Word: prose
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Evelyn Waugh is one of the finest prose stylists writing today. He is a master stery-teller--"Helena" does not lag, even without a real plot. He has a delicate touch in recording the Inanities (and worse) of civilization. But "Helena" lacks the religiousness of a religious story, and the bite of a proper satire. What remains is mere teeth...
...aims. He was neither a visionary nor a crank; but rather, in the manner of Swift-though far more successful in his mission to the English-a negotiator. By eloquent attack, irony, laughter, bounce, by the intrigue of words and a wit that cut everything to ribbons, in a prose so clear, fast and pure that it was like a charmer's music to the snake, Shaw hypnotized England. People became Socialists without knowing it even while they were denouncing Shaw as a mountebank and a playboy. Trotsky lamented that Shaw was a good man fallen among Fabians...
...when he boasted of his brilliance and genius; because (if it can be put this way) brilliance and genius were all he had. And he knew their nature: he had the penetrating comic genius. He was expert, as the comic genius is, in absurd juxtapositions and non sequiturs. His prose is made of sentences which have less and less to do with the preceding ones; each is a fresh beginning, fresh with new, vivid effrontery and traveling away from the point, like the words of an incurable but dazzling talker who is intoxicated by his own flow...
...become too clever for wrath, weakens him when he is compared with Swift. Compared with Voltaire's, his imagination is drier, lacks picture and lacks nature too. A kind of middle-class gentility preserved him from the great disgusts, the unspeakable horrors which greater imaginations could grasp. The prose is, however, a superb vehicle for the pamphleteer and any page of it is a model of the art of conducting unfair arguments. He was a highly original artist and the art lay in the transmuting of disruptive debate into a kind of classical Mozartian music. The plays date most...
...Author Farrell's mealy prose and chronic inability to individualize scene and character muffle most of his stories. In describing a summer stock production in one of the dullest of them, he comes close to summing up his own worst faults...