Word: writer
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Despite the two productions' shortcomings, the evening was an interesting one. Both plays were unusual in approach, and the Williams was enlightening as evidence of a writer's development. Last night's performance was a benefit for Camp Vence in France: the offering continues through Saturday evening...
Mama (Irene Dunne), who is very much the boss in her home, carefully allocates her husband's weekly pay. Katrin (Barbara Bel Geddes), who wants to grow up to be a writer, listens enraptured while the family's roomer, a worn-out old actor (Sir Cedric Hardwicke), reads aloud from Dickens and Shakespeare. Mama's painfully timid old-maid sister (Ellen Corby), who wants to marry an equally timid undertaker (Edgar Bergen), seeks Mama's moral support. Little Dagmar is operated on for mastoiditis (by Dr. Rudy Vallee, with a beard...
...Uncle Christopher, a "swell" of the Victorian era, whose heroic snobbery found its reward-and its doom-in the friendship of that nearly perpetual Prince of Wales who eventually became Edward VII. The story of Sir Christopher Sykes resembles a tale by Max Beerbohm, with this difference: the writer's grave pleasure in his subject never gets out of hand into fantasy...
...good thing; they then seem a bit boneless and soft, their smoothness too consistently stylized. But taken one at a time, as they were written to be read, they are rare works of art, and establish one of the most pleasurable of human relationships: warm kinship between civilized writer and reader...
...Granted. But is that sufficient ground for implying, as this novel clearly does, that the partisans' original attitude was morally right, that passivity is preferable to active resistance to tyranny? The Dreader may wonder what is the decay of values, the spiritual malaise that leads so talented a writer to write so morally ambiguous a novel...