Stuff I’ve Been Reading

— The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman
A re-read. It’s so definitive that any book covering the same period (and there are libraries full of them) must reference it. One of her real gifts as a writer is giving swift incisive personality-sketches of the many many players in that catastrophic month, and she does it so well that those sketches stick in your mind every time the person comes up again. You are able to orient yourself in that muddle of names and confusion and ego and panic. She also makes you feel the insane and disgusting inevitability of all of it, including why the war so quickly became – literally – entrenched.

— Agee on Film
I dip into his stuff all the time. His 1949 essay on silent comedians (focusing on Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon) is a classic, one of the great works of film criticism in the canon. But now I’m going cover to cover, a couple of reviews a day. His style is unfussy, sometimes very funny, he has a great critical sensibility. He refuses to be snowed. He admires many things, and is willing to admit the faults he perceives. In today’s day and age, with that Rotten Tomatoes bullshit, if you don’t RAVE UNEQUIVOCALLY about some movie – you are called on the carpet by outraged fans who basically wish every review was a studio-approved press release. 3-1/2 stars is an EXCELLENT rating on Ebert, but still, people flip OUT if you mention what doesn’t work. (Why read movie reviews then? I don’t understand.) Agee is a breath of fresh air. I love his writing style.

— From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, by Molly Haskell.
A classic of film criticism. I had never read it, although I’ve owned it for years. I finally thought, “Sheila. You need to get on the stick with this one. It’s called Playing Catch Up.” It’s one of those books where you realize, very early on, “Oh. This is why everyone talks about this book so much. Of course.” It was first published in the early 1970s. Haskell cares about the portrayal of women in film but in a different way than many advocates do today. In a lot of ways, her book was a corrective to the mainstream feminist attitude of her own day, which had a tendency towards, then as now, an anti-art prescriptive type of thing, mixed with a dismaying squicki-ness about sex. A deadly combo. Haskell leaves space for the Erotic, the Dark, the Ambiguous. She single-handedly rehabilitates Doris Day, for example, someone scorned in the 70s – and on through time – for being a virginal symbol of reactionary conformist milque-toast America (which wasn’t what Day was at ALL.). Haskell is pissed at the fact that “women’s films” get dismissed by male critics, and since there are more male critics than female critics, male critics set the agenda and the tone. Haskell’s work is a POWERFUL act of redress, and still a reminder of the importance of women’s voices and perspectives. It’s hard to believe that that has to even be said, but whatever, the world sucks, and so here we are. Great book.

— Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín.
The movie was one of my favorite movies last year. I’d have to sit on it a bit longer, but my initial reaction was: “That movie is perfect. There is nothing wrong with it.” The fact that it tells, almost exactly, the story of my great-grandmother is probably part of my overwhelming response to it. I love Tóibín’s work (I read his Testament of Mary last year) but had never read Brooklyn. One of the things that really strikes me about the book is the plain-ness of its prose. He’s not flowery. He’s not sentimental-nostalgic-Irish. He describes what Eilis does. He describes what she feels, but he does so in the same language that he describes what she does. She puts on her shoes, she studies at night, she takes the trolley, and she thinks about her mother and sister back in Ireland, and has feelings and impressions of America, and all that … but Tóibín gilds no lilies. That’s part of the power of the book. And BOY does he get women. So many male authors insist on writing women characters and they don’t realize how much they objectify their character. They are doing it unconsciously. (Hi, Don DeLillo, how ya doin’?) Objectification is fine if that’s part of the point you are trying to make. But when you’re telling a story from the perspective of the woman, and you somehow go to great lengths to let us know what the character looks like …. well. You’re fucking up. You cannot resist letting us know the woman’s surface. Eilis is never described. She could look like anything. She could look like Saoirse Ronan, sure, but there are no defining characteristics. You get to know her through what she does, what she thinks about, and what she feels and observes. It’s a powerful example for other male authors. Stop drooling over your female characters, boys. There were a couple of changes made to the script adaptation, changes that served the story of the film. It streamlined it. Eilis’ brothers vanish from the film. That’s fine, because the story in the film is about Eilis missing her sister Rose. But everything else was pretty much as is. The final shot of the film, so evocative and potentially ambiguous, is not “in” the book. So there is a bit of a cliff-hanger “still up in the air” thing going on in the book … but the final shot of the film could also be seen as a cliff-hanger, I suppose. I finished the book yesterday and the conversation Eilis has with her mother near the end of the book was lifted nearly word for word for the film, but it still killed me. It killed me in the film and it killed me in the book. The mother’s first question: “Is he nice?” I just … can’t. That that’s the first thing she asks.

— The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May, by Mark Danielewski.
Part one of a trilogy. I can think of only two books that gave me actual nightmares. As in, I-woke-up-screaming-drenched-in-sweat nightmares. Stephen King’s The Mist and Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves. I wrote about that mind-fuck of a book here. I couldn’t get through Danielewski’s Only Revolutions: A Novel, and I tried, but I just couldn’t do it. If you’ve read his work, you know the challenges. In House of Leaves, there are some sections where you need to turn the book upside down to follow the text. There are some sections you have to hold up to a mirror. A magnifying glass would be helpful too. It doesn’t come off as a gimmick, though: it serves the story, especially in House of Leaves which is about, among other things, spatial disorientation. He also can WRITE. Boy, can this man write. I’m not sure what his “style” would be, but I think one of his gifts is that of a mimic. He can take on different voices, which he does in House of Leaves (the dry-academic-research main text, the hallucinatory tattoo-artist-biker-boy narrative voice in the footnotes – both come easily to this writer) – and so far The Familiar is all about his gift with different voices. It’s a fractured story, with multiple narrators, all taking place on the same day in May. There’s a drug addict in Singapore. There are multiple characters in Los Angeles (an epileptic questioning 11-year-old girl, her game-coding father, her psychologist-in-training mother, a Turkish-American version of Philip Marlowe, a Latino gang member who runs a dog-fight operation, a la Michael Vick, a confused Armenian cab driver). There’s more. The book leaps around in space/time. I am not sure how they all are connected. Each are living their own lives, but each are starting to hear something … a cry, a yelp, three pulses of sound … represented by three pink dots, sitting alone on a white page … and they don’t know what the sound is. I can’t put it down. I love all of these different voices. There’s something Joycean at work here, and I don’t say that lightly. Danielewski futzes with English, making it do what he wants it to do. It’s not condescending. People “rap”, they riff, if they’re inarticulate then so are the words on the page, if they’re high then the words are incomprehensible, if English is their second language then the language on the page reflects that. VOICES emerge. Sometimes it’s tough going. Sometimes I have no idea what I’m reading. The book is filled with images, created (presumably) by Danielewski himself, who is a mad genius. Collages, and photo-negatives, watercolors and altered photographs … I have NO idea what is happening but I am loving every second of it, and so glad that there are two more books in the series.

— Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, by John Lahr.
Hooray! If you follow Tennessee Williams scholarship at all, then you know the deal with this book. Once upon a time, a theatre producer named Lyle Leverich was tapped by Tennessee Williams himself to write his biography. Williams knew the score. He authorized Leverich, in writing, TWICE, to do the deed. Unfortunately, the publishing world had no idea who Leverich was, Leverich had never published a book before, he wasn’t an “insider,” and so the publishing world did not “approve” that some up-start nobody would be “in charge” of the Williams narrative, and they put all their forces necessary into derailing Leverich. (Nice. You fucking morons.) Trying to cut Leverich off at the pass, one of the big publishers reached out to New Yorker theatre critic John Lahr, asking HIM to write a biography, and they would throw their weight behind THAT, in essence freezing Leverich out of the running. Lahr, thank God, said “No.” And instead he wrote a piece in The New Yorker about the estate, Leverich, publishing, and the challenges facing anyone tackling Williams. Good for Lahr. Leverich himself read the pice (of course), reached out to Lahr, and they began a friendship/correspondence. And, of course (and if you’re not aware that it’s “of course”, then now you know), Lyle Leverich’s first volume of the Williams autobiography, called Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams absolutely EXPLODED onto the scene in a way that few biographies ever do. The book is so stunning that I am actually thankful that it exists. How many books can you say that about? Lyle Leverich’s position as an outsider works so much in his favor that I hope those publishers are ashamed of themselves, although I doubt it. As a man of the theatre (as opposed to an academic), he understands what people like myself – a theatre person, essentially – want to hear and want to know. He fills in blanks in Williams’ early years that had never been done before. Williams, too, as a young man – as “Tom”, before he became Tennessee – is rendered so sensitively, so perfectly, that you end up feeling like you KNOW him. And so how hard he worked to give voice to his demons, how desperately he needed a PLACE to put all that he feared … comes across so vividly that it puts other biographies to shame. It is an essential biography, up there with A. Scott Berg’s Lindbergh and David McCullough’s definitive John Adams, perhaps one of the most popular biographies ever written. But that is just the first part of the story. Leverich ends Tom with Glass Menagerie opening on Broadway in 1945. There were 40 more years to go in Williams’ life, saved up for Volume II. Everyone who read the book waited with baited breath for volume II (similar to the waiting going on right now for Simon Callow’s final volume in his spectacular biography of Orson Welles. TICK TOCK CALLOW WHERE IS IT.) I kept my eye out for word on its progress. Then came the horrifying news: Lyle Leverich died. There would be no volume II. I remember Ted and I literally having a mournful conversation about this, desperately sad that we wouldn’t have Leverich to lead us through to the end. It was a tragedy. Come to find out: Leverich and Lahr, as mentioned, had become friends. Leverich said to Lahr, essentially, “If anything should happen to me, if I die suddenly, I want you to finish the biography.” Leverich put that in his will, bequeathing all his research, plus his stamp of approval, to John Lahr. I like John Lahr, don’t get me wrong. And if I can’t have Leverich, then I’ll take Lahr – another man of the theatre, as opposed to an academic – over anyone else. Lahr’s second volume eventually came out (last year? The year before?) to roars of approval, and I remember thinking that wherever Lyle Leverich is right now … I hope he heard those roars. He has been such an important part of contextualizing the great artist that was Tennessee Williams, removing the layers of myth and identity-politics and special-pleading that had taken over the Williams narrative following the artist’s death. It’s not that Williams needed rehabilitating. But he DID need contextualizing and a way to see the journey WHOLE. Leverich did that. Especially with the childhood stuff, which had been sketched-in, at best, before Tom. I just started the Lahr biography, which starts up on opening night of Glass Menagerie, and I’m only 10 pages in and it’s already made me cry. So there’s THAT. It is so filled with quotes from various sources that it feels like on-the-scene reportage: and THANK YOU FOR THAT, Mr. Lahr. Let the people who were there take over the narrative in their own words. Lahr doesn’t insert himself too much. It’s a cacophony of voices. I’m sure I’ll have more to say the further I get into it, but so far so good. I’m (somewhat) reconciled to the fact that the book is not by Lyle Leverich, and that pretty much says it all.