Word: overwrought
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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Harry Luce stood with the other editors; we would go ahead with the story. I sighed deeply and told Harry that Hughes probably already knew that. "Ridiculous," he scoffed, and gave me a lecture about having become overwrought about this story. I left the house and made my way to the lilac bush and my rented, locked Ford. As I slipped the key in the door, I noticed with a start that there was something white slipped beneath the rim of the horn. It was a business card, printed with the name of the TWA manager in Phoenix...
...merchant seaman, makes a prolonged visit, waiting for the birth of his grandson. The father is a grizzled old Yankee, and ideas predictably clash with those of his equally non-conformist but distastefully aesthetic daughter and her would-be husband (the couple never marry). In a climax as overwrought as the fruitiest of Bergman-either Ingrid or Ingmar-ex-med student Danny delivers his son without a doctor's aid, while fending off his 'father-in-law's' drunken attempts to break into the delivery-room. Just as the babe sees light, its grandfather brains himself on a lampstand...
What I can laud is the warm sense of cooperation which seemed to motivate the actors in these two parables of verbal aggression. They were acting in overwrought sets and from a scrawny conceptual framework. But they were acting at and with each other, in ways one could sense were both familiar and fun. Perhaps this, more than artistic polish, is what the HTC has to offer; and I intend the remark not in denigration...
...come from believing you understand your vanity, is most harmful. Johnson writes of the treachery and hunger of the human heart and imagination: the need for hope, and the folly of self-deceptions which languish life away in the gloom of anxiety. Chekhov writes of the misery of overwrought people struggling to maintain self-control against unhappiness they do not understand. Both writers see themselves subject to the same errors and anxieties. Johsnon, despite his reputation as a prodigious moralist, majestically ordering life with indefatigable lucidity through the irresistible ebb and flow of his periodic prose, as profoundly melancholy...
...lover-fool. He is richly talented, abundantly sensitive. He cannot come to terms with life only because he has not lived it in any sense except the harmful one of self-created symbols. The act of killing the seagull is romantic and comic; it shows his yearning and his overwrought emotional symbolizations. His little play sounds like Words worth rewriting Manfred. It is the funniest satire of its kind since Dickens' Two Transcendental Ladies in Martin Chuzzlewit ("Mind and matter glide swift into the vortex of immensity. Howls the sublime and softly sleeps the calm Ideal, in the whispering chambers...