When critics found a clumsy passage or inconsistency in one of Shakespeare's plays, especially if it came toward the beginning or end of his career, an attractive solution was to blame it on an inferior co-author.
Far from the elegant and mischievous "Once upon a time" opening, I was confronted with a mystifying, clumsy passage about a cartoonist named Robert Horn (in "Laughter," he becomes the much more felicitously named villain Axel Rex) and his cartoon creation, a Mickey Mouse-style guinea pig named Cheepy, who was (wisely) excised completely from "Laughter".
In this "Best of" edition, they replay some of the most amazing clumsy and bizarre passages in the book, along with some of the crew's cleverest bon mots and observations.
He gave a brilliant account of the teeming "Ce Qu'a Vu le Vent d'Ouest" ("What the West Wind Saw"), and had the audience quietly laughing during the impish passages of the delightfully clumsy "Minstrels".
"The experience of shaving is ceremonial for a father and a son, at once a clumsy farce and a triumphant rite of passage," Chandler writes.
A printer's misreading, Mr. Bruster argues, may also explain a particularly clumsy and nongrammatical stretch in the Additional Passages.
He makes much of this in the book, and the passages about his childhood have a clumsy tenderness.
Such suspicions, substantiated or not, have inspired many applicants to attempt to avoid detection by partaking in a new rite of passage, changing their Facebook names to alternative spellings or clumsy puns.
Wood sounds disapproving, and sure enough goes on to pick apart a passage from Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, which he calls "the crudest comedy … clumsy … undergraduate" and so on.
The moment would have been less unnerving, I suppose, if I'd scrutinized the passage and determined, with some comforting recourse to the superior discernment of age, that it was, in fact, clumsy or orotund or emptily romantic.
This, and other such passages, might seem less superficial if Lawrence developed a larger sense of Ellington's character and less clumsy were his prose not so unsparkling, his continuity so clunky.
