Word: lael
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...AFTERNOON WOMEN by Lael Tucker Wertenbaker, 312 pages, Little, Brown...
...Time (by Garson Kanin) is the sad, clinically harrowing story of a man who is dying of cancer of the lower bowel, and how he faces it during the last three months of his life in Southern France. The Broadway play is based on Death of a Man, Lael Tucker Wertenbaker's account of her husband's suicide. Charles Christian Wertenbaker was an able journalist (for FORTUNE, LIFE, and TIME from 1931 to 1948) turned novelist. Gift is strangely unmoving and dramatically slack, partly because the audience knows in advance that the hero will die, partly because...
...life that it rather self-consciously preaches ("use all five senses every day"). To treat life as a branch of esthetics is to observe one's responses to it, rather than engage spontaneously in it, to play-act rather than act, or play. When Wertenbaker and his wife Lael (Olivia de Havilland) make love, he asks for a morning-after review. "Miraculous, as always," she replies, making two people who believe...
...says ("tightly") by way of farewell: "You make me want to write!" and adds in a letter: "My dear, calm friend! . . . You are noble . . . You manage to make a kind of dance of it." Not all will want to follow the last steps of the dreadful dance, when Lael Tucker's second husband (whom she divorced to marry Wertenbaker) visits the dying man and sitting before the fire says: "You are the best . . . Tell me what you want...
...Lael Tucker pleads a moral cause: a kind of private euthanasia, her husband's "right to die as he wished to, when he chose." She knows that this claim is based on pride: several times during the last painful months, the Wertenbakers gaily toasted what they called their hubris, a word which they thought defined their own gallant pagan defiance of fate. Each reader will have to judge the moral issue for himself; the real significance lies in the fact that, in this book, the issue is only seen in terms of responsibility to oneself and to other human...