Word: masons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Americans for Democratic Action. In Manhattan, a regiment of eggheads closed the gap in their ranks with a Draft Stevenson Committee, signed a loyalty pledge supporting their favorite candidate. Among the signers: Poets Carl Sandburg and Archibald MacLeish. Authors John Steinbeck and John Hersey, Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Critic John Mason Brown, Playwright-Producer George Abbott, Composer-Conductor Leonard Bernstein...
...landscape made the author the bright hope of U.S. fiction among some critics, as well as the hero of a lively minor cult on college campuses. Much of his new and far inferior book takes place in Italy, south of Rome, but the characters and attitudes are standard sub-Mason-Dixon. The two central figures are Mason Flagg, a rich neurotic dilettante, and Cass Kinsolving, an alcoholic hack painter. The plot, insofar as there is one, advances at a glacial pace towards the question of what Flagg and Kinsolving had to do with the brutal sex-murder of an Italian...
...Frontier? This whodunit is essentially a whydidit. The man who delves into the twisted personality wreckage of the past is the stodgy self-effacing ("I am something of a square") narrator of the novel to whom Mason Flagg was a prep-school idol. Complicated flashbacks reveal that Mason Flagg is something of a heel, the hybrid product of a $2,000,000 trust fund and an incestuously possessive mother. By his 205 he is braining his wife with stray crockery, and swapping bedmates at Greenwich Village parties that Author Styron stops teasingly short of describing...
Still under 30, Mason becomes "the solemn apostle of the groin." tours Europe with a raft of erotica, cases of twelve-year-old Scotch and a pneumatic mistress named Rosemarie ("that great walking Beautyrest of a woman"). When he is not blacking Rosemarie's eyes, Mason likes to pontificate on Topic A: "Sex is the last frontier ... the only area left where men can find full expression of their individuality...
...agonizingly hung over from his binges, Cass Kinsolving rants at his century. He predictably hates the U.S., Ike, commercialism, conformity and just about everything except the recordings of the late Leadbelly, which he plays by the hour while his wife and four children go hungry. The knave in Mason strikes a bargain with the fool in Cass, and with almost inadvertent demonism, they destroy an innocent girl...