Word: tales
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Henry L Mencken, the high-flavored sage of Baltimore, was right in there with Edmund Wilson. A Canadian book firm owned by the United Church of Canada suddenly stopped distributing Mencken's Christmas Story-a timely tale of a bunch of bums who could not resist singing hymns when they got drunk. Decided the firm: it was "not a suitable book for us to handle." Mencken readily agreed: "I simply can't imagine anything so ribald being circulated by ecclesiastical publishers...
Along with his Christmas recitals, an endless chain of anecdotes have sprung up about 86-year-old Charles Townsend Copeland. There is the unauthenticated tale of his becoming eligible for a professorship only to be stymied by the fact that he had no Ph.D. Faced with the problem of locating someone who could give Copey an oral examination, the board gave up in despair and waived the requirement. To this day he holds only a Doctor of Letters award...
...darkness, where no land had been before, blinked the thousand lights of the city itself. Young folks squealed with the delight of it, but the old ones crossed themselves and breathed a prayer. "Go sbahailadh dia sinn" (God protect us), they muttered, for hadn't the ancient tale said, too, that when the lost city reappeared, Galway itself would slide under the water? To a Dublin man who tried to put through a call to Galway, a telephone operator (who didn't know her folklore) gave unwitting confirmation of disaster. "There's no reply," she said, "they...
Sparks & Spaghetti. Archeologists had rounded up 75,000 specimens of Eskimo handiwork for the university, pieced together exhibits of prehistoric monsters. Campus scientists had collected important data for the Government on magnetism and the upper atmosphere, incidentally scotched an old sourdough's tale that the flashing northern lights set off sparks in their whiskers...
European biographers did little better. Biographical surprise-of-the-year was Britisher Margaret Lane's admirable The Tale of Beatrix Potter, the story of the eccentric lady who fashioned and illustrated the children's beloved Peter Rabbit. Charles Dickens, by Dame Una Pope-Hennessy, cast no light on Dickens' working manners, much on his bedside manner. Stefan Zweig's posthumous, unfinished Balzac might have said more if Zweig had lived to finish the telling. Hesketh Pearson's Oscar Wilde was a sober, intelligent study of a man-and type-who is rarely treated with either...