Word: parrish
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...courtier, from courtier to servant, from servant to beggar. Homer wrote about a fine and glittering lady; Marlowe found lines like golden bells, for a casual queen; John Erskine made the legend into a matrimonial farce, and now the matrimonial farce has become a cinema, played against Maxfield Parrish walls and valleys, by Maria Corda, a pretty little blonde girl with an affected way of showing her teeth...
GRAY SHEEP-Dillwyn Parrish- Harper ($2). Dillwyn Parrish, brother of Anne Parrish, the Perennial Bachelor lady, last year came forward as another sharp-eyed anatomist of life's nobodies. Repugnantly dear to him is the tragicomedy of middling people-middling honest, middling happy, middling alive. He called his first novel Smith Everlasting. The Rev. Fred Rain of Gray Sheep is another victim of everlasting Smithness in body, mind and spirit-a figure at once lovable, pitiful and contemptible from the equivocal nature of Smithness, for which another name is stagnation...
...Rain is Elmer Gantry described by a neighbor whose generosity and politeness, guarded by a sense of humor, have not been assassinated by anger or malice. No bit of raucous mimicry by Sinclair Lewis surpasses Dillwyn Parrish's subtly corrosive pictures of fleshy Fred Rain painting his bathroom while trying not to marry; fouling his straight young son's mind with a circumlocution on sex in flowers; preparing stuffy sermons in his smug study. Not "Old Jud" himself, the muscular college revivalist of Elmer Gantry, is more offensive than Fay Johnson, the Y.M.C.A. hearty of this book...
...constitutionally impossible for a Parrish to be really lugubrious. Innumerable small pranks and whimsies set off the pall of Gray Sheep, softening the glare of its irony, warming it with humanity. The morning of Helen (Mrs.) Rain's funeral, the eaves sparrows quarrel as usual. (She would have liked that.) At John Rain's embarkation, the tugs whisper fuchsia, fuchsia, fuchsia; then cough cocoa, cocoa, cocoa as they push the ship to midstream. During a prayer at sewing circle, Helen Rain peeps covertly at the Women's varying technique-pinching bridge of nose; clasping stomach; kneeling thoroughly...
...Author. Short, slim, quiet, Dillwyn Parrish lives in Claymont, Del., the young bachelor master of an old homestead, exchanging visits often with the sister whose bookishness revived his interest in life after a bad time...