Writing the truest sentence you know

Many readers learned about the American expatriates in 1920's Paris in 1964 when A Moveable Feast was posthumously published a few years after Ernest Hemingway's death. Like many young Americans born in the new century, Hemingway had witnessed the European devastation of World War I and the experience diverted both his path as an artist and his attitudes as a man. As some alcoholic depressive writers return to their past as a way of entertaining others and reinforcing their own self worth, one can do worse than the episodes chronicled and famous personalities exposed in A Moveable Feast. Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin makes a good point when dealing with any Hemingway writing touted to be truth, saying projects like "A Moveable Feast are barely more autobiographical than his fiction, and, in many ways, just as fictional." In other words, it's the same old problem with memoirs - there's little emotional distance to vet accuracy.

Some analysts claim Hemingway wrote these remembrances to get back at those he felt had slighted him in the years since he lived in Paris, but A Moveable Feast isn't as tough or mean-spirited as it could have been. Hemingway wasn't known as being particularly woman-friendly or gay friendly. (Even soft straight men like Fitzgerald generally worried Hemingway.) Luckily, as it was Paris in the 20s and not Berlin in the 20s, Hemingway had little to concern himself, masculinity flourished everywhere, including when socializing with women like Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier. Men like Ezra Pound were able to barter mentoring Hemingway's literary ambitions in exchange for boxing lessons.

If Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Co. bookstore functioned as a sort of 1920s Paris internet, Gertrude Stein's salon was its Facebook. Anybody who was anybody (as long as they didn't piss off the hostess) showed up to be introduced to anybody who was anybody. Stein is credited with telling Hemingway to trade in his journalism experience for the world of fiction, but in reality, it was the vogue for many journalists in the new century to have a book or play on the back burner. During Hemingway's first months in Paris, he didn't have many nice things to say about the poseurs he was surrounded with, as if "the scum of Greenwich Village...has been skimmed off and deposited in large ladles" in his new Paris café society.

Hemingway and wife Hadley weren't the first nor last Americans striking a Bohemian pose in Paris, but at least they could write home about all the cheap wine available - the U.S. was in the throes of prohibition, Europe was not. Hadley's fatal mistake was packing a year's worth (some say 3 years) of Hemingway writing into a suitcase and then losing it in a train station. Perhaps she was fed-up with the poverty-crying she endured from her groom, who said they were too poor to "afford a dog...or cat" and who told others he would duck into the Luxembourg Gardens to strangle pigeons for meals when he was "belly-empty, hollow-hungry".

Gertrude Stein – according to Hemingway, they were like brothers – convinced Hemingway to check out the bullfighting scene down in Spain. (This, apparently, he could afford.) Hemingway not only turned on some of his Paris friends to the spectacle, but also wound up writing all about them, and as is so often the case, not all the characters based on real-life friends were flattering. The Sun Also Rises can be considered a fictional account of Hemingway's Paris experience, written as it was happening, contrasted with the memoirs of A Moveable Feast, written some 30+ years after the fact. Not that his eye for sacrificing truth for a good plot wavered much in between those projects. Even though Hadley was with her husband during the real-life events in Spain, she was deleted from the novel so the Hemingway stand-in hero could be free to pursue another woman (Hadley divorced Hemingway around the time The Sun Also Rises was published. Coincidence?) Unflattering portrayals were the literary equivalent of brawling back in the early 20th century. Hemingway withered Gertrude Stein's reputation in A Moveable Feast as much as Stein has shot Hemingway down in her own The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

Wife #2, Pauline, appeared around the time The Sun Also Rises was published. In fact, it looks like Hemingway often had a new wife whenever a major literary work of his completed. But first wife Hadley got the bulk of The Sun Also Rises money and Hemingway was back to the bottom rung financially if not for Pauline's help. She was the wife to lead him up to A Farewell to Arms and closed out Hemingway's Paris adventures for the Key West life.

All of this drama really stands as a testament to what happens to projects whose artist dies in the middle of its creation or original material is subsequently discovered (the original "scrolls" of Jack Kerouac's On the Road were recently unearthed and published). By the time of Hemingway's self-inflicted death in 1961, he was married to Mary, a journalist in her own right, whose job it became not only to coordinate the memoirs, but to give it its title – the publisher was just going to title it "Paris Sketches". In 2009 the controversy over a "new" edition of A Moveable Feast came to light when one of Pauline's grandsons didn't like how Pauline was portrayed (blaming her solely for breaking up Hemingway's marriage to Hadley, but otherwise removing her from the narrative) and he launched a campaign to have a different version of the book released. He even claimed that Mary herself wrote the original last chapter of the original publication, Hemingway's apology to Hadley. (Read a denunciation of the whole business by one of Hemingway's friends, A.E. Hotchner in the NY Times). It is also alleged that despite Mary's declaration that the book was completed before Hemingway died and that she didn't add a thing, the original material discovered shows she handled consideration alterations to an unfinished manuscript. In the end, no one will ever be sure whether Hemingway's words wound up being the truest words he knew.









 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 

Work Cited

Brenner, Gerry. "Are We Going to Hemingway's Feast?." American Literature 54.4 (1982): 528. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 19 Jan. 2011.

Burke, David. Writers in Paris: Literary Lives in the City of Light. Counterpoint, Berkeley, CA, 2008.

Carpenter, Humphrey. Geniuses Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920s. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA, 1988.

Hotchner, A.E. "Don't Touch 'A Moveable Feast'." New York Times. 20 July 2009.


Rich, Motoko. "Moveable Feast is Recast by Hemingway Grandson." New York Times. 28 June 2009.


Tavernier-Courbin, Jacqueline. "Fact and Fiction in A Moveable Feast." Hemingway Review 3.2 (1984): 44. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 19 Jan. 2011.

Wiser, William. The Crazy Years: Paris in the Twenties. G.K. Hall & Co., 1983.

Flying by umbrella is not a drug metaphor

She slid up the banister yet no one connected her with the experiments Harvard man Timothy Leary was doing with LSD. Cold war enthusiasts will be sad to know that 1964's most ironic and iconic image doesn't belong to Dr. Strangelove, but to an unauthorized home practitioner who was known to dose children on sugar in order to get them to take their meds.

When I think of children's books made into film - up until the '60s, I assume there wasn't a whole lot of conflict, that filmmakers needn't have worried if the sweet verses of Lewis Carroll or A.A. Milne would hold their audiences in as much thrall as their literary origins. Walt Disney Co. had appropriated but not fully controlled the future merchandising for neither Peter Pan nor Alice; Pooh Bear continues to be a legal battle worth exploring in another blog; but Pamela Travers takes the cake when it comes to control freak and all-around ungrateful author.

JK Rowling can probably attest to the firm hand wielded while films were being created out of her property. Roald Dahl's estate has made no secret of disappointments following the first big screen presence of Willie Wonka. Travers, on the other hand, went head-to-head with the force of nature that was Walt Disney when he set his sights on her creation, Mary Poppins.

Walt's daughters had enjoyed Travers' stories back in WWII and a deal was almost struck at the time, except Travers wanted script approval and Walt refused, wanting to distill a film from only the best scenes in the series. (Interestingly parallel to today, in the books, not only is Mary P a purveyor of magic, so are members of her family.) Almost 15 years passed and Travers was savvy enough to hike her financial demands considerably, remaining difficult to work with, no matter how much Walt tried to appease her, and she literally scowled all the way to the bank. The road from book to film replaced the lead character's saltiness with sweetness, her coldness with warmth. Travers fumed right up to the film premier, where she reportedly took Walt aside to bitch about the innovative animation sequences. All Walt could do was remind her what was done was done.

It's pretty to believe Travers wrote only for the children and was hellbent on protecting her characters or that even Uncle Walt was more concerned about making movies for a family audience, but the truth is surely more than money or literary merit. Travers distanced herself from the claim to wealth and legacy, cited Beatrix Potter as the inspiration of writing "to please myself. Was Pooh really written for Christopher Robin," she asked in the Saturday Eve Post, "or Wonderland for Alice Liddell?"

Although the reviews were ecstatic, the idea of a modern film portraying a lack of adult concerns created many ruffled critics who saw this throwback to a less sophisticated cultural time out of step with what audiences wanted in 1964 (wait till they got a load of The Sound of Music, Nazis notwithstanding). Attesting to the millions of fans of the movie worldwide, even those who have seen the nanny airborne over the Broadway stage (similarly wired Mary Martin of Peter Pan fame was one of Travers' first choices for Mary P), the musical is forgiven for whatever inconsistencies it has from the line of books, which Travers went on churning out until the 1980s.

The rise and rise of Mary P's portrayer, Julie Andrews, is also a favorite film story from 1964. In one of those amazing tales of the underdog turning the tables, Julie was unceremoniously dumped by the film industry after bringing the role of Eliza Doolittle to life in My Fair Lady. Her acting and singing abilities had made her a theatre star, but Hollywood didn't want an unknown - they had rather bring in Audrey Hepburn and let someone else sing for her. Julie was back onstage wowing audiences in Camelot when Disney spotted her. On Oscar night, it wasn't even a matter of Andrews and Hepburn competing - Hepburn wasn't even nominated. Julie won best actress while My Fair Lady won best picture. For another outstanding Andrews performance in 1964, check out The Americanization of Emily, a comedy she starred opposite James Garner. By the next year, Andrews would be in charge of even more children in The Sound of Music, a film she got because Hollywood didn't think the woman who created the role onstage, Mary Martin, had any box office draw.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read More

Flanagan, Caitlin. "Becoming Mary Poppins: P. L. Travers, Walt Disney, and the making of a myth." New Yorker, 19 Dec. 2005. Web.

Gabler, Neal. Walt Disney- the Triumph of the American Imagination. Vintage Books, 2006.

Perry, Danny. Alternate Oscars. Dell Publishing. 1993.

Travers, P. L. "WHERE DID SHE COME FROM? WHY DID SHE GO?." Saturday Evening Post 237.39 (1964): 76-78. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 12 Nov. 2010.

Watts, Steven. The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. Houghton-Mifflin, 1997.

Disaster and blackout - the long farewell of the playwright

It reads like a synopsis from a Tennessee Williams melodrama: amid the palms of the swarthy Florida Keys, a famous artist past the prime of his powers lives with a much younger companion while his former partner lives upstairs, dying of inoperable lung cancer.

For most of 1964, Tennessee Williams was a recluse. His partner since 1948, Frank Merlo, had died in a New York City hospital the previous September. After Merlo died there were no more Tony Awards, no more Pulitzers, no more NY Drama Critics' Circle Awards. Williams and Frank had been together for 15 years, shepherding 8 plays and countless films while creating a pseudo-domestic, settled homelife between Key West, New York, New Orleans and Rome. By 1964, the milk train didn't stop there anymore.

Occurring at the same time as his personal tragedy, there was another memorial service to attend: the end of Williams as master playwright and American theatre superstar. 1961's The Night of the Iguana squeaks by in anthologies as his last masterwork, according to critics of the day. By 1964, a rewritten version of his next play, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, with Tallulah Bankhead, bombed, closing after 4 performances. (TW's next venture - 2 shorter plays under the title Slapstick Tragedy - would also close after 4 performances in 1966.) When Milk Train was rewritten, it became a more naked treatise about death and life's ultimate futility. The main character rails: "What the hell are we doing? Just going from one goddamn frantic distraction to another, till finally one too many goddamn distractions lead to disaster and blackout?"

Milk Train covers a lot of same ground sowed a few years earlier with Sweet Bird of Youth: an aging, rich woman lamenting her loss of youth, a younger man who is both artist and paid sexual companion. He actually may be the angel of death, so the subtle metaphors are becoming less subtle...but, he's also referred to as a beatnik, so at least the play's trendy. Flora Goforth, however, is much more crude and grotesque than TW's previous heroines, and the conversation, set on a terrace on the Italian coast, ambles around a missing "sense of reality" as well as Flora's always imminent death. It is well known that after writing a play, Williams was convinced it would be his last and he was not to survive long enough to write another. Eventually, he would be correct, but not in 1964. Was Milk Train derailed by too much talk of death? (The San Francisco production had actual plaster skeletons scattered throughout the audience) Can't be - much of modern American theatre has focused on death, from 'Night Mother to Angels in America.

It was more than just the nagging spectre of being washed up that many successful artists experience. Those artists who dare to deviate from the hitmaking machine they have invented are condemned to the inevitable vegetable medley audiences and critics like to throw. TW had been writing about washed up characters from the get go. Blanche Dubois in 1947's A Streetcar Named Desire refers to herself as "played out"; Rev. Shannon in Night of the Iguana is defrocked and disassembled. Actresses Karen Stone and Alexandra del Lago are at the end of their careers as women of a certain age denied the roles of younger actresses and they acted out accordingly (although Alexandria, like TW himself, with a whole lot more pills and liquor). By 1964 Williams was beyond complaining about age, vitality and being relevant.

The state of theatre in the early 1960s showed experimentation becoming mainstream. Except when Williams attempted it. TW was a fan of Beckett's minimalism, Albee's rapid-fire dialogue (Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf) and Orton's sex farce (Entertaining Mr. Sloane). TW enjoyed employing more humor in his plays, although the humor was far more grotesque than the sophisticated breezes of Neil Simon's 1963 night on Broadway, Barefoot in the Park.

In addition, unknown to most people was Williams' discovery of the Japanese theatre of Noh. He had visited Japan in 1959 and was affected by Kabuki theatre enough to write a play subtitled An Occidental Noh Play. Noh plays are, by their definition, full of minimalist dialogue, archetype characters (often without identities beyond their description), and pointed silences. Milk Train begins with stage assistants hoisting a flag, identified only as "One and Two" and actually refer to themselves as "theatrical devices...with occidental variations." Many of the plays TW wrote in the last 20 years of his life follow these attributes and were roundly panned by audiences and critics alike.

NY Times theatre critic Richard Gilman wrote: "It was clear to us that Williams was in flight from his own powers, that he was in fact beginning to parody them." Critics began attacking his plays for being too personal - but TW always claimed "all true work of an artist must be personal". This is the old argument about art vs. commercial art, or in this case, art vs. commercially-funded business of theatre. By contrast, in 1964, Arthur Miller had no qualms about presenting the fragmented memory play After the Fall - ostensibly about his marriage to Marilyn Monroe. Intensely personal, sure, because writers write from their experience.

The vicious circle of bad reviews = more drinking = worse writing = more bad reviews. Williams would spend the remainder of mid-60s whacked out on a combo of speed injections and handfuls of downers until he ended up in rehab by decade's end.

Recent reassessments say critics are often wrong to expect an artist to keep producing the same art as they did at the height of their powers - that TW turned abstract as his world closed in on him. Perhaps these plays were not good commercial theater - or even good theater - but as art, they definitely have merit.

































Works Cited

Gilman, Richard. "The Drama is Coming Now". The Second Coming of Tennessee Williams. Yale University Press.
Hale, Allean. "Tennessee's Long Trip," Gale Research volume 45 of Contemporary Criticism. 1984. http://www.tennesseewilliamsstudies.org/archives/2003/5hale.htm
Rader, Dotson. Cry of the Heart. Doubleday and Company, 1985.
Williams, Tennessee. Memoirs. Doubleday and Company, 1975.
Williams, Tennessee. The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. 1964.
Williams, Tennessee. Notebooks. Margaret Bradham Thornton, ed. Yale University Press, 2006.

When Art Film Smiled at its Own Reflection

Cinephile sounds like a dirty word; I wonder if you called someone a cinephile on the street back in 1964 if they would slug you or invite you for an espresso. The '60s were the beginning of a new breed of audience who not only worshipped film but loved discussing it as one would discuss a novel or, more apt, a work of art. The studio system was on its way out; the era of the director-as-filmmaker-as-auteur arrived.

Considering the art film of the early 1960s – especially those coming out of Europe (and most were; to understand a history of American independent film in those years, you can usually start and stop with Cassavettes) – they were a cure from Hollywood churning out predictable product. If you lived in a large enough city, you had access to at least one old movie palace refurbed as the "art house". Since U.S. movie magazines catering to housewives and starry-eyed teenage girls didn't cover events like Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave, it was up to the audiences themselves to keep the conversation going, to influence friends to see films few newspapers and magazines would even review. By 1964, backlash was inevitable. Art film didn't go mainstream, but they were now commonplace enough to "jump the shark", and no one personified shark jumping better than Federico Fellini.

"What are you working on now? Another film without hope?"

In 1964, Fellini was an international prince of cinema thanks to 8 1/2, released the previous summer. Its success wouldn't make his next film any easier to make, nor would it make it a success, but it did help bring American audiences into avid discussion about world cinema and this movie about the making of a movie. I believe most 21st century Americans would fail to see anything odd about a film director being accused of self-indulgence. As if any artist would choose to create for themselves instead of the all-consuming public. Films are not personal canvasses - they are financed heavily, employ hundreds or thousands of people and live or die on the words of critics, reviewers and word-of-mouth audiences. It is doubtful Fellini made 8 1/2 for himself; his role had always been as entertainer. However, his stock had risen after the triumph, in 1960, of La Dolce Vita, a time capsule of life among the new glitterati in Rome.

Throughout the previous decade, Italy was experiencing an amazing bout of economic success - washing the world with vespas and kitchen appliances, Jackie Kennedy's Cassini suits and Anita Ekberg dancing in Rome's Trevi Fountain. La Dolce Vita was such a sensation that it was inevitable his next project would be closely dissected. The lack of linear narrative was a huge problem for those who were not used to movies employing vignettes, where daydreams and reverie were not bracketed by the convention of wavy lines letting the audience know what was reality or not. How could a movie about making a movie ascribe to reality anyway? 8 1/2 spends the bulk of its time lounging with the film's hero in a health spa - which in postwar Italy had more in common with the shrine at Lourdes than a weekend resort getaway. When we are finally shown a glimpse of movie set, it's a rocketship launch pad out in the middle of nowhere.

The idea of making the main character a film director evolved after the entire plot had already formulated in Fellini's mind. He originally had a Joe Everyguy escaping to a health spa, stressed from juggling wife, mistress, clergy, daydreams, flashbacks, psychoanalysis and mindreading. By the time he got the brainstorm to look in the mirror and make his hero a successful film director, he added muse, producer, critics and journalist to the circus.

In 1964, Fellini was busy on his next film with a similar theme: this time having his hero trying to find herself not through cinema but through the occult. Juliet of the Spirits asked some of the same questions concerning self-analysis - except from a female point of view. In contrast to a film about a famous man who has too many women, this film would focus on a woman who shares her husband. Divorce was illegal in Italy when the film was made, so there was really no big mystery about how the relationship would end up. The project had the added bonus of putting Fellini's wife back to work, the amazing Guilietta Masina, who hadn't had a hit film since she last worked with her husband 7 years earlier.

phantasmagoria (fanˌtazməˈgôrēə)
a sequence of real or imaginary images like that seen in a dream

Philip Kemp, writing in Sight and Sound, said: "'Felliniesque' ... usually means nowadays is 'overblown, self-indulgent, sentimental and featuring monstrously fat women and dwarves'. Less than fair." During the fallout reviews for 8 1/2, critics probably did not know that the film was a direct result of Fellini's forays into psychotherapy: the film is like one long therapy session or a Catholic confessional (same thing). It was also influenced by the fact that Federico had started keeping a journal of his dreams. He even gave a shot at celebrity-endorsing that mysteriously controlled experiment of the 60's, LSD, to unlock his creativity, but somehow did not allow his onscreen counterpart to indulge in anything nearly as trendy. A modern critique of 8 1/2 in Cineaste magazine claimed you could make good use of watching the film on DVD by running the scenes in random order.

Most European critics were unanimous in their praise (although, Derek Malcolm mentioned in The Guardian: "When it came out, the film seemed incomprehensible to many who had hitherto loved his work. In one Italian town, the audience attacked the projectionists."); in America, there were culture clashes. Time magazine thought 8 1/2's "stream of consciousness" fascinating, but "is that a reason for showing it publicly?" It wasn't a problem with sophistication or innovation; it was the idea of European films being told so differently than Americans were used to. Also showing in U.S. art houses circa 1964: Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert - another collaboration with his muse Monica Vitti - it received the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Set in a factory-laden Italy, a neurotic young wife feels disconnected from pretty much everything. The film was mostly monochrome with very exact uses of color and not a whole lot happens. However, it's Antonioni, so it is a classic of world cinema.

Critic Pauline Kael was having none of the Fellini love. (It wasn't that she had it out for any foreign film in 1964; she thought Godard's Bande à Part was a "charming" gangster movie.) According to Kael: "Someone's fantasy life is perfectly good material for a movie if it is imaginative and fascinating in itself, or if it illuminates his non-fantasy life in some interesting way. But 8 1/2 is neither..." Then again, she believed 8 1/2 was one of the first movies that some in the audience intentionally showed up stoned.

American cinema wouldn't catch up with the idea of the film director-as-artist until the 1970's when guys like Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas and Scorsese made film a subject one could study in school, like literature and art. We call it independent film now, or just: indies - supposedly small projects bereft of huge financing and studio interference. The advent of DVD means the playing field has evened out for all of world cinema. If you avoid the multiplexes and watch film based on interests and preference, it won't matter what studio is attached to it any more than it will matter how much money was spent on it.




























Works Cited:

Affron, Charles, ed. 8 1/2. Rutgers Films in Print. Rutgers, the State University, 1987.

Celli, Carlo and Marga Cottino-Jones. A New Guide to Italian Cinema. Palgrave MacMillan, 2006.

"Cinema: Director on the Couch." Time. 28 June 1963.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,874998,00.html

Cowie, Peter. Revolution! The Explosion of World Cinema in the Sixties. Faber and Faber, Inc., 2004.

Kael, Pauline. I Lost It at the Movies. Little Brown & Co, 1965.

Kemp, Philip. "FEDERICO FELLINI (1920-93)." Sight & Sound 19.9 (2009): 27. Art & Architecture Complete. EBSCO. Web. 6 Oct. 2010.

Kezich, Tulio. Federico Fellini: His Life and Work. Faber and Faber, Inc., 2002.

Malcolm, Derek. "Federico Fellini: 8 1/2." The Guardian. 22 April 1999.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/1999/apr/22/derekmalcolmscenturyoffilm.derekmalcolm

Monaco, James. "Federico Fellini's 8 1/2." Cineaste 27.3 (2002): 46. Art & Architecture Complete. EBSCO. Web. 6 Oct. 2010.

Mordeen, Ethan. Medium Cool: the Movies of the 1960s. Knopf, 1990.

Stone, Alan. "8 1/2: Fellini's Moment of Truth." Boston Review. 1995.

http://bostonreview.net/br20.3/stone.html