Word: socialism
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...intended to solve its moral and esthetic problems. Last week her literary executor, Gaillard Lapsley,* offered The Buccaneers as a novel complete as far as it went, but with its conclusion a puzzle which readers might work out themselves. Because it contains two first-rate characterizations, some sharp social satire and a tantalizing dilemma at the end, The Buccaneers makes far better reading than most novels, finished or unfinished...
...best parts of The Buccaneers are its glimpses of raucous and pretentious Gilded Age society in New York, where social maneuvers interweave with Wall Street plots and humble wives of new millionaires squat uneasily on upholstered fortunes. Although Editor Gaillard Lapsley compares scenes in The Buccaneers to passages in Proust, the comparison only calls attention to Mrs. Wharton's limitations: brilliant chapters like those laid in Saratoga fade out quickly, to be followed by weary passages scarcely superior to the average fiction in women's magazines...
...years later by an old bachelor doctor named Lacy Buchan. The protagonist, however, is the narrator's brother-in-law, a handsome, money-making Marylander named George Posey, whom the narrator worshiped but only vaguely understood. The elder Buchans, Jeffersonian aristocrats, understand Posey even less. He flouts their social codes, which he dismisses as the unpractical rigmarole of idealists who "think of nothing but marriage and death and the honor of Virginia...
...money on Buchan debts. But when his own house servant (who is also his half brother) is shot for imputed rape. Posey shoots the white man, who is the narrator's oldest brother. As another result of Posey's following his own rather than the Buchan social codes, his wife is driven crazy. Yet the narrator withholds moral judgment; the tragedy, he concludes, is one in which Fate pulls the strings...
...rigors of the life on the range where the "rabbits and the mosquitos play." The high point of this period of acclimatization was the annual R.O.T.C. "hop" --dance to you. That the men of Yale and Harvard are well versed in the "arts and sciences" of the social graces was well demonstrated by the demand for more dances...