The Sunday Times (London)
January 21, 1996, Sunday
Why books still are the write stuff
Stephen Amidon
Film has become our dominant art form, raiding novels for subjects, exploiting their writers and laying claim to the storytelling crown.But have books really lost the plot? No, says STEPHEN AMIDON.
This week, the Royal Festival Hall in London hosts a series of talks entitled Writing in Light. As is so often the case with such symposia, it poses a seemingly apocalyptic culture question: ”Did film win the fight for the storytelling crown?” (It is hard not to picture Spielberg and Updike in baggy shorts and ill-fitting gloves, slugging it out in a 12-round contest carried on The Late Review.) The month-long series will wonder aloud if ”the birth of cinema, 100 years ago, caused the death of the novel? Or did film-making techniques breathe life into 20th-century fiction?”
The basis for these talks is a powerful cultural neurosis that cinema is either a vandal at loose in the world’s libraries, ruthlessly tearing up texts and whispering dangerous nothings in the ears of working novelists, or a benevolent dictator who condescends to lend a helping hand to his aged, enfeebled ancestor. Film has been consistently pictured as the triumphant new kid on our culture’s block robust, cocksure, ready at one moment to push around the dove-chested wimp with his notepad and pencil, only later graciously to divulge his tricks and techniques to the woebegone scribbler. Whichever way you answer the symposium’s two-part question, Hollywood‘s supremacy is posited as a given.
This notion that film dominates the written word has been around for well over 60 years now. In the days of the silents, there was a rather benign and standoffish relationship between the two media the absence of spoken dialogue meant that even films as sophisticated as Fred Niblo’s Ben-Hur (1926) could be little more than dumb shows of books and plays. With the advent of sound, however, the phoney war began. Cinema became the stalker, literature the old lady cowering in the closet. The 1930s are rife with tales of cunning moguls such as Louis B Mayer and David Selznick bowdlerising the texts of dead masters, gleefully injecting sentiment and ironing out irony without a thought for tradition. The producer was pictured as a literary Visigoth, stamping through the virgin tracts of the novel’s pages with his bloodstained fur boots.
In this scenario, the living fared worse than the dead. Geniuses such as Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Huxley became hostages, forced by the infidels to slave away in penitentiary residences such as Chateau Marmont or, appropriately enough, the Garden of Allah. (The term ”mogul” is also apt for this myth, suggesting a follower of the Mongol horde that conquered 16th-century India.) These archetypes, examined in books such as Tom Dardis’s Some Time in the Sun and films such as Barton Fink, have ruled thinking about Hollywood and literature ever since that their conjugation elevates the former and debases the latter.
While the contemporary novelist escapes the supposed indentured servitude of his forebear, we have all heard stories of writers who have been roughed up along Santa Monica Boulevard (and I’m not talking about street crime here). Indeed, entire books have been written on how novels such as Bonfire of the Vanities are treated in Hollywood with the same care that a deranged pit bull lavishes upon a child’s doll. Beneath all these fables runs the theme evoked by Writing in Light’s premise that film is the emperor and literature the defeated gladiator, anxiously awaiting the thumb to twist upwards or down.
The truth is that literature is holding its own in the alleged tussle for the storyteller’s crown. There is precious little evidence, either statistically or theoretically, that people go to the cinema for the storytelling buzz they once got from books. The question of whether or not cinema caused the death of the novel is specious because there is no body. As Donna Tartt, William Boyd and E Annie Proulx will tell you, the literary novel is not only very much alive, but needs no artificial respiration, either. One need only mark the phenomenon of the hordes who rush out to buy Jane Austen paperbacks after the latest adaptation of her work appears on screen. Having seen a simulacrum, they now want the real thing. The miniseries will be over on that last Sunday night: those books will be around for another 150 years (and another 150 after that).
The notion of Hollywood wrecking literature was suspect from the start. Selznick, for instance, was reading Tolstoy and Dickens almost before he could walk, while a mogul such as Irving Thalberg had a literary sensibility as acute as most editors currently working at leading New York publishing houses. It would be hard to imagine the careers of either of these producers, or indeed most of their contemporaries, without literature. Selznick without a respectful David Copperfield would not have gone on to make Gone with the Wind, in its own way an equally respectful obeisance to the written word.
Hollywood has always followed literature rather than the other way around. Even today, your average producer is far more eager to invest in a book ”property” for adaptation than in an original script as evidenced by the seven-figure sum Tom Cruise is reported to have paid for Philip Kerr’s latest ”novel”, which is actually a title and a synopsis: the text hasn’t even been written yet. And a novelist such as Pete Dexter is able to queue-jump over scores of professional screenwriters to land work adapting his own material (Paris Trout) as well as the work of others (Rush). When it comes to the breathing in of life (literally, ”inspiration”), literature has done all the puffing.
This is not just a matter of plots and characters. Most of the storytelling techniques that film-makers have employed since the earliest days have clear antecedents in literature. There really is nothing substantive that a director can do in presenting a story that does not have a literary precedent. With its withering zooms and graphic visual effects, Beowulf, written some 900 years before the advent of the camera, bears an uncanny resemblance to an actual shooting script, while The Canterbury Tales perfected the close-up. The vaunted cut, meanwhile, has been in use from Shakespeare’s ”xit pursued by a bear” and the ”meanwhile, back in London” found in Victorian novels. The tracking shot’s genealogy predates DW Griffith by a good stretch just read the Technicolor opening of Hardy’s The Return of the Native, with its reddleman’s cart moving across a bonfire-swept Egdon Heath. The tired criticism of many contemporary novels that they are little more than screenplays-in-waiting could be just as correctly lodged against many ”classics”.
The narrator of Shakespeare’s Henry V, meanwhile, proves an early master of the voice-over when he beseeches the 16th-century playgoer to ”Grapple your minds to sternage of this navy, And leave your England” so that we might follow Hal’s fleet to France. Indeed, Laurence Olivier in his 1944 film version was able to use this bit of blank verse word-for-word to narrate the majestic pan that transports the action from the Globe to the battlefields of France. And flashbacks are as prevalent in 19th-century literature as second chapters.
Even a film as ostensibly cinematic as Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961) turns out to have been decisively influenced by the cut-and-paste prose of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s experimental novels. The notion that the film business had more influence upon Chandler or Hemingway or Hammett than they did upon it is, quite simply, insupportable. Certainly, books such as Martin Amis’s Money or Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust may take the film business as their subjects, but these dark satires only serve to emphasise the Olympian disdain serious novelists have for the cinema as a potential influence.
Almost none of the imaginative effects we associate with cinema were born of the medium it is only because we experience them with our physical eye rather than in the mind’s eye that they seem new. And practically none of the innovations in 20th-century literature, such as stream of consciousness, can be attributed to film. Literature colonised our imaginations long before film and has yet to relinquish the turf. The screenwriter and novelist Michael Tolkin pointed this out recently when asked to comment on Fitzgerald’s bitter edict that ”Movies have taken away our dreams”. His response was that just about every influence, good or bad, that a told story can have on the human imagination was in place long before the Lumiere brothers cranked up their projector. ”Walter Scott was already a director, and his books were no less influential on the minds of children than The Mickey Mouse Show. So, if Fitzgerald wants to whine about Hollywood’s effect on some uncorrupted imagination, he’s a few millennia late.”
As for the crushing influence of Hollywood on the delicate souls of writers, the truth may also be contrary to received wisdom. Sure, Fitzgerald and others left LA drunken wrecks, although you have to wonder in Scott’s case if his imbibition would not have been rampant had he stayed in Princeton or Paris. The world is full of drunks who can point their shaky fingers anywhere but at their own wretched souls. Bear in mind that Hemingway would have nothing to do with Hollywood (he never even went there), and yet he still wound up soused and useless, a shotgun in his kisser instead of a quill in his fist.
A more accurate assessment of Hollywood’s effect on the novelist comes from Graham Greene, whose relations with the film business resulted in both masterworks such as The Third Man and travesties such as John Ford’s adaptation of The Power and the Glory (called The Fugitive). Greene was stoically grateful about his experiences with the industry, deciding that the best course was simply to take the lucre, no matter how filthy, and get on with writing good prose. ”One gets used to (the corruptions of one’s work) … and it is a waste of time to resent them. You rake in the money, you go on writing for another year or two, you have no just ground for complaint. And the smile in the long run will be on your face. For the book has the longer life.” Greene knew the score.
The true novelist has no more to learn from the cinema than he does from his bank manager. In the end, there is only one real way movies can breathe life into literature by blowing some cash into the writer’s chronically depleted bank account.
