THE SENATOR'S LAST NIGHT

Amasingly the action all takes place from late afternoon to dawn -- but into this open of life and death is packed the pay off on a life of evasion of responsibility, of ego inflation, of a lust for power over human beings close to him. The Senator held the purse strings which prevented his son, in medical research, from marrying the girl he loved; he kept a Swedish housemaid in bondage to an ancient love; he toyed with his relations with a woman who once had loved him; he harassed his servants and nagged his friends. Into the story of his last night all the threads of his life are drawn, and one gets a cross section which shows other lives rotating around his whim, and a disillusioned correspondent, assigned to the State Department, as Greek chorus on the outskirts. Frankly, I felt them the author spoke through all of his characters, in rather long-winded vaporings on matters political, social, semi-intellectual. No one of the characters came alive -- nor did the situations seem real. The scene is Washington -- the time the present.