Word: hubertism
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Shortly after he emerged from the operating room following six hours of surgery at Manhattan's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center last week, Hubert Humphrey asked his wife, "Muriel, how are the polls corning out in Minnesota?" That joshing question by a Senator virtually assured of re-election told as much about his condition as his doctors' optimistic prognosis. Though a cancerous bladder had just been removed, the 65-year-old former Vice President had lost none of his spirit, loquaciousness and will to survive-physically or politically...
...sheen, the amiably unscrupulous characters and the spectral tugs of mysterious forces are all reassembled-and hardly the worse for wear. Maggie Radcliffe, a fortyish American rich beyond telling, is trying to rid herself of an old hanger-on named Hubert Mallin-daine. He is stubbornly settled in one of Maggie's three houses at Nemi, south east of Rome, where votaries once worshiped at the temple of Diana. Hubert claims squatter's rights on the rather shaky grounds of his alleged descent from Diana and the Emperor Caligula...
...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...