Word: matthiessen
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RADITZER (152 pp.) - Peter Matthiessen-Viking...
...serviceman will recognize Raditzer. There is one in every outfit-the sniveling, creepy little muckup who not only fails to pull his weight but manages to add it to the load carried by others. In his third novel, Author Peter Matthiessen, 33, has pinned him to the page as the prototype of the heel who arouses disgust in better men but touches off something uneasily protective in the best of them...
...raised in an orphanage, never knew a decent woman, never had a chance. He ducks his sea duty and Charlie Stark fills in for him. He is loud, cowardly, physically repulsive and yet arrogant. In a sensitive character probe which recalls the sharp male insights of Joseph Conrad, Author Matthiessen shows how disgust and almost unwilling compassion are at war in civilized Charlie Stark and how compassion always wins. Raditzer's only defense against the naked revulsion of his fellows is the claim that Stark is his buddy. And Stark, admired by everyone and abused by his protege, refuses...
...powerfully true, Charlie Stark as his protector is tried as Raditzer has not tried him before. And from there to the powerful ending, Stark suffers the agonies of a man who has tied himself unwillingly, irrevocably, to a wretched fellow human whose claim is based subtly on weakness. Author Matthiessen has successfully brought off something more than a war novel. The reader cannot avoid thinking of all the Raditzers he ever knew; he may even dwell uneasily, however briefly, on the Raditzer-Charlie Stark amalgam in himself...
...spring of 1936, during the preparation for the Tercentenary Celebration, an attempted repeal of the oath failed in the House of Representatives. Mather, along with other members of the Faculty such as Max Lerner and F. O. Matthiessen, formed the Harvard University chapter of the American Federation of Teachers...