Open Seas: American Bacchanal

Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde by Loren Glass. 272 pp. Stanford University Press, 2013 [latterly republished as Rebel Publisher by Penguin, 2018].

Barney Rosset’s Grove Press published some of the most important and controversial writers of the 20th century and almost single-handedly conquered literary censorship in the USA. It did this with bravura and style. So where are the tributes, the retrospectives, the museum exhibitions? A small group of recent books and documentaries have begun to counter the strange neglect of Grove’s legacy. Loren Glass’s Counterculture Colophon, republished in paperback as Rebel Publisher, goes beyond Grove’s famed obscenity trials and explores its successful dissemination of avant-garde literature in postwar America.

In my twenties I used to find old Grove Press titles in obscure corners of Gould’s Book Arcade in Sydney’s Newtown. It was appropriate. Proprietor Bob Gould was a veteran Trotskyite and anti-war activist who’d battled Australia’s embarrassingly provincial censorship in the old days. That regime had been tougher, more narrow-minded, and more enduring than in the USA. Several times raided by the New South Wales Vice Squad, Gould had been charged in 1969 for selling posters of erotic Aubrey Beardsley drawings. After a long and ridiculous trial he was fined fifty cents.

Literary censorship effectively ended in Australia with the election of the Whitlam Government in 1972, although films were still occasionally banned. In his later years Gould would sit white-bearded and gruff behind the front counter of his chaotic, warehouse-sized bookshop. The shop was a perenial haunt for seekers of the happy oblivion of late night browsing under cold white flourescent bulbs. The size of his inventory was in absurd excess of anything manageable or sensible — a million or so disorganised books, towering in the shadowy upper-floor aisles or spilling across the dirty linoleum. In my experience he never refused to buy or exchange a pile of old books. His acquisitional habit was nothing short of a mania. “Bob wanted to have more books than anyone else on the planet,” his daughter Natalie told the Guardian in 2017. That’s why I consider it a matter of quiet pride that Gould once deemed my own book-buying habits as “pathological.” (I was at the time rummaging in a box beneath a trestle table at a huge charity book sale; Gould, evidently on his own scout, had lifted the tablecloth and squinted at me with disdain.)

Those Grove Press books I discovered in the vast depository at Gould’s were relics of the US censorship wars and its bacchanalian aftermath. Many had been printed in the US long before the Australian Government would have permitted their import. I was intrigued by the mystery of their trans-Pacific journey to Newtown. Gould sold categories of books that would never turn up elsewhere in Sydney; he’d also at some point acquired caches of books published behind the Iron Curtain by Progress Publishers (Moscow) and Seven Seas Books (Glinkastrasse, East Berlin). Most of these titles had sat on his shelves for years with pencilled prices oblivious to inflation.

1950s and 1960s Grove editions are worth collecting if only for their consistently stunning dust jackets or paperback covers designed by Roy Kuhlman, which should be as fetishized, reprinted, and monographed today as Reid Miles’s contemporaneous LP covers for Blue Note. Over the years I’ve bought a smattering. Although I can’t say I got around to reading them all, they give a representative indication of the publisher’s mission. (None of these books, you may notice, was written by a woman.) I’ve owned Grove’s unexpurgated editions of classic banned books—Henry Miller’s Tropics (1934-39), Quiet Days in Clichy (1956), and the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy (1949-59), Jean Genet’s Thief’s Journal (1949), and Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves (1922-27). I bought Breton’s Nadja (1928), Ionesco’s plays, Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948), André Pieyre de Mandiargues’s The Girl Beneath the Lion (1956), and Borges’s Ficciones (1956) and A Personal Anthology (1961). Grove also published young American writers, and because its imprimatur seemed a sufficient recommendation I ended up with either the very good or the very dated (and sometimes a mix of both): Robert Gover’s Here Goes Kitten (1964), Michael Rumaker’s Gringos (1967), the Tales of LeRoi Jones (1967), and the works of San Francisco Bay Area novelist Floyd Salas, whose novels Tattoo the Wicked Cross (1967) and especially What Now My Love (1969) remain on my shelves. In fact, I ended up publishing Floyd’s more recent work when I edited the journal Contrappasso. Probably the best of all my Grove bargain buys were The Olympia Reader (1965) and The Evergreen Review Reader 1957-1967 (1968), two fat anthologies derived respectively from the backlists of Maurice Girodias’s Paris-based English-language press and Grove’s wonderful house journal. The range of important international writers in each, amid the odd merely pornographic item, is extraordinary.

Loren Glass’s Countercultural Colophon draws on Max Weber’s concept of a ‘charismatic community’ to explain how Grove functioned under Barney Rosset’s leadership. Grove seems to have been less a commercial business—although it had its share of bestsellers—than a creative manifestation of Rosset’s lifelong political agitation and enthusiasms for sex and experimental art. Born to great wealth, Rosset was both an admirable class traitor and a singularly heedless businessman. He ultimately “squandered his entire fortune on Grove Press.” Bravo.

In the 1950s avant-garde art was slowly seeping into the American mainstream. Glass cites Serge Guilbaut’s research on abstract expressionist painting and how it contributed to New York’s eventual dislodgment of Paris as the international cultural centre. Grove’s literary activities down in Greenwich Village paralleled this historic shift. Glass writes:

“Grove effectively siphoned cultural capital from Paris to New York in the 1950s and 1960s, reprinting and translating authors it had acquired from Éditions de Minuit, Éditions Gallimard, Éditions du Seuil, and the Olympia Press, thereby establishing a reputation as the premier American disseminator of European avant-garde literature, especially drama. However, Grove championed the idea of an indigenous avant-garde as well, providing an early publication venue for the Beats, the New York school, and the Black Mountain school, publishing multiple scholarly studies of American jazz, adopting abstract expressionist designs for its book covers, and affirming the San Francisco Bay Area as itself a ‘cultural capital’ in a burgeoning national scene.”

According to Guilbaut, the wide acceptance of the American avant-garde in the McCarthy era relied upon the supposed political neutrality of both its intellectual champions and the aesthetics of abstract expressionism itself. Grove, however, was increasingly a vehicle for radical politics alongside its radical literature and essentially repoliticized the avant-garde in the countercultural 1960s.

Glass’s chapters, grounded in the cultural politics of the postwar world, cover a variety of Grove’s activities. They published a stunningly cosmopolitan ‘world literature’ that ranged from the novels of Beckett, Genet, and Alain Robbe-Grillet—the “triumvirate of Parisian late Modernist literary innovators”—to works that emerged from “the decolonization of the European empires and the inception of the American century.” Grove promoted leading international experimental playwrights (Beckett, Artaud, Ionesco, Arrabal) and sold countless books by “marketing the printed text in conjunction with student performances.” Meanwhile Grove’s numerous biographical and critical works celebrated and helped to cement their canon of contemporary writers.

The obscenity trials are covered in detail, and so is Grove’s support for radical politics (Latin American revolution, Black Power, and the Post-Colonial struggle) through the publication of books by Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Régis Debray, and many others. Grove’s attempt to transform the movie business was far less successful, although its American distribution of the sexually explicit Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow) (1967) became a controversial hit after a brief banning in 1969. Glass elaborates the important contribution Grove made to academic film culture in the USA by publishing the scripts and critical commentary on the most important foreign language art films including Hiroshima mon amour, Last Year at Marienbad, Rashomon, and The 400 Blows. Pre-VHS, these books “provided a curriculum for film studies courses during this foundational period; it also helped establish the cinematic text as a legitimate object of close reading modeled on the formal analysis of literary texts.” Glass identifies these books as the prototypes of the deluxe DVDs released by the Criterion Collection.

Although remarkably progressive in its publication of explicitly homosexual works by Genet, William S. Burroughs, and John Rechy, Grove’s support of radical emancipation was not unlimited. It published few women writers, its company structure was male-dominated, and its relentlessly libertine agenda was sometimes at odds with the contemporary feminist movement. Opposition to Grove’s “popularization of pornography” did not only come from the church and conservative groups. “By democratizing access to previously forbidden texts,” Grove had made the question of obscenity “more directly accessible to political, rather than moral or aesthetic, critique.”

Nevertheless, Rosset’s successful legal campaign to defend his right to publish the unholy trio of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and The Naked Lunch enabled freedom of the written word in America. Counterculture Colophon is a worthy but not uncritical study of a rare independent publisher who transformed American culture.

Edinburgh, May 2020

[Header image: detail of Roy Kuhlman’s cover design for Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Parama]

 

 

Open Seas: From the Clyde to Silverado

The Amateur Emigrant & The Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson. 231 pp. Folio Society, 1991 [1883, 1892, 1895].

Throughout my life I’ve often found myself, purely by chance, in the former haunts of Robert Louis Stevenson. When I was a blonde-haired lad of five I scurried across the white beaches and slid down the cascading waterfalls of Western Samoa, his ultimate destination. This was no precocious literary pilgrimage across the Pacific from Sydney; my mother won this trip to paradise in a competition run by a brand of canned tropical fruit. Ironically, amid the wild bananas and pawpaws of Samoa, I quickly discovered canned fruit was passé. The Samoan kids showed me how to pierce a freshly fetched coconut with a machete blade and drink the milk fresh out of the shell.

I was also taken the long way up Mount Vaea, above Vailima, to visit Stevenson’s tomb, famously engraved:

Here he lies where he long’d to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

More recently I compared 1980s Samoan experiences with Nicholas Rankin, a decidedly more intentional follower of Stevenson’s itineraries, indeed the author of the excellent Dead Man’s Chest: Travels After Robert Louis Stevenson (1987) . We discovered he’d beaten me to the tomb by three years. In contrast to us both, the peripatetic Paul Theroux didn’t bother to make the climb up the hill when he visited Vailima, grumbling in The Happy Isles of Oceania (1992) that graves depress him, destinations “for pilgrims and hagiographers.”

When I moved to Edinburgh I again found myself in Stevenson’s old vicinities. I briefly lived up the street from his school in Canonmills and worked around the corner from 17 Heriot Row, the Stevenson family home from 1857. But Edinburgh, suffering “one of the vilest climates under heaven,” was not for the sickly yet adventurous Stevenson. “For all who love shelter and the blessings of the sun,” he wrote, “who hate dark weather and perpetual tilting against squalls, there could scarcely be found a more unhomely and harassing place of residence.” He sought epic New World landscapes and Pacific island landfalls, as well as the “virginity of sense” granted to the outsider. Valuable stuff for a writer. My apparently reverse Stevensonism—fleeing the sun of the Pacific for Scottish gloom—is probably just another form of the same seeking.

Stevenson’s permanent departure from Scotland was not until 1887, but back in 1879 he’d boarded the SS Devonia for New York City and almost immediately taken the Union Pacific railway to San Francisco. His quest was to marry Fanny Osbourne, but Stevenson doesn’t mention that in his account of the journey, The Amateur Emigrant. He claims a journalistic objective, “an anxiety to see the worst of emigrant life.” He followed it up with The Silverado Squatters, an account of his colourful honeymoon. These books were not originally published entire or in chronological sequence. The Silverado Squatters appeared in 1883, the same year as Treasure Island, but The Amateur Emigrant was not published as a complete book during Stevenson’s lifetime. The ‘Across the Plains’ section was published as a stand-alone book in 1892. The author’s account of his Atlantic crossing, which appeared in a posthumous 1895 essay collection, was by then significantly abbreviated by his over-cautious editors. The earliest complete publication from the Amateur Emigrant manuscript was in From Scotland to Silverado (edited by James D. Hart, 1966), which not only coupled it with its sequel but included between them a four-part essay ‘The Old and New Pacific Capitals’ (i.e. Monterey and San Francisco). The Folio Society’s 1991 edition of the two books also restores the full manuscript text of The Amateur Emigrant (plus some lost passages from the 1883 magazine serials of both books) but strangely omits the buffering essay. I usually find Folio Society volumes cumbersome and pretentiously designed, but it is a thoughtfully edited text, a necessity for books with such a complicated textual history.

I admit I’ve not yet sailed in Stevenson’s wake from Scotland to America, so I had a lot to discover. The first part of The Amateur Emigrant, the Atlantic crossing, is an intellectually rigorous and cliché-busting set of observational essays on the motives and aspirations of the Scottish diaspora in the late 19th century. Stevenson vividly sketches the Devonia‘s dreadful steerage conditions of claustrophobic confinement, illness, and indifferent neglect by the ship’s officers. The common grub is porridge and “soup, roast fresh beef, boiled salt junk, and potatoes.” He elects to travel by second cabin, and explains why the extra two guineas is worth paying—supplied bedding and dishes, a table (upon which he wrote ‘The Story of a Lie’), and marginally better food. Officially a gentleman, he’s entitled to a grim ‘Irish stew’ and what appear to be the scrapings of plates from the saloon. He can choose between coffee or tea; the only perceptible difference is “a smack of snuff in the former” and “a flavour of boiling and dishcloth in the second.” Instead of mere duff twice a week he’s entitled to “a saddle-bag filled with currants under the name of plum-pudding.”

Suppressing his slight snobbery, Stevenson enjoys the community of the steerage passengers and their nightly singing, dancing, and tale-telling. He confesses hostility when a couple of saloon class passengers deign to visit down below. The poor emigrants defy Stevenson’s expectations. They are neither young nor adventurous, but “for the most part quiet, orderly, obedient citizens, family men broken by adversity, elderly youths who had failed to place themselves in life, and people who had seen better days.” They’d suffered hard times. “We were a company of the rejected; the drunken, the incompetent, the weak, the prodigal, all who had been unable to prevail against circumstances in one land, were now fleeing pitifully to another; and though one or two might still succeed, all had already failed.”

I have Scottish ancestors whose New World emigrations—to Australia rather than to the United States—both pre- and post-date Stevenson’s sailing on the Devonia. No plum-pudding for them; whether they were large families with babies feverish with pneumonia, or loners like my grandfather’s grandfather, they were all squashed into steerage. The latter, a Shetlander, emigrated around 1865 after an obscure youth as a lowly ship’s trimmer that had taken him to far-flung locales “beyond the telegraph cables and mail-boat lines,” as Conrad would put it in Lord Jim. Perhaps he’d already glimpsed the Pacific. I can’t particularly speak for the extent of my ancestors’ desperation nor their motives beyond a better life under the eucalypts, but Stevenson here provides a provocative glimpse into contemporary ordeals.

The second half of The Amateur Emigrant is titled ‘Across the Plains’ and recounts the rail journey across the continent. Stevenson was seriously ill and this leg of the trip was sometimes as uncomfortable as the Atlantic crossing. Awaiting a ferry across the Hudson River to the Jersey City railway terminal, cramped inside a chaotically crowded shed, he saves a child’s life from a crashing barrowful of spilled boxes. He is pushed along in a “dense, choking crush.” On board, the plains of Nebraska provoke a more existential dread in their endless monotony. Stevenson essays his fellow travellers and condemns the widespread “a priori” hatred of the Chinese, who are assigned to their own carriage.

The Silverado Squatters is a kind of sequel that picks up Stevenson’s Californian adventures in what would later be considered Jack London country. Stevenson had by now married Fanny and acquired a stepson, Lloyd (a future literary collaborator). The family decide to squat in an abandoned mine above the Napa Valley. Again, we learn almost nothing about Stevenson’s private life or the reasons for this unusual honeymoon. Resembling The Amateur Emigrant, the format is a series of thematic essays on his encounters and observations, with evocative sketches of this part of California. He visits a petrified forest exhibited by a far-drifting Scot and speaks to early Napa wine growers. Around Silverado he meets a set of frontier characters including a Jewish family—Stevenson here somewhat uncritically indulges in antisemitic stereotypes—and a class of “Poor Whites or low-downers.” One of these, a lazy handyman, a veritable “Caliban,” stirs the grumbling Tory in our narrator. The mine itself is remote, perilous, but perched over a spectacular natural landscape. At night the sky is so breathtaking “it seemed to throw calumny in the teeth of all the painters that ever dabbled in starlight.” Most magical is Stevenson’s account of the season’s one-off occurrence, the silent “sea fogs,” a rush of clouds into the mountains. It is, he writes, “as though I had gone to bed the night before, safe in a nook of inland mountains, and had awakened in a bay upon the coast.”

These are powerfully evocative writings. I’ve never been as far north of San Francisco as Silverado—I’ve merely cycled across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito—but precedent suggests I will again find myself walking in Stevenson’s footsteps up the mountain.

Edinburgh, May 2020

[Header image: detail from The Broomielaw, Glasgow (c. 1889) by John Atkinson Grimshaw]

Open Seas: Carlos Fuentes on Reflection

The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World by Carlos Fuentes. 399 pp. Houghton Miflin, 1992; TV series written and presented by Carlos Fuentes, produced by Michael Gill. 5 episodes, 295 minutes. Sogotel, 1992.

Carlos Fuentes was not only a highly regarded novelist and intellectual but also a wildly charismatic explicator. He was perfect for the educational small screen. In fact, with such learning and panache, he sometimes seems too suspiciously perfect. In the very funny César Aira novella The Literary Conference (1997), a mad scientist attempts to clone an example of human perfection; he duly seeks the DNA of Carlos Fuentes (“the most unassailable and undisputed genius there could ever be; his level of respectability touched on the transcendent.”). Alas, the scientist accidentally clones Fuentes’s tie and plagues the landscape with giant silk worms. In addition to a lifelong commitment to left-wing causes, Fuentes was also a cosmopolitan bon vivant—Savile Row suits, luxury hotels, celebrity friends. He was famously dismissed by the Mexican critic Enrique Krause as a ‘guerrilla dandy’.

I admire Fuentes the man as well as his preference for point collars, but I’ve sometimes found his fiction to be a slog. That is true even of The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), generally regarded as his best work. The experimental aspects of this Citizen Kane-inspired novel, which represent a corrupt politician’s dying consciousness by alternating between the first, second, and third person, strike me mostly as a set of self-consciously Modernist gimmicks. And as far as self-consciously Modernist gimmicks go, I found the book far less engaging than, say, Mario Vargas Llosa’s theoretically more challenging-to-read Conversation in the Cathedral (1969). Fuentes’s prose, at least in translation, can be baroque and opaque. Nevertheless, persistently intrigued, I’ve pushed through a handful of his books (Aura, The Good Conscience, Burnt Water, Diana, Vlad) and I’ve always kept a copy of his massive, self-styled magnum opus Terra Nostra (1975) on the shelf—unread, I admit, but hopefully not unreadable as some say.

Fuentes’s ambition was extreme. From what I can gather Terra Nostra attempts a synthesis of the entirety of Hispanic history in the form of an experimental novel about Philip II and El Escorial. Elsewhere he pursued a similarly encompassing mission. I have seen the list of readings assigned for a class he taught in Fall 1987 called ‘The Spanish American Tradition: History and Fiction’, a fat book of philosophical and historical extracts from Isaiah Berlin, Max Weber, Neruda, Nietzsche, Hegel, St. Thomas Aquinas, etc. I hope Harvard has kept tapes of the lectures.

The Buried Mirror returns to Fuentes’s epic vision in a much more conventional work of cultural history. This multimedia project was occasioned by the Quincentenary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. It adopts the format minted by Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation (1969)—the large-budget documentary series hosted by its writer in a variety of scenic international locations, with an accompanying illustrated book. In light of the apparent ease of Fuentes’s cosmopolitan transit, it’s unsurprising he was commissioned to write and host this series in both Spanish and English editions.

I watched The Buried Mirror before a stint living in Buenos Aires. It was a useful crash course in Spanish American cultural history and also directed me to the best café in Plaza Dorrego, where I spent many afternoons reading at Fuentes’s table by the window. More recently I read the excellent book version, which definitely transcends the banal convention of the prosified television script. Fuentes emphatically describes the book as “not an outcropping of the series but a biography of my culture, which is really (I understood as I wrote it) a biography of myself.” Entirely complete in itself, the book has wound up the enduring incarnation of the Buried Mirror project; nearly thirty years later the TV series has fallen into obscurity (my low quality DVD copy, produced for educational institutions, had to be acquired through inter-library loan). Although originally written in Spanish, the book strangely does not credit an English-language translator. Perhaps Fuentes did that himself. His extensive annotated bibliography attests to “fifty years of reading” in this field.

Amid the celebrations of 1992, Fuentes’s guiding question was if Hispanic America had anything to celebrate? After all, it was a time of “inflation, unemployment, the excessive burden of foreign debt. Increasing poverty and illiteracy; an abrupt decline of purchasing power and standards of living. A sense of frustration, of dashed hopes and lost illusions. Fragile democracies menaced by social explosion.” Nevertheless, Fuentes’s answer is affirmative. What can be celebrated is an inclusive cultural tradition reaching back into the deep past of Iberia and absorbing influences from Jewish, Arab, and African sources (among many others). In The Buried Mirror, Fuentes follows enduring themes, symbols, and motifs, with occasional autobiographical asides. We meet him at the Gran Café de la Parroquia in Veracruz, where his father drank coffee, and outside his childhood residence in Washington, D.C.. Fuentes’s cultural canon does not seem particularly revisionist or radical, even to a cultural outsider like myself, although I was happy to be directed to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, José Guadalupe Posada, and Eugenio Lucas Villamil. Fuentes is always on hand to furnish confident—perhaps too confident—interpretations of his case studies. He is a booster of the first rank. For the on-camera segments of the English language version, he seems to be translating his Spanish commentary on the fly, which means his delivery is often halting as he reaches for equivalent words with customarily emphatic gestures.

The project is divided into five parts/episodes. ‘The Virgin and the Bull’ canvasses pre-modern Spain, through the Moorish period and the Reconquista, to Columbus. ‘Conflict of the Gods’ switches to the indigenous American world and the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors. ‘Children of La Mancha’ leaps back and forth across the Atlantic in the days of the Spanish Empire, exploring Cervantes, Velázquez, Goya, and the Baroque in the New World. Fuentes is especially insightful explaining religious syncretism via sculpture in Latin American churches. ‘The Price of Freedom’ covers the arrival of Latin American independence, tyrannical governments, and eventually the Mexican Civil War. By ‘Unfinished Business’ Fuentes’s commentary starts to drag. Rightly full of condemnation of US military interventions in the latter half of the twentieth century, the filmed version rambles as the author outlines his personal vision of a prosperous future Latin America.

“The mirror has power,” Fuentes says. “It can harness the sun, and it can show us ourselves.” The ruling metaphor of the title suggests that Spain and Spanish America have ceased to look at each other, ceased to recognise their deep-seeded cultural affinities and to imagine mutual futures. He asks: “Is not the mirror both a reflection of reality and a projection of the imagination?” He has no shortage of useful mirrors to summon from the Hispanic cultural tradition—Velázquez’s Las Meninas, the mirrors buried with the dead in Mesoamerican tombs, etc.—and is not hesitant to extend the metaphor: the pyramid of El Tajín in Vera Cruz with its 365 steps is, he declares, a “mirror of time.” He wonders if the failings of Spanish America as of 1992 can be alleviated by ceasing to follow Anglo-American and French political and economic models, and instead to forge something new grounded in the traditions of Spain and the New World. Nevertheless, this post-colonial vision of Hispanic unity is vague. Should it be based on Roman law? Or the supposed democracy of Spanish towns?

Spanish America has much changed since the pre-NAFTA days, but I think The Buried Mirror is worthy of revival. The book is easy to find but the documentary should be remastered in HD from the film source to make it viewable for contemporary audiences.

Edinburgh, April 2020

Open Seas: Welles on the March!

Marching Song: A Play by Orson Welles with Roger Hill; edited by Todd Tarbox. 178 pp. Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.

Like a few other American giants—Mark Twain and Duke Ellington come to mind—Orson Welles left behind vast archives of unreleased work in varying states of completion. He’s been dead for thirty-five years but we’re still catching up with his oceanically ambitious—albeit frequently frustrated—creative life.

The latest rediscovered Welles work is Marching Song. This play about the radical abolitionist John Brown was written in 1932 with some help from Welles’s teacher and lifelong friend Roger Hill. It was only staged twice in 1950 by the amateur drama club at Welles’s alma mater, the Todd School for Boys. Its publication caps a decade’s worth of posthumous treats including the Too Much Johnson workprint (amusing silent comedy sequences filmed in 1938), the half-hour Merchant of Venice intended for TV (1969), and, most prominently, the Netflix reconstruction and completion of his feature The Other Side of the Wind (1970-76). Meanwhile, paintings and drawings from Beatrice Welles’s personal collection have been exhibited and published by Titan Books as Orson Welles Portfolio, and two books of transcribed conversations remind us that Welles was one of the world’s great talkers. Not a bad haul for Welles fans—and more pieces to fit into an unfinishable jigsaw puzzle.

One of those books of conversation, Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts (2013), was edited by Hill’s grandson Todd Tarbox. Now returning with his edition of Marching Song, Tarbox argues for a better recognition of Welles the writer, and wishes that Welles’s “newspaper and magazine articles, radio and print essays, movie scripts, speeches, and letters were bound between the covers of a book.” Welles certainly deserves a Heminges and Condell to compile this notional Orsonian First Folio, although it’s certain to be thick as a telephone book. In the meantime Tarbox has made a laudable gesture towards that ambition with this slim volume, a very good quarto indeed.

Writing was an essential first step of the creative process for almost everything Welles made for film, television, radio, or stage, but he only occasionally wrote specifically for publication. This is why despite a scattering of published books in various languages—plays, screenplays, dubiously-credited novelizations—Welles’s writing exists in relative obscurity. Perhaps inspired by Shakespeare’s example, he seemed not very concerned with his writerly legacy. Only a few of his plays were actually published, namely Moby Dick–Rehearsed in 1956 and a volume bundling two short plays (The Unthinking Lobster and Fair Warning) in French translation in 1952. Others, such as Time Runs… (1950), were performed but never published. A number of additional plays await both premiere staging and publication, an opportunity for enterprising theatre directors. (I examined the late 1950s cold war comedy Brittle Glory at the Museo Nazionale Del Cinema in Turin a few summers ago.)

Written by a seventeen-year-old, Marching Song is by definition juvenilia, although that might not mean very much when speaking of the precocious Orson Welles. Tarbox’s volume contains the complete play accompanied by reproductions of Welles’s set sketches and photographs from the 1950 Todd Troupers production (directed by Tarbox’s father, Hascy). There is also a long and engaging introduction by Tarbox that explores Welles’s crucial relationship with Hill. It quotes in full poems Welles wrote for school publications as well as generous passages from the Highland Park News column he wrote as a teenager—including a lively dispatch from Japan. Most valuable of all are the letters Welles wrote to both Hill and his guardian Maurice Bernstein on a painting tour of Ireland in 1931. We encounter the boy in thrall to Irish culture and on the verge of his first professional experience on the stage (“Scores” of additional letters from Welles’s youth, once in the collection of Beatrice Welles, are now archived at the University of Michigan.)

Marching Song‘s 1857-59 setting predates the action of Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Welles’s back-to-back recreations of post-Lincoln America. The play is unsurprisingly ambitious. Welles’s sketches illustrate his plans for innovative sets and lighting. Keeping in mind the preliminary condition of all of Welles’s scripts, certain to be transformed by the happy “accidents” of production, this extant draft is a tad talky and expositional, with a swollen dramatis personae. It is no apparent lost masterpiece, although with its speculations by journalists on the true nature of John Brown, a charismatic and dangerous ‘great man’, it certainly seems like a model for future Welles dramas.

Tarbox’s epilogue, ‘The Social Conscience of Orson Welles,’ helps contextualize Marching Song as an early entry in Welles’s long agitation for racial justice. He includes fifteen pages of transcripts from Welles’s 1946 radio commentaries on the scandal surrounding Isaac Woodard, a black World War II veteran brutally blinded by a policeman in South Carolina. It is valuable to have these stirring texts in book form for the first time. The epilogue makes a helpful supplement to Michael Denning’s study of Welles as a radical political artist in The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (1996).

Edinburgh, April 2020

Originally published at Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource on April 6, 2020.

Header image is a detail from The Last Moments of John Brown (1882–84) by Thomas Hovenden at The Met. Public domain.

Open Seas: Twain Goes West

Roughing It by Mark Twain. 590 pp. Penguin, 1981 [1872].

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that Mark Twain is best read in dog-eared, mass-market paperback. You can keep your fancy collectable and critical editions — no point wearing white tie and tails to a hootenanny. That said, I once maintained more elevated bibliophilic tastes and over the years owned various pseudo-deluxe Twain anthologies such as the Folio Society’s shiny slipcased Treasury and a tall, half-leatherette collection from Readers Digest. My shelves once displayed a handsome pair of blue and grey cloth volumes (Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer) liberated from a Nelson-Doubleday set of complete novels. But my attitude changed recently when I read Roughing It in handy, democratic paperback format on the Brussels-Paris Megabus route. It did fine. Shortly after that, back home in Edinburgh, I decided to sell my copy of the unexpurgated Autobiography (the first pedantically annotated volume of three). The book dealer was admiring but despaired of its massive bulk and, with apologies, refused to take it. No shelf space.

Roughing It may be a hefty six hundred pages but, like all Twain’s travel books, should ideally fit in your pocket. Sure, the Iowa-California critical edition of 1972 features an excellent map of the American southwest on its endpapers, but it’s too cumbersome for the bus and especially the Megabus — and the stagecoach, for that matter. This is a book to read on your own travels or while lying on the beach. Tolerant of extended gaps in reading, it’s useful to have on hand for an idle moment.

Twain wrote his various books of comic memoir out of order. Roughing It narrates a fanciful version of his “variegated vagabondizing” from 1861-67, chronologically following the period he would eventually set down in Life on the Mississippi (1883), the story of his early manhood. In 1861 Twain went west with his brother Orion Clemens, newly crowned Secretary to the Nevada Territory. Twain covers episodes from his ill-fated career prospecting for gold and silver, his days as an often-desperate newspaper columnist in Virginia City, and his arrival in San Francisco. The book is relaxed enough to include such asides as a contemptuous history of the Mormon church. The last chunk of the book recounts his travels to Hawaii (then known as the Sandwich Islands) in 1866. Plenty of humorous chapters can be read as self-contained fictions — ‘Buck Fanshaw’s Funeral’, ‘Bemis Finds Refuge in a Tree’, the story of the bandit Slade.

Roughing It is endlessly interested in the details of how things worked. “Information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious ottar of roses,” he writes. Here is the Old West in all of its grit, hardship, and natural majesty. It is not, as Twain puts it, “a pretentious history or philosophical dissertation.” Nor does it dwell on his personal life or development throughout these years. For that reason it pleasantly, rather than compellingly, rambles from place to place, adventure to adventure, joke to joke. The extended Hawaiian section, largely reworked from newspaper articles, would really be more suited to a separate book (the original articles were indeed posthumously  published as Letters from Hawaii in 1966). A reasonably satisfying conclusion to Roughing It is provided by Twain’s first success as a lecturer back in San Francisco, although ‘lecturer’ may be misleading; by the account here, he was a prototypical stand-up comic. The book itself, like a string of routines, endlessly delivers the punchlines. The young Twain’s observations and exaggerations are grotesquely racist on occasion, more concerned with pandering to the prejudices of his nineteenth century readership for laughs than with anything else.

I’m surprised this big baggy book has not been more frequently adapted for film and television. There’s no shortage of dramatic episodes, ambuscades, and ironic reversals — all set in the epic landscapes of the American southwest. A fine comic western could be strung together from this raw material.

Twain rarely flags as an entertainer, but this kind of episodic book inevitably tempts anthologists to dig for choice nuggets. In addition to Life on the Mississippi, Twain wrote three travel memoirs in a similarly expansive and picaresque format: The Innocents Abroad (1869), A Tramp Abroad (1880), and Following the Equator (1897). Charles Neider was the prominent Twain anthologist of the mid-20th century (in 1959 he edited the most readable version of the Autobiography from that mountain of rambling dictations more recently published verbatim, and in that unwieldy and shelf-clogging format, by the University of California). Neider selected his preferred moments from all five memoirs and put together 450 pages as The Travels of Mark Twain (1960). For casual Twain readers, backpackers and bus riders, it might be just right — and it is available in paperback.

Edinburgh, April 2020

Open Seas: Shylock Must Die

Shylock Must Die by Clive Sinclair. 192 pp. Halban, 2018.

Clive Sinclair seems to have taken to heart the hot tip Isaac Bashevis Singer gave him in the seventies: “Never begin a story until you are convinced that you are the only person who can write it.” Here was not just permission but an imperative to write about one’s idiosyncratic obsessions. In Sinclair’s case, a Jewish Londoner born in 1948, those included such things as John Wayne and Israel, Kafka and Tintin, anal sex and football. Sinclair’s seemingly incongruous lifelong enthusiasms proved to be a sustaining source of plots–many of his stories are the fictionalised travelogues of a far-seeking pilgrim–and also of enlightening metaphors. His unmistakable voice delivered all the necessary coherence, the singular vision.

When I interviewed him at his home in Chelsea in early 2011, I was surprised by the contrast between the cosmopolitan elegance of his prose–both in his fiction and in his emails–and unpretentious Clive in the flesh, who seemed already significantly older than his early sixties, evidently worn down by the grief and kidney disease of his middle-age. Yet his “soap opera from hell,” as he had memorably put it, had not ruined him. He remained kind, funny, and generous. He was still eagerly engaged with literature and politics as a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement. He’d pushed through into a long and fruitful second act despite the decline of the literary fame he’d achieved in the 1980s. The stories, I think, had become richer.

Clive died on March 5 but has left his readers with a final book, Shylock Must Die. As he had used the western genre in True Tales of the Wild West (2008), he latterly turned to Shakespeare’s Shylock as the spark for six occasionally interconnected comic stories that explore his classic themes of Jewishness and antisemitism, fathers and sons, illness and death. He freely ranges across the centuries and the map. There are fewer cowboys and less eroticism than usual. Several stories are populated by members of two twentieth century Anglo-Jewish families whose fishy names–Carp and Salmon–are courtesy of a facetious Prussian bureaucracy in long-abandoned Warsaw. The Salmons closely resemble the Sinclairs of Hendon in London, which means the ridiculously-named son Calman is Clive’s alter-ego.

This collection’s eponymous novella was first published in Death & Texas (2014) and reappears as the anchoring tale of the new book. As Wide Sargasso Sea challenged the Victorian trope of the Mad Woman in the Attic by giving us her point of view, ‘Shylock Must Die’ provides a rather more comic retelling of The Merchant of Venice through another set of Venetian blinds — those of Tubal, Jewish P. I. (“two hundred ducats a day, plus expenses.”) It turns out that Shakespeare’s dramatisation of the unusual legal squabble between Shylock and Antonio was highly selective and misleading. Antonio and Bassanio are, in fact, ruthless murderers of a Jewish boy and Shylock is a mensch, the pound of flesh a clause intended to fulfill “divine justice.” Meanwhile, Shylock’s disloyal daughter Jessica is the silly dupe of Lorenzo, who sells her to white-slavers bound for the Americas. Tubal is given the thankless job of rescuing her from a ship in Genoa. Jessica finally wises up and turns femme fatale.

‘Tears of the Giraffe’ is another tale of the generation gap. Two teenage Swedish Hitler enthusiasts will discover the inconvenient fact they have a Jewish mother during the Nazi era. The story is bookended by stage productions that suggest the mutability of Shakespeare. A German-language Hamlet at Elsinore itself in 1940 presents Claudius as a Shylock-type with “lank greasy hair, and a nose that could cut a path through the north-west passage.” When Claudius virtually confesses his murderous crime during the play-within-the-play, the audience/mob cries spontaneously “Kill the Jew!” Yet four horrible years later, when The Merchant is staged at Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theatre, Shylock is a sympathetic Swedish-accented victim.

Clive sometimes mentioned his plans to write a lucrative novel about a detective to whom he would lend his own failed kidneys. It would be preceded by a prequel set in the detective’s dialysis-free childhood and inspired by the Tintin adventure The Castafiore Emerald (1962). He never seems to have found a worthy villain for his detective novel, but the prequel was achieved here as ‘A Wilderness of Monkeys.’ Calman Salmon is the detective-to-be. In 1961 the Salmons holiday in Venice’s Hotel Belmont, which has only recently re-opened its doors to a quota of Jews. Mr. Salmon buys a ruby necklace for his wife, which leads to an accusation of cat-burglary by an antisemitic Contessa, a trial, and a payoff that reaches into the present day.

The other stories take place mostly in our own era and fictionalise several Shylock-inspired peregrinations. One incorporates a 2012 performance of The Merchant in Hebrew by Jerusalem’s Habima Theatre at the Globe amid heavy security and persistent heckles. Clive told me how fascinated he’d been by the strange situation of Jews attacked for attempting to stage and watch an antisemitic play. Although not without sympathy for the plight of Palestinians, Clive resented the self-righteousness of the English protesters, many of whom he identified as antisemites, and “the unspoken assertion that if you were not with the hecklers, then you were a latter-day Shylock yourself, demanding your pound of Palestinian flesh.”

Other stories arose from his attendance at Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s mock trial of Shylock in the Venetian Ghetto in 2016 and a visit to the Venetian Resort Hotel in Las Vegas. In the Vegas story, a fast-moving political fantasy of the American West, his fictional hotel mogul Shy Lokshen — descending, of course, from Jessica and Lorenzo — creates a golem who becomes a Trump-like President. Incidentally, Clive emailed me in late 2016 to describe how much he had enjoyed taking a swing at a Trump piñata in Santa Cruz. Finally, ‘Shylock’s Ghost’ takes an ageing Calman to the Hendon film set of his son’s “reboot” of Merchant. He slips through a time portal and briefly visits his long-dead parents in the company of the 18th century actor Charles Macklin (in the guise of Shylock). Our narrator returns to the present but on the final page is fading away, appearing to his son “as insubstantial as a kodachrome.”

With a prefatory tribute to the late Israeli painter Yosl Bergner and a epigraph from Hamlet on the death of fathers, this is an unavoidably death-haunted book. And yet Clive did not allow the unappealing coming attraction to strip out the zest, humour, and searing intelligence he brought to all of his inimitable, individual, profoundly human stories.

 

[Image: Orson Welles as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (1969)]

Open Seas: Julie Bertuccelli in Georgia and Australia

Since Otar Left (2003)

If you can imagine the experience of watching an Abbas Kiarostami film in an Iranian mountain village, or Star Wars on a space station, you’ll have some idea how strange it was to see Julie Bertuccelli’s wonderful Since Otar Left (2003) at a Tbilisi film club less than a decade after it had been shot in that city. In fact, some scenes had been shot directly outside that tiny cinema on Rustaveli Avenue. There were chuckles of recognition.

That season Tbilisi revealed to me its double identity. When the clouds were black the city was an atmospheric post-Soviet ruin stinking of cold mud and acrid cigarettes. The sagging balconies of its nineteenth century apartment buildings sometimes hung by a single bolt, while the Soviet concrete monoliths looked, bizarrely enough, centuries older. Rubble piled up on the footpaths. The flaking and mould-blackened yellow paint, the makeshift patches of rust-red tin, the bare-limbed trees — all contributed to an atmosphere of devastation. And yet when the sun sparkled on the River Mtkvari all that decay seemed diminished and Tbilisi was as delightful as an Italian renaissance town.

Since Otar Left captures that urban duality. Co-written by Bertuccelli and Bernard Renucci, the film centres on three generations of a Georgian family. The elderly matriarch’s adored son, a doctor named Otar, is working as an illegal immigrant in Paris. The report comes of his accidental death. To spare the old woman this devastating news, her granddaughter begins to fake new letters from Otar. This plot is nothing new — E. L. Doctorow’s story ‘A Writer in the Family’ (1984) spins from the same basic idea — and yet the subtle screenplay and the tremendous performances of its three central actresses are the foundations of a powerfully moving film.

Each of the three main characters seeks her own vision of dignity and independence. The elderly matriarch Eka (Esther Gorintin) is stubborn, full of life despite her years, and unfairly critical of her supposedly ambitionless daughter Marina (Nino Khomasuridze). Marina’s daughter Ada (Dinara Drukarova), while dutiful and loving, is bored by her university studies, bored by her casual boyfriend, and bored by the squabbles of her mother and grandmother over the legacy of Stalin in the close quarters of their ramshackle apartment.

All this takes place in an era of economic deprivation. The film repeatedly returns to the failure of Tbilisi’s basic utilities a decade after the end of the Soviet Union. Power outages leave the women in the dark. The water supply cuts while Marina is washing her hair in the shower, causing her to cry out in despair, “Life’s impossible in this fucking country!” (By 2011 the situation had improved, although most of the shops in the city centre had a petrol-powered generator on its stoop ready to start puttering.) To survive, Marina must sell items in the open-air antiques market beside the river with her supportive but inessential lover; at one moment she tells him with a laugh, “I wish I was in love with you.” (That week I had browsed in that very market, where ruined cars live on as permanent stalls selling every imaginable item: swords, canes, pick-axes, rusty pistols, button accordions, 8mm camera equipment, pictures of 1970s Soviet film starlets, cigar boxes decorated in Polynesian kitsch, and century-old adding machines.) When Eka falls ill, the hospital facilities are inadequate and the bill must be paid immediately in cash to the bored, chain-smoking doctor.

Despite hard times, life goes on in Georgia. Eka, Marina, and Ada own an idealic country dacha where they collect fruit. They gather with friends in their apartment to sing folk songs. They pause by the roadside to tie strips of cloth to a wish tree — until Ada refuses to perpetuate this superstition.

The women also follow family tradition as devoted Francophiles — although none of the three have ever actually visited France. This is one reason Eka is so supportive of Otar’s life in Paris. At night Ada reads to Eka from a volume of Proust, part of the valuable library of French books that had to be hidden during the darkest Soviet years. France represents the apex of culture and economic opportunity. There is a powerful conclusion as Ada, with Eka’s complicity but Marina’s distress, decides to remain behind in Paris as an illegal immigrant. As an audience we are left in no doubt that Georgia is a provincial dead-end for Ada. The film boldly depicts illegal immigration as a step towards self-fulfilment. France offers a new life. It might have been a colossally chauvinistic move for these French screenwriters to invent Georgian characters who exalt France in this way, but I have to admit I was totally won over by the humanity of the performances and the universality of the film’s theme: the desire for a better life and to transcend the mundane here and now.

Nevertheless, watching this story about Tbilisi in Tbilisi gave me a usefully unsettled perspective. Is Since Otar Left a film made for international audiences rather than for the Georgians it purports to depict? I’m sure many locals do not consider it a Georgian film. Although acted in a mixture of Georgian and French, only one of the three leads, Nino Khomasuridze, is actually a local (the late Esther Gorintin was Polish and Dinara Drukarova is Russian). I’m not suggesting that Bertuccelli was a superficial tourist — after all, she was a protégé of director Otar Iosseliani — but I wondered whether Georgians consider her a cultural interloper, a Western European condescending to tell a story about the citizens of an impoverished country who idolise her own.

Luckily, Bertuccelli has given me a convenient opportunity to evaluate that question because her second fiction feature, The Tree (2010), was made in my home country, Australia. All the characters are Australian with the exception of its nominally French-English protagonist, Dawn, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg. The setting is rural Queensland. Dawn’s husband dies and leaves his family in grief. His young daughter (Morgana Davies) comes to believe that the enormous Moreton Bay Fig on their property has absorbed his spirit and can speak to her. Dawn also toys with the belief. But the tree grows wildly, and its roots and branches invade the house. The neighbours are outraged. The family’s grieving process, the slow acceptance of the man’s death, is mirrored by the eventual abandonment of the tree after an act of God.

How well does Bertuccelli grasp the Australian milieu? An interesting question, because I don’t actually think many unquestionably Australian films demonstrate any particular insight into Australia as it really is. Despite tiny box office and indifferent reception, much of the national cinema doggedly sticks with a default set of elements: depressing subject matter, protagonists of limited intelligence who lack agency, and plenty of lingering shots of the landscape. There’s nothing inherently limiting about that, but so far Australia hasn’t produced filmmakers of the calibre of the Dardenne brothers or Andrey Zvyagintsev or Andrea Arnold who would find universal resonance, let alone poetry, in the dark and mundane surfaces of Australian society. Instead we frequently wind up with badly written, pretentious, and crushingly boring movies that nobody really likes.

I had high hopes for The Tree after the triumph of Since Otar Left. Bertuccelli was also a assistant director on Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours Blue (1993), a truly great film about a grieving widow. What could go wrong? But I’m afraid The Tree, to borrow a phrase from Jean-Luc Godard, is a film like any other. Although beautifully photographed, its Australian characters have none of the complexity of Bertuccelli’s Georgians. True to the conventions of our national cinema, no character in The Tree is allowed to have any sort of intellectual life — not even a corny worship of Le France. The dead husband and his replacement, a plumber, are almost interchangeable tanned men in flannel shirts, amiably laconic, of whom almost nothing is discovered. Charlotte Gainsbourg and Morgana Davies give strong performances with what they have but the dialogue often sounds unrealistic. The narrative meanders, and many scenes could have been removed with little consequence to its coherence.

To date these are Bertuccelli’s only two fiction features, although she has been a prolific documentarian of French society. I’m happy to see that a third starring Catherine Deneuve and Chiara Mastroianni is in post-production — a feature film, finally, set in France.

Edinburgh, February 2018

Open Seas: Hemingway’s Garden

Here are two older pieces about Ernest Hemingway’s intriguing unfinished novel The Garden of Eden (published posthumously in 1986). They originally appeared at my now-defunct blog Honey for the Bears. Part ii has been updated.

i. AN INTERVIEW WITH JAMES SCOTT LINVILLE

In late 2010, hiding from the chill of the Manhattan winter in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel, I had tea with screenwriter James Scott Linville. An American who lives in London, Linville is a former managing editor of the Paris Review. His adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s Garden of Eden—Linville’s first produced screenplay—is now available on DVD in the US through Lions Gate.

The film recreates the sun-blanched milieu of the Lost Generation at play between the wars. On an extended honeymoon on the Côte d’Azur, Catherine (Mena Suvari) draws her writer husband David (Jack Huston) into androgynous sexual role play. They soon have identical bleached blonde haircuts and are the scandal of the season. David, a less macho Hemingway hero than we’re used to, doesn’t put up much resistance. Catherine then seduces the smitten Marita (Caterina Murino), a beautiful Italian heiress, and offers her to David as a part-time mistress. This time-share arrangement soon dissolves as Catherine drifts into madness and David and Marita grow close. Interpolated into this narrative is a dramatization of David’s work-in-progress, a short story based on a childhood elephant hunt in Africa with his father (Matthew Modine).

Colonel Boyle, a World War I pilot and David’s former comrade, is played by Richard E. Grant. “He’s astonishingly good,” said Linville. Boyle appears only in passing in the novel, but Linville expanded the role to three scenes. “I liked Colonel Boyle because he was a bit of an outsider, stepping in and quickly getting the lay of the land.” The Boyle role turned out to be useful in raising money for the project. “The producer told me, ‘Inadvertently you created a cameo for a star. We will pay him to come in for four days, but his name will be up there.’” Linville smiled. “I had no idea. It was luck. But it was also a great education.”

Linville’s literary background helped in unexpected ways. He had worked on many Paris Review author interviews in the 1980s and 1990s with George Plimpton (Plimpton had famously interviewed Hemingway for the journal in 1958). Linville learned firsthand Plimpton’s techniques of “fiddling” with transcribed speech for print. The reverse was necessary when transforming Hemingway’s laconic dialogue for the screen. “Even if a line reads well on the page,” Linville said, “it’s not necessarily going to sound right in the actor’s mouth.”

Hemingway’s novel was controversial not just for its preoccupation with androgyny when published posthumously by Scribner’s in 1986. The 247 page book had been created by editor Tom Jenks from a much longer, more ambitious unfinished manuscript Hemingway worked on during his last fifteen years. A long manuscript analysis in Rose Marie Burwell’s Hemingway: The Post-war Years and the Posthumous Novels (1996) indicates how much of Hemingway’s original conception was excised, including a mirror plot about a painter named Nick Sheldon and his wife Barbara.

I asked Linville if he made a trip to the Hemingway Archive at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston to read the purported 1500 pages of raw manuscript. He said no. Firstly, Jenks had told him the published book was very close to one version of the manuscript. “The other thing is I was given the commission and had to start three days later on Monday. The clock was ticking on some equity that could be put into the production, and I had to finish and lock a script to go out to actors by a certain date,” said Linville. “I approached this as somebody who loves the writer’s work, loves this book, not as an academic.”

The film was not well-received by critics when released theatrically in December 2010. Linville said, “In some ways people have been arguing with Hemingway. They’re arguing with the movie because it’s Hemingway taking his themes and turning them upside down, examining them, taking them apart.” The novel, like several other posthumously published works, suggests that late in life Hemingway was reconsidering his core beliefs. “There are scenes of hunting but the lead character of the subplot is making an anti-hunting argument.”

“When the book came out it got wonderful reviews from James Salter, E. L. Doctorow, and John Updike. At the same time it sold millions of copies. Why is there slightly less respect for the book now? I don’t quite understand. In some ways Hemingway is somewhat out of fashion. He was even more so at the time the book came out and that was why there was such a startling reassessment.” Linville added: “I think The Garden of Eden is one of his most interesting books. It might be his best about a writer writing.”

John Irvin (Hamburger Hill and the 1979 TV series Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) directed the picture. Linville joined the cast and crew on location in Spain’s Alicante province. The small city of Alcoy doubled for 1920s Madrid. Hemingway’s immeasurable gift for evoking the physical qualities of a landscape is beautifully translated to film by cinematographer Ashley Rowe.

Linville praised Mena Suvari’s “brave performance” and called the Italian actress Caterina Murino, who previously appeared in Casino Royale (2006), “a revelation. She’s considered a Bond girl but she’s a wonderful actor, extremely refined, very beautiful. You’re seeing a young Sophia Loren. She’s been in a lot of French movies but none have come out in the United States. I think this movie should probably be remembered for introducing her.”

With a new Raymond Chandler adaptation recently completed, Linville faces the possibility of another Hemingway project. The Garden of Eden and its unusual history still fascinates him. “Mena Suvari was very curious and did a great deal of research for the part. She wants to go to JFK and read the original.” He laughed. “Maybe we’ll all go on a field trip.”

Madrid, March 2011

ii. CALL FOR A CRITICAL EDITION

I enjoy the edition of The Garden of Eden published in 1986, although Tom Jenks’ drastic reduction of the unfinished manuscript makes Mary Hemingway’s posthumous tampering with A Moveable Feast look like mere spell-checking. Nevertheless, I like the published novel’s rich evocation of the 1920s Riviera setting, the dark portrait of a ménage à trois, and its embedded African hunting story.

According to Rose Marie Burwell, Hemingway wrote The Garden of Eden between 1948 and 1959. It evolved from an ur-text he began after the war – from which also grew Islands in the Stream, Across the River and Into the Trees, and The Old Man and the Sea. Thematically, The Garden of Eden evolved at least partially from the discarded “Miami” section of Islands in the Stream (much of “Miami” was published as a short story, “The Strange Country”, in 1987’s not-exactly-complete Finca Vigia story collection). Burwell makes the case that Garden, Islands, A Moveable Feast and Under Kilimanjaro (initially published in edited form as True At First Light):

“form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. The works form a tetralogy that is Hemingway’s portrait of the artist as writer and painter, and as son, husband and father; but their serial nature, and their place in the body of his fiction, has been unrecognized, misconstrued, and undervalued because of the manuscript deletions made for publication, the order in which the […] works appeared, and the restrictions of archival material that clarifies much about their composition and intentions.”

Of course, some kind of drastic editing was necessary to create a readable and marketable Garden of Eden. The Garden manuscript material, according to Burwell, is immensely repetitious. But Jenks went to an extreme by deleting half of the plot, and as such distorted the very conception of the novel.

The publication of the ‘restored’ Moveable Feast in 2009 initiated a series of ‘Hemingway Library Editions’ overseen by the Hemingway heirs including grandson Seán Hemingway. Each volume — not exactly a critical edition — contains the text of an original book with appendices of deleted sequences, alternate drafts, and relevant historical documents. To date we’ve seen The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, Green Hills of Africa, and a volume of selected stories. Meanwhile Cambridge University Press has pressed on with their mammoth, multi-volume complete letters project, executed with scholarly rigor.

In other words, Hemingway continues to be republished and the ouevre goes on expanding. The Garden of Eden‘s moment of reconsideration has not yet arrived. The manuscript poses an editorial challenge that may require several parallel volumes. I don’t believe the Jenks version should go out of print, but a judiciously edited, essentially comprehensive reading edition of the full manuscript — similiar to Under Kilimanjaro — would give us a much better indication of Hemingway’s ultimately unrealised ambitions.

There should also be a simultaneous publication of a facsimile edition of Hemingway’s very long typescript with his annotations intact. Similar editions exist of other Hemingway manuscripts. The mass market has had their version of the book for more than thirty years, and it is time to release the full manuscript to those who want to slog through it.

Sydney, July 2009
Edinburgh, February 2018

Open Seas: Romance in Durango

Major Dundee (1965)

Sam Peckinpah’s third film is usually considered a failed draft of what would be more fully realised as The Wild Bunch (1969). Peckinpah’s behaviour was too erratic, and his producers and budget too inflexible, for the earlier film to be finished to anybody’s satisfaction. But what survives, particularly in the 2005 extended version, is compelling. Major Dundee is the first film set in Peckinpah’s Mexico. His dark vision of the country is a land of escape, lawlessness, corruption, sexual decadence, alcoholism, and some measure of purity.

Peckinpah was engaging with the tradition of John Huston, who first went to Mexico in 1925, a few years after the end of the revolution. Vera Cruz, Huston remembered in his autobiography An Open Book, “had a blasted, pitted look. Buzzards fed in the streets, which were the same unrelieved color as the tin-roofed adobe houses.” Beggars cruised the cafe tables, just one aspect of “the bleak, dire kind” of poverty “that revolution leaves in its wake.” Irrepressible and lusty, Huston took the train to Mexico City and befriended a colonel who gave him an honorary commission in the Mexican army. That way he could train as a horseman with the calvalry. During poker games with high ranking military officers, “someone usually drew and cocked a pistol, turned the lights out and threw the pistol up so that it hit the ceiling. It would go off upon striking either the ceiling or the floor, and then the lights were turned on to see who, if anyone, had been unlucky.” Huston escaped a duel and discovered a passion for pre-Colombian Mexican artefacts; in later years he would smuggle out antiquities of dubious authenticity. On another trip he rode a mule train from Acapulco to Mexico City. He witnessed bandits rounded up to be executed by rurales.

Huston’s colourful memories of Mexico in the 1920s gave him firsthand details to draw upon when he made a film of B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in 1948. Huston sought an unusual level of authenticity for a Hollywood film: he shot on location in Tampico, hired real Mexican actors for supporting roles, even used unsubtitled Spanish dialogue in some sequences. Set just after the Mexican Civil War, Sierra Madre became the foundational movie of the desperate-gringo-south-of-the-border genre and an influential expression of a mythical Hollywood landscape. In this ‘Mexico’, the West could still be found long after the US frontier had been conquered. We visit it again in Vera Cruz (1954), The Magnificent Seven (1960), and The Professionals (1966). (Read Richard Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992) for the best elaboration of the evolution and political significance of this cinematic landscape.) Huston himself revisited the landscape in The Night of the Iguana (1964) and Under the Volcano (1984) — and all of this without ever bothering to learn Spanish.

Sam Peckinpah’s ‘Mexico’ does not reject the Hollywood myth but makes it grittier, more violent, and so static that almost nothing changes from the 1860s to the 1970s. Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), a brilliant, bizarre, and extremely violent reworking of Huston’s Sierra Madre, intentionally blurs the place and the time at the film’s outset. The script begins at a hacienda: “IS IT SPAIN — Maybe ITALY — or possibly MEXICO — or BRAZIL — or ARGENTINA — or…? It is not Mexico.” But it is! At the conclusion of a brutal scene in which a pregnant teenage girl is stripped and tortured by her father into revealing the name of her lover, his henchmen leave to seek the man’s head. “BUT NOT BY HORSE,” says the script. “MERCEDES, FERRARIES [sic.], CORVETTES and even a Limo or two provide transportation. Because it’s today, baby, not 1880, and like it or not, exactly this kind of bullshit still exists.”

A decade earlier, in early 1964, Peckinpah had shot Major Dundee on location in Mexico. The screenplay, originally by Harry Fink, was greenlit by Columbia Pictures before it was finished. On the strength of Ride the High Country (1962), Peckinpah was invited to take over the script and direct the film. He took the company south of the border. Lead actor Charlton Heston, in his autobiography In The Arena, recalled that their script conferences often wound up in grimy brothels. Heston sat out these sordid evenings drinking beer. He didn’t share Peckinpah’s taste for very young prostitutes.

Plot-wise Major Dundee is a pastiche of classic westerns. Like John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948), it follows the US Cavalry hunting Apaches in border territory. After unspecified actions at the Battle of Gettysburg, Major Dundee has been unofficially demoted to a jailer at a fort in New Mexico in the middle of the American Civil War. But then a family of ranchers and a group of soldiers are slaughtered by Sierra Chariba’s band of Apaches. Borrowing a page or two from Ford’s The Searchers (1956), Chariba also kidnaps white children. Dundee eagerly raises an army — Union soldiers, black soldiers, and a group of Confederate prisoners led by Lt Tyrene (Richard Harris), Dundee’s former friend. His quest for Chariba and the children quickly reaches Mexican territory, as hatred and mistrust grow between the soldiers. He essential starts a war with the occupying French — all to promote his own military glory.

Heston reflected:

“Columbia, Sam and I all really had different pictures in mind. Columbia, reasonably enough, wanted a Calvary/Indians film as much like Jack Ford’s best as possible. I wanted to be the first to make a film that really explored the Civil War. Sam, though he never said anything like this, really wanted to make The Wild Bunch.”

Peckinpah lost the right to final cut on Major Dundee, which wasn’t really finished at all; it splutters towards an only minimally coherent ending. The story loses focus after Dundee is wounded in the leg by an arrow during a tryst with a beautiful Austrian widow played by Senta Berger. Still, I’ve always been fascinated by Dundee’s subsequent self-destructive lost weekend in French-occupied Durango (much restored for the 2005 version). Here is Peckinpah’s attempt to personalise the generic story material and the landscape, the plot be damned.

“You make an unlikely-looking Mexican,” Sgt. Gomez tells Dundee as he lies wounded in Durango and considers fleeing in disguise. (That might have been a joke about Heston’s earlier role as the narcotics agent Vargas in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958); written as a cosmopolitan Carlos Fuentes-type, Heston played him without an accent, albeit with dark makeup.) So Dundee stays in Durango, gets drunker, wallows in self-pity. He takes his nurse to bed. It would be overstating things to say Dundee has been drawn away from his quest for Chariba like Odysseus to the island of Calypso — his dignified and largely passive Mexican lover, played by Aurora Clavel, is far from a seductress. Nevertheless, there is something of that mythical quality to Dundee’s fall. In Peckinpah’s Mexico things quickly go to seed. Dundee winds up a bum in a dive bar. Identity begins to dissolve in whisky.

Heston, a conscientious but stiff and limited actor, is well cast as a soldier who leads through intimidation rather than inspiration. Senta Berger is a far better actress than her character really deserves. With her discovery of Dundee’s affair during his Durango convalescence, Berger forever vanishes from the film. The script’s well-developed tensions then fall apart. Tyrene dies bravely in a fight with the French at the Rio Grande, evading what should have been an inevitable showdown with Dundee. Major Dundee is a small man who seeks greatness — an ego-driven monster — but there is no reckoning for his colossal irresponsibility.

The original 1965 score by Daniele Amfitheatrof is terrible. The longer preview version of the film, rediscovered and released in 2005, was specially rescored by Christopher Caliendo. This version of the film is the best one in existence but is still not Peckinpah’s version. He never was able to finish the movie.

Peckinpah would return to Mexico many times, lastly in Alfredo Garcia, which imagines a more pathetic version of Sierra Madre’s gold-lusting Fred C. Dobbs. The great Warren Oates puts Heston to shame as a lowlife gringo in Mexico still seeking the prize.

Seville, January 2018

Open Seas: Lewis’s Loyalty

A View of the World by Norman Lewis. 310pp. Eland, 2004 [1986].

Norman Lewis’s thirty-odd books testify to a long and admirable life of travel and activism. Born in 1908, he spent his childhood in the drab London borough of Enfield — “nothing, with chips,” in his words. Forever after he sought experience. He travelled through pre-Civil War Spain and went to Arabia as a spy for the Foreign Office. In the Second World War he was posted to North Africa and Naples with the Intelligence Corps. But Lewis wasn’t really cut out to be an English patriot. He was entirely lacking in imperial chauvinism. His loyalty was to human dignity wherever he found it.

After the war he made several South East Asian and Central American expeditions. He spent summers in Spain before the irrevocable transformations wrought by commercial tourism. In late middle age his efforts were directed towards exposing the ongoing genocide of indigenous peoples, particularly in South America. I only wish he had written about Australia.

Lewis died in 2003 at the age of 95. So far his posthumous legacy has been well-served by his champions. Julian Evans’ outstanding and ambitious biography Semi-Invisible Man appeared in 2008. All thirteen of Lewis’s novels remain out of print — I haven’t read any — but most of the travel books have been republished by Eland as high quality paperbacks.

Disregarding Lewis’s juvenilia — accounts of his early journeys through Spain and Arabia that were eventually rewritten from scratch — the non-fiction can be divided into five basic categories. Four books recount his travels in Asia: to Indochina (A Dragon Apparent, 1951), Burma (Golden Earth, 1952), India (Goddess in the Stones, 1991), and Indonesia (An Empire of the East, 1993). His extensive experiences in Italy and Spain inspired two retrospective memoirs each: Naples ’44 (1978), Voices of the Old Sea (about the Costa Brava, 1984), In Sicily (2000), and The Tomb in Seville (2003). He wrote book-length pieces of investigative reportage on the Sicilian mafia (The Honoured Society, 1964) and on genocide perpetrated by evangelical Christians (The Missionaries, 1988). His two-volume autobiography begins with Jackdaw Cake (1985; expanded as I Came, I Saw, 1994) and concludes with The World, The World (1996).

There are also five collections of shorter travel pieces. They were never simultaneously in print, so it isn’t surprising that their contents occasionally overlap. The Changing Sky (1959) contains nineteen pieces and is illustrated by Lewis’s exceptionally good photographs (for much of his life he operated a chain of camera shops). Ten of those early pieces were republished in the next collection, A View of the World (1986), accompanied by another ten written since 1959 including his most widely-known article, ‘Genocide’ (1969), about the destruction and enslavement of Brazilian tribes. Lewis’s dispatches from the eighties and nineties are respectively anthologised in To Run Across the Sea (1989) and The Happy Ant Heap (1999). A Voyage by Dhow (2001) gathered pieces from across thirty years. A final tally of seventy-four unique short articles across five books. They range nearly everywhere across the globe.

Few writers can make the imaginative recreation of a place truly palpable and memorable for the reader. How does Norman Lewis do it? Game for adventure and discovery, his voice is wry, gently amused, free of cynicism. The narrator, the man himself, retreats into near-invisibility; the prose also does its work without drawing much attention to itself. He writes in the tradition of Orwell — elegant but unpretentious clarity. Some writers are casual in the division of their prose into blocks of text, but Lewis is a crafter of paragraphs. They have robust internal structures and almost always contain at least one attention-grabbing element to ignite the imagination of the reader. It could be a concrete detail, a metaphor, a line of dialogue, or a piece of information. These moments register in the reading mind like splashes of colour, bring the setting to life, and with their accumulated weight, compel the reader onwards.

Consider the most vivid specifics in ‘A Quiet Evening in Huehuetenango’, which was first published (as fiction) by The New Yorker in 1956. Lewis escapes an English winter and winds up in the Guatemalan highlands. He is adept at metaphorical descriptions — in the town he sees soldiers “fishing in space with their rifles over the blood-red balustrade of the town hall” and vultures that fly over “waving their scarves of shadow” — but the details he chooses to note without such overt literary flair register even more vividly. His hotel features a garden turned into a “floral jungle” bordered by “Pepsi-Cola bottles stuck neck down in the earth.” Each table-top has a goldfish bowl “containing roses hideously pickled in preserving fluid.” A craze for American-style processed food means Lewis must eat “hygienic but emasculated fare… The whole loaf of bread and a half-pound of butter of a generation ago had wasted away to two slices of toast and a pat of margarine.” The scene is set and the adventure begins. When Lewis goes out to investigate a commotion in the street, he encounters a boy “throwing a bayonet at an anatomical chart given away with a Mexican journal devoted to home medicine.” Lewis and his driver wind up in a bar as the semi-captives of exceedingly polite bandits with “machetes as big as naval cutlasses.” Lewis is pressed to operate the jukebox for the bandits, who only want to hear one record over and over again. A deus ex machina arrives in the form of an earthquake, which Lewis cleverly defamiliarises: “It seemed unreasonable that an electric train should be rumbling through a subway immediately beneath us in Huehuetenango.”

A quiet man with expansive compassion, appalled by exploitation of the weak, Lewis celebrated societies that had not been transformed (or destroyed) by modernity. This could easily have become mere romantic nostalgia, but Lewis did not shy from exploring the violence, superstitions, and destructive codes of honour within the traditional societies he encountered. He evokes those societies in their complexity. A View of the World may have a lacklustre title, but it is a perfect introduction to Norman Lewis’s imaginative prose.

Edinburgh, December 2017

 

[Image CC Wikimedia Commons, Attribution agracier]