Word: odyssey
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Fresh from his last safari (Dylan Thomas in America), Poet-Critic John Malcolm Brinnin goes in search of this Abominable Snowoman of modern letters. What he brings back is not startling, but it is a biographically complete if critically indulgent account of the concentric odyssey of Gertrude Stein, of whom it might be said: in her beginning was her end, because she was all middle...
...impure and guileful as anything in literature, and Petronius was mocking Roman bluenoses when he pretended to deny it. But the great gaiety of the work, and the sharpness with which Petronius satirizes esthetes, pedants, bad poets, the nouveau riche and the rapacious poor, lift this gutter odyssey well above the merely pornographic. The fragment that remains of the original huge manuscript is a mixture of prose, poetry and puns, fustian rhetoric and sweaty argot...
Sometimes this pitch seemed a little extreme, as when the class spent some time to decide on the meaning of catharsis, and when, in the third class on the Odyssey, some of the girls were still referring to Telemachus. But the instructor hesitated to correct, and said he felt that this might make students self-conscious...
...Negulesco has tried to turn Nancy Mitford's nit-witty high-society farce (TIME, Oct. 15, 1951) into a conventional comedy, develops into a fairly funny, mildly sophisticated what-is-it, rather like an interpolation of The Diary of a Chambermaid with the last six books of the Odyssey...
...play, in which Good and Evil, Spirit and Nature, Christian and Pagan fight to the finish on the vast stage of the unbroken prairie. The hero is a Galahad with a six-gun, a Perseus of the purple sage. In his saddlebags he carries a new mythology, an American Odyssey that is waiting for its Homer. And the theme of the epic, hidden beneath the circus glitter of the perennial Wild West show, is the immortal theme of every hero myth: man's endless search for the meaning of his life...