by Jim Shepard
What I wrote to do was to ask forgiveness. Instead, with your image before me, I return to my own solitude.
Many greetings to your mother. I send you all that I’m unable to say to you. I wish you God’s safety. Write. Write to your Murnau. I wish I could say more—
On March 10, 1931, with his own car in the shop, Murnau rented a light blue Packard for a two-day drive from Los Angeles to Monterey. Twelve miles south of Santa Barbara, his chauffeur stopped for gas at the Rio Grande Oil Station. When the chauffeur returned to the car, Murnau’s house-servant, a young Filipino, was seated at the wheel.
The Filipino told the chauffeur that Murnau had said he could drive. Murnau, seated in the back seat with Pal, didn’t confirm or deny the claim.
The Filipino drove for approximately five miles. The chauffeur records having protested repeatedly that he was driving too fast.
At about that time, Murnau is supposed to have said from the back seat, “Pal is frightened.” These were his last recorded words.
At six-thirty or so the Packard slung itself sideways off a bend and rolled over once. At first all of its occupants, including Pal, seemed unhurt. Murnau was found twenty feet from the car, conscious but unable, or unwilling, to speak. He was admitted to the Santa Barbara College Hospital. He died the following morning, fifteen years and two hundred and twenty-six days after the death of his friend Hans.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This novel is a work of imagination.
That imagination would have been pitifully undernourished without the contributions of the following texts:
Gerd Albrecht and Klaus Becker’s Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau: Ein Grosser Filmregisseur der 20er Jahre; Uta Berg-Ganschow and Wolfgang Jacobsen’s Film … Stadt … Kino … Berlin; Janet Bergstrom’s “Sexuality at a Loss: The Films of F. W. Murnau”; Luciano Berriatua’s Los Proverbios Chinos de F. W. Murnau; Hans-Michael Bock and Wolfgang Jacobsen’s Film-Materialien: Henrik Galeen; Robert Bresson’s Notes on Cinematography; Karl Brown’s Adventures with D. W. Griffith; Jean Cocteau’s Diary of a Film; Alan Clark’s Aces High; Richard Dyer’s “Children of the Night”; Lotte Eisner’s Murnau and The Haunted Screen; David Flaherty’s “A Few Reminiscences”; Lewis Freeman’s In the Tracks of the Trades; Karl Freund’s “Die Berufung des Kameramannes”; Peter Fritzsche’s A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination; Ken Gelder’s Reading the Vampire; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann; Albin Grau’s “Licht-Regie im Film”; Richard Griffith’s The World of Robert Flaherty; Ursula Hardt’s Erich Pommer: Film Producer for Germany; Charles W. Haxthausen and Heidrun Suhr’s Berlin: Culture and Metropolis; Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig’s “Der Damon im Glashaus: Eine Skizze von Arbeit am Faust-Film”; Ernst Hofmann’s Aus Briefen F. W. Murnaus: DerMensch und der Kunstler; Christopher Isherwood’s Christopher and His Kind, Prater Violet, and Lions and Shadows; Franz Kafka’s Letters to Milena; Klaus Kreimeier’s The Ufa Story; Else Lasker-Schüler’s Concert; Hector MacQuarrie’s Tahiti Days; Roland Marz and Rosemarie Radeke’s Von der Dada-Messe zum Bildersturm DIX + Berlin; Victor Meisel’s Voices of German Expressionism; John H. Morrow, Jr.,’s German Air Power in World War I; Robert Newton’s Your Diamond Dreams Cut Open My Arteries: Poems by Else Lasker-Schüler; Aaron Norman’s The Great Air War; Frederick O’Brien’s Mystic Isles of the South Seas; Graham Petrie’s Hollywood Destinies; Michael Powell’s Edge of the World; Eberhard Roters’s Berlin 1910–1933; Rainer Rother’s Ufa-Magazine NR. 5: Faust, from Die Ufa 1917–1945: Das Deutsche Bildimperium; Thomas J. Saunders’s Hollywood in Berlin; Oliver Sayler’s Max Reinhardt and His Theatre; The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer (Tut Schlemmer, ed.); Eberhard Spiess’s Wenn Ihr Affen nur ofter schreiben wolltet!: Briefwechsel zwischen Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau und Lothar Müthel; Robert Louis Stevenson’s In the South Seas; Walter Thielemann’s “Nosferatu: Der Neue Weg im Film”; Paul Virilio’s War and Cinema; Thomas Waugh’s “Murnau: The Films Behind the Man”; and Robin Wood’s “The Dark Mirror: Murnau’s Nosferatu.”
I’m also grateful for the assistance of the following institutions: the Armchair Sailor Bookstore, in Newport, Rhode Island; the Deutsche Bundesarchiv-Militararchiv, in Freiburg; the Deutsches Institut für Filmkunde, in Frankfurt; the Goethe-Institut, in New York; the Krankenbuchlager, Berlin; the Staatliches Filmarchiv, Berlin; the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin; and Williams College.
I thank the following individuals, for their time, their support, and their particular contributions: Hans Albrecht, Ann Blume, Amy Bottke, Kristin Carter-Sanborn, Gary Fisketjon, Charles Fuqua, Katrin Herzog, Frau Hoffmann, Meredith Hoppin, Thomas Kohut, Peter Matson, Elizabeth Pennebaker, Eberhard Spiess, Werner Sudendorf, and Gary Zebrun.
And finally, my thanks to two people who can’t be thanked enough: Ron Hansen and Karen Shepard. Against all odds, they remained unflagging, optimistic, patient, and rigorous with their editorial advice.
About the Author
Jim Shepard (b. 1956) is the author of four short story collections and seven novels, most recently The Book of Aron, which has been shortlisted for both the Kirkus Prize and the American Library Association Andrew Carnegie Medal. Originally from Connecticut, Shepard now lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He is the J. Leland Miller Professor of English at Williams College, where he teaches creative writing and film. He won the Story Prize for his collection Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which was also a finalist for the National Book Award. Shepard’s stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, among other publications; five have been selected for the Best American Short Stories, two for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and one for a Pushcart Prize.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1998 by Jim Shepard
Introduction © 2005 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
Portions of this novel previously appeared in TriQuarterly, the Southwest Review, the Michigan Quarterly Review, and Doubletake.
Cover design by Kat JK Lee
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2666-6
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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JIM SHEPARD
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