Word: farragut
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Blair House has heard just about every kind of talk before, some strong and some gentle. WilHam Tecumseh Sherman, the man who later marched to the sea, was married there in 1850. One day in 1861 at breakfast, Navy Captain David Glasgow Farragut ("Damn the torpedoes-full speed ahead!") was told he was to command the Union attack against New Orleans. And in a front room Robert E. Lee turned down command of the Union armies, a melancholy prelude to many visits by the anguished Lincoln, who used to prowl the area...
Since becoming chief of the CIA last March, Admiral Stansfield Turner has come on like David Farragut at Mobile Bay: Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead! Turner gave orders to discharge 820 spooks. He then dismissed Deputy Director for Operations William Wells, who had carried out the firing. The admiral also surrounded himself with former naval officers as high-level subordinates...
There is also prison loneliness, which, Cheever writes with painful accuracy, "can change anything on earth." Farragut, previously a dog breeder, becomes attached to a jailhouse cat. Farragut, previously a heterosexual, falls in love with a fellow prisoner. Loneliness can change anything...
Cheever's great strength has always been his ability to charge both the ordinary and the fanciful with emotion. Falconer is strong on feelings, even though they often overflow the novel's loose structure. Farragut is admittedly a man keenly aware of the banal ironies of his life and of his own sententious observations. Yet at times Cheever imposes them on the reader as if the novel itself were a correctional institution. "We prisoners," says Farragut, "more than any men, have suffered for our sins, we have suffered for the sins of society, and our example should cleanse...
...mortal illness that must be overcome. One inmate escapes by disguising himself as an altar boy and slipping out with a visiting Cardinal and his party. That the Cardinal actually aids the man is Cheever's way of saying that miracles are still possible. In the end, Farragut himself escapes like the Count of Monte-Cristo by hiding in a body bag intended for a dead convict. Since - unlike the Count - Farragut has no plans for revenge, the point seems to be that survival is always a miracle and reward enough. Falconer is not a young...