Word: plain
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Leafing through the Sept. 15 issue of Vogue, British Author George Orwell, literary critic (Dickens, Dali and Others) and political satirist (Animal Farm), ran across a picture of himself in Vogue's "spotlight," found himself described as a "plain speaker" and a "direct writer." Leafing a little more, he generated some direct thoughts on U.S. fashions, women and mores. Last week the New Republic printed them...
Though the tone of the whole speech was determined, politicos saw more significance in the worried undertone. Plainly the P.M. had been alarmed by the Party's recent setbacks. He was appealing to the plain people for support. And in retaining the reluctant St. Laurent in his Cabinet, the P.M. was keeping close at hand a potential heir apparent from the key province of Quebec...
Chatter & Curiosity. When the whim takes him, Dadswell goes to sea, works in the black gang or deck crew, returns with human-interest yarns that set him solid with his plain-folks readers. He has none of the synthetic open-eyed wonder of the late O. 0. Mclntyre, or the troubled sympathy of Pyle. Says Dadswell: "I always have a specific story in mind when I make a trip. Soon I am going to Cuba to find out if Sloppy Joe's is really sloppy and if a guy named Joe really runs...
...Down. For his thousands of plain followers, Dadswell has his own sort of glamor. Readers who might be sold the Brooklyn Bridge can warm up to the man who confesses that he bought a $5,000 diamond for $25 from a mysterious Mexican, discovered it was a zircon "not worth a buck." He has the reckless savvy of the smart fellow who retires on his earnings (he did in 1926, 1938, 1945), and then shows up broke for a fresh start. But if his new column brings him another competence, Dadswell insists it will have to come from little papers...
...collection are marked by arty borrowings from the jargons of pseudo science and verse mannerisms ("the vowelled beeches," "the neural meaning," "the scurry of chemic blood"); in others, sense and emotion itself become lost in a game with words. But where Thomas is inspired by nothing more complicated than plain joy or direct recognition of beauty, his verse has a clear and bouncing simplicity-as in his picture of summer on a Welsh farm...