Word: wretch
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Vice Wretch...
...enormous") feat, a one-man job ("a low word now much in use") comprising 2,300 folio pages of definitions and examples accomplished in nine years (from 1746 to 1755), with the help of only six copyists. Only a fopdoodle ("a fool") or a slubberdegullion ("a paltry, dirty, sorry wretch") would deny the greatness of the work, and only one who had carried it out had the right to define a lexicographer (as Johnson did in the dictionary) as "a harmless drudge." Privately, he was not so humble. As he told his Boswell: "I knew very well what...
...have any character at all. Matricides may be dealt with kindly in novels, an author may find a spark of good in a drug-addicted card cheat or a grasping banker, and it is an immutable law that prostitutes' hearts are warm. But let a novelist introduce a wretch whose vice is writing novels, and there begins a recital of character faults that would have horrified Caligula: the fellow is meanspirited, lazy, a coward, lustful but inept at sex. soggy with drink, cruel to his children, and two months behind on the phone bill...
Accidental Justice. Two characters are among the best grotesques in Greene's entire waxworks. Conder is the archetype of the author's army of squalid journalists -a wretch so practiced at sleazy sleight-of-mind that, although he is a bachelor, he tells everyone that he has a wife and six sickly children. The other is the unnamed Assistant Commissioner, an old jungle hand stiff with integrity and old wounds and hated by his underlings at Scotland Yard. He is a magnificent Greene hero who pursues criminals with stolid skill, shutting away the unhappy knowledge that his quarries...
...novel, blowing both sequence and motivation into a rubble of farcical shocks and grisly surprises. Catch-22 is held together only by the inescapable fact that Joseph Heller is a superb describer of people and things. Take his portrait of a character called Hungry Joe: "A jumpy, emaciated wretch with a fleshless face of dingy skin and bone and twitching veins squirming subcutaneously in the blackened hollows behind his eyes like severed sections of snake. Hungry Joe ate voraciously, gnawed incessantly at the tips of his fingers, stammered, choked, itched, sweated, salivated and sprang from spot to spot fanatically with...