Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) (24 page)

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 continually 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 contentious, 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.

1. “They all think it’s never going to end.”

Every September, a festival of American films is held in Deauville, France—the new films that will be appearing in both countries that fall. I don’t know how or why the festival was started, but every year an award is given (or used to be given) to an American writer for the body of his work. In 1994, I turned out to be that lucky man, and when I was told that Mailer and Styron had both won in previous years, I decided it was an honor worth crossing the Atlantic for, so off Siri and I went to the Normandy resort town of Deauville. It was a good year to be there—the fiftieth anniversary of the D-day landings. To mark the occasion, the festival had invited various children and grandchildren of the Allied generals, among them one of Leclerc’s descendants and Eisenhower’s granddaughter, Susan. Siri and I wound up spending some time with Susan Eisenhower (we liked her very much), and when we found out that she was a “Russia expert” who was married to a scientist from one of the republics of the former Soviet Union, we both understood that the cold war was indeed over. Eisenhower’s granddaughter married to a Soviet scientist!

Also to mark the occasion, the festival had scheduled screenings of films about World War II and had sent out invitations to some of the old American actors who had appeared in them. That was how we got to meet such people as Van Johnson (deaf as a post), Maureen O’Hara (still beautiful), and Roddy McDowall. At one point during the dinner we attended with those bygone movie stars, O’Hara leaned over to McDowall and asked: “Roddy, how long have we known each other?” To which McDowall replied: “Fifty-four years, Maureen.” They had acted together in John Ford’s
How Green Was My Valley
. Astonishing to have been there, to have witnessed that exchange.

One of the other people who came that year was Budd Schulberg. I had met him a couple of times in America, and his connection to Hollywood films probably went further into the past than anyone else in the land of the living, since his father had been B. P. Schulberg, the head of Paramount in the twenties and thirties, and all the way back when he was nineteen years old, Budd had collaborated on a screenplay with F. Scott Fitzgerald. The man who wrote
On the Waterfront
, author of one of the best novels about Hollywood,
What Makes Sammy Run?
, as well as the script of Bogart’s last film,
The Harder They Fall
, an excellent movie set in the world of boxing—a complex man, a former Communist Party member who had named names before HUAC in the late forties or early fifties, but from what I have read, he turned against the party with great violence after they tried to interfere with his work and condemned them as bastards one and all. Anyway, I didn’t know him well, we were causal acquaintances at best, but I had enjoyed talking to him back in America, always struck by how well he spoke in spite of a double speech impediment (stutter and lisp), and now, at Deauville in 1994, we unexpectedly ran into each other in the lobby of the hotel where we were both staying, where everyone involved with the festival was staying (movie stars, directors, producers, young actors and actresses), and because we were both waiting for our wives to come downstairs for dinner, we sat down together on a bench in the lobby and quietly surveyed the hectic comings and goings of the rich and famous and beautiful. In rushed Tom Hanks (it was the year of
Forrest Gump
—a dreadful film in case you are tempted to see it), in rushed a glamorous starlet with her entourage, in rushed numerous others, all of them looking confident, filled with a sense of their own importance,
on top of the world
, as if each one of them in fact
owned the world
, and after a while Budd turned to me, the eighty-year-old Budd, who had been watching such people since he was a child, who had been at the top and been at the bottom, the wise old man who both stuttered and lisped turned to me and said: “They all think it’s never going to end.”