Word: subhumanity
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...Odessa. Romains' account of the run-around the Russians give him is as icily slick as the run-around itself. But his reporting of the famine is harder to swallow whole. The drought and the European blockade, Jallez finds, are far less responsible for the famine than the subhuman corruptness of the local officials. This and other arraignments, just or not, are set down in much too general and unqualified terms. But the volume ends with much, obviously (and as usual), still to be said...
...France last summer with four of his ponderous bronze statues, no money. This week Manhattan's Buchholz Gallery presented his first U.S. show in six years. Cast in weird, glowering embryonic gobs whose lumpy lines suggested the random patterns of molten slag, Lipchitz's bronzes showed writhing subhuman and sub-animal figures. One, called Mother and Child, was a legless, stump-armed female torso, held by the neck in the ponderous grip of a bulgy, anthropoid infant. Each is signed with the thumbprint of Sculptor Lipchitz...
Everywhere Steinbeck finds atavistic hints and murmurs which carry men far back into their brute heritage. When he uses such phrases as "the deep black water of the human spirit" he sounds like D.H. Lawrence, as he does in his subhuman enchantments. Yet Lawrence's animal-love was a negation, a retreat from human modes of thinking and acting; Steinbeck's is an inclusion. Steinbeck also enjoys the syllogisms of philosophers and the constructions of theoretical physicists-it is all right, all part of life...
...Memory builds a family sporting on a beach into a terrible mural of subhuman vulgarity...
...author's curse at his own foredoomed failure to convey all he feels. Conventional acceptance of his book would be "the one unmistakable symptom that salvation is beaten again." His real aim is to enforce the realization that the Gudgers, the Ricketts and the Woods, whose hopeless, subhuman lives he reverently exposes, are now alive, human brothers of the reader, sharers of "certain normal predicaments of human divinity...