Just another taxi driver

Paul Schrader encapsulates everything a reader needs to know about his central character.

TRAVIS BICKLE, age 26, lean, hard, the consummate loner. On the surface he appears good-looking, even handsome; he has a quiet steady look and a disarming smile which flashes from nowhere, lighting up his whole face. But behind that smile, around his dark eyes, in his gaunt cheeks, one can see the ominous stains caused by a life of private fear, emptiness and lonliness [sic]. He seems to have wandered in from a land where it is always cold, a country where the inhabitants seldom speak. The head moves, the expression changes, but the eyes remain ever-fixed, unblinking, piercing empty space.

Travis is now drifting in and out of the New York City night life, a dark shadow among darker shadows. Not noticed, no reason to be noticed, Travis is one with his surroundings. He wears rider jeans, cowboy boots, a plaid western shirt and a worn beige Army jacket with a patch reading, ‘King Kong Company, 1968-70.’

He has the smell of sex about him: sick sex, repressed sex, lonely sex, but sex nonetheless. He is a raw male force, driving forward; toward what, one cannot tell. Then one looks closer and sees the inevitable. The clock spring cannot be wound continually tighter. As the earth moves toward the sun, Travis Bickle moves toward violence.

Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver, written in 1972, published by Faber and Faber, 1990, page 1.

Reading the script, it’s striking how literary and ambitious it is. This shouldn’t be surprising I suppose, since Schrader had been an incisive film critic steeped in the most serious European modernist and Japanese cinema for many years, and the survivor of a particularly muscular Christian upbringing. Surely, the anti-Tarantino.

It is also unconventional in format, lacking the usual scene and location cues and divided into titled chapters, which only increase the intensity of Travis’ deterministic downward spiral. The sense of surprise comes from the disjunction between the pulpy subject matter and the tone of thematic seriousness; Travis as a 1970s Raskolnikov.

Reportedly, De Niro flew back to New York from Rome during breaks on filming ‘Novecento’ and drove a cab for several weeks in preparation.

Irma La Douce (1963)

Pottering in the Woodend Bookshop the other week, I found a copy of the ‘Irma La Douce’ screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, published in 1963.

It appears to be a cheap movie tie-in paperback, badly typeset, a Midwood-Tower Book, “First printing anywhere”. Other books under that imprint appear to be almost exclusively ‘naughty books’ of the early sixties, the kind you still find in Opp shops, with titles like ‘A World Without Men’ in illustrated covers in garish colours. Which makes me think that perhaps the primary consideration for the publishers was the film’s subject matter and the opportunity to put Shirley MacLaine in a transparent blouse on the cover.

Opening it at random, I came across this exchange. Irma the streetwalker is complaining to Moustache, the wordly barman, of her money troubles.

Irma: If only Monsieur Camembert were still around. You remember Monsieur Camembert, don’t you?
Moustache: Do I? Big spender.
Nestor: Who’s Monsieur Camembert?
Irma: That’s what we called him – he was a cheese wholesaler at the market – used to see me twice a week – always gave me five hundred francs – so I didn’t have to see anybody else. I had lots of time then – went to cooking school and I knitted sweaters and I played solitaire – he was such a nice man.
Nestor: What happened to him?
Irma: His wife died – so he stopped coming around.

That is why I love Billy Wilder scripts so much. Even with collaborators, that sweet but sour Viennese Jewish sensibility is always there.

It been years since I saw the film, but I remember it to be only a moderately good Wilder of that strange mid-sixties period, where the things he did so well before didn’t seem to click anymore and good scripts were let down by poor casting and a general air of uncertainty. He wasn’t alone in that, of course. Hitchcocks of the same period often have similar problems.

It is reported that Wilder originally wanted Marilyn Monroe, who he had worked with on ‘Some Like It Hot’, for the part of Irma. She died before the production began, as did Charles Laughton, who was first choice for Moustache.

There are, as always, some great jokes.

The pimps’ union is called the “Mec’s’ (tough guy’s) Paris Protective Association” (MPPA), which is also the acronym for Motion Picture Producers Association.

Irma: A painter once lived here. Poor guy, he was starving. Tried everything, even cut his ear off.
Nestor: Van Gogh?
Irma: No, I think his name was Schwartz.

Other Billy Wilder posts: The Front Page, Billy Wilder: A little bit less and Stalag 17.

‘Cold Comfort Farm’

I’ve just had a thoroughly good time reading Stella Gibbons’ ‘Cold Comfort Farm’, and marvelling that a satirical novel published in 1932 could still be so much fun, long after the sources of the joke have faded or disappeared entirely.

It was intended as a satire of the fashionable rural novels of the time, sending up authors who are mostly forgotten or of interest only because she did them over. The exception is D.H. Lawrence, who was only the most self-consciously highbrow exemplar of the style.

For a first novel by a young woman in her twenties, when most novels were not by young women let alone those in their twenties, it is astonishingly self-assured and full of energy. She was a journalist and book-reviewer at the time and I can imagine the implied pressure not to burn bridges with those she might bump into at the next cocktail party, not to mention those who might employ her in the future. What a gamble.

In a strange, knowing flourish, she even flags paragraphs with an asterisk when she’s being particularly naughty, on a scale from one to three. Hence:

*** The man’s big body, etched menacingly against the bleak light that stabbed in from the low windows, did not move. His thoughts swirled like a beck in spate behind the sodden grey furrows of his face. A woman… Blast! Blast! Come to wrest away from him the land whose love fermented in his veins like slow yeast. She-woman. Young, soft-coloured, insolent. His gaze was suddenly edged by a fleshy taint. Break her. Break. Keep and hold and hold fast the land. The land, the iron furrows of frosted earth under the rain-lust, the fecund spears of rain, the swelling, slow burst of seed-sheaths, the slow smell of cows and cry of cows, the trampling bride-pride of the bull in his hour. All his, his…

Phew! And the punch line:

He stood at the table facing Flora and blowing heavily on his tea and staring at her. Flora did not mind. It was quite interesting: like having tea with a rhinoceros.

I have seen the more recent film of the book, directed by John Schlesinger and featuring Ian McKellan and Eileen Atkins. Even after reading the novel, I still think it is extremely good. It actually adds something to the experience of reading the book. I heard their broad rustic accents in my head as I went.

Some juicy bits. McKellan as amateur preacher Amos, discovers his gift move the humble folk of the Church of the Quivering Brethren with terrible enthusiasm:

“Ye miserable, crawling worms, are ye here again, then? Have ye come like Nimshi son of Rehoboam, secretly out of yer doomed houses to hear what’s comin’ to ye? Have ye come, old and young, sick and well, matrons and virgins (if there is any virgins among ye, which is not likely, the world bein’ in the wicked state it is), old men and young lads, to hear me tellin’ o’ the great crimson lickin’ flames o’ hell fire?”

. . .

In novels, persons who turned to religion to obtain the colour and excitement which everyday life did not give them were all grey and thwarted. Probably the Brethren would be all grey and thwarted… though it was too true that life as she is lived had a way of being curiously different from life as described by novelists.

I kept wondering what George Orwell would have made of Stella Gibbons. As, I suppose, a good journalist, her prose showed all the virtues of concision and clarity that he regarded so highly. As a novel with a political heart, he would have found its lack of class consciousness highly questionable, and her feminism just a little beyond his definition of progressive, as limited by his time and place as that was. I searched the index of the ‘Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters’ without result. A pity, but she would have found his asceticism a bit much, not to mention his lack of a sense of humour. Cheer up you earnest old socialist and have a glass of champagne!

They would have bonded over a shared disdain for literary and cultural pretension. Here is Mybug, a sexually obsessed intellectual, as he attempts to engage in fruitful conversation with a visiting Hollywood talent scout, a Mr Earl P. Neck, on the lookout for the next matinee idol.

“’Have you ever seen Alexander Fin?’ asked Mr Mybug. I saw him in Pepin’s last film, ‘La Plume de Ma Tante’, in Paris last January. Very amusing stuff. They all wore glass clothes, you know, and moved in time to a metronome.”

The heart of the novel is Gibbons’ heroine (and alter ego, given that she was herself a smart go-getter under thirty) Flora Poste, a new woman, one of the bright young things, wilful, assertive, with a very low tolerance for self indulgence and a passion for tidiness in all its forms:

She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while you were eating an apple.

One of the advantages of almost universal education was the fact that all kinds of persons acquired a familiarity with one’s favourite writers. It gave one a curious feeling; it was like seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one’s dressing gown.

All the inmates of Cold Comfort sustain themselves on various fruits of misery, which each of them invokes to justify their refusal to engage with life and its real potential. “I saw something nasty in the woodshed!” screams the gothic Aunt Ada from her refuge and throne at the top of the house, where she is the master of all she can see.

The wordly-wise, sophisticated busybody Flora Post sees her mission in tidying up the place, which means making herself the catalyst for change and emotional resolution for each character in turn. This is framed at the beginning of the novel as Flora simply concocting something to keep herself busy, but the author’s intention is quiet serious.

When she’s not being witty with extreme prejudice, Gibbons has a point to make, which she stitches seamlessly into the novel. It is something to do with life and way it should be lived in the shadow of the grave, which is to say, not in the shadow of the grave, but in the light. Life is other people.

A little later, as she sat peacefully sewing, Adam came in from the yard. He wore, as a protection from the rain, a hat which had lost – in who knows what hintermith of time – the usual attributes of shape, colour and size, and those more subtle race-memory associations which identify hats as hats, and now resembled some obscure natural growth, some moss or sponge or fungus, which had attached itself to a host.

An added bonus: it comes in the beautiful new/old Penguin Classics, in all their lovely orangeness.

Maugham and literary ambition

Lately I saw the film of W. Somerset Maugham’s ‘The Painted Veil’. Completely against my initial prejudice, I liked it very much and found that the landscape, the oppressive sense of heat and lack of air and its studied atmosphere hung with me for several days afterwards.

I especially liked the way its unpromising plot kept eliding my expectations and going places that were unlikely and surprising. I wondered about Somerset Maugham, who I’ve never read, and why no one seems to read him any more, when at one point in the Twentieth Century he was one of the staples of any enthusiastic reader.

I had his ‘Cakes and Ale’ on my shelf. I read it with relish and it is funny and dry and flattered me into thinking that I too would know a literary poseur when I saw one.

The narrator is an apparently successful author who is unexpectedly contacted by Alroy Kear, an old acquaintance and social climbing literary figure in London. He leaves us in no doubt about Kear’s lack of talent:

“Though I have finished few of his novels, I have begun a good many, and to my mind his sincerity is stamped on every one of their multitudinous pages.”

The urge to add italics to that withering second-last word is difficult to suppress.

Sincerity is of course a necessary precondition for the creation of kitsch. Lovely. A joy on every page.

Happy Birthday Philip

Happy Birthday to Philip Larkin. No doubt he would have hated birthdays, miserable bugger that he was.

The great poems like ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ and ‘Aubade’ no doubt recommend themselves without any mention from me, but here is one of my favourites, a poem not often mentioned but great in its own exquisite way.

First Sight

Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.

As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth’s immeasureable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.

‘Stranger Than Fiction’

Spending some time getting to know my couch over the long weekend, I had the opportunity to see a few good films that had otherwise escaped my notice.

The best was probably ‘Stranger Than Fiction’.

“Everybody knows that your life is a story. But what if a story was your life? Harold Crick is your average IRS agent: monotonous, boring, and repetitive. But one day this all changes when Harold begins to hear an author inside his head narrating his life. The narrator it is extraordinarily accurate, and Harold recognizes the voice as an esteemed author he saw on TV. But when the narration reveals that he is going to die, Harold must find the author of the story, and ultimately his life, to convince her to change the ending of the story before it is too late.”

This is a film that reminded me of a story by Borges – not any particular story, I should say, but a kind of narrative about narrative, disguised as something else entirely.

It has predictably been called ‘Charlie Kaufman lite’. This is both a slight on Charlie Kaufman and on the film’s scriptwriter, Zach Helm. This is his first feature, and on this evidence I look forward to his next which he also directed. The script’s refreshing sense of freedom with space and time is reminiscent of Kaufman, but it doesn’t have his caustic quality; it goes for sentiment more often than not. This is not a criticism, as sentiment has a place in every story; what’s happily lacking here is mawkishness.

It occurs to me that it is the second film which owes its genesis to Robert McKee’s book “Story”, being in many clever and interesting ways, essentially about the hold that stories have over us. The other one is Charlie Kaufman’s ‘Adaptation’, where the book almost becomes a character all on its own (as does Robert McKee himself).

I should say though, that this is an example of a writer and a director at variance with each other about what the film should be, and probably what it means.

Director Marc Forster has gone for a slightly slick visual stylization, which often dilutes the film’s emotional strengths, leaving it ungrounded, not located in the real world of partitioned offices and coffee breaks. It threatens to become the film that Jim Carey (in comedy mode) never made, which is a mistake.

The visual style often threatens to overwhelm the content, especially early on when borderline obsessive-compulsive Ferrell begins to go about his day, counting toothbrush strokes and steps to the bus stop. He didn’t need to work in an office that looked Joseph K’s in Orson Welles’ ‘The Trial’ for us to get that he works in a grey, featureless world without prospects of emotional release. And did all the staff literally have to wear grey – so that when Will Ferrell comes to work in a red sweater he looks like an anarchist?

When Ferrell counts his steps and does elaborate calculations on the spot, figures appear over his head, graphics elaborate themselves across the screen, appear backwards and flip around when he passes from one side of the screen to the other. At first this appears witty, and I suppose it is in a self-conscious way, but it begins to look like a commercial for insurance. I’m glad that it only appears at the beginning of the film. For no apparent reason, it ceases to happen after the first ten minutes. The viewer asks what did it mean? And that’s the trouble. It is simply a cosmetic smear; a device that distances us from the drama. As the action begins to accumulate some emotional stake for the audience, it disappears. Someone should have told Forster to lose the idea.

Emma Thompson’s performance is beautifully judged, and near-perfect. Intense, but never giving in to the temptation to go for comedic caricature. She leaves the humanity of her character’s predicament intact, no matter how attenuated the concept. The expression on her face when she stands on a precipice above the city streets, taking in the delicious possibility of death, eyes closed with hands extended to feel the rising warm air from the street. It makes sense that such a sensualist should embrace life and not give in to the temptation. She says it’s “research”, but we don’t doubt that a few more degrees of disenchantment with life might see her confronting the temptation for real.

It was the sort of performance which reminded me of Toni Collette, especially in ‘About A Boy’, where she’s supposed to be the main character’s comically eccentric and unbalanced mother, but she’s so convincing she threatens to upset the whole trajectory of the film.

Watching the ‘Making Of’ feature on the DVD, I was struck by how perfectly uninteresting a person Marc Forster seemed to be. I apologise to his mother if she ever reads this, but during the interminable interviews with cast and crew, he fails to say anything that sheds the least bit of light on his creative motivations. There’s not a joke to be made, not an observation even the laziest couch potato couldn’t have made for him. The fact that the crew spend a lot of time telling how “great he was to work with” makes it worse.

If there’s one aspect of the screenplay which might betray Zach Helm’s lack of experience, it’s the matter of the wristwatch. The film begins with Emma Thompason’s author intoning “This is a story about a man named Harold Crick and his wristwatch”. I get the feeling that the wristwatch might have featured prominently in the original pitch. In the film however, having established itself it quickly gets in the way, so that when the narrator feels compelled to keep referring to it for no necessary reason, it becomes confusing and then irritating. Somebody should have told him to leave it in the second draft.

The cast are uniformly good; all of them showy by temperament but with their usual intensity turned right down, including Will Ferrell, Dustin Hoffman and Queen Latifah.

Kay Eiffel: I went out… to buy cigarettes and I figured out how to kill Harold Crick.
Penny Escher: Buying cigarettes?
Kay Eiffel: As I was… when I came out of the store I… it came to me.
Penny Escher: How?
Kay Eiffel: Well, Penny, like anything worth writing, it came inexplicably and without method.

Dostoyevsky’s epilepsy

A very interesting recent piece I found almost at random on the nature of Dostoyevsky’s epilepsy.

I had known that he was believed to be epileptic, but I didn’t know that the condition was self-diagnosed. Relatively little was understood about the condition in the 19th Century, causing Freud to disbelieve the diagnosis on the grounds that it was found only among the mentally feeble. He thought the condition was a straight case of hysteria. Yes, but then he always believed that…

On the basis of recent comments, it seems the consensus is that it was in fact temporal-lobe epilepsy. He described his seizures in such great detail both in his correspondence and in the mouths of his characters, that modern researchers have a remarkably complete account of his condition.

His auras were ecstatic in nature. The sensation was so powerful, that:

“For several moments,” he said, “I would experience such joy as would be inconceivable in ordinary life – such joy that no one else could have any notion of. I would feel the most complete harmony in myself and in the whole world and this feeling was so strong and sweet that for a few seconds of such bliss I would give ten or more years of my life, even my whole life perhaps.”

The author (I can’t find a name attached to this piece), conjectures a connection between the nature of Dostoyevsky’s ecstatic states and his religiosity, his pervasive sense of guilt, his feeling of dread.

Because of his epilepsy, Dostoyevsky was, to borrow the title of his second novel, a “double man”; a rational, exalted being on the one hand, and, because of his illness, a mystical and base creature on the other. It seems that as his life progressed, and his epilepsy became more severe, the latter persona prevailed, as evidenced by the increasingly mystical nature of the work produced later in his life.

Nora Ephron: ‘Everything is copy’

Nora Ephron won the thanks and praise of adults around the world by writing an infectiously likeable and in its own way penetrating film about a relationship called ‘When Harry Met Sally’. It was so good, it bought her so much credit that most people can still forgive her even after ‘Bewitched’.

Apparently she wrote books, which I have heard of even if I didn’t know they were by her. After this, I might seek them out.

She now blogs occasionally for the Huffington Post, and here she is confirming something that I have always suspected: that blogging is actually an entirely new genre of writing.

Arianna Huffington first asked Ephron to write a blog for her when Mark Felt was revealed to have been Deep Throat. “So I tossed something off and got this huge response, and it was fun to do.” In the two years since then, she has blogged roughly once a fortnight, on politics and the media and whatever is happening in her life at the time. “I learned that this is a different way of writing – you have to do it really fast, and if you don’t do it fast, you’re making a mistake. If I’m working on anything for more than an hour, I say, this is not a blog, I have to stop right now, cos I’m writing a column or something else.”

What’s the difference?

“The function is different. The function of a blog is on some level to start a conversation that you’re not involved in any more because you’ve already had your say. That thing of coming right off the news – did you see what I saw this morning, can you believe it? – has a kind of fun appeal.

Cliches

“Cliches are precisely what one turns to when thinking gets too hard but you can’t stop talking.”

Nice sentence spotted in Martin Krygier’s article ‘The Usual Suspects: Quadrant at 50’, which appeared in The Monthly, December 2006/January 2007.

Words were my only love and not many

I will drink some Irish whisky on April 13th, the centenary of Samuel Beckett’s birth.

There was a nice piece about him in the Guardian this week from Edna O’Brien, who knew him. I think she gets him about right in this passage, in words I should use the next time I’m trying to justify my once-obsessive interest in the man to friends who think him nothing but a whining Irish existentialist:

Much is made of Beckett’s despairingness, his Cartesian soul nailed to its Cartesian cross, yet he is not a depressing writer, not depressing in the way Henri de Montherlant or Thomas Bernhard can be, because, as with Shakespeare, his darkest words are shot through with beauty and astonishment, his impassioned keenings the best witness that there is to the human plaint, his disgusts brimful with exhilaration. He was a maniac who managed with consummate skill to convert that mania into lasting poetry.

I also think of Francis Bacon’s decription of what he was trying to achieve in art: “exhilarated despair.”

Once upon a time, I collected every play and small bound volume I could get with Beckett’s name on the cover. I discovered there were scores of tiny books, often no longer than a few dozen pages, all of them possessing a power I couldn’t describe when I was 21 years old, but found oddly comforting.

I will get out “The Unnameable” or “Embers” or “Company” or “Not I” on April 13th and have another look.