Word: manne
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Images of Truth, by Glenway Wescott. The author, one of the U.S.'s best nonwriting novelists (he wrote The Pilgrim Hawk), ends a long silence with a fine if critical collection of portraits of fellow authors-Katherine Anne Porter. Isak Dinesen, Thomas Mann and others...
Images of Truth, by Glenway Wescott. The author, one of the U.S.'s best nonwriting novelists (he wrote The Pilgrim Hawk), ends a long silence with a fine collection of critical portraits of fellow authors-Katherine Anne Porter, Isak Dinesen, Thomas Mann and others...
Magical Power. At first glance, the six objects of Wescott's literary affection-Katherine Anne Porter, Somerset Maugham, Colette. Isak Dinesen, Thomas Mann and Thornton Wilder-seem to have little in common. But all illustrate Wescott's passionate belief in the magical power of a story to hold those brooding truths about human behavior that cannot be abstracted as philosophy or illuminated in the swift lightning of poetic metaphor...
With that belief established, Wescott lavishes high praise on the storytelling insights of Somerset Maugham and cheerfully states that Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain would be improved by pruning 300 pages of extraneous erudition out of it. Wescott's main critical contribution, however, is his experienced literary sightseer's infectious enthusiasm. "Let me not bully you about this novel that I love," he says engagingly of Christmas Holiday, a little-known book of Maugham's that he thinks is the best novel ever written about Europe just before World War II. His account...
There is no clue in Images of Truth as to whether or not, after his own long silence, Wescott will speak as storyteller again. In the end he is left waiting, perhaps for some miraculous intervention when-in the words of Thomas Mann, which Wescott wistfully quotes-"some new work can begin to struggle into being, giving out light and sound, ringing and shimmering, hinting at its infinite origin, as in a seashell we hear the sighing...