Word: willingham
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Henry, who co-authored The Gradaute with Calder Willingham, reveals his true limp creative hand this time around. There are so few laughs in Candy that one must conclude that anything funny in Henry's earlier film came from either Willingham or director Mike Nichols. Likewise, the often funny television series of a few years back, Get Smart, which was co-authored by Henry and Mel Brooks, apparently owed its humor to Brooks...
...Americans, meanwhile, have adopted comedy as their tool and social alienation and absurdity as their twin themes. Nearly every important American writer-Nabokov, Mailer Barm, Bellow, Malamud, Donleavy, Roth, Friedman, Burroughs, Heller, Pynchon, Willingham-works from an assumption that society is at best malevolent and stupid, at worst wholly lunatic. The gods are dead and their graves untended, morality is a matter of picking one's way between competing absurdities, and the only sane reaction to society-to its alleged truths and virtues, its would-be terrors and taboos-is a cackle or a scream of possibly cathartic laughter...
...expense, he wrote to fellow Garfinckel stockholders, saying that he did not think Jarman's business methods were "very commendable" and urging everyone to refute Jarman's "dubious claims" about Garfinckel's. Speaking for Jarman, who was on vacation in Nassau, Genesco President Ben H. Willingham retorted that Hoving was conducting a "personal vendetta" against Jarman...
...reduce his favorite four letters to three ("fug"), or that there was ever any fuss about poor old Lady Chatterley's Lover and his worshipful deification of sexual organs. John O'Hara, whose writing until recently was criticized as "sex-obsessed," appears positively Platonic alongside Calder Willingham and John Updike, who describe lyrically and in detail matters that used to be mentioned even in scientific works only in Latin...
Unfortunately, none of the characters and none of their predicaments ever approach anything real; the only reality in this witty, bitter novel is the author's dislike of the South. But Willingham is a skillful as well as a bitter man, and for a while he makes that reality seem enough...