Word: windom
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...some 300 pages and each is as long and as closely packed as a novel in itself. Finally, there is a prologue and an epilogue, laid in 1944 and 1945, explaining that the three books are a manuscript left by a great American, a former Supreme Court Justice, Orville Windom (obviously modeled on Oliver Wendell Holmes), as both his concept of family history and his testament of the American heritage...
Freedom & Fog Ghosts. Windom is sentimental, liberal, vague in his speech, tremendously learned in American history. He has lived through the administrations of 14 Presidents, and has shaken hands with nine of them. He holds long, philosophic-poetic conversations with his granddaughter-in-law-his grandson is a flyer-in a language which, with its mixture of slang and Walt Whitman grandiloquence, is unlike anything in American life or literature...
...book opens, Justice Windom is preparing a radio address for the troops overseas, trying to define what they are fighting for: the founders of the nation had had a vision-"unity and common understanding there had been ... but the mockers came. And the deniers were heard. And vision and hope faded . . . yet there always arose enough of reserves of strength, balances of sanity, portions of wisdom, to carry the nation through to a fresh start...
...novel that Orville Windom's grandchildren find in his strongbox after his death is not a very good novel. In fact, a reader not sharing their family interest might be tempted to say that it is the worst novel he has ever read. It is, however, the sort of novel a distinguished Supreme Court Justice might write. It is an extraordinary mixture of learning and naivete, of self-conscious poeticizing and shrewd observation, with dim characters wandering about in a grey, dreamlike fog, bumping into ghosts bearing the names of historical personages...