Word: lucidities
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Whatever its resemblances to Williams' other plays, the play he meant to write in Slimmer and Smoke is easy to approve of. The only trouble is, he has not written it. It remains only a lucid diagram. Summer and Smoke has moments of sad, sharp insight, but little coherence and intensity as a whole. The reason is partly structural. In none of his plays has Tennessee Williams made a classic frontal assault on drama. Writing episodically, with tricks of stagecraft and a crutchlike use of offstage music, he has always trusted to a vague sense of poetry...
...friend Jonathan Cilley a barrel of Madeira wine that he, Hawthorne, would be unmarried twelve years later. He won the bet. For a modern biographer it is almost superfluous to note the sexual distrust, as well as the calculation, in this resolve. What is more important is the lucid analysis, through fiction, that Hawthorne gave to such matters (and indeed to his whole Puritan background) in the years that followed...
...agreement not to notice that a "peculiar" aunt wears three hats to the breakfast table and a sealskin coat in the bathtub. Waugh's world simply ignores that convention. Lunacy is its norm, evil is without guilt, pain without pathos, and tragedy is comedy. Yet, in lucid intervals, the real world and Waugh's world are seen in part to be one. The degree to which they are so measures Evelyn Waugh's ironic vision of mankind...
...gentlemen keep their distance? Not much longer, thought the Osaka Prefectural Education Committee. Last week, with an eye to future emergencies, the committee issued a one-page Etiquette Concerning the Association Between Boys and Girls for all school kids. Principal pointers: "All associations between the two sexes must be lucid; there must be no secrets . . . Don't confuse friendship with love . . . Avoid physical contact with the opposite sex . . . Use straightforward, refined, beautiful language . . . When visiting one of the opposite sex, you must sit facing each other. It is not good etiquette to sit alongside each other when there...
...averaged about a book a year (poetry, fiction, drama or criticism); he also had a hand in half a dozen magazines. On the Revue Blanche he succeeded Leéon Blum as literary critic. ("Blum has the precise kind of mind that congeals mine at a distance and whose lucid brilliance keeps mine muscle-bound as it were and reduced to impotence.") Trying his hand as a publisher, Gide pulled one of the greatest boners in literary history when he turned down a first novel by Marcel Proust: Swann...