Word: moralize
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Shavian descendant John Tanner is portrayed as a social agitator and the author of The Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion, which Shaw thoughtfully appends to the published edition of the play. In his own person, Tanner enunciates Shavian doctrine on such sublunary matters as sex, social convention, and moral passion. As Don Juan in the hell scene he discourses with equal brilliance on the Life Force, the nature of Nature, and the whole duty of man, arguing against the Devil's hedonistic creed of "love and beauty" in favor of an eterntiy of energetic striving to serve, in contemplation...
...character than the excitable little man he gives us. The "Olympian majesty" specified by Shaw is missing; Tanner's magnificent brashness becomes mere cheek. Mr. Morse can lay down doctrine with considerable brio, but his John Tanner never seems committed to his ideas with any great intensity of the "moral passion" he talks about. It becomes a matter of little significance that the revolutionary activities of this Tanner should be circumscribed by marriage. (His air of frivolity vanishes during the hell scene, but here his attempt at the aristocratic chill becoming to Don Juan degenerates sometimes into mere posturing...
...broken by Edith, who shows up to buy a painting and promptly recognizes the lamster. Will he turn worm and let himself be stuffed back into a boiled shirt? Not, the reader can bet his burnt sienna, until expatriate geniuses drink Pepsi-Cola instead of Pernod. For wives, the moral is clear: if a husband begins to doodle, draw your own conclusions...
ANATOMY OF A MORAL (181 pp.)-Milovan Djilas-Praeger...
...Vice President of Yugoslavia, Djilas eventually convinced himself that Communism is the inevitable foe of revolutionary ideals. This disenchantment produced The New Class (TIME, Sept. 9, 1957), a dazzling indictment of Marxism as the opiate of the masses. An earlier product of his apostasy is Anatomy of a Moral, 18 casual essays written for two of Belgrade's leading journals when Djilas was still the party's Red-haired boy. The speculations begin innocently enough: a yawningly orthodor insistence that Yugoslavia must wiggle between the traps of Stalinist "bureaucratism" and "decadent" Western capitalism. But as the articles progress...