January 1, 1966
Kokoschka: Modern Old Master
The Vienna in which I grew to manhood was rife with café gossip about the “madman” Oskar Kokoschka, spread by those who still remembered the now world-famous painter as the […]
October 1, 1965
The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet
What a better place to begin than in a hamlet we know as Winesburg, Ohio. An old man with a white mustache lies in bed there, subject to brooding notions […]
October 1, 1965
Bad Verses and Good Offices
The Woeful Victorian: A Biography of John Addington Symonds by Phyllis Grosskurth. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $6.95. Cockerell by Wilfrid Blunt. Alfred A. Knopf, $7.50. Was John Addyas mediocre as […]
October 1, 1965
Not on Their Toes
The Winter 1964 issue of The Kenyon Review, in its dedication to John Crowe Ransom, remarked that “there was very little American criticism of any value before the 1930s.” The […]
October 1, 1965
Kurosawa’s Humanism
It is fourteen years now since Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Rashomon burst on the world, evoking reactions ranging from waspish—”slow, complacent, Louvre-conscious, waiting-for-prizes” (Manny Farber in The Nation)—to ecstatic—”It is a […]
October 1, 1965
Moralist’s Progress
Part of the Truth: An Autobiography by Granville Hicks. Harcourt, Brace and World, $5.95. Granville Hicks’s Autobiography is more about the small town and its function in American life than […]
October 1, 1965
No Machine to Measure the Poem With
Sound and Form in Modern Poetry: A Study of Prosody from Thomas Hardy to Robert Lowell by Harvey Gross. University of Michigan Press, $8.50. The subtitle closes in on Gross’s […]
October 1, 1965
Echoes in a Burnt Building
A cellar blots the light, blocks swallow signs: against each brick, charred space reclines. Rats hide behind the fire-demented walls, and what is this that falls? A little girl’s brushed […]
October 1, 1965
Let Me Tell You about the Rich…
The love of money is the root of all evil. If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich? A man who marries money has to earn it. Money can’t buy […]
October 1, 1965
Sappho in Wales
On the mountainside, toward the bald and stony summit, was Hilliard’s house, with a view of the sea. A quarter of a mile away, along a rough track and a […]
October 1, 1965
Father, His Friend, and Another
Father’s friend Ray at the planing mill worked wood the color of afternoon air, curls of it clasping everything there—like the legs of the saw that mumbled at first, and […]
October 1, 1965
New Luster on an Old Facade
The Making of the President by Theodore H. White. Atheneum Publishers, 1964. $6.95. American Politics, which fosters such a lot of agonizing by practitioners over their own public images, needs […]