![]() The Weeping and the Laughter by Vera Caspary (1950). This may be one of those books whose cover outrates its contents. Several reviewers compared the novel to Crime and Punishment - and then quickly added that Maass lacked Dostoevsky’s obsessive intensity. Married to a dancer whose career was cut short by an accident, Ernst Tylmann never understood the artistic temperaments of his wife or their three children, so the police suspect any of them might have killed him for his sheer obtuseness. The first, from what I can determine, to use the title was the English translation of this German novel about the murky details surrounding the murder of a Hamburg businessman. The Weeping and the Laughter by Joachim Maass (1947). So, let’s take a look at some of the other books with this title. That hasn’t prevented other authors from using it for their own purposes. They are not long, the days of wine and roses: Out of a misty dream Our path emerges for a while, then closes Within a dream. They are not long, the weeping and the laughter, Love and desire and hate: I think they have no portion in us after We pass the gate. Dowson’s poem is appropriate for an autobiography written in one’s eighties after a long and busy life: The phrase comes not from Shakespeare, as usual, but from an Ernest Dowson poem whose title, “Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam,” is taken, in turn, from a poem by the Roman poet Horace (translation: “The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long”). When, as is my habit, I went in search of other reviews of Viva King’s book, I quickly discovered that “The Weeping and the Laughter” is a popular title. ![]() (She offers a fastidious way of saying that her lovers were uniformly bad at foreplay: “I needed revving up - and though the men may have had the right tools, they were bad mechanics.”) King’s parties you would risk peppering half the characters in the novels of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell.” Anthony Blond wrote that trying to keep track of the people who flash through King’s pages was like trying to read the names of stations on a fast-moving train.īut reviewers also noted her reputation for exceptional generosity Richardson called her “a sort of British Higher Bohemian Mother Courage” and admired her honesty in writing of an affair she had with a sailor 40-plus years her junior when she was 70 - despite his tendency to make off with her jewelry. Maurice Richardson quipped in the Observer, “If you fired a shotgun at one of Mrs. She corresponded with Augustus John, dined in Soho with Norman Douglas, had Ivy Compton-Burnett and her partner Margaret Jourdain to tea. I bought Viva King’s autobiography, The Weeping and the Laughter, on the strength of a single review: “How pleasant to know Viva King even if it only be at second-hand through this candid and amusing book.” It also said that “There were few of that period whom Viva King did not come to know.” Ezra Pound greeted her naked once (he, not she). ![]() The Weeping and the Laughter by Viva King (1976). ![]()
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