Word: ironist
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...nation whose literary life is wedded to the colleges, quiet, courtly Poet John Crowe Ransom has for years been one of literature's most influential college teachers. An ironist of edged eloquence, Ran som has published only a few dozen sharply tooled poems, but they are among the best written in the U.S. this century. A critic of high reputation, he has never allowed his views to fossilize; he can retreat with grace from an untenable position, or with great courtesy flay the hide off a literary wrongdoer...
...Remembered (translated from the French of Jean Anouilh by Patricia Moyes) is by no means Anouilh's only play with fairy-tale trimmings. But it is the first in which the bad fairy-far from cutting up or winning out-is not even allotted a role. Though the ironist in Anouilh may jab the romantic in places, the cynic nowhere throttles him. On the contrary, Anouilh piles gilt on the gingerbread, and gives Cinderella her Prince Charming without any rushing from ballrooms or bother of trying on shoes. Indeed, if there is anything of a crooked smile to Anouilh...
Cozzens' favorite writer is Swift. Among moderns, he prefers Maugham, Huxley and the early Waugh-all of which suggests that he is an ironist in default of being a satirist, possibly for lack of humor or savagery. Like any good storyteller, James Gould Cozzens peddles no "message." Says he: "I have no thesis except that people get a very raw deal from life. To me, life is what life...
...With his last words he says to Abbé Mas: "Be happy in the Lord." And "in that moment the abbe found his vocation again . . . The old man . . . on whom miracles had long palled had performed a miracle." When they laid out his body "it was found that this ironist, this witty censurer, had worn a hair shirt...
Orwell wrote in the reverse English of the ironist: when he is most grim he reads most gay, and such laughter is a Jason's shield against the Medusa he is facing. In the movie all sense of humor is discarded, and the audience is asked to look the Soviet horror square in the eye. The film, in short, is a shocker that demands not customers but a sort of resolutely determined suicide squad...