Andy Davidson's Blog, page 3

The Shining: In Praise of Shelley Duvall

Post-Doctor Sleep, there was a great deal of talk in book presses and blogs about Stephen King’s well known take on Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of The Shining. No secret by now that King has strong dislike for the film, mostly owing to Kubrick’s interpretation of the characters and his cold tone. Wendy, for example, King says, is one of the most misogynistic portrayals of a woman ever committed to film (his take paraphrased). I recently re-read Roger Ebert’s review of The Shining, one of his Great Movies, and at the end of the review he tells the story of asking Shelley Duvall what it was like working on the picture. “Almost unbearable,” is her answer. She describes the year-long shoot as nine months of crying, five and six days a week.

She means crying in the role of Wendy Torrance, of course, but in Vivian Kubrick’s documentary, Making The Shining, we catch glimpses of very real tears. Duvall has a fainting spell; the assistant director cracks wise. Jack Nicholson ignores her, directs his flirtations elsewhere. Kubrick himself mutters impatiently, occasionally yells at her. Duvall, as tall and strikingly pretty as she is, like a weird, wide-eyed forest creature by way of Tim Burton, seems small and frail on set, almost overlooked. “After all that work,” she tells Ebert, “hardly anyone even criticized my performance in it, even to mention it, it seemed like. The reviews were all about Kubrick. Like I wasn’t there.”

King noticed her, though. His comment to the BBC is that she’s basically just “there to scream and be stupid, and that’s not the character that I wrote about.” In this, King’s both right and wrong. No, he didn’t write a stupid screamer in Wendy Torrance, but it’s no stupid screamer that Shelley Duvall’s playing. In light of what Duvall says to Ebert, I don’t wish to give Stanley Kubrick any more credit here for how great The Shining is than I’ve given him in the past (a lot). I say, instead, let’s talk about Shelley Duvall’s Wendy, about misogyny, and why she’s every bit as strong as King’s character in the novel.

First, it’s important to note that Wendy, in the movie, performs no action that Wendy, in the book, does not do. Wendy in the book looks out for Danny. Wendy in the movie looks out for Danny. Wendy in the book stands up to her husband when her son appears with bruises on his neck. Wendy in the movie does, too. In fact, Wendy in the movie locks Jack Torrance in the pantry all by herself, whereas in the book, her hands are shaking so badly her five-year-old son has to slide the bolt in place for her (granted, that’s because she’s been beaten with a mallet by her deranged husband, but Wendy in the movie never allows herself to be beaten). My theory is that Shelley Duvall simply isn’t the Wendy King describes: long blonde hair, great legs, beautiful. Not that Duvall isn’t beautiful, but she’s not King’s Wendy. She’s an altogether different kind of woman whose long features and odd physicality are amplified by near-constant screaming and crying (all of which is perfectly logical within the circumstances of the film; her terror is meant to be our terror). Simply put: she doesn’t look strong because she looks odd and she cries and screams a lot. But how or why do these things equal weak? Does a woman have to look or act like Rebecca DeMornay to be strong?

Was Kubrick a misogynist? On this set, probably. Does he destroy Duvall’s performance, crush her spirit? No. Conversely, does the way he treats her somehow add to her performance, make it better, more natural, more harried? Not in the least. She persists in spite of Kubrick, I think, not because of him. To endure a year-long shoot in such isolation with so many men, I think, is the strength we’re ultimately seeing in the film version of Wendy Torrance. Is it a quiet performance? Not always. Is it pretty? Not always. Is it graceful? You bet.

Consider what’s happening in Shelley Duvall’s early monologue about Jack dislocating Danny’s arm. Notice the fragility she conveys, the complex psychology at work behind her mask. She tells the psychiatrist it was just “one of those things you do to a child a thousand times,” but we get the sense that Wendy has never done any such thing to Danny, or would she ever. It’s her husband she’s really talking about in this scene, and the subtext of her fear of him is all there in the way she trembles, the way her eyes widen, the way her cigarette ash lengthens, forgotten. The way she smiles. Hers is, in fact, the first great moment of naturalistic acting in the movie, following a scene of oddly calculated, mannered dialogue between Nicholson and the manager of the Overlook Hotel. How is this, then, a misogynistic portrayal, to shoot her in light and colors so becoming, to make her the first great moment of the movie?

One thing I will give Kubrick credit for here, because it’s relevant: he understands Jack Torrance. Detractors of Nicholson’s take on the character often cite the fact that he seems crazy from the beginning. But in the novel, well, Torrance is, in fact, crazy from the beginning. He’s the heavy, an angry man whose issues with rage, not alcohol, seem to be the true root of his madness. Yet in the novel King allies Danny with Jack, creates a bond between them that his Wendy is jealous of. Kubrick, to his credit, makes Jack the villain with no apology, and allies Danny with his mother, not his father. It just makes sense.

In fact, in the movie, Duvall saves Danny’s life on at least two occasions. She drops him down the snowbank away from Jack and takes up a knife to defend herself. She finds him outside the hedge maze and drives the Snow Cat down out of the mountains. What’s more, she’s confronted with the horrors of the hotel after the horror of her husband, and she survives both.

In Vivian Kubrick’s documentary, there’s an unforgettable moment in which Scatman Crothers, who plays Dick Halloran, is asked what it was like working on the film. His eyes water. Tears spill down his cheeks. Extraordinary, he says. Just extraordinary. Shelley Duvall’s answer to that same question, ten years later, from Ebert: “Almost unbearable.” In light of the fact that Kubrick put Crothers through almost 160 takes of a single scene, I can’t help wondering if the actor was spilling tears of relief just to have survived.

Duvall’s Wendy is just that: a survivor. Her performance is one of the great naturalistic performances in horror, made even more special by the fact that it’s found in one of the most mannered horror movies ever made. She’s the warm light at the center of this cold, cold movie. She’s the one we root for.

Too Long for the Bed: Hemingway’s Swede Finds a Home

“Couldn’t you get out of town?”

“No,” Ole Andreson said. “I’m through with all that running around.”

So I’ve been feeding two cats outside my day-job office. One is completely feral but as sweet as any feral cat can be. Small and dark with a little white patch on his/her chest (after two years, my wife and I still haven’t gotten a good enough look at the nethers to gauge the sex). This one I’ve been feeding for a while; his/her ear is notched, suggesting he/she was spade/neutered, at some point long ago, before I came into the picture. A few weeks back, a second cat showed up: big, scarred, missing some teeth. A real big-headed male Tom bruiser. But he got along sweetly with feral Littlecat, who seemed to welcome the company. His presence even seemed to help socialize him/her, who started meowing for the first time after Bighead showed up. And with us, well, he was perfectly insistent that we feed him and love him and not touch his head (I have the scar to prove it).

It was Crystal, I think, who first noticed Bighead’s toes. She counted seven on one forepaw, six on the other.

Over the years, we’ve made a few pilgrimages through writers’ homes, among them the rural farmhouses of William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Carl Sandburg, and — nothing farmy about it — the Key West estate of Ernest Hemingway. Of course, Hemingway’s house was the best, if only because it was, in fact, home to several generations of mutant cats. Polydactyl cats: if you’ve never seen one in the flesh, wow. What a treat you’re missing. There, they have names like Charlie Chaplin and Nick Adams, names that suggest they are, in fact, heirs to royal personalities: grand entertainers and characters that spring forth from traditions both literary and cinematic. Two things, well, I love.

So. Yeah. We weren’t looking for another cat. Really. But it wasn’t that long ago that I bought Criterion’s double-release of The Killers, both the 1946 and the 1964 versions, featuring Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin, respectively, as the washed-up prizefighter Ole Andreson, the Big Swede two men have come to town to kill. And so, imagine my delight, when into our lives walked a twenty-two-toed brawler with no upper teeth and scars so thick they bent two needles at the vet’s office. A cat equal parts Lancaster and Marvin: all Swede.

We came out to feed the pair of them last Friday and discovered Bighead’s left foreleg — the one with seven toes — was swollen and fevered. So we got him to the vet, after taping towels around my arms, just in case he didn’t want to walk into the carrier of his own accord (he did). And thus Ole Andreson — after a snipping and a lancing and a tending — was ours, and my years-long dream of owning a polydactyl cat, ever since meeting Charlie Chaplin at the Hemingway estate in Key West, came to pass. In his story, Hemingway describes Ole as a “heavyweight prizefighter” who’s “too long for the bed.” Of the big boxer’s fate, Nick Adams says: “I can’t stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he’s going to get it. It’s too damned awful.” I guess that’s how I felt, seeing him with a fevered leg. George advises Nick not to think about it, and that’s the end of the story. That’s never been an option for me, when it comes to critters, and so: welcome to the family, Ole Andreson. You don’t have to run anymore.

 

A Room or Place or Hut or Lodge or Corner of Your Own

In the fall of 2014, faced with the longest, most difficult portion of a major revision for my not-yet agent, I decided to commit wholeheartedly to an endeavor I had only thus far daydreamed about: I would make myself a writer’s space, separate from our house. Partly, yes, this seemed like simple procrastination — avoiding the monumental challenge of a task that would largely define the beginnings of any future I hoped to have as a writer. No small thing, this revision. So, I told myself that it was also a very practical course of action: our eighteen-year-old cat, Harry Potter, had lately been howling at odd times of the day and night, making working out of the house near impossible (and my wife and I live in a small house in a small town, the nearest coffee shop a forty-five minute commute). If I were to make any progress on my manuscript, I told myself, I would just have to have such a space, no doubt about it, no way around it. Yep.

I did a little research into writers’ huts and shacks — famous retreats of the mind. Virginia Woolf had one, more a lodge of her own than a room: a converted toolshed with a brick patio and big glass windows that looked out upon the lawn. She wrote there in the summers and, once heating was supplied, winters, too. George Bernard Shaw had one, a little shack built on a turntable so it could rotate and take advantage of the moving sun. Americans had their writing huts, too. Mark Twain. Dylan Thomas. A New England writer named Michael Polland actually built his own, after the fashion of Thoreau, and wrote a book about it. I read his book, A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams, and decided, knowing nothing of ground-thaws and shifting foundations, that it would probably be best to simply buy my room and have someone else install it.

At that point, Crystal and I — she, my life-partner and soul mate, ever-so-supportive of the architecture of my own daydreams — began looking at pre-fab sheds. We also looked into renovating our own backyard storage shed, which would have required any number of structural repairs, along with new wiring, insulation, air conditioning, sheetrock, flooring, heating, and any number of other semi-expensive refinements. (Here, perhaps, it is worth noting that Virginia Woolf, in her famous essay on the subject of women and their subjugation, also notes that money is important, as well as space; she is, of course, absolutely correct.) Too many decisions! We kept researching, and all the while, the weeks crept on. And the manuscript went unrevised in its black, three-ring binder, bright pink and blue and yellow and green Post-It notes sticking out at me from between the pages like little tongues.

Eventually, I went back to one of my earliest fancies: Roald Dahl’s writing hut, a cozy little room in a day-shed. It possessed no stained glass windows, no view of the Downs, no complicated architecture to capture the natural light. It simply was a hut: a practical, small space made warm by the presence of the imagination and character of the artist who worked there. It was intimate.

All the other spaces I had considered were huge by comparison: sheds and barns and free-standing structures with nooks and crannies and corners to turn. Why not simple, I thought. For the first time, I thought of the room just off our carport: a long, narrow space, full of unused junk from top to bottom, mostly leftover stuff from eight years past when Crystal and I were married. The room was frigid in the winter, sure, but it was small enough for a heater, and it had a ready supply of electricity. In the summers, it was naturally cool, like a cellar. And it was dry. It had walls made by people who (mostly) knew how to make walls. Most importantly, any work it needed done was doable by me: someone who had never framed anything or run a wire anywhere, who knew nothing about foundations or frost-lines or any of a hundred other potential structural hazards that precluded his building a freestanding structure that could withstand the elements.

This is what the room looked like in September, 2014.

First, I cleaned it out: one box of holiday decorations, one tub of action figures, one hoe and rake and mattress pad and extension cord at a time. Chemicals and paints and bookshelves and bike helmets and potting dirt. Two Christmas trees. Spider webs and dead bugs. The homemade shelves the previous owners had erected were packed to the very edge, and once they were emptied, it was clear, in their emptiness, what ridiculous things they were. The first real structural change to the room was to tear them out.

Emptied, the space was perfect. Bare, simple. The right and rear walls, the outer walls of the house, were solid brick. The left wall featured framing over brick and mortar, the mortar sloppy and careless, as if never intended to be seen. The room was strangely incomplete and whole, all at once, a room in want of a revision. I knew right away that I would leave the brickwork on the left wall partially exposed so that I could use the framework here and there for bookshelves, to emphasize that it was and would always be a place unfinished, a place always in the process of a draft, never quite complete.

So I sketched, measured, planned. I went to Lowe’s and Home Depot and bought furring strips and electrical cord and expensive oak plywood I wouldn’t even use. I bought sawhorses and power tools and turned the carport into a workshop. I sawed and nailed and screwed into the late evening light for two, three weeks. I watched YouTube videos on how to install electrical boxes. I watched a lot of YouTube videos. I learned to do this:

The ceiling of the room was made of cheap plywood, gaps here and there to the crawlspace above the carport. I didn’t like those dark crevices, so I covered them over with pine boards. And then I taped off around the boards for painting. I scrubbed and cleaned the concrete floor, laid down a primer, then painted. Got the color wrong (too light). Painted again. Painted the ceiling a warm brick red. I sealed cracks with water-proof acrylic and discovered that my hatred for caulk and caulk guns knows no bounds.

With the room prepped, Crystal and I arranged to have a new door professionally installed, my one real extravagance, as Georgia is, after all, a spidery place, and a good seal is a good investment. Next came the furnishings. We drove to IKEA in Atlanta, looking for a simple, inexpensive desk and some simple, inexpensive lighting (IKEA, for us as a couple, is a Nordic-themed wonderland where life is simplified to a kind of ice-flow essence without, somehow, sacrificing style; yes, Crystal and I do fantasize about getting small in a 632-square foot apartment). Not all the furniture was bought. I also included a bookshelf made by my grandfather, a shelf that’s been with me since graduate school (this and a carpenter’s pencil and a denim quilted shirt are all of his things that I own, and I used each of them throughout the course of this project). Soon, it was late November, and I had two hands with callouses, a solid knee injury from ascending and re-ascending a ladder more times than I ever will again for the rest of my life, and a genuine room of my own, in which I could then complete my revisions.

After Thanksgiving, as the day-job allowed, and for one solid week of eight-hour days in December of 2014, I sat down at the desk above and I worked. I made the revisions in a room that smelled of pine furring strips and fresh paint. I added over 15,000 words to the manuscript, filling in holes and gaps in characters and narrative. In the end, those revisions got me an agent, though there would be even more changes to come, some minor, some major (I happily suspect there are always changes to come in this profession). But all of them since have been undertaken, religiously, in that room. I may not write every page of every book I ever write there, but each one will have some genesis or, at least, re-birth in this room, because it is, if nothing else, a space for working and reworking, the perfect nook for creativity. In a way, it’s the cave of my own imagination, and somewhere in the darkness there, I know, I can always count on fire.

I say all this to say: you’ll hear a lot of conflicting things when it comes to whether you should set yourself to the task of writing or first preparing a space to write. Stephen King famously tells a story about wanting a big writer’s desk and getting it and finding it worthless. By contrast, there’s a picture of him in his office in the early 80s that I like very much, cocked back in his chair with his feet on his desk, a notepad on his lap, a dog under his chair. You can tell he’s getting things done. The late great Barry Hannah said he did his best writing at the kitchen table, long-hand. Rowling, of course, wrote in a coffee shop. Some say spaces don’t matter. Others, like Virginia Woolf, have said famous things on the subject that are usually quoted out of context by folks like me, urging the need for such a space. But Woolf had trouble concentrating in her own room, turns out — the dog scratching at fleas, church bells ringing in the nearby village (one can’t help wondering if the last thing she ever wrote in that place — her goodbye letter to her husband — was  written in a state of distraction).

Ultimately, the thing is this: where we write, like how we write, is up to us. Writing is, after all, a deeply personal, private act, encompassing the way we speak, the way we think, the way we view the world. Why should that process not include the necessity of a quiet, intimate corner of the world — a shelter from howling winds or even howling cats? Know your own needs. And be honest with yourself. Sometimes procrastination is not so much a stalling tactic as a kind of unconscious creative patience at work: slow instinct, let’s call it. Trusting your subconscious to know what you need and when you need it to support the work. Sometimes the deepest, richest parts of ourselves as writers — those places we can only tap into at certain times, in certain chairs, in certain slants of light — are guiding us, gently, toward the coziest, most productive place imaginable. At least, on a rainy night like the one pictured below, I like to think so, anyway.

Feel the Force

Over Force Friday weekend, Crystal and I went store-hopping in search of Star Wars treasures to add to our collection. If you, too, were one of the celebrants on September 4, you might have dropped dollars for anything from a certain remote-controlled droid to a can of Campbell’s soup featuring a wookie. It was, as the Internet will attest, a shopping bonanza for Star Wars fans savvy enough or lucky enough to get out there early. But it should not go un-remarked upon that more — much more — was happening in stores that day. And it was happening outside stores, too. In fact, Force Friday brought a most unexpected party into our home, a party that lasted all through the Labor Day holiday and, I hope, will continue in our hearts long after December.

Yes, one result of that party was a three-minute video showcasing the day’s haul and shot through the eyes (eye?) of BB-8, a magical little piece of tech from the good minds at Sphero. We shot the video on Crystal’s iPhone in our hallway, and it told a story of sorts, I later realized, about our own Star Wars journey, one we haven’t really shared with anyone. It’s the story of two lifelong Star Wars fans who found each other and returned to their first great childhood love together. We strayed, as so many did, in the wake of the prequel trilogy (maybe I strayed more than Crystal, who never lost a place for Jar Jar Binks in her heart; I had to carve this place out over the years, but he’s there now, upon the shelf, along with the rest). In fact, a number of our early conversations about Star Wars focused on the errant storytelling and the missing humanity of the prequel trilogy. This was the conversation that went back and forth for years between us, the occasional speculative rewriting on our parts, usually delivered in back and forth exchanges in the car on our way to the grocery store, the bookstore, like a pitch session, the indignant wonder at why George didn’t just pick up the phone and call a fan.

Probably not an unfamiliar story to most fans our age.

On this went, and then, in 2012, the unthinkable happened: Disney bought Star Wars, changing the conversation forever. Speculation turned, finally, to what the future might hold: more movies, new filmmakers? Healing?

In short, yes. But the road to healing really began, for us, with Dave Filoni’s fantastic Clone Wars, which introduced the idea that a young Anakin Skywalker and a young Obi-Wan Kenobi possessed greater humanity than Lucas had been capable of delivering. And, of course, Mr. Filoni gave us the one and only Ahsoka Tano, whom we now count among the greatest of all the Star Wars characters, past, present, and future. For once, our conversations turned from what was wrong to what was right, but still there was the lingering fact of the need for balancing the opposing Forces at work, if you will, between renewed hope and much-remembered disappointment.

Now, we have The Force Awakens, and in this I suppose we’ve all given ourselves over to, well, a new kind of madness: hope. We have the desire to take out the old toys, even as we take up the new. We aren’t grown-ups arguing against the dark and backward abyss of time anymore! We’re just kids again, playing. In the end, can we thank the Walt Disney Corporation enough, friends? Can we ever buy enough toys to repay their corporate generosity? I’m not sure we can. But that’s okay, because Star Wars has never been about the possession of the material; rather, it asks us to search out the spiritual within ourselves, to listen to others, to commune with the larger world, to carry and spread the spark of imagination and joy. Witness the tale of the stormtrooper who walked hundreds of miles in memory of his deceased wife, or the story of the little girl who was bullied for wearing boys’ clothes (she was a Star Wars fan, and girls are still woefully underrepresented when it comes to apparel), and the stormtroopers who came to her rescue. On and on these stories go.

Maybe this is why Star Wars fans feel such ownership of the galaxy George Lucas created; he took us there as kids and we never left it. Though we may have grown up, we never grew out of it. It became a part of us, of who we are. And now, we have a little droid to show us the way back, to guide us to the very heart of what we remember. It’s a good time to be a Star Wars fan, yes, but an even better time, friends, to be a grown up. To live in this world and carry its banners.

 

 

 

Finch v. Finch: or, the Strange Case of Harper Lee’s GO SET A WATCHMAN

So: it’s a little over forty hours after the release of Harper Lee’s new-old novel, Go Set a Watchman, and by now, like me, like the rest of the world, you’ve either read the book or an article (or even just a headline) from The New York Times or The Guardian, preparing you for the eventuality that you aren’t going to like the way the story shakes out.

Wherever you fall in the conversation, you’re no doubt attempting to make sense of a few things. Me, I read the novel over the course of Tuesday and Wednesday, via iBooks, and my own initial reaction to the text itself hewed pretty close to the five stages of loss and grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and, finally, acceptance. Even now, having finished the book and numerous reviews, most of which are being mildly generous to the text, I can’t quite settle on any one emotion.

Ultimately, the only way I can join the conversation is from the perspective of a writer. With Go Set a Watchman, we find ourselves at a strange juncture between the literary past and the literary present, and the effect is a kind of reader’s vertigo. In a way, we’re through a looking-glass, and nothing is what it seems.

But It’s Not a Sequel.

Before Tuesday’s release of Go Set a Watchman, here’s what we thought we knew, a la To Kill a Mockingbird: Jean Louise and Jem Finch come of age in the summer of 1936, when their father unsuccessfully defends a black man on trial for the rape of a nineteen-year-old white girl. Their lives are put in jeopardy by this defense. Their father, Atticus Finch, is a principled man who believes all are equal in the eyes of the law. He also believes his children should never presume to know another person’s mind or heart until they’ve walked in his or her skin.

Now, after Tuesday’s release, here’s what we think we know: Atticus Finch, later in life, is a pro-segregationist and a member of Maycomb’s white citizens’ council, and when Jean Louise and Jem were young he successfully defended a black man on trial for the rape of a fourteen-year-old white girl. His defense was successful based on proving consensual sex between the two. He openly loathes the NAACP and its political agenda, which has led to the Brown v. Board of Education decision threatening Alabama’s right to maintain separate but equal facilities for whites and negroes.

But remember: nothing is what it seems.

My initial concern, before reading the book, was that Americans would not be able to hold in their heads two separate notions about such a sainted figure as Atticus, that this evolution of his character would be a dose of cynicism too strong for most to swallow. That no intelligent conversation would emerge from such a disappointing characterization of one of the great fictional heroes in American literature. Basically, that To Kill a Mockingbird’s themes would be undercut and served up on a plate to a cynical age when, in reality, America is in desperate need of racial healing.

One thing to keep in mind: this fear was predicated upon the notion that Watchman was a direct sequel to Mockingbird, a continuation of the same characters’ stories. The book was sold to the public as such, complete with unrealistic expectations bound up in Harry Potter-esque midnight release parties, Atticus impersonators, and potluck read-a-thons (picture a moment when readers at coffee shops all over America spat hot lattes late Tuesday afternoon when Jean Louise discovers a racist pamphlet in her father’s pile of reading). But Go Set a Watchman is simply not a sequel. As the history of Mockingbird reminds us, it’s essentially a rejected manuscript that the author never visited again over five decades. At best, it can only be an alternative history to the one established in Mockingbird, as it presents a portrait of Atticus that is largely inconsistent with what came before.

Writing for Mashable, critic Hillary Busis posits that Go Set a Watchman could be the true account, that “Watchman is Jean Louise (a.k.a. Scout) Finch’s reality, while To Kill a Mockingbird is a gauzy imagined past.” A “memory play that Jean Louise chose to write down after learning the heartbreaking truth about her father.” In her thoughtful piece, she calls Mockingbird a “cleaner story told by a nostalgic narrator.” While I do appreciate the challenges and conundrums such a re-visioning of Mockingbird entails, as a fiction writer who tends to emphasize process (a series of ordered steps: outlining, drafting, revising, publishing), I tend to think that what was published was final, unless, of course, the future text deliberately attempts to subvert the original (which Watchman does not and cannot, by virtue of being a scrapped project written before Mockingbird).

In the end, Go Set a Watchman just doesn’t jive as a sequel. Ultimately, it’s far too mature a work to be re-jiggered via the “It was all a nostalgic fantasy” reading. And if certain crucial details of this book had aligned with Mockingbird’s (e.g. the outcome of the Tom Robinson trial, the presence of the Radley family, etc.), it might have started a conversation about fictional characters and their place in our hearts and lives, what happens when they let us down, but this is, factually, just not the same Atticus. Nor is it the same timeline. It’s not an extension or a deepening of the story; it’s a contradiction.

Finch v. Finch

In some ways, Go Set a Watchman would be a more interesting novel if To Kill a Mockingbird had never been written. Just getting over the emotional baggage of what it does to our beloved Atticus from Mockingbird gets in the way of talking about the progressive ideas in Watchman, and I don’t necessarily mean the book’s heavy-handed preoccupation with racism. Watchman presents in Jean Louise a Southern hero with a nuanced and intellectual point of view, and through her the book deals deftly with the subjects of feminism and classism. All men in the novel—from Jean Louise’s doctor-uncle to her suitor Henry to Atticus himself—condescend to her and treat her as if she requires protecting from herself. Even the novel’s climax revolves around the notion of men enabling Jean Louise to become her own person. But throughout the book she maintains a fierce individualism and takes her Maycomb peers to task for their small-minded points of view about men, sex, religion, and, of course, civil rights—though she is hardly a crusader for the last of these when the novel begins.

Of particular interest to me was the book’s climax, in which Jean Louise and her father face off in a courtroom-style argument, Finch against Finch. At first, the argument concerns itself with the law, with the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the resulting fallout for states’ rights, which Jean Louise is actually a proponent of. (Curiously, Atticus, who believes in the law above all else, fails to see the validity of the Supreme Court’s decision and cannot abide it; this is a prescient moment in the novel, with our current climate of “religious freedom” advocates opposing the recent Supreme Court ruling with regard to same-sex marriage.)

Jean Louise, faced with the moral contradiction of Atticus’s racism, cannot confine her arguments to the Constitution, though, and soon father and daughter’s back-and-forth devolves into a verbal attack against Atticus, in which Jean Louise accuses her father of being a coward, a snob, and a tyrant. “You deny [negroes] hope,” she says. “Any man in this world, Atticus, any man who has a head and arms and legs, was born with hope in his heart.” In her fury, she goes on to imply that Atticus Finch is no better than Adolf Hitler. “You just try to kill their souls instead of their bodies,” she says.

Atticus remains calm and unflappable throughout, insisting that he loves his daughter, even as her trust in him completely dissolves. When she tells him she despises him, his answer is: “Well, I love you.”

This interplay is followed by a final scene in the Finch household between Jean Louise and her Uncle Jack, Atticus’s brother, who attempts to put his niece’s confrontation with Atticus into perspective. After slapping Jean Louise twice and giving her a bit of whiskey to calm her down, he accuses her of being, by definition, a bigot herself. “What does a bigot do when he meets someone who challenges his opinions?” Uncle Jack wants to know. “He doesn’t give. He stays rigid. Doesn’t even try to listen, just lashes out.” This is the most complex moment in an altogether challenging and difficult novel, when a man whose viewpoint Jean Louise (and we) oppose turns the hero’s righteous indignation against her.

In this way, Go Set a Watchman is a heady work. It offers no easy answers and deals in shades of grey, whereas To Kill a Mockingbird painted in starker contrasts. The novel’s release now, with the recent controversy over the Confederate flag in South Carolina and the ongoing civil rights struggle of same-sex couples, makes it a genuinely timely work—if not a timeless story, as its predecessor remains.

Where Reason Ends and Faith Begins

“Prejudice,” Uncle Jack says to Jean Louise in the final scene of the book, “a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.” Go Set a Watchman takes us to the end of reason when Jean Louise has no words left for her father, when his wrong-headed thinking has exhausted her, has killed her spirit. But at the end of reason she also finds an end to a lifelong faith, faith in her father’s godhood. Her journey mirrors the reader’s, in this regard. And it is a dreary and fitting end, to be sure, given this Atticus Finch’s pro-segregationist views. There is hope, too, that in recognizing her father as human, there will come some type of reconciliation between them.

“I called you some pretty grim things,” she says to her father in the final pages. Atticus replies: “I can take anything anybody calls me, so long as it’s not true.” And one page later, the book ends, with Jean Louise’s reflection upon her father as a flawed individual she must continue to love, in spite of her own watchman, her conscience. “I can’t beat him,” she thinks, “and I can’t join him—” And so the novel ends in emotional stalemate.

To Kill a Mockingbird also takes us to the end of reason, when Tom Robinson, an innocent man, is shot on the fence of a penitentiary. This defeat is no less dreary than Scout’s loss of faith in her father in Watchman, but Mockingbird understands the enduring power of defeat, how it shapes us, reveals the ways we can improve. Mockingbird gives us, in Atticus Finch, a man whose very ideals—his reason and devotion to the law—are ultimately inadequate to protect the lives of those he is sworn to defend, especially his own children. And here, in the final pages of the better novel, when a ghost saves the Finch children from the inevitable outcome of their father’s wrong-headed assertion that Old Man Ewell will not make good on his threat of violence, faith has its beginning, not its end. “Thank you, Arthur,” Atticus tells Boo Radley, “for my children.”

Go Set a Watchman makes no mention of Boo, and the narrative is lesser for it. Boo, after all, is the central mystery of Mockingbird. He is the unseen force in which the children place their faith, and their faith, ultimately, is rewarded, reminding us, the readers, of the dignity of all people. For this single thread, if no other, the story of Mockingbird is inherently more powerful, and this was something at least one good editor—and Harper Lee herself—understood over fifty years ago.

Not all novels are intended to reflect only the stark realities of the world in which we live. Some show us a world in which we’d like to live, and this is no small thing. In fact, a compelling, successful story set in such a world is a far greater achievement. Such a story is not the stuff of fantasies or childhood fairy tales, but the stuff of hope. The stuff of faith, which steps in to save us when reason cannot.

How Killer Nashville Taught My Wife to Fight Crime

In August of 2014, my wife and I attended our first writers’ conference together. We went to Killer Nashville, which — for those of you who don’t know it — is a fantastic conference for crime writers. I went with a manuscript and, eventually, through contacts made at the conference, found my agent. And until today, almost nine months later, the good people at Maria Carvainis and the incomparable Elizabeth Copps were the greatest things to come out of that experience. But today, friends, I learned that Killer Nashville is, in more ways than one, the gift that keeps on giving.

Apparently, it also taught my wife how to fight crime.

First, some background: Crystal and I got married in July of 2008. About a year later, for our first anniversary present, we bought each other Electra bicycles. We opted for Electras because, well, we’re grown-ups now, and neither of us had ever owned a truly expensive bike and thought the cost alone might encourage us to keep using them after the first week of euphoric togetherness, those yearned-for spring and summer afternoons spent pedaling past fields of blooming flowers. Not the greatest logic, to be sure, but there were other, sounder ideas at play, too: the craftsmanship, the engineering, the idea of something that would endure. We bought cruiser models, the kind you might take to the beach and poke around on leisurely. (According to the logos emblazoned on the sides, their design features “patented flatfoot technology”; to be perfectly honest, I still don’t know what this means).

I’d like to tell you that we kept riding them and riding them and that every glorious sunset here in Georgia ended with our biking silhouettes tall against it, but that wouldn’t be the truth. In fact, we rode them for about six months, semi-regularly, then put them in the shed and forgot about them for a while.

This past May, feeling guilty and wistful and in need of some good, heart-pumping exercise, we took them out and brought them into the shop for repairs and tune-ups, and we began riding them to the college campus where we work, about a mile from our house, to feed a stray cat that lives under my office building. In the evenings, we returned and left them unchained on our carport, hidden by our parked cars. We live in a small town, and while small-town life doesn’t always suit us, it does carry with it the distinct advantage of letting out slack when it comes to trust. Alas, about a week ago, during the day, when both cars were gone from the carport on separate errands and the bikes were left exposed, that slack pulled taught, and someone crept onto our property in broad daylight and stole my black Electra.

We did our due diligence as citizens: we made the police report and thanked the officer, thinking to ourselves that the bike was lost forever. We felt victimized. We felt responsible. After all, by leaving the bike unchained, hadn’t I supplied the criminal with opportunity? We talked about the possibility of whether the thief would be foolish enough to ride it around the neighborhood, whether we’d see it ditched along the roadside, whether it was already in a truck somewhere driving away. Anyway, we went on with the business and pleasure of our lives.

Today, at work, I got a call from my wife. “I’ve called the police,” Crystal said. “I saw a guy riding your bike. I’ve followed him into an apartment complex. I’m going to hang back, but the cops are on their way.”

Oh, friends. How to describe, now, the latent thrill of your wife tailing a thief? Or recovering your stolen property like Wonder Woman? I won’t even try here.

Instead, this: at Killer Nashville last August, Crystal and I both attended a seminar by a female private investigator. She covered surveillance equipment and surveillance techniques. Among her advice: “Hang back and fly casual.” When Crystal spotted the man on my bike, pedaling down the street toward the apartment complex, she did just that. She was driving her Kia on an errand to Walgreens. She turned after him, remembering what the P.I. in Nashville had said and keeping her distance, all the while forming a description of him for the police, anticipating the inevitable moment when he would run. And run, he did. But the details were fixed by then: white sport shirt, shorts, sandals over socks, a beard. A man not necessarily young, but dressing young. A quick process that played out in her head, one picked up in a seminar meant for fiction.

The time was 10 a.m. Crystal waited on the cops, they got there, and she and I texted details for about fifteen minutes after that. She sent word that the officers had found the bike, but the guy riding it was gone. So I drove to the complex to collect the bike. It was mine, for sure, scratched and muddy. Crystal was beaming, and the cops had nothing but praise for her actions. Quick-thinking. Eagle eyes. Good judgment in hanging back.

We were late for a veterinary appointment by then, and when we walked into the doctor’s office, carrier in hand, Crystal apologized. “I’m sorry we’re late,” she said. “I was fighting crime.” And it was my turn to beam.

Disclaimer: If you witness a crime occurring, do not assume a writer’s conference has taught you to fight it. Use good judgment, as any writer would.

 

My Board Members

In the office of The Day Job, I keep a bulletin board on the back of a door. This door is an exit, and the board is a reminder: writing is the key. The good folks pinned to the board remind me of this daily.

Who reminds you?

Batman and Me: On Tim Burton’s BATMAN Turning 25

Tim Burton’s Batman came along the summer I turned eleven and awoke my creative soul.

Looking back, of course, it also introduced me to consumerism, just as Star Wars had done for the first wave of my generation only ten years prior: I bought lobby cards, comic books, a novelization of the script, posters, action figures, rubber masks, rubber gauntlets. I had the breakfast cereal. The Batwing. The Batmobile. Bob the Goon. I asked Mom to order a copy of the Warner Bros. catalogue and checked off three pages of merchandise for Christmas that year. Pins. Playing cards. A laugh-box that, to my great disappointment, looked nothing like the Joker’s in the movie. Mom also made me a homemade costume out of a gray sweatsuit, black fabric, and cardboard (for the ears). There’s a picture of that somewhere, God help me. And, to this day, I still have a wooden fridge magnet I made myself at my grandmother’s house with the bat-logo painted in acrylic. I was swept up in the rising tide of what the media called “Batmania.” These days, we just call it fandom, which is, by turns, one of the great social movements of the twenty-first century or, more or less, a correct term for a marketing demographic.

Batman the movie brought with it a resurgence in the character’s popularity. He was in demand, and he wasn’t just for kids anymore. He was dark, he was brooding. He was Gothic. He was, in essence, Frank Miller’s nightmarish vigilante, a hero of the modern psyche. I remember the first time I saw the leather-bound collection of Miller’s Batman stories on display in the window of a Waldenbooks in 1988: The Complete Frank Miller Batman. Before this moment, as a kid, I had not paid much attention to anything called a “graphic novel.” I doubt I even knew what a graphic novel was back then, but here was a beautiful, black, adult-looking thing with pages trimmed in silver, and when I priced one, I was thrilled. Sixty dollars! Serious stuff. Had I ever paid sixty dollars for anything at that point in my life? Moments later, I overhead two twenty-somethings talking about how great the book looked on their shelves at home, and that, I suppose, was how my epic Christmas list started. I couldn’t pick the book up and flip through it because it was shrink-wrapped, and so the mystery of what lay inside was a tantalizing one. The reveal when I finally opened my copy was nothing short of a revelation: The Dark Knight Returns. Thirteen years later, I would place this book a reading list of influential fiction for my creative writing comps at Ole Miss. It was a book that taught me to take the fantastic seriously, to see the world not as a child sees it but as an adult, to look beyond the surface of a symbol and see the myriad complexities and contradictions at work within. I devoured it, read it and re-read it so many times the spine began to crack. There were other books that came along, among them Bob Kane’s somewhat questionable autobiography Batman and Me, a book less interested in truth-telling, you might say, than myth-spinning. But it was filled with full-color panels of original 1930s storylines, and at the time, those weren’t so easy to come by.

I began to draw around this time, too, at first just reproducing the character’s various poses in the artwork that permeated the culture. Eventually, once my parents started paying for lessons, I came to art for its own sake, not to create color-pastel reproductions of Jack Nicholson’s eyebrows and hairline but to make art as a fundamental expression of my own inner life. I never came to enjoy sketching as deeply as writing, which had come a few years earlier for me, but I did understand the connection between the two, the visual and the written: after all, Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren and Frank Miller had also written their stories. So Tim Burton’s Batman goes deep, I suppose, the whole phenomenon surrounding it, as well as the thrill of the film itself. Every year, as more and more Marvel movies come out, each more bombastic and labyrinthine than the last, each so determined to say something but clueless about what that something is, Batman grows more refined, more artful. Its chief pleasure stems from its timeless, mythic qualities: the city in decay, order out of chaos, the orphan hero. And beyond the superficial trappings of the merchandise I amassed and eventually lost or sold in so many garage sales, beyond its place as a touchstone of my childhood, it’s a flashpoint of creativity: the moment when I understood the difference between standing on the outside of a display window looking in and wanting to make art for myself.

A version of this post originally appeared via The Banana Tree of Jean Louis in 2014.

“The Film is a Poem…”

The first line of Roger Ebert’s autobiography, Life Itself, is the kind of opening line most writers wish they had written: “I was born inside the movie of my life.” It’s an elegant, humble start to the story of a writer who became the only movie critic to ever win the Pulitzer prize. The only movie critic, it is said, that many people ever read. Well, for the sake of movie critics everywhere—and here I think Roger Ebert would agree with me—I hope that’s not true.

Ebert left behind a lifelong career of loving movies, a body of written work unparalleled, save maybe in the works of the great Pauline Kael, a body of work he planned to continue building even as his own body was failing him. I knew him through his writing, and I found his prose always to be warm, witty, and eloquent, even when he was being downright acerbic. His criticism I sometimes liked less, as he occasionally got his facts wrong, misremembering or misquoting. Still, he always had an eye for the loving details, as in his review of Star Wars, where he notes Luke’s landspeeder reminds him “uncannily of a 1965 Mustang.”

A decade ago, when I began watching movies in earnest—which only means, with aspirations to write about how and why they move me—I usually disagreed with Ebert’s overly generous, three- and four-star reviews of popular American films. His reviews of the great movies, though, I absorbed, so conversational and approachable was his style. As the years have gone by, I’ve mellowed in my own conversations, gotten more approachable myself when it comes to movies, and I see his work now in a different light. He was that rare and gifted writer who bridges the gap between his subject (cinema) and his readers (everyone). No small feat in a nation that still holds little respect for movies as art.

Tonight I watched McCabe & Mrs. Miller, one of the greatest movies ever made about longing, isolation, love and loneliness. Ebert wrote this about it, in one of his finest reviews: “It is not often given to a director to make a perfect film. Some spend their lives trying, but always fall short. Robert Altman has made a dozen films that can be called great in one way or another, but one of them is perfect, and that one is McCabe & Mrs. Miller. This is one of the saddest films I have ever seen, filled with a yearning for love and home that will not ever come—not for McCabe, not with Mrs. Miller, not in the town of Presbyterian Church, which cowers under a gray sky always heavy with rain or snow. The film is a poem—an elegy for the dead.”

It’s a fitting kind of mourning, I think, to revisit this movie tonight. Ebert has been an undeniable influence upon this blog, just as another writer I once knew, Barry Hannah, was of immeasurable influence upon my fiction. I once thought Warren Beatty’s achingly beautiful line—”I got poetry in me!”—might have been attributed to Barry, who spent some time in Hollywood in the seventies and worked with Robert Altman doctoring scripts. A friend chased that theory down and, straight from Barry’s mouth, debunked it. But it’s still the kind of line Barry would have written, probably wished he had, when he thought about it. And so McCabe & Mrs. Miller has always held a special place in my heart as the movie that reminds me of a writer who taught me, who teaches me still. Now, I guess, two such writers owe the film a debt.

In Life Itself, speaking of his own death, Ebert says, “What I expect to happen is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function, and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’s theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, cliches that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting, and telling too many jokes, I will leave behind more memes than many. They will all also eventually die, but so it goes.”

That list of memes seems like a thing McCabe might rattle off to himself, mumbling his heart out before a mirror, putting bullets in his pistol. Unlike McCabe, Ebert will be remembered for a much longer while, and he never mumbled.

A version of this post originally appeared via The Banana Tree of Jean Louis in 2013.

Gone, Baby. Gone.

In March 2010, I was having dinner at a Mexican restaurant with a handful of other teachers and the writer Judith Ortiz Cofer. Cofer was the visiting dignitary to the two-year college where I work here in small-town Georgia, and six or seven of us had taken her to the only joint in town with decent grub. Over the chips and salsa, Cofer was lamenting the gone-baby-gone days of the “bad boys” of the trade — writers like James Dickey who, when hired to read on a university campus, would end up drunkenly serenading the college President’s fifteen-year-old daughter at five in the morning from the lawn beneath her bedroom window. Those were the days, Cofer said, when writers were dangerous.

Well.

I don’t know about that.

But I do know that Barry Hannah is often remembered as being of those days, and so when the conversation inevitably turned to his legendary gun and trumpet, I couldn’t help smiling.  The truth was I, now a teacher of the trade and a struggler at the craft, had not known a dangerous man. In fact, I had learned to write at the feet of a man who, when he smiled, resembled nothing so much as someone’s sweet grandmother. A grandmother, sure, who wore leather and rode a motorcycle down the back-roads of rural Mississippi. A grandmother, sure, who professed a deep admiration for the intricate mechanisms of firearms.

But dangerous?

There was nothing dangerous about the man I saw in Walmart in 2006 on a snowy night in Oxford, Mississippi, wearing a woman’s scarf and gray sweat pants and pawing through the five-dollar bin of DVDs, looking, like me, I guess, for something special to watch on a cold winter’s evening.

In the 2004 winter issue of The Paris Review, Barry Hannah tells interviewer Lacey Galbraith about the incident in Alabama that became infamous, how he once brought an empty pistol into a workshop and “twirled the chambers to explain six movements in a short story.” This had been a lifetime ago, a drunken mistake that became the specters of things Barry had done only vaguely, haunting him into old age. In the interview, Lacey kids him as to whether he remembers what the six movements were. “No,” he tells her. “I could make something up, but it would be untrue….”

In the wake of his death, one or two writers out there have attempted to canonize Barry’s apocryphal past. If you’re like me, you’ve probably read a few of these in search of something honest.  One of the worst pieces I read was by a New Orleans writer. He paints a picture of a shit-faced but ambitious skirt chaser casting a fly rod from a balcony on Decatur Street. All things the writer of the piece didn’t witness, mind you, because he was too much of a ninny to drop by his buddy’s party and actually meet Hannah. The piece celebrates the writer’s cowardice. It’s a strange, mealy kind of tribute, one I’d wager Barry would have been baffled by. Secondhand tales set down as first-person remembrances, all done in the spirit of love.  Odd.

Barry always spoke of his past in interviews as a joyous, messy time, stopping well shy of naming regrets. By the time I knew him, though, his bad-boy days — the booze, the carousing, the guns and trumpets — had become as central to his life and writing as his forgotten six movements. Instead, he’d tell you it was a vision of Christ that had begun to inform his life and work, a deeply tanned man standing quietly at his sickbed. “I haven’t paid you enough attention,” Barry told him.

Dangerous?

No.

Kind. Generous.

Considerate.

At a party I attended my first year in the program, Barry’s wife Susan — gone, as well, now — found me hugging a wall and suggested I “quiet down.” Moments later I shared my first words with Barry, who sat in a chair in a corner, drinking a Red Bull. I learned he, like me, didn’t care for these academic shindigs. My God, though, how many of them he must have gone to in his life, and this was only my first. I loved him immediately, if only because his soul seemed that of a quiet, thoughtful man’s who’d rather be home reading with a dog at his socked feet. So that’s pretty much what I did when it came to parties for the next three years: stayed home.  Barry went, of course. In truth, he carried the mantle of writing god with immeasurable grace in Oxford, a place at once expert and ignorant of men like Barry Hannah. They love their mythic drunken writers so in Oxford, toast them with champagne and without irony when they’re over a decade sober. It’s no secret that Barry sometimes chafed at that love, likening Oxford, as he put it, to a kind of “theme park for writers,” more enamored with myth than truth. If he was dangerous, he was dangerous only to everyone’s idea of themselves. He walked taller than the pretenders, and there were a lot of pretenders in Oxford.

Anyway, now that Barry’s gone, I hope the legends unspool until there’s nothing left to hold them together, and the only thing that remains is this: he lived, he wrote, he taught, he loved, he died; he did all of these with grace and as much dignity as they required.

Someone somewhere, I know, remembers James Dickey sitting quietly in a room, feeling old and thoughtful. But where’s the fun in telling that story? It’s not even a story, not by the standards of Barry’s fiction. No beginning, no end, just interminable middle. No thrill. No danger.

Just an old man looking for a good story cheap on a cold night.

I guess I could make something up, but it would be untrue.

This essay was originally published alongside a number of others from Barry’s students in a special issue of Drunken Boat.