Gerard Jones's Blog, page 3

The anonymous writer

One thing I wrote about when I started this blog was that most of my professional writing so far has spared me a lot of critical scrutiny as a writer. I've sold my non-fiction mainly on my knowledge of the subject matter, thus taking the spotlight off the writing itself. Writing comic books I can hide behind artists and established characters. But with this book, about subjects that few people are aware of, I'm really forced to present myself as a "writer," to succeed or fail on my ability to capture and hold readers through my narrative. This is the first book I've sold because an editor wanted to work with me and my literary voice as opposed to a subject matter.

That led me to think that my challenge here was to deliver a powerful enough voice and authorial presence to justify the book. To put me at the center of the process, demanding attention as me and then delivering a strong enough authorial presence to justify the attention. But now I'm starting to wonder if I don't have it backwards.

My thinking's been shifting since I spent the past weekend at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Friday night I saw Harold Lloyd's The Kid Brother. Saturday it was William Desmond Taylor's Soul of Youth, René Clair's Les Deux Timides, Carl Maria von Dreyer's Mikäel, and Paul Leni's The Man Who Laughs, with Conrad Veidt. Then four more on Sunday: Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Coleen Moore in Her Wild Oat, Teinosuke Kinugasa's Jujiro, and the King Vidor/Marion Davies/Marie Dressler The Patsy. Movies ranging from the good to the incomparable, with superb live music and a Castro Theater full of joyous worshippers. The effect of the whole was transcendent.

The emphasis of the introductory speeches and the program notes was almost entirely on the directors and actors, with occasional mentions of cinematographers, producers, and studios. Almost never was a writer mentioned, and yet silent movies had writers. Between the desire of Universal Pictures executives to adapt Victor Hugo's L'Homme Qui Rit and the astonishing on-film work of Paul Leni and Conrad Veidt lay a writing process, no doubt hard and chaotic and hair-pullingly fraught, during which at least four scenarists had to chop a sprawling, wordy, twelve-volume novel down to about a hundred pages of visual continuity. Events had to be cut, rearranged, stripped down, and invented. Image and movement had to be substituted for conversations and exposition. Characters had to be sharpened to points of light. And then, to convey the information that only words could carry, a fifth writer was brought in to script the intertitles, in each of which a transition had to be carried or a backstory evoked in a third as many words as a typical Hugo sentence. A great silent movie was also, usually, a writerly triumph.

But of the five writers on The Man Who Laughs, I'd heard of none of them. And I know a fair amount about old Hollywood, too. Only one of the five, whose name I can't remember now, got credit on screen.

Sometimes you'll hear a spiritual writer speak of writing not for personal glory but for God. Those silent movie writers were doing that, in a sense, although the gods they were giving expression to were Paul Leni and Conrad Veidt and Olga Baclanova and "Uncle Carl" Laemmle's Universal Picture Corp. Their motives were scarcely holy, of course, but what they asked of their talents was the same: They turned their writing not toward expressing themselves or calling attention to themselves but toward making a larger project work. They directed their art through others because it was through those others, those actors, those crew people, that the story would be revealed.

All of which puts my own past work in perspective. Whether I was subsumed in a collaboration with cartoonists or serving as the vessel for some non-fiction subject matter to find its way to the readers interested in it, my relative anonymity was a gift to the project. I was far more useful leading the readers attention away from me instead of toward me. So now I'm thinking that even in this book, in which the author and his skills and his voice are so much more important than in past work, I might still do best to make sure that the process is not about me. Maybe the best thing I can do is forget not only about the readers' eyes on me. Let go of both the fear of not living up to critical expectations and the hope of receiving critical accolades. Be just a conduit for the story and for the immortality of the people I write about.

But what's the book ABOUT?

My friend Todd Oppenheimer at the Writers Grotto asked me this recently. Todd and I are in a sort of mutual support group that meets every two weeks to set and compare personal writing goals. "You've been talking about this book for a while," he said, "but you always call it just 'the FSG book.' You've never said what it's about."

I had two reactions to this. My first was, "Screw you, Todd." That's the one I didn't say.

The one I said was, "That's a really good question, Todd. Thanks for asking that." Then I explained that although I was very clear on the subject matter and the central characters of my narrative, I felt I was still in the process of zeroing in on the major points I wanted to make and the specific focus of the story, and so I was still wrestling with issues of timeline, entry point, structure, voice, and point of view. As a result of this, I was still uncertain about my title—I'd gone through True Story, American Madness, and Mad Fortune on the way to The Undressing of America—and so tended to refer to it as simply "the FSG book." But now that Todd led me to think about it, I saw how that vagueness only compounded the problem of writing chapters that I could commit to well enough to send my editor, and how referring to it in terms of the publisher that was waiting for it only kept me locked in thinking of it as an unfulfilled obligation rather than a book unto itself.

So I made a resolution, right there talking to Todd, that I would settle on The Undressing of America as a working title, at least, and refer to it by that. (It helped that I'd already run it by my editor and he liked it.) That's why I chose the name of the book as the name of this blog, so that every time I came here to write about it I would be engaging with the book itself at least nominatively, instead of some new, separate entity like "It Sure Is Hard to Write a Book" or "The Agony of Being Me" or "Out of Sheer Pique." And I told Todd what I knew for sure about what the book was about. Not so fully or so neatly as this, but in essence:

In 1919, a husband and wife team named Bernarr and Mary Macfadden published a magazine that transformed American culture. It was called True Story, and although few remember it now, and cultural historians are inclined to give it a passing nod at best, it became the best-selling and most widely imitated magazine of the 1920s, upended publishers' perceptions of what the public wanted to read, shifted the relationship between media "producer" and "consumer" forever, and discovered a vast new market among young women negotiating a changing moral climate. And it accomplished more than any other enterprise to shatter the culture of Victorian concealment and usher us into a "culture of the explicit," a culture that still shapes our public discourse, in which increasingly frank confessions of our private emotional struggles become essential threads in our social fabric: guides to living, subjects for bonding, moral crucibles, self identifiers, class identifiers, entertainment, titillation, grist for outrage, commodities. True Story's immediate descendants were the tabloids, true crime stories, celebrity gossip rags, "women's issues" magazines, and the mainstreaming of soft-core pornography (and the Macfaddens published all of those in their earliest days). Its longer-term descendants include almost everything we lump under "reality media."

Bernarr and Mary Macfadden themselves had hardly any idea what they were doing. He grew up an abused, neglected, and sickly farm boy in the 19th century Ozarks who discovered body building and turned himself through sheer will and desperation (desperation to be something, to be noticed, to have power over his life, to drive away the illness that take his parents from him as a child) into a paragon of health and strength. He knocked around the carnival circuits of mid-America for years as a strongman and a professional wrestler before he went to the 1893 Chicago world's fair (the "White City" fair) and saw people making a killing on the new "fitness" fad. Over the next decade, Bernarr made a modest success of himself selling exercise gadgets, running health farms for rich hypochondriacs, opening health-food restaurants, and publishing Physical Culture, the first magazine to call attention to body building as a pursuit and a subculture and the first to demonstrate that you could sell a lot of magazines with pictures of nearly naked men and women if you did so to demonstrate exercises. He reached the second tier among health gurus, grinding out book after book on his self-generated ideas for health and happiness, rejecting traditional medicine, and getting himself on the AMA's enemies list

It wasn't the AMA that drove him to the edge of bankruptcy and forced him to flee the country. It was the censors, led by the great "social purifier" himself, Anthony Comstock, who had developed a special enmity for Macfadden. When Physical Culture ran a serialized novel dramatizing the causes and costs of venereal disease, Bernarr was convicted of peddling pornography, and when he fought back he became a cause celebre, an opponent of the early 20th Century equivalent of "abstinence only" sex education, the mad idea that is always held up by cultural conservatives that we would not have any moral or sexual problems if we just never talked about them. In the end, the President himself pardoned him, but the opponents of sexual discussions would not relent, and in 1912 Macfadden fled to England.

There, at the age of forty-five, he met and pursued and married a nineteen-year-old amateur swimming champion named Mary Williamson. He won her by staging a pageant called "Britain's Perfect Woman," promising a glorious tour of England to the winner, knowing full well that his object was to secure a young bride who would bear him heirs, a "Phyical Culture Family" to promote his program for achieving perfect health. Mary herself was a young woman of simple goals, a carpet-mill worker, a Yorkshire lass who just wanted to swim, enjoy the days, and raise a family. She was lonely, too, having been kept house-bound by illness for much of her childhood, and susceptible to a man who seemed to need her every minute, who told her how to live her life, who spoke of the crusade they would lead to restore mankind to health, who was sexually insatiable, who wanted to be her father and lover at once.

The Macfaddens had just begun to build their new life in England when the Great War came. They retreated back to America, back to poverty and trouble. Bernarr tried every trick he could to boost the sales of Physical Culture, to launch a new health farm, to invent a new exercise gadget that would make him rich. Everything backfired. Then Mary had her idea. Physical Culture published letters from Macfadden's followers in which they described their own struggles with illness and triumphant returns to health. Mary help select and edit the letters, and she knew very well that young women like herself would be most interested in those that veered into moral and marital and emotional issues as well. No other twenty-five year old, lower-middle-class woman in the world was in a position to create a new magazine, and perhaps no one else could have imagined True Story. It was an instant success. Within a few years it had turned the Macfaddens into milloinaires and inspired Bernarr to go head-to-head with William Randolph Hearst for mastery of the newsstands.

Then everything began to change. A new figure entered Bernarr's life, an amateur stage magician and crime novelist named Fulton Oursler who began to whisper things in Bernarr's ear that Mary didn't like. Bernarr came to see himself as man's salvation and diverted his resources to a man run for the presidency. And there was the terrible thing that befell the Macfaddens' baby son, thanks to Bernarr's devotion to his own odd health precepts....

By the time I'd reached that point in my quick summary of all this to Todd, he was nodding enthusiastically. "It sounds like a great story," he said. "And it sounds like just the sort of thing you'd do well, like it's right in line with your interests and your strengths." I thanked him for that. It did sound like a compelling book when I described it, and the decisions about what to include and how to present them didn't seem so daunting after all. Then Todd asked, "But what's the 'ah-ha' of the book? What is it that's going to make it stand out, that's going to get you the NPR interviews, the reviews, the attention that a book needs to get anywhere these days?"

And I thought: "Screw you, Todd."

Sisyphus rocks

A Facebook friend was comparing herself to Sisyphus this morning, which got me thinking about the old stone-roller's dilemma. You know the myth: the arrogant king whom the gods punished by making him roll a huge stone to the top of a hill, only to have it slip away from him right at the crest and roll all the way back to the bottom every time. Anyone who's ever tried to write a book can identify. I've thought about old Sis a few times myself while pushing The Undressing of America toward completion.

But today something new occurred to me. What turns Sisyphus's task into torture? The disappointment and frustration of seeing the rock roll back down the hills, right? So his problem is the expectation that one of these times, maybe this time, he's actually going to get it to the top. But what if he changes his attitude? What if Sisyphus says to himself, "Okay. This is what I'm doing with my eternal life. This is who I am. I push a rock." Maybe then he could start to enjoy it. You know: fresh air, exercise, the feel of the rough stone against his palms, the smell of the loam as the boulder's weight breaks the soil beneath it, the regular break when the rock rolls back down, the pleasant walk to the bottom to start over again. And no worries about what he's going to do next. After all, it's not the destination that counts, right? It's the journey.

So starting tomorrow, I'm reinterpreting the Sisyphean challenge of writing my book. After all, as Olympian punishments go, this one's pretty sweet. I'm not a bodiless shade drifting through a lightless limbo. I'm not being tantalized by food that's snatched away. I get to wake up every morning and push my rock, and if I don't get all worked up over how it's all supposed to come out, what's not to like? If Sisyphus has learned any wisdom and humility in all those centuries in Tantalus, I'll bet he's pretty grateful to the gods for the assignment. Am I supposed to rage against the job they've given me? What's that but arrogance?

The glamor of insanity

There are two ways for me to be as I write my book: I can go to my office at the Writers Grotto, open my laptop, type a sentence, then type another one, then type another one, noticing that some of them are good and some of them of them are bad but remembering that I can go back and make the bad ones better, and keep doing that until I'm exhausted. Then I can do it again for a bunch of other days until I have a book. I can work, in other words. Like a guy with a job. Like my dad.

Or I can open my laptop and stare at it and slam it closed and get up and pace around and ask myself why the hell I can't come up with a good enough opening sentence. I can take a long walk with my eyes on the sidewalk trying to cut to the theme at the heart of the book. I can screw around on my Facebook page or burn a movie from my DVR to a DVD or try to read a Patricia Highsmith novel without actually comprehending any of the sentences I'm looking at or go back to bed for "just a few minutes" while I wait for more clarity about what I'm going to write today. In short, I can get nothing done for days while I hunger for the moment of galvanic insight or self-loathing fury or shallow-breathed, tunnel-vision terror ("My editor hates me! My career's about to end!") that will force me, just force me, through the walls of my resistance and send me exploding through the book with the unstoppable momentum of passion.

Which would be my mom's choice. Not that she ever really lived it. She went to work every Monday morning through every Friday afternoon too. But she hated it, and she drank herself to sleep every night until she returned, and she was constantly looking for that new approach, that new specialty, that new way of approaching the whole thing that would inspire her to love it. She wrestled for years with the question of what to do with her life before economic logic and sheer resignation drove her to teach high school. Tried writing for a while, before her insecurities beat her. Always loved artists and their stories of struggle. And never quite trusted the ability of so many people (like my dad) just to keep plugging until the job was done.

The downside to such madness is pretty obvious: not much work gets done. Oh, but what an upside! Life is so much more entertaining in the throes of artistic agony! When do you think I feel more alive, when I spend the night wrestling with demons and angels or when I'm sitting at a desk typing? When am I more fascinating to others, when I'm pouring out the fear and anger and self-loathing that turns every day on this book into a psychological drama or when I'm closing my door and saying, "I gotta work, I'll be out at five"?


I'm sure you can understand, then, why I choose the glamor of tormenting myself over my book to the ordinariness of writing it. But there's a problem with that kind of glamor: it looks pretty tawdry once the game's been exposed. I mean, how do I sustain the charisma of the tormented writer after I've outed myself as a drama junkie? What the payoff for all my effort then, except for a few blog entries?


So the only real reward left is the book. Just showing up and getting it done, like a regular job. Like my dad. God damn it.

My new book, and the writing of it

Over two years ago, I sold a book idea to Farrar, Straus & Giroux, one of the most respected publishers in the book business. My editor was very praiseful and encouraging, and I liked him. I expected to jump right in and turn it around quickly. But I haven't submitted a word yet. I've written a lot: written long segments and thrown them away, written others knowing that I was just trying to get my thoughts down and that they weren't good enough to submit. But I haven't yet produced a chunk long enough and good enough to feel I should send it to my editor.


It's a good idea for a book, I know that. And I believe I'll do a good job with it. When I talk to other writers they tell me that not only does it sound like a good book, I'm just the guy to do it. But so far the book defies me. It will allow itself to be written only if I don't commit myself to the "real writing." When I commit to the "real writing" it laughs in my face.

This blog will be the story of how I got here, an exploration of what the book is, a showcase for excerpts, a platform for your comments and advice, a confession of my madness, and, in the end, the vehicle through which the book gets written.

It had better be, anyway.