by Clive James
Similarly, in the film world a meeting is a civilized battle, but there is no point to being civilized if you can’t fight in the first place. To that extent, she is not ladylike; but only if you think that ladies should sit still to be overruled. The only element missing from her gift for the useful rule of thumb (“Never go to a meeting without a strategy”) is that she is not especially funny. Lighthearted, yes: but not hilarious. Julia Phillips, who pioneered the format of the female executive vade mecum with her brilliantly entertaining You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, was hilarious. Reading it again, I find that her book still is, though more than ever it generates too great a sense of waste. The producer of Taxi Driver, The Sting, and Close Encounters could have done even more: run studios, run for president. But the cocaine got her. Sometimes I think I might have been a Puritan all along. I drank too much, smoked cigarettes and cigars like an idiot, and at one period I was the kind of pothead who looked like a small cloud being propelled by a pair of legs. But even in my present condition I still tend to draw myself up to my full height and denounce all users of hard drugs. They are such an unequivocal attack on the brain. Julia Phillips was brilliant and funny and could write a book. She was Nora Ephron and Elaine May rolled into one. How dared she throw all that on the fire? In her book she talks quite a lot about her sad proclivities, but the more she confesses, the less confidence the reader has in her when she touches on other topics. Would you buy a movie about aliens from somebody whose idea of solving her personal problems is to cram Peru up her nose?
Despite the ruinous consequence of Julia Phillips’s coke habit, women have gone on to something like equality in Hollywood, and sometimes, intermittently, to something like dominance. In 2008 a remake of George Cukor’s 1939 movie The Women appeared, based, like its predecessor, on the stage play by Clare Boothe Luce. Diane English, who wrote, produced, and directed the remake, spent fifteen years of her life setting it up. The movie not only is the brainchild of a woman, it stars nothing but women, and even the extras are all women. Unfortunately, the result is utterly unwatchable. Feminism is an ideology, and like any other ideology it can easily transmute a necessary perception into an indulgent madness. The studio heads sat on the movie, on the sensible principle that nobody except an idiot would want to see it, but finally their nerve cracked and they released it. What was wrong with the idea? A world without men doesn’t look like the world, however desirable the notion might sometimes seem. For once, the studio bigwigs should have stuck to their conservative instincts.
Still, Hollywood tales of fallibility add up to a field of interest that can never lose its charm. I reread a few pages of David McClintick’s Indecent Exposure, which recounts how the film executive David Begelman embezzled ten thousand dollars belonging to the actor Cliff Robertson; and I soon found myself rereading it all. Begelman didn’t need to embezzle money: he earned millions. He embezzled because one of his many talents was a talent for the shortcut, and he thought that if Cliff Robertson’s bank account was open for pilfering, then it ought to be pilfered: it was practically a duty, an act of morality. Robertson was a wealthy man beyond his high fees for stardom, but he also had the strange characteristic of honesty. The collision of Robertson’s strange characteristic with Begelman’s strange characteristic made for a story begging to be told, and McClintick tells it well, with the proviso that he is the kind of writer who can’t tell “flaunt” from “flout” and who must therefore feign the literacy that he would like to embody.
But a few solecisms don’t much hurt the story, which is essentially an illustration of how, in Hollywood, a mighty figure need not fall, even when he is caught with his hand in the bag. Begelman was forgiven by the industry, whose illuminati thought that he must have been sick, or else he would have embezzled serious money instead of just a lousy few thousand dollars. If anyone emerged from the affair with his reputation damaged, it was Cliff Robertson, for making such a fuss.
Essentially all the stories of Hollywood fallibility are the one story, differing only in who tells it best. The interesting news is not so much that weak men, when given power, are still weak, but that whole empires of production have been built up which incorporate human corruptibility, allow for it, and even thrive on it. Books which analyze the durability of the Hollywood imperial systems are thus almost as interesting as books which analyze its frailty. Really the studios have never been frail at all: it might seem that a great brand name can be brought low by a single bad choice—Fox almost ruined by Cleopatra, UA totally ruined by Heaven’s Gate—but in fact the structures underwent decades of early testing and usually could be shaken only when it made business sense to merge or be absorbed.
Hollywood is a scale model of corporate America. Soon I will once again read The Genius of the System, by Thomas Schatz. I can tell I will, because I never really stop reading it. Exhaustively researched in the studio archives, the book shows how the survival of any filmmaking enterprise depended on Poverty Row: there had to be ordinary product to make the money, so that the occasional extraordinary product could aim at prestige, and thus act as a loss leader even when it failed. It was all worked out before sound was invented. And although many of the men who built the system loved the movies, they could just as well have been selling gloves. Most of them were Jews, as Neal Gabler describes in An Empire of Their Own. Good at finance, they used their expertise to move into a business territory that didn’t yet exist. It was a collective act of imagination, which would attain such an all-pervasive reality that we can’t now imagine our lives without it. My own business has always been with serious books, yet I have spent a large proportion of my life—years, when you add it up—watching movies and their television derivatives, and a lot of the books I have read have been about those movies. Some of them felt like a waste of time, but usually I felt as if I was learning something, unless the book was devoted to the kind of film theory that briefly surfaced in the 1960s and struck anyone intelligent as simply begging to be ignored. (The word “semiotics” was always a tip-off: head for the hills!) When I classify film books now, as time gets tighter, I ask myself whether the book is likely to contain anything I don’t know already. I have just read Tom Shone’s lavishly illustrated monograph on Scorsese. Shone writes well, but I would probably not have read his book if I hadn’t been asked to review it; whereas his wide-ranging treatise Blockbuster is a book I would like to read again. Books that give you the cultural scope of Hollywood are valuable right up the point when it is some sub–Frankfurt School pundit writing them, and even then, Otto Friedrich’s City of Nets, written from a lofty European viewpoint, is full of crunchy moments. (It was Friedrich who revealed to me that in California during the Nathanael West period there was a cult fad billing itself as Brain Breathing: The Secret of the Aztecs.) The glossy book in a large format, on the other hand, is rarely worth the effort of lifting it. David Thomson’s Moments That Made the Movies ranks nowhere beside his often-revised Biographical Dictionary of Film, which is even more batso but at least gives you a shower of judgments you can argue with. On that level, film books are a way of quarrelling while alone. They are popcorn reading for people who are glad not to have to share their popcorn. I exempt from this stricture any collection of pieces by a proper film critic such as David Denby or (the incomparable, in my view) Anthony Lane, but I wonder whether the collection of critical journalism, as a form, might not die with the print media. If so, it could live again on the web. As a print journalist who still remembers the sweet smell of hot metal, I would like to think that my principal means of expression will not survive my passing, but the truth is that nothing stops the kids. On my own website I have provided a gateway (in the Web section) to a blog called Self-Styled Siren. Sane in judgment and global in scope, the Siren, whose real name is Farran Nehme, seems to have seen every movie in the world. Even more annoyingly, she writes like an ace. You can cruise her site for a long time before remembering that time is not infinite, even though the love of art might seem t
o make it so.
Extra Shelves
WHEN IS AN EXTRA bookshelf not really an extra bookshelf? When you don’t have to build it. In my house I am under steady pressure from my most frequent visitors—wife, two daughters—not to turn it into a book warehouse like every other dwelling I have ever been in. Some of my critics are shameless in this regard. In my wife’s extended kitchen there are piles of books which have been there for years. Her magnificent scholarly library extends in an orderly manner through several rooms, but somehow it reaches the kitchen as Antarctic ice reaches the sea. Kitchens are strange attractors. In the kitchen of my elder daughter, who lives next door to me, there are bookshelves built into every free space, but on top of each top shelf there are piles of books lying horizontally, giving the general effect of a bookshop in Haye-on-Wye. Nevertheless, because these women have supervised my latest house since its beginnings, I try to respect their wishes for neatness, which they kindly associate with my comfort. Therefore, in the kitchen-studio which acts as my principal room for reading and writing, the floor-to-ceiling built-in bookcases on either side of the room should take care of my traditional holdings plus any new influx. In practice, however, some nonshelf shelving has appeared. On the kitchen counter, where it meets the wall beside the door, my complete set of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time stands between a horizontal stack of all the discs of season four of Game of Thrones—kindly sent to me by the producers—and another horizontal stack of some of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels, not yet read. The Flashman novels are popular among my friends and I have always promised myself that I would get around to them. Now that they have invaded my kitchen, they must be dealt with. Elsewhere in the kitchen, on a footlocker beside the couch, a couple of those invisible L-shaped plastic doodads provide support for a vertically arranged display of about half the Patrick O’Brian novels, which look so good in paperback. Thanks to the generous lending policy of my elder daughter and her friend Deirdre Serjeantson—a very learned woman, who is also good for advice on Elizabethan poetic imagery—I had already read the whole Jack Aubrey saga, but when I spotted a bunch of the individual volumes on Hugh’s bookstall I thought I had better start my own collection. Madness. Horizontally on the footlocker are also arranged some biographical books about Hemingway. Double madness: they don’t even look as if they are standing in a shelf. They just look as if they are lying around.
Upstairs there is a whole floor of the house which has similarly not only been taken over, but where the taking over is being taken over. Most of my books about twentieth-century politics are up there. I sold off my complete set of Martin Gilbert’s biography of Churchill, but all of Gilbert’s books about World War II and the Holocaust are there. My rationale for this particular cull was that I would be unlikely to find time to read the Churchill biography again, even though one of its volumes, Finest Hour, is among the great books about Britain’s salvation from barbarism. On the other hand, all six volumes of Churchill’s own history of World War II are still there, as if I will have time to pay them another visit. But I probably won’t, so their presence is really talismanic. We are often told that the next generation of literati won’t have private libraries: everything will be in the computer. It’s a rational solution, but that’s probably what’s wrong with it. Being book crazy is an aspect of love, and therefore scarcely rational at all.
Always Philip Larkin
READING JAMES BOOTH’S cloddishly entitled Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love so that I might review it for the New York Times Book Review, I was glad to find that the only sane view of Larkin is once again becoming standard, after too long a period in which there have been serious debates about how so disturbed a psyche could have produced such serenely integrated poetry. (Some pundits resolved the question by announcing that Larkin’s poetry was never really much good at all, but luckily their witless views did not penetrate as far as the high schools, where children continued to be told, correctly, that some of Larkin’s poems were as good as anything they were ever likely to read.) But for once, while working, I found myself a bit short of the necessary books. Over the years I have accumulated all the individual collections of Larkin’s poetry plus both versions of the Collected Poems (one version preserves the ordering of the individual volumes while the other version arranges everything chronologically) and I was laboring under the misapprehension that I had enough to go on. Now, reading Booth’s treatise, I realized that I needed The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, edited by Archie Burnett. There were scholarly notes to be consulted, and a few poems which I had never seen. Feeling ashamed that there was anything I had missed in the work of a man I had admired so much, I got my personal assistant to press the right buttons on her computer so that Abebooks might supply me with the desired volume. It arrived seemingly within minutes: yet more proof that we have entered a new age. Or, rather, that everyone else has: some of us are leaving too early to get much more than a hint of what life will be like when you will merely have to think of something you want and it will arrive instantly, still crackling with the ozone of the time-space continuum.
By whatever means it was supplied, though, what a glorious book to have on my desk. Promising myself to read only what I needed, I read on and on for hours, even rereading those poems which I have known almost by heart since the week they were first published. (I say “week” because they tended to make their first appearance in such weekly magazines as the Listener, whose then editor, Karl Miller, rightly treated the arrival of each fresh Larkin manuscript as a visitation from the angel Gabriel.) During my career as a critic I wrote at least half a dozen articles about Larkin without doing much more than scratching the surface of his brilliance, but I’m sure my instinct was sound in not trying to plumb the depths. The turmoil of his psyche is the least interesting thing about him. His true profundity is right there on the surface, in the beauty of his line. Every ugly moment of his interior battles was in service to that beauty. That being said, his unique thematic originality should be remarked: no other great modern poet, not even Yeats, was so successful at making his own personality the subject, and this despite the fact that his personality was something that he would really rather not have been stuck with. He would rather have been Sidney Bechet.
Villa America
AMANDA VAIL’S 1988 book about Sara and Gerald Murphy, Everybody Was So Young, is a disarming treatment of a subject that you have to treat disarmingly or get nowhere. The Murphys brought to Antibes in the 1920s a powerful first taste of the modern American international cocktail of artistic sensitivity and wealth. With prominent Europeans like Picasso eating out of their elegant hands, it was no wonder that the American expatriates—Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Hemingway, John Dos Passos, et hoc genus—all turned up to enjoy the facilities. The Murphys put some hard work into the Villa America: there were fourteen rooms and seven acres of garden, and the private beach had to be cleared of seaweed. But basically their little empire was an exercise in purchasing power, with the most famous artistic figures of the day included in the inventory. As a star hostess, Sara had the necessary gift of preparing the perfect scene to make it seem effortless. Later on, the golden couple had their tragedies—two children died in sad circumstances—but the basic rhythm of their story was one of stylish leisure, maintained as easily as breathing. Amanda Vail catches the charm. You can see yourself lounging about on the beach and feeling bound to start writing a masterpiece, if not today then tomorrow. Scott Fitzgerald, resenting the fact that the conditions were too good to favor the act of creation, trashed the furniture instead; and Hemingway, unwilling to yield to Gerald the position of center of the action, soon reestablished a due distance.
Fairyland had its tensions. The story has been told before. Calvin Tomkins’s 1971 book about the Murphys, Living Well Is the Best Revenge, failed to explain its own title (revenge for what? For too big an income?), but it caught the mood. Louis Auchincloss, who knew something about being born to privilege, reviewed Tomkins�
��s book with approval for the way it caught the theme of Sara’s dislike of the very idea that Scott Fitzgerald might have based Dick and Nicole in Tender Is the Night on her and her husband. Sara resented any suggestion that the ruling couple might have been unhappy. The Murphys had staked their lives on being perfect. Gerald, a painter who gave up painting, probably didn’t want to injure his seigneurial role with too much artistic commitment. In retrospect, that can seem a real pity, if you think, as I do, that his paintings were original, with a modern, clean-cut elegance that lasts like the styling of a Cord automobile.
But he wasn’t going to let art rule him. He had the means to run his own life, up until the point when catastrophe arrived in the form of arbitrary death for the children. He was able to go back to being a businessman and bury himself behind a desk, but Sara never really recovered. Theirs was a short era, and no dynasty. But their little kingdom generated a specific texture of bliss that was remembered by all who touched it, and by now it is being written about by people who were born long after it was over. You can see how facts might arouse the urge to perpetuate them beyond their time, but it is harder to see why that should be true of flavors and tones. There is a kind of writing that wants us to remember a way of life that the writer never saw. It ought to be a doomed enterprise, yet sometimes it is done well.
