Word: waif
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Bogart is further encumbered with an unfortunate supporting cast. They play a variety of mawkish roles, including a folksy old man from Ohio, a beautiful crippled waif, and the inevitable bad girl with the good heart. Ida Lupino, who plays the bad girl, might be described as a very square Laureen Bacall. She emotes...
...penniless gentlewoman who had sunk to the role of "dust broom" (as Sarah put it) to a titled lady. What happened next seems, as Author Kronenberger says, "too much in the flashy traditions of the theater to have happened in real life." Slowly, week by week, Abigail, the dowdy waif, replaced Sarah as the dowdy Queen's bosom friend-largely because Sarah had become haughty and downright rude to the Queen. When Sarah at last discovered that the ungrateful "dust broom" had swept her off the royal doorstep, she pelted the Queen with abuse, venting her spleen in "thunderclaps...
...Jungle Waif. The central Beat character that unintentionally emerges is a model psychopath. The hipster has a horror of family life and sustained relationships. In a brilliant, poignant story, Sunday Dinner In Brooklyn, Anatole Broyard recounts the ordeal of a highbrow Greenwich Village bohemian returning for an hour or two of strained parental nuzzling. Says the hero plaintively: "I realized that I loved them very much. But what was I going to do with them?" The hipster is also estranged from nature. In George Mandel's The Beckoning Sea, the suicide-bent hero runs screaming along a beach...
Even when he is not being bitten by foam-teeth, the hipster is a chronic manic-depressive ("Crazy, man!"; "Everything drags me now"). A kind of urban waif in the asphalt jungle, he regularly tastes despair, or what Kerouac calls "the pit and prunejuice of poor beat life itself in the god-awful streets of man." Sometimes he "flips," i.e., goes mad. Allen Ginsberg, 32, the discount-house Whitman of the Beat Generation, begins his dithyrambic poem Howl (which the New York Times's Critic J. Donald Adams has suggested should be retitled Bleat) with the lines...
...very Catholic exposition involves a waif who is left before the gates of a Franciscan monastery, is taken in by the monks, strikes up a friendship with a crucifix in the attic and is apotheosized at age five in a very unconvincing sequence as Marcelino Pan y Vino...