Word: lepers
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Rusty Calley has evoked unpleasant responses from almost all elements of American society: professional members of the silent majority have organized to make him a hero, professional liberals have propagandized to turn him into a leper, the military has contrived to blame him for conceiving, organizing, and carrying out the assault on My Lai 4 almost single-handedly, the President has intervened to make political...
Even the title is pure Greene: low-key, self-deprecating, perfectly descriptive. Indeed, readers hoping for massive disclosures about the author's marriage, love life, experience of miracles, abortive World War II spy career, trip to a leper colony, et al., had best go back again to the novels. This brief autobiographical fragment ends in 1931. Greene was 27 years old at the time, and about to face a decade of relative failure following his early hit with a book called The Man Within. As he writes somewhat archly in the preface, more or less explaining why he stops...
...Mauriac carried his interior landscape to Paris, where it furnished him with boundless material for his writing. After two years of writing poetry, he turned to novels. His first succes d'estime, A Kiss for the Leper, was a projection of his own youthful fears. The leading character, an ungainly, misshapen provincial lad, marries a girl who is physically repelled by him. Only on his death can she begin to love him. Into The Leper are woven the themes that run through the later books: the subtle corruption of sensuality, the deep self-loathing that accompanies love, the glimmer...
...more he acts like Christ, the more cruelly he is razzed by his diabolical editor ("Leper licker," Shrike calls him. "Still more swollen Mussolini of the soul"). Thinking to help, Miss Lonelyhearts arranges to meet one of his correspondents, a woman with a crippled husband. She rapes him. In the last scene, "his identification with God complete," Miss Lonelyhearts tries to envelop in cosmic pity the crippled husband-who seems to stand for long-suffering humanity. Terrified, the cripple shoots him dead...
...first thought of working in Africa in 1960, when he came across a newspaper story about conditions of life in the leper colonies. Three years later, between sessions of Vatican II, he spent a month touring the continent. "Africa was a revelation to me," he recalled. "All those crowds, all those children. I was moved to think of the words of Christ, 'You must love each other as I love my Father and as I am loved by my Father.' " Four years later, during the Synod of Bishops in Rome, Léger kept thinking about...