Word: reader
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Inevitably, much of it turns out to be chaff; Frost, for instance, was a tireless and occasionally tiresome punster. But from the mass of letters stretching back to 1915, a perceptive reader can piece together a startling self-portrait of the artist. Some of it will go against the grain of Frost's more sentimental adulators. People thought of him, Untermeyer explains, "as benevolent, sweet and serene. Instead he was proud, trou bled and jealous. Robert did not converse, he spoke...
Great Lies. Carson's trick was to become a tourist guide, and a more freewheeling, freeloading, freethinking travel agent there never was. A further device, for which the reader can be grateful, is to tell great lies about his adventures. There even seems to be some doubt about his real name, which he says is von Falkenhausen, though there are reports to which neither he nor his publisher refer, that it is actually Peter Brooke...
...what capital city in Europe is a beheaded man the patron saint? It is by such recondite clues that the reader comes to understand that the scene of Susan Sontag's The Benefactor is, in fact, Paris. The publishers confirm this on the book jacket. "Identifiable as Paris" is the tentative concession, as if Farrar, Straus had only reached a majority decision on the issue...
...course of these, the reader tentatively gathers that Hippolyte has been a student and saloniere in Paris, acted in films (he was a natural as Bluebeard's confessor), acquired a mistress whom he arranges to have seduced by delivery boys and other women and whom he finally, in a scene rich in unconscious comedy, sells for 13,000 old francs to a merchant in Tangier. Then there is a wife; he seems to have some notion that he has murdered her. Has he or hasn't he? By this time, the reader may feel that he has been...
...lust, not for human flesh but for one of the club's principal assets -a taffeta Schiaparelli dress that is lent around among the sleeker girls for evenings on the town. Does lust for a Schiaparelli justify the burning of Eden? Is Author Spark just pulling the reader's leg? A final scene is not much help. In it, the vicar is told that his poetry-loving daughter believed in the existence of Hell. "Really?" he replies with dismay. "I've never heard her speak morbidly. It must have been the influence of London...