MINUTES OF THE LAST MEETING

by Gene Fowler ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

Another memorial to a misfit -- Sadakichi Hartmann, half Japanese, half German -- includes some further notes on Barrymore, Uncle Claude (W. C. Fields) and the artist, John Decker and dwells nostalgically on the very irregulars that hung and held together until their death, refusing to depart from the never never land of a careless, self-executioned youth, even when they grew old. The center spot turns out to be an announced genius, whose fame as a cadger, ungrateful exhibitionist, durable writer, poet and critic brought him to the author's attention and to the uninhibited company of Barrymore and Fields. This is a picture of bibulous cronies of the falling epithet, of eccentrics in which Fowler finds gems of purest gold, of a Dali-esque unreal, and unrealistic, life in which the whiplash of destruction leads to a seedy, sad ending. Through Hartmann's life there are the possibilities of a real artistic value but he was ""a man needed but not wanted"" in his own opinion and treated the world accordingly. Fowler's own feeling for these tempestuous characters, for the spate of anecdote and incident, for the rowdy rightness of their lives has an intoxication of its own which will attract the clan who followed him in his previous Goodnight, Sweet Prince and Beau James.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1954

Categories: NONFICTION