Word: queeg
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...good at puzzle solving that the government employs him to find a cure for the common code used by enemy agents. When hiring new girls for his staff, Sebastian confronts them with questions like "How many words can you make from thorough!" And "What is Naitsabes spelled backward?" A Queeg in mufti, he compulsively fingers a rubber ball as he orders his overworked underlings to "switch your gorgeous minds to overdrive." From time to time, Sebastian mutters antiheroic cliches to himself, like "I'm a septic tank for the world's ugly secrets...
From Herman Melville's Captain Vere (who hanged Billy Budd) to Herman Wouk's Captain Queeg (who rolled ball bearings during the Caine mutiny), naval literature has teemed with tales of rumbustious skippers and mutinous crewmen. Of late, the U.S. Navy has pitched and rolled to a real-life story that has all the elements of legend: a destroyer in war-torn waters, a high-handed captain called Marcus Aurelius Arnheiter, a roster of rebellious junior officers respectively named Hardy, Generous and Belmonte, and a precipitate change of command that reverberated clear to the Secretary of the Navy...
...thus finished as a career officer. Alexander, Semmes and the other senior officers involved in the case on both sides may also find their careers in jeopardy. If there is anything the Navy abhors, after mutiny, it is bad publicity. "We all have a little of the Captain Queeg in us," admitted one officer. "But Arnheiter had more than his share...
...boys or Radcliffe girls have pictures of Bogart in their rooms because that sort of thing is looked down upon as "too Big Tenish." They will never forgive John Huston for making Bogey a boozy simpleton in The African Queen. They don't like The Caine Mutiny either: "Queeg is not good Bogey." Key Largo is very good Bogey. And when Bogey pumps five slugs into Edward G. Robinson, the crowd has seen the picture so often that it shouts "More! More!" in perfect unison with his shots...
Critics will never admit it, and the reader's good sense denies it, but sometimes bad writing is best. Good writing would never have produced Eliza crossing the ice. Scarlet and Rhett. Ivanhoe. Amber, James Bond, Arrowsmith, Queeg's ball bearings, or any of the Bobbsey twins. The best and most enjoyable bad writing ever done by an American is Hemingway's in To Have and Have Not, but when some anthologist pastes together the definitive collection of Great Moments from Bad Novels, he should give a secondary dedication, at least, to Frederic Wakeman...