Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) (23 page)

The difficulty of understanding current events in distant parts of the world. Except for what is happening in front of my nose here in America, everything I know is filtered through the media (mostly the
New York Times
and the
New York Review of Books
, but also some TV and radio), and the farther away I am from the events in question, the less certain I am about what I know. I can grasp the tawdry farce of the recent Italian scandals (European politics are not alien to me), but when it comes to what is happening in the Middle East, I feel on less solid ground. What we are told in the American press is that spontaneous revolutions have occurred in Tunisia and Egypt, that protest movements have sprung up in several other countries throughout the region, and that the conflict in Libya is quickly devolving into a bloody civil war. To concentrate on Egypt for the moment: it seems that the peaceful uprising was secular in nature, for the most part led by young people in their twenties and thirties—educated young people who are largely unemployed or underemployed because of the malfunctioning society created by years of corruption and dictatorship—and supported by women, civil servants, impoverished workers, and even the military. Everyone praised the extraordinary fervor and dedication of the rebels, and yet now, just weeks later, cracks seem to be forming again, violent confrontations have been growing (most recently between Christians and Muslims), and all in all the situation seems perilously unstable to me. Decades of no true political life, no organized political parties, and no possibility of coherent political opposition have led to a kind of mass hunger for social change, but with no political tools to implement it—which has left the army in control of the country, at least for now. I sense there is a vacuum of power, and when I think about revolutions of the past, that sort of vacuum tends to produce a Napoleon or a Lenin, the brilliant opportunist who steps into the breach and takes control by force. Those are my fears—but what do I really know about what is going on, and what do I really know about the people involved? Next to nothing. Meanwhile, America debates whether we should start dropping bombs on Libya. One shudders to think . . .

With warmest greetings,

Paul

March 14, 2011

Dear Paul,

You don’t use e-mail and (I am pretty sure) you don’t carry a mobile phone. I presume that these are principled decisions on your part. I am not at all interested in what they say at a personal level. What intrigues me is what it will mean to be a twenty-first-century person writing fiction from which twenty-first-century tools of communication like the mobile phone are absent.

Before I say any more, be assured that my sympathies are very much on your side. I too have, willy-nilly, become a twenty-first-century person, yet I write books in which people write (and mail) paper letters, books in which the most up-to-date means of communication employed is (now and again) the telephone, which happens to be a nineteenth-century invention.

The presence/absence of mobile phones in one’s fictional world is going to be, I suspect, no trivial matter. Why? Because so much of the mechanics of novel writing, past and present, is taken up with making information available to characters or keeping it from them, with getting people together in the same room or holding them apart. If, all of a sudden, everyone has access to more or less everyone else—electronic access, that is—what becomes of all that plotting? In the movies, one is already used to seeing all kinds of little plot routines being invoked to explain why character A can
not
speak to character B (phone left behind in taxi; phone reception blocked by mountains). The default situation has become that, save in extraordinary circumstances, B is always contactable by A.

Is it going to become the norm of the fiction of tomorrow (indeed, of today) that everyone always has access to everyone else, with the corollary that if in a specific fictional world everyone does not have access to everyone else then that fictional world belongs to the past?

One used to be able to get pages and pages out of the nonexistence of the telegraph/telephone (yet to be invented) and the consequent need for messages to be borne by hand or even memorized at one end and recited at the other (example: the man who had to race from Marathon to Athens). Are many of the stories that you and I and people like us write doomed to be seen as fictions premised on the nonexistence of the mobile phone, and therefore as quaint?

Think further of what the mobile phone has done to the practice of adultery (the adaptations that adulterers have had to make), and to the practice of deception in general. A contemporary novel of adultery (or a novel of contemporary adultery) would have a quite different mechanics.

Without making a mountain out of a molehill, let me also point to the growing lists of goods and services unavailable to people without mobiles (not nearly as large as the list of goods and services unavailable to people without access to the Internet, but nevertheless . . .). The pressure is definitely on us to have a mobile each—pressure, in effect, to have a number, a code, at which we can be located at all hours of the day and night. When every citizen has such a number, what need will there any longer be for a physical identity document?

Already there are fictions in which mobile phones are used as tracking devices. Some unlucky guy in a turban switches on his mobile, and an instant later is hit by a missile fired from a drone.

March 22, 2011

With memories of your praise of William Wyler at the back of my mind, I have been watching what films of his I can lay my hands on—in the last couple of weeks,
Mrs. Miniver
,
The Desperate Hours
,
The Children’s Hour
,
and a film based on a Somerset Maugham story, starring Bette Davis, whose title escapes me.

Wyler does everything so efficiently and unobtrusively that one barely notices the authorial hand. I’d like to talk to you about him one day, and hear what, as someone in the business, you admire.

Your comments on the current situation in Egypt seem exactly right. One watches those intelligent, fresh-faced, enthusiastic youngsters on the streets of Cairo telling the television cameras how great it feels to be free, how much they are looking forward to a new Egypt, and one wonders how they will be talking in two or three years, when a new ruling elite will have settled into power.

I keep thinking that it is only in those all too brief interregnums, when one power has been overthrown and the next has yet to install itself, that people have a true taste of liberty—Europe between the eclipse of the Nazis and the arrival of the New Austerity, for example. How rare it is, a chance for the masses to dance in the streets! And how quaint that term,
the masses
!

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.)