Word: staffords
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...Butler minced no words about. "We are really up against it," he said last week. "Our lifeblood is draining away, and we have got to stop it." In contemporary Britain, the job that wealthy "Rab" Butler holds might well be called Chancellor of Gloom. His two predecessors, schoolmasterish Sir Stafford Cripps and perky Hugh Gaitskell won admiration for telling people the worst. Last week Butler did the same, frankly and specifically, and added to his reputation as one of the fastest rising Tories. No orator, but respected for the cool clarity of his mind, Butler told the House of Commons...
...bulk of the book consists of honest, strongly felt stories by authors who have profited from the example of such pioneers as Anderson and Hemingway, but have had enough intelligence and drive to cut their own paths. Stories by Nelson Algren, Erskine Caldwell, Paul Horgan, Albert Maltz, Jean Stafford and Wallace Stegner deal with such basic human situations as the feelings of parents as they take a dead baby to the cemetery, the comic tangle of a farm hand who gets into trouble while courting, the pain of a girl recuperating from an accident. These writers offer hope that...
Delicate Fireworks. The best of the three is Jean Stafford's The Catherine Wheel. In two previous books, Boston Adventure and The Mountain Lion (TIME, Jan. 22, 1945 & March 10, 1947), Novelist Stafford failed in her themes but established herself as probably the best young prose writer in the U.S. In her new book, the manner is still fine, but the matter is thinner than ever. The heroine of The Catherine Wheel is Katharine Congreve, rich, lovely, kind and altogether admirable. Her problem is a not uncommon one, in or out of fiction: in her late 30s and unmarried...
...whole thing is settled during a summer when the Shipleys are in Europe and Katharine has the children at her house in Maine. In prose that is gracious, sensuous and only occasionally selfconscious, Author Stafford deals with Katharine's emotional wrestle, the special despair of young Andrew Shipley, life in the big house, the crotchety local characters. But when Katharine is burned to death in a fireworks display, the tragedy is merely shocking, not moving. The Catherine Wheel is an exercise in literary grace, so delicate that the characters and problems it creates go up with the final fireworks...
Novelists Stafford, Newby and Auchincloss all write about life. Each is serious, sincere, talented. But each lacks robustness, a sense of the comic and a feeling for the grainy give & take of human experience. All three tell a story well, but all tell thin ones...