Word: witting
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Kaufman pays most and it is hard to imagine that his reputation as a humorist will ever fully recover. Although his numerous hit comedies are often revived they are a fragile literary legacy and he needs a talented biographer to appreciate his personal wit. Instead he has Teichmann...
...some reason recently, biographers have gotten snotty about chronological order and prefer instead their own, sometimes psychedelic approaches. Teichmann's book is an "intimate portrait," so he packs a series of topical chapters ("...The Playwright, The Wit, The Cardplayer...") between two very thin slices of reminiscence. While the reminiscences are very good, the stuff in between would be bad filler for the Reader's Digest. In each chapter Teichman sloppily recounts a few Kaufman anecdotes, comes up with a few obvious generalities and sometimes even tacks on a list of short witticisms. The purpose of this approach is understandable...
CAMPAIGN rhetoric is not always up to the level of 1884, when a Republican helped doom his candidate by calling the Democrats the "party of Rum, Romanism and Rebellion." But this season's accumulation of banalities, balderdash, wit (sometimes unintended) and invective is impressive enough. Some of last week's prize entries...
...Chimera is finally unsatisfying, unrealized. Barth's imagination has soared higher, his wit has pierced sharper. Still, there are moments when it is all working, when the myth, the irony, and the experiment resolve themselves into some sort of precarious harmony, and the radical possibilities of this fiction come clear. So it is not too much to hope that the seventies will yet bear what the sixties begot. It is not too much to hope that Barth's best work is still unwritten...
...success of La Salamandre became obvious. New York Films rushed into circulation Tanner's first Texture Charles--Dead or Alive, completed in 1969. It is in no sense as mature or finished a product as La Salamandre. It has nothing of the complexity, the subtlety or the wit of that second film. But its New England release concurrent with La Salamandre provides an interesting opportunity to observe Tanner's development...