Word: mason
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Field has a number of veterans returning from last year who should from the nucleus of this year's squad. Maud Wood has the center halfback slot nailed down, with co-captain Diane Finch and Maureen Mason at the other halfback spots...
...PHILIP MASON...
...Wilson, like other literary revisionists, overreact? Philip Mason thinks so. A veteran of 20 years in the Indian civil service, Mason is neither a first-rate biographer nor a first-rate critic. Still, stolidly and finally convincingly, he builds a case for a Kipling who stands between the old clichés and Wilson's anti-clichés-a Kipling rather magnificent in his contradictions...
Putting together these parts, Mason has Kipling come out a little like a 19th century British Hemingway. Like Hemingway, Kipling prided himself on an almost tactile knowledge of his craft, as if he were more artisan than writer. Like Hemingway, he approached the world as a no-nonsense man of action, only to have it turn into a landscape of terrifying myths. Kipling's fundamental theme, like Hemingway's, was pain and its endurance...
Kipling, both Mason and Wilson agree, was a superb writer who, again like Hemingway, could make textures and smells-the very rhythms of life-leap off the page. Why, then, did he come closer to success in his short stories (for instance, The Man Who Would Be King) than in his novels (for instance, Captains Courageous)? Because, says Wilson, he could not conceal his true, tragic nature in the longer run. Mason concedes that Kipling's training and temperament put him into an almost impossible position as a writer: he was "an artist who must on no account betray...