Word: septimus
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Langguth wastes little time trying to decide whether Saki was a literary butterfly who finally tried to stamp or some kind of shrike with a sense of humor. The book notes the Waugh-like gift for comic names (Loona Bimberton, Septimus Brope), the Wildean wit, the Wodehousean way with the featherheaded fauna of the West End and the country house party, the surprise endings self-consciously borrowed from O'Henry...
...Gated City offers one such vindication. For Lessing, the Coldridge townhouse is an elaborate metaphorical conceit--at its base, in its cellar, it house Linda, Mark's mad wife. In another novel produced during another time, Linda would have probably been left to her solitary fate--most probably, like Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway, Linda would have simply destroyed herself. At best, she could only hope to remain locked up for life, half-mad, in a Gothic tower. But, in this novel, Linda is treated as a prophet as she conducts Martha through the looking glass into another, better world...
...World War I: "This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears." Perhaps, as World War II and the war's changes closed over her, Virginia Woolf came to feel at last like war-shocked Septimus Smith, whose suicide she had described in Mrs. Dalloway: "Human nature, in short, was on him-the repulsive brute with the blood-red nostrils. . . . The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself...
...issue of TIME, May 24, contains a review of Charles Eugene Claghorn's The Mocking Bird in which credit for writing the song, Listen to the Mocking Bird, is given to the late Septimus Winner. The review does go on to state that "Sep" got the idea for his most famous song from "Whistling Dick," a Negro beggar who used to strum his guitar and whistle like a bird...
...Septimus Winner was a plain man who, on the side, wrote blank verse for which he had no talent, worried discreetly over his drunken father. He was also responsible for 200 texts on how to play instruments, 2,000 piano and violin arrangements. His brother Joseph determined to write song hits too, resoundingly succeeded once with Little Brown Jug, Don't I Love Thee. As Septimus was more prolific, so was his end more picturesque. On a fine November day in 1902 he attended the dedication of a new building for his alma mater, the old High School, shook...