guardian film critic fears he was interfered with—by paul bowles!

"The next thing I knew was that I woke up in a bed wearing a djellaba with nothing underneath . . . Who had undressed me and put me in a djellaba, and why? Had I been abused? I think I would have known if I had . . . I’ve since read everything I could by him in the vain hope that I would appear somewhere in his writings where the mystery would be solved."

            
             The sinister Mr. Bowles: “Care for a smoke, dear?”

"Me, Paul Bowles and that forgotten night in Tangier"

By Ronald Bergan

A documentary on the American author triggered a memory of a disturbing night at the writer’s apartment that had been suppressed for 40 years

 

In 1998, at the Edinburgh Film Festival, I was happily watching the documentary Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles, when the weirdest thing happened to me. While the 87-year-old author was being interviewed in his apartment in Tangier, I had a strange feeling of deja vu. An African mask on the wall triggered the sense that I had been in that apartment before. Was that possible? Maybe I had seen a photo of it somewhere. I had come to the film without any pre-conceived notions, nor did I know much about Bowles, merely that he had written The Sheltering Sky, a book I had not read. I had seen Bernardo Bertolucci’s film adaptation of it, which I had not much liked. That was the sum of my knowledge of Bowles.

 

The more the documentary continued, the more I became convinced that I had been in Bowles’s apartment in Tangier and not just seen photos of it. It was too potent a sensation. While I watched the film, I struggled to understand why I had this certitude. Gradually, some images started to emerge from my unconscious mind, and then the whole story came flooding back. I had what I can only call a flashback to an incident that had taken place more than four decades earlier.

 

When I was 17 years old, a friend of mine, known as Frog, and I had decided to take a year off between school and university to travel around Europe very cheaply, hitch-hiking, staying in youth hostels and getting odd jobs where we could. We had managed to hitch rides down through Spain and had crossed on the ferry from Gibraltar to Tangier.

 

On our first night, after getting a room in a run-down hotel, we sat at an outdoor cafe nursing glasses of beer. After a while, two middle-aged men sat down at the table next to us. I immediately recognised one of them as Richard Wattis, a supporting actor in dozens of British films and TV shows, mostly playing officious civil servants. I caught myself staring at him. He smiled at me, and introduced himself as Dickie and his friend as Monty. They offered to buy us more beer and asked if we would like something to eat. As we had been living mostly on bread for the week, we accepted gladly.

 

After our meal, and a couple more beers, Dickie and Monty asked if we would like to visit the famous author Paul Bowles, of whom neither of us had heard. We could hardly refuse. Now rather tipsy, we followed our newfound friends through endless back streets, then climbed some winding stairs. Dickie rang the bell of an apartment. A young Moroccan dressed in a djellaba opened the door. There were a few other young men lounging on sofas and a strange smell in the air.

 

My friend and I were introduced to a tall, thin man in his late 40s. He was sitting in a cane chair and smoking a pipe. An African mask was on the wall above him. Ignoring Frog, whose looks had engendered his nickname, he asked me some questions and seemed to take an unusual amount of interest in my naive answers. Then he offered us some peculiar-looking cigarettes. Though neither of us smoked, it would have been impolite to refuse. I took a few puffs, not knowing then that the cigarettes must have been kif, as hashish is known in Morocco.

 

The next thing I knew was that I woke up in a bed wearing a djellaba with nothing underneath. I looked around and saw Frog, fully dressed, dozing in a chair. My clothes were at the foot of the bed. It was early morning. I remember feeling more confused than shocked. I just knew I had to get dressed and out of there as fast as possible. I woke Frog and we made our way quietly out of the bedroom. There didn’t seem to be anyone around. Luckily, the front door was open. We ran out into the street and tried to find our way back to our hotel.

 

I had no recollection of what had happened between my taking the kif and waking up. I asked Frog if he knew, but he didn’t, having fallen asleep after smoking the kif. I still wonder what took place during those few hours after I blacked out. Who had undressed me and put me in a djellaba, and why? Had I been abused? I think I would have known if I had. All I felt on waking up was a rather nasty headache.

 

It was curious, however, that I had eliminated the episode from my conscious mind until it had been aroused by the documentary more than 40 years later. I had heard about repressed and recovered memory, but had always been rather skeptical about it. There was another peculiar side-effect. Ever since the memory came back, I struggle to remember Bowles’s name.

 

Incidentally, I’ve since read everything I could by him in the vain hope that I would appear somewhere in his writings where the mystery would be solved. Bowles’s best writing drew me into an exotic, perverse, nihilistic world in which one of the dominant themes was the destruction of innocence. What impressed me and disturbed me most was his second novel, Let It Come Down (1952), set almost entirely in Tangier among the louche ex-pat community. It ends with the main character, Nelson Dyar, a soulless American high on hashish, hammering a nail into the ear of his sleeping Arab friend.

 

—from The Guardian, Tuesday, December 29, 2009

 

john cheever on why he wrote short stories in his underwear

"a great many of the stories in my current collection were written in my underwear"

Why I Write Short Stories

John Cheever

 

To publish a definitive collection of short stories in one’s late 60s seems to me, as an American writer, a traditional and a dignified occasion, eclipsed in no way by the fact that a great many of the stories in my current collection were written in my underwear.

 

This is not to say that I was evera Bohemian. Hardly a man is now alive who can remember when Harold Ross edited The New Yorker magazine, but I am one of these. The Ross editorial queries were genuinely eccentric. In one short story of mine, I invented a character who returned home from work and changed his clothes before dinner. Ross wrote on the galley margin: “Eh? What’s this? Cheever looks to me like a one-suiter.” He was so right. At the space rates he paid, I could afford exactly one suit. In the mornings, I dressed in this and took the elevator to a windowless room in the basement where I worked. Here I hung my suit on a hanger, wrote until nightfall when I dressed and returned to our apartment. A great many of my stories were written in boxer shorts.

 

A collection of short stories appears like a lemon in the current fiction list, which is indeed a garden of love, erotic horseplay and lewd and ancient family history; but so long as we are possessed by experience that is distinguished by its intensity and its episodic nature, we will have the short story in our literature, and without a literature we will, of course, perish. It was F. R. Leavis who said that literature is the first distinction of a civilized man.

 

Who reads short stories? one is asked, and I like to think that they are read by men and women in the dentist’s office, waiting to be called to the chair; they are read on transcontinental plane trips instead of watching a banal and vulgar film spin out the time between our coasts; they are read by discerning and well-informed men and women who seem to feel that narrative fiction can contribute to our understanding of one another and the sometimes bewildering world around us.

 

The novel, in all its greatness, demands at least some passing notice of the classical unities, preserving that mysterious link between esthetics and moral fitness; but to have this unyielding antiquity exclude the newness in our ways of life would be regrettable. This newness is known to some of us through “Star Wars,” to some of us through the melancholy that follows a fielder’s error in the late innings of a ball game. In the pursuit of this newness, contemporary painting seems to have lost the language of the landscape, the still-life, and—most important —the nude. Modern music has been separated from those rhythms and tonalities that are most deeply ingrained in our memories, but literature still possesses the narrative—the story—and one would defend this with one’s life.

 

In the short stories of my esteemed colleagues—and in a few of my own—I find those rented summer houses, those one-night love affairs and those lost key rings that confound traditional esthetics. We are not a nomadic people, but there is more than a hint of this in the spirit of our great country—and the short story is the literature of the nomad.

 

I like to think that the view of a suburban street that I imagine from my window would appeal to a wanderer or to someone familiar with loneliness. Here is a profoundly moving display of nostalgia, vision and love, none of it more than 30 years old, including most of the trees. Here are white columns from the manorial South, brick and timber walls from Elizabethan England, saltbox houses from our great maritime past and flat-roofed echoes of Frank Lloyd Wright and his vision of a day when we would all enjoy solar heating, serene and commodious interiors and peace on earth.

 

The lots are 1½ acres, flowers and vegetables grow in the yards and here and there one finds, instead of tomatoes, robust stands of cannabis with its feathery leaf. Here, in this victorious domesticity, the principal crop is a hazardous drug. And what do I see hanging in the Hartshores’ clothes-yard but enough seasoning marijuana to stone a regiment.

 

Is forgetfulness some part of the mysteriousness of life? If I speak to Mr. Hartshore about his cannabis crop, will he tell me that the greatness of Chinese civilization stood foursquare on the fantasies of opium? But it is not I who will speak to Mr. Hartshore. It will be Charlie Dilworth, a very abstemious man who lives in the house next door. He has a No Smoking sign on his front lawn, and his passionate feelings about marijuana have beenintelligently channeled into a sort of reverse blackmail.

 

I hear them litigating late one Saturday afternoon when I have come back from playing touch football with my sons. The light is going. It is autumn. Charlie’s voice is loud and clear and can be heard by anyone interested. “You keep your dogs off my lawn, you cook your steaks in the house, you keep your record player down, you keep your swimming-pool filter off in the evenings and you keep your window shades drawn. Otherwise, I’ll report your drug crop to the police and with my wife’s uncle sitting as judge this month you’ll get at least six months in the can for criminal possession.”

 

They part. Night falls. Here and there a housewife, apprehending the first frost, takes in her house plants while from an Elizabethan, a Nantucket, and a Frank Lloyd Wright chimney comes the marvelous fragrance of wood smoke. You can’t put this scene in a novel.

 

1978

 

—from John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings (Library of America, 2009), pp 996–998. Originally published in Newsweek, October 30, 1978.

horton foote’s the orphan’s home cycle

 

While in New York I saw Part One of Horton Foote’s The Orphans Home Cycle. All nine plays are set in the fictitious town of Harrison, Texas, which is based on Footre’s hometown of Wharton, Texas.

 

Spanning the lives of three families over three decades, the plays are based in part on the childhood of Foote’s father and the courtship and marriage of his parents. As a boy in the 1920s, Foote (March 14, 1916 – March 4, 2009) routinely eavesdropped on the adults in his small Texas town. The cycle charts the life of Horace Robedaux from the time he is a young boy whose father has died to when his father-in-law dies and he becomes the family patriarch.

 

In a recent review, critic Brendan Lemon wrote that:

 

All the bouquets being bestowed on Horton Foote’s trilogy The Orphans’ Home Cycle, off-Broadway at the Signature, compel me to try to defend it from the hype. The three evenings, each consisting of three one acts, are not “event theatre”, if that phrase means large-scale projects distinguished by inflated claims rather than by artistic achievements. There are longueurs here, but they are of the littlenesses of life, not of inept stagecraft.

 

Daily existence abounds, while death is more pressing than in the finale of Hamlet. These stories covering life in a fictional village in East Texas called Harrison from 1902 to 1928 offer a true nature’s bounty – and bounty is a key concept for Foote, who in a long career (he died this year at 92) wrote not only dozens of plays but also screenplays for The Trip to Bountiful and To Kill A Mockingbird.

 

Orphans’ ache of prosaic occurrence may suggest Our Town, and the family squabbling may conjure up Foote’s friend Tennessee Williams without the heightened lyricism, but Foote’s method is his own. A co-production with Hartford Stage, the first evening of Orphans’ introduces us to the two families, the Robedauxs and the Thorntons, who stand stage-centre in the cycle.

 

Foote, generally known for his Academy Award-winning screenplays for the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird and the 1983 film Tender Mercies, and his Academy Award nomination for writing The Trip to Bountiful. He won a 1995 Pulitzer Prize for his play The Young Man From Atlanta. But his legacy must surely be The Orphans Home Cycle, which he finished shortly before his death. The cycle breaks down as follows:

 

Part One, The Story of a Childhood

Roots in a Parched Ground

Convicts

Lily Dale

 

Part Two, The Story of a Marriage

The Widow Claire

Courtship

Valentine’s Day

 

Part Three, The Story of a Family

1918

Cousins

The Death of Papa

 

Here’s Foote’s forward to the cycle’s opening play, Roots in a Parched Ground:

 

THE ACTUAL WRITING of these plays began after my mother’s death in 1974. My father had died the year before in the very room and on the bed my brothers had been born in. After my mother’s death, I was alone in our house in Wharton, Texas for a week, sorting letters and personal papers, making decisions about what to do with the accumulations of fifty-nine years of life in that house.

 

After I returned to my then home in the New Hampshire woods, I began making notes for these plays. I don’t remember if at the time I thought there would eventually be nine plays, but I am sure that the writing of these first notes was prompted by my thinking over my parents’ lives and the world of the town that had surrounded them from birth to death. Some two years later I had finished first drafts of eight of the plays: Roots in a Parched Ground, Convicts, Lily Dale, Courtship, Valentine’s Day, 1918, Cousins and The Death of Papa. The Widow Claire , the last to be written, was finished some time later.

 

On a trip to New York, I bought all the records of Charles Ives I could find, playing his music over and over while resting from my work on the plays. It was a time of fuel shortages and exorbitantly high fuel prices, and my family and I kept warm in the New Hampshire winter by burning wood in the fireplaces and stoves. In the spring and summer I would write in a screen house overlooking the woods and a large stone wall. My surroundings couldn’t have been more different from the place and time in Texas I was writing about.

 

I don’t remember now, either, the sequence in which I wrote the plays, but I believe 1918 was the first completed, although an earlier version of Roots in a Parched Ground had been written years before and done on the Du Pont Play of the Month television series, long before I thought of the possibility of there being nine plays or could have imagined the changes that would lead to my living and working in New Hampshire.

 

Change, however, was an early acquaintance in my life. My grandfather, who seemed impervious to all mortal ends, died when I was nine, and the reverberations and changes from that death continued for many years. It was soon after that I was to see a quiet, serene street (in front of my grandparents’ house) begin its slow but steady descent into a metaphor for all the ugly, trashy highways that scar a great deal of small-town America. And these plays, I feel, are about change, unexpected, unasked for, unwanted, but to be faced and dealt with or else we sink into despair or a hopeless longing for a life that is gone.

My first memory was of stories about the past—a past that, according to the storytellers, was superior in every way to the life then being lived. It didn’t take me long, however, to understand that the present was all we had, for the past was gone and nothing could be done about it.

 

I learned, too, how unreliable memory can be, for when members of my family would recount a story from their collective past, I would early on marvel how subtly it would change from storyteller to storyteller.

 

The time of the plays is a harsh time. They begin in 1902, a time of far-reaching social and economic change in Texas. The aftermath of Reconstruction and its passions had brought about a white man’s union to prevent blacks from voting in local and state elections. But in spite of political and social acts to hold onto the past, a way of life was over, and the practical, the pragmatic were scrambling to form a new economic order. Black men and women were alive who knew the agony of slavery, and white men and women were alive who had owned them. I remember the first time slavery had a concrete face for me. I was on a fourteen-mile hike to complete some phase of becoming a Boy Scout. I stopped in a country store for a bottle of soda water and on the gallery of the store was an elderly black man. As I drank my soda water we got to talking and he asked me my name, and when I told him he said he had been a slave on my great-great-grandfather’s plantation. I have never forgotten the impact that made on me. Slavery up until then was merely an abstract statistic that I’d heard older people talking about. "Our family had one hundred sixty slaves, one hundred twenty …" or whatever, but as I looked into that man’s tired, sorrowing face, I was shocked to realize that this abstraction spoken of so lightly ("we were good to them," "we never mistreated them") was a living, suffering human being. The tales of the past had a new reality for me after that.

 

And so with the 1918 influenza epidemic, which causes such havoc in the play 1918 . I was raised on stories of the terror of the flu, what it did to my family and to the families of the town, but it seemed only a local phenomenonto me until I read Katherine Anne Porter’s "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" and I began to understand how far-reaching it was. Since the productions of 1918 , 1 have heard from many people telling me how it affected their lives or the lives of their families.

 

All the plays are based on family stories—stories often of dislocation, sibling rivalries, delopements, family estrangements, family reconciliations, and all the minutiae that make family life at once so interesting and yet at times so burdening, causing a reaction described by Katherine Anne Porter in "Old Mortality": Her mind closed stubbornly against remembering, not the past, but the legends of the past, other people’s memory of the past, at which she had spent her life peering in wonder like a child at a magic lantern show. Oh, but there is my own life to come yet, she thought, my own life now and beyond. I don’t want any promises, I won’t have false hopes, I won’t be romantic about myself, I can’t live in this world any longer, she told herself listening to the voices back of her. Let them tell their stories to each other. Let them go on exploring how things happened. I don’t care. At least I can know the truth about what happened to me, she assured herself, silently making a promise to herself in her hopefulness, in her ignorance.

 

But many of us do care, of course, and we do continue to remember, and we give to our children and their children our versions of what has gone before, remembering always how unreliable a thing memory is and how our versions of what has gone before can only be what we have come to perceive the past and its people and stories to be. To quote Miss Porter again: By the time the writer has reached the end of a story, he has lived it at least three times—first, in a series of actual events that, directly or indirectly, have continued to set up the condition in his mind and senses that causes him to write the story; second, in memory; and third, on re-creation of this chaotic stuff.

 

I have worked on the plays for about ten years, from the first drafts to the forms found here, during various readings, staged readings, andtheater productions, in and out of New York. But essentially the plays have remained the same, some with no revisions whatsoever.

 

Here, then, are the first four of the plays, their stories and characters, I hope, true to their place and time—true at least to my memory of what I was told or have seen.

 

—Horton Foote

March 1988
 

Roots in a Parched Ground may be downloaded here.

 

 

boredom / happiness studies: adorno on the fetishism of suntanning & schopenhauer

An archetypal instance is the behaviour of those who grill themselves brown in the sun merely for the sake of a sun-tan, although dozing in the blazing sunshine is not at all enjoyable, might very possibly be physically unpleasant, and certainly impoverishes the mind. In the sun-tan, which can be quite fetching, the fetish character of the commodity lays claim to actual people; they themselves become fetishes. The idea that a girl is more erotically attractive because of her brown skin is probably only another rationalization. The sun-tan is an end in itself, of more importance than the boy-friend it was perhaps supposed to entice. 

   
Adorno on the evils of suntanning:

The act of dozing in the sun marks the culmination of a crucial element of free time under present conditions – boredom. The miracles which people expect from their holidays or from other special treats in their free time, are subject to endless spiteful ridicule, since even here they never get beyond the threshold of the eversame: distant places are no longer – as they still were for Baudelaire’s ennui – different places. The victim’s ridicule is automatically connected to the very mechanisms which victimize. At an early age Schopenhauer formulated a theory of boredom. True to his metaphysical pessimism he teaches that people either suffer from the unfulfilled desires of their blind will, or become bored as soon as these desires are satisfied. The theory well describes what becomes of people’s free time under the sort of conditions of heteronomy, and which in new German tends to be termed Fremdbestimmtheit  (external determination). In its cynicism Schopenhauer’s arrogant remark that mankind is the factory product of nature also captures something of what the totality of the commodity character actually makes man into. Angry cynicism still does more honour to human beings than solemn protestations about man’s irreducible essence. However, one should not hypostatize Schopenhauer’s doctrine as something of universal validity or even as an insight into the primal character of the human species. Boredom is a function of life which is lived under the compulsion to work, and under the strict division of labour. It need not be so. Whenever behaviour in spare time is truly autonomous, determined by free people for themselves, boredom rarely figures; it need not figure in activities which cater merely for the desire for pleasure, any more than it does in those free time activities which are reasonable and meaningful in themselves. Even fooling about need not be crass, and can be enjoyed as a blessed release from the throes of self-control. If people were able to make their own decisions about themselves and their lives, if they were not caught up in the realm of the eversame, they would not have to be bored. Boredom is the reflection of objective dullness.

Adorno on DIY (home improvement?):

 

‘Do it yourself ’, this contemporary type of spare time behaviour fits however into a much more far-reaching context. More than thirty years ago I described such behaviour as ‘pseudo-activity’. Since then pseudoactivity has spread alarmingly, even (and especially) amongst those people who regard themselves as anti-establishment. Generally speaking there is good reason to assume that all forms of pseudo-activity contain a pent-up need to change the petrified relations of society. Pseudo-activity is misguided spontaneity. Misguided, but not accidentally so; because people do have a dim suspicion of how hard it would be to throw off the yoke that weighs upon them. They prefer to be distracted by spurious and illusory activities, by institutionalized vicarious satisfactions, than to face up to the awareness of how little access they have to the possibility of change today. Pseudo-activities are fictions and parodies of the same productivity which society on the one hand incessantly calls for, but on the other holds in check and, as far as the individual is concerned, does not really desire at all.

 

—excerpted from Adorno’s essay “Free Time,” in his The Culture Industry: Selected Essays On Mass Culture (1991).

 

a bit more on stanley crawford’s log of the s.s. the mrs unguentine

Reading Stanley Crawford’s Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine
Ben Marcus

1972 was a difficult year for the novel. This might—and perhaps should—be said of all years and times, since the novel is forever, genetically, finding everything a struggle and all things difficult (I think we’re supposed to be worried when the novel does not do this). But 1972 was particularly special in its overshadowing, domineering, mattering way. It was a year that refused to cede an inch to the make-believe. The merely imaginary might finally have seemed trifling up against some of the defining and grisly moments of the century that collided that year and chewed up every available dose of attention in the culture. 1972, in short, produced the Watergate scandal, the Munich Massacre, and Bloody Sunday. Nixon traveled to China in 1972, and the last U.S. troops finally departed Vietnam. It wasn’t clear that a novel had leverage against all of this atrocity, deceit, transgression, and milestone, let alone a novel posing as a ship’s log, narrated by a widowed ship slave who has witnessed logic-defying architecture, radical ecological invention, and faked a pregnancy while being banished—by her alcoholic, abusive husband—from all land and humanity.

Forget that painting (or sculpture, or the better poetry) was never asked to compete with the news, or to be the news. The novel’s weird burden of relevance—to reflect and anticipate the times, to grab headlines, to be somehow current, while not also disgracing the language—was being shirked all over the place, and Stanley Crawford, already unusually capable of uncoiling his brain and repacking it in his head in a new, gnarled design for every book he wrote, was chief among those writers who seemed siloed in a special, ahistorical field, working with private alchemical tools, producing work just out of tune enough to disrupt the flight of the birds that passed his hideout.

Architectural dreamwork, end-times seascapes so barren they seem cut from the pages of the Bible, coolly-rendered Rube Goldberg apparati, and the crushing sadness that results when you tie your emotional fortunes to a person whose tongue is so fat in his mouth he can barely speak, mark this little masterpiece of a novel. Cast as a soliloquy in the form of a ship’s log, a grief report from someone who has no good insurance she will ever be heard, the novel moves fluidly between its major forms: love song, a treatise on gardening at sea, an argument against the company of others, and a dark science expo for exquisite inventions like a hybrid lichen that makes things invisible. Published by Alfred A. Knopf under the editorial guidance of Gordon Lish, the fiction world’s singular Quixote—a champion of innovative styles and formal ambition—there may have been no better year in which to tuck such an odd, exquisite book. Instead of rushing for relevance and breaking the news, Crawford was taking the oldest news of all—it is strange and alone here, even when we are surrounded by people, and there is a great degree of pain to be felt—and reporting it as nautical confessional. The result, now thirty-six years later, seems to prove that interior news, the news of what it feels like to want too much from another person, will not readily smother under archival dust . . .

—from Ben Marcus’ afterword to Log of the S.S. Mrs Unguentine

The complete text of log of the s.s. mrs unguentine is here. 

warren ellis versus harold bloom’s bardolatry (plus philip k. dick, booze, fathers & cave paintings)

Stories, Drinking and the World

 

Written in June of 2005

 

The literary critic Harold Bloom once said that we weren’t fully

human until Shakespeare began writing: that Shakespeare

completed our sapience. Which is both interesting and stark, utter

bullshit. Stories are what make us human. They’re an advanced form of

play. Cats have play. Sometimes very sophisticated, dramatised forms

of play. But they’re not communicated or externalised. So far, only

humans use stories to dramatise the way they see the world.

 

And we’ve always had them.

 

Go out to the ancient standing stones at Callanish in the Orkney

Islands, at sunrise. You stand in the middle of the stone circle and turn

to follow the sun. From that position, the sun is alternately occluded

and revealed by the curves of the surrounding hills. The sunrise is

dramatised as a struggle. As a performance. Shadows fall and twist

around you like spokes, until the sun claws free of the hillside and

sends light right down the middle of the circle and on to your face.

Walk down the great processional avenue to Glastonbury Tor, and

you experience a similar effect. The walk is designed to sequentially

reveal and present aspects of the surroundings, until the Tor is brought

out of the backdrop to stand in front of you. It’s intended as a religious

experience—a walk that becomes an experience of mystery and

revelation. It’s a plotline.

 

Cave paintings are comics. Standing stones are art installations. It’s

all stories.

 

And I don’t mean that in an ethereal Gaimany “the world is made

out of stories, mine’s a nice cup of tea” kind of way. I mean that we

make the world into stories. From scratching our perceptions of the

day into cave walls to dramatising the landscapes we’re born into, we

make the world into stories to make living in it all the sweeter.

 

Millions of us, every day, add art into our daily mundane experience

of the world by playing a personal movie soundtrack into our ears.

I knew a guy who’d put a tape into his car’s player and would

wait until Lemmy tore into “Ace Of Spades” before standing on the

accelerator and pulling out into the street. I must’ve nearly died a

hundred times because of that bastard.

 

An acquaintance of mine had a Lemmy story. He was living in an

apartment building in New York, and heard a terrible banging outside

his door. Going out into the corridor, he found Lemmy, throwing

himself into the walls, gripping a huge wooden spoon in one hand.

Lemmy, he said, why are you outside my door with a wooden spoon?

You know how some people have a little silver coke spoon? Lemmy

said. And then he held his wooden ladle up like it was Excalibur and

yelled, This is MINE!

 

Which brings me to drugs, which accompany storytelling

cultures. Being southern English, my own culture is an alcoholic one.

Mead culture. I’m from a village that began as a Norse settlement.

Thundersley. It translates from the old English as thunder clearing or

Thor’s clearing. It was a small centre of worship for Thor. There was

and is another Thundersley, fifty miles north, and the old story was

that every Thursday Thor would fly over both of his English clearings.

Thundersley was all forest and weir, back then. When I lived there, the

weir has been paved over, and the only trees in the centre of the village were around the school I went to, on a gloomy tree-lined alleyway called Dark Lane. A dramatised little passageway. We still do it. Over in rural Rayleigh, five miles away, there’s a road called Screaming Boy Lane. I’ve never found out why it’s called that.

 

My dad told me about that. He never found out either, and it was

one of those things that bugged him to his grave. He was one of those

people who stories happen to. He was a drummer in the Sixties. One

night after a gig, a couple of Liverpudlians came up to him and asked

if he wanted to join their band, as they were without a drummer at the

time and on the promise of playing some gigs in Germany…

 

“I can’t think about that too much,” he used to say.

 

He was in the Household Cavalry, the Queen’s mounted soldiers,

and once responsible for giving the Queen a horse with the shits to

ride during a public event. He was in the Merchant Navy, and once

imprisoned on Fiji for accidentally jumping ship—said prison being a

thatched hut that he was asked to return to at night, if he’d be so kind.

You become part of your father’s story, and you can feel like maybe

you haven’t done enough to live up to his stories. My dad was an

unpublished writer, and I didn’t realise until late on that he felt that

he’d become part of my story, and that he loved it. I’d phone him on

my mobile from other Countries, places he’d never visited, or had only

seen once. From my usual hotel in San Francisco I can see Telegraph

Hill, where he’d gone during his single trip there. I called him from the

black shoreline of Reykjavik. Our stories, then.

 

Dad and I had similar histories in our drinking. Both woke up

in our late teens/early twenties finding ourselves doing a bottle of

something in a single sitting without trying. For the rest of his life,

I never saw him have more than a small can of beer at Xmas. I just

control mine, ferociously. I know to the drop the point at which I can’t

return from, and can fine-tune my drunkenness so I don’t wake up

naked and halfway up a tree. Again.

 

the perfect gift for all who treasure the queen’s christmas message

 —Aye Jay, The Punk Rock Fun Time Activity Book, ECW Press, 2009.

scenes from the writing life: clancy sigal, novelist & agent

Hollywood agents, that most despised of human specimens, of which I was one, are as indispensable as the rabies vaccine, which kills as easily as it cures.

 

‘Hidden Talent: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents’ by Tom Kemper

 

A history of the rise of ‘that most despised of human specimens,’ the Hollywood agent.

By Clancy Sigal

 

Hollywood agents, that most despised of human specimens, of which I was one, are as indispensable as the rabies vaccine, which kills as easily as it cures. Although in one form or another agents, as the middlemen brokers of human talent, have existed since the dawn of 19th century mass entertainment, they are a nearly perfect metaphor for a late-blooming capitalist economy. They don’t make anything except spit and hot air. Or, as author Tom Kemper writes, giving it an academic polish, "agents serve in the commercial fabrication of individuality," selling "personality [as] a commodity" including, especially, their own commission-hungry personalities.

 

However loftily the business of agents is described — and Kemper is fond of euphemisms like "embedded field of routine transactional and social relationships" (I think he means schmoozing) — we in the movie business cannot function without a go-between as our link to the money. Indeed, as Kemper reminds us in his scholarly history of early Hollywood agentry from the 1920s into the early 1950s, one pioneer agent used to publish a "Sears catalog of stars" that listed his clients in a magazine bluntly titled "Link."

 

Kemper tells us that there was an "agent problem" right from the start. The Motion Picture Academy, itself no paragon of business ethics, accused agents of "racketeering, double-dealing, arrogance, failure to live up to obligations [and] semi-legal trickery" — and that was long before CAA, UTA, Endeavor, ICM and West Coast MCA had been invented.

 

Studios and their talent suppliers, the agents, had yet to figure out a true business model of how to live with each other on the backs of the people who actually made the movies: "The skirmishes between studios and agents . . . essentially erupted over stars . . . [that were] a studio’s most visible assets." Agents connived in the most lucrative deals for their clients and themselves, and studio executives, under relentless pressure to maintain a 50-picture-a-year slate for theatrical release, connived right back. Cat and mouse, predator and prey, but which was which?

 

Even a loyal agent — as I guiltily know from experience — weighs "negotiations in terms of the relationship with his client and the long-term relationship with studio executives." You walk "a fine line between representing a client’s grievances and alienating the producer." Kemper points out that "these steady relationships formed an almost conspiratorial syndicate between the agency and production executives." I like that "almost."

 

As studios matured, accommodation (and a form of industrial efficiency) came in the form of two temperamentally opposed uber-agents who ushered in the modern era. Kemper builds his book around the files and archives of neurotic, "taciturn and brutish" Myron Selznick, who pushed client Vivien Leigh into the Scarlett role in his older brother David’s "Gone With the Wind"; and the "finely tailored," dapper, graceful-in-his-skin "career engineer" Charles Feldman. The angry, insecure Myron Selznick and the socially adept Feldman pretty much monopolized Hollywood’s high-priced talent, including almost all the stars seen today on Turner Classic Movies.

 

Keep the money in mind. In one year alone, 1949, when a school teacher’s annual salary was $1,400, Feldman, with a few phone calls, earned a $250,000 commission on a single deal.

 

Like many agents at the time, including me, Myron was an alcoholic; unlike most agents, "Charlie" Feldman was legally trained and could read a contract the way Einstein read an algebraic equation (which a lot of studio agreements resembled, then as now).

 

What both men shared, Kemper underscores, was a crucial Southern California family background in the movie business. The Hollywood agency racket was a deeply tribal phenomenon. (My boss, Sam Jaffe, head of his own agency, was the brother-in-law of Paramount mogul B.P. Schulberg, and Jaffe hired relations galore who hired their sons.) For years, New York-centered agencies like the band-booking MCA and stage-and-radio power William Morris failed to gain a foothold in Hollywood because they had no blood connections here. Then, choosing their moment, they rudely bought their way into Hollywood by corporate takeovers that squashed the char- ismatic, personality-driven, "one-stop powerhouse[s]" like Feldman, Selznick (for whom contracts were "a form of trickery") and Leland Hayward.

 

Reading Kemper’s original and deeply researched study, I couldn’t help thinking of Hollywood’s golden oldie days. Then agents tended to be a colorfully mixed (mainly Jewish) bag. My colleagues were war veterans who included a furniture-removal man, a tennis bum, a secret-ops military officer, a former labor agitator, a trust fund baby — rich men, poor men, beggar men and thieves with some considerable wild, woolly life experience. Today’s agents go to film, business or law school and come up through the mailroom, guzzle sparkling water instead of gin and work out at the gym. They are healthier, cooler, more handsome, less emotional and less angry and much, much more innocent about life.

 

A glaring omission in Kemper’s book is the absence of any mention of Hollywood’s then-current labor racketeer troubles, violent strikes, criminal conspiracies and the blacklist in which the agents played a key, and unheroic, role. Kemper’s de-politicalization of what was, in fact, a lasting trauma for the entire industry one hopes he will remedy in a forthcoming history of talent agencies in a later period.

 

Sigal is a screenwriter, novelist and a former Hollywood agent whose firm represented, among others, Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Jack Palance, Joseph Cotten and Peter Lorre.

 

—from the Los Angeles Times, December 24, 1009

a new translation of vivant denon’s point de lendemain

 

Vivant Denon’s No Tomorrow (Point de Lendemain), now translated by Lydia Davis!

 

The famous opening sentences, which Milan Kundera admired for "the playful elegance of repetition in the first paragraph of one of the loveliest pieces of French prose:"

 

J’aimais éperdument la comtesse de ——; j’avais vingt ans, et j’étais ingénu; elle me trompa, je me fâchai, elle me quitta. J’étais ingénu, je la regrettai; j’avais vingt ans, elle me pardonna; et comme j’avais vingt ans, que j’étais ingénu, toujours trompé, mais plus quitté, je me croyais l’amant le mieux aimé, partant le plus heureux des hommes.

 

Davis’ translation:

 

I was desperately in love with the Comtesse de —— ; I was twenty years old and I was naive. She deceived me, I got angry, she left me. I was naive, I missed her. I was twenty years old, she forgave me, and, because I was twenty years old, because I was naive—still deceived, but no longer abandoned—I thought myself to be the best-loved lover, and therefore the happiest of men.

 

 

Davis’ translation reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, November 13, 2009:

 

Peter Brooks opens his fascinating introduction to Lydia Davis’s translation of Vivant Denon’s novella by asserting that "No Tomorrow may be the most stylish erotic tale ever written. Erotic, while not at all pornographic". Set over the course of one night and the following morning, it is the lush account of the seduction of the twenty-year-old narrator by the beautiful Mme de T ——, who knows that he is in love with her friend the Comtesse de——. A game of love and sex played out with the consent, it emerges, of Mme de T——’s lover, closes with her parting words "Don’t give the Countess cause to quarrel with me".

 

Point de Lendemain was first published anonymously in 1777, five years before Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses, in which such stratagems were given a more brutal twist. Brooks refers to the "male fantasy" aspects of Denon’s libertine work, and draws profitably on Marcel Mauss’ s theory of the gift — "the eighteenth century’ s erotic version of the ‘potlatch"’. He reveals that Balzac so admired Denon’s conte that he recycled it in his Physiologie du mariage (1829). Milan Kundera, it could be added, also paid homage, in his novella La Lenteur (1993).

 

Vivant Denon (de Non, before the Revolution) was born in 1747 into minor French nobility. He became a favourite of Louis XV and spent seven years with the French embassy in Naples where he developed an interest in antiquities. A skilled engraver, he accompanied Napoleon on his Egyptian campaign and published his Travels through Lower and Upper Egypt in 1802. Napoleon later appointed him first Director of the Louvre. He died in 1825. Point de Lendemain is his only work of fiction.

 

Lydia Davis’s translation is equal to the challenges of Denon’s formal , elaborate prose, and there is little to choose between her version and the excellent one produced by David Coward in 1995. Where Denon writes "Le château ainsi que les jardins, appuyés contre une montagne, descendaient en terrasse jusque sur les rives de la Seine", Davis gives us: "The château as well as the gardens, resting against a mountainside, descended in terraces to the banks of the Seine", while Coward goes for the topographically more realistic " … built on the side of a hill, sloped down in terraces to the Seine". Elsewhere, the narrator tells us "J’étais d’ailleurs trop ému pour me rendre compte de ce que j’éprouvais"; Davis renders it "Besides, I was too moved to realize what I was experiencing", while Coward gives us "But truth to tell l was too distraught to know what I felt". Both appear to fit. This elegant edition reproduces Denon’s original text. which remains, by common consent, a masterpiece.

the last chapter of the log of the s.s. the mrs unguentine

X

 

Years passed. Eons. Eras without temples. Through rusting twigs, through the struts of the dome gnawed annually higher by daring termites, the sun rose, fell, rose; things flaked, things peeled, things vanished into earth and mud and brackish water, into the formless cocoon to be mixed and moulded into whatever had the energy to sprout through and have another go. I had seen it all before. It was the same awake, the same asleep. I knew by heart that if in daytime the wind blew strong and flattened the blades of grass out on the marsh, then at night it would drop and the air be silent, or that a cooling breeze would always follow a hot day, dispel the haze. Yet I did what I could. A year I spent catching up with all the correspondence neglected over the decades, that my old friends might have some notion of what had finally become of me and how my life had turned out, how I came to live in seclusion among old mirrors and deep carpets, endless chambers, atop some highest building in a great and angry city into w hose concert halls I was limousined once a month, to hear a gloomy symphony; how I lived in exile, in oases, behind ramparts of palms and aqueducts and spraying fountains, walls inlaid with intricate tiles, in the middle of a blazing desert inhabited only by morose brigands whose camels had the gout, how I fed them dates, taught their children French; or my life in northern mountains, the great stone house set amid trackless miles of evergreens half buried in the snow nine months of the year, the walls upstairs and down lined with books, my reading, my lives, my lies I told them all. For I could not speak of the sea. The sea was there, was all, beyond the mud and ooze of the floating marsh, too close to be chattered about. When I finally sealed up those hun­dred and fifty letters pasted with the bankrupt republic‘s worthless postage stamps which depicted the S. S. The Mrs Unguentine cutting through the waves in all her ancient splendour, a tiny smear of dots and hatchmarks to the right forming two seated figures, perhaps Unguen­tine and I at the breakfast table granting a cheerful salute with waving arms, again and again, a hundred and fifty times, those arms, licked, pasted, cancelled away under the postmark once bestowed upon me, honorary postmistress of the high seas, and which read simply BARGE. I tied them all up into bundles and sealed them inside a sheet of plastic, then fitted them into a wooden box roped with life preservers. There were still pools of water around the barge, narrow estuaries which flowed out to sea and sometimes ran sweet, sometimes salty; I dropped the box into one of these and watched it float away. It didn’t get far. Fifty yards at the most, where it ran aground on a mudbank and stayed forever after.

 

The barge called, however. My health was perfect, my body the repository of a long life of vigorous exercise, fresh sea air, a simple diet, and I could not remain inactive amid the weary throes of the old vessel; she had to be tended, aided, propped. Unguentine’s mechanical trees could be death-traps. More than once while raking up the gardens I was caught out there by a wind suddenly rising, momentarily seduced by the clatter of the leaves and padded boughs, until the groan of bending metal would tell me something was going to fall, was falling-but which? Which teetering? Where to run? The huge green claw, hairs of metal hissing, would swoop down past me inches away and strike the earth with a rustling bang, whirrings, a tinkle of bells, with a shower of sparks and a puff of smoke shooting out of the stump at the point where it had rusted through. They always made such a mess. Their white stuffing would waft about the garden for days and days, noxious and impotent pollen. Metal branches that I tripped over and got caught up in like barbed wire. Leaves that would not yellow. The odor of rotting mattresses. One by one they fell down over the years. I managed to cover most of them up by sewing together a dozen trunkloads of old clothes and linen, into huge motley muffs which I draped over them like furniture covers, securing them tightly with cords staked into the ground. Thus they stood or lay and seemed to float about the garden, bloated forms marked with the puzzle-pattern of ancient wardrobes, until my plantings of honeysuckle and wistaria would finally cover them, consume what they could of them; if ever.

 

Things still grew, except trees, except the livestock which died oft fell overboard, waded or swam away. I didn’t mind. It was quieter without them. I had my vegetable patch. Potatoes and yams mainly a few carrots and greens, a tomato plant or two towards the bow end of the barge, up high on the right in a clear and sunny space with a southern exposure and where, on account of the barge’s list, the trees fell the other way. Water I carried in buckets from the stern pump uphill to my vegetables, tasting it each day to make certain it was still fresh. Most things I ate raw, laying out a tablecloth on the ground on the high side of the vegetable patch, with a basin of water, a sharp knife, a plate, a napkin, and I would sit there a while in silence and look over the short rows and tops of green, then wander amongst my plants to pull up a carrot or pick a tomato, return to my spot and wash them, eat them, perhaps return for more. I took my time. They grew slowly, I had no wish to rush them. With dinner I would watch the sun setting through the twisted struts of the dome, stove in here and there and glassless except where beaded gleams of sunlight indicated a sliver still resisting the winds, and all across the marsh long-legged birds would settle in for the night, vanish in the grass; a mist might begin to rise, and off in the distance the hoarse barkings of seals and sea lions, moments when the surf only sighed, not pounded. Perhaps it was they who drove in those tiny fish like sardines which came close to the barge in shallow water,L beneath its silvered surface, and bred there before my very eyes, on and on, swarms that came and went. Cold months I sometimes netted up a few and fried them over the fire in the pilot-house, now galley, now bedroom, now my little house with water lapping at the sill since that day when the hull finally gave out and flooded everything below deck.

 

I remember the evacuation. It took almost a week. In all those years of solitude it was the one time I raised my voice and called in desperation for Unguentine, to have his help, his guidance, his ingenuity. Otherwise, I scarcely missed him. I wanted to recount to him my adventure in the bilge below the stern deck when I was wandering around down there to see how all the bulk­heads and pipes and machines were doing, all that ironwork rusting away, neglected, silent, sealed off for so many years. I was armed with a board on account of my fear of rats and snakes, and happened to thrust the end of it against the hull near the old propeller shaft. It went clear through, to my amazement, and with no more resistance than a pie-crust. Hastily I withdrew it, expect­ing to be enveloped in a shower of water or a jumbled whirlpool, be pursued or floated up the stairs and shot into the air as the whole barge crumbled into pieces and sank into the mud and water, leaving me adrift in the marsh, alone, muddy, clutching at the last debris of what had been. But no, nothing happened. I bent down and peered through the hole. The light was dim; I could see nothing. Finally I dared reach into it and succeeded in withdrawing a handful of black muck and white roots, whereupon there began to flow a small trickle of dank water. I sensed I was about to have a flood on my hands. Indeed, within minutes it grew into a hardy spout, belching and erectile, its surging spray spotted with a multitude of tiny frogs, fish, the bright leaves of water-cress. I stood on a box, wondered what to do. There were things to be moved upstairs and above deck. Which? Which first? Which second? I ran. Most of the hatchways were rusted and jammed open, and even those. I succeeded in closing in the path of the cheerfully babbling stream did no good: the bulkheads were cracked and fissured all over the barge below deck and the water quickly found the way. But still I could not decide. So I simply moved everything I could carry above deck with the intention of sorting it out later up there, down to a few treasured possessions which I would stow in the skiff and on the swimming platform. It was a frenzied week. Laden down with bundles and boxes, dragging trunks and suitcases behind me, I staggered and crawled up those narrow stairs hundreds of times, day and night, with pots and pans and dishware, sacks of potatoes, bedding, small tables, chairs, box upon box of Unguentine’s tools and materials, nautical instruments, ropes, cables; my rugs, my curtains and countless things I knew I could never use but felt compelled to save from those rising waters. And I would have gone on after the water was knee-deep, would even have attempted to learn how to unbolt the cabinets in the galley, dismantle the stove, save an attractive oil-lamp in the old engine­room-had it not been for the rats, flushed out in ever greater numbers from hiding-places I had not known about before, thank God. I gave up, sealed closed the hatchway above the stairs, laid myself down on it and fell immediately into the sleep of utter exhaustion.

 

I slept perhaps for days. When I awoke and raised my head to find myself surrounded by heaps of house­hold goods and bloated tree tents, a flea-market, a warehouse of damaged goods, a circus in disorder, amid all this unaccountable debris, I could have gone back to sleep and left it at that, finally unaccountable. There had been no beginnings. There would be no end. In this vast rangeland of junk I would awaken now and then, tidy up here and there, make false order, sleep again, wake up anew in another chaos, do my work anew, resume sleep. And when after several weeks it became apparent that the barge had no intention of sinking, or was unable to, was, perhaps, solidly encased in a mud life’ preserver a quarter of a mile in diameter, I saw how foolish I had been and realized that the time had come to simplify my life. I had no need of museums, collec­tions, mementoes. So I opened up the hatch to the stairs below deck and into that dark well of sloshing water I threw back all I had dragged upstairs. Grimly at first, calculating my losses, but gradually then with calm, until with joy, until song and liberations, until I filled it all up to the sill and closed the door, shoving the rest into the pond in the cargo hold. I saved only a few kitchen utensils, dishes, some blankets, two changes of clothes and a heavy coat for winter.

 

Jauntily, suitcase in hand, I walked over to the pilot­house and moved in. It was a small place, nine by six, but ample for my needs. The pilot wheel I succeeded in unscrewing, hung above the window; the other levers and controls I left as they were to drape my clothes over, air the bedding on. A small mattress already lay on a row of footlockers; these I dragged outside and pried open one afternoon: more old clothes, papers, letters I had stored away decades before and which I now shoved overboard with only the briefest of visits from my fingers. There was a small box of photographs all curled up and yellowed, photographs of Unguentine in athletic poses perhaps identical to ones he now held elsewhere­—on another barge, with another woman? Of myself embraced by a forgotten landscape, young thing, un­knowing, unwise, no doubt peering through time to this moment of being able to gaze back on it all, but still unknowing, unwise, tossing it all over the railing to a shallow splash. They floated on and on, taking days to submerge. Lilies, water faces, friends, family, pets. The mud eventually claimed them. As they silted deeper and deeper in they might fossilize, those faces, to be touched by a germ of life eons hence, to move again, breed again, be photographed again.