Remembering Ray

When The Paris Review sent William Plummer to interview Ray Bradbury in the late 1970s, George Plimpton, the magazine's publisher, returned a transcript of the interview to Bradbury, where it was discovered among his papers by Sam Weller, who has since written a biography of Bradbury. Attached to the transcript was a memo from Plimpton saying that he found the first draft “a bit informal in places, maybe overly enthusiastic.” The interview was never published. Bradbury was supposed to make his own changes and return the transcript to Plimpton, but he failed to do so and couldn't (in 2010) remember why.

With Bradbury's help, Weller added finishing touches to the interview, and The Paris Review published it in 2010. After I read the interview, I can see why Plimpton had misgivings about publishing it. The magazine has been publishing interviews with some of the greatest writers of the time, like T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Hemingway, Faulkner, Bellow, Cheever, and Borges. Bradbury is remembered as a science fiction, horror, and mystery writer. It was his 1953 dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451 that attracted serious attention, however, and it was adapted to film by François Truffaut in 1966.

I remember one of his stories that I must've read in junior high school about a bedridden old millionaire who spends his time telephoning the offices of his international company and having someone dangle the phone outside the window so that he can hear the noises of Rome or London or Buenos Aires. At the story's end, the old man expires and, when his nurse discovers him dead, she takes the receiver out of his hand and puts it to her ear. The only thing she hears is the sound of the phone on the other end hanging up.

Like many other successful writers of his generation, Bradbury worked extensively in Hollywood. I don't know what he thought of Truffaut's version of Fahrenheit 451, which I thought was hamstrung by its small budget. It looks terribly dated today, but it shows off a deep reverence for literature, which Truffaut shared with Bradbury. In its last scenes, the hero, Montag, has fled to the countryside where he meets people named David Copperfield and Huckleberry Finn - so named because they have memorized the books by those titles in a world where books are outlawed.

Bradbury's admiration for great books and great authors is betrayed, however, by his comments in the Paris Interview. Early in the interview, he says, "If I’d found out that Norman Mailer liked me, I’d have killed myself. I think he was too hung up. I’m glad Kurt Vonnegut didn’t like me either. He had problems, terrible problems. He couldn’t see the world the way I see it."

Bradbury expressed interest in writers like Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, as well as a few forgotten ones like Theodore Sturgeon and Van Vogt (contributors to the magazine Astounding Science Fiction). When he read Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, he said "I was so taken with it that I thought, Someday I’d like to write a book like this, but I’d set it on Mars." He spoke of his interest in Thomas Wolfe and Eudora Welty, but when he was asked "What about Proust, Joyce, Flaubert, Nabokov—writers who tend to think of literature in terms of style and form," he replied:

"No. If people put me to sleep, they put me to sleep. God, I’ve tried to read Proust so often, and I recognize the beauty of his style, but he puts me to sleep. The same for Joyce. Joyce doesn’t have many ideas."

Then it was suggested that he write the screenplay for the Hollwoodization of War and Peace. As Bradbury recalled,

"I was offered the chance to write War and Peace for the screen a few decades ago. The American version with King Vidor directing. I turned it down. Everyone said, How could you do that? That’s ridiculous, it’s a great book! I said, Well, it isn’t for me. I can’t read it. I can’t get through it, I tried. That doesn’t mean the book’s bad. I just am not prepared for it. It portrays a very special culture. The names throw me."

Later, director John Huston contacted him: "Do you have some time to come to Europe and write Moby-Dick for the screen? I said, I don’t know, I’ve never been able to read the damn thing." He broke down and read "the damn thing" and wrote the screenplay. "I got out of the bed one morning in London, walked over to the mirror and said, I am Herman Melville. The ghost of Melville spoke to me and on that day I rewrote the last thirty pages of the screenplay. It all came out in one passionate explosion. I ran across London and took it to Huston. He said, My God, this is it." So Bradbury rewrote the novel's ending for Huston's incredibly shallow film version.

Bradbury admits to being self-educated:

"Yes, I am. I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los Angeles, and spent long days every summer in the library ... you begin to run in circles because there’s so much to look at and read. And it’s far more fun than going to school, simply because you make up your own list and you don’t have to listen to anyone. When I would see some of the books my kids were forced to bring home and read by some of their teachers, and were graded on—well, what if you don’t like those books? They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don’t have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself."

It's one thing to prefer some writers to others - everyone has personal preferences - or to dislike an intellectual approach to the arts. But it's quite another thing for a well-known writer to openly show off his ignorance of works of literature, and to deliberately avoid the writings of Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, and Melville because he finds them boring or unreadable. It's actually quite irresponsible. His comments on those far superior writers and books are embarrassing proof of his quite abysmal taste. Bradbury was one of those phenomenally successful writers of trash like Edgar Wallace, or the recently deceased Elmore Leonard who devoted themselves to writing on an almost industrial scale whatever they pleased, with varying levels of intensity and control. Perhaps Bradbury knew this when he re-read the manuscript that George Plimpton sent him for editing, and declined to have his words published. That Plimpton wasn't around when the interview was finally published is evidence, I suppose, of editorial discretion.

Remastering the Film: Bertrand Tavernier

While I am still at it, my list of unfinished business reminds me that I have yet to finish a modest project that I started in 2011, Remastering the Film, a series of profiles of what I consider to be the world's greatest filmmakers.

Some people seem born to make films. Vigo, Fellini, Kurosawa. What would they have done with themselves, I wonder, if they hadn't been filmmakers? Others, like Bruce Beresford, Zhang Yimou, and the man I celebrate today, Bertrand Tavernier, seem to go about their business as filmmakers more deliberately and methodically. It's easy to imagine them excelling at some other pursuit, like philosophy, the Law, or even politics.

If one discounts the critical argument levelled by François Truffaut at the legendary script-writing team of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost (1), which was one of the many strange ways in which the Cahiers du Cinema critics cannibalized their national cinema, Bertrand Tavernier is easily the best French filmmaker of his generation. Tavernier saw the sheer idiocy and injustice of Truffaut's argument, and got the elderly Aurenche (2) to write the the scripts for his first three feature films, Let Joy Reign Supreme (1974), The Clockmaker (1974), and The Judge and the Murderer (1976), three first films whose brilliance and uniqueness rival those of Truffaut himself. Tavernier later adapted a novel by Pierre Bost for his luminous film, A Sunday in the Country (1983).

After such a brilliant start to his career, it would've been predictable if Tavernier had slid into a sharp decline, as just about every notable French director (Including Truffaut) had done before him. He did experience a somewhat self-indulgent phase, with Des Enfants Gates (1977), the often charming but slight A Week's Vacation (1980) and the clever but terribly arch Coup de Torchon (1981). He regained his sure footing with the exquisite A Sunday in the Country, which explores the world of a painter of the Impressionist era.   

Of all his films, I've seen, I am sad to say, only eleven. It's difficult for me to choose a favorite. The Clockmaker portrays a loving father's inability to deliver his son from evil. The Judge and the Murderer shows us how clumsily human justice punishes the worst crimes. A Sunday in the Country opens for us the heart and mind of an old artist. It All Begins Today (1999) delineates the heartbreaking inadequacy of compassion.

I recently had the pleasure of viewing one of his latest films, The Princess of Montpensier (2010) (3), based on a story by Madame de La Fayette and starring the stunning Mélanie Thierry. As in his earlier earlier La Passion Beatrice (1987), Tavernier breathed life into past lives and a bygone era with subtlety and great art. Tavernier's latest film, Quai d'Orsay, is a comedy starring Thierry Lhermitte. It was shown at the Toronto Film Festival last month.

(1) The essay was published in 1954 and centered on a treatment the team had written of the Georges Bernanos novel Le Journal d'un Cure de Campagne, which was rejected by the director Robert Bresson. Due partly to the essay, and the decline of the directors they had worked for, they found little work in the Sixties.

(2) Aurenche was 71 at the time.

(3) The film premiered in competition at Cannes on my birthday. (It lost to a Thai film called Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.)

Touching a Void

Not that I was waiting with bated breath (not after ten years anyway), but I finally watched the film Touching the Void (2003) a few nights ago, and I found it both a fulfillment of my expectations and something less. What I expected was another paean to mountain climbing in general, a celebration of what compels perfectly healthy and seemingly contented people to risk losing it all scaling the world's highest mountain peaks - going where few people (or no one in Touching the Void) have gone before. What I didn't expect, even after reading Stanley Kauffmann's less than laudatory review, was that the film should ultimately be so, well, vacuous. Not because it is poorly made. It's actually quite beautifully made.(1) I found it vacuous because it's far more impressive than its subject.

With neither elaboration nor embroidery, the film - a "docudrama" (with the dramatic events re-enacted as described by the real participants of the drama) - tells the somewhat belated story of how, in 1985, two experienced mountaineers, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, climbed the West face of Siula Grande, a 20,813 foot high mountain in the Peruvian Andes. These two Englishmen arrive at their decision because no one has ever attempted to climb the West Face, for excellent reasons (as the film makes clear), and also to attempt an "Alpine Climb," without any preparation, proceeding directly from their base camp to the top of the mountain, carrying all that they think they will need in backpacks. They take on this challenge with a strangely and ominously casual manner, like it's a weekend outing.

The "void" in the film's title is left undefined. It could refer to the void beyond the earth's atmosphere to which standing atop a 20,000 foot mountain puts one a little closer. Or the title could refer to the void to which we all go eventually. Both climbers come up against this second void during the course of their descent from the mountain peak. As I expected, however, the film doesn't come close to living up to its vaunted title.

Leaving all their gear at base camp with a fellow they barely know (he doesn't even know their full names), Simpson and Yates set out and manage to reach the mountain peak without complications. On their descent, however, they choose the North Ridge, and soon find themselves running out of supplies and poorly equipped to get down. While Yates is slowly lowering Simpson, Simpson painfully fractures his leg. With his hands frozen and with poor weather bearing down on them, Yates is faced with no other choice but to cut the rope bearing Simpson. Simpson falls into an ice cave, banged up but alive. When Yates arrives there, he assumes that Simpson is dead, and continues down the mountain. The rest of the story is "re-created" quite effectively. But one has to wonder if the risks that the film's cast and crew took to re-create the events of 1985 weren't greater and more impressive than the events themselves.

What the film also left me wondering, as all these moutaineering movies do, is, finally, why? Why do they do it? The old answer, as George Mallory put it ("because it's there"), was never intended to provide an answer. Another answer I've heard is "if you need to ask why, you'll never understand the answer." This sort of evasiveness makes me think that the mountain climbers themselves don't have a clear grasp of their reasons for so routinely and, to me, foolhardedly risking their necks for such a dubious achievement.

George Plimpton once said that ordinary people admire great athletes because of their ability to perform physical feats with ease and grace that are extremely difficult for us mere humans. A mountain climber is called an "athlete," but climbing a mountain requires neither talent nor athletic ability. A tiny but - significantly - growing number of people climb mountains. There are so few of them, obviously, not because it is so difficult but because, like sky diving, it is inordinately hazardous. Most of us would rather avoid putting our lives at risk. We prefer safer, even vicarious, thrills (like movie thrillers).

The pride that mountain climbers presumably attain in the pursuit of their hobby comes at a price that the vast majority of people is unprepared to pay. In his review of Touching the Void, Stanley Kauffmann was more explicit:

"Mountain climbing, of all dangerous sports, has always seemed to me the silliest . . . The very word 'sport' seems fraudulent. Other risky pursuits have some grace in them, some sense of competition, of victory or defeat: mountain climbing has none. Worse, what we may take for admiration of the climber's courage is - admitted or not - a decline into degeneracy. Death is what we are watching for . . . Further, mountain climbing, more than any other risk-taking, is wrapped is vacuous philosophy, even theology, flourishing out of its physical aspects."

Practitioners of "extreme sports" like mountain climbing have become known, contemptuously, as "adrenaline junkies." But I think this is inaccurate. I think that it is for something much more basic that these people go to such extremes. When a mountain climber reaches the peak and looks out over the world below, is he not feeling, at last, what the rest of us feel upon waking up in the morning? Who we are, where we are, what day it is, what time it is? Neurologists may one day discover, as some already claim to have done, that a chemical present in a sufficient quantity in the brains of most people that is responsible for their feeling of sentience, of being alive, is conspicuously lacking in a few others, who have to climb mountains to attain the same degree of sentience.

(1) Directed by Kevin Macdonald and photographed (spectacularly) by Mike Eley and Keith Partridge.

Scaling the World

Watching an American movie recently (Sean Penn's Into the Wild) with some Filipino friends, left them wondering aloud where all the people could have gone from the deserts of the American Southwest or from the woods of Alaska. I explained that much of the American West is like that - that one can drive for miles at a time on highways without seeing another car or a house. And it's likely to stay that way as long as people continue to migrate to cities. The only way to comprehend the sheer size of America is to drive across it.

But the size of many nations in the world is comparably small. The expansiveness of America makes it hard for many Americans to comprehend the comparable tininess of most modern nations. The Philippines, for example, is made up of 7,107 islands, most of which are uninhabited because of a lack of a fresh water source. The total land area of the Philippines, including it's lakes and rivers, is estimated to be around 120,000 square miles, making it 73rd on the list of the world's largest countries. It also makes the Philippines only slightly smaller than the state American state of New Mexico.(1)

The United States is the 4th largest country in the world, behind Russia, Canada and China. Since a little more than one-third of Americans have bothered to acquire a passport (2), signifying their indifference to the attractions of the rest of the world, it might be diverting to some to conduct an informal survey of the comparative dimensions of different countries in relation to our fifty American states.

Afghanistan, which American soldiers have had to explore for nearly twelve years, is smaller than Texas. So is France, which is the biggest European nation. Sweden is only about ten thousand square miles larger than California. All of the Japanese islands constitute an area that is slightly smaller than Montana. Germany, even with East and West now united, is ten thousand square miles smaller than Montana. No wonder Hitler wanted Lebensraum ("living space").

Italy is less than a thousand square miles smaller than Arizona. New Zealand is about the same size as Colorado. The United Kingdom, which includes (as of this writing), Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, is a tad bigger than Michigan (and this is a country whose Royal Navy ruled the waves!). Greece is slightly smaller than Louisiana. Syria, all over the news, is a bit bigger than Washington state. Austria is a bit bigger than South Carolina.

I have written before about the meaning and importance of borders and other lines of demarcation. In another movie, Sam Peckinpah's masterpiece The Wild Bunch, the gang arrives at the banks of a river, on the other side of which is Mexico. Angel, played by Jaime Sánchez exclaims in Spanish how beautiful it looks to him. Tector Gorch (Ben Johnson) says, "Just looks like more Texas far as I'm concerned." Angel replies, "You have no eyes!"

(1) By population, however, the Philippines is ranked 12th in the world, with 98,346,000 people. Try to imagine that many people in New Mexico. California, 40,000 square miles bigger, has about one-third the population of the Philippines.
(2) A pleasant surprise is that the number is on the rise. Nearly 110 million Americans (out of 313 million) now have passports.

[Look closer at the map (click on the image). All the names are in Cyrillic.]

The Long Shadow of Spain

And the life, if it answers at all, replied from the heart
And the eyes and the lungs, from the shops and squares of the city
"O no, I am not the mover;
Not to-day; not to you. To you, I'm the

"Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily-duped;
I am whatever you do. I am your vow to be
Good, your humorous story.
I am your business voice. I am your marriage.

"What's your proposal? To build the just city? I will.
I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
Death? Very well, I accept, for
I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain."

from W.H. Auden, "Spain"



Looked at from the perspective of a pacifist (which I decidedly am not), I think it would be impossible to decide which is worse - the man who shouts "Allah Akbar" as he fires a rocket into a crowd of people standing in line for bread or the man who says nothing as he presses his thumb on a button that signals a drone aircraft a thousand miles away to launch a Hellfire missile on a house in which a suspected terrorist, along with members of his family, is residing.

And yet this is where we stand today. Terrorists can't possibly win a "fair fight" with the United States or any other modern army. So they hijack our commercial jets and fly them into skyscrapers. Or try to blow us up by lining their shoes or their underwear with explosives. Or they create bombs for which we had to invent the term "Improvised Explosive Device" that kill American troops in Iraq or Afghanistan.

By now, we all know that Bashar Al-Assad, dictator of Syria, is a monster to equal previous monsters like Saddam Hussein (death by hanging) and Gaddafi (death by ?). So what are we to do about him? No one appears to have a stomach for another shot at Regime Change. There was another time when no one (except the bad guys) had an appetite for war. It was the Thirties. Most armies were commanded by veterans of The Great War, the war that was supposed to end armed conflicts. Certainly Hitler had to be stopped, but no one in his right mind relished the idea of carrying it out. Certainly enough people remember what that war cost humanity.

Then came Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Shock and Awe, and whatever the ongoing mission in Afghanistan is called. Not to mention the Cold War, which seemed (20 years ago) to end in victory. U.S. and Allied forces are "scheduled" to pull out of Afghanistan next year. Nobody in his right mind could call it a victory. Our leaders' use of the ridiculous term "limited war" is nothing but their resignation to eventual defeat. Despite its coinage in the Boer War, nobody seems to know how to win a "guerrilla war".

In 1942, George Orwell wrote an essay he called "Looking Back On the Spanish War". The Spanish War was, of course, the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), in which the elected government of the Second Spanish Republic was (eventually) overthrown by a military coup led by Fascist General Franco. Fascist Italy and Germany supported - with men and weapons - the Franco side, while people who touted various left-leaning political agendas went to Spain to fight in "International Brigades", as well as with Spanish militias. Orwell fought in one such militia, and was wounded in the throat. Soviet Russia also provided guns and an untold number of unsolicited and often clandestine Communist spies to the Republican side.

What Orwell wrote about the "Spanish war" in 1942 sounds strangely familiar [italics are mine]:

"As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on an off like a tap, are the result of newspaper and radio hypnosis. In the intelligentsia I should say they result rather from money and mere physical safety. At a given moment they may be 'pro-war' or 'anti-war', but in either case they have no realistic picture of war in their minds. . . . We have become too civilised to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who don't take the sword perish by smelly diseases."