Word: witnessed
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...home in the suburbs to fish for his soul in the shade of a Rocky Mountain peak. The hero of The Durable Fire undergoes the equivalent of a deathbed conversion before he can regain his faith in the corporate way of life. Both men sing the organizational blues, to wit, Big Business is too much like Big Brother...
...interviewing Edgar Degas, has in a busy lifetime turned out more than a hundred books-novels, histories, art studies. To top off his career, Michel Georges-Michel this week is bringing out the American edition of his carefully culled memoirs (From Renoir to Picasso; Houghton Mifflin; $4). Glittering with wit and the reflections of the great, M. G.-M.'s book is not only lively anecdotal history but a refreshing reminder that the men who painted today's museum pieces were rich with the juices of life...
Author Templeton's wit is a subdued delight, and her mental antennae vibrate not only with a sense of the past but with an understanding of the present as well: "[Renaissance men] protested against the shortness of human life and against the instability of all things by being as alive as they possibly could be. They ate sensations by the spoonful and turned themselves into a salad of all sorts of contradictory human qualities. We today behave in the opposite manner. We imagine that the less different and the less conspicuous we are, the less we shall be noticed...
...hands folded, grew more animated when the talk shifted to the U.S.-Russian tension. He jabbed his finger didactically as he prophesied that "your grandchildren in America will live under Socialism." A metal tooth often glinted at the corner of a cunning smile, and his quick but heavy wit, like a fat lady with a flair for dancing, lunged repeatedly in scorn; e.g., "You must do away with your Iron Curtain and not be afraid of Soviet cooks arriving in the U.S. -I don't think they will make any revolution in your country...
...Amis and the rest of his school part company, it will be because he is its only conscientious craftsman and its only notable wit. Even so, his humor travels no better than the average joke in Punch, and U.S. editions of Lucky Jim and a second novel. That Uncertain Feeling, have barely topped the 5,000 mark in sales. His fellow writers would probably fare even worse, for they write with a sloppy, cliche-ridden arrogance that has been absent from serious U.S. fiction since the heyday of James T. Farrell and the cult of social protest...