Word: passion
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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England. King Henry II of England (1133-89) was a coarse, bull-necked man of capricious temper, with a talent for statesmanship and a passion for territorial expansion. Deciding to correct abuses on the part of the ecclesiastical courts, he began well by declaring at Clarendon Palace his "Constitutions of Clarendon" which imposed reasonable restraints, but he fell out with Thomas a Becket, the up-&-coming young churchman whom he had promoted to be Archbishop of Canterbury. The resulting imbroglio with the Church was too hot for King Henry to handle; he ate crow and purchased absolution from the Pope...
...children of an English country parson, apparently a solid character, John Cowper Powys was erratic from the start. From early childhood, he says, his life was dominated by a besetting neurotic sin. He calls it sadism but from the many examples he gives it sounds more like the peeping passion. As a young man he used to make trips to Brighton for the sole purpose of looking at girls' legs as they lay on the beach. For years he periodically bought and feverishly devoured armfuls of French pornographic books. When he first went to Manhattan, penny-in-the-slot...
Among the best stories in the collection are "Sunstroke", a tale of how a man's momentary passion develops into an unrealizable love. "A Night At Sea", the meeting of two men who loved the same woman and the unexpected unemotional calm with which they discuss their life with her, and "A Simple Peasant", delineation of the jealous love of a simple peasant for the maid-servant and mistress of his master...
...quarrel with Jotham and a sudden turn of good luck for Dan sends Molly into the kitchen of Dan's Sarsey Sal. A tranquil panorama by Currier & Ives, The Farmer Takes a Wife becomes emotionally articulate only when Molly is trying to infect her bumpkin beau with her passion for The Big Ditch...
...building, critics had already divided in their previews: some called it superb, others jerry-built. Men-in-the-street, content merely to watch the structure go up, told themselves it was beginning to look more like the real thing. Readers of the first two volumes (Men of Good Will, Passion's Pilgrims) will have little difficulty in picking up the threads of the story, will be relieved to see that the parallel narratives have now begun to intertwine, making fewer different threads to follow. Mme. de Champcenais' timid affair with Sammécaud gets warmer. Haverkamp, the ambitious...