Word: poetics
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...WATCHMAN, by Davis Grubb (275 pp.; Scribner; $3.95), is the latest of the author's marrow-chilling tales of good and evil, written in a style compounded of Hans Christian Andersen imaginativeness and American Gothic hyperbole. His Night of the Hunter (1954), a surefooted, poetic horror story of two children and a malevolent pursuer, was told with controlled passion. Now in The Watchman, Grubb has pulled out all the stops, piled terror on madness, disaster on helplessness. The book is a mixture of poetic rage against cruelty in man, a song in praise of physical love...
...best of the home-grown dramas include the tender, poetic family chronicle, All the Way Home, and Advise and Consent, a tense political melodrama. As for the musicals: although it is currently fashionable to dismiss it, Camelot holds many treasures that make it worth seeing; Do Re Mi survives only through the shenanigans of Stars Phil Silvers and Nancy Walker. Which leaves two of the year's least pretentious works but also its zingiest -Carol Channing's satirical revue, Show Girl, and An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine...
What makes this novel so extraordinary is that it is both an allegory and a chronicle of despair. The style fluctuates rapidly between poetic vision and brutal realism. The characters are naturally symbolic, but at the same time human--although remarkable in their sensitivity. Ernie Levy is the six million Jews put to death by the "final solution," yet, at certain moments, he is a most ordinary human being. That M. Schwarz-Bart has been able for the most part to combine these two levels of his story successfully is a tribute both to his skill and his diligence...
...most provocative original plays and the liveliest musical all imported. They are Rhinoceros, a farce-satire by perky Avant-Gardist Eugene lonesco; A Taste of Honey, a sort of earthy British lonely-hearts story; and the wonderfully pert French musical Irma La Douce. The domestic dramas include the tender, poetic family chronicle, All the Way Home; Advise and Consent, a tense political melodrama; and Tennessee Williams' Period of Adjustment, a lively but somehow disappointing comedy-lecture on marital success. Among the musicals: although it is currently fashionable to dismiss it, Camelot holds many treasures that make it worth seeing...
Miller's third and most irksome flaw is suddenly to change the way his characters talk, from common speech to rhetorical and poetic common speech, whenever he approaches a climactic scene. His dialogue, which is usually dull, becomes silly...