Word: monke
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Johann Gregor Mendel (1822-84) was a quiet Moravian monk, who discovered the laws of inheritance by puttering with peas. He showed, for example, that if a "dominant" yellow pea is bred to a "recessive" green pea, all the first generation peas will be yellow, and three out of four of the second (if bred together) will be yellow and one green. This ratio always holds in breeding a dominant to a recessive. At the dawn of the 20th Century, Mendel's laws were dug up and made the basis of the science of genetics, which was also boosted...
...Monk's demented passions with their own. But in The Web and the Rock they will be reminded again that, in the death of Thomas Wolfe, U. S. literature has lost its most violent personality...
...Heart's centre" of the story is petite, passionate Mrs. Esther Jack, a stage designer with a grown daughter and a nebulous husband somewhere in the Park Avenue background. Hero is not Eugene Gant but a presumably new character named George ("Monk") Webber. Unlike Eugene, he is of medium height, pug-nosed, simian-shaped. His antecedents are carefully different from Gant's. But no disguise will hide a Thomas Wolfe hero...
Pacing up & down in Mrs. Jack's "workshop" in Greenwich Village, Monk sings, makes strange gurglings, stares out of the window, suddenly emits an ecstatic "goatlike cry of joy." Whereupon they join in wild cavorting, break off to eat the lunch which she comes each day to prepare. At times Monk speaks as follows: "Can I devour you? Can I feed my life on yours, get all your life and richness into me, walk about with you inside me, breathe you into my lungs like harvest, absorb you, eat you, melt you, have you in my brain, my heart...
When the romance begins to wane, when Monk begins brooding over love's "bitter mystery," then not even the most extravagant prophet could anticipate the window-rattling violence and savagery of these lovers' quarrels, the crazed sadism of Monk's accusations, or the deadly criticism that Mrs. Jack shoots back. Because she always comes back for more, however, because they make up from time to time and declare "Was there ever love like ours?" it is a long time before the final parting. Near the end Monk makes his bitterest accusation: "I've lost my squeal...