Word: humorless
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Pompous Senator George, on whom all clothes look formal, is a grey, humorless, urbane man. He will preside over the committee's deliberations during the grave days that lie ahead. Franklin Roosevelt will be forced to deal directly, week after week, with the man he tried to purge from the Senate in 1938. No one accuses Senator George of being vengeful; but neither is he forgetful...
...rain. But there was to be no manchasing in the Yale Bowl. At the last moment, the News had cold feet. Sole evidence of Sadie Hawkins Day in the Bowl was an undergraduate representing Daisy Mae, who suddenly dashed on the field at halftime in the midst of a humorless procession. They cavorted a few minutes before the silent, unsmiling stands, then slunk away...
Immoderate and humorless as Marxian sectarian journalists, as human beings the Partisan Review editors are an eager, uneven, engaging crew. Happiest when criticizing critics, capitalizing on capitalists and declaring war on "Imperialist War," they are almost as happy when they can snag a literary lion. Of these they have snagged a pride, from Apostle Trotsky himself to such international camelo-pards as Andre Gide and Gertrude Stein. Latest catch is Poet T. S. Eliot's new, beautiful, 200-line poem for the current May-June issue...
...stables; dozens of new calves; his herd's milking records. He lunched with kindly, pretty Mrs. Pew in the mansion-house-a broad, yellowstone Pennsylvania farmhouse with a vast fireplace, beamed ceilings, wide-board floors. Over the rolling, spring-green hills he looked and said, with his quick, humorless smile: "I get about three tons of manure off the pasture every year. The New Deal can't take that away from me." And, with a twitch of his bushy eyebrows: "If I'm busted in November, and the Republicans have won, I'll be satisfied...
...Humorless, superficially "abnormal," The Blaze of Noon is not a great novel nor one that a wide public will at once admire. But it is a work of art with more than one dimension. As a parable, for example, it offers food for thought to those who have sight but waste it. As a tract it is a severe corrective to the mindlessness of the D. H. Lawrence preachings on sex. As Elizabeth Bowen says, "the disabusedness, and the absence of conflict, make this un-English writing"; as she does not say, they make it something like French writing...