Word: highbrow
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...inner torments in stream-of-consciousness. Virginia Woolf carried off the trick; Toynbee doesn't. Through the dense matting of symbolism (even the choice of tea cakes, the dropping of a cup, becomes symbolic), readers may extract many meanings or none. Guesses British Critic Cyril Connolly, editor of highbrow Horizon: "And what are these figures, but expressions of a deeper truth, of cycles of spring and winter, youth and age, death and rebirth, of the Mother who must become our enemy if we are to grow...
...Initiated. Without a 'big bank roll, Partisan Review has filled its pages with big-name writers to whom it has offered not money but space: a place to be as highbrow as they like, to talk to their own kind and never mind being intelligible to the uninitiated. The result has been sometimes stuffy, oftentimes overreaching, but usually stimulating. Such first-rate writers and critics as Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, George Orwell, Albert Camus, Andre Gide and Edmund Wilson have sold Partisan Review articles for a token $2 a page. Poets T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Karl Shapiro...
Never before had the U.S. electorate chosen a President who had not served in Congress or the Army, or put in a long apprenticeship somewhere in public office. Woodrow Wilson's record had been suspiciously highbrow and severely private: he had written and taught for nearly three decades, spent eight years as Princeton's president, served part of one term as governor of New Jersey. Twelve months before he went to Trenton, probably not one U.S. voter in ten knew much more about him than that he had kicked up some kind of a row on the Princeton...
...that the lazier-minded type of cinemagoers will probably get tired. Chaplin overexerts, and apparently overestimates, a writing talent which, though vigorous and unconventional, weighs light beside his acting gifts. As a result, a good deal of the verbal and philosophic straining seems inadequate, muddled and highly arguable -too highbrow for general audiences, and too naive for the highbrows...
...effective fiction of his own. But not in Victor Sawdon Pritchett's case. The 14 stories in It May Never Happen are proof that a first-rate critic may also become a fine storyteller. Pritchett's reviews in London's liberal New Statesman and Nation are highbrow; they are also incisive and discriminating. Pritchett considers his story writing "an endless chewing of the cud of experience, an effort to digest; and also a desire to fill up the unfurnished wastes of time which surround the goggling...