By Noah BendzsaThe Department of English Language and Literature Student Blogger for 2021/2022
Here is the beginning of one of my favourite novels, Wildcat:
Late that night the boy tramped out to the old reservoir, through the Johnson’s lot with its broke glass and up the hill through the loblolly pines windwassailed at this hour, then down at the shoreline through the sedge and wholestock and whistlegrass. The night was old and hard and bright like a great glaucomic eyeball. There was an orange pickup at the far end of the lake by the trestle bridge on the gravel road to Coleman City and a man in dungarees and workboots was standing on the hasaw. The man was staring into the lake like it was some primordial well. The boy walked by pulling back at himself, and going slothly as he could came up to that hood and leaned on it and said, Hey there.Tom Such turned and reached out his arms so suddenly like the violence before the oblivion as he took hold of and embraced the boy. You, he said. There was nothing else. Wildcat by Eli Cash, p. 3
Late that night the boy tramped out to the old reservoir, through the Johnson’s lot with its broke glass and up the hill through the loblolly pines windwassailed at this hour, then down at the shoreline through the sedge and wholestock and whistlegrass. The night was old and hard and bright like a great glaucomic eyeball. There was an orange pickup at the far end of the lake by the trestle bridge on the gravel road to Coleman City and a man in dungarees and workboots was standing on the hasaw. The man was staring into the lake like it was some primordial well. The boy walked by pulling back at himself, and going slothly as he could came up to that hood and leaned on it and said, Hey there.
Tom Such turned and reached out his arms so suddenly like the violence before the oblivion as he took hold of and embraced the boy. You, he said. There was nothing else.
Wildcat was panned when it was first published, in 1998, and is now out of print. Its author, Eli Cash, reasoned that its lack of success was due to it being “written in a kind of obsolete vernacular.” Critics may have hated it, but it fascinates me. I would write a paper on it, although that could be problematic. Eli Cash isn’t a real person: he’s a character in Wes Anderson’s 2001 movie, The Royal Tenenbaums. Unlike Cash’s other novel, Old Custer, Wildcat does not even get a prop dust jacket. It is briefly mentioned, in one scene, in which a Charlie Rose stand-in brings it up and triggers Cash’s meltdown on live TV. The “excerpt” above, as you may have already guessed, was something I cooked up by doing either my worst or my best imitation of Cormac McCarthy—as Sam says, “who’s to say” (Gilman, 2012).
It’s funny, I don’t like McCarthy much. (Just now I tried reading No Country for Old Men, for inspiration writing the beginning of Wildcat, and the opening scene with Chigur and the deputy almost made me vomit.) I do, however, love movie writers. That is, not screenwriters but movie characters who are writers, especially those who have failed to live up to their potential in some way, or otherwise basked in oblivion despite their talent and the praise they so clearly deserve. There is Cash from The Royal Tenenbaums, George Gulden from One True Thing (1998), Grady Tripp from Wonder Boys (2000), Bernard Beckman from The Squid and the Whale (2005), and Joan Castleman from The Wife (2017).
Most of the films these characters appear in were adapted from novels. Two of them, One True Thing and Wonder Boys, were written by Pulitzer Prize–winners. (Anna Quindlen had already won, for commentary, when she wrote One True Thing, her first novel. Michael Chabon won for The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay, in 2001.) The Wife was first a novel by Meg Wolitzer.
I made the mistake of reading Wonder Boys and The Wife after I had seen the films. The novel The Wife, purely from the perspective of reader response, was okay. It was a little clichéd, a little heavy-handed, and the prose was sometimes awkward. But there were some good similes. (As an airplane stewardess leans over her husband, Joan Castleman remarks, “I could see the ancient mechanism of arousal start to whir like a knife sharpener inside him” [Wolitzer 2].) Chabon’s Wonder Boys, on the other hand, was a disaster—a well-written disaster, but a disaster nonetheless. The novel’s Grady Tripp is insufferable—the first insufferable literary pothead I have ever encountered—and not in the least engaging, empathetic, or otherwise worth reading about. I would quote from the novel, but once I was finished with it, I got rid of it as fast as I could. The only thing I got out of its three-hundred-odd pages was that Michael Douglas, who played Tripp in the movie, is a magician, transforming an annoying lecher into an earnest, likeable muddler.
I have a general theory about why it’s more fun to watch these characters than to read about them. It’s because you’d rather be reading what the characters themselves have written. Successful metafictionalists, like Philip Roth, know the perils of making their novelist characters’ novels more interesting than their own. When Roth writes about Philip Roth or Nathan Zuckerman, he has them tell the story he wants them to tell, the interesting story, rather than merely alluding to how these characters once won the PEN Award or the National Book Award or the “Helsinki Prize.” Nobody, least of all me, wants to read about how a character is in a slump because they’re typing away on an endless project, or because they’re always stoned, or because they didn’t get tenure at Harvard one time. And in print, there’s only so much you can do with a blocked writer. Although Roth and Zuckerman often agonize over whether they have gotten the story straight, at least they give it a shot.
But this is a negative theorization. It doesn’t answer why watching these writers on film isn’t tedious. For me, the answer is simple. I like watching movies and TV shows on their own terms. Watching them rarely inspires me to read about their characters’ interests. (Besides, films are rarely really about what their characters are interested in. The Sweet Smell of Success [1957] isn’t about newspaper culture but power; The Draughtsman’s Contract [1985] not about drafting but semiotics; Goodwill Hunting [1997] not about “math” but something else, I assume. I don’t know.)
The more interesting question is why I like the writer movie-character in the first place. Why do I think that Eli Cash and Grady Tripp would be great professors, when there’s sound evidence they wouldn’t be? (When would they even have time to mark midterms?) Why is Bernard Beckman fascinating even though he’s a jerk? Why do I want so desperately to read The Walnut, even if Joe Castleman’s name were on the cover instead of Joan’s? Why is George Gulden my hero? I don’t intend to answer all of these questions. Some of them come down to taste and thus aren’t very interesting for anyone other than myself. Cash is charming and silly and easily hurt. His vulnerability is cute. Tripp, (un)blocked as he is, has a debut novel whose name, The Arsonist’s Daughter, is right out of Harold Brodkey’s top desk drawer. Beckman (Jeff Daniels) is a petty narcissist, but I can stomach watching him blunder through his personal life, because I’ve known men like him, and he’s hardly an exaggeration. Now, my loves of George Gulden (William Hurt) and of Joan Castleman (Glenn Close and Annie Starke) are a little more complicated and deserve more detailed explanations, because I think these loves are revealing.
In addition to being white, straight, and male, Gulden shares a lot of traits with Cash, Tripp, and Beckman. All four of them teach at insignificant, fictional liberal arts colleges. Like Tripp, Gulden has run up against the old 8x11 white wall in his writing life; like Beckman, he’s an unrepentant narcissist (at least, up until the end); and like Cash and Tripp, he’s an addict. Cash, Tripp, and Beckman, though, are all meant to take up space in their respective pictures. Tripp and Beckman are the main characters of Wonder Boys and The Squid and the Whale, respectively, and Cash plays the pivotal role in The Royal Tenenbaum’s zany climax. Gulden is not supposed to be the focus of One True Thing. He is meant to shadow the beginning of the film as an august presence, only to be defoliated as the film progresses and his daughter, Ellen Gulden (Renée Zellweger), realizes how shallow and self-centred her father really is, shifting her allegiances from him to her dying mother (Meryl Streep).
I have watched One True Thing perhaps three times now, twice all the way through. George never loses his centrality. His literary anecdotes are all the same, customary tchotchkes of Mr. American Literature. Something-something Gertrude Stein, punchline Hemingway. So-and-so kept rotting fruit in their desk to boost their concentration, so now I keep rotting fruit in my desk. He tells his daughter her prose needs to be “more muscular,” and then goes on to say, “When I was twenty and working at The New Yorker, I would spend a whole day working on a single sentence” (Hurt, 1998).
Now, you might think you’ve got me. Didn’t I just spend my last blog going on and on about The New Yorker? Isn’t that what English students do, talk about The New Yorker until they’re either working there (unlikely) or dead? This is true, but I assure you, it isn’t why I’m interested in George. When I first saw Knives Out (2019) and Daniel Craig’s character says that no one reads Gravity’s Rainbow, I leaped out of my theatre seat. “I did! I did!” I may have screamed, in that blank moment in which I lost all self-control—but Knives Out is not a movie that I have returned to or that I have any yen to return to any time soon. Moreover, George’s “more muscular” comment is vague and airy, and his New Yorker name-drop is pathetic and, perhaps unintentionally, hilarious. So Ellen’s prose is supposed to be more muscular… like Cormac McCarthy’s? Roger Ebert points out that if George really did spend all day on a single sentence, “then to meet his deadlines he must have had to dash off his other sentences in heedless haste” (par. 3). In this case, as welcome as literary references usually are in the movies, George is not exactly paying good writing a compliment, or arguing for his presence continuing to overshadow the clichéd, albeit well-acted, mother-has-cancer storyline.
My love of George is an extra-textual imaginative process. It isn’t something that the movie means to happen; it just happened to me. I see what kind of academic and writer the character could have been, and in this role, he is oddly inspiring. My own failures as a writer and tyro scholar can crouch behind his image. The character George is at once a literary hero, incapable of letting me down by virtue of his fictionality, and a disguise. He is a set of Groucho glasses that I can pull on when I am writing something difficult. (Like you, I have other disguises, too, but they are completely of my own design.)
Joan Castleman, on the other hand, does not represent a disguise; she is the locus of all the technique of which I am arrogant, the technique that darts a yard or two ahead of my laziness. Not once in the film The Wife (as is the case with George) are readers privy to any of Joan’s prose. Instead, we are merely tantalized by how she writes. In one scene, she explains to her husband, Joe—for whom, like Colette, she is ghostwriting—why a scene of a woman folding laundry goes on for so long (he feels it should be cut). It’s not about the laundry, she says, it emphasizes the woman’s loneliness, her sense of waiting. What would this look like on the page? Would the reader be able to grasp this, or is it too subtle? It doesn’t matter: the challenge has been set, the paces walked. I get the feeling someone has done it, even if, on second consideration, they really haven’t.
The other thing that I long for and envy about Joan’s writing life is its sense of stability. Her husband has his names on her books, but her life is taken care of. She gets none of the credit, but she is allowed to write, to communicate her ideas through stories that are ostensibly Joe’s. For her, the work is a form of therapy from the badness of her marriage. She feels misused: Joe has his affairs, is hailed as a literary genius; she is the invisible woman. Her presence, dependence, and servitude are expected. As a person, however, she is no more than “the wife.” I am not a woman and did not live through the 1960s as a housewife and homemaker, so I cannot say for certain that I would feel any less resentment than Joan does, placed in her situation. But I do think I would be amenable to it. My temperament is more in line with Alma’s (Vicky Krieps) in The Phantom Thread (2017): I am ultimately a codependent person. I need a sense of home and being a spouse or partner (in both the romantic and productive sense; children are optional).
This is somewhat the same feeling I have for Alice Munro’s life. Despite everything she has had to endure—depression, sadness, loss, anger—there is something enviable about her life seen from the outside. I suspect Meg Wolitzer feels somewhat the same way about Munro. She has Joan refer to the ability of “the gelatin of art [to] contain and suspend” life (165), and for those who have read the short story “Material,” it’s hard to see “the gelatin of art” as anything but a reference to that famous “marvellous clear jelly” (Munro 43). So it isn’t surprising that Joan’s life is an intensification of the feeling I derive from Munro’s. And the film, in clarifying the relationship between the fictional writer and the real one (it changes the “Helsinki Prize” to the Nobel Prize, which Munro won in 2013), only makes Joan’s life even more tangible.
What I like about both Joan and George is that they allow me to transport myself out of the life I am currently living. (I feel as though I have read this somewhere before.…) This is one of the functions of good fiction. When it comes down to it, Joan and George are the kernels of stories I tell myself about writing and stories that allow me to write. They are enviable, inspiring, other lives. They are a few movements and sounds into which I am helpless but to see myself, just as I am often wont to do with prose:
The dryer made a flat, congested sound, like a rubber bicycle horn. Maeve checked on the sheets, but they were still damp, and she put them on again. When she returned to their bedroom, she saw at the foot of the bed the pile of clothing. She had pictured herself and Thom, too absorbed in themselves, bypassing it for the bed, when she had dumped it there from where it had sat, since Friday, in the middle of the mattress. And perhaps he wouldn’t notice; it was not for noticing. But she saw it now. Were he here, her husband would stare, grunt. Perhaps, in the right circumstances, he would even stoop, pick it up, and deposit it on the dresser. There it might look as though as though it were part of a process interrupted, that she had momentarily stepped away and might resume at any time. It had been on the bed since Friday. Now it was Sunday. She began to fold it, one piece at a time, leaving the unfolded clothes on the floor and piling the folded ones on the dresser. She bent and righted, bent and righted at the waist like a wooden doll. Took two steps across the room to the dresser. At first, she only folded his clothes. Even his sweaters, now creased, which she needed only hang up. Then, when she had finished, she made a separate folded pile of her clothes on the dresser. The pile on the floor was gone. She checked the dryer: the sheets were still damp. It was after six o’clock, and the afternoon light was gone. The Walnut by Joe Castleman, p. 58-59
The dryer made a flat, congested sound, like a rubber bicycle horn. Maeve checked on the sheets, but they were still damp, and she put them on again. When she returned to their bedroom, she saw at the foot of the bed the pile of clothing. She had pictured herself and Thom, too absorbed in themselves, bypassing it for the bed, when she had dumped it there from where it had sat, since Friday, in the middle of the mattress. And perhaps he wouldn’t notice; it was not for noticing. But she saw it now. Were he here, her husband would stare, grunt. Perhaps, in the right circumstances, he would even stoop, pick it up, and deposit it on the dresser. There it might look as though as though it were part of a process interrupted, that she had momentarily stepped away and might resume at any time. It had been on the bed since Friday. Now it was Sunday. She began to fold it, one piece at a time, leaving the unfolded clothes on the floor and piling the folded ones on the dresser. She bent and righted, bent and righted at the waist like a wooden doll. Took two steps across the room to the dresser. At first, she only folded his clothes. Even his sweaters, now creased, which she needed only hang up. Then, when she had finished, she made a separate folded pile of her clothes on the dresser. The pile on the floor was gone. She checked the dryer: the sheets were still damp. It was after six o’clock, and the afternoon light was gone.
Works Cited