in 20th-century Europe, ended in 1853 with the arrival of Commodore Perry. The Japanese people, who are by nature the world's cleverest imitators, entered into a new era of imitation of all things foreign...
...last year Japan has begun again to withdraw into its hermit shell. English signs have been taken down. American films have been banned. Cabarets have been closed. Foreign clothes have become taboo for Japanese women. Even baseball has been Japanofied, with Japanese phrases substituted for such terms as "home run " "foul" and "kill the umpire" and with all bats made of bamboo. But last week Japan's xenophobes ran into a linguistic stone wall. Trying to enforce a new language law, designed to purify Japanese of foreign words, authorities found that English words had become deeply embedded...
...Welshman John Cowper Powys is concerned, it has that too. It is about Wales during the years 1400-1416. The title character is that subtle, flawed part-genius who led a Welsh-French army toward the London of Henry IV, and died a hermit. Its hero, a venturesome Oxford student named Rhisiart, is a young man with a "narrow skull . . . predatory beak and snatching lips." He becomes Owen's secretary, engulfs himself in an almost pathic loyalty-love for his boss, and has become an English Justice by the time Glendower dies...
Abandoning his 33rd floor aerie (in Manhattan's New Yorker Hotel) as well as his customary winter costume of long underwear, red golf socks and high-laced shoes, genial, ghostly, 84-year-old Hermit-Inventor Nikola Tesla (Tesla induction motor, Tesla pump, Tesla transformer, some 700 other patents) indulged an old enthusiasm for prize fighters, went down to dine with a fellow Croat, Welterweight Champion Fritzie Zivic...