Word: manley
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Sehulberg's protagonist, Manley Halliday, invites comparison with Fitzgorald, for he is an author, fabulously unsuccessful as a writer in and of the twenties, who has never made the transition to modern times. He was "the only writer who could win the approval of Monckton and Stein ad make fifty thousand a year doing...
...What Makes Sammy Run? and The Harder They Fall, Schulberg has borrowed the handy, ready-to-wear drape-shape of the thriller to dress up his story. He has filled that shoddy garment with a human being whose words and acts carry a raw, boozy reek of vitality. Manley Halliday is one of the few credible portraits of a writer in recent U.S. fiction...
...Fictional Binge. Manley Halliday took his first drink on the plane, and flew high all night over the U.S. and his mental blocks, but landed hard the next morning in New York and exhaustion. Benzedrine and booze revived him, and he started to work out his story line for Love on Ice with his young co-scripter, Shep Stearns; they had only one day left in which to dream up the whole plot...
That day and night, and the next, and the next, drink and sleeplessness and memories and the pressure of finishing the script dissolved Manley Halliday like a lump of sugar in the depths of an oldfashioned. The passages describing the long, lost weekend on the campus are among the most effective renderings of the binge mentality since some of Fitzgerald's own. They follow Halliday down to the bottom of the glass and leave him there, dead among the dregs, with the tired, very tired self-epitaph: "A second chance. That's the delusion. There never...
...bangs a machine so hard that the adjustment kept slipping to Tense Melodrama. The plain fact is that Fitzgerald's story calls for a Fitzgerald to tell it. Yet Author Schulberg has thought hard, guessed shrewdly, and written the truth as he sees and feels it. His Manley Halliday may not be the whole Fitzgerald, but he is a figure to remember...