Word: hubert
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Janos has been covering the show-business beat for two years, working on cover subjects as varied as Jack Nicholson and Mary Tyler Moore. He came to TIME in 1968 after serving as a speechwriter for L.B.J. and then Veep Hubert Humphrey. Says Janos, a former Houston bureau chief who has also reported on space shots and astronauts' moon walks: "Even a superspectacular like Kong is pale stuff compared with watching a rocket lift off at Cape Kennedy...
...Hubert is also systematically selling Maggie's paintings and antiques and filling the house with clever fakes. "Hoping to inherit the earth," he intones, "I declare myself meek...
...Spark's best characters, however, Maggie keeps busy being clever. She complains that the "tempo" of her husband's lovemaking is all wrong: "He starts off adagio, adagio. Second phase, well, you might call it al legro ma non troppo and pretty nervy . . ." When she is offstage, Hubert the poseur can usually be counted on for verbal sprightliness. "What is opulence," he asks in his best Oscar Wilde manner, "but a semblance of opulence...
This question is not as flippant as Hubert makes it sound. Indeed, it has theological overtones that echo through the novel. Behind the glitter and chatter...
Spark hints at dark spiritual convulsions, a "new world which was arising out of the ashes of the old, avid for immaterialism." Toward the end of the book, the fraudulent Hubert is lionized by a crowd of jaded Romans as a spokes man for the vengeful goddess Diana...