Word: theophilus
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...First Deadly Sin, Sanders (3) 6-Theophilus North, Wilder (9) 7-The Salamander, West...
...Theophilus North, Wilder...
...Theophilus, however, has a sense of humor. He is the first to admit that his only weapons are charm, some mild Freudian therapy, a gift for mendacity and the kind of benign chicanery that in old-fashioned stories used to help gentle, truthful and kindly people at the expense of the rapacious, the pretentious and the proud. Indeed, most of the crises North confronts are genteel and domestic: incipient misalliances (to be blocked), henpecked husbands (to be liberated) and the ill effects of ghastly rumors (to be laid to rest...
...recent years Wilder, who is 76, has been in and out of hospitals, sadly ailing. Young Theophilus North, similarly, remembers that when he came to Newport after quitting a deadly teaching job, it was like release from a hospital after a long illness. "One slowly learns to walk again, and wonderingly one raises his head." At the start, he says, he had lost his sense of joy and play. He was "cynical and almost bereft of sympathy for any other human being." When the book ends, with all those preposterous tangles easily, magically, straightened out, Theophilus is restored to affection...
Newport is an island. Theophilus North is Wilder's Tempest, a mock world, a playful world, made safe and orderly by kindly meddling. It would take a Caliban or a young curmudgeon to complain that it is a tempest in a teapot...