Word: painters
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Time was when a fictional hero sold his soul to the Devil; nowadays the Devil often seems to sell his to the hero. Manhattan-born Sigrid de Lima, 37, has attempted a novel in the older fashion, but before Praise a Fine Day ends, her nameless painter-hero appears more devilish than the odd bargain he makes and breaks...
...expatriate American hero-heel, who tells this story in first-person flashback, has a code of sorts. He believes that arty ends justify ratty means. Setting up his easel on Rome's Spanish Steps, he sketches the pigeons until the inevitable tourist sucker expresses interest. Eventually, the painter cadges a meal at the Caffe Greco, or his rent money, or a small "loan" to tide him over till the next patron of the arts appears...
...balding and married-but not to Mara. She is his Polish mistress, and pregnant. A homeless refugee, she wants to bear her baby in New York as a U.S. citizen. For going through with a temporary marriage that gives Mara the chance to become an American, Isaak offers the painter $3,200, a new wardrobe, and all travel expenses...
This strange menage a trois tours France, and at first everything is reasonably decorous. But the inevitable happens: the painter falls for Mara's catlike face and supple body. Readers who follow the story this far will know that he is the sort of coward who kills the thing he loves with a kiss...
Storm center of this culture crisis was Poet-Painter William Morris. 28. who can make with both the words and the brushes. "If Jack Kerouac is the prose writer of the Beat Generation, I am its visual chronicler," boasts Morris. As a painter, Los Angeles-born Morris once rode a motor scooter from Barcelona ("I cleaned Miro's studio") to Denmark (where he painted canvases with his bare feet), has kept a partial record of 25 exhibitions and eight museums in which his work hangs. As a poet, Morris has the word from Ezra Pound ("In 50 years...