Word: spender
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Christopher Isherwood, that permanently promising young man, seemed during the '30s to be the two dandiest literary dactyls since Joyce's Malachai Mulligan. To earnest literary leftists of the decade, Auden, Spender and Isherwood were pronounced as one word, and in 1935 Isherwood and Auden were acclaimed for an amusing prose and verse play (The Dog Beneath the Skin) that twitted the British Establishment satisfactorily, even if it struck no telling blows in the class war. Isherwood's most promising work came four years later: Goodbye to Berlin, six wistful stories whose curiously passive hero announced that...
...Spender. But the boy from Brooklyn had it made financially, and he knew it. He became the biggest of the big-time spenders, and has kept it up. Jackie saves little and gambles as if he were using Monopoly scrip. He is willing to bet $100 a hole in a golf game, and he lost $3,000 on a wager that Grace Kelly would never marry the Prince of Monaco. With him, betting is as direct a challenge as Indian wrestling. Says Arthur Godfrey: "I understand that he finds out what his opponent's top wager is and then...
...want to compliment you on it. You needed it to get these new industrial plants. I'm not saying I did it all but certainly I had a small part . . . When it comes to spending money on the Arkansas River. I plead guilty to being a spender." He has a pet statistic ready at hand for Arkansans who, like Alford, distrust "Government spending": "There are those who say we shouldn't send our money to Washington and get back 50? for every dollar. I had some figures checked and I find that in 1960 the State of Arkansas...
...quickly discovers that these are pseudonyms for William Butler Yeats. Then there is Yeats, the prophet of the Celtic Twilight (the "cultic twalette," Joyce called it), sitting on the turf in Connacht and self-consciously schooling himself to be a poet of the peasants. But as Stephen Spender once noted, the calculated lyricism of "I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree" suggests "the image of a young man reclining on a yellow satin sofa...
...Aren't you the big spender. Let's see it. . . Wrong color. Phew. It stinks...