Sublime

Max’s comments were effective almost subliminally; he had a way of gently tossing them out as one would pebbles into a pond, making rings of meaning which enlarged until they touched the author’s consciousness.

“Advertising,” Perkins said, “is a matter that nobody can ever speak of positively,

fiat

He believed no “real lady” would ever drink beer or use Worcestershire sauce.

The severity of the depression caught everyone by surprise.

Mark Twain’s sentiment in “The Two Testaments”—that “when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free”—seemed

assiduous

the watchword by which he edited every writer thereafter: “Don’t ever defer to my judgment. You won’t on any vital point, I know, and I should be ashamed if it were possible to have made you, for a writer of any account must speak solely for himself.

So, as in Death in the Afternoon, he writes beautifully, and then immediately turns it off with a flippant comment, or a deliberate obscenity.