'So Splendid It Hurts'
| Autor: | Doug Cumming |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2014 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Journalism History. 40:59-64 |
| ISSN: | 2641-2071 0094-7679 |
| Popis: | This is the twelfth in a series of articles on archival collections of interest to mass communication historians. Readers of Journalism History are invited to suggest collections that they would like to see appear in future articles, and the editors would welcome volunteers to write such articles.The year was 1957. Marshall Frady, a seventeen-year-old rebel intoxicated with the romance of Byrons death in the Greek revolution and Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, had found a cause. In a Time magazine brief, this precociously literary son of a Southern Baptist preacher read about Castro and Che Guevara mobilizing for revolution in the jungles of the Sierra Maestra of Cuba. This would be Frady's escape from a boring little South Carolina mill town into the heady fame-nay, immortality-of authorship.Hemingway had his quixotic Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. "Now," Frady wrote to his literary agent in 1972, recounting this youthful folly, "here was that very dramaturgy, by God, actually in sweltering re-enactment that moment no further than a seventeenhour Trailways-bus-ride to Key West, a brief plane hop to Havana and then-well, as it turned out, I never reached those ultimate mythical mountains and wound up, with my third try, on the streets of Havana with some $ 12, accosting a series of right puzzled and uneasy Cubans with an offer to exchange the somewhat stale and crumpled suit I had worn on the bus-ride down for a bicycle on which I figured I could then maybe pedal the 750 miles on down to Oriente Province at the other end of the island, where Castro was."'Frady's 1972 letter to his well-connected book agent Robert Lescher in New York, asking him to pitch to Playboy magazine Frady's idea of a profile of Castro, is one among thousands he pecked out on a manual typewriter over a four-decade career, writing on yellow bond paper and drawing on his love of the English language. These draft letters are packed in thick folders, along with reporter notebooks, thoroughly filled legal pads, plump drafts of books and other craft-shavings, in fifty-eight boxes of this remarkable journalist's papers.Marshall Frady (1940-2004), praised by Norman Mailer and David Halberstam for his distinctly eloquent and nimble reportage,2 ranged across lofty plateaus of the dominant media of journalism. He wrote magazine articles about Southern politics in the civil-rights years and its aftermath with a prose style like that of James Agee, first as a reporter for Newsweek, then on contract or as staff writer with The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Willie Morris's Harper's, and finally, The New Yorker. Starting at age twenty-eight, he also published novelistic biographies of George Wallace, Billy Graham, Jesse Jackson, and Martin Luther King Jr. In 1980, he leaped into television documentary news as chief correspondent for ABC News' Closeup, and worked in that medium until as a reporter for Nightline he had a falling out with Ted Koppel around 1987. He moved from New York to Sherman Oaks, California, to become a screenwriter. Frady made good money scripting docudramas based on books by others-such as his favorite Southern writers, William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren-and based on his own books. He also left an unpublished book manuscript and never-produced screenplay on his lifelong obsession, Fidel Castro.One long sentence from a Frady letter of 1989 gives the flavor of what lies in his personal papers. "Another notion that's only recently brought a certain stirring in the flanks," he wrote to one of his literary agents, "prompted by having had occasion not long ago to rummage back again through the mammoth bale of letters, speeches, files, that's accumulated over the years and that I have somehow managed to haul whole along with me in my errant peregrinations, including the one now out here to these soft-focused lassitudes of southern California, is to write a kind of picaresque reminiscence of the rather lurching, restless, wayfaring, sometimes malarial life that's ensued since growing up a Baptist preacher's son in South Carolina and Georgia-but I won't go into this for now. … |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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