Gotham Diary:
Imagination
5 March 2013
The gondola men are about to resume boring holes at the edge of the balcony, holes into which the new railings will be fitted. Although the men have been working elsewhere on the building, they haven’t landed here in some time, but they showed up on Friday, rather discouragingly only to sweep, and again yesterday, this time to make some noise. They removed the last of the old railing and immediately began boring the new holes. It is loud work. You can’t watch a movie or listen to music.
I did try. My new schedule calls for me to tidy the bedroom and do the ironing on Monday afternoons. I’ve always listened to opera while doing the tidying, but I have to watch a movie while I iron. So I chose Andrew Wagner’s Starting Out in the Evening. An arguably inappropriate choice. Wagner’s quiet but intense movie deserves to be watched with undivided attention. But for me the video was going to be a prelude to rereading the novel, by Brian Morton, from which it was taken. The novel came to mind when Roger Rosenblatt failed to mention it in an Essay in the Book Review in which he hailed the movie as one of his three favorites about writers. The other two were The Third Man and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Rosenblatt also neglected to name Graham Greene — also neglected to mention that two of his three movies about writers were based on books. Well, they all were, but he did identify Truman Capote, arguably the least serious of the three authors. To gush about movies about writers in the Book Review without mentioning the underlying books (in two out of three cases) is proof of either the nonexistence of God or the editorial incompetence of the Book Review staff or both.
How maddening this must have been for Brian Morton, I thought. Greene and Capote are no longer with us, but Morton (a much younger man) is on the faculty at Sarah Lawrence and, I hope, working on a fifth novel. It must seem that the book, one’s own book, has been vaporized by the film adaptation. Now, of course, everybody will “see the movie,” because it just takes so much less time than reading the novel. Even people who read.
I had to wait until after the gondola men broke for the day to get on with the movie (and the tidying and the ironing; I’d gone off to do something else during the drilling). My attempt to bluff through the racket broke down when I found that I had no idea what a handsome middle-aged man (played by Jeff McCarthy) was saying to Schiller, the elderly novelist (Frank Langella) at the 92nd Street Y. I could tell that they were discouraging words, and it seemed important to do better than guess at what they might be. I would quote the words from the novel, but I’m not sure that the scene exists in the book. Although the first couple of pages read like a scenario — so faithful is the film at the start — there are differences great and small. Levin, for example, Schiller’s dying friend, whom Schiller crosses town to visit in the hospital, does not appear in the movie. (He’s not even mentioned, I don’t think.) I’ve only just begun re-reading the novel, and I haven’t got to Levin yet, but I have noticed one small but telling divergence in the storytelling. It’s interesting because nothing “important” is changed. Heather Wolfe, the young grad student who thinks she wants to write about Schiller, and Schiller’s daughter, Ariel (played by Lauren Ambrose and Lily Taylor) arrange for Heather to give Lily a lift. In the film, we see the negotiation as it takes place in Schiller’s apartment, before the two women leave. In the novel, it is mentioned as having taken place at the beginning of the second chapter, as the women are walking to Heather’s car. The banal exchange about having a car and asking for a lift does not clutter the somewhat hierophantic page on which Heather takes her leave of Schiller. For the film to do the same would have been needlessly awkward.
Within a few pages, the novel opens up all to the complexity of which novels are capable (I don’t mean complication — there’s nothing necessarily difficult about novelistic complexity), and the movie, good as it is, suddenly seems limited and almost unimaginative.
***
My mother was not an imaginative person in the general sense of the term, but she was given to suspicion, and that requires a certain imagination. She was always on the lookout for people trying to take advantage of her — the legacy, perhaps, of having lived through the Depression in untroubled affluence. By extension, she was on the lookout for people trying to take advantage of her children, in theory, at least. I remember one mortifying instance in which her unseemly imaginings prompted a mortifying act of protectiveness.
During the difficult year before I went off to boarding school, I escaped on winter Saturdays by taking the train into the city and walking to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to hear lectures on this and that. One Saturday morning, standing on the platform at the Bronxville station, I noticed a tall young woman, and she noticed me, and we fell to talking. She was somewhat plain, but attractive when she spoke with enthusiasm, which she did as a matter of course. I was already familiar with tall, plain girls. I was fully-grown myself, an inch and half taller than I am today. My mother had this almost demented habit of urging me to “go out and meet some nice, tall queen!” (Didn’t she know what “queen” meant, I wondered.) I must have struck the young woman as older than I was. By the time she found out that I was in the tenth grade, however, and I found out that she was something more than a freshman at Sarah Lawrence, she must have been happy to settle for talking with an intelligent person. I know that I was. That was all I asked for when I was a teenager. I was so hungry to talk to intelligent people that I never gave sex a thought. (You could almost say that sex never gave me a thought.) I don’t remember what the Sarah Lawrence girl was going into the city to do, and I’m not sure that we ever met again, but I did write to her, and she to me, from opposite sides of the Holy Square Mile, and who knows where that would have gone if my mother had not telephoned a dean at the college and put a stop to it. If there was one thing my mother knew for sure, it was that Sarah Lawrence girls were up to no good.
I am still ashamed. The only way my mother could have gotten into Sarah Lawrence would be as a housekeeper.
***
I remembered this story because I was thinking about Brian Morton at Sarah Lawrence, and how he must be quite familiar with girls like Heather Wolfe. (The young woman on the station platform couldn’t, of course, have been less like her, but in my mother’s mind all the girls at Sarah Lawrence were Heather Wolfes.) In Starting Out in the Evening, Heather continually pesters Schiller for the real-life details behind the passages in his novels that strike her as autobiographical. I’d be more curious to know about the older writers whom Morton might have known. But I would not pester him for details. I’d rather imagine them.