Word: visitations
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Goldilocks, a musical visit to the Cro-Magnon days of moviemaking, was singing just a bit off key in Philadelphia, and its authors, Critic Walter Kerr and his wife Jean (Please Don't Eat the Daisies), were working overtime to tune it up. At the Grand, the musical version of Vicki Baum's Grand Hotel that is scheduled to take Paul Muni back to his beginnings as a vaudeville hoofer, is laid up in California while its producers try to produce a new book. Other shows were more nearly ready to kiss the road goodbye...
...trouble with Tobias Hood, though at first he is not aware of it, is that he suffers from simple decency. When he is asked to a mixed party of whites and coloreds, he accepts and makes friends. He is shocked when, after some of these colored friends come to visit him at his office, his white secretary resigns in horror. As the education of Toby's heart proceeds, he finds himself leading a double life: his white pals and his mistress would drop him like a synthetic diamond if they knew that he was going to slum homes...
Author Gordimer, a Johanne burger herself, tours this world of racial strangers with easy accuracy. When she describes a party, white or mixed, a hunting trip, or an illicit visit to a colored shebeen (speakeasy), there is always a byproduct of insights into what is meant by every word or act. When she has finished with Toby Hood, he is a changed man. Any reader who shares Toby's indifference may feel at least the beginnings of a similar change of heart...
...including priests, professors, young virgins, even "an American consul with a big black mustache." The book is at its best in an account of how New York City's Mayor Vincent ("Mr. Impy") Impellitteri returned to his native village in 1951. With no blasphemous intent, Levi describes the visit in the way some of the simpler Sicilians might have seen it-as the story of the Saviour repeated in modern form...
...Visit satirizes in very funny fashion a good many things, such as man's penchant for war, the Pentagon bureaucracy, the self-inflated news analyst, free love, the power of mind over matter, and the flying saucer furore...