Word: oed
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Shirley May France's clothes still hung on the hickory limb but she clung anxiously to a French beach, waiting for southwesterly winds to die down. The winds did not deter a hefty, partially crippled, 34-year-old Belgian mining machine manufacturer named Fernand du Moulin. Around 10 o'clock one night last week Fernand left a champagne party given by his wife, anointed himself with grease and took to the choppy waters off France's Cap Gris Nez. He struck out with a powerful breast stroke, stopping now & then to tread water and consume 20 fortifying...
...o'clock the Mercury drove me to what had once been one of Europe's finest polo grounds. There was Tito, now in a flashy riding habit, trotting his handsome white mare, Mitzi. He put her into a gallop, came towards me at full tilt. As he reined up I said: "I hear you like to fish, Marshal." "We go fishing," he said. Briskly he swung Mitzi around and rode off to the villa. By the time we reached the rowboats which would take us to his launch, Tito had made another quick change and appeared...
...RAGE TO LIVE (590 pp.)-John O'Hara-Random House...
Meet the People. That is the whole story of A Rage to Live, John Henry O'Hara's new novel, his first in eleven years. But it is not O'Hara's whole intent. Like his earlier taut and febrile novels (Appointment in Samarra, Butterfield 8), A Rage to Live is shot through with enough gratuitous sex to get itself talked about. But unlike them it attempts the kind of large-scale social portraiture which could easily be the framework of the Great American Novel. Rage is not that. Its wide-lensed look at U.S. small...
Nevertheless, A Rage to Live is peppered with evidences of O'Hara's technical writing skill. He still has an ear for dialogue that makes his characters' conversation as credible as if it were overheard, whether they are talking in a brothel or planning a dinner at home. His gallery is extensive (housewives, doctors, politicians, businessmen, lovers, prostitutes) and the people seem as true and alive as if the reader had just met them. But Novelist O'Hara seems satisfied with only a casual-meeting knowledge of his people. Reading A Rage to Live is almost...