Word: venuses
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...home, a squat, block-long modern building on upper Madison Avenue, 20 blocks away from his old store adjoining 57th Street's famed antique shops. Over the galleries' door, to symbolize art and industry, is a 14-by-10-foot sculpture of Venus and Manhattan, a reclining male. (Because Venus' bosom protrudes more than the permissible 18 inches over the sidewalk, Parke-Bernet pays $25 a year to the city for the privilege...
...smooth, sophisticated novel which gave Helen & Co. the immediacy of next-door neighbors. Erskine is now 70 and a professor emeritus of Columbia University, but he appears to have lost little of the confident urbanity and slick malice that became his literary trademarks. Always gallant, his defense of his Venus is both tolerant and graceful: "Her infidelities were only apparent, they were never more than intermittent, and she always went home as soon as she could...
Actually Erskine's Venus had a rather exalted idea of love. She wanted it to be "creative" and became quite embarrassed when her sexy brother-in-law Mars talked about its "animal implications." At the same time, she got a great kick out of spying on Achilles and Polyxena as they made love in a grove outside the walls of Troy. It was also true that looking at her musclebound Vulcan after he bathed made her forget supper and the problems of the world...
Dirty Looks. Venus had some right to feel dissatisfied with life on Olympus. Juno was forever quarreling with Jupiter, and whenever the conversation got lively she was apt to interrupt with, "Would you mind, all of you, finishing your soup before it's cold?" or "Don't forget that the domestics have their rights. They wish to remove the dishes. . ." When Venus dropped down to earth with Mars, the whole godly clan gave her dirty looks. Vulcan ran to father Jupiter like a spoiled brat crying, "I want Mars to keep his hands off her! If he doesn...
Nostalgia alone may endear Venus to the aging generation of readers that chuckled over Helen. But literary tastes change even if the authors of taste do not. Venus is not so clever as Helen; even if it were, the quarter century between them has probably depressed the market...