Philip Fleck claims to have seen over ten thousand movies. Are you a movie buff as well? How many do you think you have seen? Can you tell us your top five favorite movies and why they make the list?
I spent much of a rather difficult adolescence in a movie (the virtues of a Manhattan childhood—there were so many cinemas nearby) and must still watch at least five films a week. One of the reasons I maintain an apartment in Paris is that there are two dozen cinemas within ten minutes’ walk of my place. There is a great line in Walker Percy’s great novel The Moviegoer: “I am happiest in a movie, even a bad movie.” And though I hate lists, here are five of my favorite films: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, John Ford’s The Searchers, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane—five films that all deal with isolated men who are the architects of their own despair . . . as we all are.
During his revision of We Three Grunts David notes that screenwriters “let the pictures do the talking . . . when you have pictures, who needs a lot of words?” Do you think screenwriters have it easier than authors do? How do you create such vivid visual imagery when you do not have the advantage of pictures?
I have a very visual imagination—but I work in words, not pictures. So many people tell me that my novels are very filmic, but I always think myself a literary storyteller first and foremost. I suppose the fact that, prior to my novels, I wrote three narrative travel books has meant that I have always had a strong imaginative sense of time and place and life on the street (so to speak). I am endlessly interested in life’s manifold nuances. The devil is, verily, in the details.
David is very critical of himself while he edits his first screenplay, We Three Grunts. Temptation is your ninth book; do you ever find yourself going back to your first or second novel and being critical of how you wrote it? What is your writing process like?
I rarely reread my previous novels. Of course, writing is a learning curve without end. I will (I hope!) keep perfecting and improving my craft until the end of my life. As such I’m certain that, twenty years from now, I will (all going well) still be telling myself: you must up your game. Because writing is a craft that you never totally master. Nor should you. You always have to keep learning as a writer and, for that matter, as a sentient being. Life, for me, is about maintaining an active curiosity and never resting on your laurels. I always want to do better.
Your novel is a commentary on both the opportunities and the dangers that success brings. Do you feel that people need to keep a level head as they achieve success in their professional and personal lives? What do you think is the danger in getting everything that we want?
To paraphrase a great quote from Aesop (which I used as an epigraph in The Big Picture): beware lest you overlook the substance by grasping at the shadow. Or, in plainer American English: never fall in love with the aroma of your own perfume. One of the great ongoing dilemmas of modern life is the fact that we are endlessly told we can master ourselves. The fact is, the moment we think we have arrived is the moment that life sends us a reminder that the proverbial goalposts have been moved. Or that the success we thought was a now-permanent state of being is but a fragile veneer. What’s most interesting about success—and this is a central idea running through Temptation—is whether you can hold on to it. If you begin with the basic premise that the biggest argument we have in life is with ourselves, then the question arises: once we achieve that professional breakthrough we’ve always craved, how do we sustain it? This is a particularly tricky question in creative life, where you really are only as good as your last play/book/screenplay, etc. This is why, as I have discovered over a writing career of nearly thirty years (the first eight of which comprised a period when I was a produced, but rather so-so, playwright), you must retain a certain fragility, a belief that it all can be taken away from you, in order to keeping growing as a novelist. Writing is a confidence trick you endlessly play on yourself.
Martha Fleck makes the offhanded comment: “the one thing I know about writers is that they’re normally a mixture of doubt and arrogance.” Are these just Martha’s feelings or do you tend to share her view?
Well, arrogance always hides doubt, doesn’t it?
Philip Fleck makes very poignant comments about the world we live in and the human impulse to dominate another individual. Do you believe this to be true? Do you think everyone tries to impose their own worldview on everyone else?
Look at every desperate, dysfunctional dystopia of the past century, from Stalinism to Nazism to the horrors of the Khmer Rouge to the insane cult of personality that is North Korea to the theocratic nightmare that is Iran. All of these systems are about the imposition of a worldview on the masses. I am desperately unsettled by anyone who tells me they have answers to life’s larger questions. No one has answers—just disparate points of view. The thing is, there is a great human need to impose order and control on life’s more unruly, happenstantial forces. Just as there is a fearful need to control other people as a way of masking one’s own fears and insecurities. Bullies are always scared people who have learned that intimidation is a modus vivendi that masks their own self-loathing and cowardice.
Gossip columnist Theo McCall sets out to destroy David’s star status. Do gossips like McCall ruin celebrity lives? Or just keep the public informed of their transgressions? Do you agree with McCall that “Hollywood is an industry that will overlook any venal or mortal sin committed by one of its own.” (p. 169)?
In Hollywood, the comeback, the resurrection, the rehabilitation are all treasured events, especially if the individual in question has just spent six months in the Betty Ford Clinic or has regained control of their destiny after marrying an eighteen-year-old croupier from Vegas while on a crack cocaine binge (I’m riffing here!). Hollywood is a profoundly Darwinian place. Only the fittest survive, and failure is considered the ultimate mortal sin. But I have always admired the fact that Hollywood is so nakedly, unapologetically ruthless. You know exactly the game they are playing—and which you yourself must also play to make it there. You know what the table stakes are—and the fact that (to borrow a line my grandfather was fond of using), “only the winner goes to dinner.”
You provide detailed descriptions of the California coast, Antigua, and Saffron Island. What research, if any, did you do for this book?
I’ve been to California at least a dozen times—and am always seduced by it . . . even if the easterner in me still finds it somewhat foreign in temperament. And I have made around three journeys to the Caribbean, which has always struck me as an unsettling combination of Third World realities crossed with five-star glitz. I live to travel, and, as such, foreign places always inform my fiction. To travel is to always test yourself in a world outside your own comfort zone.
Nine books later, what advice would you give to a budding writer?
In two words: keep writing. And learn how to cope with disappointment, as there will be plenty of it. But a real writer always keeps going. As David says at the end of Temptation: there is only one solution—go back to work.
What’s next for you? Will we be hearing from David Armitage again?
When a novel is finished, I tend to move on and not return to past characters. But, yes, a new novel—my eleventh—is under way. And as I never talk much about what I’m working on at any given moment, all I can say is: watch this space.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by Douglas Kennedy
Originally published in Great Britain in 2006 by Hutchinson
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Designed by Kyoko Watanabe
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kennedy, Douglas, date.
Temptation / Douglas Kennedy. —1st Atria paperback ed.
p. cm.
1. Americans—France—Paris—Fiction. 2. Paris (France)—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6061.E5956W66 2011
813'.54—dc22
2011015333
ISBN 978-1-4516-0210-4
ISBN 978-1-4516-0213-5 (ebook)
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
A Readers Club Guide
Introduction
Questions and Topics for Discussion
Enhance Your Book Club
A Conversation with Douglas Kennedy
About Douglas Kennedy
For Frank Kelcz
“Everything she had told the Superintendent was true, but sometimes nothing is less true than the truth.”
—GEORGES SIMENON, LA FUITE DE MONSIEUR MONDE
ONE
THAT WAS THE year my life fell apart, and that was the year I moved to Paris.
I arrived in the city a few days after Christmas. It was a wet, gray morning—the sky the color of dirty chalk; the rain a pervasive mist. My flight landed just after sunrise. I hadn’t slept during all those hours above the Atlantic—another insomniac jag to add to all the other broken nights I’d been suffering recently. As I left the plane, my equilibrium went sideways—a moment of complete manic disorientation—and I stumbled badly when the cop in the passport booth asked me how long I’d be staying in France.
“Not sure exactly,” I said, my mouth reacting before my brain.
This made him look at me with care—as I had also spoken in French.
“Not sure?” he asked.
“Two weeks,” I said quickly.
“You have a ticket back to America?”
I nodded.
“Show it to me, please,” he said.
I handed over the ticket. He studied it, noting the return date was January 10.
“How can you be ‘not sure,’ ” he asked, “when you have proof?”
“I wasn’t thinking,” I said, sounding sheepish.
“Évidemment,” he said. His stamp landed on my passport. He pushed my documents back to me, saying nothing. Then he nodded for the next passenger in line to step forward. He was done with me.
I headed off to baggage claim, cursing myself for raising official questions about my intentions in France. But I had been telling the truth. I didn’t know how long I’d be staying here. And the airplane ticket—a last-minute buy on an Internet travel site, which offered cheap fares if you purchased a two-week round-trip deal—would be thrown out as soon as January 10 had passed me by. I wasn’t planning to head back to the States for a very long time.
How can you be “not sure” when you have proof?
Since when does proof ever provide certainty?
I collected my suitcase and resisted the temptation to splurge on a cab into Paris. My budget was too tight to justify the indulgence. So I took the train. Seven euros one-way. The train was dirty—the carriage floor dappled in trash, the seats sticky and smelling of last night’s spilled beer. And the ride into town passed through a series of grim industrial suburbs, all silhouetted by shoddy high-rise apartment buildings. I shut my eyes and nodded off, waking with a start when the train arrived at the Gare du Nord. Following the instructions emailed to me from the hotel, I changed platforms and entered the metro for a long journey to a station with the aromatic name of Jasmin.
I emerged from the metro into the dank morning. I wheeled my suitcase down a long narrow street. The rain turned emphatic. I kept my head down as I walked, veering left into the rue La Fontaine, then right into the rue François Millet. The hotel—Le Sélect—was on the opposite corner. The place had been recommended to me by a colleague at the small college where I used to teach—the only colleague at that college who would still speak to me. He said that the Sélect was clean, simple, and cheap—and in a quiet residential area. What he didn’t tell me was that the desk clerk on the morning of my arrival would be such an asshole.
“Good morning,” I said. “My name is Harry Ricks. I have a reservation for—”
“Sept jours,” he said, glancing up from behind the computer on his desk. “La chambre ne sera pas prête avant quinze heures.”
He spoke this sentence quickly, and I didn’t catch much of what he said.
“Désolé, mais . . . euh . . . je n’ai pas compris . . .”
“You come back at three PM for the check-in,” he said, still speaking French, but adopting a plodding, deliberate, loud voice, as if I were deaf.
“But that’s hours from now.”
“Check-in is at three PM,” he said, pointing to a sign next to a mailbox mounted on the wall. All but two of the twenty-eight numbered slots in the box had keys in them.
“Come on, you must have a room available now,” I said.
He pointed to the sign again and said nothing.
“Are you telling me there isn’t one room ready at this moment?”
“I am telling you that check-in is at three PM.”
“And I am telling you that I am exhausted, and would really appreciate it if—”
“I do not make the rules. You leave your bag, you come back at three.”
“Please. Be reasonable.”
He just shrugged, the faintest flicker of a smile wandering across his lips. Then the phone rang. He answered it and used the opportunity to show me his back.
“I think I’ll find another hotel,” I said.
He interrupted his call, turning over his shoulder to say, “Then you forfeit tonight’s room charge. We need twenty-four hours’ notice for cancellation.”
Another faint smirk—and one that I wanted to rub off with my fist.
“Where can I put my suitcase?” I asked.
“Over there,” he said, pointing to a door by the reception desk.
I wheeled over my suitcase and also took off the computer knapsack slung over my shoulder.
“My laptop is in this bag,” I said. “So please—”
“It will be fine,” he said. “À quinze heures, monsieur.”
“Where am I supposed to go now?” I asked.
“Aucune idée,” he said. Then he turned back to his call.
At a few minutes past eight on a Sunday morning in late December, there was nowhere to go. I walked up and down the rue François Millet, looking for a café that was open. All were shuttered, many with signs:
Fermeture pour Noël.
The area was residential—old apartment buildings interspersed with some newer ones from the ugly school of seventies brutalism. Even the modern blocks looked expensive; the few cars parked on the street hinting that this corner of town was upscale and—at this time of the day—lifeless.
&nb
sp; The rain had quieted down to an insidious drizzle. I didn’t have an umbrella, so I marched back up to the Jasmin metro station and bought a ticket. I got on the first train that arrived, not sure where I was heading. This was only my second trip to Paris. The last time I had been here was in the mideighties, the summer before I entered graduate school. I spent a week in a cheap hotel off the boulevard Saint-Michel, haunting the cinemas in that part of town. At the time, there was a little café called Le Reflet opposite a couple of backstreet movie houses on the rue . . . what the hell was its name? Never mind. The place was cheap and I seemed to remember that they were open for breakfast, so . . .
A quick study of the metro map on the carriage wall, a change of trains at Michel-Ange Molitor, and twenty minutes later I emerged at Cluny–La Sorbonne. Though it had been more than twenty years since I’d last stepped out of this metro station, I never forget my way to a cinema—so I instinctually turned up the boulevard Saint-Michel and into the rue des Écoles. The sight of the marquee of Le Champo—advertising a De Sica and a Douglas Sirk festival on their two screens—provoked a small smile. When I reached its shuttered doors and peered up the rue Champollion—the name of the street I had forgotten—and saw two other cinemas lining its narrow wet pavement, I thought, Fear not, the old haunts still exist.
But at nine in the morning, none of them were yet open, and Café Le Reflet was also shuttered. Fermeture pour Noël.
I returned to the boulevard Saint-Michel and started walking toward the river. Paris after Christmas was truly dead. The only working places nearby were all the fast-food joints that now dotted the streets, their neon fronts blotting the architectural line of the boulevard. Though I was desperate for shelter from the rain, I still couldn’t bring myself to spend my first hours in Paris huddled in a McDonald’s. So I kept walking until I came to the first proper café that was open. It was called Le Départ, located on a quay fronting the Seine. Before reaching it, I passed a nearby newspaper stand and scored a copy of Pariscope—the “what’s on” guide for the city and my cinephile bible back in 1985.
The Douglas Kennedy Collection #2 Page 34
