Word: moralist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Such candid statements appear throughout Fools Die. Novelist Puzo enjoys casting a sly peasant eye on pretension and selfdelusion. When moralist Puzo judges his characters' behavior it is not because that behavior offends convention but because it endangers survival. Merlyn's warning to a promiscuous actress about the dangers of V.D. echoes an Army training film, though the reader may not be sure whether the author is trying to be funny or just didactic. The novel's biggest flaw is a switching back and forth from third-to first-person narrative, thus violating Puzo's own first rule of writing...
...that he is both practical and flexible, and that his statecraft must be taken seriously. Says a top presidential adviser: "The President is acutely conscious that there are plenty of uncertainties and even worries about him in Europe. I think he will impress them as a pragmatist, not a moralist, and as a guy who's got a firm grip on the problems." Fuel Sales. Carter arrives bolstered by firm public support at home. A New York Times/CBS News survey last week showed that he had a 64% favorable rating after announcing his energy program. That was a drop...
Outrage rises from the men - and from the prose - and it continually buoys Voyage. Hayden is offended that things as splendid as ships, and the sea they sail on, are polluted by avarice. Yet for a moralist with a case to make, he stays commendably free of melodrama and polemic. It is clear that his seamen need to unite, but the organizers in the book are ineffective, and there is no vacuous optimism; a seafarers' union cannot (and did not) miraculously end greed or brutality...
...With his moralist, individualist approach, upperclass lifestyle and unshakeable belief in the democratic and civil libertarian ideals Thomas, never a Marxist ideologue, was at best a bourgeois socialist. Indeed, in his later years, disturbed by the systematic suppression of dissent in Stalinist Russia, he felt his socialist faith slipping...
Freund then spoke of Brandeis, for whom he clerked after graduating from the Law School in 1932. Brandeis was a "moralist," Freund said, who "wrote opinions not to pierce the mind, but to instruct and overwhelm" with their weight...