Literary Miscellany

by Alex Palmer

  From the look of things almost four decades later, Thompson seems to have been right. For the rest of the second half of the twentieth century, extended writings on drug use receded, and tended to be confined to “misery memoirs” and self-help works about overcoming addiction.

  Perhaps the most notable work on addiction in recent decades is Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993). Unlike most other works on drug use, his novel about Edinburgh heroin addicts is not told as a true or semitrue description of the author’s own experiences (Welsh dabbled in petty crime as a youngster but straightened himself out before college). Perhaps concerned about his wellbeing or that being a junkie writer was just a bit too clichéd, Welsh seems to have put addiction literature in a healthier place for now: the fiction shelf.

  WHY ARE THE BEST AUTOBIOGRAPHIES SO EMBARRASSING?

  Humiliating confessions from St. Augustine to Augusten Burroughs

  Georg Orwell once wrote that autobiography is “only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying.” This pointed comment gets to a surprising truth about the genre. While readers might expect to hear a grand life story of historical importance, the greatest works of memoir have focused far more on awkward tales of humiliation and shame.

  St. Augustine began it all when he wrote his autobiography, Confessions, at the end of the fourth century. Written when the author was in his forties (he lived to be seventy-five), the work describes Augustine’s wanton youth and episodes of suffering “the disease of lust which I preferred to satisfy rather than suppress.”

  Did You Know?

  The actual word “autobiography” does not make its first appearance until 1797, when William Taylor suggested its use in the Monthly Review as a hybrid term of autos (self), bios (life), and graphein (write). He concluded it was too “pedantic,” and it was not until 1809 that it was used in its present sense, by Robert Southey.

  Augustine spends much of the work describing his various crimes and embarrassments (including stealing pears from a neighbor’s tree) in salacious detail, before finally turning to God for redemption. Confessions puts self-exposure, rather than self-aggrandizement, at the center of autobiography, and offers a titillating—but ultimately moral—tale that the average reader can relate to. Augustine’s formula worked so well that it was embraced by many writers in the genre.

  Quick Quotes

  “I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering.”

  —Oscar Wilde

  “All those writers who write about their childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn’t sit in the same room with me.”

  —Dorothy Parker

  “I don’t think anyone should write their autobiography until after they’re dead.”

  —Samuel Goldwyn

  The mystic Margery Kempe’s The Book of Margery Kempe offered what is considered the first autobiography in the English language around 1420. Kempe’s work reads like Confessions on psychedelics, complete with visions of Jesus and brutal persecution by religious leaders. These recollections may have been tragically true or merely reflections of her paranoia.

  Autobiography really took off in the early seventeenth century, rising alongside the growing practice of journaling. John Bunyan, in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), describes himself as “the very ringleader of all the youth that kept me company, in all manner of vice and ungodliness.” Bunyan finds grace soon enough, but not before disclosing juicy bits about “lusts and fruits of the flesh.” Sir Thomas Browne’s revealing Religio Medici (1642)—a psychological self-portrait that examines the author’s religious and scientific life—was one of the other major autobiographical works of the seventeenth century.

  Over the next decades, the religious journey became less central to the genre, while the embarrassing details only became more important. The private diary of Samuel Pepys includes bits on his affair with a seventeenyear-old servant, as well as numerous respectable lady friends, but without the weighty sense of guilt of St. Augustine and the others brought to their accounts. While Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782) shares its name with St. Augustine’s work (and includes admissions about stealing and siring five illegitimate chil-dren), it is framed in terms of worldly experi-ences rather than spiritual growth. One of the other successful memoirs of the period was the Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740), which offered rambling and witty anecdotes on Cibber’s life in the theater—a very different world than the church. (See Chapter 16).

  Papa Shouldn’t Preach

  Rousseau wrote, “He who cannot fulfill the duties of a father has no right to become one.” This is a strange selection of words considering that Rousseau and his partner Thérèse Levasseur had five illegitimate children, all of whom were placed in an orphanage. The woman running the orphanage supposedly berated Rousseau for his neglect and when he told her that he simply wasn’t meant to be a father, she replied, “Then you must stop being one!”

  Rousseau wrote of his autobiography that he “decided to make it a work unique in its unparalleled truthfulness,” and as the genre exploded throughout the nineteenth century, candid emotion and intimacy continued to dominate it. William Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude (written at the not-quiteripe age of twenty-eight) followed Rousseau’s example in making the author’s musings more important than external events. A far more scandalous example of autobiography came in William Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion (1823).

  The book was written while the author was going through a painful divorce, and he wrote in the terms of a pining teenager his love for nineteen-year-old Sarah Walker, declaring: “Ah, Sarah! I am unworthy of your love,” and, “frown if you will, I can bear your resentment for my ill behaviour, it is only your scorn and indifference that harrow up my soul.” Hazlitt was roundly derided by critics for his adolescent emoting, but his disclosures were a landmark in raw, candid confession.

  Other autobiographical writing of the century, including that of Benjamin Franklin, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, and Mark Twain avoided such outpourings, instead sticking with a more conversational and even didactic tone.

  Did You Know?

  In addition to writing his own autobiography, Mark Twain helped Ulysses S. Grant get a good deal on his. The Century Company offered Grant 10 percent royalties on his memoir—which would be expected to fetch him $20,000 to $30,000 (about $600,000 today). Twain intervened and connected the former president with Charles L. Webster & Co., which had published Huckleberry Finn, scoring Grant some $450,000 in royalties (more than $10.5 million by today’s standards).

  The twentieth century saw a snowballing of memoir writing, but things really kicked into high gear beginning in the 1950s as it became standard for someone in the public eye to write his or her life story. The 1960s marked the first time that celebrity autobiography overtook religious and spiritual autobiographies in sales.

  Throughout these decades, past achievement was no longer a necessary prerequisite for writing one’s life story, as writers like Robert Graves, Maya Angelou, and Maxine Hong Kingston actually started, rather than concluded, their careers with autobiographies. Recently there has been an onslaught of what book reviewer Sarah Goldstein calls “schtick lit,” where writers undertake an unusual project specifically to write about it. Since Henry David Thoreau decided to spend some time in the woods and record his experiences, a raft of other stunt memoirs have come out. These include John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me (1961), in which the white author artificially darkens his skin and tours the segregated south, to A. J. Jacobs’s The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Attempt to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible (2008), and Pete Jordan’s Dishwasher: One Man’s Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States (2007).

  Perhaps the biggest trend in recent autobiography is what has been called the “memoir of cr
isis” or “misery lit,” in which writers catalog their drug addictions, painful family histories, and all variety of other experiences from which they must recover. Works like Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called It (1995), which recounts his brutal abuse at the hands of his alcoholic mother, and Augusten Burroughs’s tales of his chaotic childhood and struggle with alcoholism were huge bestsellers. In some ways the autobiography has come full circle, returning to St. Augustine’s mission at the beginning of Confessions: “The recalling of my wicked ways is bitter in my memory, but I do it so that you will be sweet to me.” Memoirists today might say the same, though “you” would no longer refer to God, but to the crowds at book signings and in Oprah’s audience.

  WHY COULDN’T F. SCOTT FITZGERALD WRITE A DECENT MOVIE?

  Hollywood adaptations and why most novelists shouldn’t quit their day jobs

  Great novelists do not make great screenwriters. While this might seem counterintuitive (a great writer is a great writer, right?), the demands of Hollywood tend to rub novelists the wrong way. Though there are occasional exceptions (like Oscar winners John Irving and Mario Puzo), writing a fine book and writing a fine script often prove to be two very different talents.

  This is not to say that great novels do not make great screenplays. Every year, dozens of films based on bestselling books or perennial classics are released, and many are critically acclaimed, get big box office returns, and occasionally both. From Gone with the Wind to Slumdog Millionaire, a whopping forty of the eightythree winners of the Best Picture Oscar through 2010 have been based on books.

  Quick Quotes

  “It’s like taking a cow and boiling it down to a bouillon cube.”

  —John Le Carré, on adapting his spy novels like The Constant Gardener and The Tailor of Panama into films.

  “Movies have to pick their battles, and they have to pick fewer of them than novels do.”

  —Walter Kirn, on the adaptation of his novella Up in the Air (2001)

  “[Hollywood] worships the visual image to the extent that it feels a need to constantly humiliate the purveyors of the written word.”

  —Gore Vidal

  In the 1930s and 1940s, studio executives began thinking that star authors could command a similar loyalty at the box office as some of the big actors and actresses. They also expected that literary writers would add a richness and sophistication to the movies that the studios’ hack writers couldn’t match.

  Attracted by the promise of easy money and a new platform where they could feature their work, a clutch of writers made a literary exodus to the west coast. William Faulkner, Aldous Huxley, Robert Benchley, Anthony Powell, Raymond Chandler, and Dorothy Parker all made their way to Hollywood and began trying to crank out screenplays. A few found success—Faulkner helped write the critically acclaimed The Big Sleep (1946); Parker helped write A Star Is Born (1937) and Smash-up, the Story of a Woman (1947), both of which earned her Oscar nominations—but most found their work in Hollywood far less satisfying than their other writing, or hit a creative brick wall with the studios.

  While deadline-oriented writers like Benchley and Parker, who had been writing for magazines like The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, could make the system work for them, for many authors it was just too stifling. The playwright Lillian Hellman said about working on the screenplay for The Chase (1966) that, “decision by majority vote is a fine form of government, but it’s a stinking way to create.” In The Hollywood Studios, Ethan Mordden gets at the trouble many writers faced in commenting on an original script by F. Scott Fitzgerald. He says that the author, “giv[es] too much of minor characters and too little of the principals. Words, words: yet little is conveyed. Nor does Fitzgerald have any grip on what Hollywood wants, what movies do.”

  Not knowing “what movies do” has been a challenge for many writers. While studios became less interested in literary types after these first experiments, embarrassments continued as writers tried their hand at filmmaking or got creatively involved in the adaptations of their novels. Norman Mailer wrote five unremarkable screenplays, with The New York Times describing the adaptation of his novel Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1984), which he wrote and directed, as “a celebration of the energy, the chutzpah, the imagination and, frequently, the misjudgment of Mr. Mailer.” While Michael Cunningham wrote the screenplay to A Home at the End of the World (2004), which was received unenthusiastically by critics and made little money at the box office, he did not do the writing on the adaptation of another of his novels, The Hours (2002), which was both a commercial and critical success.

  From Page to Screen

  Among the authors who have made attempts to cross over to the big screen:

  F. Scott Fitzgerald—Made two tours through Hollywood, producing thousands of pages of scripts, but ended up with only one writing credit: for the 1938 film Three Comrades, received coolly by reviewers and audiences. The director Billy Wilder, a friend of Fitzgerald’s, compared the writer to “a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job.”

  Aldous Huxley—Wrote the original screenplay for Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, which was rejected for being too literal. While he had success adapting

  Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre, Huxley’s efforts on two productions of his own Brave New World both ended without the film ever getting made.

  Nathanael West—Wrote more screenplays than he did novels, including Five Came Back starring Lucille Ball. Though the alienation and emptiness with which he depicts Hollywood in The Day of the Locust (1939) speaks volumes about his thoughts on the place.

  Anthony Powell—Went to Hollywood in 1937 to write screenplays, but left without a single credit to his name.

  There may be no better example of the dangers of author involvement than Stephen King, whose work has served as source material for dozens of films or television series (he and Zane Grey are neck and neck for most adapted authors, each with 116 adaptations according to the Internet Movie Database at the time of this writing). But while his work has been the source material for some film classics, there is something of a reverse relationship between King’s involvement in a movie and the quality of the film. In 2004, film critic Erik Lundegaard rounded up the five best and five worst Stephen King adaptations (excluding TV movies) for MSN. See if you can spot a pattern:

  BEST:

  1. The Shawshank Redemption (1994) Didn’t write screenplay

  2. The Dead Zone (1983) Didn’t write screenplay

  3. The Shining (1980) Didn’t write screenplay

  4. Misery (1990) Didn’t write screenplay

  5. Stand by Me (1986) Didn’t write screenplay

  WORST:

  1. Maximum Overdrive (1986) Wrote screenplay and directed

  2. Sleepwalkers (1992) Wrote screenplay

  3. Pet Sematary (1989) Wrote screenplay

  4. Graveyard Shift (1990) Didn’t write screenplay

  5. Silver Bullet (1985) Wrote screenplay

  Jonathan Franzen may have the healthiest attitude toward Hollywood. After selling the rights to The Corrections even before it was published, he told Poets & Writers magazine in 2002 that, “I know too much about Hollywood—about Hollywood adaptations of novels, about novelists interfacing with Hollywood—to have hopes of anything much besides getting paid. My chief hope is that a movie of The Corrections gets made but not before the option has been lucratively renewed a few times.” Being in it for the money never sounded so wise.

  Flipping the Script

  While adaptations traditionally go from the page to the screen, they can also go the other direction. The classics 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke, and The Third Man, by Graham Greene, began as screenplays and were later novelized.

  ARE SHORT STORY WRITERS LESS MATURE THAN NOVELISTS?

  Why size matters, and when a novella is really just a novel

  When it comes to literature, size matters. Whether it is a short story or massive novel, the length of a work has a lot to do with how we define and appreciate it
. It may also tell us quite a bit about the character of the author him- or herself.

  Hemingway is famous for his terseness, and he is not only the author of the shortest novel ever to win the Pulitzer Prize (The Old Man and the Sea) but also the author of what some have called the shortest novel ever written: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

  Fighting Words

  Faulkner and Hemingway had different views on the importance of length. Faulkner commented that Hemingway “had never been known to use a word that might send the reader to the dictionary.” Hemingway retorted, “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the tendollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”

  On the other end of the spectrum, Samuel Richardson is responsible for what is considered the longest novel in the English canon, with Clarissa (1748) coming in at around one million words. Even this may seem modest when compared to sequence novels like Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time and Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series, both of which weigh in at around two million words.