Word: roger
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Roger D. Brown is managing editor. Jonathan Kozol '58, author of Fume of Poppies, and Richard Tilinghast are the senior editors in Cambridge. Herbert Kohl '59, and Mark Mirsky '61 are the New York senior editors...
...Roger Micheldene is a plump package of just about everything Americans find detestable in a U-type Englishman. He is expensively accented (Oxford), twice married, with a modest homosexual past, a nonchurchgoing Roman Catholic, but a devout snob and a glutton, a sexman and a Potterish ployman of epic pretensions. His exploits in one-upmanship take the form of a baroque conversational style, impeccable scholarship in cigars, and a collection of snuffboxes with appropriate snuff (antelope horn for the Otterburn mix). He hates progress, Protestants, Negroes, Jews, Americans, today and tomorrow. Such a man, Amis implies, has done very nicely...
...Roger comes to the U.S. ostensibly in his function as a publisher, but privately to visit his mistress, a blonde, heavy-lidded mother of one, who is married to a Danish philosopher at Budweiser College, somewhere in Pennsylvania. (Amis himself was a visiting lecturer at Princeton...
Pursuit of Angst. What happens is a howling shame. Roger is defeated in conversation by an undergraduate "Jewish jackanapes" who enrages him by professing identical opinions. He tests his conviction that "these Yank college girls were at it all the time," and is bitten severely in his fat neck. He bloats with rage after a faculty party when he guessed the word was "effeminately" in a game of charades; the word was "Britishly." He is finally seduced by an ill-complected nymphomaniac and is comic in love as he conjugates Latin to prolong his pleasure. He is outdrunk, outmaneuvered, outraged...
...Englishman is very funny. But by the time Amis lets his ployman homeward plod his weary way, the reader finds his heart wrung with pity. In a puzzling way, the appalling Roger has endeared himself. It is not just that Roger himself in odd moments has recognized that he is a pretty dreadful character. "Very angst-producing, being a snob," he confesses to his mistress. Something deeper is involved. The secret may be that the totally selfish man is pathetic as well as detestable; Roger has some of the heartbreaking quality present in the rapt self-absorption of a child...