And What Do You Do Mr. Gable?

by Richard Flanagan

  ‘All the living are guilty,’ he writes, a judgement he did not exclude himself from. He had signed the letters, he had refused to help, and he bore especial guilt about his mother, whom he felt he should have saved from the Holocaust.

  The dying Grossman is a novelist now going for broke. Like the dying Bulgakov writing The Master and Margarita, he was liberated from fame, success, even the possibility of publication, to finally be able to write what he meant.

  Near its end, Everything Flows breaks its banks again and again, chapters grow shorter, more concentrated, reducing history, thought, human nature, to a dazzling and dizzying poetry.

  Grossman makes a chilling historical argument replete with the ultimate Soviet blasphemy, the essence of which is still shocking to come to terms with. That it was written half a century ago makes it even more extraordinary.

  Grossman argues that the great nineteenth-century Russian prophets, from Gogol to Dostoevsky, those prophets of the unique Russian soul, believed that this soul, once fully realised, would lead the world to spiritual evolution.

  The fatal flaw, according to Grossman, was that ‘all failed to see that this soul had been enslaved for a thousand years’.

  For Grossman, Russian history was a chronicle of slavery. He traces the growing enslavement of the Russian people through the Middle Ages, and argues that the great progressive achievements of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great were linked to a corresponding increase in the growth of what he calls ‘non-freedom’.

  In Russia, Grossman sees progress and slavery as inextricably linked, while in the West it is progress and the growth of freedom.

  And here is the heart of Grossman’s terrifying vision: the true consequences of Lenin’s revolution were to take this uniquely Russian slavery to the world. This for Grossman is the Russian spectacle that enchants the world: ‘of modernisation through non-freedom’.

  For Grossman, Stalin is but a consequence, and an inevitable one at that, of Lenin. And not just Stalin, but Fascism. Writing this in the early 1960s in Russia was more than merely blasphemous. It was an historical insight of extraordinary perception.

  ‘Did Russia’s prophets ever imagine,’ Grossman wrote in the final months of his life, ‘that their prophecies about the coming universal triumph of the Russian soul would find their grating fulfilment in the unity of the barbed wire stretched around Auschwitz and the labour camps of Siberia?’

  Grossman’s hero, Ivan Grigoryevich, senses the spirit of the Gulag all around him. ‘Barbed wire, it seemed, was no longer necessary; life outside the barbed wire had become in its essence no different from that of the barracks.’

  How terrifying this insight is: an idea has escaped the Gulag and might take the world.

  The great irony, according to Grossman, was that Lenin, through his violence and terror, not just destroyed any possibility of liberation from what he terms ‘the satanic force of Russia’s serf past’, but hugely advanced its domain. ‘Through the will, passion and genius of Lenin, Russia’s thousand-year law of development became a worldwide law.’

  And who looking at China can read this without trembling? Who can contemplate the USA’s present stumblings and the rise of the Tea Party movement without wondering?

  ‘A Putin–Palin ticket,’ suggested Gary Shteyngart—another Russian–Jewish writer whose contemporary satires focus on turbo-capitalism’s closeness to old-style totalitarianism—‘can really cement the liberties Russia has achieved over the last two hundred years.’

  Yet as he journeys through hell, somehow Grossman divines meaning in all this, and is finally hopeful. He concludes that freedom can never be destroyed. For Grossman this is ‘a sacred law of life: human freedom stands above everything. There is no end in this world for the sake of which it is permissible to sacrifice human freedom.’

  When he died, two letters were found in Grossman’s shirt pocket. One was the last letter his mother sent him from north Ukraine before the invading Germans murdered her, along with 30,000 other Jews of Berdichev in 1941. The other letter is his reply to his mother’s letter, written in 1951. In a sense he never stopped writing that letter.

  Chekhov, the grandson of a serf, wrote what could well serve as Grossman’s epitaph:

  Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave’s blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being—not a slave’s—coursing through his veins.

  Grossman, one senses, died a free man.

  The Age

  18 September 2010

  NEAR THE END of making the movie of One Hand Clapping, I one night stayed back in the cutting room drinking with my editor, John Scott, whose luminous career spans the history of modern Australian film. I listened to his wondrous tales of film-making madness: of directors whose productions had run out of money and who burnt their out-takes both to keep warm and so that they could not be made to put them back in their final cut; of actors who got drunk and surly in order to provoke fights they then lost in order to play in a suitably physically decrepit manner a death scene the following day; of producers imprisoned for stealing art works to finance their next film.

  He told me of how for every tired Hollywood joke about the tycoon who comes to Beverly Hills and sends his chauffeur in to the hotel to bring back the most expensive whore he can find, only for the chauffeur then to return with a writer, there is an apocryphal tale of encounters such as that between Clark Gable and William Faulkner, traditionally scripted as follows:

  CLARK GABLE:

  And what do you do, Mr Faulkner?

  WHILLIAM FAULKNER:

  I write. And what do you do, Mr Gable?

  When I went home that evening, I had on my bedside table Joseph Roth’s 1924 novel Hotel Savoy, set in a hotel on the border between Europe and Russia after World War I. The book fell open to the page in which the narrator, a survivor of Siberian POW camps, watched endless masses of refugees and soldiers flooding in from the revolution- and war-torn east, while from the West came ‘loud people who shouted and lied at the top of their voices, so as to deafen their conscience. They were cheats and braggarts and all of them came from the film industry and had a lot to tell about the world, but they saw the world through their goggle eyes, held it to be a commercial failure on the part of God, and intended to compete with him and to go into business on an equally large scale.’

  Near a century has passed and Roth’s goggle-eyed cheats and braggarts may not yet have overtaken God, but they have become, in their own words, king of the world, while the refugees continue to flood in from the east, and, like a hopelessly feuding old couple, writers and film-makers continue to denigrate each other, and continue to need each other.

  For my own part, I have come to a somewhat different position than is conventional. For one, I don’t believe in the myth of the devouring maw of movies. For another, I learnt a great deal from my time in the industry, about people as well as art, about how to tell stories, about rhythm, about narration—lessons I am still absorbing. And it has long seemed to me a gross slander to suggest, when film fails to deliver on the promise of the written word—be it a novel or a play or a screenplay—that it is writers who have been uniquely betrayed in the film-making process.

  Because in the film industry everyone is betrayed, everyone is exploited, and the writer differs only in his ludicrous individual vanity, in thinking that his pitiful situation is unique to him, rather than common to all. I say this with the sorry authority of one who is a writer by trade, but a director by misadventure.

  I had never directed a centimetre of celluloid in my life, had no background in film-making whatsoever, but I was guilty of writing one script, which had a long and curious history that culminated in me being asked if I wished to direct it.

  Carlos Fuentes once remarked, ‘We cannot act without the horizon of failure constantly in
view.’ Bearing this in mind and, in any case, having no other prospects of employment at the time, I agreed. Such vainglorious ignorance and its entirely predictable consequences are what the ancients coined the word hubris to explain, and invented classical comedy and tragedy to explore.

  A director, Orson Welles said, is someone who presides over disasters. Welles’ maxim captures perfectly the lunacy of the job, the King Canute-like nature of the role—to be granted seeming absolute power over events that can never be controlled, which, tide-like, wash up the shore over the feet, regardless of our desires, heedless of our demands. He neglected to add that the writer is the one who initiates the disaster, but that they should not be held responsible for its consequences.

  As director I was to learn that film-making runs on terror, rewards mediocrity, and views everybody as expendable. Film-making is the closest thing to a totalitarian society we have left outside of North Korea, and in it the director is expected to play the part of Kim Jong-Il. But it is only a part, and the director’s job is closer to that of the actor than the artist, more the Wizard of Oz inflating his image than Stalin exercising his omnipotence—for power, as he is constantly reminded, does not reside with him but with his masters.

  If the director is unwilling to play his role as dictator, he is seen as unfit for the job. If he is humble and good-natured, his humility and good nature will be understood only as weakness, and weakness will inevitably be punished. If he speaks honestly in a world in which the currency is lies, he destabilises not the tyranny, but only his own legitimacy as director. His position is hopeless, his task forlorn, his world a velvet prison.

  He must suffer the politics of film—in which he is but a lackey—and the inevitable artistic costs of those politics with what the Russian writer Isaac Babel termed, in a speech in Moscow in 1934, as the authority of silence. The great Russian director Eisenstein wished to make films in the spirit in which Babel wrote: but in the end Babel’s only possible answer to the horror of Stalinism was to write nothing, his creative death anticipating his physical death in the Gulag five short years later.

  Film is troubled by these and by so many other things. It is troubled by needing too much money, and never having enough. It is troubled by wanting to be art and needing to be popular. It is troubled by needing too many people and it is troubled by the people it gets: a procession of the halt and the lame staggering back from a World War I killing field would have fewer physical and emotional traumas than the average film crew.

  And film is troubled by the destructive delusion, shared by so many film-makers and writers, that film can and should aspire to the same condition as the written word. Film’s desire for respectability remains strong after a century, and in consequence so does its ambition to put itself on a pedestal along with the older forms of storytelling, notably novels. Given that film’s possibilities and delights are not those of the word, such a snobbery is both artistically destructive and historically ironic.

  Three centuries ago it was novels that were dismissed as vulgar, common entertainments with neither artistic merit nor potential. Then justification for novels was sought through inappropriate comparisons and imitations of lyric poetry, as films today too often seek to justify their worth through an inappropriate deference to novels.

  In film, fidelity to the written word is not necessarily desirable, even if it were realisable—which it is not. Such tensions between the word and the finished film are nothing new. In the screenplay for the original version of King Kong we find such descriptions as the following of Skull Island at dawn:

  The rose light of the silent domes flushes that heaven about them until the whole sky, one scarlet canopy, is interwoven with a roof of waving flame.

  The first King Kong was shot in black and white.

  Even great directors sometimes succumb to what may be termed the literary fallacy. In the screenplay for Three Colours: Blue, we read the following direction by the writer–director Krzysztof Kie´slowski, for the character Julie to enter a doorway that ‘is hideous and stinks’.

  I still watch Blue hoping my nostrils might pick up that scent of Kie´slowski’s doorway.

  It is a commonplace that screenplays are never the finished work: they are the invitation to others to build a finished work—the film—on a foundation of words. To direct is to learn something more—that a script is like a song tune that can be sung in many different ways. It is to discover that there is an infinite array of films, magnificent, average, mediocre and bad, that could be made from a single script. A writer tends to think there is only one version—the one he saw as he was writing.

  In any case, whatever the intentions of the director and his colleagues, film remains above all else the art of the possible. It has been put to me that film is a cyclone you summon into existence, and in the eye of which you are compelled to live and work, hoping that it doesn’t destroy both you and your movie before its energy is spent. Like all evocative metaphors this says in too many words what can be said simply in fewer: that film changes because of life.

  Because of sickness. Love. Hate. Jealousy. Generosity. Technical fiascos. Bad weather. Genius. Mediocrity. Because a great scene on paper becomes a terrible scene on film when an actor has been up all night drinking and believes himself to be in the scene from the day before and that he is shortly to be murdered. Or the crew are in mutinous ferment because the first is out of her mind on cocaine because her boyfriend believes she is sleeping with the actor who is receiving death threats on his mobile phone. When the gaffer is being interviewed by police to assist with their enquiries regarding all or any of the above.

  Occasionally, things do change for the better. For example, my brief for my film’s composer, Cezary Skubiszewski, was limited and limiting. His wondrous music was neither, and when coupled with images, created effects and moods I had not been able to achieve with words. I found actors who would have wept tears of blood for a director if they knew how, who blew the breath of life into the dust of the dialogue and instructions that were my poor script.

  Such miracles—the word seems not unjustified—of working together with gifted people were for me the great pleasure of film-making, and one of the great creative joys of my life. As a writer one more or less knows what one is capable of creating. The mystery of film is that you can never predict how much worse or how much better the final product will be from your original conception, because you are working with others.

  And so film is not made in a state of inspiration when the muse and artist and environment come together in glorious creative ferment. Film is what you achieve with a small army of skilled anarchists embroiled in constant civil war, without enough money, running out of time, in a state of exhaustion, when you daily face the possibility you may be sacked.

  There is, of course, the lamentable nonsense that because movies are a collaborative form, they are somehow superior as art to older individual forms such as the novel, being—supposedly—truer to the collective Zeitgeist. We may question this view if for a moment we ponder a short list of some of the truly great and successful collaborations of the last one hundred or so years: the genocide of the Armenians, the collectivisation of the kulaks, the Final Solution, Year Zero, Operation Desert Storm and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. I offer no moral gloss on The Phantom Menace, nor yet an aesthetic one on the other listings. I would merely observe that collaboration is in itself neither a moral nor an aesthetic virtue, and should never, in any case, be taken as a guarantee that the final collectively realised product—the film—will be better than its individually conceived inspiration—the novel or screenplay.

  There is the recurrent MacGuffin, as Hitchcock termed red herrings, that audiences relate to film as they do to novels. But where a novel written with no money can hold a reader transfixed for a dozen hours—in the bath, in bed, over breakfast, in a rattling, overcrowded tram—a film cannot. It needs the most elaborate
technology available and even then has to lock people up in a state of sensory deprivation to keep them vaguely amused for a hundred minutes.

  Could this have something to do with the way a novel demands that a reader collaborate in its creation, where a film does not? With the way a novel needs a reader to invent it as much as the writer; whereas a film dictates to an audience what the characters look like, sound like, and so on? Is a novel a cosmos we invent, and a film a cul-de-sac we only visit?

  We are deluded by the budgets, the publicity, that vast screen, those extraordinary effects, to believe that the world is being shown us in the cinema. But in truth, a film is very limited in the story it can tell. A film structurally is a short story with, hopefully, some poetic overlays. It must cleave closely to its plot, and to a very small number of characters.

  A novel, however, is a universe you must invent and people, and it is a much larger, richer and more diverse creation. I don’t mean that novels are superior as a form, but that films, like sonnets, have definite constraints that one must understand and respect, and that, like sonnets, within those constraints anything is possible.

  When writers write books, they write them without interference. No one in publishing threatens a writer that they may be taken off their book unless they write the next chapter like Wilbur Smith, because Wilbur’s selling this week. No one says that they love the writing but the problem with this book is the writer. But in films, such heavy-handed behaviour—and far worse besides—is routine. And all because a book may be cheap, but a film is not.

  In film, money is everything, and everyone ends up in its thrall. In comparison to any other art form, the money the film industry spends just on promoting and marketing itself is enormous, and makes me sometimes wonder whether film, rather than being the great art form, is instead the great hype, the great con job of our age. And yet it is undeniable that in spite of all arrayed against them, film-makers still sometimes manage to make great movies, but it is art made in a tyranny, and the name of the tyrant is money.