: When Winter Comes to Main Street by Overton Grant M Grant Martin - English literature 20th century History and criticism; American literature 20th century History and criticism; English-speaking countries Intellectual life 20th century

@FreeBooks

Posted in: #FreeBooks #FreeBooksIndia #FreeBooksApp #gg

Vote Up Vote Down   0 Reactions

Login to give Reaction!

to his lips a slight recurrent smile.

"The bad habit of working late at night was growing on this young man. It is a picturesque habit, and one of the most imbecile, because sound work is done only with a normal mind.

"He made himself some coffee. A rush of genius to the head followed stimulation. He had a grand time, revelling with pen and pad and littering the floor with inked sheets unnumbered and still wet. His was a messy genius. His plot-logic held by the grace of God and a hair-line. Even the Leaning Tower of Pisa can be plumbed; and the lead dangled inside Achilles's tendon when one held the string to the medulla of Annan's stories."

Our young man is undergoing a variety of interesting changes:

"Partly experimental, partly sympathetically responsive, always tenderly curious, this young man drifted gratefully through the inevitable episodes to which all young men are heir.

"And something in him always transmuted into ultimate friendship the sentimental chaos, where comedy and tragedy clashed at the crisis.

"The result was professional knowledge. Which, however, he had employed rather ruthlessly in his work. For he resolutely cut out all that had been agreeable to the generations which had thriven on the various phases of virtue and its rewards. Beauty he replaced with ugliness; dreary squalor was the setting for crippled body and deformed mind. The heavy twilight of Scandinavian insanity touched his pages where sombre shapes born out of Jewish Russia moved like anachronisms through the unpolluted sunshine of the New World.

"His were essays on the enormous meanness of mankind--meaner conditions, mean minds, mean aspirations, and a little mean horizon to encompass all.

There comes a time when Eris Odell says to Barry Annan:--

"'I could neither understand nor play such a character as the woman in your last book.... Nor could I ever believe in her.... Nor in the ugliness of her world--the world you write about, nor in the dreary, hopeless, malformed, starving minds you analyse.... My God, Mr. Annan--are there no wholesome brains in the world you write about?'"

I think these citations interesting. I do not feel especially competent to produce from them inferences regarding Mr. Chambers's own attitude toward his work.

"Ses Corporal Madden to Private McFadden: 'Bedad yer a bad 'un! Now turn out yer toes! Yer belt is unhookit, Yer cap is on crookit, Yer may not be drunk, But, be jabers, ye look it! Wan-two! Wan-two! Ye monkey-faced divil, I'll jolly ye through! Wan-two! Time! Mark! Ye march like the aigle in Cintheral Park!'"

Free books android app tbrJar TBR JAR Read Free books online gutenberg

(0)

Login to post a comment!