Word: verbalism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...verbal pingpong has started for the day. International Party Girl Zsa Zsa Gabor and Autobiographical Collaborator Gerold Frank have begun their daily attack on the intricate task of translating Zsa Zsa onto the pages of a book. Ex-Newsman Frank (New York Journal-American) comes to the task with impressive qualifications. A veteran ghostwriter for wartime marines and submariners (Out in the Boondocks, U.S.S. Seawolf), longtime freelancer and magazine editor (Coronet), he now makes literary collaboration with show-business characters his well-paying specialty. After nearly 5,000 hours of listening, he in effect wrote Lillian Roth...
When Pather Panchali leans towards the neo-realist, its most striking scenes show Auntie's hollow, shrewd, dying face; it pictures her eating wet meal with long, bony fingers, wiping dirt off her crackled skin, hobbling pitifully around the yard. At intervals she has snarling verbal bouts with Mother, who, though warm-hearted, is not the ideal of the Ladie's Home Journal. In fact, Mother often wishes Old Auntie would drop dead...
...Bridge ("Her first name was India-she was never able to get used to it"), he uses a mannered but often effective device of 117 very short chapters, each concerned with a single episode, often a single glancing thought or aspiration. The reader, in effect, leafs through a verbal photograph album, ranging from an eleven-line snapshot of Mrs. Bridge finding her small son staring meditatively at the dressmaker's dummy of her figure (thereafter, she hides it in the attic) to a seven-page description of a country-club dinner that is as savagely tedious as anything...
...Verbal Report. Bender proved equally diligent at wielding a whitewash brush. Breaking an understanding with the other two commission members-a Detroit judge and a Washington lawyer-Bender went ahead on his own, using an investigative method roughly comparable to trying to solve a murder case by going to an open window and yelling, "Is anybody out there guilty?" To Teamster officials around the country-Hoffa's own men-Bender sent a form letter asking for information about racketeering, if any. Back came brief, negative replies. That was that. Without even bothering to draft a written report, Bender informed...
...Roger Vailland. In the Italian town of Porto Manacore, the main sports seem to be sex and formalized verbal abuse. Author Vailland won France's Prix Goncourt with this slick, cynical and true-ringing novel of small-town hunger-for women, for power, for land and money...