by Tom Bissell
For many months after Desperate Characters reappeared, writer friends, agents, and strangers sent to me numerous works of fiction and poetry they maintained never met with proper acclaim. The books came in, one after another, accompanied by nth-generation Xeroxes of effulgent reviews from Publishers Weekly and stamped with enthusiastic blurbs from James Baldwin, Stanley Elkin, and Rita Mae Brown. Brokenhearted postscripts revealed the miserable delicacy of our literary machinery: “Although it sold well, the publisher let it go out of print....” “The Times review came out eleven months after its publication....” “There was no paperback sale....” I soon felt as though I were deep in the peaty bowels of some awful literary purgatory, where hundreds of books are lashed with their own obscurity, many no worse than those considered—in an irritating oxymoron—“contemporary classics.” I floated one or two of these projects before Norton’s board, but failed to convince anyone of the fiduciary soundness of further revivals. It did not auger well that Graywolf Press’s ambitious Rediscovery series, which republished, among other books, Larry Woiwode’s Beyond the Bedroom Wall, one of the greatest American novels I have ever read, had been recently discontinued.
With all this in mind, I don’t know if I could have read a less comforting book than Joseph Blotner’s landmark biography Faulkner. Even Faulkner was forced to sneak past checkpoints into demilitarized literary immortality. Here again, in this century, were all the hard-luck accouterments of ill-starred nineteenth-century scriveners. With every book but Sanctuary out of print, Faulkner was living in Hollywood, drinking too much, reduced to reworking screenplays for films like The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse. (Of course, he also scripted To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep.) While many writers and critics revered him, Faulkner’s popular status was so obscure that Faulkner was asked by the actor Clark Gable who Faulkner felt were the best living writers. Faulkner replied, “Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, and myself.” A surprised Gable asked Faulkner if he wrote fiction. “Yes, Mr. Gable,” Faulkner said. “What do you do?”
In 1944, a despondent Faulkner came across a letter that had lain unopened in his desk for months. Faulkner opened his mail only when he recognized the return address, or to scavenge any return postage stamps. The three-month-old letter, torn open on a whim, was from the young critic Malcolm Cowley, who wanted to write an essay on Faulkner that would “redress the balance” between his worth and reputation. Faulkner gave Cowley his delighted blessing, but the essay was rejected several times by editors who maintained that Faulkner was an unsalable commodity. It finally appeared in the New York Times Book Review, which for once found itself on the right side of history. Soon after that, Viking Press contracted Cowley to edit a collection of Faulkner’s work for the Viking Portable Library, a book that remains in print to this day. Thanks to Cowley’s essay and the windfall of reappraisals that followed, Faulkner no longer had to “eke out a hack’s motion picture wages” to support his financially hopeless fiction. Five years later, he would win the Nobel Prize.
I don’t doubt that many writers eventually receive their due returns, but the fact remains that many is not all. For those of us who love literature, only the all-encompassing justifies complacency. Our situation today is not altogether grim. In recent years, several writers have been revived thanks mainly to the efforts of individuals, my Norton colleague Robert Weil’s heroic republication of Henry Roth and Tim Page’s equally heroic salvage of Dawn Powell among them. Occasionally, I pull from my shelf my favorite contemporary novels—Robert Antoni’s Divina Trace, Philip Caputo’s Horn of Africa, Mark Jacobs’s Stone Cowboy, and Gayl Jones’s The Healing, to name a vastly underappreciated few—and wonder what will become of them. These questions were much less troubling when I was merely a reader who believed that the captains of the industry that now employs me were, at heart, attentive and just. Critics deserve their portion of blame—too many incapable of all but obvious commonplaces. Those few critics of higher caliber are often given to asking, “Will we be reading this fifty years from now?” The implication of this last-resort rhetoric is clear: I am a noncombatant observer upon literature’s battlefield. The implication is also false. Whatever a book’s merits, it can do little to fulfill such prophecy by itself.
What faith, then, can the poet or novelist place in his or her work’s survival? Is literary destiny simply yet another god that failed? Although I know what I now believe, I hope I am wrong. Nevertheless, I cannot help but imagine that literature is an airplane, and we are passengers on it. One might assume that behind the flimsy accordion door sit pilots of skill and accomplishment. But the cockpit is empty. It has always been empty. The controls are abandoned. They have always been abandoned. One needs only to touch them to know how mutable our course.
—2000
ESCANABA’S MAGIC HOUR
Movies, Robot Deer, and the American Small Town
MAGIC HOUR: The brief periods of dawn and dusk that allow enough time for shooting, but also create some striking effects on film.
—The Complete Film Dictionary
EXT. ESCANABA AREA HIGH SCHOOL ATHLETIC FIELD—TWILIGHT
In the hard cold of a waning afternoon in early March, I stand on the hash-marked permafrost of my hometown football field in Escanaba, Michigan, and wait for a motion picture to be filmed. So far, I have seen almost nothing of what moviemaking is rumored to consist. I have seen a brief game of touch football break out among the crew. I have seen the film’s star, writer, and director, Jeff Daniels, field the same question from four different journalists. I have been introduced to one of those journalists by Daniels, an irreducibly dreamlike introduction, since that journalist happened to be my childhood best friend, Mike. I have seen many, many lights—enormous, mutant lights whose wattage is equal to a perpetual camera flash—moved all over the place and overheard complicated justifications for doing so. And I have listened to three Escanabans, standing together near the field’s entrance gate, tell me what they think of the production: “It’s interesting,” “It’s interesting,” and “Pretty interesting.”
The one scene on tonight’s call sheet is a nightmare sequence in which Daniels’s character realizes he is standing in his underwear before a stadium of Escanabans. The film’s producers were hoping for a turn-out of 4,000 local extras. What looks to be 600 have been herded into the center section of the bleachers, leaving huge swaths of seating utterly empty. The trouble no doubt began with the request for extras the Movie People placed in Escanaba’s daily newspaper. There were three provisos.
Proviso One: No one would be allowed to bring alcoholic beverages. Why this is a problem: Escanaba is the sort of place where family friends earn nicknames like A Liter Later. Booze is, quite simply, a cultural staple.
Proviso Two: No one would be allowed to wear “any clothing from professional sports teams,” since to do so would force the producers to pony up permissions fees. Why this is a problem: Escanaba is the sort of place where people (people, meaning more than one) paint their homes the colors of their favorite football team. More often than not, this means the green-and-gold of the Green Bay Packers. It is immensely difficult for many grown-up Escanabans to leave their homes without some NFL logo displayed somewhere on their bodies. Many people’s “good” coats happen to be expensive leather jackets the breasts of which are emblazoned with a gigantic Packers G. This is not to suggest that these people don’t own other, non-NFL-related clothing, only that to forbid it, for whatever reason, is to disapprove of it, and since rural Midwesterners are highly self—conscious, a good way to ensure that large numbers of them will not show up for your movie shoot is to tell them what they can and cannot wear.
Proviso Three: No one would be allowed to leave his or her seat, not even for bathroom breaks. Why this is a problem: From what I was able to gather earlier in the day, this simply baffled everyone. A woman I ran into at the mall all but scoffed at the idea of sitting still for four hours “without a bathroom.” The Movie Peo
ple’s fatal error here was their failure to explain why no one could leave his or her seat. At stake, of course, is the film’s continuity. If people are getting up to relieve themselves, a scene that takes hours to shoot yet occupies thirty seconds of film time will be riddled with hundreds of inconsistencies. So what was a sensible request on the part of the Movie People came off to Escanabans as a veiled if really weird threat.
Mike and I are not the only members of the press here to cover the film, which is nothing less than the biggest story in Escanaba’s history. The film’s producer, Tom Spiroff, a Michigan-born, Los Angeles-residing man in his early forties, approaches our journalistic flotilla. He is wearing a small fortune’s worth of North Face arcticwear and, in a gesture of superhuman kindness, greets every one of us by name. This includes the pretty redhead from the local television station, a tall fellow from the Flint Journal, and a reporter from a national wire service who interviewed Mike three days ago. Mike, a graduate of a top—flight midwestern law school, has reason to believe that he will find himself cast in the man’s coming dispatch as Escanaba’s rube reporter, which he does not relish at all.
The remaining two journalists, both locals, ignore the filming entirely and discuss last night’s barnburner between the Carney-Nadeau Wolves and the Rapid River Rockets:
“Good game there, eh?”
“Oh, yeah. That was really something.”
Their accents are rich with the atonal music of the Upper Midwest, so this exchange is more accurately rendered as:
“Good game dare, eh?”
“Oah, yah. Dot was reely sumptin.”
To appreciate just how newsworthy by Escanaba standards, this film is, one needs only to peruse a recently published millennial Escanaba retrospective, which includes in its “Faces of the 20th Century” a local chemist who invented something called “bloodberry gum” and a man who “helped bring natural gas service to the area.” What’s more, the Movie People are here not to use this lonely ore town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula as an anonymous backdrop; they are here to carry Escanaba to the silvery brink of eponymous fame. Daniels’s film is titled Escanaba in da Moonlight, a bit of marketing audacity equal to setting a sitcom in Qom. They’ve been here, filming, for a little over a week, and within a month they will be gone. “Like gypsies,” promised Daniels, a little cruelly, to the local newspaper, in one of the several thousand articles it has so far published on the film. (Most of these articles were written by Mike, who has privately—and, I fear, quite seriously—vowed to shoot himself in the face if asked to write another.) But Daniels is mistaken. I know Escanaba’s delicate musculature too well. The Movie People might leave, but they will never be gone. This movie will be, forever, a part of it.
An incidental curiosity of living in New York City, as I do, is how often one finds oneself on the entertainment industry’s participatory edge. One learns quickly to correct one’s path as to leave undisturbed the crew doing exterior shots for Law & Order as they wait for the perfect wash of Sunday-morning light to fall across Beekman Street. Cities, like movies, are extradimensional, most easily defined by what they are not: neither suburb nor town, neither novel nor play. The immense grandeur of cities is often the hatch through which people escape places like Escanaba. Although the city escape is spatial and difficult to repeal, the movie escape is much simpler—a temporal hegira of ninety minutes in familiar darkness. This is what makes the Movie People’s presence in Escanaba so incongruous. Rather than supply Escanaba with their industry’s latest distraction, the Movie People will make Escanaba itself distraction’s newest template. In return, Escanaba will play the part of that myth-fogged place so popular with Hollywood’s illusionists: the American small town.
Escanaba is an Ojibway word meaning either “red buck” or “flat rock.” (Local gallows humor holds that the Ojibway were exterminated before this could be cleared up.) It is not a wholesome town, no clean—living idyll where Clark Kent comes of age. The summers are lovely but brief, the winters long and Siberian. Its industries are extractive and blue-collar. Its tourists, who usually come from nearby, even tinier towns, refer to Escanaba as “the city.” The good-looking, athletic boys I went to high school with did not go on to Yale or Wall Street. Many are still here, managing restaurants or selling cars. The people are not especially nice, which is not to say Escanaba does not have many fine people. “Nice” is a surface with little relation to inner decency. It takes some doing in our Pentium-processed time to be Caucasian and poor, but there is a lot of solemn Caucasian poverty in Escanaba. This is best illustrated by the local newspaper’s personal ad section, in which a disproportionate number of ads begin: “DWF, 21, single mother...”
The question remains whether “small town” signifies anything today beyond its modest adjective-noun mandate. The Census Bureau refuses to define what a “small town” is. A city, according to its definition, is any settlement of more than 25,000 people. Anything below that is, in an enigmatic tautology, a “place.” A sad fate for a way of life upon which whole architectures of faith were once built, and one wonders if the Movie People are here as apostates or revivalists or for one last sweep through the small town’s abandoned pews.
Whether one is from Nashville or the Upper West Side, one’s hometown means something that often outstrips our ability to explain what. Small hometowns, in considerable ways, tend to mean even more. A young woman with a mohawk becomes immeasurably more intriguing when she claims Portage, Wisconsin, as her birthplace rather than Westport, Connecticut, and one can safely assume that the young urban striver who hails from Winner, South Dakota, regards himself differently from his fellow straphangers from Westchester. I, too, have always privately cherished telling people I’m from rural Michigan, especially in a city in which very few can say the same. Imagine my alarm, then, to learn that a film will soon offer an entire nation its own vicarious Escanaba. And so I have returned to the place in which I was born and raised and love very much to determine how much of it the Movie People will take and how much they will leave behind. Will Peoria play in Peoria?
I abandon my colleagues and sidle toward the half dozen Movie People gathered at midfield, all of them huddled around Daniels’s stand-in, an Escanaban named Rob Hosking. A Steadicam operator walks a tight circle around Rob, beginning his sweep focused on Rob’s face and ending it with a clinching shot of the stadium’s bleachers. Gary Goldman, Daniels’s assistant director, watches the shot’s rehearsal within a hand-held monitor. Gary is a good-natured, ruthlessly efficient commercial director from New York. He wears sunglasses regardless of available daylight and a tight white ball cap one suspects is in place to keep his skull from detonating. “Let’s do it again,” Gary tells the Steadicam operator, and speaks, commando-style, into the miked collar of a sporty Day-Glo orange jacket: “Right side. Camera right side. Copy.”
As the sun sets behind the thick pine stand that perimeters the football field, the lack of extras begins to become a problem. To appreciate how crucial extras are to tonight’s filming, one must know several things about Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. First, citizens of the Upper Peninsula are known as “Yoopers,” an inelegant transliteration of “U. P.,” as this underpopulated and fearsomely bleak stretch of land is known. The U. P. is separated from the rest of Michigan culturally and geographically, connected only by the Mackinac Bridge, an architectural marvel built as recently as 1957. The U. P. might be the most rural part of the country, as well as its least familiar. Some maps neglect to include the border separating the U. P. from Wisconsin, an accidental annexation that, if made official, would please the vast majority of Yoopers, who feel a stronger cultural identification with Wisconsin anyway. Finally—and in light of tonight’s scene, not to mention the whole film, this is a key point—for Yoopers, deer hunting has near religious significance. The first day of deer season is actually a school holiday—Deer Day, it is called—and the entire place is a hotbed of gun crazies and gun-craziness. Despite this, there were, in 1997,
in the Upper Peninsula, a land mass larger than Massachusetts and Connecticut combined, and which contains a population of 300,000 Schlitz-drinking, deer-slaying yahoos, a grand total of eight murders.
In Escanaba in da Moonlight, Daniels plays Reuben Soady, a luckless forty—year—old who stands in danger of becoming the oldest Soady in history to have never bagged a buck. The film—which is, incidentally, a comedy—details Reuben’s efforts to kill a deer. Some will perhaps be unsurprised that the film is being independently produced. Even Daniels, in my interview with him, was quick to point out that he “doesn’t hunt,” and that the film is really a love story. Let me say that, as an erstwhile Yooper, I am not especially fazed by the script’s deer-murdering aspects, even though I do not hunt either. Hunting occupies an elemental chamber within the consciousness of rural Americans, for whom the semantic schism between pig and pork and deer and venison is harder to justify. More to the point, deer are the stupidest terrestrial mammals the planet has so far known. They are essentially locusts with hoofs. When not eating or breeding, they like to launch themselves into traffic. If hunting in Upper Michigan were abolished, thousands of deer would starve during its brutal winter, and its highways would be a living obstacle course.
Reuben’s nightmare, then, finds him before his mocking fellow Escanabans, all of whom chant “Buckless! Buckless!” and wave aloft signs that say things like “Da Buckless Yooper.” If the scene comes off, Escanaba in da Moonlight could mark the first instance in cinematic history of a central character being derided for his inability to slaughter a highly beloved constituent of the animal kingdom.
I mention the crowd problem to a unit publicist, who explains that tonight’s filming is in direct competition with the Escanaba Area High School athletic department’s Fan Club Fund Raiser across town. “It’s a really big deal here,” she tells me. I nod, even though it is the first time I have ever heard of this Fan Club Fund Raiser. The Movie People hoped to counteract the Fan Club Fund Raiser by staging one of their own. By paying two dollars, each extra can sit on his or her oversized Midwestern keister and know that not only will they appear in the film, but their money will go to benefit the high school’s athletic department.
