Homer feels lucky to be alive. This, I decided, would be the conflict that would drive Dr. Larch and his beloved orphan apart. Homer will learn how to perform an abortion, but he won’t want to. For fifteen years, he’ll refuse.
The Cider House Rules is a didactic novel. The nature of Dr. Larch’s argument with Homer Wells is polemical, and Larch wins the argument in the end. Larch is a polemicist raving against an entrenched moral doctrine of his day.
That abortions are illegal doesn’t stop Dr. Larch from providing them—nor, as I’ve said, is this the only law Larch breaks. He lovingly creates college and medical-school degrees for Homer; indeed, the falsification of these docu-ments gives Larch inordinate pleasure.
In my screenplay of The Cider House Rules—but not in
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the novel—I have Nurse Angela object that Homer’s credentials are against the law. (So much of the argument of the novel is carried on in the narration; the characters’
thoughts are often internal, not expressed. In the film, the dialogue best advances the argument that drives the story.)
“We all know who trained Homer—his credentials are
as good as mine are,” Larch tells Angela. “Don’t you be holy to me about the law.What has the law done for any of us here?”
“I don’t want to perform abortions,” Homer says to
Larch. “I have no argument with you performing them.”
Larch replies: “You know how to help these women—
how can you not feel obligated to help them when they can’t get help anywhere else?”
“I didn’t ask to know how—you just showed me,”
Homer protests.
“What else could I have shown you, Homer?” Larch argues. “The only thing I can teach you is what I know.”
The first chapter of the novel is titled “The Boy Who Belonged to St. Cloud’s.” (It was my earliest title for the book.) The point is, Homer Wells will never get away from what Larch has taught him.
“I expect you to be of use,” Larch tells the boy.
“For Homer Wells, this was easy,” I wrote at the end of the first chapter. “Of use, he felt, was all that an orphan was born to be.”
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Larch’s edict “to be of use” is strictly in keeping with his utilitarian nature. Homer, like any young man, wants to live his own life—like any boy, he wants to have an adventure or two.
Homer has far fewer adventures in the movie of The Cider House Rules than I permit him to have in the book.
What was, to begin with, a didactic novel is no less didactic as a film, but Homer has less fun.
Larch’s argument with Homer dominates the screen-
play. It should, although it may not necessarily, dominate the movie. (I’ll leave that judgment to the audience. I’m unsure of the final result because Larch’s lengthiest and most bitter argument with Homer didn’t survive the director’s first cut of the film.) While a woman’s right to an abortion, and all that that implies, is the dominant argument of the book, in the necessary compression of the story—to make a long, plot-driven novel into a feature-length film—the distillation of Larch’s polemics becomes stronger stuff in the script. Maybe too strong. Michael Caine’s choice, which was to play Larch softly, helps to quiet how loud Larch is on the page.
While the Homer of the novel is a passive hero who
seizes control of his own life and dedicates himself to Larch’s cause only upon his mentor’s death and as a result of the drag-on fifteen-year affair with his best friend’s wife, the Homer of the movie seems more passive—
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because Caine-as-Larch is less of a moral bully than Larch is in the book.
When I saw the director’s first cut of the film, I thought there were a few too many close-ups of Homer. For much of the film, until he makes up his mind to perform the abortion on Rose Rose and return to St. Cloud’s, the expressions on Homer’s face are his only responses to the world—both inside and outside the orphanage. In the
movie, Homer’s expressions are perfect—meaning utterly true to his character—but I cautioned the director that too many close-ups of his keenly observant but inactive expressions served to underline his passivity. So much of the novel was missing from the screenplay, I didn’t want the movie audience to grow tired of Homer’s lack of action before he becomes an active hero.
Missing from the screenplay, too, are most of the
novel’s scenes of comic relief. Despite the abortion polemic, The Cider House Rules—like all my novels—is a comic novel. There is little “relief ” of any kind in the screenplay, wherein the grim and difficult-to-accept truth of Dr. Larch’s utilitarian message is given center stage. The screenplay condenses the novel in such a way that the story’s harshest elements stand out all the harsher in their relative isolation.
Candy’s betrayal of Wally seems more of a betrayal.
Homer seems more needed at St. Cloud’s, and Larch
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seems more impatient to get him to come back. Larch’s ether habit is more lugubrious.And all the deaths are more truncated in film time—Fuzzy’s death, the death of the unnamed twelve-year-old who has the botched abortion, the violent end of Mr. Rose, and Larch’s tired succumbing to ether.
“Even for me,” chirps little Jane Eyre, “life had its gleams of sunshine.” Not in this orphan story, not as a film.
In the screenplay, I made a decision to hold the “sunshine”; I thought there was no time for sunshine. (The director, Lasse Hallström, persuaded me to interject a little sunshine into my final draft of the screenplay; it’s a good thing he did. Now the producer, Richard Gladstein, says: “While we don’t have the brightest of movies, there is a bit of sunshine here and there.” I concede that he’s right.)
In the screenplay, I have the ever-thoughtful Buster ask Larch what the twelve-year-old girl died of. Larch won’t say “a botched abortion,” but he says everything else.
Pounding the dead girl’s coffin, he rails at Buster. “She died of secrecy, she died of ignorance . . . ”
“It’s bad luck to hit a coffin,” Buster interrupts him.
“She died of superstition, too!” Larch shouts. (I think I had Larch bully Buster too much. In the first rough cut of the movie, Lasse edited out Buster’s line about hitting a coffin and Larch’s rejoinder about superstition.)
There is no Buster in the book. I created him to stand as
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a replacement of Homer as a younger boy, because I didn’t have the time to reproduce Homer’s childhood in the
screenplay. (One of the film’s co-producers, and Lasse Hallström’s longtime creative partner, Leslie Holleran, made many valuable contributions to the script; Leslie suggested that it would be a good idea to see a little of Homer’s childhood, if only in montage over the opening credits. She was right.)
I’ve already said why I eliminated Melony from the
screenplay. She would have overpowered Homer—she al-
most overpowers him in the novel. In the film, she might have rivaled even Dr. Larch. I wanted no one, not even Mr.
Rose, to rival Larch.
Movies are not only popular with nonreaders; they are also for young people and for restless readers. Doubtless many moviegoers will “identify” with Homer Wells. For most of the audience—the younger members, especially—
Homer will be the main character,
but Dr. Larch is the most important character to me.
My friend Peter Matthiessen read the novel The Cider House Rules in manuscript. He said that I should make Larch the main character; Peter urged me to revise the novel, taking some scenes away from Homer, giving more to Larch. I agreed with Peter, and tried to heed his criticism, but I was not entirely successful. The Cider House Rules is a novel with two main characters.
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I’m not saying that novels with two main characters are necessarily flawed, but they create problems of focus—for both their authors and their readers. The World According to Garp is also such a novel; Garp may be the principal main character, but his mother, Jenny Fields, is a much more dramatic character than he is. Many readers wrote me that they wanted Jenny to be the main character.
In writing the screenplay of The Cider House Rules, I felt I was given the opportunity to make Dr. Larch the uncon-tested main character of the film. This idea was met with formidable resistance; all four directors associated with the project wanted more of Homer and less of Larch. The result is that Homer is in many more scenes. In movie language, Homer is the star of the picture. Nonetheless I am hopeful that Dr. Larch is the driving force behind the film, even when he’s not on camera.
The Cider House Rules is a symbolic title. To anyone familiar with the story, Larch’s rules are the rules that apply.
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set The Cider House Rules in Maine because it was the first state in the country to make abortion illegal. From colo-Inial times,abortion had always been permitted until the fetus was “quick”; in other words, until the fetus was advanced enough to make movement of its own that could be differentiated from the mother’s movement. Thus, in the first trimester of pregnancy, abortion was legal in the United States, even in the time of the Puritans. Notwithstanding the punitive beliefs of America’s deeply religious founding fathers, abortion was nobody’s business but the woman’s herself.
Later, in the state of Maine, the Eastman-Everett Act of 1840 declared that performing an abortion was punishable by a year in jail or a $1,000 fine, or both. If you were a doctor, you might also lose your license to practice. By
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1846, abortion was illegal throughout the United States; it remained so until 1973, when the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision held that a woman had a constitutional right to an abortion. Exactly what happened to make the procedure illegal for 127 years when, for the first 226
years—since the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock—it
had been legal?
Ironically, doctors were the first to undermine a
woman’s right to an abortion. In the 1830s, a group of doctors in the American Medical Association believed that midwives were making too much money performing
abortions; it was money that the doctors believed they should be making instead. They argued that performing an abortion was a lot more difficult, medically, than delivering a child, so only doctors should perform the procedure.
Yet for years midwives had been doing abortions with as great a degree of safety as had doctors.
As for the greater danger, between childbirth and abortions in the 1830s, women who were having their babies at lying-in hospitals ran a far greater risk of dying from childbed fever (puerperal fever) than women delivering babies or having abortions at home. As my grandfather wrote: “In cases where those in labor and those recently delivered were bedded in a proximity that afforded facilities for the transfer of infection from one to the other, puerperal fever attained the proportion of a pestilence.”
By 1840, nevertheless, a group of doctors had managed
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to take abortion out of the hands of midwives; and once the only legal access to the procedure rested with doctors, another group of doctors (but not entirely a different group) within the American Medical Association lobbied for the procedure to be declared illegal.
This is as confusing as it is contradictory. But, in retrospect, many doctors were unprepared to discover that midwives had been as busy performing abortions as delivering babies. The doctors panicked. At first they had wanted the money that midwives were making from performing abortions. But then, when some of these same doctors recognized how overwhelming the need for abortion was, they wanted nothing to do with it.
I will never fully comprehend this murky history, but at least one book from the period is clear. It was published in New York in 1860—Mrs.W. H. Maxwell’s A Female Physician to the Ladies of the United States. Mrs. Maxwell treated
“all diseases peculiar to women, or which they may have unfortunately incurred through the dissipations or wanton unfaithfulness of husbands, or otherwise.” (In short, she treated venereal diseases.) Mrs. Maxwell also wrote that she gave her attention, as well, “to women . . . who are forced by the malfunction of their genital organs, or other cause, to resort to premature delivery.” (In short, she performed abortions.)
Until the late 1870s, Mrs. Maxwell operated a women’s
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clinic in New York. “The authoress has not established her hospital simply for the benefit of lying-in women,” she wrote. “She believes that in view of the uncharitableness of general society towards the erring, it is fit that the unfortunate should have some sanctuary to which to flee, in whose shade they may have undisturbed opportunity to reflect, and hiding forever their present unhappiness, nerve themselves to be wiser in the future. The true physician’s soul cannot be too broad and gentle.”
Mrs. Maxwell was one of my earliest models for Dr.
Larch. Larch’s soul could not be too broad and gentle, I decided; yet, with Homer, Larch is ruthless. Larch may be Homer’s physician, but he is primarily Homer’s father, and he is Homer’s teacher. Larch starts training Homer to be his replacement when Homer is just a boy.
As for what Mrs. Maxwell accurately describes as “the uncharitableness of general society towards the erring,” I am reminded of an expression that was more common in my grandfather’s day, which was also Dr. Larch’s day, than it is nowadays, although the spirit behind this expression is still present. It was what people used to say about a young, unmarried girl who got pregnant: “She is paying the piper.”
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R E A L L Y B E T A U G H T
T O A C H I M P A N Z E E ?
Think of the Right-to-Life movement today. It is
fueled by something stronger than a concern for the
rights of the unborn. (Proponents of the Right-to-
Life position show very little concern for children once they’re born.) What underlies the Right-to-Life message is a part of this country’s fundamental sexual puritanism.
Right-to-Lifers believe that what they perceive as promis-cuity should not go unpunished; girls who get pregnant should pay the piper.
This thinking is more invasive than many other manifestations of invasion of privacy. What calls for greater privacy than the decision to have, or not to have, a child? And isn’t that decision a case where common sense obtains? (If you don’t approve of abortion, don’t have one. If you don’t want to have a baby, have an abortion.)
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Let doctors practice medicine. Let religious zealots practice their religion, but let them keep their religion to themselves. Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else’s religion practiced on us.
Yet here is the irony in our country today: more than twenty-five years after the Roe v. Wade decision, the biggest obstacle to safe, legal abortion is not the law—it is the absence of trained abortion providers. (Doctors, again.) The average age of our country’s abortion providers is sixty-five.
Throughout the United States, medical students rarely get clinical exposure to abortion. Only 12 percent of OB-GYN residency programs require abortion training. What you hear from many OB-GYN residents is that they’re too busy with seriously sick people—they mean in-patient work—to be interested in working at out-patient clinics, where the majority of abortions are provided. (Only 10
percent of abortions are performed in hospitals.) Out-patient clinics were vital in the early days following Roe v.
Wade, but nowadays we might be better off dealing with abortion as a part of family practice. More than half the abortions in the United States today are medical abortions, which means that no surgery is necessary. (Something the Right-to-Life zealots don’t like to be reminded of.) Many OB-GYN residents don’t want to waste their
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time with modern-day abortion procedures, which are
too simple, too easy to learn. Dr. Judy Tyson, an OB-GYN and abortion provider at Dartmouth-Hitchcock
Medical Center, is fond of telling her medical students that she could teach standard surgical-abortion procedure to a chimpanzee in less than an hour. Yet, in more than three quarters of this country’s medical schools, standard surgical-abortion procedure is not taught.
The good news is that more and more medical-school
students today are turning to family practice. If the OB-GYN community has been reluctant to provide abortion-procedure training, many medical students with an