David C. Smith's Blog, page 2

Why Write?

Sometimes I wonder, if were on a desert island, alone in some ocean, would I continue to write, find some way to write?

There would be no one to read what I wrote, no one to listen to me read aloud what I had put down, for me to ask their opinion.

Would I simply let my thoughts be thought and so be released into the air or into the sky, done, empty, their thought-molecules stretched apart and gone?

Out there on some island, alone with the scrub and beetles and maybe a tree, would I scratch words into the sand, then brush the words away and continue? Scratch words and signs into rocks, stones? Crush up those beetles to make ink and write with a stick dipped into the ink to write on the rags of my own clothes, taking care with each word?

Why write? For fame, for an audience, for money?

I cannot imagine sitting on that island waiting for a boat to rescue me and then asking those on board to pay me before I would say  anything or write anything.

Do poets do that? Would a musician, alone on that island, not hit rocks with a stick and hum to remind herself that she is alive? Would the painter not use that beetle-ink to paint on rocks, on the tree, on leaves, on his own skin?

When we were children, did we wait for our parents or grandparents to give us money before we experimented with colors, danced foolishly, sang loudly out of key, shouted for joy, created?

When we lived in caves, did we ask for shells or beads or stones to be paid us before we told stories at the fire or painted on the walls of those caves?

Why write?

The question is not even worth asking.

Money is good.

Writing writing writing writing writing is better.

Haunted Houses

So the other night I was up late and I watched The Twilight Zone on Me-TV, the Chicago channel that boasts Svengoolie and SciFi Saturday Night and otherwise broadcasts nationwide television shows from the Fifties through the Eighties.

The episode was “The Masks,” and those of us well-read and of a certain age could ascertain immediately what was going to happen to the characters in this story. In New Orleans during Mardi Gras, the useless, vain, and greedy family members of a dying old timer must each wear a special mask created by a Cajun man and keep it on until midnight. (This was 1964, mind. The Cajun man business tells us that something supernatural and no doubt unpleasant is going to occur. Voodoo, most likely. Something. Those darned Cajuns….) The masks are horrific: ugly and misshapen. Of course, at midnight, with the unmasking, the daughter and husband and grown grandkids remove the masks to find that their own faces have now been transformed into those horrendous visages, reflecting their own miserable personalities. Serves them right. The script was written by Rod Serling and naturally reflects his own moral center, so much in evidence in many of the episodes he wrote, such as “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” and “I Am the Night—Color Me Black,” sequentially the episode broadcast the week after “The Masks” back in 1964.

What I found myself reflecting on, though, as I watched the story of the dying old man and his no-account family, was the mansion in which the man lived. What a classic of grand Queen Anne design—broad staircases with spindled railings; fireplaces that sit open like great, awaiting maws; refined, beautifully carved woodwork throughout; and enormous rooms with the highest ceilings possible and filled with bureaus, chests and chifforobes, standing mirrors, library tables—remarkable furniture from a period of elegance now long gone. The ideal house, certainly, so deep with history, for grisly occurrences to take place.

We all know that house, or at least many of us do, because it is the old mansion of an earlier generation that showed up regularly in macabre fiction of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when I was kid in love with the macabre, reading Poe and the paperback short-story anthologies passed on to me by my Grandma Smith, also a lover of ghost stories and dark mysteries. It is Shirley Jackson’s Hill House. It is The House on Haunted Hill. It is the decaying mansion Bette Davis and Joan Crawford inhabit in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? It is the house where Anthony Perkins keeps his mother’s corpse in Psycho.

I fell in love with that ancient, corrupt Gothic house in the early 1960s, a period that holds pleasant memories for me precisely because it was the period of The Twilight Zone and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and other series of that type. Thriller, with Boris Karloff. The one whose title I can’t remember that opened with a burning haystack in a field at night and, as the camera closes in, a human arm and hand falls out of the haystack. Jesus. That image right there all by itself might have set me up for a life of writing gruesome Gothic stories.

Those old houses with their supernatural perils have stayed with me and, I confess, if I am lying on the couch of an afternoon, I can mentally walk up their grand winding staircases and through their corridors and find it…relaxing. Without a doubt that house is the reason I wrote Coven House, first as a short story, then as a play, finally as a novel (which I hope will come out this year).

The attraction is not just the pleasant memories of my Aunt Nancy and Aunt Carol coming out on Friday evenings to share pizza with my mom and sister as we watched Vic Morrow get buried alive or wondered if those were really human body parts stuffed into “The Jar” (one of the best things Robert Bloch wrote, in my humble opinion) or to see Telly Savalas finally killed (as he deserved to be) by the Talking Tina doll. Without knowing it, these shows were a learning process for me. I wasn’t aware then of the writers of those stories, names now legendary to those of us who appreciate Gothic fiction—Serling himself, Bloch, Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson—a pantheon that blossomed during that brief period in early television. They were all familiar with that house, and thinking of it takes me back to what I recall as a friendly period in my life when I was eleven, twelve, not yet an adolescent, but when imagination was everything.

The decaying old house is a place where anything can happen—ghosts return, consciences erupt with terrible results, inert things (even the house itself) can come alive when we enter it and contaminate it with our own lives. It reflects an interior landscape of guilt and crime and disease the same way that the outdoors and the frontier reflect an open landscape of vitality and possibility.

And I keep coming back to it.

I’m writing another little Gothic story right now and, of course, the setting for the awfulness that the characters bring upon themselves is an ancient house on a hill, once proud and commanding and determinate, now a shell filled with cobwebs and shadows and nearly audible memories of a wicked history.

Not at all like the pleasant memories I have of being a kid, caught somewhere between Mad magazine and science fiction paperbacks, enjoying the warm company of my own family, and taking those vicarious journeys into the doomed hearts and diseased minds of intruders caught, appropriately, within the doomed, diseased walls of an old mansion that is falling apart around them as they themselves are falling apart.

Serves them right.

On the Sublime

Word day, I guess. Sometimes I latch onto a word and roll it around in my brain, I don’t know, just to do it because it is a word.

In the current issue of Vanity Fair (yes, I subscribe, both to mock the rich and famous in the photographs of them at their soirees and their Hollywood mansions and Manhattan gatherings because soon enough we will all be dust, so ha to them, and also because it still does good investigative reporting, which alone is worth the price, although I do miss the days when Graydon Carter, previously editor of Spy, was editor), actually the Holiday issue, there is a nice long profile of Stephen Colbert. Admitting to the disorientation of the times we live in, Colbert admits: “I have often said that happy is overrated. I’ll take the sublime over the happy any day.”

The sublime.

What a word.

I know what it means—elevated, august, lofty, grand, outstanding, really really good—but because of the sound of it for some reason I associate it with relaxing on a pleasant sandy beach with warm tropical breezes, or just lying in the back yard looking up at the clouds.

Maybe those moments could, after all, be avenues to the sublime. I can see that.

But…“I’ll take the sublime over the happy any day.”

We all know how elusive happiness can be. You plan for it, it doesn’t happen. It surprises you and you are glad and then the moment fades. We can look back on things in our lives and feel happy about them in retrospect. Or is that joy that we feel? Maybe it’s joy. Joy…happiness…pretty much the same, I guess. One rooted in Latin, one in Greek. Except that the Declaration of Independence doesn’t say anything about the pursuit of joy; it’s the pursuit of happiness. A website I found (actually called thepursuiteofhappiness.com) reckons that Jefferson with that phrase was harking back to John Locke, who defined happiness “as an ability to achieve the greatest good free from any predetermined will or forced action.” Certainly that’s a bit more elevated or refined than the way we tend to use the word happiness today.

But…the sublime.

I think—and this is just me—that when we contemplate the sublime, we are moving past ourselves and entering a region worthy of our contemplation and thought and emotions, being induced thereby to join in appreciating the best of what is available to us because it offers us more than just ourselves. We can often be happy, but the sublime is something to reach for or appreciate on another level, even something we need to be worthy of. Maybe we need to work for it. Or maybe all we need do is be in awe.

I like classical music. Every time I listen to the third movement, the “Nocturne,” of Borodin’s Second String Quartet, I feel like I am lifting out of my body. Every time. For me, this is sublime. I am, for those minutes, part of something much more than simply myself. And reading good writing can do it for me, not take me out of my body but allow me to sit there for long moments in a kind of glow because I just partook of something truly fine, thought or a story put down so well that my mind and imagination were with it for that while, fully engaged in appreciation, because the experience was sublime.

I suspect that this is what Stephen Colbert is getting at.

I’m very glad he said what he did in the magazine profile. Gave me something to contemplate and move me past myself and closer to the sublime.

Which…I don’t think making fun of rich celebrities quite qualifies.

Things I Was Grateful for in 2020

Yeah, it was the worst year in memory, and it hit most of us very hard. However, at the end of each year and the beginning of the next, I try to remind myself that the world didn’t end (although we came close this time) and that there always seem to be a few good things somewhere in your life if you think about it or are lucky enough to have them cross your path. So here are some of mine for last year as, thank God, it disappears down the gullet of eternity:

My family. This one is a layup, I know, for any of us to thank our patient loved ones, but I am not easy to live with, and Janine and Lily make my life worthwhile.

We didn’t catch Covid-19. This one is pure selfishness but, let’s face it, we all did a dance with this invisible goddamn virus last year, and too many of us—the innocent as well as the arrogantly foolish—caught it, and too many of us died. We were overdue for another plague or pandemic, and this one tells me that our behavior as a species hasn’t changed very much since 1918, at least. Haven’t we learned anything?

Black Pumas. This one is pure joy. I discovered this band and was blown away immediately. Dear God, what a sound. They are up for a Grammy or perhaps many of them in 2021, and they sure do deserve one or many of them. You might already have heard “Colors.” If you have, that’s the Black Pumas.

Sometime Lofty Towers. The manuscript I began in 1997 as a “literary sword-and-sorcery novel” following the death of my father, and which I finally finished last year, is days away from being published through the good graces of Bob McLain at Pulp Hero Press (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_He...). I never even considered trying to find an agent for it or reach out to conventional publishers; I feel it would have been wasted effort. This novel isn’t conventional at all. But this is the best work I can do right now; I put everything I know into it; and I’m glad it’s finally going to be between covers.

Thursdays at noon. A group of us who used to work together and have since been retired or gone on to putting in our time elsewhere—Pete, Susan, Genevieve, and I—meet on Zoom each Thursday to engage in a meeting of the minds. We talk about anything we want to, we not infrequently crack each other up, and in general we keep each other company intelligently and pleasantly the way we did when we worked together over the years. This one hour a week helps to keep us sane, and especially did so last year.

Getting back in touch with Sheldon. Shel and I have known each other since the fourth grade. After college, we stayed in touch for years. Then things went quiet for no particular reason. However, we got together again remotely last year and have been chatting on email ever since, sometimes seriously, sometimes sillily. (Sillily?) Fun fact: when Shel and I were visiting once during the holidays in the 1990s, I ventured to ask him what everyone else in high school actually thought of me then because I was someone who truly followed the beat of a different drummer. He replied with one of the best lines of all time: “We thought you were strange but not dangerous.”

Chester’s Flaming Hot Fries. I suppose I could have managed to get through viewings of the DVD complete series of Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire last year without also munching on these spicy hot pipettes of gustatory delight, but we’ll never know, will we? I have become addicted to them.

Forward! May we each have our own special pipettes of gustatory delight in 2021!

New Day, New Year

New day, new year, new— Not exactly a new website, but a revised and revived one. I have Pete Pollack to thank for this. I stopped blogging a long time ago, but now I am retired from my fulltime job as a medical editor, and I guess I am ready to try it again, not with formal essays but with talk. Whatever is on my mind (within reason). And Pete has helped me immeasurably with this, getting me back online. So I thank him.

This website was originally created by the late Mike Johnson, a friend of ours from our days at the AAOS. Mike died too young, damn it, and we lost him in 2020, right in the middle of the goddamn worst year in memory. He leaves behind his wife and daughter, was loved by many and missed by all of us. He and I used to have fun talking about fanboy stuff, and he knew the mysteries of programming and software in ways I will never master. Years ago, he took VHS stuff I filmed, digitized it, and put it online for me. And had fun doing it.

So Pete, our friend, has stepped up to help me out with this revived website, meaning that he is doing all the work behind the scenes, leaving me to blabber on this blog.

Which I intend to do. My goal is to put out a bit of monologue every day or every other day. I seem to be able to go on and on and on when I type emails to friends, so we’ll see if I can do it on this blog.

Outside the window, the day is gray, overcast, with black naked skeletal tree branches set against the gray. Quiet and empty out there. I’m here listening to Radio Dismuke, my online go-to comfort zone. It plays music from the late 1920s and early 1930s exclusively. I find this very relaxing.

Goes back, I am sure, to my interest in silent movies and the popular culture of the 1920s and all the 78 rpm records I found at country auctions and in thrift stories back in the 1970s and played on the deluxe antique Victrola I have lugged around with me wherever I have moved and lived. I listen to Bix Beiderbecke and Scrappy Lambert and Annette Hanshaw and Ben Pollack and am content.

Today, though, as it does on holidays, Radio Dismuke has notable record collectors and historians talking about the old records, so not much is playing. I’ll cue up my own old stuff.

I know my audience is small, and that’s okay with me. Preferable, in fact. For folks who know about my writing, I intend to talk about that, about my books and books I’ve read and any other ideas that come to me. Four hundred, five hundred words at a time. That’s sufficient.

New day, new year, and new blogs to come.

Birdman, or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

NOTE: Spoilers follow.

Where to start with Birdman? It is brilliant to have Michael Keaton, who has always been first rate, carry as extraordinary a picture as this one. All those years since the Batman movies doing smaller, sincere pictures, cable work, and voiceovers, and now here he is in this exceptional, dark, very serious comedy by Alejandro González Iñárritu.

I was hesitant about seeing it, however, because the bare bones of the plot made it seem likely that Birdman would bump up against my own inner drama, and anticipating this made me nervous. I have this story that I carry around in my heart, the story of my own so-called career, the on-again, off-again periods when I write, when I go into a corner and challenge myself to do the best work I can. I do this in private because no one is really paying attention. I once tasted greater success, but that has been the extent of it. Riggan Thomson, Keaton’s character, has had billion-dollar worldwide success playing a superhero character—a Batman–type character, an in-joke—in a series of three pictures, a success he walked away from in 1992 as a matter of personal integrity. Twenty-plus years later, he’s mounting his own production on Broadway of Raymond Carver’s famous short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” He’s put everything he has into it—his money, his talent and life experience—and during the two hours or more of Birdman in which we follow him and the people around him during previews and then opening night, we sympathize with this nettlesome, flawed human being as he reaches for something he might not attain. (But what is talent for if not to attempt exactly that?)

I’d like to think that the fact that “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” is the play that Riggan Thomson is mounting is itself also a kind of in-joke. Troubled-soul Thomson, a regular bloke with the spirit of artistic genius in him, is a reflection of troubled-soul Carver. Under the tutelage of or despite the interference of Gordon Lish, a darling of the New York literati and avatar of the institutional “new fiction” of the 1970s and 1980s, Carver came to be regarded as an essential talent, and the writer did, after all, praise Lish for that one’s guidance and strong hand in the editing of his stories. But for me, this episode in American letters has the odor of goofy Manhattan literary smugness and that city’s dreary, insulated view of the world, which is that of a flaneur strolling the boulevards and glancing down dirty alleys while remaining too precious actually to put his hands in that dirt. This sort of wrestling match—phony, momentary, artsy pretentiousness and troubled but sincere artistic integrity—fits neatly into the facile pomposity displayed by Tabitha Dickinson, the weary theater critic for the Times, a seen-it-all, done-it-all creature of the indoors and too much booze, who plans to base her review of Thomson’s play not on the play itself but on what she perceives it to be—a stunt mounted by a Hollywood celebrity arriviste, an interloper in the self-aware colony of Broadway theah-tuh folk. So Raymond Carver, a regular bloke adopted by anaerobic New York intellectuals, is being played on Broadway by another self-aware bloke, Riggan Thomson, in the actor’s attempt to gain respect and be real in the only way acceptable in modern America, by appealing to these anaerobes—and the whole gimmick opens a long corridor (figuratively and literally, backstage in the St. James Theater) in which we wonder what’s behind that door, or that one, or that one.

Each of the persons involved in the production of this play— Riggan Thomson, Jake, his lawyer (Zach Galifianakis), Mike Shiner (Edward Norton), the actresses Laura (Andrea Riseborough) and Lesley (Naomi Watts), and even the contemporary artificialistes (a word I just made up), such as the theater critic—has part of the truth, and it clearly hurts them, being aware of whatever they have that is part of the truth. But nothing means anything, as Thomson’s daughter, Sam (superbly played by Emma Stone), makes clear to him in one of the many blood-on-the-floor, nonartificial, wholly aerobic confrontations in this picture. We don’t matter. Nothing matters. (Could this be made any clearer than in the scene in which Thomson passes an actor on the sidewalk thunderously orating Macbeth’s sound-and-fury speech?) This is the heart of it: we don’t matter. But what should then be a moment of spiritual liberation instead weighs these people down, traps them on a hamster wheel, suffocates them.

The joy of liberation, however, is communicated and emphasized in the magical realism exhibited by the Riggan Thomson character. When he meditates, he floats. When he is angry, he points a finger, and whatever he points at flies around the room and smashes into a wall. It is as though he has the powers of one of Professor Xavier’s X-Men.

In fact, he does, because he is creative. I hope to tell you that this is exactly, exactly, what it feels like to be a creative person. We bring things to life. We make something out of nothing. We push things together and watch them crash or light up or send out sparks. Once, during a suffocating lesson in a seventh-grade English class with Mrs. Fuller, I sat in my seat looking at the front the room, at the wall beside her desk, and I realized that at that moment, to avoid the boredom I was experiencing, I could have stood and gone down the aisle between the desks and walked through the wall. I didn’t. But I could have. I have written books and screenplays and drawn pictures and done many artistic things. This tells me that, although I didn’t walk through that wall in the seventh grade, I could have.

The characters in this story, whether they know it or not, and most of them don’t, are seeking redemption. Certainly Riggan Thomson understands this, and his quest for personal redemption imperils and threatens and enlightens and frightens those around him. He is being honest in every way possible (for example, as when he walks through Times Square in his tightie whities, a scene that occurs following an argument between Thomson and a backstage door that abruptly closes on his dressing gown—leaving him with nothing else to do than hurry out of the alley and quickly walk all the way around to the front of the theater in time for his entrance). His ex-wife is achingly present and honest, but whatever their relationship—and clearly they still love each other—it is clear that he remains alone in his personal desperation. He is like the soul of a dying man fighting in the immediate afterlife against the demons he has created while on earth so that he can move beyond the demons and gain enlightenment. Thomson does so, and as he moves through this journey of life-in-death throughout the course of the movie—his search for redemption, his hope for honesty and integrity—he pulls many others along with him.

The performances in this movie test your heart. Everyone is exceptional. Perhaps because I’m a father now, the performance by Emma Stone of the disenchanted, recovering-from-drugs Sam hit me hard. It would break me if I failed in this way as a father. But did Thomson really fail her? Shiner puts Sam wise to herself, just as all of these characters, in a script that is perfectly, beautifully constructed, help one other through their rites of passage backstage and onstage. When are we being honest, and when are we acting, and can we ever tell the difference? Tabitha Dickinson (Lindsay Duncan), the powerful theater critic, is such an anaerobe that she interprets Thomson’s failed suicide on opening night, his attempt at freeing his soul and being honest, as an advance in the art of stage acting. This is because she, like Shiner, of whom she has never written a poor review, are so hollow that, for them, performance is reality. Norton’s Mike Shiner is so far gone that he has become sexually impotent, able to get it up only when he is on stage; he is a real human being unable to be a real human being unless he is acting on stage pretending to be a real human being. Corridors full of doors waiting to be opened, and what part of us will we find on the other side when we open this door, or that one?

A word about the soundtrack, the music. It includes selections from the soaring symphonies of Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky and Mahler—all late Romantic era composers—as well as Ravel’s beautiful, infinitely sad “Pavane for a Dead Princess.” I have seen Birdman only once, but if I recall correctly, these romantic aural vistas of the concert hall are pretty much allied with the Birdman character when he appears in the picture and when Thomson—insane, or perhaps merely self-aware—is talking to the cartoon character—that is, to himself. The vivid, immediate drum solos that make up the other half of the soundtrack serve as the chorus or commentary on the backstage shenanigans, ego-bruising emotional confrontations, and high-pressure stakes that Thomson deals with every waking moment.

So what about that subtitle—the parenthetical The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance? Thomson, in the ignorant, clear-eyed assuredness of his genius, enters with trusting, childlike certainty the wolf den of the commercial Broadway theater, a substitute for the world itself—for the world, as we know, is a messy agglomeration of everyone else’s compromised virtues, distorted imaginations, failed ambitions, and phony personas. In maintaining his belief in himself, in trusting to his genius, in mounting his play the way he wishes to against all odds—will Riggan Thomson’s artistic integrity even be comprehensible to the denizens of such a soiled world, or will the world disappoint him as it inevitably does all visionaries? What unexpected virtue— strength, courage, self-awareness, moral honesty—will Thomson gain by being true to himself but remaining ignorant of many things—ignorant of parts of himself, perhaps, and ignorant of certain aspects of those around him, and ignorant of the dangerous situation he has put himself in?

The answer is in the ending, which follows his failed suicide attempt. I wondered throughout the final act how the writers—Alejandro González Iñárritu himself in collaboration with Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, and Armando Bo—would complete Thomson’s quest for redemption. Have him kill himself? Too easy, I thought—but they gave this necessary conclusion a wonderful twist that perfectly fits Thomson’s character, his history, and his spiritual quest. Failing in his suicide attempt on stage and still largely misunderstood, we assume, by his opening-night audience, Thomson awakens in a hospital bed with a bandaged face. He goes to a mirror and undoes the wrappings to regard himself for the first time since passing out. He accidentally shot off his nose in his try at suicide; now, with the new schonzz his surgeons have provided him, his physiognomy is literally that of Birdman. His nose is a beaklike proboscis. The humor is not lost on our genius; indeed, the transformation is revelatory and completes his search for his soul. Sam is in the room with him; she has brought him flowers. The story opened with the two of them arguing via Skype over what kind of flowers Thomson wanted Sam to buy to celebrate his play on Broadway. Now that they have made their peace with each other, she has brought a lovely bouquet for him to have while he recuperates. But there is no vase. She leaves to fetch one. While she is gone, Thomson walks to the window of his hospital room and opens it, looks out at the birds in the sky, steps onto the ledge—

When Sam returns, we see that Thomson is no longer on the ledge. We hear ambulance sirens and shocked voices on the street. Sam goes to the window and looks down, then up at the birds, and she smiles. My hope at first was that, in another moment of magical realism, Thomson had joined the birds and was flying over the city as we saw him do in an earlier scene. But of course he is dead. Of course he achieved the only possible resolution available to a man of his gifts who has gained what he has and who has gone down the dark corridors and looked into the dark rooms and dealt with the crowd of demons that have tugged at him through the course of the story and throughout his life.

We are left, finally, with the words of Raymond Carver explaining, or illuminating, just what it has been that Riggan Thomson has been searching for in this hell of his own making, his life, and what it is that his earnest ignorance has gotten him. They are the lines inscribed, as we know, on Raymond Carver’s headstone:

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

That’s what Carver wanted. It’s what Riggan Thomson wanted. It’s what all artists want. It’s what I want. It’s what everyone wants.

To be understood by others may be asking too much. But to be loved?

Can asking to be loved be too much to ask for?

Birdman, or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

NOTE: Spoilers follow.

Where to start with Birdman? It is brilliant to have Michael Keaton, who has always been first rate, carry as extraordinary a picture as this one. All those years since the Batman movies doing smaller, sincere pictures, cable work, and voiceovers, and now here he is in this exceptional, dark, very serious comedy by Alejandro González Iñárritu.

I was hesitant about seeing it, however, because the bare bones of the plot made it seem likely that Birdman would bump up against my own inner drama, and anticipating this made me nervous. I have this story that I carry around in my heart, the story of my own so-called career, the on-again, off-again periods when I write, when I go into a corner and challenge myself to do the best work I can. I do this in private because no one is really paying attention. I once tasted greater success, but that has been the extent of it. Riggan Thomson, Keaton’s character, has had billion-dollar worldwide success playing a superhero character—a Batman–type character, an in-joke—in a series of three pictures, a success he walked away from in 1992 as a matter of personal integrity. Twenty-plus years later, he’s mounting his own production on Broadway of Raymond Carver’s famous short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” He’s put everything he has into it—his money, his talent and life experience—and during the two hours or more of Birdman in which we follow him and the people around him during previews and then opening night, we sympathize with this nettlesome, flawed human being as he reaches for something he might not attain. (But what is talent for if not to attempt exactly that?)

I’d like to think that the fact that “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” is the play that Riggan Thomson is mounting is itself also a kind of in-joke. Troubled-soul Thomson, a regular bloke with the spirit of artistic genius in him, is a reflection of troubled-soul Carver. Under the tutelage of or despite the interference of Gordon Lish, a darling of the New York literati and avatar of the institutional “new fiction” of the 1970s and 1980s, Carver came to be regarded as an essential talent, and the writer did, after all, praise Lish for that one’s guidance and strong hand in the editing of his stories. But for me, this episode in American letters has the odor of goofy Manhattan literary smugness and that city’s dreary, insulated view of the world, which is that of a flaneur strolling the boulevards and glancing down dirty alleys while remaining too precious actually to put his hands in that dirt. This sort of wrestling match—phony, momentary, artsy pretentiousness and troubled but sincere artistic integrity—fits neatly into the facile pomposity displayed by Tabitha Dickinson, the weary theater critic for the Times, a seen-it-all, done-it-all creature of the indoors and too much booze, who plans to base her review of Thomson’s play not on the play itself but on what she perceives it to be—a stunt mounted by a Hollywood celebrity arriviste, an interloper in the self-aware colony of Broadway theah-tuh folk. So Raymond Carver, a regular bloke adopted by anaerobic New York intellectuals, is being played on Broadway by another self-aware bloke, Riggan Thomson, in the actor’s attempt to gain respect and be real in the only way acceptable in modern America, by appealing to these anaerobes—and the whole gimmick opens a long corridor (figuratively and literally, backstage in the St. James Theater) in which we wonder what’s behind that door, or that one, or that one.

Each of the persons involved in the production of this play— Riggan Thomson, Jake, his lawyer (Zach Galifianakis), Mike Shiner (Edward Norton), the actresses Laura (Andrea Riseborough) and Lesley (Naomi Watts), and even the contemporary artificialistes (a word I just made up), such as the theater critic—has part of the truth, and it clearly hurts them, being aware of whatever they have that is part of the truth. But nothing means anything, as Thomson’s daughter, Sam (superbly played by Emma Stone), makes clear to him in one of the many blood-on-the-floor, nonartificial, wholly aerobic confrontations in this picture. We don’t matter. Nothing matters. (Could this be made any clearer than in the scene in which Thomson passes an actor on the sidewalk thunderously orating Macbeth’s sound-and-fury speech?) This is the heart of it: we don’t matter. But what should then be a moment of spiritual liberation instead weighs these people down, traps them on a hamster wheel, suffocates them.

The joy of liberation, however, is communicated and emphasized in the magical realism exhibited by the Riggan Thomson character. When he meditates, he floats. When he is angry, he points a finger, and whatever he points at flies around the room and smashes into a wall. It is as though he has the powers of one of Professor Xavier’s X-Men.

In fact, he does, because he is creative. I hope to tell you that this is exactly, exactly, what it feels like to be a creative person. We bring things to life. We make something out of nothing. We push things together and watch them crash or light up or send out sparks. Once, during a suffocating lesson in a seventh-grade English class with Mrs. Fuller, I sat in my seat looking at the front the room, at the wall beside her desk, and I realized that at that moment, to avoid the boredom I was experiencing, I could have stood and gone down the aisle between the desks and walked through the wall. I didn’t. But I could have. I have written books and screenplays and drawn pictures and done many artistic things. This tells me that, although I didn’t walk through that wall in the seventh grade, I could have.

The characters in this story, whether they know it or not, and most of them don’t, are seeking redemption. Certainly Riggan Thomson understands this, and his quest for personal redemption imperils and threatens and enlightens and frightens those around him. He is being honest in every way possible (for example, as when he walks through Times Square in his tidy whities, a scene that occurs following an argument between Thomson and a backstage door that abruptly closes on his dressing gown—leaving him with nothing else to do than hurry out of the alley and quickly walk all the way around to the front of the theater in time for his entrance). His ex-wife is achingly present and honest, but whatever their relationship—and clearly they still love each other—it is clear that he remains alone in his personal desperation. He is like the soul of a dying man fighting in the immediate afterlife against the demons he has created while on earth so that he can move beyond the demons and gain enlightenment. Thomson does so, and as he moves through this journey of life-in-death throughout the course of the movie—his search for redemption, his hope for honesty and integrity—he pulls many others along with him.

The performances in this movie test your heart. Everyone is exceptional. Perhaps because I’m a father now, the performance by Emma Stone of the disenchanted, recovering-from-drugs Sam hit me hard. It would break me if I failed in this way as a father. But did Thomson really fail her? Shiner puts Sam wise to herself, just as all of these characters, in a script that is perfectly, beautifully constructed, help one other through their rites of passage backstage and onstage. When are we being honest, and when are we acting, and can we ever tell the difference? Tabitha Dickinson (Lindsay Duncan), the powerful theater critic, is such an anaerobe that she interprets Thomson’s failed suicide on opening night, his attempt at freeing his soul and being honest, as an advance in the art of stage acting. This is because she, like Shiner, of whom she has never written a poor review, are so hollow that, for them, performance is reality. Norton’s Mike Shiner is so far gone that he has become sexually impotent, able to get it up only when he is on stage; he is a real human being unable to be a real human being unless he is acting on stage pretending to be a real human being. Corridors full of doors waiting to be opened, and what part of us will we find on the other side when we open this door, or that one?

A word about the soundtrack, the music. It includes selections from the soaring symphonies of Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky and Mahler—all late Romantic era composers—as well as Ravel’s beautiful, infinitely sad “Pavane for a Dead Princess.” I have seen Birdman only once, but if I recall correctly, these romantic aural vistas of the concert hall are pretty much allied with the Birdman character when he appears in the picture and when Thomson—insane, or perhaps merely self-aware—is talking to the cartoon character—that is, to himself. The vivid, immediate drum solos that make up the other half of the soundtrack serve as the chorus or commentary on the backstage shenanigans, ego-bruising emotional confrontations, and high-pressure stakes that Thomson deals with every waking moment.

So what about that subtitle—the parenthetical The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance? Thomson, in the ignorant, clear-eyed assuredness of his genius, enters with trusting, childlike certainty the wolf den of the commercial Broadway theater, a substitute for the world itself—for the world, as we know, is a messy agglomeration of everyone else’s compromised virtues, distorted imaginations, failed ambitions, and phony personas. In maintaining his belief in himself, in trusting to his genius, in mounting his play the way he wishes to against all odds—will Riggan Thomson’s artistic integrity even be comprehensible to the denizens of such a soiled world, or will the world disappoint him as it inevitably does all visionaries? What unexpected virtue— strength, courage, self-awareness, moral honesty—will Thomson gain by being true to himself but remaining ignorant of many things—ignorant of parts of himself, perhaps, and ignorant of certain aspects of those around him, and ignorant of the dangerous situation he has put himself in?

The answer is in the ending, which follows his failed suicide attempt. I wondered throughout the final act how the writers—Alejandro González Iñárritu himself in collaboration with Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, and Armando Bo—would complete Thomson’s quest for redemption. Have him kill himself? Too easy, I thought—but they gave this necessary conclusion a wonderful twist that perfectly fits Thomson’s character, his history, and his spiritual quest. Failing in his suicide attempt on stage and still largely misunderstood, we assume, by his opening-night audience, Thomson awakens in a hospital bed with a bandaged face. He goes to a mirror and undoes the wrappings to regard himself for the first time since passing out. He accidentally shot off his nose in his try at suicide; now, with the new schonzz his surgeons have provided him, his physiognomy is literally that of Birdman. His nose is a beaklike proboscis. The humor is not lost on our genius; indeed, the transformation is revelatory and completes his search for his soul. Sam is in the room with him; she has brought him flowers. The story opened with the two of them arguing via Skype over what kind of flowers Thomson wanted Sam to buy to celebrate his play on Broadway. Now that they have made their peace with each other, she has brought a lovely bouquet for him to have while he recuperates. But there is no vase. She leaves to fetch one. While she is gone, Thomson walks to the window of his hospital room and opens it, looks out at the birds in the sky, steps onto the ledge—

When Sam returns, we see that Thomson is no longer on the ledge. We hear ambulance sirens and shocked voices on the street. Sam goes to the window and looks down, then up at the birds, and she smiles. My hope at first was that, in another moment of magical realism, Thomson had joined the birds and was flying over the city as we saw him do in an earlier scene. But of course he is dead. Of course he achieved the only possible resolution available to a man of his gifts who has gained what he has and who has gone down the dark corridors and looked into the dark rooms and dealt with the crowd of demons that have tugged at him through the course of the story and throughout his life.

We are left, finally, with the words of Raymond Carver explaining, or illuminating, just what it has been that Riggan Thomson has been searching for in this hell of his own making, his life, and what it is that his earnest ignorance has gotten him. They are the lines inscribed, as we know, on Raymond Carver’s headstone:

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

That’s what Carver wanted. It’s what Riggan Thomson wanted. It’s what all artists want. It’s what I want. It’s what everyone wants.

To be understood by others may be asking too much. But to be loved?

Can asking to be loved be too much to ask for?

Revising Oron

Oron, originally written in 1973-1974 and published by Zebra Books in 1978, is going to be reissued by Wildside Press/Borgo Press—next year, I hope, but relatively soon, in any event. I’ve scanned in the text—all 93,000 words of it—and am now revising the novel. I have several reasons for doing so.

Oron is the first novel-length manuscript I completed. I managed to achieve this goal at a young age—I was 21 years old—after having written many short stories over the course of three years and after abandoning several other attempts at novel-sized manuscripts, all of them historical stories (about pirates, or cave men, or Romans fighting barbarians, as well as other straightforward adventure fiction conceits influenced by Jack London, Robert E. Howard, and the many mid-century popular novelists I’d read). Why I decided that I should attempt so large a story—a sword-and-sorcery epic—I don’t remember, other than that I was ambitious, I wanted to be published by a conventional publisher, and sword-and-sorcery fiction (which I like) was still appearing on the paperback racks at that time. I do recall wanting to write an adventure that would echo the exploits of a Homeric figure from a lost age, a notion inspired by Howard’s Hyborean Age. So I set the bar high, and Oron went through three partial and three complete drafts before I decided that it was more or less completed.

The novel was thus very much a learning process for me. As I looked at the story while scanning in the pages to revise them, I was pleased to see how well it holds together structurally. My instincts in that regard were solid. What does not work so well for me any longer is the hyperemotional language, which was very much influenced by the pulp fiction being reprinted in the early 1970s. Because of that and my limited writing experience, the book reads “real young.” Also, even though I tried to invest the characters with emotional depth and personal psychology, they remain larger-than-life personages on a very large stage. They are the products of my interest in Elizabethan and Restoration theater. Oron plays it big; everything is twice the size it needs to be—language, action, characters, scope. It works because the novel is sincere and because I was trying to break new ground. Still, it has an old-school quality to it: it does not reach out to the reader; rather, it’s the kind of story that pulls the reader in. It is the work of a talented, ambitious, widely read but still unseasoned young man.

(Which is fine. Andy Offutt understood what I was doing; he wanted to nominate me as the John W. Campbell Best New Writer of the Year, although he felt that the science fiction community at the time would frown on allowing a fantasy writer to be up for that award. He also thought that Oron should have been nominated for a Balrog Award, but that did not occur, either.)

Oron was written long before novels, particularly fantasies, were designed to fulfill predetermined corporate agendas. The book is very much of its time, a period in popular fiction situated between the postwar, modern, masculine America (a sensibility that persisted well into the late 1970s) and the subsequent libertarian, postmodern, universal America that has been dominant for several decades now. In attitude, it is much more like the freelance fiction written today by authors online and published by small, independent presses. It grew out of the fanzine era, itself the last echo of the great pulp fiction of the mid-twentieth century, a generation before imaginative fiction became mainstreamed as a result of Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas movies, role-play gaming, and the influence of Tolkein’s trilogy. In that sense, Oron is not at all a construction of postmodern conceit; for example, is not a world-building fantasy epic; such a concept was unknown in the 1970s. Neither is it influenced by role-play gaming, which I don’t think existed in 1973. There is a lot of Howard, obviously, in Oron, but I was also influenced by the adventure-story writers I’d read in the years leading up to the summer of 1973—Frank Yerby, for example, and Samuel Shellabarger. I had any number of titles by these authors, either in used paperbacks or in book club editions given to me by neighbors who were clearing out their attics or basements. These writers are largely forgotten now (no one has manufactured a video game of Captain from Castileor Prince of Foxes!), but in the 1940s and 1950s, they wrote polished, romantic adventure stories very much in the vein of Sabatini, whom I also read to excess back then. I feel now that the influence of these writers had much to do with the fact that Oron in the novel is not a purely barbaric figure, even though he should be. He has some of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Errol Flynn in him; he is Hector as well as Achilles, but he ought to be Achilles or, better, Alexander—a born fighter bred for war and personal combat, yet innately intelligent and intrigued by life as he finds it. Oron is a Nevgan—raised to survive anything, anywhere—but he has a bit of us in him, too, enough so that we understand him and even sympathize with him. (Nevga, I believe, was my alteration of the name of the River Neva in Russia, so perhaps my barbarian world-shaker has a bit of Aleksandr Nevski and Ilya Mourametz in him.)

In revising the novel, then, I have reworked Oron so that he reflects the character who subsequently appeared in two other novels and several short stories—prequels—all written in the early 1980s, when Oron had gone through its two printings and fallen out of print. I expect the tone and substance to be similar to that of “Dark of Heart,” a short story scheduled to appear in Weird Tales, or that of “Shadow-born, Shadow-taken,” my novelette recently released in the e-anthology Artifacts and Relics (http://heathenoracle.weebly.com/).

I also intend to do my best to improve the quality of my writing, including the dialogue. Morgan Holmes mentioned to me years ago that one of the things that set my sword-and-sorcery stories apart from those of other writers was my extensive use of dialogue. He’s right. I did not intentionally set out to write in such a way; it comes as an outgrowth of my strong interest in cinema and theater—that is, in developing characters defined as much by their speech and thoughts as by their actions. But the dialogue in Oron as it was originally published is in places almost formal, and there are several monologues in which characters might as well be on a stage under a spotlight reciting Gloucester’s speech at the opening of Richard III. I intend to do away with those monologues and present them as private, indirect discourse.

One more thought: I am dismayed whenever I hear people express surprise that Howard’s volatile fiction could be taken seriously. “He really believed this stuff,” these people say. In fact, the world that Howard portrays is closer to the existence most human beings have lived for the past ten thousand years than is the simulacrum most of us now inhabit. We have put our trust in a fashionable but errant world that teeters every minute on a pinpoint, and this cannot last. I would remind those who find Howard’s worldview to be an affront to our finer sensibilities that his world is real; ours is not. The world of Howard’s sword-and-sorcery, and that of Oron, is not a world of irony and camp; it is not a world of degrading reliance on global technology, as necessary as we have made that. The world that Howard describes in his stories echoes with myths, legends, and tales that go back to the beginning of human settlements, and we ought not to discount this rawness; it is in us still. That noted, I rather like the world I was born into—the world of Western sensibilities, that is; it makes immediately available a great deal that mankind has inherited, and having gotten an education, I am at home in it, although we can do much better, especially in America, in terms of civil rights and economic fairness, and we may.

Nevertheless, we remain a Neolithic species, and the pretense that we are rational, sensible, just, or honorable is not to be trusted. Man is a wolf to man, as the Romans said. The best of us have much to teach us, and we are wise to listen, but few of us as yet are equal to what the best among us ask of us. The haunted world of elemental terrors and human cruelty and desperation is the world we have known the longest; we come from that world, and we dismiss our memory of it at our peril. Stories of men and women armed with swords and strong hearts, facing whatever may confront them on whatever red field they find themselves, encourage us to remember where we have come from and who we have been.

Revising Oron

Oron, originally written in 1973-1974 and published by Zebra Books in 1978, is going to be reissued by Wildside Press/Borgo Press—next year, I hope, but relatively soon, in any event. I’ve scanned in the text—all 93,000 words of it—and am now revising the novel. I have several reasons for doing so.

Oron is the first novel-length manuscript I completed. I managed to achieve this goal at a young age—I was 21 years old—after having written many short stories over the course of three years and after abandoning several other attempts at novel-sized manuscripts, all of them historical stories (about pirates, or cave men, or Romans fighting barbarians, as well as other straightforward adventure fiction conceits influenced by Jack London, Robert E. Howard, and the many mid-century popular novelists I’d read). Why I decided that I should attempt so large a story—a sword-and-sorcery epic—I don’t remember, other than that I was ambitious, I wanted to be published by a conventional publisher, and sword-and-sorcery fiction (which I like) was still appearing on the paperback racks at that time. I do recall wanting to write an adventure that would echo the exploits of a Homeric figure from a lost age, a notion inspired by Howard’s Hyborean Age. So I set the bar high, and Oron went through three partial and three complete drafts before I decided that it was more or less completed.

The novel was thus very much a learning process for me. As I looked at the story while scanning in the pages to revise them, I was pleased to see how well it holds together structurally. My instincts in that regard were solid. What does not work so well for me any longer is the hyperemotional language, which was very much influenced by the pulp fiction being reprinted in the early 1970s. Because of that and my limited writing experience, the book reads “real young.” Also, even though I tried to invest the characters with emotional depth and personal psychology, they remain larger-than-life personages on a very large stage. They are the products of my interest in Elizabethan and Restoration theater. Oron plays it big; everything is twice the size it needs to be—language, action, characters, scope. It works because the novel is sincere and because I was trying to break new ground. Still, it has an old-school quality to it: it does not reach out to the reader; rather, it’s the kind of story that pulls the reader in. It is the work of a talented, ambitious, widely read but still unseasoned young man.

(Which is fine. Andy Offutt understood what I was doing; he wanted to nominate me as the John W. Campbell Best New Writer of the Year, although he felt that the science fiction community at the time would frown on allowing a fantasy writer to be up for that award. He also thought that Oron should have been nominated for a Balrog Award, but that did not occur, either.)

Oron was written long before novels, particularly fantasies, were designed to fulfill predetermined corporate agendas. The book is very much of its time, a period in popular fiction situated between the postwar, modern, masculine America (a sensibility that persisted well into the late 1970s) and the subsequent libertarian, postmodern, universal America that has been dominant for several decades now. In attitude, it is much more like the freelance fiction written today by authors online and published by small, independent presses. It grew out of the fanzine era, itself the last echo of the great pulp fiction of the mid-twentieth century, a generation before imaginative fiction became mainstreamed as a result of Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas movies, role-play gaming, and the influence of Tolkein’s trilogy. In that sense, Oron is not at all a construction of postmodern conceit; for example, is not a world-building fantasy epic; such a concept was unknown in the 1970s. Neither is it influenced by role-play gaming, which I don’t think existed in 1973. There is a lot of Howard, obviously, in Oron, but I was also influenced by the adventure-story writers I’d read in the years leading up to the summer of 1973—Frank Yerby, for example, and Samuel Shellabarger. I had any number of titles by these authors, either in used paperbacks or in book club editions given to me by neighbors who were clearing out their attics or basements. These writers are largely forgotten now (no one has manufactured a video game of Captain from Castile or Prince of Foxes!), but in the 1940s and 1950s, they wrote polished, romantic adventure stories very much in the vein of Sabatini, whom I also read to excess back then. I feel now that the influence of these writers had much to do with the fact that Oron in the novel is not a purely barbaric figure, even though he should be. He has some of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Errol Flynn in him; he is Hector as well as Achilles, but he ought to be Achilles or, better, Alexander—a born fighter bred for war and personal combat, yet innately intelligent and intrigued by life as he finds it. Oron is a Nevgan—raised to survive anything, anywhere—but he has a bit of us in him, too, enough so that we understand him and even sympathize with him. (Nevga, I believe, was my alteration of the name of the River Neva in Russia, so perhaps my barbarian world-shaker has a bit of Aleksandr Nevski and Ilya Mourametz in him.)

In revising the novel, then, I have reworked Oron so that he reflects the character who subsequently appeared in two other novels and several short stories—prequels—all written in the early 1980s, when Oron had gone through its two printings and fallen out of print. I expect the tone and substance to be similar to that of “Dark of Heart,” a short story scheduled to appear in Weird Tales, or that of “Shadow-born, Shadow-taken,” my novelette recently released in the e-anthology Artifacts and Relics (http://heathenoracle.weebly.com/).

I also intend to do my best to improve the quality of my writing, including the dialogue. Morgan Holmes mentioned to me years ago that one of the things that set my sword-and-sorcery stories apart from those of other writers was my extensive use of dialogue. He’s right. I did not intentionally set out to write in such a way; it comes as an outgrowth of my strong interest in cinema and theater—that is, in developing characters defined as much by their speech and thoughts as by their actions. But the dialogue in Oron as it was originally published is in places almost formal, and there are several monologues in which characters might as well be on a stage under a spotlight reciting Gloucester’s speech at the opening of Richard III. I intend to do away with those monologues and present them as private, indirect discourse.

One more thought: I am dismayed whenever I hear people express surprise that Howard’s volatile fiction could be taken seriously. “He really believed this stuff,” these people say. In fact, the world that Howard portrays is closer to the existence most human beings have lived for the past ten thousand years than is the simulacrum most of us now inhabit. We have put our trust in a fashionable but errant world that teeters every minute on a pinpoint, and this cannot last. I would remind those who find Howard’s worldview to be an affront to our finer sensibilities that his world is real; ours is not. The world of Howard’s sword-and-sorcery, and that of Oron, is not a world of irony and camp; it is not a world of degrading reliance on global technology, as necessary as we have made that. The world that Howard describes in his stories echoes with myths, legends, and tales that go back to the beginning of human settlements, and we ought not to discount this rawness; it is in us still. That noted, I rather like the world I was born into—the world of Western sensibilities, that is; it makes immediately available a great deal that mankind has inherited, and having gotten an education, I am at home in it, although we can do much better, especially in America, in terms of civil rights and economic fairness, and we may.

Nevertheless, we remain a Neolithic species, and the pretense that we are rational, sensible, just, or honorable is not to be trusted. Man is a wolf to man, as the Romans said. The best of us have much to teach us, and we are wise to listen, but few of us as yet are equal to what the best among us ask of us. The haunted world of elemental terrors and human cruelty and desperation is the world we have known the longest; we come from that world, and we dismiss our memory of it at our peril. Stories of men and women armed with swords and strong hearts, facing whatever may confront them on whatever red field they find themselves, encourage us to remember where we have come from and who we have been.

Building a Story: Walt Disney’s Cinderella

If I were ever to teach a class in basic storytelling, especially one in which the class and I discussed popular imaginative fiction, I might very well start off with this book as a perfect example of how to structure a story.

The edition of the Walt Disney Cinderella story I mean is one that I found in the children’s section of Top Shelf Books, our wonderful used-book store on Northwest Highway here in Palatine, Illinois. The book is copyrighted 1995 and on the title page is identified as a Grolier Book Club Edition: “Originally published in Denmark by Egmont Gruppen, Copenhagen, in 1995.” Probably I bought it when Lily, our daughter, was around three years old. I’ve read it to her countless times. She’s read it to herself numerous times, as well. (She’s now seven.) It is a slender hardcover volume of about 44 pages, although it doesn’t even have folios. It does have four-color illustrations taken directly from the Walt Disney cartoon version of Cinderella, the one all of us are familiar with.

Here’s the thing that I noticed the very first time I read it to Lily. Getting into the story, I’d read the large-type text on facing pages, and the events described would be good news for Cinderella. Turn the page, and the next you know, we have dialogue or action that pushes things backward. Trouble for Cinderella. Classic reversal. Next page or two, we’re on the upswing. Next two pages, reversal. This goes on regularly until we get to the happy ending. It isn’t mechanical, although I may make it sound that way here. But the succinctness of telling the story this way builds into it a real sense of dramatic tension and personal investment. It’s the x-y graph we all learned when we were introduced to the classic structure of Freytag’s pyramid or the up-and-down sine wave of how to structure a movie script or a mystery story. Peak, trough, peak, trough, gradually climbing in intensity, until we get to the final act and then everything comes together except for those last few curve balls that leave you breathless until, ta da, climax, happy ending, resolution, denouement, redemption, happily ever after.

On the very first page of this edition we get an illustration of Cinderella awake in bed, fooling with her hair, with bright sunshine coming through the window and her little bird friends chirping her awake. No surprises here. We know that the use of animals in fables and tales pretty much goes back to the very beginning of storytelling. The Jatakas of early Buddhist literature and Aesop’s fables for all practical purposes reach back to the beginning of the human oral tradition. Generally, animals are regarded as being better than human beings in almost all ways; they are clever, wise, powerful, sexy, vital. (We may debate whether anything’s being superior to human beings is really much of a challenge, given how woefully we have disported on this earth in our time, but that would be a topic for another blog.) Animals represent the gods or the supernatural, introduce change in the protagonist’s life or bring wisdom to the afflicted or afflict those who think themselves very wise or clever in order to teach them a lesson. So here is Cinderella, very much an Ur-protagonist, one with Nature, beloved of Nature —

— and very clearly in trouble, as we notice immediately on the facing page, in a deep trough, because here we see Cinderella on hands and knees, scrubbing the floor, with the evil stepmother hovering over her, and the text makes clear that the stepmother is cruel and that she and the two stepsisters treat her like a servant and make her do all of the work. That’s all we get. Not much in the way of nuance. We are in a world of wholes, not of halves or fractions, of gray areas or ambivalence. We go from the natural world of Nature and happy birds to this false, indoor world of cruel people who aren’t even actually part of Cinderella’s life because they’re not related by blood. They’re artificial. We’ve already been notified that Cinderella has more in common with the innocent creatures of the natural world than she does with these creeps who command the household.

And so it goes. The royal messenger arrives saying that the king is going to have a ball that night for the prince. Peak! Turn the page. Cinderella is permitted to go…if she gets all of her work done in time. Trough! Cinderella excitedly pulls out her mother’s old gown from the trunk in the attic in anticipation of a wonderful evening. Forward! Then the stepmother comes in: “Cinderella, wash the floors!” “But I washed them yesterday!” “Well, wash them again!” Reversal! The animal friends help Cinderella, but even that assistance fails against the will power of the evil stepmother and the machinations of the wicked stepsisters.

Until! Halfway through the story, we get the fairy godmother. For me, this brings to mind Robert Bly’s famous leaps of association, which he describes in “Looking for Dragon Smoke,” the first part of Leaping Poetry (1975): “In ancient times…the poet flew from one world to another, ‘riding on dragons,’ as the Chinese said…. [Poets] dragged behind them long tails of dragon smoke…. The dragon smoke means that a leap has taken place in the poem. In many ancient works of art we notice a long floating leap at the center of the work. That leap can be described as a leap from the conscious to the unconscious and back again, a leap from the known part of the mind to the unknown part and back to the known.” Bly cites examples of such leaps in Gilgamesh and The Odyssey. “In all art derived from Great Mother mysteries, the leap to the unknown part of the mind lies in the very center of the work. The strength of ‘classical art’ has much more to do with this leap than with the order that the poets developed to contain, and, partially, to disguise it.”

So we are dealing with deeply resonant human material in Cinderella, a story that Marina Warner, in From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, reminds us goes back at least a thousand years. Warner discusses at length an ancient Chinese version of the story, details the sexual symbolism of the slipper, and makes clear that the fairy godmother in modern variations was an animal helper in more ancient versions but that, fairy or animal, this figure is indeed the dead mother returned: “The animal helper, who embodies the dead mother in providing for her orphaned child, constitutes a structural node in the Cinderella story, but the creature changes in later European versions until she takes the form of the fairy godmother familiar today.” Structural node, indeed: that’s Bly’s long floating leap, isn’t it? It’s the dragon smoke. Cinderella, Warner reminds us, is a “much-loved story of female wish fulfillment.” “Cinderella is a child in mourning for her mother, as her name tells us; her penitential garb is ash, dirty and low as a donkey skin or a coat of grasses, but more particularly the sign of loss, the symbol of mortality….”

Right here we have the beginnings of the Harry Potter epic or an Ender’s Game in the making, or another of any number of such characters and plot set-ups. This is rich, deep stuff, and when we use the story in its stripped-down form in this Grolier Book Club Edition that I would provide for my class, we have very clear architecture that we can use to build any sort of story we like.

So the fairy godmother appears and the impossible occurs: Cinderella, or her dead mother, or the girl’s subconscious, or animal spirits assist her in achieving her original goal, of attending the ball so that she might, of course, meet the prince and thereby achieve the happy ending, the fulfillment, the enlightenment, the resolution that all true suffering protagonists must attain. The last half of the story is pretty much the first half in reverse: the prince searches for the beautiful girl whom he wishes to wed, and no matter what the evil stepmother and the wicked stepsisters do to interfere with this fated reunion, things backfire on them. The animal friends actively help Cinderella in the first half of the story; in the second half, they assist by actively interfering with the stepmother and the sisters. The stepsisters, proactive but arrogant and remote in the first half, now react with selfish tears and moans when they are unable to fit the glass slipper onto their own toes. The stepmother was able to control all circumstances when it was just she and the girls inside their old castle in the first half of the story; now that outsiders, life, fresh air, and freedom have intruded in the persons of the duke and the footman, the envoys of the prince (that is, envoys of the world that Cinderella’s fairy godmother has opened for her and introduced her to.) the stepmother’s actions take the form of bungling slapstick. Whereas previously she could do nothing wrong, now she can do nothing right. The story reversals now work in Cinderella’s favor.

This Disney version undoes a lot of what, over the centuries, were critical elements in the Cinderella story, but in terms of sheer basic storytelling power, this really works. So I’d introduce my class to all of this material and draw the graph and the sine wave on the chalkboard or whiteboard or easel, and then suggest that we all collaborate on building the outline of a story based precisely on this architecture.

You can see where this could go. A teenage vampire story? A space opera adventure? A Western? The opening has to provide an introduction for our protagonist that gives us fundamentally everything we need to know. Look at the opening of, for example, John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian, right? And the dragon smoke or structural node in that movie? Conan dies on the Tree of Woe and is brought back to life from the land of spirits. Wouldn’t have worked to have it be Conan’s fairy godmother, but we get the idea, be it strength deep within ourselves or the symbolism of dragon smoke (or demonic spirits), a trip through a time portal, a perilous sea voyage or space voyage —  we could use whatever we like, but that’s what makes the protagonist the protagonist. For Gilgamesh, it was battling Enkidu, his spiritual brother, his animal-like wilder self, before journeying to the end of the world, losing what he had come for, but returning all the wiser for that and becoming, finally, a decent man and a decent king.

That would be the first day of my class, and this concise little hardcover of Disney’s 1950 cartoon would be my introductory text. It makes use of very resonant, and gratifying, subconscious elements while using a story framework  patterned on the Greek tragic model we’re all familiar with, that of incident piled on incident until we have a final denouement, like Greek warriors rushing into battle to settle things once and for all — the shootout on the streets of Dodge City, or the attack on Darth Vader’s battle star, or John Walton’s finally making it back down the mountain in time for Christmas morning, despite all odds that his life is in very real danger. (Or maybe it was coming back up the mountain. I forget which.) I’ll bet my class and I could spend the rest of the semester crafting story after story built on this architecture, creating good popular fiction with compelling plots, and – – if we were to do it right — with characters that halfway through look into a mirror, die and are reborn, defeat a shadow, or take a long journey that brings her or him back to where she or he started in order to complete a very powerful story journey. That journey would feel as satisfactory for whoever were to read it as it would to those of us who wrote it. Whether we did it as an outer space Western or a Victorian mystery story or a sword-and-sorcery adventure, I’ll bet that few people would recognize it literally. Subconsciously, though, they might very well understand that they are experiencing a good strong tale…one that, in its essence, has been around for a thousand years or more.