Word: spells
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Forget style. Gene Fowler knows how to write. But it used to be that people didn't write books unless they had something to say. The Viking Press, under the spell of Americana, the opiate of the theatre, motion picture, and publishing worlds, apparently gave Gene Fowler an assignment: to capture the flavor of the Old West, Rocky Mountain division, in which he had been reared. "Solo in Tom-Toms," the result, is not unlike its running mate in the Viking lists, Marquis James' "The Cherokee Strip," in that it captures the flavor of mother's milk and cheap whiskey...
Anybody who had seen the winter wheat knew a few weeks ago that this would be a fine crop-if all went well. There had been grave doubts, two months ago. Kansas, Oklahoma and the flat Texas Panhandle had had a long dry spell, even an ominous dust storm. But in mid-February Nature had relented, and over most of the great winter wheat belt had come gentle sizzle-sozzle rains. In most of Kansas and Oklahoma, the wheat was now high enough to hide a bounding jack rabbit...
McGovern is apt to explain Kant in terms of Buicks and boogie-woogie, and fall back frequently on McGovern reminiscences. These include boyhood in Brooklyn, a spell in the English theater, a junket to Tibet's Forbidden City of Lhasa, and his days as a Buddhist monk in Japan. He can also spin yarns about his explorations of Peru's Inca ruins and Formosa's head-hunting country. McGovern is a sound scholar withal, master of twelve languages, author of a Manual of Buddhist Philosophy, and From Luther to Hitler. He was one of the boys...
...except Nym, who "cannot kiss; that is the humor of it", is contained all the heartache and tears-behind-the-smile that the business of men going off to fight has always been. This scene and that of the campfire on the eve of Agincourt where three Englishmen spell out for their king what war is all about--that it is not gaudy trappings and caparisons, but fear and mud and obscene smells--early an ice-cold shock of recognition for a world that has just got another war under its belt...
...Violin Concerto in D Minor. It had none of the splendiferous sets and costumes, the "story" told in pantomime, or the applause-bidding entrechats of a star dancer which attract the matinee mobs; yet it brought down the house. Balanchine's geometric wizardry made the girls' bodies spell out Bach's music for all eyes to read...