Word: mistressed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...when the author lessens the depth of his stories, as he does in "The Instruction of a Mistress," and "The Hand of Emmagene," his tales lose much of their appeal. As cruel revelations of the obsessions with which Taylor's characters "feed" their minds, all these stories lack the moderating presence of an adolescent observer. The reader can't sympathize with the presumptuous homosexual poet who keeps his mind busy with the loveless education of mistresses. Then there is the niece who chops off her hand, because she can't transcend her low upbringing, the couple who finds its marriage...
...MAGIC of Warren's language creates a web of images more vivid than the characters they describe. What one remembers from Warren's novel is first of all a series of word-pictures--of Jed's mistress tapping her sandal hypnotically in the glow of the firelight, of his wife, dying of cancer, lifting up her bony hand to him in pain and entreaty, of Jed himself holding a gun to the head of a German officer sneering "Heil Hitler!" The lingering force of these images is linked to the mode of narration; Jed tells his story--an odyssey which...
Warren's depictions of major characters are less exact, particularly in the case of Jed's mistress, Rose (nee Rozelle) Carrington. Rose exists only as Jed imagines her-a compound of firelight and sweating sexuality. She is a medley of images, of bare feet and huddled fur and surrender. But, like Jed, for whom she ironically represents a form of ultimate reality, she is less a character than a poetic creation--evoked, but in the end, not completely present...
...also the self-conscious seeker of "a moral language" to set against his father's passionate self-indulgence. Dissatisfied with his son's marriage to Sonia, Langham obliges her to pursue Kevin Woodford (David Warner), the defendant in the trial sequence, and couples his son with a mistress (Elaine Stritch) who bears a suspicious resemblance to Claude's mother...
...tall, balding, staccato-voiced multimillionaire-an adviser to statesmen, head of a transatlantic food conglomerate and a director of three great European banking houses. With a French wife and two children in Paris, and an openly acknowledged mistress. Lady Annabel Birley, and two children in London, he lives a heady cross-Channel version of Captain's Paradise. Sir James Michael Goldsmith, 44, juggles all this and just about everything else with the aplomb of a crack gambler -which he also is. His latest gamble, to become an international press lord...