Word: uppers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Love), but somehow it was described with sensuous excitement. In his recent books (The Empty Canvas, Roman Tales), the excitement has progressively decelerated, and in the present collection of 41 short stories Moravia has attained what might most charitably be described as a creative pause. His milieu is comfortable, upper-middle-class Italy. His characters are dead souls, stifled with boredom and loneliness, who wander their existential wasteland groaning under the stylish burdens of too much money, too much leisure, too little heart. The women are shallow, complacent, cruel; the men are feeble, nervous, dependent; all fritter away their lives...
That struck a responsive chord, and Africa's former French dependencies played it repeatedly, with particular focus on the futile firebrand of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah. Charging that Nkrumah has bankrupted his nation for his own political ends, Upper Volta's President Maurice Yameogo drew cheers with his acid observation that "in Ghana you have to stand in line nowadays to buy a box of matches." Should Nkrumah lead a Pan-African government? Chortled Yameogo: "How can he expect to extend that to the rest of Africa when he has lost the allegiance of his own people...
...America. He never conceived of Negroes as equal, fully capable participants in American society. His greatest concern after the war was indeed to bind up the nation's wounds through clemency for the South. he also intended to revive Whig strength by restoring the political prominence of the upper economic classes of the Confederacy. Lincoln's plan for Reconstruction, therefore, was to grant pardons to most rebels, quickly install white Southerners in the state houses, and forge a national conservative alliance. The Negro would be a free but second class citizen who would best return to Africa...
Under a pretentiously artsy façade, Newley slams the audience with a symbol as if it were a clown's pig bladder. Cocky is pitted against an autocratic upper-class fat cat in a dented top hat named Sir (Cyril Ritchard). Sir makes the rules for the Game of Life, which is played rather like circular hopscotch on a huge disk at stage center. Any time Cocky manages two jumps forward, he is forced to go three jumps or more backward. Arbitrary? Unreasonable? One understands-the game is hopelessly rigged...
...bitters. Chaplin's Little Tramp was a tattered knight of the open road, dueling his foes with his wits and a twirling cane. Newley's Oh-So-Little Man, windily inflated with his rights and his wrongs, is a human editorial page who deplores God, the upper classes, atomic war and racial injustice...