Word: fitzgibbons
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last year, with The Arabian Bird, Author FitzGibbon showed the critics that he could write a pretty good first novel. This time he has attempted the poet's task of turning history into myth, without the poet's vision. Though the result is bad myth, it is not a complete failure as a novel...
...IRON HOOP (268 pp.)-Cons/crn-tine FitzGibbon-Knopf...
CHARLES E. FITZGIBBON Syracuse...
...almost too easily. He deals with a delinquent girl (Jean Heather) so silkily that before long she is married. He handles the jail-fodder kids of the street so astutely that before long they are singing Mozart's Ave Verum and liking it. He even teaches old Father Fitzgibbon how to play golf. He also writes songs which, with the help of an old friend who sings in opera (Metropolitan Diva Risé Stevens), he sells so effectively that the parish, despite a disastrous fire, rises clear of all financial problems. And just before he leaves St. Dominic...
...limpid direction and Steve Seymour's splendid sets are partly responsible for this-the coarse lace half-curtains, waxed floors and seldom-used ashtrays of the rectory are evocative just short of genius. But the best reasons are the loving attention to character, and some magnificent acting. Father Fitzgibbon might have been any brogue-rippling old male biddy. But as Fitzgerald portrays him-senile, vain, childish, stubborn, good, bewildered, stupid-he is the quintessence of the pathos, dignity and ludicrousness which old age can display. Father O'Malley, still more dangerously, might have been one of those brisk...