All the best,
John
March 28, 2011
Dear John,
Yet another friend has given me an old manual typewriter, in this case an Olivetti Lettera 22 (circa 1958–60), which I have just carried back from Manhattan, where for the past two weeks it was in the hands of a man named Paul Schweitzer, whose Gramercy Office Equipment Co. is the last place in New York where typewriters are still repaired. For $275, my new toy was given a complete overhaul, and I am now using it for the first time, taking immense pleasure in the feel of the keyboard and the elegance of its design. Such a nifty, compact piece of machinery—small enough and light enough to serve in the future as a travel typewriter, something I have been without for many years.
Good timing (or strange timing) in light of your recent remarks about cell phones and other forms of digital technology. Yes, all these instruments are now an integral part of daily life, and novelists cannot speak of the contemporary world without acknowledging the existence of these inventions. Although I no longer have a cell phone myself (I owned one briefly, rarely used it, and subsequently gave it to my then teenage daughter, who had lost three phones in the past nine months), I am not so ignorant or stubborn as to want to force my contrarian views on the characters in my books. In my last novel, which is a story set entirely in the Now, cell phones figure in the action, and even though I have also given away my laptop (which I had used for work on a screenplay), computers and the Internet have appeared in other novels I have written in the twenty-first century. I am a realist! I might long for the old days (record stores, palatial movie houses, smoking permitted everywhere), I might feel depressed when I realize that my dinner companions have suddenly stopped talking and are all looking at their cell phones, but however mixed my feelings might be about these wondrous gadgets—which were built in order to bring people together but in fact often drive them apart—I know that this is how the world lives now, and there’s nothing I can do but keep up a brave front and try to accept it.
One could, of course, write historical novels. If one were interested in historical novels, that is—which I am not.
The novel of adultery: a lovely term, which brought a smile to my face. No doubt it is more difficult to hide from your spouse when both of you have cell phones. But people sometimes switch off their phones, and sometimes they will receive a call, check to see who has called, and not bother to answer (I have observed this). On the other hand, repeated failure to answer your wife’s calls might not be such a good idea if you want to keep your marriage intact—which, I assume, is the aim of all adulterers. And yet I can’t believe that adultery is any less prevalent today than it was before everyone had a cell phone in his pocket. It might demand new forms of deviousness—but that would be a challenge most novelists would welcome.
You talk about everyone being available to everyone else, and in a sense that is true—but only in a fragmented, ad hoc sort of way. There are no directories for cell phones. Those fat books listing the numbers of traditional landlines still exist (in a large city like New York, the books are positively obese), but the distribution of cell phone numbers is a private affair. I have your number because you gave it to me, but there is nowhere for me to look it up, no public access to your private number. But once I do have it, of course, I can contact you anywhere, any time, for the mobile phone (a much better term than the American cell phone) goes wherever you go. There are many advantages to this new system (especially in the case of emergencies and accidents), but many disadvantages as well (as in the case of clandestine, adulterous affairs). All in all, probably a wash. Where films are concerned, however, cell phones strike me as a positive step forward. Now that no one is allowed to smoke anymore, they give actors something to do with their hands.
On the subject of film, I’m impressed that you are taking the trouble to look into William Wyler. I can’t say that I admire him as much as you think I do (or might have led you to think). Whenever I make an imaginary list of my favorite directors from around the world, or even my favorite American directors, his name is never on it—in fact, never even comes up for consideration. It’s true that I have an enormous soft spot for The Best Years of Our Lives, which I rank as his finest film and one of the top Hollywood films ever made, but nothing else of his comes close to it. There are others that I like, of course, but not necessarily the ones you have seen lately—although, if the title of the Bette Davis film is The Letter, then you have seen what is probably one of his best after The Best. . . . The other two that I think are extremely good were both adapted from American novels: Dodsworth, 1936 (Sinclair Lewis) and The Heiress, 1949 (Henry James, Washington Square). He is a beautiful stylist, a terrifically talented director of actors (many impressive performances), visually stimulating (especially in the films shot by Gregg Toland—a genius who died of a heart attack at forty-four), but someone so good at his craft that I rarely feel the mark of something personal, that indefinable something that separates the great from the very good. André Bazin, the well-known French film critic, made a big fuss about Wyler’s importance in Cahiers du Cinéma in the late fifties, but in the end Wyler is not a director one loves so much as tips one’s hat to out of respect. I enclose a photocopy of the Wyler entry from my film encyclopedia, which gives a chronology of all his films as well as some interesting bits of information, in particular the fact that in his first two years as a director, he made more than forty two-reel Westerns. There were no film schools back then, but what better school than the intensity of that on-the-job training? Young directors today are not given a chance to fail, to improve steadily from one film to the next. A single flop, and they’re out.
Also enclosed: a Xerox of a photograph taken of me at age five in my football uniform. I stumbled across it by accident yesterday—looking through a box for something else—and remembered having written to you about that uniform in an earlier letter. Note how pristine the uniform is. Never touched by a blade of grass or a thimbleful of dirt. And how serious the expression on my face. I wonder who on earth that little boy was.
With warmest best,
Paul
P.S.: I have signed up for two of the university roundtables in Canada next September. My first academic conference ever. No, I don’t blame you. Anything for a friend.
April 7, 2011
Dear Paul,
Thanks for the observations, and material, on William Wyler. Have you seen The Children’s Hour (1962), based on a play by Lillian Hellman? I saw it recently for the first time—I mentioned it in my last letter—and thought it a brave film. Or, to be more precise, I thought it brave of Wyler to push a film like that past the gatekeepers of Hollywood. (It would have been even braver, I suppose, to have made it in the 1950s.)
There is a supernumerary pleasure in watching restored black-and-white prints of films that one saw in one’s youth (or even in one’s childhood) in crummy cinemas with indifferent projectionists and poor projectors. It is only very rarely in color films that one sees black used with all the tonal gradations that it is capable of. It’s sad to think there is no audience for new b+w movies.
Is your newly acquired Olivetti one of those little flat jobs that comes in a zip-up canvas carry case? My wife brought one of them to our marriage as part of her dowry. I typed my MA thesis on it. Then in 1972 I bought myself an Adler, a Swiss machine, too heavy to be portable, and used that until computers and printers came along. I won’t ever go back to them, the Olivetti and the Adler, but I feel nostalgic about them. I still have them in a cupboard somewhere. God knows where one would buy ribbons nowadays, to say nothing of carbon paper.
You say that you are quite prepared to write novels in which people go around with personal electronic devices. I must say I am not. The telephone is about as far as I will go in a book, and then reluctantly. Why? Not only because I’m not fond of what the world has turned into, but because if people (“characters”) are contin
ually going to be speaking to one another at a distance, then a whole gamut of interpersonal signs and signals, verbal and nonverbal, voluntary and involuntary, has to be given up. Dialogue, in the full sense of the term, just isn’t possible over the phone.
It had never occurred to me that there is no directory publicly available of people’s cell phone numbers. Entrusting someone with one’s number has today acquired quite a weight of meaning.
Think of all those old noir movies in which the detective uses the telephone directory to track down his quarry. Cut to close-up of a page in the directory, with a name and number circled in black.
April 18
I’ve been sleeping badly for years now. I count myself lucky if I can get four hours a night; as for four consecutive hours, that’s my idea of bliss.
One consequence is that I nod off during the day, sometimes sitting at my desk—little fugues from the world that usually last no more than a few seconds but sometimes extend to five or even ten minutes.
I’ve taken to having the most interesting dreams during these escapes: episodes with believable little plots, acutely realistic in their situations, their dialogue, the look of things. They don’t seem to be based on memories at all, but to be pure invention. Nothing fantastic in them, nothing menacing. I think of them as finger exercises of the imagination, the improvisations of a mind with something like forty years of practice in conceiving situations. They are of no use to me—they don’t fit into what I am writing—so there is no point in noting them down. I am pleased with them, I even enjoy them while they are running, but they leave a residue of sadness too. It seems a pity to have built up, over the decades, this particular little skill, and to think that it is going to be lost, eclipsed, when I go. Not something one can bequeath.
All the best,
John
April 22, 2011
Dear John,
You will have received my little note by now telling you that Siri and I are taking off for Europe again and won’t be home until May 30. How good to receive your latest, then—just in the nick of time.
To begin with a last word about William Wyler. In fact, he did make an earlier version of The Children’s Hour—as long ago as 1936. That adaptation bore the title These Three. I saw it at some point in the distant past but can remember nothing about it now except that I thought it was good. (A brief description enclosed, from a video guide we sometimes refer to while watching films.) I will try to track it down after I return. If you happen to find it before then, let me know what you think. It would be interesting to see how the two versions compare with each other.
I don’t want to meddle in your private business, but what you report about your sleep problems disturbs me. If I were in your position, I would surely go half mad. What about pills, or a sleep clinic, or some other remedy? One simply cannot survive in a state of permanent exhaustion. It occurs to me that it might have something to do with traveling, your frequent trips to Europe, and the wrenching discombobulation of trying to cope with shifting time zones—especially because you live in Australia, which is devilishly far from everything. Did you have this problem while you were still living in South Africa, or did it begin only after the move? I mentioned your struggles to Siri—because of her deep affection for you, but also because she has studied and written about sleep and knows far more about it than I do—and she was alarmed. She said she wanted to write to you and offer some suggestions. Would that be okay?
On the other hand, the little dreams you talk about are fascinating, and, I think, highly unusual. Most people when they drift off tend to go into a realm of half waking/half sleep in which one encounters a free-for-all of wild, Technicolor images. Your little stories seem to be in black-and-white (that same black-and-white we both miss in contemporary movies), and the fact that they are neither grotesque nor frightening makes them poignant to me. It seems a pity to let this talent go to waste—this unique talent—and even if you feel you can’t “use” these dream stories in the work you are doing now, perhaps a day will come when you can approach this phenomenon directly in a work of fiction, an essay, or, even better, a film. I for one would watch (or read) with rapt attention.
A couple of days ago, I had a startling revelation about the effect our correspondence has had on me. We have been at it for close to three years now, and in that time you have become what I would call an “absent other,” a kind of adult cousin to the imaginary friends little children invent for themselves. I discovered that I often walk around talking to you in my head, wishing you were with me so I could point out the strange-looking person who just walked past me on the sidewalk, remark on the odd scrap of conversation I just overheard, or take you into the little sandwich shop where I often buy my lunch so you could listen to the talk that goes on in there with me. I love that place, a wholly unpretentious nothing of a place, with its heterogeneous clientele of cops and firemen, hospital workers from across the street, mothers with their children, students, truck drivers, secretaries, and what makes the place special is the men who work behind the counter, good-spirited young guys with their proletarian Brooklyn voices, who seem to know everyone who comes in there (“I talked to your mother yesterday,” “I hear your son is doing well on his Little League team,” “Welcome back. How was your trip?”), as if I were living in a small provincial town and not in a gigantic metropolis, and I know you would appreciate the spirit inside that shop and understand (if you don’t already) what I find so interesting about living in New York. So there you are, John, inside my head as I talk to you, and nothing like this has ever happened to me—probably because I have never corresponded with anyone so regularly—and the effect, I can assure you, is an entirely pleasant one.
A phrase has been running through my head these past few weeks: New Hope for the Dead. It’s the title of a pulp novel I read many years ago (a good one, by an American named Charles Willeford), and it sprang to the forefront of my consciousness after reading that Doctorow had just published a new book of short stories at eighty, talking to Coover (seventy-nine) about the Beckett Address he will be delivering in Ireland this fall, having dinner with Roth (seventy-eight) and DeLillo (seventy-four) and finding all of these so-called old men in remarkably good form, busy with projects, cracking jokes, eating with healthy appetites, and I felt encouraged by what I saw and heard. New Hope for the Dead. Meaning: New Hope for Us.
Until my return. With best thoughts,
Paul
P.S.: Yes, the Olivetti is exactly as you remember it. A little flat job with a zip-up canvas carry case—in this case, a blue case with a black stripe down the middle.
May 24, 2011
Dear John,
I am writing to you from Italy with my new-old Italian typewriter, sitting on the top-floor terrace of the castle where Siri and I have been staying for the past week and looking out at an extraordinarily beautiful landscape of vineyards and hills. What did we do to deserve this? The organizers of the little festival we will be participating in on Friday and Saturday offered us this respite, which we blindly accepted, not knowing what we were getting ourselves into, and everything has turned out better, far better, than we possibly could have imagined. We are the only guests in the hotel, which is indeed a castle, albeit a new one for these parts (circa 1880), an architectural folly that is nevertheless a genuine faux castle, and after three weeks of tramping through cities in northern Europe, the quiet of this place (Novello, in the Langhe hills of Piedmont) has given us a welcome stretch of blissful, unprecedented repose. No obligations, no cares. We write, read, and eat, and every day there is the sun—each day more balmy and sun filled than the day before it.
We began with ten days in Paris, where I had nothing to do but work on my book and see old friends, whereas Siri was inordinately busy with journalists (her novel is just out in France) and various public events. I have watched her address the Paris Society of Psychoanalysts, conduct a contentio
us, wholly invigorating seminar on trauma and writing at the Sorbonne (at one point, she rolled up her sleeves and said: “I love fighting about ideas”), do an onstage conversation at the Bibliothèque Nationale, take part in a dialogue at Shakespeare and Company with another woman writer that was billed as: “I don’t read fiction, but my wife does. Would you dedicate the book to her?,” and finally, a double, bilingual reading with the actress Marthe Keller. Then on to Vienna, where she read her much anticipated Sigmund Freud Lecture to a full house. A splendid talk, a brilliant talk, the product of two or three months of brain-splitting work, and there I was sitting in the audience with tears welling up in my eyes as the applause rained down on her. Then we went off in opposite directions for four days, Siri to Germany for readings in Berlin, Hamburg, and Heidelberg, and I to Stockholm, where I began to sing for my supper as well. We joined forces in Copenhagen after that, having promised our Danish publisher to show up for a festival he had organized, our struggling Danish publisher whose company is hanging by a thread, hoping our presence there would give him a boost, and for five days we worked hard, too hard, and by the end we were both dropping from exhaustion. I tallied up Siri’s public appearances: fourteen events in nineteen days—an inhuman schedule, which I have made her promise never to repeat for the rest of her life.
Strangely, I seem to have finished my book. After crashing into a wall last November with the novel I had been trying to write (which I told you about earlier), I took a pause, and a couple of days into the new year began writing something else: an autobiographical work, a collection of fragments and memories, a curious project that revolves around the history of my body, the physical self I have been dragging around with me for sixty-four years now. Two hundred pages later, I feel that I have said enough, and after Siri read through it yesterday and gave it the stamp of approval, I suddenly find myself unemployed again. That is why I am writing this extra letter to you—because I am living in a faux castle in Italy and don’t know what to do with myself today. Another letter, then, in order to fill these tranquil morning hours and share two little anecdotes with you, two sentences that have been ringing in my head for some time.