Word: waining
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...whole genre by devastatingly describing Burroughs' Nova Express as "the feeding almost literally of human flesh and organs on each other in an orgy of annihilation. The whole world is reduced to the fluidity of excrement as everything dissolves into everything else." And Critic John Wain adds: "A pornographic novel is, in however backhanded a way, on the side of something describable as life. Naked Lunch, by contrast, is unreservedly on the side of death...
Sprightly Running, by John Wain. In an interim report on himself at 35, British Novelist-Critic Wain provides a witty portrait of his intellectual generation...
...sells books," British Novelist-Critic John Wain came right out and announced the other day. He did not, however, examine the corollary proposition (which worried a more censorious generation) that books sell sex. In any case, The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme seems dedicated by Novelist Colin Wilson to the first of these notions. As to the second, the Diary will not sell sex, since the subject is presented at its worst-neither for play, passion nor procreation, but as a something-or-other that promotes the spiritual development of a prig. It is woeful stuff-the sort of Promethean...
...chance of a detached retina. Wain escaped war service and found at Oxford a chance to know himself and the world better. His Oxford life is one of the best stories of an education ever told, be cause he was one of the few for whom education itself is a crucial experience. He conveys this by sketching the characters of others-a theologian talking to a poet in a pub, a dour Clydesider who became a monk, the tutor C. S. Lewis and that really odd ball of erudition, the madly neurotic Jewish poet and scholar "Eddie" Meyerstein...
...sense of this lends complete conviction to Wain's passionate reaction years later, when Novelist C. P. Snow had praised Soviet education. Wain had just been in Russia, and tells about it in a lively bit of reporting. As Wain defines it, "Education is the process whereby the mind is freed: freed by knowledge, by thoughtfulness, by imagination." As such, education, he says firmly, does not exist in the Soviet Union. Technical instruction, yes. Education, no. He seems to know what he is talking about...