Name That Author

[anotherDan]

interesting quotes, and I loved the Wiki-analysis of the author

but I certainly haven't read the works quoted

[bfh]

A British comedic author, and the quintessential butler, Jeeves :

Is that P.G. Wodehouse?

[wrdsandwrks]

A British comedic author, and the quintessential butler, Jeeves :

Is that P.G. Wodehouse?

Yes! That's it, Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, known as Plum to friends and family.

[bfh]

New Author:

When I had finished the bed, I caught myself looking at him in a fascinated sort of way.

He was certainly a handsome man - beautiful in the masculine sense.

And again, with never failing wonder, I remarked the total lack of viciousness, or wickedness,

or sinfulness in his face. It was the face, I am convinced, of a man who did no wrong.

And by this I do not wish to be misunderstood. What I mean is that it was the face of a man who

either did nothing contrary to the dictates of his conscience, or who had no conscience.

I am inclined to the latter way of accounting for it. He was a magnificent atavism, a man so

purely primitive that he was of the type that came into the world before the development of the moral nature.

He was not immoral, but merely unmoral.

As I have said, in the masculine sense his was a beautiful face. Smooth-shaven every line was distinct,

and it was cut as clear and sharp as a cameo; while sea and sun had tanned the naturally fair skin to a

dark bronze which bespoke struggle and battle and added both to his savagery and his beauty.

The lips were full, yet possessed of the firmness, almost harshness which is characteristic of thin lips.

The set of his mouth, his chin, his jaw, was likewise firm or harsh, with all the fierceness and indomitableness

of the male - the nose also. It was the nose of a being born to conquer and command. It just hinted of the eagle beak.

It might have been Grecian, it might have been Roman, only it was a shade too massive for the one,

a shade too delicate for the other. And while the whole face was the incarnation of fierceness and strength,

the primal melancholy from which he suffered seemed to greaten the lines of mouth and eye and brow,

seemed to give a largeness and completeness which otherwise the face would have lacked.

[wrdsandwrks]

New Author:

When I had finished the bed, I caught myself looking at him in a fascinated sort of way.

He was certainly a handsome man - beautiful in the masculine sense.

And again, with never failing wonder, I remarked the total lack of viciousness, or wickedness,

or sinfulness in his face. It was the face, I am convinced, of a man who did no wrong.

And by this I do not wish to be misunderstood. What I mean is that it was the face of a man who

either did nothing contrary to the dictates of his conscience, or who had no conscience.

I am inclined to the latter way of accounting for it. He was a magnificent atavism, a man so

purely primitive that he was of the type that came into the world before the development of the moral nature.

He was not immoral, but merely unmoral.

As I have said, in the masculine sense his was a beautiful face. Smooth-shaven every line was distinct,

and it was cut as clear and sharp as a cameo; while sea and sun had tanned the naturally fair skin to a

dark bronze which bespoke struggle and battle and added both to his savagery and his beauty.

The lips were full, yet possessed of the firmness, almost harshness which is characteristic of thin lips.

The set of his mouth, his chin, his jaw, was likewise firm or harsh, with all the fierceness and indomitableness

of the male - the nose also. It was the nose of a being born to conquer and command. It just hinted of the eagle beak.

It might have been Grecian, it might have been Roman, only it was a shade too massive for the one,

a shade too delicate for the other. And while the whole face was the incarnation of fierceness and strength,

the primal melancholy from which he suffered seemed to greaten the lines of mouth and eye and brow,

seemed to give a largeness and completeness which otherwise the face would have lacked.

Anne Rice???

[bfh]

No, it's not Anne Rice.

[bfh]

Here's some more:

Sometimes I think Wolf Larsen mad, or half mad at least, what of his strange moods and vagaries.

At other times I take him for a great man, a genius who has never arrived. And, finally, I am convinced

that he is the perfect type of the primitive man, born a thousand years or generations too late and an

anachronism in this culminating century of civilization. He is certainly an individualist of the most pronounced type.

Not only that, but he is very lonely. There is no congeniality between him and the rest of the men aboard ship.

His tremendous virility and mental strength wall him apart. They are more like children to him, even the hunters,

and as children he treats them, descending perforce to their level and playing with them as a man plays with puppies.

Or else he probes them with the cruel hand of a vivisectionist, groping about in their mental processes and

examining their souls as though to see of what soul-stuff is made.

[anotherDan]

Jack London?

[doojable]

Robert Conrad?

[bfh]

Jack London?

Jack London is correct!

Both quotes are from The Sea Wolf and are indicative of Hump's man-crush on Wolf Larsen, the captain of the Sea Wolf.

aDan, it's your turn.

[anotherDan]

Good book, bfh... though that passage is a little strange, isn't it? I don't think Hemingway could have written that!

New author:

"The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is "man" in a higher sense - he is "collective man," a vehicle and moulder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind."

[anotherDan]

"The fact that artistic, scientific, and religious propensities still slumber peacefully together in the small child, or that with primitives the beginnings of art, science, and religion coalesce in the undifferentiated chaos of the magical mentality, or that no trace of 'mind' can be found in the natural instincts of animals - all this does nothing to prove the existence of a unifying principle which alone would justify a reduction of the one to the other. For if we go so far back into the history of the mind that the distinctions between its various fields of activity become altogether invisible, we do not reach an underlying principle of their unity, but merely an earlier, undifferentiated state in which no separate activities yet exist. But the elementary state is not an explanatory principle that would allow us to draw conclusions as to the nature of the later, more highly developed states, even though they must necessarily derive from it. A scientific attitude will always tend to overlook the peculiar nature of these more differentiated states in favour of their causal derivation, and will endeavor to subordinate them to a general but more elementary principle."

[anotherDan]

No takers, eh?

Here's a new author who is/was a contemporary of the previous author. Name either author, and it's your turn.

There are moments of sentimental and mystical experience . . . that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination with them when they come. But they come seldom, and they do not come to everyone; and the rest of life makes either no connection with them, or tends to contradict them more than it confirms them. Some persons follow more the voice of the moment in these cases, some prefer to be guided by the average results. Hence the sad discordancy of so many of the spiritual judgments of human beings; a discordancy which will be brought home to us acutely enough...

[anotherDan]

We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.

Quoting an unnamed writer: "To this day," she writes, "I cannot understand dallying with religion and the commandments of God. The very instant I heard my Father's cry calling unto me, my heart bounded in recognition. I ran, I stretched forth my arms, I cried aloud, 'Here, here I am, my Father.' Oh, happy child, what should I do? 'Love me', answered my God. 'I do, I do," I cried passionately. 'Come unto me,' called my Father. 'I will,' my heart panted. Did I stop to ask a single question? Not one. It never occurred to me to ask whether I was good enough, or to hesitate over my unfitness, or to find out what I thought of his church, or . . . to wait until I should be satisfied. Had I not found my God and my Father? Did he not love me? Had he not called me? Was there not a Church into which I might enter? . . . Since then I have had direct answers to prayer — so significant as to be almost like talking with God and hearing his answer. The idea of God's reality has never left me for one moment."

hint: this second author's work is a book derived from a series of lectures he gave, I believe at Harvard University. Surely someone here has read it.

Edited August 9, 2008 by anotherDan

[GeorgeStGeorge]

hint: this second author's work is a book derived from a series of lectures he gave, I believe at Harvard University. Surely someone here has read it.

Probably. But not I, I'm afraid.

George

[Cynic]

First author: the first quote has an elitist air, and appears to be from a fellow who has been taken up into the narcissism and pomposity of the artistic caste. In the second quote, there are implications that the author’s speculative abilities can penetrate beyond recorded history and gather a metanarrative that explicates the development of art, science, and religion. I hope the author is not someone I like (e.g. Dostoevsky), unless the author is merely penning pomposity and presumption into a character. My guess: Sigmund Freud.

The second author:

There are moments of sentimental and mystical experience . . . that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination with them when they come. But they come seldom, and they do not come to everyone; and the rest of life makes either no connection with them, or tends to contradict them more than it confirms them. Some persons follow more the voice of the moment in these cases, some prefer to be guided by the average results. Hence the sad discordancy of so many of the spiritual judgments of human beings; a discordancy which will be brought home to us acutely enough...

The quote seems familiar, but, of course, its familarity could be due to something that reminds me of another author’s style. Here, I hope the author is not someone I dislike. My guess: I don’t know whether he gave lectures at American universities, but the snappy, confident, intelligent prose reads like it could be G. K. Chesterton’s.

[anotherDan]

Cynic, you're close on the first author. He was Carl Jung. (His first conversation with Freud lasted about 13 hours.) For you curmudgeons, his last name is pronounced very much like "Young."

The second author's book, from which I've been snipping, has seen very wide use in seminaries ever since it was written. He was a philospher. His brother was also quite famous as an author of fiction.

another snip:

A genuine first-hand religious experience like this is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which in purer days it drew its own supply of inspiration.

Edited August 9, 2008 by anotherDan

[Cynic]

Paul Tillich?

[bfh]

Lectures at Harvard, that would probably be William James, a professor at Harvard, and brother of Henry.

[anotherDan]

bfh: you got it

The work is called The Varieties of Religious Experience

A great read. His philosophy is call Pragmatism.

Edited August 10, 2008 by anotherDan

[bfh]

New Author:

The next morning the grandmother was the first one in the car, ready to go. She had her big black valise

that looked like the head of hippopotamus in one corner, and underneath it she was hiding a basket with

Pitty Sing, the cat, in it. She didn't intend for the cat to be left alone in the house for three days because

he would miss her too much and she was afraid he might brush against on of the gas burners and accidentally asphyxiate himself.

The old lady settled herself comfortably, removing her white gloves and putting them up with her purse

on the shelf in front of the back window. The children's mother still had on slacks and still had her head

tied up in a green kerchief, but the grandmother had on a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of

white violets on the brim and navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print...In case of an accident,

anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.

[anotherDan]

I'm weak in the fiction department, unless it has to do with sailing. (Lucky break for me that Jack London was included.)

[bfh]

Here's some more:

"In my time," said the grandmother, folding her thin veined fingers, "children were more respectful

of their native states and their parents and everything else. People did right then. Oh look at the cute

little pickaninny!" she said and pointed to a Negro child standing in the door of a shack. "Wouldn't that make a picture, now?"

she asked and they all turned and looked at the little Negro out on the back window. He waved.

The grandmother shrieked. She scrambled to her feet and stood staring. "You're the Misfit!" she said. "I recognized you at once!"...

"You wouldn't shoot a lady, would you?" the grandmother said and removed a clean handkerchief from her

cuff and began to slap at her eyes with it...

"Listen," the grandmother almost screamed, "I know you're a good man. You don't look a bit like you have common blood.

I know you must come from nice people."

"Yes mam," he said, "finest people in the world."...

"Yes, it's a beautiful day," said the grandmother. "Listen," she said, "you shouldn't call yourself The Misfit

because I know you're a good man at heart. I can just look at you and tell."

[bfh]

Here's a little more:

The Misfit kept scratching in the ground with the butt of gun as if he were thinking about it.

"Yes,m, somebody is always after you," he murmured.

The grandmother noticed how thin his shoulder blades were just behind his hat because

she was standing up looking down on him. "Do you ever pray?" she asked.

He shook he head. All she saw was the black hat wiggle between his shoulder blades. "Nome," he said.

There was a pistol shot from the woods, followed closely by another. Then silence.

The old lady's head jerked around. She could hear the wind move through the tree tops like a long satisfied insuck of breath.

"Bailey Boy!" she called.

The children's mother had begun to make heaving noises as if she couldn't get her breath.

"Lady," he asked, "would you and the little girl like to step off yonder with Bobby Lee and Hiram and join your husband?"

"Yes, thank you," the mother said faintly. Her left arm dangled helplessly and she was holding the baby,

who had gone to sleep, in the other. "Hep that lady up, Hiram," The Misfit said as she struggled to climb

out of the ditch, "and Bobby Lee, you hold onto that little girl's hand."

[bfh]

Movin' On:

All of the above quotes are from the short story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find," by Flannery O'Connor.

This short story is probably the best known and most popular of her work.

O'Connor was an important American, as well as Southern writer, who wrote in a Southern Gothic style, and was greatly influenced by Faulkner.

Oftentimes, she would infuse her unique Southern Gothic style with Roman Catholic theology, sacraments, and rituals.

Following is a quote by O'Connor regarding the reviews of "A Good Man is Hard to Find:"

"I am tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard but they are hard

because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism... when I see these stories described

as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror."

New Author:

Miss Watson she kept pecking at me, and it got tiresome and lonesome. By and by they fetched the niggers in

and had prayers, and then everybody was off to bed. I went up to my room with a piece of candle, and put it

on the table. Then I set down in a chair by the window and tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn't no use.

I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever

so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and

a dog crying about somebody that was going to die; and the wind was trying to whisper something to me,

and I couldn't make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me. Then away out in the woods

I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that's on its mind and can't

make itself understood, and so can't rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving.

I got so down-hearted and scared I did wish I had some company. Pretty soon a spider went crawling up my shoulder,

and I flipped it off and it lit in the candle; and before I could budge it was all shriveled up. I didn't need anybody to tell

me that that was an awful bad sign and would fetch me some bad luck, so I was scared and most shook the clothes off of me.

I got up and turned around in my tracks three times and crossed my breast every time; and then I tied up a little lock of my

hair with a thread to keep witches away. But I hadn't no confidence. You do that when you've lost a horseshoe that you've found,

instead of nailing it up over the door, but I hadn't ever heard anybody say it was any way to keep off bad luck when you'd killed a spider.