Word: sexuality
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...jacket: For Strong Stomachs Only. It is a picaresque story of the Depression, rich in shocking incident and rinsed in squalor that makes The Man with the Golden Arm seem like a novel of suburbia. Its hero is an illiterate, crafty boy of 16 whose talents are chiefly sexual, whose amorality would excite the envy of an alley cat. Yet he vaguely wants to better himself, and knows he can never do it in his Texas home town, where his father cleans cesspools and spouts drunken fundamentalism from the courthouse steps. So Dove Linkhorn rides the rods, just as Algren...
...more exhausting for me than making love three times," he said-adding, after a moment's reflection, "-or even four." He died at 83, after writing a charming book called The Art of Being a Grandfather, and dedicated the last few months of his life to "eight sexual performances...
...just against Freudian theory, but against a wide range of psychiatric practices that owe little or nothing to Freud. Psychosurgery, said Bailey, has built a sorry monument of mutilated frontal lobes. "I am frankly appalled by the [aftereffects] of lobotomy and similar operations-abusive and obscene language, uninhibited sexual drive, obnoxious mannerisms, stealing, suggestibility . . . The great neuro-surgical revolution has proved abortive; it has not emptied our state hospitals." Later, "much the same panegyrics attended the spread of the shock gospel as had attended the spread of lobotomy and -in a previous generation-the spread of phrenology." Electric shock...
...marital relationship of the parents was unstable or really nonexistent. In 77% of the cases the real fathers were extremely hostile, aggressive men who frequently beat their children. In approximately half the children, enuresis [bedwetting] was an accompanying symptom." The Freudian explanation: "Fire-setting is greatly related to sexuality and sexual identification. In almost all of the children there was no adequate, wholesome ground for resolving the oedipal conflict . . . The fire is [the boys'] assertion of their manhood and is their means of protection...
Annette survives unscathed a succes sion of farcical and scabrous sexual ad ventures, and even when, for love of a real monster called Mischa Fox, she swallows some deadly tablets, they turn out to be milk of magnesia. Novelist Murdoch's moral seems to be that only those can get along today who have a talent for forgetting about yesterday...