Word: old
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Roosevelt's memoir has little of the high historic excitement of Robert Sherwood's Roosevelt and Hopkins and none of the hero-worshiping quality of Grace Tully's F.D.R., My Boss; she just runs along easily as though she were showing the family album to some old friends. Yet every few pages she comes to a striking, familiar snapshot of the great ones among whom she and her husband moved. Random shots...
...gives his unschooled protagonist his own clarity of thought and narration) has peppered The Woman of Rome with flashes of wisdom that seem like borrowed pearls as simple Adriana threads them: "We never get clear, definite changes in life; and those who do make hurried changes risk seeing their old habits come to the fore once again, still alive and as deep-rooted as ever." Those who want to read universal meanings into this couch-worn tale will have to do it at the level of amorality where only the Adrianas of the world can move with assurance...
Born to wealth (his father was a railroad tycoon), Firbank spent most of his short life roaming around the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, halting, as the whim seized him, in a tent in the desert, a palace in Portugal or an old house in Constantinople. He carried around with him a trunkful of objets d'art, including a bronze bull, his own novels bound in white vellum, some colored quill-pens, a "vast tortoiseshell crucifix" and stacks of "those large blue rectangular postcards" on which he wrote both his novels and correspondence ("Tomorrow I go to Hayti," crooned...
...coal and the real estate left out and no throaty constriction to impede the fluent lushness. ¶ Valmouth (1919) is a tale about high-society high jinks in an imaginary British health resort where the salubrious climate assures salacious longevity. The sexy heroine is a brisk 120 years old. ¶ The Flower Beneath the Foot (1923) tells of the unrequited love of a French girl for a royal prince (addressed as "His Weariness"). It is set in an orchidaceous never-never land of languor and burning kisses, and contains the memorable exclamation (made, of course, by a female character...
Once in a while, the old Faulkner power comes through in a blaze of language, an original phrase (a gangster has "a face like a shaved wax doll"), or an insight into rural character. But except for Tomorrow, an effective account of how the family loyalties of a poor-white clan can tangle the job of justice, the stories fall between two stools: they are neither ingenious enough to be good detective yarns nor deep and free enough to be good Faulkner Detective-story fans will be horrified to find crucial clues spelled out in italics; Faulkner fans will find...