Word: stephen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...genuine member of the Upper Class? Last week, in a slim anthology of aristocratic manners edited by aristocratic Novelist Nancy Mitford (Noblesse Oblige; Hamish Hamilton), England got an answer that has managed to stir up everyone from Novelist Graham Greene to Actor John Loder. Not since Humorist Stephen Potter launched the cult of gamesmanship had the nation been so obsessed as it was over the difference between U (Upper Class...
...Stephen Desmonde, son of a well-off Anglican clergyman, has all the cherished stigmata of the True Artist-a "slight figure and sensitive face, dark eyes and delicate pallor," and at every crisis he coughs blood. His father is appalled when Stephen insists he Wants To Paint. "To throw away your brilliant prospects, wreck your whole career, for a mere whim," he wails. Stephen is adamant: "The only thing that mattered was this creative instinct that burned within him." He Renounces All, including the love of the neighboring squire's daughter, a girl with an "air of quiet composure...
Broken, Thank God. There he mingles with Struggling Artists dressed in moleskin trousers and given to statements like "I rejoice in the fact that in all my life I have never debased my art." He starves, paints, and falls for a firm-breasted circus girl. For several chapters Stephen hangs about her "like a wasp around a nectarine, but without once penetrating the soft flesh of the fruit." She jilts him, but "through his hurt and humiliation, he still wanted her, through his hatred he still had need...
Buzzing off from the nectarine, Stephen returns to England to suffer some more. His paintings for a war memorial shock the village elders because they depict Naked Men and Women. His most masterful masterpieces declared obscene by an ignorant magistrate, Stephen lurches off to London, coughing, and takes refuge in a London boarding house run by a little Cockney girl of his acquaintance. In Cronin's rendition, Jenny speaks Cockney as if she had learned it from a talking book, but Stephen finds "something in her, a simple quality of womanhood, of homely warmth," marries her and settles down...
...Later, dealers beg him for pictures, but Stephen declaims: "Success, especially popular success, imprisons the spirit." He paints only "to satisfy himself," and soliloquizes: "We're all mad, or half mad . . . perpetually in conflict with society . . . All except the ones who compromise." He, of course, "has never done that...