Word: musings
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...expect that, with the maestro so well set and devil-may-care, his personal Notebook would be as breezy as, say, the Autobiography of Anthony Trollope (in which the old fox hunter posthumously appalled his huge public by admitting with a gay cackle that money had always been his muse). But where other note-makers have nailed their colors to the mast and let their hair down to the last soiled lovelock, urbane Maugham has preferred to soak his colors in bleach and pin his hair in a tight bun. His Notebook (the whittlings-down of "fifteen stoutish volumes") contains...
...last line of the above paragraph might seem to indicate that Mr. Behrman has some thesis or other hiding behind the skirts of his winking Muse, but such is not the case. The plot of "I Know My Love" offers about as much opportunity for character-study as an hour with the old family album. What dimension the Chanler family has is due mainly to the embellishments given it by the actors...
...realism comes chiefly from the absence of the typical villain-hero relationship that marks the average movie plot. Henry Fonda has the leading part but he only rebels against the mob; he cannot stop the lynching. Fonda takes the position of a muse that realizes, even raises his voice against the injustice, yet when the end comes, he has really been only a bystander. And the villains too are not singly responsible but are rather cowards whose weaknesses combined make a criminal potent enough to kill three...
...Baseball Muse was so pleased with the perfect records of the Lowell and Adams teams that she couldn't bear to let either squad lose the crucial game yesterday. So she came up with this solution: Lowell 4, Adams...
...great shakes either as a novel or a sociological essay. But it manages to stand up-and to stand out-as another rich expression of Robert Graves's fantastical mind. To laugh in the face of his Goddess is only natural; but without this pure yet beastly muse Graves would probably not be what he emphatically is-one of the finest poets of the Late Christian Epoch...