Word: prometheus
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Painter Nolan did his portrait in crayon and watercolor on paper (he has been known to use layers of paint burnished with one of his wife's nylons). Nolan also did a series of paintings inspired by Lowell's new play, Prometheus Bound, four of which appear with the story. His startling, highly imaginative visions bring to mind what Poet Stephen Spender once said of his work: "Conscious though he is of mystery, Nolan is not a mystifier. On the contrary, he is an explainer, and his figures, however bizarre, are self-explanatory...
...Life Studies, For the Union Dead, Lord Weary's Castle, The Mills of the Kavanaughs and Land of Unlikeness. He has also written three short plays collectively titled The Old Glory, and a translation of Racine's Phaedra (recently staged in Philadelphia). His new prose play Prometheus Bound, produced this month at the Yale School of Drama, is not so much drama as an oratorio streaked with images of visceral intensity, as exemplified in the paintings of his friend, Artist Sidney Nolan (see color pages). The play is a loose adaptation of the Greek tragedy by Aeschylus...
Many of the apparent contradictions are caused by one basic difference between the West and China. Western man, in the image of Prometheus or Faust, seeks to dominate nature; the Chinese seeks to live in harmony with it. The ideal of harmony-with the universe, with the past, within society-helps to explain China's durability, its long resistance to change, the subordination of the individual to the overall design. Above all, it helps to account for the periodic outbursts of violence in a land that values nonviolence. When society is repressed, when forms are meticulously observed, when balance...
...understand," said Lahr, an alumnus of the Columbia Burlesque Circuit '23, "that Aristophanes allowed the comedian to do whatever he wanted." But no one in 23 centuries ever winged the Birds as Lahr did. When Prometheus reveals some of Zeus's confidences to him, Lahr calls him "a fink." When Zeus offers Lahr his wife, Bert busses her and then bellows his trademarked "annng-anng-anng." When Lahr stumbles over the pronunciation of "Agamemnon," he quips, "That's Greek to me." At one point, he even digresses into a rendition of his famous Frito-Lay TV commercial...
...Maurois, an old hand at literary biographies (Shelley, Byron, Dickens, Dumas, Hugo, Proust), disavows that intention. "This is a life of Balzac, not a critical study," he says in a foreword and, having passed his 80th year, announces that it is the last biography he will write. Nevertheless, Prometheus is strewn with the kind of judgments that a disciple makes at the feet of the master: "A super-novelist," "the greatest novelist of the century." Balzac's very faults become virtues: "The enforced disorder" of his life "reproduces the disorder of life" itself...