Word: wastrel
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...understanding by Hugh O'Connell, is one of the season's great. Inebriates are of course familiar to the stage, but the antics of most of them seem like distorted mummery beside Mr. O'Connell's gentle and imaginative euphoria. As a chubby, post-War wastrel at a houseparty in Barbizon (just outside Paris) he may be found continuing his perennial search for a champagne in which the bubbles go down instead of up, and ever so politely inquiring, "Did you ever feel as though you had a live trout inside you?" Most of the stories...
...cuckolds his hayseed brother Hiram. For some reason Hiram's wife, Rebecca, believes in life-weary Edsel as the ambassador of a richer existence. After the bucolic Hiram has fled his shame, she stays on until Joe, cowshed philosopher, reminds her to leave for greater conquests. Gene Riminy, wastrel squire, and his mad, illegitimate Yolande furnish further confusion to a fantasy in embarrassingly amateurish water colors...
...this audaciously frank autobiography, the most glamorous figure since Lord Byron shares with us his confessions and his memories. ... Strange wastrel days ... flashes of long-gone frolics ... These astounding confessions bid fair to become the sensation of the literary year," said a Ladies' Home Journal advertisement in October, 1925. The article, thus heralded, appeared: it was neither rowdy nor pornographic. It was the well-mannered and suave memoirs of John Barrymore. Titillatable females who had been led to expect red-hot nights increased the circulation of the Ladies' Home Journal and were undoubtedly disappointed...
...actions by which an individual emerges from a type. The degeneracy of Daniel Pardway's issue-Gene into "a lout among gentleman, a gentleman among louts;" Bert into a floorwalker and window-dresser; Phoebe into a dreamy sadist, via sex-starvation; Freddie into a Princeton fop, proud wastrel and frayed dope fiend-seems mechanical, arbitrary. Like their father, the reader sees little of these children until it is time for them to appear in bars and brothels. Their Presbyterian mother dies young and their worldy-wise Kentucky step-mother is taken up and pushed aside as brusquely by Author...
...Half a century later one Henri Stephan de Blowitz, jack of all trades, paunchy ne'er-do-well, sought the Paris office of the famed London Times and audaciously asked for a job, although he admitted that he had never written a line of news in all his wastrel life...