Sometimes writing, a particular work, has magnified meaning to its author. Thus in recent years, my novella Baumholder 1961, which got my Army experience during the Cold War off my back, and my short film Deconstructing Sally, which got the ghost of an ex-wife off my back. Each dealt with important and pivotal experience in my personal life that I had not "resolved," in the sense of understanding their meanings so I might move on. "Everything is material," I well knew, and here was some of the best material I had but I yet had shaped it dramatically into as powerful a narrative as the material deserved. And this bugged the hell out of me. What kind of writer was I if I couldn't even make use of my "best" personal material?
Sally happened by accident. I was invited to a graduate class reunion, which would return me to the scene of the crime, as it were, thrust me back among the people and the memories where the seminal experience had occurred. I went to the reunion not knowing what I would do except shoot a ton of video. Then something would occur to me, I assumed, as indeed it did, resulting in the "fictional memoir" that most observers consider my best film.
Baumholder happened a different way. I knew for decades my Army experience had been so surrealistic that it was material for a novel. I assumed a typical epic "Army Novel" in the tradition of James Jones or Norman Mailer. Only the material was more like M.A.S.H. and Catch-22. "Big novels" in any case. I made dozens and dozens of false starts through the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. Then one day, in a moment of frustration, I sat down and made a list of the essential things I wanted to communicate in my Army novel. I discovered it really wasn't all that much -- which is when it occurred to me I could do this in a shorter form, a novella, setting the entire story in one day, the day the Berlin Wall starts being built. Eureka! I'm pleased with how it turned out.
Ever since coming up with the ending of my feature The Farewell Wake I've had a sense that this project, too, might have special personal significance. But what monkey is still on my back that needs removal? This morning it occurred to me: the monkey is myself! This film might get myself off my back. Indeed, the narrator in the film is very much myself with my issues and his resolution, dropping out to become something of a private hedonist, his dog his companion, sounds very much like a remedy for my own fretting about the world. At least metaphorically. We'll find out soon enough if this notion has legs. I retain a sense that this film is special in my life in some way.
Something else I've been thinking about recently: James Otis burning his life's work. Otis is the man John Adams called "the first Patriot," the leader of the "no taxation without representation" movement, by which he meant representation not divorce. So history, the way things went, drove Otis literally mad and he was hauled out of Boston in a straitjacket, thinking the world had gone mad. After the revolution, he burned all his life's writing, which was going to be edited by his sister, Mercy Otis Warren, who is considered our first playwright. Otis became very depressed that the victorious Americans were still dancing the minuet and acting like regality, especially Hancock and friends.
At any rate, I can see why a man would get so depressed at how the world has changed that he'd destroy his life's work, assuming it meant nothing any more. I've had similar thoughts myself, and I'm sure I'm far from alone. More than once I've come close to deleting this entire blog, for example. But I babble on.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment