Word: scum
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Scumbler's name is borrowed from the technical term for texturing over one color with another; usually he shortens it to Scum, for scum of the earth. A self-proclaimed people's painter, he roams the streets on his battered motorcycle, white beard flying, paintbox strapped on his back, searching for subjects. He relishes getting caught up fitfully in the lives of the students, prostitutes, policemen and tourists who gather around his easel. He goes where the flow carries him, down to explore unused tunnels under Paris or off to join some young Americans on an outing...
...Scum might seem more engaging and colorful if he were not so familiar: another in a long line of romantics who disdain the bourgeois "scramble for outside things like money or status," a lesser descendant of that definitive rogue-genius Gulley Jimson, hero of Joyce Gary's The Horse's Mouth. For a man who claims that most of his life has been "a flight from boredom," Scum has an amazing tolerance for bull-session profundities. Scarcely a page goes by without an interpolated haiku-like verse (WE WEAR OURSELVES INSIDE OUT/ TRYING TO BRING THE OUTSIDE...
...pseudonymous William Wharton, author of Birdy, Dad and A Midnight Clear, is himself an American painter who lived many years in Paris, so it is no surprise that his street scenes and descriptions of the painterly process are vividly authentic. His chapter on Scum's attempt to paint a self-portrait that would transport him out of the temporal dimension makes a stirring set piece. But his identification with his character is so complete that the novel seems to be spun from their shared fantasy fulfillment. Difficulties give way before Scum. Whatever he needs comes conveniently to hand, whether...
...sham, and I don't want to forget it. For most of my four years, the grass has been brown and my shower curtain has been covered with scum. I have memories of this place, some good and many bad; I want to keep them all. When I'm riding a special bus to a reunion Boston Pops concert, I want to remember the days I trudged through snow or rain because the shuttle service is insufficient. When I'm eating at the Union again, I hope I'll think about the 11 days Harvard kept me from my diploma...
...Church, not Mem Hall), he might have found the arguments presented for the divestiture a good deal more sophisticated than mere "name-calling." Saying that "many of the students who support divestiture compare President Bok and the Corporation members to "rednecks and Klansmen" and "racist nightriding scum" is a bold-faced lie, insupportable by all forms of evidence...