Word: liking
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...pieces that makes the anthology well worth attention is one of Gold's own, Love and Like. The author examines a young man who is trying to put his life back together a few weeks after a shattering divorce. He seems to be succeeding until, at story's end, an idea is seen at the periphery of his mind, the more horrifying because it has been so thoroughly excluded from his conscious thoughts. It is the idea of suicide. Another story whose effect lingers after the pages have been turned is Bernard Malamud's The Magic Barrel...
...supply of that scholarly formaldehyde, tenure. Surprisingly, his life as an aborigine (he is accepted as a Dang) makes considerably more sense to him than his hollow existence as an academician. The savages consider him a master prophet, and he is on the point of believing it himself when, like a paddle ball on a rubber cord, he is snapped back to civilization. The irony is delicately put, and Satirist Elliott leaves no doubt as to which society he is shaving with his razor's edge...
...ironic that, for the most part, Miller remembers to be an artist instead of an orator only in the wacky, obscene, and sometimes brilliantly comic passages that make most of his books unmailable-but that will not be found here. Reading Miller in his scurrilous top form is like ending a riotously drunken evening by getting a foot caught in a chamber pot; but such sport cannot be had in this book...
...sentence from one of Miller's most mailable literary essays is typical: "Joyce, the mad baboon, herein gives the works to the patient antlike industry of man which has accumulated about him like an iron ring of dead learning." In a collection of aphorisms, the reader learns that "in life's ledger, there is no such thing as frozen assets." If the sage of Big Sur were to be judged from this book alone, it would be hard to justify Editor Durrell's prophecy that Miller may one day be classed with Whitman and Blake...
...from cognac, he told the story of Goldilocks to his children. "One day the grizzly bear was out gathering wood for the fire," the father improvises shakily. "He had nothing on but his bearskin, and the flies were driving him mad ..." The son objects contemptuously: "I don't like the way he tells it, he's all mixed up." Determinedly, the father plows on. The reader may reflect that for a Henry Miller heroine, Goldilocks gets off easily. She is eaten by the three bears...