it is the day after Thanksgiving that is always the hardest. I have come to terms with Thanksgiving being difficult and empty, a day of remembering how rich our Thanksgivings were when Don was here, and the children were still lovable and accepting, when even my son who took exception to the quality of my cooking ("Gourmet again! Why can't we have hamburgers like normal people?") took pleasure in my pumpkin soup in a pumpkin shell, Teriyaki Turkey with Chinese stuffing(almonds and crystallized ginger and turkey sausage, celery and beansprouts and water chestnuts, a festival all on its own.) And most unexpectedly and deliciously,Cranuberry Much, a side dish I'd learned when I visited friends in DC and went to cooking classes when Jimmy Carter was Prez. So instead of sweet potatoes there were grits, but I paid no attention to those. Ah, but Cranuberry Much! That was a dish to mollify the angels, espcially those who liked a good crunch.
I remember asking Paul, the doctor who was attending Don, his best friend who had failed to catch the bad cell in an early x-ray,if Don would be with us for Thanksgiving. Paul went a little nuts when he finally x-rayed Don in August and the whole right lung was gone-- he'd been giving him pain pills for his back, and in his crazed denial said"Which Thanksgiving? He'll be here next year and the year after that." But Don left us the 14th of November, so our warm cornacupia, the jewel-colored piled high vegentables and fruits, grapes dripping down the side.,with a brown felt 'Thanks,' that I'd bought at a street fair in Westwood, little embroidered Pilgrims in its center, sat looking at us merrily cartoon-like, as deeply into denial as Paul had been, and we would have been, too, except that we'd felt him dying.
But Susan came for the dinner,our sweet airheady friend we'd made in the course of our exploration of metaphysics,and she said at the table she'd been out in the back yard talking to Don. And because she was so divinely silly, or maybe so sillily divine, we accepted that she'd been out there with Don and that made us feel he was all right, and so we went on eating.
I have non-celebrated many Thanksgivings since-- when I was just on that wonderful cruise I realized that the 21st anniversary of his death took place during one of the impressive panels. But friends have been kind. I have celebrated with Sheila,and with the Boyarskys, and one time with my darling cousin Susie who made her Thanksgiving on the Friday, so because it was Shabbis, she being deeply observant because she thought G_d would save her if she was a good Jew, wouldn't re-ignite the gas as it was after the non-witching hour,so the turkey was little more than raw, but we ate it anyway, because we loved Susie,who died anyway.
Some Thanksgivings I have fasted, as my way of saying thank you, a custom I found out yesterday in an editorial in The Times might have been more to the point, that early pilgrims may have sanctified it as a spiritual observance, and so fasted rather than stuffed. As most of my true compadres are elsewhere, I decided to fast yesterday, and it was easy, really. But there were pieces of my soul that were splintered, because I wish i had a family that was real family, children, grown too big now to be considered children, who were nicer, more productive, less self-absorbed, grand-children I had real access to. None of this is larded with self-pity, as i have to cut down on cholesterol. But it would have been nice to wake up this morning with a sense of accomplishment, which fasting somehow gives you. Instead, though, I woke up with the feeling it was Sunday, and resented the fact that it wasn't. And that the paper wasn;t the Sunday paper, and people weren't easy with the day that it was.
It is bitter cold suddenly,and I wonder how I will make it through winter. I had a joyous day, truly joyous last Tuesday, when Julek blew in for a vsiti from France, and I went to the Gypsy run-though of Chita, the magnificent dancer from West Side Story who still tears a stage up at she says 72, but might be 78. The Gypsy run-through is when they do it for all the dancers in other shows, a special matinee so her peers can come and see. And cheer. My God, I never heard such cheers. The show is beyond exuberant. it is a paean to all the shows that were, when shows were shows and Chita was in them. And it made me weep for what isn't anymore in the way of theater: songs you can sing, music that thrills you, people you can root for. But I guess, in a way, that's the same thing you can feel about Thanksgiving.
gwe
Friday, November 25, 2005
Sunday, November 20, 2005
Ship of Smarts
It was my intention to go on The Nation cruise-- The Nation being America's oldest magazine, unfailingly well-written by the intellectual Left, that yearly offers its faithful subscribers a moderately costly voyage up and down some waterway during which journey panels led by its contributors, editors and bureau chiefs discuss the pressing issues of the day, in this particular day more pressing than ever, with stop-offs at various Mexican ports of call-- and afterwards write a wry salute to Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools. At the end of my parodized odyssey, the ship, on returning to port, would be turned away by Cheney and re-directed to Cuba, as in World War II a vessel filled with interesting souls escaping the Nazis was sent back to Europe so those on board could meet their tragic fate.
But I found myself so touched, so opened, simulated and refreshed by all that had transpired, not the least of it connecting with these people, each of them, as a novelist would have it, with a story to tell, fierce opinions, not all of them reasonable, not all of the persons sane. But everyone on board was so deeply concerned, that I decided I could do nothing that might in any way minimize how great it was, how lucky I felt to be on board. My heart was as full as if the Bush administration were no longer in power
But alas, as the phonies in publishing say in the second half of the letter the first half of which has praised your work, we landed. At the San Diego Airport I was faced with the reality. Before me on the newspaper rack was only one publication, The Wall Street Journal, announcing in its lead, tight paragraph that that which we imagined on the cruise was transpiring, Bush's plummeting in the polls forcing congress to turn the stupidity around and start the troops coming home, not what had happened at all, but alas. As those of you who were plugged in know the opposite had occured.
On board ship we had only bright people who lifted our enraged spirits, the Times Digest in the morning, and some real newspapers mysteriously acquired by me in various ports and, even more mysteriously while at sea. I suppose I had fallen into the fantasy of thinking the world would go sane in honor of our cruise, so seeing the real news shocked my eyes, minus the awe. Oh, but it was a lovely dream, albeit a combative one, while it lasted. Great speakers,stimulating panels, like-minded people who want things like peace, health care, help for the destitute, responsible men in office, democracy as the Founders would have had it, Jeffersonian and Madisonian principles, spirited discussions to stimulate the mind. And every morning I swam for an hour just after sunrise, so my body was alive ,too. Sitting in the airport, though, motionless,I could feel the weight begin to settle into my legs and arms after all those days of working them. So I wonder if my brain, too, will experience withdrawal,and fall into a similar lassitude.
The one regret I had as the ship pulled into port was that i had done nothing the entire trip to nourish my soul. All those stars and tranquil seas and I had never meditated on them, taking time only one night to concentrate fully on the moon, rewarding me in kind.
I did, though,make one pilgrimage of a sort-of spiritual nature, getting off the ship at Puerta Vallarta,where we'd been once, Don and I, when Madeleine and Robert were little, I'd gone parasailing and they'd rented horses on the beach. After Don died I went back there to a beautiful hotel-- the name escaped me when I first landed on Wednesday, but I knew the general direction, that there were curves in the road, the sea on the right, ands hills to the left-- where I'd met Marty and Aileen. He was an appellate judge and she was a psychologist, kind, sharp people with a lovely sense of humor and,on his part, a sense of chivalry. Marking my aloneness he invited me to join them,and we'd become good friends. When I'd pulled my memorable coup of taking a group of friends gratis to the Cooking School of Umbria, they were part of the gang. Particularly fortuitous for us in Aileen's case, as we had among us a self-proclaimed Famous Person, whom our resident (and softly sensitive) shrink diagnosed as a Borderline Narcissist. For those of you who don't know what that means as I didn't either till Aileen explained it to me, it's like a tree that gets caught in a very strong wind when it's a sapling, so gets twisted and never grows the way Nature intended, The most you could do with one of those, Aileen said, was keep it out of trouble, or try to. There was no way it would ever get untwisted. We stayed very close till I moved to Paris.
I tried to find them again when I returned to New York, but their numbers in Michigan were disconnected. I found his son, who works for the city and Bloomberg,and he told me they had died, she of cancer, he of Lou Gehrig's disease, both still young. So I went to try and find the spot where I'd met them all those years ago. And looking at the map, I found a beach called Garza Blanca and remembered that had been the name of the hotel. But my taxi driver said the owners had run out of money, and the place had fallen into disrepair. I asked him to go there anyway.
Out of it all at least has come a pome.
Puerta Vallarta-November 16
So this is where my children galloped first across the sands
Exploring what there was of life in new,exotic lands
And here in later years I found a pair of loving friends
But tides swirled in to pound the rocks,and much that's lovely ends.
Once villas rose against these hills, now broken huts decay
And what was treasured in my life has mostly worn away
My husband's gone, my friends have passed, my country is demeaned
The chubby cherub I adored has morphed into a fiend
Ah, but the trees stand velvet green, umbrellaed towards the sea
Lush fuchsia flowers edge the shore, saluting God and me
'Amor por un rato' they are called, 'Love for a little while'
Better than'never was,' says I, as we go out in style.
But melancholic as that day might have been, there were unexpected joys on this trip. Besides the mental excitement, it was a Dutch ship, so the crew was in large part Indonesian. I was able to greet in their language, and felt that I was in my beloved Bali as well as on the sea. I wore my Milene necklace,(everyone admired and many coveted) and some of my Nadya clothes, so it also became a fashion adventure.
Sad as I was to be coming home, as much of a letdown as I felt, when I opened my door, Mimi jumped to greet me. The groomer had put her there, as a surprise. And I remembered that no matter how much love you might have lost in life, there is still some that is unconditional.
But I found myself so touched, so opened, simulated and refreshed by all that had transpired, not the least of it connecting with these people, each of them, as a novelist would have it, with a story to tell, fierce opinions, not all of them reasonable, not all of the persons sane. But everyone on board was so deeply concerned, that I decided I could do nothing that might in any way minimize how great it was, how lucky I felt to be on board. My heart was as full as if the Bush administration were no longer in power
But alas, as the phonies in publishing say in the second half of the letter the first half of which has praised your work, we landed. At the San Diego Airport I was faced with the reality. Before me on the newspaper rack was only one publication, The Wall Street Journal, announcing in its lead, tight paragraph that that which we imagined on the cruise was transpiring, Bush's plummeting in the polls forcing congress to turn the stupidity around and start the troops coming home, not what had happened at all, but alas. As those of you who were plugged in know the opposite had occured.
On board ship we had only bright people who lifted our enraged spirits, the Times Digest in the morning, and some real newspapers mysteriously acquired by me in various ports and, even more mysteriously while at sea. I suppose I had fallen into the fantasy of thinking the world would go sane in honor of our cruise, so seeing the real news shocked my eyes, minus the awe. Oh, but it was a lovely dream, albeit a combative one, while it lasted. Great speakers,stimulating panels, like-minded people who want things like peace, health care, help for the destitute, responsible men in office, democracy as the Founders would have had it, Jeffersonian and Madisonian principles, spirited discussions to stimulate the mind. And every morning I swam for an hour just after sunrise, so my body was alive ,too. Sitting in the airport, though, motionless,I could feel the weight begin to settle into my legs and arms after all those days of working them. So I wonder if my brain, too, will experience withdrawal,and fall into a similar lassitude.
The one regret I had as the ship pulled into port was that i had done nothing the entire trip to nourish my soul. All those stars and tranquil seas and I had never meditated on them, taking time only one night to concentrate fully on the moon, rewarding me in kind.
I did, though,make one pilgrimage of a sort-of spiritual nature, getting off the ship at Puerta Vallarta,where we'd been once, Don and I, when Madeleine and Robert were little, I'd gone parasailing and they'd rented horses on the beach. After Don died I went back there to a beautiful hotel-- the name escaped me when I first landed on Wednesday, but I knew the general direction, that there were curves in the road, the sea on the right, ands hills to the left-- where I'd met Marty and Aileen. He was an appellate judge and she was a psychologist, kind, sharp people with a lovely sense of humor and,on his part, a sense of chivalry. Marking my aloneness he invited me to join them,and we'd become good friends. When I'd pulled my memorable coup of taking a group of friends gratis to the Cooking School of Umbria, they were part of the gang. Particularly fortuitous for us in Aileen's case, as we had among us a self-proclaimed Famous Person, whom our resident (and softly sensitive) shrink diagnosed as a Borderline Narcissist. For those of you who don't know what that means as I didn't either till Aileen explained it to me, it's like a tree that gets caught in a very strong wind when it's a sapling, so gets twisted and never grows the way Nature intended, The most you could do with one of those, Aileen said, was keep it out of trouble, or try to. There was no way it would ever get untwisted. We stayed very close till I moved to Paris.
I tried to find them again when I returned to New York, but their numbers in Michigan were disconnected. I found his son, who works for the city and Bloomberg,and he told me they had died, she of cancer, he of Lou Gehrig's disease, both still young. So I went to try and find the spot where I'd met them all those years ago. And looking at the map, I found a beach called Garza Blanca and remembered that had been the name of the hotel. But my taxi driver said the owners had run out of money, and the place had fallen into disrepair. I asked him to go there anyway.
Out of it all at least has come a pome.
Puerta Vallarta-November 16
So this is where my children galloped first across the sands
Exploring what there was of life in new,exotic lands
And here in later years I found a pair of loving friends
But tides swirled in to pound the rocks,and much that's lovely ends.
Once villas rose against these hills, now broken huts decay
And what was treasured in my life has mostly worn away
My husband's gone, my friends have passed, my country is demeaned
The chubby cherub I adored has morphed into a fiend
Ah, but the trees stand velvet green, umbrellaed towards the sea
Lush fuchsia flowers edge the shore, saluting God and me
'Amor por un rato' they are called, 'Love for a little while'
Better than'never was,' says I, as we go out in style.
But melancholic as that day might have been, there were unexpected joys on this trip. Besides the mental excitement, it was a Dutch ship, so the crew was in large part Indonesian. I was able to greet in their language, and felt that I was in my beloved Bali as well as on the sea. I wore my Milene necklace,(everyone admired and many coveted) and some of my Nadya clothes, so it also became a fashion adventure.
Sad as I was to be coming home, as much of a letdown as I felt, when I opened my door, Mimi jumped to greet me. The groomer had put her there, as a surprise. And I remembered that no matter how much love you might have lost in life, there is still some that is unconditional.
Monday, October 24, 2005
GODSPELL and also do GRAMMAR
So in-between all the cheer-making noise about nerves at the White House, and Republicans now starting to diss the until-now-above-reproach Fitzgerald in advance, just in case, you may have missed the news about Anne Rice. Her next book will be about Jesus, in his voice.
Ms.Rice was a student of my friend Bill Weigand who was in the Creative Writing Program with me at Stanford. He taught her writing at San Francisco State, where he told me she wrote soft porn. But as a result of the flooding of New Orleans, and a spiritual awakening, she has turned to the realms of Ralph Reed, leaving the dark shadows and pulsing arteries behind, with perhaps just a weeny thought of picking up the Christian market. Jesus' voice, I read, will date from when he was seven. So if no one objects, or even if they do, I will speak with the voice of a writer who confuses herself with God.
A POME:
I would forgive myself
The loneliness
If only I held in hand
A work of Art
For it is the task of the artist
To be lonely
Because if someone were there
To brighten up the time
He might never create.
I wonder if God felt like that.
I am not going to answer Myself right away, as I am only qualified to feel with the sentiments of a very young God, not yet self-realized. So probably my response would be a bit mawkish, as I have always imagined it was lonely work, Creation, and resting among the cold swirl of stars. It is at this point that I must monitor myself(that's my little self, not the Big One) since the government is trying to get universities to change their e-mails so they can be monitored for terrorists, a not-so-subtle hint that we are being watched/and or listened to electronically. You may recall some months ago when i (little Gwen) lost my closest relationship from college, my vacation invitation rescinded, because what I was writing was 'Inflamatory.' I did not correct my friend's spelling, as I knew she was already distressed at my having likened Bush to pond scum, which she said spoke of my not having an education, something we both knew was not so. I look back at it now as maybe having been a protective act on her part, rather than a rejection, as she is a Republican with heavy government connections, so maybe she knows we all better be careful.
Ms.Rice was a student of my friend Bill Weigand who was in the Creative Writing Program with me at Stanford. He taught her writing at San Francisco State, where he told me she wrote soft porn. But as a result of the flooding of New Orleans, and a spiritual awakening, she has turned to the realms of Ralph Reed, leaving the dark shadows and pulsing arteries behind, with perhaps just a weeny thought of picking up the Christian market. Jesus' voice, I read, will date from when he was seven. So if no one objects, or even if they do, I will speak with the voice of a writer who confuses herself with God.
A POME:
I would forgive myself
The loneliness
If only I held in hand
A work of Art
For it is the task of the artist
To be lonely
Because if someone were there
To brighten up the time
He might never create.
I wonder if God felt like that.
I am not going to answer Myself right away, as I am only qualified to feel with the sentiments of a very young God, not yet self-realized. So probably my response would be a bit mawkish, as I have always imagined it was lonely work, Creation, and resting among the cold swirl of stars. It is at this point that I must monitor myself(that's my little self, not the Big One) since the government is trying to get universities to change their e-mails so they can be monitored for terrorists, a not-so-subtle hint that we are being watched/and or listened to electronically. You may recall some months ago when i (little Gwen) lost my closest relationship from college, my vacation invitation rescinded, because what I was writing was 'Inflamatory.' I did not correct my friend's spelling, as I knew she was already distressed at my having likened Bush to pond scum, which she said spoke of my not having an education, something we both knew was not so. I look back at it now as maybe having been a protective act on her part, rather than a rejection, as she is a Republican with heavy government connections, so maybe she knows we all better be careful.
Thursday, October 06, 2005
What'sa Blogger to Do?
Some days the news defies satirizing. The past few editions of the papers and announcements on TV seem themselves to be parodies. A woman chosen as candidate for the solidest seat in the land who has never even judged a hog-calling contest,and considers W "the most brilliant man i ever met." Where's she been, in a kennel? While those of us who were dreamers enough to believe an education majoring in English could equip you for survival in the world, reel under mis-used and uninformed language, even high school dropouts wince at the opinion that things are getting "more better."
Bali bombed again. The most peaceful people on the planet are the Balinese, who believe in Instant Karma: that which you send out will boomerang back,so nobody loses their temper, they are so afraid of anger. Of course, occasionally there is that hapless burglar caught in stealing delicto coming out a window, at which point the whole village beats him to death, flees,and the police ask no questions. But aside from that, the most peaceful and loving people on the earth.
Those of you who know me understand I am a Quaker-Buddhist-Jew, something my husband begged me to put on the questionnaire for my Bryn Mawr reunion years ago to drive everybody crazy. But in addition to that, I get the Daily Word, a peaceful, uplifting thought to start the day with. And they passed my name on to the Daily Dig, which e-mails me uplifting thoughts in case I don't have enough, sometimes from Tolstoy, sometimes Dorothy Day, or Reinhold Niebuhr. But today's Daily Dig,coinciding with the right hand column of The New York Times warning of Bird Flu, said that Bush had asked Congress to let him call in the Military in the event of an Avian breakout. I of course thought it was a joke. Someone had hacked their way in and found an even greater absurdity than is the fact. So I e-mailed them back asking if it was a joke. No, they responded, deadly serious. Deadly. Serious.
I'm not sure if the military is supposed to move against the birds or the people who contract the flu, but I wish there was some way to get them to move against Bush. I spoke to my longtime idol Kurt Vonnegut, who says it's too late, that there's nothing we can do. But he is tired, by his own admission, and old, and., I am afraid,ready to pack it in. But what about the rest of us? Is there nothing we can do?
Enjoy every minute of every day. God knows, or maybe George will tell him so he'll know, how much time we have left. Take your clue from Mimi, who drinks in the weather and the water while it's here. Sneeze not lest you be sent to Guantanamo. Father,forgive him: he knows not what he does. But You already know that.
Bali bombed again. The most peaceful people on the planet are the Balinese, who believe in Instant Karma: that which you send out will boomerang back,so nobody loses their temper, they are so afraid of anger. Of course, occasionally there is that hapless burglar caught in stealing delicto coming out a window, at which point the whole village beats him to death, flees,and the police ask no questions. But aside from that, the most peaceful and loving people on the earth.
Those of you who know me understand I am a Quaker-Buddhist-Jew, something my husband begged me to put on the questionnaire for my Bryn Mawr reunion years ago to drive everybody crazy. But in addition to that, I get the Daily Word, a peaceful, uplifting thought to start the day with. And they passed my name on to the Daily Dig, which e-mails me uplifting thoughts in case I don't have enough, sometimes from Tolstoy, sometimes Dorothy Day, or Reinhold Niebuhr. But today's Daily Dig,coinciding with the right hand column of The New York Times warning of Bird Flu, said that Bush had asked Congress to let him call in the Military in the event of an Avian breakout. I of course thought it was a joke. Someone had hacked their way in and found an even greater absurdity than is the fact. So I e-mailed them back asking if it was a joke. No, they responded, deadly serious. Deadly. Serious.
I'm not sure if the military is supposed to move against the birds or the people who contract the flu, but I wish there was some way to get them to move against Bush. I spoke to my longtime idol Kurt Vonnegut, who says it's too late, that there's nothing we can do. But he is tired, by his own admission, and old, and., I am afraid,ready to pack it in. But what about the rest of us? Is there nothing we can do?
Enjoy every minute of every day. God knows, or maybe George will tell him so he'll know, how much time we have left. Take your clue from Mimi, who drinks in the weather and the water while it's here. Sneeze not lest you be sent to Guantanamo. Father,forgive him: he knows not what he does. But You already know that.
Monday, September 26, 2005
How Smart Was Nero?
So I have returned from the protest march in Washington. It was truly inspiring, in the right sense of the word: breathing in. So much of the past few years has been spent holding our breaths, or breathing fire, it was joyful to just take in how many like-minded spirits there were, almost all of them benign. The carpers and screamers who stood on the sidelines and told us we were going to go to Hell if we didn't accept Jesus were few in number and ineffective, as there was such general good will, and sense of-- Get this: Love of Country. It has been easy to forget, or at least be numbed into a wounded kind of amnesia, what a great country this is, was, and can be again. But there were fourteen busloads in from Wisconsin,and twelve in from Arizona, and people who had flown in on their own from all over the United States of America which it showed signs of becoming.
There were posters being carried by children:"Get rid of Mad Cowboy Disease", "I want my Country Back."and T-shirts(I was wearing mine, bought at the Roe v. Wade march: "Stop Bitching, Start a Revolution," connecting me with two others I spotted wearing the same, so we 'Yo'd' to each other,and a younger one "Hey!"d,revealing several steel balls in her tongue(I'm glad I'm not that young)and Peace banners waving, some drummers, a brass band surrounding Iraq vets in wheelchairs, an Uncle Sam on stilts with a Pinocchio nose, several "Nobody died when Clinton lied"signs, a blow-up of the doctored photo making its way around the Internet, of George the 1st and W grinning as they hauled a big fish out of the floodwaters of New Orleans. And I could not help thinking that as Nero fiddled while Rome burned, that W biked while the Gulf flooded,and I wondered if Nero had a father he emulated. Sometimes I cannnot help wishing I were Gore Vidal, who would have known.
The march was long and routed past the White House("Our House!" people shouted.) I told somebody Bush wasn't home, and she said "He isn't home when he is home." Starbucks (there were several along the way) must have made a fortune( the coffee-house Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired,") and in one of them, when we could wa;lk no further(I'd connected with three wonderful women,Unitarians I met on the Metro, spirited and kind, distressed at how far right Christianity had veered in this country, saying Jesus wouldn't approve of how he was being used) I met up with Joy, a downsized journalist who went back to school and now teaches English as a second language(in Wisconsin! -- who would have known there were Hmongs.)
All in all a wonderful voyage which I invite you all to join in in some sympathetic fashion, finding out when the next march is(check Moveon.Org or UnitedforPeace.org) and think about maybe making Cindy Sheehan our candidate. We don't know how smart she may be, but she certainly is charismatic, something the available Democrats show no sign of being;It is not just enough our being against, we have to have someone we're for. And she did do something, which is more than most of us did before Saturday. And how smart do you have to be to be smarter than W?
I remember when I was in the earthquake in '89 in San Francisco,and a bunch of women were picked up fromHuntington Park where we were huddled on what is the solidest part of Nob Hill, and taken back to a sort-of friend's house,and among those gathered was Ann Richards, who was in town for a fundraiser that, sadly, must not have raised enough or maybe George W.wouldn't have beaten her as Governor, and then we wouldn't be in the pickle we are now. And as we spent that earthquakey night watching the marina explode through a picture window, I asked her what would happen if Dan Quayle were to become president. She said "Then the country will find out what the Founders always knew: that it can run without a president." Well, I guess we've found that out, but the Founders weren't counting on Karl Rove.
There were posters being carried by children:"Get rid of Mad Cowboy Disease", "I want my Country Back."and T-shirts(I was wearing mine, bought at the Roe v. Wade march: "Stop Bitching, Start a Revolution," connecting me with two others I spotted wearing the same, so we 'Yo'd' to each other,and a younger one "Hey!"d,revealing several steel balls in her tongue(I'm glad I'm not that young)and Peace banners waving, some drummers, a brass band surrounding Iraq vets in wheelchairs, an Uncle Sam on stilts with a Pinocchio nose, several "Nobody died when Clinton lied"signs, a blow-up of the doctored photo making its way around the Internet, of George the 1st and W grinning as they hauled a big fish out of the floodwaters of New Orleans. And I could not help thinking that as Nero fiddled while Rome burned, that W biked while the Gulf flooded,and I wondered if Nero had a father he emulated. Sometimes I cannnot help wishing I were Gore Vidal, who would have known.
The march was long and routed past the White House("Our House!" people shouted.) I told somebody Bush wasn't home, and she said "He isn't home when he is home." Starbucks (there were several along the way) must have made a fortune( the coffee-house Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired,") and in one of them, when we could wa;lk no further(I'd connected with three wonderful women,Unitarians I met on the Metro, spirited and kind, distressed at how far right Christianity had veered in this country, saying Jesus wouldn't approve of how he was being used) I met up with Joy, a downsized journalist who went back to school and now teaches English as a second language(in Wisconsin! -- who would have known there were Hmongs.)
All in all a wonderful voyage which I invite you all to join in in some sympathetic fashion, finding out when the next march is(check Moveon.Org or UnitedforPeace.org) and think about maybe making Cindy Sheehan our candidate. We don't know how smart she may be, but she certainly is charismatic, something the available Democrats show no sign of being;It is not just enough our being against, we have to have someone we're for. And she did do something, which is more than most of us did before Saturday. And how smart do you have to be to be smarter than W?
I remember when I was in the earthquake in '89 in San Francisco,and a bunch of women were picked up fromHuntington Park where we were huddled on what is the solidest part of Nob Hill, and taken back to a sort-of friend's house,and among those gathered was Ann Richards, who was in town for a fundraiser that, sadly, must not have raised enough or maybe George W.wouldn't have beaten her as Governor, and then we wouldn't be in the pickle we are now. And as we spent that earthquakey night watching the marina explode through a picture window, I asked her what would happen if Dan Quayle were to become president. She said "Then the country will find out what the Founders always knew: that it can run without a president." Well, I guess we've found that out, but the Founders weren't counting on Karl Rove.
Monday, September 19, 2005
You Can't Fool Mother Nature, but you can Piss her Off
The best part about cellphones is that the insane among us can now talk comfortably to themselves without anyone's being the wiser. I spent Sunday morning, a glorious one, resplendent you might actually call it, sitting on a park bench next to the mucked-up pond in Central Park, still eerily viridescent on its surface, reading the paper and listening to a pleasant lunatic railing and commentating a few benches away. I say pleasant because he bore some resemblance to Brando in his later years, not yet the full-blown grotesque, but only moderately bloated, in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, and a Panama hat. His voice was well- modulated and interesting, more so because my last few outdoor ventures have been marred by people on their fucking mobiles nattering away loudly, at sidewalk cafes, walking on the street,n'importe ou(the French are here, plugged in, too.) So as there is no peace left anywhere, it is comparatively charming to hear someone intelligent who has lost it, and so has an excuse.
"Cole slaw," he noted, as he took out the contents of his lunch bag. "My grandmother made excellent cole slaw. I remember the hurricane when I was ten, it was 1938, November 28th it was. There were three more days till the end of the hurricane season, but it came anyway. The streets of New York were flooded,and she went into shock over it. They put her in a mental ward and she didn't speak for five years. I wonder why they never talk about that hurricane. on the news She was sixty six, the same age I am now." I didn't try to correct him on his math, because the conversation he was conducting with himself was quite amicable, and infinitely more interesting than the ones you tune into without wanting to, just because you are seated near some klunkhead who is planning a party and talking loudly to a Maitre d', or at least insisting she is well known to the Maitre d', so the message should be passed along, "a table for fifteen."
"Funny," the man on the bench was saying "how you remember things from so long ago but you can't remember what happened yesterday. That's probably good for this administration."
Well said. It put me in mind of 'The Snake Pit' where Olivia de Havilland speaks of the lunatics being allowed to run the asylum. It would be nice to think that the catastrophic events of these past weeks would have some effect for the good. Frank Rich in his brilliant op-ed piece Sunday wrote that once the curtain was pulled aside the Wizard of Oz could never seem to be a wizard again, revealed once and for all as a blustering snake-oil salesman, as the true Bush has been revealed, never to be believed at the level he was by the American people. Oh, God,I hope not. The idiocy has been so blatant, the media so far ahead in its reporting that even Fox News has had to acknowledge the embarrassment. I got an e-mail today from a friend in Malaysia who sent me the Roe v. Wade joke/query, 'What does Bush think of Roe v.Wade? Answer: He doesn't care HOW the people get out of New Orleans.' From Kuala Lumpur, for God's sake. The rest of the world catches on while here there is joy among bright people that his approval rating is down to 46%. How can 46% still approve of him?
You can fool 46% of the people some of the time,and a lot of the people at a time when it really mattered, but you can't fool Mother Nature. I felt sure she had expressed her feelings as a response to the spit in her face about Global Warming, her fury at the blatant ignorance, after all she had done to give us a clue. Ignorance is no longer bliss, it's policy. I remember when I was making my first foray into the realms of spiritual questing, I asked Jack if there was evil in the world. (I had asked the same question of Richard Kleindienst, one of Nixon's fallen Attorney Generals, my dinner party partner in Georgetown,and he said "You better believe it." Still I was in the first throes of attempted deep discovery, so I welcomed Jack's answer: "No. There is ignorance and greed." I'll say. I wasn'tsure where to send my donation for New Otleans,and wondered if it wasn't best to send it directly to Halliburton.
So now Hurricane Rita(that'smy Aunt), or maybe it will be downgraded to a Tropical Storm, is almost upon us. Everyone is preparing this time. Bush says the levees might give if the storm hit New Orleans. It's nice that he understands that by now. After Katrina he said 'Who knew that the levees would give?' Well,only everybody who paid any attention for the past few years,or listened at all, ever. Live in the moment, George. Who ever thought that someone who never watches TV could be stupider than someone who did?
After he departed, the man who was talking to himself, I saw that he had left a wax paper-wrapped sandwich: he had forgotten to eat his lunch. It was a bologna on white with American cheese, and I wondered if that was symbolic of what we had become. I fed it to the mallards.
"Cole slaw," he noted, as he took out the contents of his lunch bag. "My grandmother made excellent cole slaw. I remember the hurricane when I was ten, it was 1938, November 28th it was. There were three more days till the end of the hurricane season, but it came anyway. The streets of New York were flooded,and she went into shock over it. They put her in a mental ward and she didn't speak for five years. I wonder why they never talk about that hurricane. on the news She was sixty six, the same age I am now." I didn't try to correct him on his math, because the conversation he was conducting with himself was quite amicable, and infinitely more interesting than the ones you tune into without wanting to, just because you are seated near some klunkhead who is planning a party and talking loudly to a Maitre d', or at least insisting she is well known to the Maitre d', so the message should be passed along, "a table for fifteen."
"Funny," the man on the bench was saying "how you remember things from so long ago but you can't remember what happened yesterday. That's probably good for this administration."
Well said. It put me in mind of 'The Snake Pit' where Olivia de Havilland speaks of the lunatics being allowed to run the asylum. It would be nice to think that the catastrophic events of these past weeks would have some effect for the good. Frank Rich in his brilliant op-ed piece Sunday wrote that once the curtain was pulled aside the Wizard of Oz could never seem to be a wizard again, revealed once and for all as a blustering snake-oil salesman, as the true Bush has been revealed, never to be believed at the level he was by the American people. Oh, God,I hope not. The idiocy has been so blatant, the media so far ahead in its reporting that even Fox News has had to acknowledge the embarrassment. I got an e-mail today from a friend in Malaysia who sent me the Roe v. Wade joke/query, 'What does Bush think of Roe v.Wade? Answer: He doesn't care HOW the people get out of New Orleans.' From Kuala Lumpur, for God's sake. The rest of the world catches on while here there is joy among bright people that his approval rating is down to 46%. How can 46% still approve of him?
You can fool 46% of the people some of the time,and a lot of the people at a time when it really mattered, but you can't fool Mother Nature. I felt sure she had expressed her feelings as a response to the spit in her face about Global Warming, her fury at the blatant ignorance, after all she had done to give us a clue. Ignorance is no longer bliss, it's policy. I remember when I was making my first foray into the realms of spiritual questing, I asked Jack if there was evil in the world. (I had asked the same question of Richard Kleindienst, one of Nixon's fallen Attorney Generals, my dinner party partner in Georgetown,and he said "You better believe it." Still I was in the first throes of attempted deep discovery, so I welcomed Jack's answer: "No. There is ignorance and greed." I'll say. I wasn'tsure where to send my donation for New Otleans,and wondered if it wasn't best to send it directly to Halliburton.
So now Hurricane Rita(that'smy Aunt), or maybe it will be downgraded to a Tropical Storm, is almost upon us. Everyone is preparing this time. Bush says the levees might give if the storm hit New Orleans. It's nice that he understands that by now. After Katrina he said 'Who knew that the levees would give?' Well,only everybody who paid any attention for the past few years,or listened at all, ever. Live in the moment, George. Who ever thought that someone who never watches TV could be stupider than someone who did?
After he departed, the man who was talking to himself, I saw that he had left a wax paper-wrapped sandwich: he had forgotten to eat his lunch. It was a bologna on white with American cheese, and I wondered if that was symbolic of what we had become. I fed it to the mallards.
Thursday, September 15, 2005
Love's Uneaten Bread
My Jewru Jack, in one of his talks, quotes some mystic or spiritual maven, who says "The trouble is, we think that we have Time." Patience has always been my short suit, and as I was early in the creative game, I was in a great hurry to have my musical open on Broadway, my great novel published and recognized, my movie made, my song sung, my poem published in The New Yorker, whatever. When I was little more than twenty, I met Stanley Kubrick, and because of his obvious dark brilliance and the desperate shadows in his eyes, he became my closest friend.
Billy Wilder was already referring to him, somewhat ironically, as “twenty-nine-year-old” Stanley Kubrick, so the appellation of boy genius was in the air. He had not yet become famous, though anyone who’d seen his 1958 film, The Killing, was dazzled by his work. He was at the party where I met him in Hollywood with his wife, Christiane, who was wearing a white dress, slightly glamorized with beads and crystal, and a splendidly distended belly. I told him she was the most beautiful pregnant woman I had ever seen, and he said “What did you expect?” as though we were very old friends, and I should have known he would come up with nothing less.
We became friends, very quickly. I was part of a small band who often ate dinner at their house, where Christiane cooked wonderful meals, and the conversation was heady and intense. I was on my way to Stanford for a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing. Others at the table were John Gavin, who was later to become our ambassador to Mexico, and had just finished acting (rather stiffly) in ‘Spartacus,’ which Stanley was editing at the time, John’s wife Cecily, Jimmy Hill, partner with Stanley on his early films, and various people who were technically innovative. It was Stanley’s intention to change the way movies were made, along with becoming rich and beating taxes.
He had met Christiane while making ‘Paths of Glory.’ She played the singer, the quietly disconsolate young woman so moving in the cabaret scene. In life Christiane was the daughter of a former German army officer, very high in the ranks of Hitler’s elite, and Stanley was a Jew. For their first date, while making ‘Glory’ in Germany, he made her take him on a tour of Dachau. That should have told me everything I needed to know about him.
But I was truly an innocent, infatuated with all that was the movie industry, captivated by talent and beauty, bulldozed by brilliance and bright eccentricity. He and Christiane came to visit me in Northern California where I was at school. I took them on a tour of San Francisco, and the boat that went around Alcatraz. I figured that in spite of the sunlit day and the dazzle on the water, the nature of the excursion would make it dark enough for him. He was sneak-previewing ‘Spartacus’ at a theater in Oakland, where he let me go over the audience reaction sheets with him. ‘Get rid of the dwarf,’ a number of them said. ‘Cut the dwarf.’
“People are very threatened by dwarfs,” he told me, “because they have enormous genitals.” I didn’t ask if that were true. I assumed if he said so, it was.
I was by then in the midst of my second novel, which I was dedicating to him and Christiane, so they were reading it as I went along. “You’re the best writer of dialogue in America,” he said to me on that ride around the bay, flattery so inflating I was almost parasailing. “I’m in big trouble,” he went on after a moment. “I just bought ‘Lolita,’ and Dwight McDonald (movie reviewer at Esquire at the time) is going to give me a good review because Nabokov is a literary genius. But he can’t write a line of dialogue. Would you do me an enormous favor?”
So I played hooky from Stanford, and went down to L.A. Ensconced in the Park Sunset, a semi-seedy hotel in West Hollywood, I proceeded to go to work on the screenplay of ‘Lolita.’ I was not to let anyone know I was in town, or contact my friends, as Stanley was sure if they knew I was there, they would know what I was doing. The paranoia that was to characterize many of his films did not come out of nowhere.
Every day I wrote reams of pages, every night I delivered them to him, rewarded like an eager puppy with a fine meal from Christiane. I did not ask what else was in it for me at the time. I loved them both, considered it a privilege just to be in their company. I understood I was involved in the Hollywood version of espionage. But he assured me I would write his next picture in the open, where he could give me credit.
Then a day came when he asked for a scene where Lolita makes a face when Humbert speaks of another eleven-year-old. Humbert had been supposed to be employed by her family, but it hadn’t panned out. “Oh, you’re so lucky you didn’t have to work with her,” Lolita says. “She’s a creep. She had polio.”
“Stanley,” I argued. “You can’t have Lolita putting down another little girl for having polio. The audience will hate her.”
“No, don’t you get it?” he said, grinning. “Humbert is thinking he’s never fucked a kid with polio before.”
Dismayed, I asked him “How do you see this movie?”
“It’s a love story,” he said.
Huh? I’d thought it was a comedy. As little as I knew about sex—I was young and inexperienced, and, I confess, a bit prudish—I knew enough, or thought I did, not to take pleasure from what was clearly perversion. Stanley’s finding delight in a man’s humping a crippled child was repellent to me. I quit.
He gave me $1600 to cover expenses, and I slunk back to Stanford. He stopped speaking to me after that for a few years.
Then the time came when I was about to be married, and I heard Stanley was in New York. I told Don,my about-to-be husband, “I’d really like Stanley Kubrick to be at our wedding.”
Don said, “How do you expect to find him?”
“We’ll go to the first showing of ‘Dr. Strangelove,’ and he’ll be there counting the house.
“Stop being a writer,” Don said.
But we went to the four o’clock screening. As we came down from the loge, I heard ‘Click, click, click, click, click.’ And standing at the rear of the orchestra, with a busman’s counter, was Stanley.
“We just broke the house record for the Criterion,” he said.
So he came to the wedding. At the time Don was producing the first of the Jets games for WOR-TV. Stanley cornered him, and held him hostage with his heavy-lidded charisma for most of the reception, telling him how to shoot the game. “Keep the camera on the line,” he instructed him. “Don’t follow the ball. Hold the camera on the line. That’s the most interesting part of football.”
And Don said “Stanley, if you’ll let me run a credit at the end of the game, ‘Directed by Stanley Kubrick,’ I’ll put the camera anywhere you want me to.”
After that, I saw the Kubricks rarely. They moved to England, where they went by boat—Stanley wouldn’t fly. They came back for ‘2001, A Space Odyssey.’ Christiane called me and said the critical reaction was half idolization, half cries for crucifixion.
At one point I visited them in England, in the compound he was building for himself in Boreham Wood. He sat in his screening room with Christiane, her brother Jan Haarlan, with whom he worked, and me, studying the films of Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s propagandist, in preparation for making ‘A Clockwork Orange.’ That we were there in one room, Stanley, the Bronx Jew, with his beautiful wife, the daughter of a high-level Nazi, and her brother, against the grainy black and white specter of Riefenstahl’s brilliance on the screen, was beyond a fiction writer’s gift of invention. I remember particularly a shot of the ankle of a Hitler Jungen, straining so hard to see his Fuhrer, that you could see the calf muscles bulging, as he stood on tiptoe, edging out of his sock. “What a genius she was!” Stanley exclaimed. “You never even had to see Hitler to get how powerful he was.”
After that, I saw them hardly at all. He withdrew further and further into the private realm he’d created for himself, closing the world out, and his filmmaking in. Cutting himself off from the society that posed such a threat to him, much as it seemed to revere him, he appeared to have lost his sense of what the world really was, and with it, his timing. Feasting his bulging onyx eyes on what he saw as the center of the universe,-- the picture in each frame-- he didn’t notice how sloooowly they passed, how static and unmoving his movies became.
I remember best the last time I saw him, or almost saw him. My family and I went to Thanksgiving dinner at the home of American friends who lived next door to him at Elstree. My children were four and two, beautiful and bright, and I wanted so much for him to see them, to see how full my life had become, even absent his formidable presence. So I took them next door.
I knocked on the great wooden door, thick and heavy as Mel Brooks' Frankenstein take-off. Characteristically, it moaned and creaked, as slowly it opened. Two great, snarling Dobermans on the end of a chain growled and barked from inside the entryway, leapt into the darkness, snapping at the air.
“Stanley?” I said into the darkness. “Stanley?”
He recognized my voice. “Gwen?” he said.
“Yes.”
“I’d let you in,” he said. “But the dogs will go for the children.”
He wrote me a letter of apology for his behavior some weeks later, a long, squiggly, handwritten thing, the script cramped and running up the page and sides and over the top. The handwriting seemed evidence of what had happened to him as much as his having the dogs. It upset me too much for me to have the sense to keep it, and sell it at Christie’s.
The last thing I saw of his, the last movie he was to make, was‘Eyes Wide Shut.’ I couldn’t believe how arduous it was, how boring. As saddened as I was by what had happened to the early indisputable filmic genius of Stanley, I was astounded at the non-flow of the words, by Frederic Raphael, whom I’d long considered the best screenwriter in the world.
The following winter, back in New York, I saw Elliott Kastner, once on top of the producer pile, a man who had made over seventy pictures. I asked him how Raphael could have written such lifeless, awful dialogue. “I’ll send you his book,” Elliott said. “’Eyes Wide Open.’ That’ll explain it.”
“Nothing can explain how bloated it was,” I said. “How turgid and overblown. It was like nobody knew what to do.”
“Stanley did,” said Elliott. “Stanley knew what to do. He died.”
Sad as that loss seemed, and was,today for me is even sadder. There's an editorial in The New York Times about this being the fiftieth anniversary of Lolita's being published,so without even having to drown, my life is passing in front of my eyes. I have never had the sensation of time passing. My energy was always fresh, and renewed. Even the loss of my husband at a very young age, his and mine, was bounceable-back from, because I went back to Bryn Mawr to write a play, so thought, once again, when it was finished, that I was just out of school.
But to add insult to obituary, I went today with a friend to a seminar of the American Theater Wing about musicals. Present on the panel were the writers of the coming musicals Dr. Zhivago and The Color Purple. Line me up and shoot me with bad ideas. And if that's not enough, the writer of Purple was a woman who looked like Bruce Valanch, only not as pretty. She had never known a Broadway musical before getting involved in this project, whereas I, as close friends know, have loved and aspired to the musical theater since I was a little girl, which I now realize, finally, was a reallllllllllllllllllly long time ago. My musical comedy has been ready and optioned and passed by for more years than there are UN officials in town. And, to make it worse, I have recently read The Motherland, my novel that came out at the same moment Richard Nixon fell, and all anyone wanted to read was All the President's Men. Lost lost. The time is out of synch. I was born too late, and bright too early.
The best sentence in Wuthering Heights, lamenting about Cathy and Heathcliffe's failure to get together is "Love's Uneaten Bread." What about Song's Unheard Melody? Word's Unread Insight?
Oh,God, I wish I had the energy to start all over. The trouble is, we think that we have time.
Billy Wilder was already referring to him, somewhat ironically, as “twenty-nine-year-old” Stanley Kubrick, so the appellation of boy genius was in the air. He had not yet become famous, though anyone who’d seen his 1958 film, The Killing, was dazzled by his work. He was at the party where I met him in Hollywood with his wife, Christiane, who was wearing a white dress, slightly glamorized with beads and crystal, and a splendidly distended belly. I told him she was the most beautiful pregnant woman I had ever seen, and he said “What did you expect?” as though we were very old friends, and I should have known he would come up with nothing less.
We became friends, very quickly. I was part of a small band who often ate dinner at their house, where Christiane cooked wonderful meals, and the conversation was heady and intense. I was on my way to Stanford for a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing. Others at the table were John Gavin, who was later to become our ambassador to Mexico, and had just finished acting (rather stiffly) in ‘Spartacus,’ which Stanley was editing at the time, John’s wife Cecily, Jimmy Hill, partner with Stanley on his early films, and various people who were technically innovative. It was Stanley’s intention to change the way movies were made, along with becoming rich and beating taxes.
He had met Christiane while making ‘Paths of Glory.’ She played the singer, the quietly disconsolate young woman so moving in the cabaret scene. In life Christiane was the daughter of a former German army officer, very high in the ranks of Hitler’s elite, and Stanley was a Jew. For their first date, while making ‘Glory’ in Germany, he made her take him on a tour of Dachau. That should have told me everything I needed to know about him.
But I was truly an innocent, infatuated with all that was the movie industry, captivated by talent and beauty, bulldozed by brilliance and bright eccentricity. He and Christiane came to visit me in Northern California where I was at school. I took them on a tour of San Francisco, and the boat that went around Alcatraz. I figured that in spite of the sunlit day and the dazzle on the water, the nature of the excursion would make it dark enough for him. He was sneak-previewing ‘Spartacus’ at a theater in Oakland, where he let me go over the audience reaction sheets with him. ‘Get rid of the dwarf,’ a number of them said. ‘Cut the dwarf.’
“People are very threatened by dwarfs,” he told me, “because they have enormous genitals.” I didn’t ask if that were true. I assumed if he said so, it was.
I was by then in the midst of my second novel, which I was dedicating to him and Christiane, so they were reading it as I went along. “You’re the best writer of dialogue in America,” he said to me on that ride around the bay, flattery so inflating I was almost parasailing. “I’m in big trouble,” he went on after a moment. “I just bought ‘Lolita,’ and Dwight McDonald (movie reviewer at Esquire at the time) is going to give me a good review because Nabokov is a literary genius. But he can’t write a line of dialogue. Would you do me an enormous favor?”
So I played hooky from Stanford, and went down to L.A. Ensconced in the Park Sunset, a semi-seedy hotel in West Hollywood, I proceeded to go to work on the screenplay of ‘Lolita.’ I was not to let anyone know I was in town, or contact my friends, as Stanley was sure if they knew I was there, they would know what I was doing. The paranoia that was to characterize many of his films did not come out of nowhere.
Every day I wrote reams of pages, every night I delivered them to him, rewarded like an eager puppy with a fine meal from Christiane. I did not ask what else was in it for me at the time. I loved them both, considered it a privilege just to be in their company. I understood I was involved in the Hollywood version of espionage. But he assured me I would write his next picture in the open, where he could give me credit.
Then a day came when he asked for a scene where Lolita makes a face when Humbert speaks of another eleven-year-old. Humbert had been supposed to be employed by her family, but it hadn’t panned out. “Oh, you’re so lucky you didn’t have to work with her,” Lolita says. “She’s a creep. She had polio.”
“Stanley,” I argued. “You can’t have Lolita putting down another little girl for having polio. The audience will hate her.”
“No, don’t you get it?” he said, grinning. “Humbert is thinking he’s never fucked a kid with polio before.”
Dismayed, I asked him “How do you see this movie?”
“It’s a love story,” he said.
Huh? I’d thought it was a comedy. As little as I knew about sex—I was young and inexperienced, and, I confess, a bit prudish—I knew enough, or thought I did, not to take pleasure from what was clearly perversion. Stanley’s finding delight in a man’s humping a crippled child was repellent to me. I quit.
He gave me $1600 to cover expenses, and I slunk back to Stanford. He stopped speaking to me after that for a few years.
Then the time came when I was about to be married, and I heard Stanley was in New York. I told Don,my about-to-be husband, “I’d really like Stanley Kubrick to be at our wedding.”
Don said, “How do you expect to find him?”
“We’ll go to the first showing of ‘Dr. Strangelove,’ and he’ll be there counting the house.
“Stop being a writer,” Don said.
But we went to the four o’clock screening. As we came down from the loge, I heard ‘Click, click, click, click, click.’ And standing at the rear of the orchestra, with a busman’s counter, was Stanley.
“We just broke the house record for the Criterion,” he said.
So he came to the wedding. At the time Don was producing the first of the Jets games for WOR-TV. Stanley cornered him, and held him hostage with his heavy-lidded charisma for most of the reception, telling him how to shoot the game. “Keep the camera on the line,” he instructed him. “Don’t follow the ball. Hold the camera on the line. That’s the most interesting part of football.”
And Don said “Stanley, if you’ll let me run a credit at the end of the game, ‘Directed by Stanley Kubrick,’ I’ll put the camera anywhere you want me to.”
After that, I saw the Kubricks rarely. They moved to England, where they went by boat—Stanley wouldn’t fly. They came back for ‘2001, A Space Odyssey.’ Christiane called me and said the critical reaction was half idolization, half cries for crucifixion.
At one point I visited them in England, in the compound he was building for himself in Boreham Wood. He sat in his screening room with Christiane, her brother Jan Haarlan, with whom he worked, and me, studying the films of Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s propagandist, in preparation for making ‘A Clockwork Orange.’ That we were there in one room, Stanley, the Bronx Jew, with his beautiful wife, the daughter of a high-level Nazi, and her brother, against the grainy black and white specter of Riefenstahl’s brilliance on the screen, was beyond a fiction writer’s gift of invention. I remember particularly a shot of the ankle of a Hitler Jungen, straining so hard to see his Fuhrer, that you could see the calf muscles bulging, as he stood on tiptoe, edging out of his sock. “What a genius she was!” Stanley exclaimed. “You never even had to see Hitler to get how powerful he was.”
After that, I saw them hardly at all. He withdrew further and further into the private realm he’d created for himself, closing the world out, and his filmmaking in. Cutting himself off from the society that posed such a threat to him, much as it seemed to revere him, he appeared to have lost his sense of what the world really was, and with it, his timing. Feasting his bulging onyx eyes on what he saw as the center of the universe,-- the picture in each frame-- he didn’t notice how sloooowly they passed, how static and unmoving his movies became.
I remember best the last time I saw him, or almost saw him. My family and I went to Thanksgiving dinner at the home of American friends who lived next door to him at Elstree. My children were four and two, beautiful and bright, and I wanted so much for him to see them, to see how full my life had become, even absent his formidable presence. So I took them next door.
I knocked on the great wooden door, thick and heavy as Mel Brooks' Frankenstein take-off. Characteristically, it moaned and creaked, as slowly it opened. Two great, snarling Dobermans on the end of a chain growled and barked from inside the entryway, leapt into the darkness, snapping at the air.
“Stanley?” I said into the darkness. “Stanley?”
He recognized my voice. “Gwen?” he said.
“Yes.”
“I’d let you in,” he said. “But the dogs will go for the children.”
He wrote me a letter of apology for his behavior some weeks later, a long, squiggly, handwritten thing, the script cramped and running up the page and sides and over the top. The handwriting seemed evidence of what had happened to him as much as his having the dogs. It upset me too much for me to have the sense to keep it, and sell it at Christie’s.
The last thing I saw of his, the last movie he was to make, was‘Eyes Wide Shut.’ I couldn’t believe how arduous it was, how boring. As saddened as I was by what had happened to the early indisputable filmic genius of Stanley, I was astounded at the non-flow of the words, by Frederic Raphael, whom I’d long considered the best screenwriter in the world.
The following winter, back in New York, I saw Elliott Kastner, once on top of the producer pile, a man who had made over seventy pictures. I asked him how Raphael could have written such lifeless, awful dialogue. “I’ll send you his book,” Elliott said. “’Eyes Wide Open.’ That’ll explain it.”
“Nothing can explain how bloated it was,” I said. “How turgid and overblown. It was like nobody knew what to do.”
“Stanley did,” said Elliott. “Stanley knew what to do. He died.”
Sad as that loss seemed, and was,today for me is even sadder. There's an editorial in The New York Times about this being the fiftieth anniversary of Lolita's being published,so without even having to drown, my life is passing in front of my eyes. I have never had the sensation of time passing. My energy was always fresh, and renewed. Even the loss of my husband at a very young age, his and mine, was bounceable-back from, because I went back to Bryn Mawr to write a play, so thought, once again, when it was finished, that I was just out of school.
But to add insult to obituary, I went today with a friend to a seminar of the American Theater Wing about musicals. Present on the panel were the writers of the coming musicals Dr. Zhivago and The Color Purple. Line me up and shoot me with bad ideas. And if that's not enough, the writer of Purple was a woman who looked like Bruce Valanch, only not as pretty. She had never known a Broadway musical before getting involved in this project, whereas I, as close friends know, have loved and aspired to the musical theater since I was a little girl, which I now realize, finally, was a reallllllllllllllllllly long time ago. My musical comedy has been ready and optioned and passed by for more years than there are UN officials in town. And, to make it worse, I have recently read The Motherland, my novel that came out at the same moment Richard Nixon fell, and all anyone wanted to read was All the President's Men. Lost lost. The time is out of synch. I was born too late, and bright too early.
The best sentence in Wuthering Heights, lamenting about Cathy and Heathcliffe's failure to get together is "Love's Uneaten Bread." What about Song's Unheard Melody? Word's Unread Insight?
Oh,God, I wish I had the energy to start all over. The trouble is, we think that we have time.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)