Word: palmist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...cast seems to go gaga about being on the same stage with Katharine Hepburn, and so does Hepburn. She delivers the fizzed-out Schweppigrams that pass for lines as if La Rochefoucauld had bottled them. Ask your neighbor hood palmist what they, or the play, mean. As for Hepburn, she may or may not care. Give a star a star turn and vanita somnia vincit...
...only to look at those hands: enormously large and elongated, and so full of flexion folds as to be a palmist's nirvana. Tricassus Mantuanus, Melampus of Alexandria, John de Indagine - those late-medieval heavies of palmistry would have gone bananas over Satch Sanders' hands....The vertical line from the wrist to the base of the middle finger is the line of fortune, and to an expert chiromancer like Tricassus, that line would probably say it all....Harlem to Harvard...
Prescient Palmist. Of the stories, Enoch Soames is the better one. Soames (Richard Kiley) is a minor minor poet pickled in absinthe who harbors a paranoiac conviction: people who ignore his slim volumes, The Ultimate Nil and Fungoids, are turning their backs on a late 19th century Milton. He desperately yearns to know posterity's judgment and makes a pact with the devil to spend a few hours 100 years hence in the library of the British Museum. There he finds that the brief and only mention of the name Enoch Soames is in a short story...
Kiley is marvelously intuitive in the role, capturing both the smug vanity and simultaneous vulnerability of literature's seedy hangers-on. In A.V. Laider, Kiley is a prescient palmist who foretells the death of four people riding in a railway coach. Or does he? Beerbohm is having a little fun with the old writer's problem of illusion and reality. Neither story is much more than an attenuated anecdote told over brandy and cigars...