Word: tricksters
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...allow the publication of any edition that did not meet his exacting standards. Wheeler died in 1956, and Editor Harold Henderson (former Nipponologist at Columbia University) has now dipped into Wheeler's collection and selected 24 gracefully wrought, highly polished little gems. A favorite hero is the trickster figure, who appears in many guises (as a taciturn bumpkin, a crafty samurai, a modest wife, a voluptuous virgin) and unfailingly triumphs. But the Japanese joker is a special breed. A blend of Socrates and Till Eulenspiegel, he serves as gadfly to his ritualistic feudal society, sits in judgment...
...Deaf Blockhead. Fyodor has no politics (except to prefer a regime where "there is no equality and no authorities either"); he does not hanker for the Return; he does not brood on the past or hope for the future. His fellow emigres regard him as "a useless handicraftsman," a "trickster" and an "arabesquer," and he in turn regards the typical Russian emigre intellectual as "blind like Milton, deaf like Beethoven, and a blockhead to boot...
...white man ("You dah boss, Boss"). Here is the bighearted, yuk-yuk-yukking Southern mammy (Helen Martin). Here is the corn-pone simpleton (Ruby Dee) who says things like "Indo. I deed." Here is the unlicensed preacher hero, Purlie Victorious Judson (Ossie Davis)-a liar, a braggart, a trickster, and the self-appointed messiah of his race ("Who else is they got?"). And here, too, is the neo-Confederate villain, Ol' Cap'n Cotchipee (Sorrell Booke), a Simon Legree plantation owner equipped (in A.D. 1961) with a bull whip and not-quite-so-unbelievable quips ("You tryin...
...rather curious motives. When interest lagged, these clever fellows stepped into the "power vacum," played some unconstitutional tricks, brought in a flock of cronies, and elected one of their number as president. The name was promptly changed to the Committee Against Appeasement. During a student Council inquiry, however, the trickster resigned, and the group was left free to puruse its original purpose...
...Steel Hour had a lighter and happier essay on the same theme of a family consuming its own, with a TV adaptation of the London and Broadway hit Edward, My Son. Britain's Robert Morley was superb as the oleaginous trickster who believes that nothing is too good for his son-or for himself, either-and is ready to burn down a building or buy up a school to prove...