Word: clod
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Dally's lover is a healthy clod, her taxi-driver husband (Ralph Meeker) is a wounded, raging animal who empties bottles and smashes chairs- because it one accepts Playwright Hanley's shaky psychologizing, he let his three-year-old son drown years before. Mrs. Dally tries to put a think-tank in this poor tiger but he is properly mystified by a wifely oracle who is as daft as she is Delphic: "I think a lot of people could be great people...
...clod, but I do not see any art in Chagall's paintings. They are just a mess. In fact, they rather remind me of nightmares...
...Three Sisters. If the Hemingway hero was the man to whom things happened, the Chekhov hero and heroine are people to whom nothing happens. His Sisters exist in a sad purgatory of might-have-beens and never-will-bes. Masha (Kim Stanley), married at 18 to a bureaucratic clod, alternately tongue-lashes him as a clownish bore and lapses broodily into tears. Irina (Shirley Knight) has made a hysterical religion of work. Olga (Geraldine Page) is a kind of involuntary nun of duty, serving joylessly as the local school headmistress. The cultured, well-educated sisters are too weak to demand...
...most elegantly precise English to be heard in Cambridge and often illustrates his points with Latin or Greek quotations which he clearly expects his listeners to understand. His manner of delivery varies with his subject. He can be quietly incisive ("A professor should be a person, not a clod. The whole system of Ph.D.'s in certain fields tends to turn professors into clods. I do not have a Ph.D.") or, if the situation demands, violently destructive ("Linguistics has much to offer psychology; psychology has nothing to offer linguistics. And that nothing is wrong." Certain issues (Whether anyone...
...plot upside down like an hourglass. Shortly, Gloria is chatterboxing Ben's ears with lists of suburban conformities: pulling crabgrass, going bowling, bed-hopping around. While they prate of the lack of communication among moderns, each spills a major grievance. Gloria's husband is an unread clod. Ben flunked a French exam that meant getting into college. When Ben and Gloria go to bed together, and then agree to meet weekly for more extracurricular love and French lessons, a double irony is consummated. Her special pride was her fidelity; his was being a self-taught genius. The Wallachs...