Word: whitmans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Leached out of a novel custom-written for the studio by Stuart Cloete, the story begins in 1837, when small parties of hardy Boers were setting out on the great trek from Cape Colony to the Transvaal, a thousand miles to the north. The hero (Stuart Whitman), an N.C.O. in the British cavalry and an s.o.b. in everybody's book, deserts with two buddies (Ken Scott, Rafer Johnson) and hitches a ride to the interior with a wagon train of Dutch Voortrekkers...
...lucrative little Western Pacific which Marsh wants for the Santa Fe. A Southern Pacific-Western Pacific combination, charged Marsh, "would not even be in keeping with a plan to consolidate Western railroads into as few as two competing systems." Echoed Western Pacific's own President Frederic B. Whitman: if the ICC approved the SoPac's plans, "they would do it on the basis that a rail monopoly is a good thing...
Democratic Presence. As the letters show. Whitman was nagged by more than one man's fair share of family troubles. One brother was feebleminded, another alcoholic, another a syphilitic who died insane; a sister was married to an artist and blackmailer of whom Walt wrote as "a cringing crawling snake"; a sister-in-law was a streetwalker; his "loud, tight, crafty" carpenter father was no help at all. Only his sturdy Dutch mother, for all her complaints, parsimony and illiteracy ("Not being boss of your own shanty ain't the cheese," she wrote), gave aid and comfort...
Like Robert Frost after him, Whitman was first acclaimed in Britain; in the native land he celebrated, he was long left to push his own barrow. In one letter he is found trying to promote a visit to the U.S. of the prestigious Alfred Tennyson. His letter to the poet is curious on three counts. With its evocation of the "seething mass" of America and its "measureless crudity," it gives a prose version of his poetic vision. As such, its effect was only to scare off a poetic grandee, and it showed a naively crude Marxist notion of culture...
...Whitman did not think of culture as an integral part of life but as a top dressing, he insisted that his own art was a totality in itself. In one of the oddest letters ever written by a poet (it is in the third person), he sent to an admirer a blurb for his work, intended to be passed on to his publisher. "Personally," wrote Walt, "the author of Leaves of Grass is in no sense whatever the 'rough,' 'eccentric,' 'vagabond' or queer person that the commentators persist in making him . . . always bodily sweet...