Word: lillian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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King recognizes three stages of "historical consciousness"--a term poorly defined by him and most others who overuse it--in the Southern Renaissance, an intellectual outburst after World War I that includes William Faulkner, Allen Tate, Thomas Wolfe, Lillian Smith, W.J. Cash, C. Vann Woodward, and Robert Penn Warren. King observes that these three historical stages leading up to the Southern Renaissance--repitition, recollection, reassimilation--parallel exactly the process of psychoanalysis. The writer and historians of this era, climaxing in Woodward, struggled to reassess the Southern burden, the Gone With the Wind fantasy of hoopskirts and grace, the centerpiece...
Finally, like many others before him, King declines to deal with Black and women Renaissance writers (excepting Lillian Smith) because "they were not concerned primarily with the larger, cultural, racial and political themes that I take as my focus." His attitude is chillingly condescending. By choosing to contemplate solely the father-son tradition in Southern psychology rather than the equally rich area of Black-white and mother-daughter relationships, King selects a narrow perspective sadly similar to his predecessors'. Repetition, not recollection, is King's game...
...play tells of a Salvation Army lieutenant's wooing of a hardened but unhappy gangster. Their love causes Bill Cracker to fall afoul of the gang's sinister leader, the Fly, and results in Sister Lillian's expulsion in disgrace from the Army. Through a series of predictable and improbable coincidences, all are reunited and forgiven, and the two camps join hands to form an army of the poor to fight the "real enemy"--capitalism...
There is also new information about the era's most famous flameouts (D.W. Griffith, Buster Keaton, Erich von Stroheim) and the best-documented veterans (Gloria Swanson, King Vidor, Lillian Gish). Even the trivia somehow does not seem trivial. It is touching to hear Frank Capra recall Mack Sennett's sad mansion full of unread books and overdressed servants. Director Henry Hathaway, who remained active past True Grit (1969), wittily brings back the days when his job was to follow DeMille around with a chair on location. A writer remembers the shock of seeing her credits on a silent...
...Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman) who are overtaken by circumstance. Yet his call for a corrective to the country's present antiheroic mood is simply an "intelligent political participation on the part of citizens"-a phrase indistinguishable from November editorials in small-town newspapers. His attack on Lillian Hellman, whom he calls "The Scoundrel in the Looking Glass," exhumes old records to catch the autobiographer in a variety of duplicities and concealments. Hook concludes that "the manner in which [she] refers to ... anti-Communist liberals shows that what she cannot forgive them for is not so much their alleged...