Word: passione
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...John Seniors have a passion for an extremely dispassionate painter: Piet
...doctor could love her in selfless fashion. She thinks that son Raymond may bring her romance and a fresh start-until he attacks her crudely. She tries, vainly, to commit suicide. Years later, by now a hardened rake, Raymond thinks to himself: "Everything serves as fuel for passion: abstinence sharpens it, repletion strengthens it, virtue keeps it awake . . . It is a frantic and a horrible obsession...
Flaubert's great passion was work: the endless quest for verbal perfection. Often he spent weeks on a single page. To his young protégé, Guy de Maupassant, he wrote: "You must-believe me, young man-you must do more work. I am coming to suspect you of being somewhat of an idler. Too many tarts, too much rowing and too much exercise. A cultured man has not as much need of exertion as doctors pretend...
...barber, Johnson picked up plenty of gossip right in his shop, but he also got around town. He owned a farm, did a steady business as money lender, ran a thriving bathhouse and hired out slaves. Next to business, his passion was "manly sport." He seems to have spent as much time at the busy Natchez race track as he did in his shop, bet regularly, and finally owned his own race horses. Marksmanship and hunting ran racing a close second. Unfortunately, Johnson would shoot anything that moved, from alligators to robins. A typical day's bag: "2 Squirrells...
Anyone expecting a crime of passion at this point reckons without the glacial restraint of modern British novelists. Author William Sansom muzzles the tiger in the blood in order to muster a conversational mouse in the drawing room. In The Face of Innocence, the crisp, angled light of his prose gives the mouse an exaggerated shadow. So does his main theme: that things are rarely what they seem...