Word: sarton
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...most recent books that have devoted any considerable space to Harvard are John Phillips, '46 The Second Happiest Day and Faithful Are the Wounds by May Sarton. Phillips, who (as everyone will tell you confidentially) is Marquand's son, takes a closer look at the institutions which Marquand satirizes. But final clubs and social prestige are still the main thoughts of his Harvard students, although they have a far broader outlook than the George Apley type. Phillips plainly has an acute understanding of the kind of Harvard man he depicts, and has probably written the most valid and sympathetic description...
...disturbingly bitter indictment of the effect which a quest for "security" might have on the Harvard faculty and students. Although its location is Cambridge, the book is not so much a characterization of Harvard as it is a eulogy of a magnetic past member of the faculty. Sarton is concerned less with the Harvard scene and more with the struggle of a liberal mind in a time of national crisis...
Because Miss Sarton is dealing with the effect of a single act on many people, she is necessarily repetitive. And because the people are not truly individual or apart from one another, her repetition becomes exhausting. To present nine developed people in a short novel is a challenge in itself, but to go within each of them, probing their thoughts, is a far greater undertaking. When her characters talk, Miss Sarton can invent the right phrases and do it well, for she has a poet's feeling for language. But when her creations must think, she relapses to one view...
...Miss Sarton's resolution more satisfying. Her book is a personal story, with the forces beyond Harvard only phantoms hovering over the tragedy but not responsible for it. In an epilogue, however, Miss Sarton exploits the drama of the recent Congressional investigations, passing by her central theme for a flurry of unnatural reformation and simulated excitement...
...about them combining traits and features into composites. But when he borrows from life--unless revenge was his motive--a writer takes care to change the locale, the time, any detail which might embarrass the subject he has chosen for his literary portrait. In Faithful are the Wounds, Miss Sarton neglects such precautions. The novel has, for people who have lived through the event she describes, all the impact and all the pain of a newspaper account or a contemporary history. But Miss Sarton does not bind herself to the accuracy such forms demand. She can swipe...