Word: pantaloons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Moreover, many of the Brothers' allusions are rooted in Toynbee's first novel-in-poetry, Pantaloon, which was even less effective and provided at best an all-too-private mythology on which to draw. The most notable passages in the book ring like Toynbee's own experiences as a youth traveling in Europe in the '30s, raising the suspicion that the author's mannered tricks of deminationality, time future, and exaggerated technique-even the device of the too neatly counterpointed brothers themselves, two peas split from the same psyche-are perhaps only artful foils permitting...
Psychological Substance. Nichols can be alternately Harlequin and Pantaloon, his crayon-blue eyes and round, astonished mouth suggesting that he finds the world just a little too much to cope with. Elaine is a dark-eyed Columbine of many moods who wears her immemorial, feminine wisdom a little uncomfortably, like an ill-fitting evening dress. Just as the commedia players ridiculed the braggarts and poltroons, cuckolds and scheming Don Juans, Mike and Elaine act out caricatures of their own time and place-the phony intellectual, the lecherous boss and his confused secretary, the little man at the mercy...
...Pantaloon Pilgrim. After the revolution, the Jews of Homel had obediently shaved their beards and otherwise tried to behave like loyal members of a godless and classless society. The results were not always happy. One rushed into the synagogue shouting, "Down with that rotten Sabbath! Long live, let us say, Monday!" Some changed their names, but although "it was only a matter of two rubles and the proper enlightenment," Lasik Roitschwantz passed up the opportunity of becoming Spartacus Rosaluxemburgsky. Adopting two saints' names in the hagiography of Marxism* was his last chance to stay out of trouble. Instead...
Satirist Ehrenburg also leads his pantaloon pilgrim to some slapstick swipes at Communist literature of the period. Although all he knew about the subject was that "Leo Tolstoy had a handsome beard just like Karl Marx," the little tailor becomes an "inexorable" Marxist literary critic. As pundit of proletarian literature -which is what Ehrenburg himself became after he ended his Paris stay in 1940 and went home-Lasik writes a preface for a socialist realist novel about romance in a soap factory ("Dunja yielded to the beat of new life, and whispered, blushing slightly: 'You see. we have surpassed...