Word: minting
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French Lick, Ind. (pop. 2,000), a quiet spa, has a special place in the nostalgia of the Democratic Party. There the pre-F.D.R. generation of Democratic leaders were wont to gather before and after election-time, consuming mint juleps, Pluto water ("If nature won't, Pluto will") and the salty wisdom of Indiana's late boss, Tom Taggart. Last week the Democrats, their blood up, went back to French Lick to consider how their party might be reinvigorated for 1956. "There is no question but what we will focus our guns on the President himself...
Clouds piled high over Churchill Downs.Lightning flickered, and a few drops splashed from the thunderheads. The band broke into My Old Kentucky Home, the mint-julep vendors stopped their spiel, and the carnival that was the 81st Kentucky Derby slowed down to a hush...
...Perhaps, he reasoned, a hitch in the R.A.F. would give him peace of mind. It is doubtful that restless, unstable T. E. Lawrence ever found peace of mind, but the notes he took in barracks became a book whose history is as odd as his own bizarre career. The Mint was finished in India in 1928 (Lawrence had been discharged from the R.A.F., enlisted in the Tank Corps under the name of Shaw, went back to the R.A.F. in 1925). But Lawrence did not want the book to be published until 1950, because, he said, he had named people...
After Lawrence was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1935, Critic Edward Garnett turned over a typescript of The Mint to a New York publisher. Only 50 copies of the book were printed. Ten were offered for sale at $500,000 apiece; there were no takers. Now the book is published, at $20 a copy, in a special edition of 1,000, which is already oversubscribed. Perhaps in the fall the average reader will get a go at it in a cheaper edition. He may well wonder what all the fuss was about...
...Mint, the brutalities of noncoms, the indifference of officers, the rude comradeship and intellectual sterility of barracks life are set down with hard fidelity. But Lawrence, a romantic misfit, was overcome with tiresome self-pity. He tried to understand what barracks and discipline do to men's lives, but Lawrence's writing was best suited to description, and it became cluttered when he tried to think. Set down as it is in short jerky chapters, The Mint has no final impact. Above all, it comes too late. A generation of men who know KP chores, the squeeze...