Southern Bookman

Hemingway and Gellhorn Hit the Small Screen

I'm looking forward to the HBO film "Hemingway and Gellhorn," to be broadcast Monday night. The movie will look at the relationship of Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, herself a renowned journalist and novelist. From what I've read, it appears as if the movie will be fairly true to life.

Clive Owen plays Hemingway and Nicole Kidman Gellhorn. The two writers' affair and subsequent marriage played out during the Spanish Civil War and World War II, when the much younger Gellhorn was reaching her prime and Hemingway had already done much of his best work, although years of stories and novels would follow.

Hemingway, one of the characters in Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris," looks to have continued appeal 50 years after his death. No doubt a movie is in the works about F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, especially with the latest film version of "The Great Gatsby" imminent.

Ken Kesey's "Magic Trip"

In one of those serendipitous discoveries, I found that Comcast's On-Demand is showing a documentary on Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' psychedelic trip across the United States in a painted bus called "Further." Although the hour was late and sleep called, I had to immediately watch "Magic Trip," the History Channel-funded film.

The film, pieced together from movies taken by Kesey and crew on the trip (the initial motive for the journey was to make a film), was exhilarating and hilarious, although the antics of the proto-hippies now seem ill-conceived, jejune and wasteful.

How wonderful and relevatory to see characters in "living color" I'd only read about previously. Kesey with his physical power and charisma, bursts from the screen. Neal Cassidy, the hero of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," also shows his legendary physical dynamism and electric non-stop raps. Although he was constantly on speed, driving through the night and talking even when no one is listening except for the microphone, Cassidy despite his love of nutty,unexpected adventures comes off as an adult, knowing how to change tires and get out of frequent scrapes with the highway patrol. Cameo appearances are made by an amusingly proper Larry McMurtry,  perplexed when his old Stanford chum Kesey and the Pranksters show up at his home in a rarified Houston neighborhood, a sadly diminished Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. A young and beardless Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead play a significant role in the film's look at the famed Kesey acid tests, the subject of a book by Tom Wolfe (not even mentioned).

The less famous members of the crew come off as silly, confused, bewildered, infantile and mentally derangedl. I felt something like pity for them, along with the sick fascination of watching impaired people acting out their delusions. One or two of them show intelligence in commenting upon the experience. Others are just children trapped in Kesey's artistic and social experiment.

Frequent LSD trips mark the cross-country journey. Kesey is an early LSD apostle, although the film shows Timothy Leary and Ram Dass shunning the group when it shows up at Kesey's LSD experimental station in New York. Kesey first took acid as part of a government-funded experiment at Stanford. The experiment is shown is excruciating detail, with Kesey recording his observations in a tape recorder, then in an interview with a nurse who may be a Nurse Ratched prototype. Kesey's psychedelic visions sound pretty much like any other acid trip, showing how mundane and unordinary the so-called "revelations" really were.

Like other "happenings" and political street theater projects of the time, the trip of Further doesn't hold up aethetically. Most of the crews' antics while on acid don't appear very imaginative and innovative. Yet, the film, with its comments from Kesey and Cassidy and its constant attempt to show the context of the times, still possesses great charm and energy. As with Andy Warhol's similar aesthetic experiments with a crew of acolytes, Kesey's experiment looks like a grand failure. At the end, he turned against the counter-culture folks who kept showing up at his Oregon farm, and the widespread use of acid, although he kept maintaining the value of its use for select visionaries such as himself.

Kesey says to an unnamed interviewer who sounds like "Fresh Air's" Terry Gross that he kept writing to the end. Yet, at least in posthumous works that have been published so far, he never reached the heights of his earlier works, the classic "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," and "Sometimes a Great Notion." Kesey wasted much creative energy in the Magic Trip. While the film is amusing, I wish we would have had instead later, artistically mature, books from Kesey.

By the way, I was glad to hear Kesey say he didn't like the movie made from "Cuckoo's Nest," although he liked the Broadway play (Kirk Douglas played Randall McMurphy.) Kesey thought the movie, starring Jack Nicholson, focused too much on the conflict between McMurphy and the Big Nurse. On reviewing the movie several years ago, I hated the misogynistic portrayal of Ratched, although Louise Fletcher won an Academy Award for her performance.

....Note: Terry Daughtery, interviewed by Southern Bookman after his fine biography on Donald Bartheleme, will have a biography out this month on "Catch 22" writer Joseph Heller. A riveting excerpt is in this month's Vanity Fair. 

Remembering Ernest Hemingway

The media mania for anniversaries is taking hold with the 50th anniversary of Ernest Hemingway's suicide. On July 2, 1961, Hemingway at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, blew out his brains with a shotgun while his wife, Mary, slept. In the last week, I've read two pieces on Hemingway, the latest in Saturday's New York Times by Hemingway pal and biographer A.E. Hotchner. The gist of Hotchner's piece was that Hemingway wasn't delusional in thinking that FBI agents were tapping his phone and following him; Hotchner found through a Freedom of Information Act receipt of documents that J. Edgar Hoover's spooks really were following the author. As the saying goes, attributed to San Francisco music writer Ralph J. Gleason, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not really out to get you.

Hemingway's Paris years after World War I continue their romantic pull, as in Woody Allen's movie "Midnight in Paris." Last year, I read the "unedited" version of Heminway's "A Moveable Feast," which restored parts reportedly removed by Mary. The book's image of the young, idealistic Hemingway is an admirable contrast to the outsized self-parody he became.

Hotchner in his New York Times piece quotes Hemingway speaking, his voice sounding like one of those bad Hemingway contests. By the end, paranoid and depressed and having lost the ability to concentrate on his writing, Hemingway decided to end it all.

No matter how unlikable I find the late Hemingway, I'll always admire much in his work. Many of his short stories continue to live for me among works I'll continue to reread. His novels I consider lesser works, but I plan to one day reread "The Sun Also Rises," which I loved in college. 

Hemingway's death 50 years ago marks the end of a time in American culture when novelists were still venerated and the masculine ideal was far different. It was the height of American power, when the Cold War was raging, when deep and powerful cultural currents were evoking major changes. Yet, a rereading of Heminway's early short stories, like other classic works, reveal the unchangeability of the human heart.

Larry McMurtry's "Hollywood" Glitters With Star Power

The wonderful Texas writer Larry McMurtry has given us another volume of his chatty, episodic memoirs, this one about his experiences in Hollywood as a screenwriter/producer. As with his previous memoirs on his bookselling and writing lives, McMurtry writes in a conversational, ruminative style that's highly entertaining. He pokes fun at readers and himself with a comment about complaints he's received about his short chapters; some of them in this book are two or three paragraphs long.

The book is really a series of vignettes, or snapshots, of Hollywood folks he's encountered, from Diane Keaton to Peter Bognanovich and Cybill Shepherd. He calls Keaton a great friend, and gives some of his most thorough dishing in discussing how Peter and Cybill grew to be a couple during the filming of "The Last Picture Show."

Another interesting chapter or two concerns another classic made from one of his novels, "Terms of Endearment." He talks about a dinner at the home of Jennifer Jones, who wanted the lead role in the movie, which later went to Shirley MacLaine. He also covers the making of "Hud" and "Lonesome Dove" and his experiences producing/writing the Oscar-winning "Brokeback Moutain."  One of his most memorable character sketches is that of the late superagent Irving "Swifty" Lazar, whom McMurtry estimates cost him $15 million in clumsy negotiations for "Lonesome Dove."

Some critics will call McMurtry's book superficial, commercially exploitive and so forth. But McMurtry in his comments on the movie business and movie stars gives more insight in a brief chapter than can be found in most door-stopping tomes on "Film" or "The Cinema." He does complain a bit much about having to attend awards banquets -- oh, the horror -- but overall McMurtry again diplays his unique blend of worldliness, cynicism, wonder, Texas cowboy shrewdness, romanticism, and wry whimsy.

Evoking Mark Twain and Willie Morris

Last night, I happened to catch the last half of Ken Burns' PBS portrait of Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain. For some reason, I'd never heard of it before, although the show had apparently been done some time ago, since it included comments by the late William Styron.

The show gave a touching portrait of Clemens and his family life. It also presented an in-depth account of Clemens' writing of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." I particularly found meaningful and insightful the exploration of "Huckleberry Finn," including appreciations by Dick Gregory, Russell Banks and Styron, among others.

The Clemens production showed Burns at his best. I thought his "Ciivl War" series was strong, but he succumbed to self-indulgence in the overblown "Baseball" and "Jazz" series.

Although he was not included, the Twain/Clemens broadcast summoned to me the ghost of Willie Morris. I woke up during the night, aware of Willie's presence. I suppose the show's portrayal of Clemens' recollections of his boyhood in the writing of "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" reminded me of Morris' excellent memoir "North Toward Home," based on his boyhood in Yazoo City, Miss.

When I was at the recent Faulkner Conference in Oxford, Miss., I also thought about Morris a few times. After a tumultuous career in New York, where he was the groundbreaking editor of Harper's, Morris returned to Mississippi as the writer in residence at Ole Miss. Before his death, he sparked a literary flowering in Oxford.

Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain and Willie Morris. Such essential American voices endure and speak to us, no matter the momentary chattering and noise that at times overwhelm us.

The Summer of Slow Reading

This August, I'm in one of my periodic lulls in which I don't find any fiction to engage me. I've tried Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" and David Mitchell's "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet." While I could see strong literary skill in the opening chapters of both books, neither captivated me enough to make me want to spend weeks reading them. When I was younger, I could fully enter an author's literary world, escaping my own time and place. But now, as in the case of Mitchell and Mantel, I don't disappear into another place; the writing is too apparent, creating a barrier rather than a magic escape hatch such as Alice fell through.

Recently, James Wood in the New Yorker, in reviewing "The Thousand Autumns," confessed that he doesn't like long, involved  historical novels like "Wolf Hall" and Mitchell's book. While I point out that all novels are essentially historic novels, I'm like Wood in usually being unable to find a novel set in a distant time believable and interesting. In general, I find the nonfiction, or as nonfiction as it can get, history more compelling. 

I've also struck out this summer on novels by Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, although I enjoyed Sam Lipsyte's "The Ask." Now I'm trying Per Petterson's "I Curse the River of Time." Yep, it's a historical novel too, taking place in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall. At least I actually lived through that time. I like Petterson's minimalistic writing style, and getting an impression of the atmosphere of Oslo and nearby Denmark. His style has a surrealistic mystery to it that reminds me of Bergman films. I'm hopeful of finishing it, but the story of a depressed, alienated Norwegian ... not exactly a laugh riot. 

Faulkner and Film: The Cinematic Dimension of His Imagination

The 37th Faulkner Conference at Ole Miss, exploring Faulkner & Film, combined my interests in writing and movies. With speakers exploring Faulkner's experience as a Hollywood scriptwriter, movies made from his books and how his work influenced film and vice versa, the conference was provacative, informative and inspiring.

I particularly enjoyed the talks by professors Julian Morphet, Robert Jackson and Phil Smith. Julian's "Faulner in the Histories of Film" expressed a belief in the higher language of the movies, a visual, dreamlike narrative style that Hollywood films all too often have fallen short of. Bob concentrated on how often Faulkner participated in collaboration, not only in the movie busienss, but in his novels. His talk showed Faulkner as a professional, working writer, not reluctant to make changes in his work and willing to incorporate sensationalistic features to seek commercial success. Phil's piece, expressing his love for "The Wild Palms," and identifying Faulkner as a "punk" writer incorporated effective, highly entertaining high tech features.

Later, Julian warmly discussed his ideas with me, and generously welcomed me to the table at a picnic at Rowan Oak, Faulkner's home. Later, Phil invited me to join the Film/Faulkner scholars for drinks at the City Grocery on the Oxford square, where I enjoyed an engaging conversation with Bob on film history, Southern writers and journalists in the civil rights movement and other topics. Phil and Peter Lurie were convivial companions as well. Jay Watson of Ole Miss, a native of Athens, Ga., excited me with an informal discussion of the last chapter of the "Sound and the Fury," matching Faulkner's narrative with landmarks of the square. I was honored by the friendship of these princely fellows, welcoming an old newspaperman into their company.

I also enjoyed meeting Riche Richardson, a daughter of the South now an associate professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University. Rene (should have accent on second e) gave a dynamite paper on how Oprah's selection of three Faulkner novels for her book club. A graduate of Atlanta's Spellman College and Duke University, Rene is a wondeful scholar and gracious young woman. I am glad that I happened to run into her in the Memphis Airport and was able to bid her farewell.

With all of the discussion of Faulkner and Film, I enjoyed most of all two sessions that concentrated on Faulkner's writing exclusively. These were the two "Faulkner and teaching" sessions. Professor Theresa Towner was an enthusiastic team leader, along with James B. Carothers, a wonderful Faulkner scholar who gave me a new status to which to aspire, being a "Faulknerian."

At the next day's teaching session, ably led by Charles A. Peek and Terrill A. Tebbetts, I found a beautiful friend. When I displayed my ignorance of Faulkner's story "Barn Barning" during a discussion, this lovely lady turned to me and kindly explained to me the story. Her knowledge of Faulkner matched, if not exceeded, the scholars on the panels. Later, I found that she was a native Louisianian and LSU graduate. Funny, we never told each other our names.

At the end of the second day, I was glad to know that I'd made a small contribution to the conference. On the first day, the speakers had passed out index cards seeking ideas for discussion, and I'd written on mine Faulkner and the King James Bible. The next day, Mr. Peek mentioned the King James as an essential source for teachers. With all due respect to the film scholars who spoke, I still believe that the King James Bible is a much greater influence on Faulkner's work than films.

I also enjoyed the warmth and friendliness of Seth Berner, consummate collector of Faulkner memorabilia. (www.bernerbooks.com). An attorney in Portland, Maine, Seth also sells rare Faulkner books, movie posters and on and on.

What's truly remarkable is how vital Faulkner's work is. I was surprised and delighted at how younger scholars there expressed an excitement for his work. The discussions of Faulkner kept raising in my mind the idea that Faulkner is in the same league as Shakespeare. Dickens also came to mind.

In short,  the Faulkner conference inspired me to want to be a more knowledgeable "Faulknerian," and read and reread much more of his work. Another benefit of the conference: I now know how to pronounce "Yoknapatawpha." I guess they teach that in grad school.

 

 

Looking at Faulkner's Relationship to Film

After flying from Boston to Memphis, I rode down the interstate to Oxford, Miss. for the Faulkner and Film conference at the University of Mississippi. The speakers, from across the globe, strongly support how writing for the movies influenced Faulkner's fiction.

Tonight, we're supposed to see a Russian film from 1991 based on Faulkner's obscure short story "The Leg." The film takes the story from World War I to the Russian incursion into Afghanistan. Last night, we sa Howard Hawks film written by Faulkner and Joel Sayre. The film, "The Road to Glory," starred a young Frederic March, Lionel Barrymore and familiar Hollywood character actors of the 1930s. The film was disjointed and quite slow at times, but had some interesting visual scenes, including some cannibalized from a French film that 20th Century Fox's Darryl F. Zanuck bought and ordered Hawks to create a film around. The conference makes clear that Faulkner at times was a much more proficient Hollywood survivor than F. Scott Fitzgerald, who nevertheless used the Hollywood experience much more explicity, especially in "The Last Tycoon." 

The lectures are next door to the Music Building, where today I found an unused piano to play for a while. The conference is quite stimulating, especially meeting teachers. It's amazing that Faulkner's work is at the center of a vast global universe of academic work and speculation.  

That concludes the brief, disconnected update. I'll write more on the Faulkner conference upon returning to Atlanta.

Recalling Christopher Isherwood

Watching the movie "The Single Man" with Colin Firth and Julianne Moore brought back my Christopher Isherwood phase, 25 or 30 years ago, when I read several of Isherwood's books. That was also the time of my Graham Greene phase, but that's another story.

After the movie "Caberet," I read Isherwood's "Berlin Stories," with the famous beginning "I am a camera." Then I read as much of his work as I could find, including "A Single Man." I liked his taut, old-school mandarian style, its sardonic, stylish tone unable to stop heartbreak and despair from breaking through. The interplay and conflict between the main character's high literary culture and British eduction and the glitzy, unrooted culture of Los Angeles and Hollywood charged the books with tension and foreboding.

Directed, written and produced by Tom Ford, the movie version of "A Single Man" gets closer to the heart of Isherwood's work than the overly sentimentalized "Caberet," which I still love. Colin Firth's perfomance as the grief-stricken professor George Falconer deserves the praise it received. Julianne Moore again shows herself a marvel. 

The story takes place in November 1962, in the aftermath of the Cuban missle crisis. A major theme is the pervasive fear at the time over nuclear annhiliation, with the global Cold War with the Soviet Union reaching its zenith. Despite the characters' anxiety, the movie made me longe for the era. The movie evokes the time with its well-designed, lovely products, such as the vintage Mercedes that Falconer drives. The clocks, the furrniture, the clothes all speak of a sense of aesthetics and elegance soon to be blown away.

Firth's face changes from scene to scene. His English drawl recalls Michael Caine, and his thick glasses and lovely suits made me think of George "Superman" Reeves as Clark Kent. He also reminded me of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who would be slain exactly a year after the events of the movie. Like Kennedy, Falconer represents a world of culture, learning and refinement swept away by the '60s counterculture. This new cultural energy is brilliantly shown in the outstanding scene of the sad dinner party between Falconer and Julianne Moore's lovesick Charley. The tipsy couple get together to dance, and Charley changes the record from the jazz classic "Stormy Weather" to Booker T. and the MGs' "Green Onions." They awkwardly, then increasingly abandonly, do the twist, then collapse in exhaustion to the floor. That brief sequence embodies the huge cultural and social swifts of the next few years.

The film is loaded with literary references. One striking one is that George's class is studying Aldous Huxley's "After Many a Summer Dies the Swan." Aldous Huxley, also a member of the Britisith literary expatriates in Los Angeles who would dabble with psychedelic drugs and mystical religion. That whole mileu is fascinating; acute sensibilities bred in tradition and literary culture captivated by sensuality and psychic experimentation. Also there in the L.A. scene were such worthies as Thomas Mann and the composers Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, seeking to transplant European culture to the far Pacific coast.

Isherwood's old chum W.H. Auden, who also left England for the New World before World War II, would remain in New York and cling to the old culture, finding solace in traditional Christianity. Watching "A Single Man" bids me to reread Auden's poems of the era, which evoke the same despair, the same sense of the poetic and literary mind beset by America's consumer culture, love of speed, power and new money. The two worlds could reach common ground: I first heard of Auden when I saw him on the Johnny Carson show.

 

A Bomb Worth Detonating

I recently discovered the art/literature/film/music quarterly Bomb, although it's apparently been publishing since 1981. With the vagaries of newsstand display, I just noticed the mag showing up at my neighborhood Barnes & Noble.

In contrast to literary journals, Bomb has a full magazine format, with glossy pages and a big helping of colar art and photographs. The editorial theme is "conversations between artiststs, writers, actors, directors, musicians." The magazine includes "First Proof," a literary supplement with original fiction and poems.

I picked up the spring 2010 issue, number 111, because of interviews with Sam Lipsyte and Charles Bernstein, because I'd recently read Lipsyte's bleakly funny novel "The Ask" and Bernstein's selected poems collection "All of the Whiskey in Heaven."

The Lypyte interview is conducted by the writer Christopher Sorrentino, whose works I've been wanting to read for some time. I was a fan of his father, Gilbert Sorrentino, a master of postmodern fiction. The conversation betwqeen Chris Sorrentino and Lipsyte is an interesting meditation on fiction and writing techniques.

I haven't gotten around to the Bernstein interview, but I expect it to be an in-depth discussion of postmodern poetry, especially Bernstein's Language poetry school. Bomb also has an interview with actress Patricia Clarkson, known for her work with Woody Allen. Although the introduction doesn't mention it, I also liked her work on "Six Feet Under" as the neo-hippie sister of the funeral home matriarch played by Frances Conroy.

With its focus on our most notable artists, writers, actors and directors, Bomb will be a worthy addition to my relenteless reading menu.