Word: tales
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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That Indefinable Something. Even apart from the good fortune of being born to culture and marrying wealth, Christian Herter has displayed over the years what 18th century Author Horace Walpole called "serendipity"-the gift (possessed by the heroes of an old tale, The Three Princes of Serendip) of finding good things without having to seek them. He has never sought a new job, says Herter, because he always liked whatever he was doing; he was often urged or invited. "Almost every step I've taken," he says, "was a pure fluke...
...found naked in the hothouse of a dwelling on Wimbledon Common, or even for a member of Edwardian London's Drones Club to consult Webster's Dictionary rather than the Oxford. Victorian and Edwardian euphemisms such as "bally" and "ruddy" work their way into the tale of a British knight who once "allowed some hornswoggling highbinder to stick him with . . . dud Smelly River Ordinaries"*-and, of course, there are the usual Wodehousian references to or quotations from Shakespeare and Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Lord Tennyson and Publishers Knopf, Holt, Doubleday, Simon & Schuster-all balled up together...
...Cadenza as if to prove that O'Brien and Donleavy were squares and that James Joyce was well within his rights when he borrowed the English language and returned it in a condition unfit for use by the original owners. Cadenza is a maddeningly clever and occasionally poetic tale which concerns the identity -in a shifting foreground of misplaced time and mistimed space-of a wantonly Irish character called Desmond...
...tale has the aggravating quality of a dream, but there is no denying its hallucinatory vividness. It is like seeing a film spliced together from five different movies and provided with a narration from a sixth, for Desmond has the confident conviction of the reality of his fantasies possessed only by the very mad. Through it all runs a wild vein of comedy mixed with bits of loony wisdom; e.g., "All birds that don't sing make me hungry: all birds that do make...
Armstrong Circle Theater (CBS, 10-11 p.m.).-A lesson for the larcenous: a true tale of how U.S. customs agents cut up a diamond-smuggling ring...