The Disappointment Artist

by Jonathan Lethem

  D. was smart enough to detect my near-hysterical reverence, and it irritated him. The veneer of civility between us was thin by then. Seizing an advantage, he began picking at the film.

  “Come on, Jonathan. It’s a Hollywood Western.”

  I wanted to reply that any film became generic if you reduced it to a series of disconnected scenes by flitting in and out of the room. Instead I bit my tongue.

  “You’re giving it too much credit.”

  What The Searchers requires is focus, patience, commitment, I thought. Things you’re now incapable of giving.

  “You don’t really think John Ford was conscious—”

  A thousand times more conscious than you, I thought. My heart was beating fast.

  Then he burst out laughing. We’d come to the first battle scene, where Indians forgo a chance to ambush Wayne and his party from behind, only to be slaughtered in a face-off across a riverbank. For D. the scene was gross and malicious, calculated to make the Comanche look like tactical morons. The film had become contemptible to him, and he let me know. He’d missed the contextualizing moments that make the scene ambiguous—the other characters’ dismay at Wayne’s murderous fury, the bullets Wayne fires at departing braves as they carry off their dead. Nor would he happen to be in the room for the scene half an hour later when Wayne is elaborately censured for shooting an opponent in the back.

  I began a defense and immediately contradicted myself, first insisting that the Indians weren’t important as real presences, only as emblems of Wayne’s psychic torment. The film, I tried to suggest, was a psychological epic, a diagnosis of racism through character and archetype. The Indians served as Wayne’s unheeded mirror. Then, unable to leave my research on the shelf, I cited Ford’s renowned accuracy. Maybe he knew a few things about Comanche battle ethics—

  D. scoffed. For him it was impossible to honor Indians by showing them mowed down in a senseless slaughter (never mind that senseless slaughter was historical fact). He paced away, leaving me in a kind of hot daze, mouth dry, eyes locked on the screen, still grasping at my dream of a sanctified viewing of The Searchers, not seeing that it had already slipped away, that I’d again failed to defend the film, this time with an audience of just two.

  D. returned, and now his trembling effort to appear casual had as much to do with the freight between us as with any junkie symptom. Rightly—he knew me well enough to sense what was coming.

  “How can you expect to understand anything when you’re too fucking distracted to give it more than a passing glance?”

  “Relax, Jonathan. I only said I thought the movie wasn’t very good—”

  I couldn’t stop. “How do you decide so easily that you’re superior to a work of art? Ever worry that cheap irony won’t carry you through every situation?”

  “I’ve got eyes. It’s a fifties Western.”

  “That’s what’s so pathetic about people our age—” I silenced myself before I’d widened his crimes to cover our whole generation. Still, the damage was done. D. stalked off. I wouldn’t speak with him for five years from that day. Under the astonished eyes of my girlfriend I’d burst the bubble of silence in the apartment. Anger stemmed for months had risen and found a conduit. In D.’s underestimation of the film’s makers I saw his underestimation of his friends, we who weren’t fooled by his dissembling but indulged him, maintaining guilty silence as though we were fooled. D. had been an ambitious and generous soul when I first met him, and a champion of artistic greatness. In his sniping at The Searchers—at the film itself and at my galactic openness to it—I saw the slow-motion embittering of that soul condensed to one sour-grapes snapshot.

  What may have astonished my girlfriend more, and shames me in retrospect, is the Nietzschean chilliness of my actions. As in a priest-and-doctor-in-a-lifeboat puzzle, two things cried for saving and I could save just one. Seeing a friend spiral into desolation I reserved my protective sympathy instead for a work of art, for John Ford and John Wayne, remote, dead, and indifferent though they might be. Again my cards were on the table. Greatness above all.

  But that was in retrospect. At the time my concern was for my relationship with The Searchers. How ill-fated, how aggrieved, it had become. What was it with this film? Would I ever get to watch it without yelling at someone?

  Berkeley

  I snuck into the Pacific Film Archive on the heels of a crowd of perhaps fifty students, then sat with them in the theater, waiting—for what I didn’t know. The screening room there is a lot like Bennington’s Tishman, an austere, whisper-absorbing little hall, only built into a large museum in the center of a city instead of standing free in the Vermont woods. It was two years since my argument with D., and I was two years into the first draft of my quasi-Western. A grad-student friend, appraised of my need to refurbish my mind’s eye with a constant stream of imagery, had tipped me off to the existence of an undergraduate course on the Western, mentioning that the professor who taught it had once written about The Searchers. So I was there that afternoon to see a screening and hear a lecture, without any clue as to what was on the syllabus.

  The lights dimmed. The Warner Bros. logo, a strum of acoustic guitar, the familiar credit sequence—today’s movie was The Searchers. Sure, why not? Sitting there anonymous among the murmuring, notebook-rustling students, I stifled a laugh. I’d been watching the movie regularly on video, in private trysts. This would be the first time in the company of others since my early disasters.

  Other films can live in the tunnel-vision light of video, but The Searchers aches for the air of a screen large enough so that Wayne can loom like those distant towers of rock, and for the air of an audience. A ragged slice of American something, it wants to be met by another slice— to be projected, ideally, on a canyon wall, for a crowd of millions. The Cal freshmen at the Pacific Film Archive that afternoon were just forty or fifty shapeless new minds, there half willingly, dreaming of dates or Frisbees, yet they gave the film the air it needed. Or maybe after five or six watchings I was ready to respond to every frame of The Searchers, to meet it completely. Maybe there was something freeing about my place there as an official ghost, voiceless. As the lights came up I wept discreetly.

  I stayed for the professor’s talk. In his lecture he gestured at the film’s deep ambiguities without ever reaching, apparently with nothing to prove. He might have seemed a bit perfunctory, enclosed in a bubble of weariness, but if I noticed I blamed the bubble on the students. They were slightly interested, slightly more vague and restless. The vibrant ridicule of the Bennington students had been replaced here by automatic, spaced-out respect—sure it’s an important film: It’s assigned, isn’t it? In the professor I grokked a fellow obsessive. But I mistook him for an unfulfilled obsessive, instead of the vanquished one he turned out to be.

  The next day I tried not to be self-conscious, waiting in the English Department corridor behind a couple of his students. When my turn came I apologized for sneaking into his class, described the book I was writing, praised his lecture, then fished—he’d written about The Searchers somewhere, yes?

  What I caught was an old boot of pride lodged at the bottom of a stagnant lake of academic ennui, that reflexive self-censorship of real enthusiasms. I dragged the boot up to the surface, if only for a second. “My article’s about the iconography of Monument Valley,” he said, with unguarded brightness. “I only published an excerpt. The long version’s much more—I’m still working on it, actually—”

  “I’d love to see it.” I scribbled my address.

  “Yes, yes . . .” But he was already slipping back into those opaque depths. He’d noticed that he ought to be bewildered to have me in his office, that he didn’t really need a wild-eyed autodidact tugging his obsessions into the light. By then I was familiar with how so many grad students, hunkered down inside their terrifying careers, spoke of teaching loads, job postings, anything but the original passions at the cramped secret center of their work. Now I saw it was the same for the
professor. Or worse. Armies of yawning undergraduates had killed that part of him. Long or short, published or unfinished, I never saw any version of that essay.

  Defending The Searchers

  I surrounded The Searchers , ambushed it at every pass, told it to reach for the sky. In my pursuit I watched hundreds of other Westerns, studying the tradition, looking for glimpses. I studied Ford, learned his language, first in good films, then in rotten ones. I watched Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Paul Schrader’s Hardcore, those unofficial remakes, wanting to triangulate my obsession or feel the pulse of someone else’s. I read biographies of Wayne: What made him ready to play the part? Did he understand or was he Ford’s tool? I mowed through scholarship, hoping to assemble a framework that would free me to understand all I felt. And I wrote my novel; like a child with dollhouse figures I manipulated my versions of the characters and crises that had overpowered me, trying to decant The Searchers, unmake it, consume it. I watched the film and thought about it and talked about it too much, and when I eventually became a bore, The Searchers shot me in the back and walked away.

  I diminished the film, I think. By overestimating it, then claiming myself as its defender, I’d invented another, more pretentious way of underestimating it. My wish to control its reception was a wish to control my own guilt and regret, not anything the film needed from me, or from anyone. If the case for The Searchers could be made airtight then my dropping out of Bennington was justified. My cruelty to D. excused. My own isolating intensity pined for some tidy story of struggle and triumph. But there might not actually be anything to struggle with, no triumph to claim, nobody to rescue. Wasn’t it possible that John Wayne should have left Natalie Wood in the tepee—that she was happier there? Weren’t he and I a couple of asses?

  For years I’d chastised the crowd at Tishman in my fantasies, my words ever-more blistering, my argument ever-more seamless. Now I concocted a balm for the burning ears of my imaginary schoolmates: I can forgive your resistance to this film. The Searchers is a thing I seem doomed to spend a lifetime trying to fathom, and how often do you have a lifetime to spend? Then I’d add, Can you forgive me my absurd responsiveness?

  Oh, I’ve perfected my defense of the film. It’s hinged on the notion that in certain Hollywood films a major star can be placed under examination as icon of a set of neurotic symptoms, a “problematic site,” and yet still operate as a creature of free will and moral relevance, a character whose choices matter. James Stewart in Vertigo, say, or Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place. Refuse the notion and The Searchers becomes unwatchable, an explosion in the void. Grant it and the rest falls into place. The weird stuff, the racist stuff, the hysterical stuff: it all serves to split Wayne from fellow characters and from the viewer’s sympathies, to foreground his lonely rage. It’s very, ah, Brechtian. If you liked, I could chart how even the most distractingly unfunny pratfall contributes to my thesis. Imagine a DVD with my commentary, my filibuster of articulations, covering every frame.

  Snore. Who’d listen? Detractors of The Searchers are casual snipers, not dedicated enemies—like D., or the audience at Tishman, they take a potshot and wander off, interest evaporated. Those who care like I do cherish their own interpretations, and don’t need mine. I know this because as a minor consolation I’ve collected these people. The rock critic who screens a 16 mm print of The Searchers in his living room. The biographer who scoured Monument Valley to find the charred remains of the burned cabin, chunks of which he hoards at his home in L.A. Others . . . among fellow cultists the title’s enough, passed like a talisman.

  A new friend remarks he’s surprised to learn I rate The Searchers as an influence.

  “Have you seen it?” I ask, falsely casual.

  “Long time ago. I just remember how racist it was.”

  “ The Searchers is racist the way Huckleberry Finn is racist,” I say, of course. But it’s cant, and stale in my mouth. He’ll watch again and understand, or not. The Searchers is my private club, and if you don’t join you’ll never know you’ve been rejected. I’m like the Cal professor—caring has worn me out. The Searchers is too gristly to be digested in my novel, too willful to be bounded in my theories. I watch or don’t, doesn’t matter: The Searchers strides on, maddened, through broken landscapes incapable of containing it—Ford’s oeuvre, and Wayne’s, the “Studio-Era Film,” and my own defeated imagination—everywhere shrugging off categories, refusing the petitions of embarrassment and taste, defying explanation or defense as only great art or great abomination ever could.

  The Disappointment Artist

  Mrs. Neverbody vs. Edward Dahlberg

  My aunt Billie—Wilma Yeo (1918–1994) to her readers, to the world, to you—was among the first human beings I remember. Her Kansas City apartment is the site of one of my earliest, murkiest memories: seated on a carpet, I wept at seeing, on television, a depiction of a forest fire, one that routed a herd of panicked baby animals. Aunt Billie’s twin daughters, then young teenagers, laughed at me for weeping. In the memory, which plays like a length of corroded celluloid—grainy, broken at both ends, but reliably identical each time—Aunt Billie sweeps in, rescues and consoles me, lightly chastises her daughters.

  I lived with my parents in Kansas City, on the campus of the Kansas City Art Institute, from 1965, when I was two, until 1968, when my parents returned to New York City, and each of three or four of my earliest memories takes place there. Another involves television: taking shelter during a tornado warning, with my parents and a couple of their friends, in the basement of our stone house. George Burk, another painter on the faculty then at KCAI and my father’s best friend, brought for entertainment a six-pack of beer and a portable black-and-white, on which we watched The Monkees while the storm harmlessly passed. Yet another Kansas City memory is of seeing my first film in a theater: Yellow Submarine. Counterfeit Beatles, animated Beatles, forest fires seen but unreal, tornados real but unseen—may one plead, Your Honor, post-modernism as an involuntary condition?

  That’s Kansas City’s whole place in my life: a small, strange place. Aunt Billie’s place in my life is larger. She was my first writer. And, though my father was a painter and I was trained for a career in his footsteps, as a visual artist, I somehow knew from the first to sit at the feet of any writer I encountered. Aunt Billie was primarily an author of children’s books, but her résumé boasted articles in The Reader’s Digest and The Saturday Evening Post, and a biography of Thomas Hart Benton, Maverick with a Paintbrush, which, though written simply enough for young readers, is solidly researched and a contribution to Benton studies. Her Mrs. Neverbody’s Recipes (J. B. Lippincott, 1968; the title page notes: “The following poems were first published in Humpty Dumpty’s Magazine”) was the first autographed book in my collection, which before I was even out of my teenage years had grown to include inscriptions from Allen Ginsberg, Robert Heinlein, Norton Juster, and Anthony Burgess. I was a nerdish and sycophantic kid, let me be the first to say. I revered writers, and still do. I loved my aunt Billie.

  So did my father, who’s still around. Sibling bonds were strong among my father and his two sisters and three brothers. They grew up together in Depression-era towns in Missouri and Iowa. But Aunt Billie (the second oldest) and my father (the runt) enjoyed a particular lifelong kinship as the two “creative” types. Their closeness defied and outlasted my father’s repeatedly throwing over the Midwest for, in turn, Columbia University, the army, Paris (on a painter’s Fulbright), and New York again.

  On the telephone my father still shouts, gives only rudimentary news, and suspects all he hears, feeling, perhaps rightly, that long-distance calls are a sham apparatus. He and Aunt Billie maintained their intimacy by writing letters. One day not long ago my father asked if I’d ever heard of Edward Dahlberg. I had some familiarity with that name, but I couldn’t imagine why he wanted to know.

  “Have a look at this,” he said, and handed me the letter.

  Dearest Brother—first of all I should sa
y that I write this in an ego-centered search for an identity that I lost in a class at UMKC taught by Edward Dahlberg, a writer in residence for this semester. To describe him is impossible—I’ve read most of his autobiography now BECAUSE I WAS FLESH, and have a little more comprehension of this individual who emerged from a poverty stricken childhood in Kansas City where his whore-mother was a Star Lady Barber and he had no father—his book is the story of Lizzie Dahlberg—his mother—whom he loved with revulsion. This man, an intellectual Alexander King—in both looks and attitude—bitter, bitter sweet (and I don’t use the term intellectual in the bannal method of today) has verbally crucified every member of the class who dared open his mouth—and to read a work of ones own! Sheer folly. He is a man of letters and so well acquainted with Dreiser, Swift, Mather, Taylor, Stendhal, DeBalzac, Unamuno, Dryden, Gissing, Ruskin, Morris, Ford, Coleridge, Anderson, Baudouin, Flaubert, Keats, Gill, Read, Chestov, Thoreau, Rozanov, Merjkowski, Tolstoi Swinburne, Hulme, Williams, Heywood, Jastrow, (all of the bible) though he disclaims religion Weaver, Meyers, Garland, Berkman, Goldman, Delacroix, Dostovsky etc but not many more—that he is astonishingly like a walking library—He calls James and Brecht scribblers—says nothing worth reading has been written ’en contemporary . . . no doubt it would seem to be a mistake to sit two hours twice a week in the mezermizing world he weaves for I can no longer write a word— should my life depend on it.

  That’s the whole text of the first, unparagraphed page. There are six more. The letter—it is still in my possession—is on onionskin, letters carved in ink by a manual’s keys. Rich with delirious typos and misspellings (Dostovsky and Chestov!), and hasty cursive annotations, as well as a torrent of weirdly antique name-drops (Alexander King, Jastrow), but above all eloquently desperate, the letter radiates human intellectual panic like pheromones. Each time I read it I feel the thrill of unsealing a time capsule, and of awakening my aunt from her deservedly peaceful slumber.