Word: raffish
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Readers who enjoyed John Gregory Dunne's True Confessions (1977) know the author as a connoisseur of the raffish, the macabre and the sleazy. They also know how deftly Dunne snatches sentiment from the jaws of cynicism, and how he can cut a plot line with fine malice. But in his new novel, Dutch Shea, Jr., sentiment is savagely chewed and the free association of memory is substituted for plot...
...earlier and in many ways more pleasant France. No Englishman could show more excitement over a cricket match than the average sports-loving American, and last week's beginning of the World Cricket Series was a national ritual for most Americans. Louisiana, in turn, has retained that raffish, somewhat off-center charm we associate with all things French: good food, good conversation and a fine contempt for conventional morals. It has also retained some unfortunate reminders of its frontier heritage. Unlike America, where handguns are outlawed, Louisiana allows every ten-year-old a six-shooter. No one is safe...
...most raffish and fantastic crew that I have met yet and even I-excessively broadminded as I am-feel somewhat shocked by the goings-on." That was how Tennessee Williams described his Provincetown acquaintances in a letter to his friend, Novelist Donald Windham, in the summer of 1940. Now the playwright has returned to that scene. But somehow that raffish and fantastic crew has fled his memory, and the characters on the stage of Manhattan's Jean Cocteau Repertory would not shock a novitiate...
Whatever the price, by whatever name, cocaine is becoming the all-American drug. No longer is it a sinful secret of the moneyed elite, nor merely an elusive glitter of decadence in raffish society circles, as it seemed in decades past. No longer is it primarily an exotic and ballyhooed indulgence of high-gloss entrepreneurs, Hollywood types and high rollers, as it was only three or four years ago-the most conspicuous of consumptions, to be sniffed from the most chic of coffee tables through crisp, rolled-up $100 bills. Today, in part precisely because it is such an emblem...
...hear. But there was a scratchier side to this earthy romanticism. In 1940 the playwright rejected a Pulitzer Prize for the Broadway hit The Time of Your Life on the grounds that business could not judge art. As a Hollywood scenarist he squabbled with studio heads and cut a raffish, boisterous figure Gambling and drinking contributed to the breakup of his marriage and the decline of his fortunes. In 1958, owing $50,000 in taxes, he moved to a working-class neighborhood in Paris. During the '60s, he wrote gloomy memoirs under the titles Not Dying...