Word: old
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Having long behaved like 36 characters in search of an author, Demara finally found the author in the person of Robert Crichton, 34-year-old son of Author-Editor Kyle (The Proud People) Crichton. The result is this slight, bright, abrasively readable biography of a bounder...
Sacred Mission. The central fact of Demara's life, according to Biographer Crichton, may be that he is a status sucker. He was eleven years old when his father, who owned movie houses in Lawrence, Mass., abruptly went broke. Kicked out of their mansion on Jackson Street, the Demaras landed in a shabby old carriage house on the wrong side of the gloomy old mill town. Fred hated poverty, with its stiff work boots and corduroy knickers, and he refused to face it. Every chance he got he sneaked back to the old house, sat in the attic...
...Yesterday) Kanin (rhymes with rain in), a jazz saxophonist during his knockabout days, has managed this much. His novel is cast in the form of a onetime saxman's fond, moody reminiscence of the hard-blowing early '303. Jogged by a telephone call from one of his old partners, the narrator recalls the rise and fall of the combo they formed. The group begins as a trio, built around an astonishingly good young trumpeter. Then the saxman finds a pianist at a Harlem rent party, and the trio sounds even better as a quartet. Bookings pick...
Marijuana Fudge. The old nostalgia is sometimes dangerously near burning down as Kanin writes of the antic hey-hey, but the mood is so pleasant and pervasive that the bemused reader is willing to forgive Author Kanin for taking a few choruses too many. The people are alive-the pretty French girl who collects jazz and jazzmen, the frazzlewit bass player who concocts a marijuana fudge...
...couldn't learn to live together?" The narrator's sanctimonious reply: "Woody, if we could-even between us-answer that simple question-seemingly simple-we could turn this into a hip world." But the world remains sadly square, and in the highflying riff of moralizing, Old Jazzman Kanin has lost his novel's beat...