Word: squalidly
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Traveler Balfour found Oriental night life squalid, Damascus disappointing, with trams and a dump heap of wrecked automobiles bulking large in his impressions. He saw no cedars on Lebanon, was bored by the Syrian desert, slept soundly in the wilderness while his companions complained that the howling of jackals kept them awake. But at Baalbek Traveler Balfour's up-to-date boredom crumbled as he brooded over the temples of the past, felt his heart beat more rapidly as he awakened to the enchantment of the legendary cities of the East...
...dozen other great Dickensian characters live and move and have their being in this picture. Best of the lot, though, is Mr. Micawber, played by W. C. Fields, red-nosed, dazzled, grandiloquent and undespairing. It is Micawber, hounded by creditors but never for an instant quailing at their squalid naggings, who first protects young David Copperfield in London. It is Micawber whose fine denunciation of Uriah Heep brings David Copperfield finally to its conclusion...
...parents of Fleur, the prostitute, were illiterate. French-Canadian mill hands, the father an alcoholic, the mother notoriously immoral. Fleur's first affair, when 11, was with the father of her mother's bastard. The family lived in squalid poverty, were chased from hovel to hovel, sometimes for not paying rent, sometimes for debauching the neighborhood. Fleur's adolescent peccadillos took place in cellars. Later she became a common street walker...
...neither women nor married men; hence, they were bachelors liable to the tax. Other men could escape the levy by means of a hasty marriage to one of Turkey's still ample supply of women. But the poverty-stricken eunuchs could neither marry nor pay. Clustering in their squalid club rooms last week, they squealed in outraged impotence...
...required to pass his well-loved wives around among his friends, to lose a wife, to murder, and to suffer excess of thought; through all these turns with lady Fate, he avoids heroics, and at the same time veers away from the equally dangerous wall of intellectually squalid sentimentality which might so easily block his performance; he covers a middle-ground of mindless, emotionally dulled savagery which is absolutely genuine. The Eskimos in minor roles are ably directed; the more difficult parts, Mala's wives, are treated with a surprising delicacy...