Miss Lonelyhearts

On December 3, 1994 the comic Adam Sandler introduced his “Chanukah Song” on Saturday Night Live. It was so popular that, in perennial appearances during the holidays, Sandler performed the song with new lyrics, all of them about how Jewish-Americans have endured, and prevailed, during the Christmas Season, pointing out how American culture has been enriched by Jews.

When you feel like the only kid in town
Without a Christmas tree
Here's a list of people who are Jewish
Just like you and me

Those first two lines are what informs the rest of the song – the feeling of isolation from, and resentment towards, the prevailing – Gentile - culture. Ever since I first heard the song, I have had the overwhelming feeling that it was an anthem of pain – the outcry of a Jewish kid growing up in a goyim world.

One name you won’t find on Sandler’s list of Jewish people is Nathanael West, author of the novels Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust.(1) Born Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein in 1903, his short-lived career as a novelist (just nine years) was beset with misfortune. His second and fourth novels, among the best writing of the 1930s, sold fewer than 2,300 copies in his lifetime. When his fortunes at last turned in his favor and he was enjoying happiness in marriage and success as a screenwriter in Hollywood, he was killed in a car crash.

In his monograph on West, Stanley Edgar Hyman wrote:

West received little or no education in the Jewish religion, and although he was probably circumcised, he was never confirmed in a Bar Mitzvah ceremony. During his years at Brown [University], West threw off what he could of his Jewishness, and suffered for the rest. "More than anyone I ever knew," his friend John Sanford later reported, "[he] writhed under the accidental curse of his religion." West had nothing to do with any organized Jewish activity on campus, hung around the snobbish Gentile fraternities, and was intensely anxious to be pledged and intensely bitter that he never was. "Nobody ever thought of [him] as being Jewish," a college friend has said, but apparently the Brown fraternities did.

West's first novel, The Dream of Balso Snell, seems to have been first written in college, but he rewrote it and in 1931 he managed to get it privately printed in a limited edition of 500 copies. The book listed "Nathanael West" as author and thus marked West's official change of name. He had spent much of his class time at Brown doodling "Nathan von Wallenstein Weinstein," which was the name signed to his [Brown literary magazine] contributions, but even that had turned out to be not Gentile enough. West explained to William Carlos Williams how he got the name: "Horace Greely said, 'Go West, young man.' So I did." West's anti-Semitism was now considerable. He referred to Jewish girls as "bagels," and avoided them.

West's personal life in the East was no more successful than his literary career. Balso Snell was dedicated to Alice Shephard, a Roman Catholic girl who had gone to Pembroke College with West's sister Laura. He was secretly engaged to her from 1929 to 1932, then publicly engaged, but they never married, although West had bought a marriage license and carried it around with him for several years. His poverty was the explanation given out, but in Sanford's opinion the engagement foundered on the religious difference.

West’s novel Miss Lonelyhearts is a unique achievement in American literature. By interjecting interior states into its action of a newspaper columnist exiled to providing advice to the lovelorn (or the otherwise disenchanted), West takes the reader in the opposite direction of contemporary “realistic” writing, away from Hemingway and toward European modes, from Baudelaire through Kafka to the Surrealists. The novel's protagonist, whose name is always “Miss Lonelyhearts,” becomes so overwhelmed by the misery expressed so clumsily in the pile of letters he receives every day that he becomes ill both physically and emotionally. Miss Lonelyhearts becomes an alter ego, it possesses him and, eventually, destroys him. It doesn't matter that, as Edmund Wilson pointed out, Miss Lonelyhearts overestimates the veracity of the letters to him and ascribes disproportionate importance to them. As the son of a Baptist minister, he is predisposed to regard the suffering in the letters, and the moralizing responses they provoke that he publishes in his column, as demonstrations of Christian love and forgiveness. So it is not exactly surprising that, just as he is attaining a kind of Christian grace in his attitudes toward his subject, it leads him directly to disaster.

But West does offer his hero a real chance for human - not divine - salvation in the character of his fiancée, Betty. He has a transcendant idyll with Betty at a country farm in which West's language becomes suddenly explicit and expressive of the physical beauties of the natural world and the conditions of living in its proximity:

He sat on the porch and watched her work. She had her hair tied up in a checked handkerchief, otherwise she was completely naked. She looked a little fat, but when she lifted something to the line, all the fat disappeared. Her raised arms pulled her breasts up until they were like pink-tipped thumbs.

There was no wind to disturb the pull of the earth. The new green leaves hung straight down and shone in the hot sun like an army of little metal shields. Somewhere in the woods a thrush was singing. Its sound was like that of a flute choked with saliva.

Betty stopped with her arms high to listen to the bird. When it was quiet, she turned towards him with a guilty laugh. He blew her a kiss. She caught it with a gesture that was childishly sexual. He vaulted the porch rail and ran to kiss her. As they went down, he smelled a mixture of sweat, soap and crushed grass.

It is, of course, terribly ironic that Miss Lonelyhearts should be undone by Christian love. West's efforts to divest himself of his Jewishness, his having studied medieval Catholicism at Brown and his aborted engagement to a nice Catholic girl, led him, in his last months in Hollywood, to achieve the comfortable life of a successful screenwriter (even while attempting, with The Day of the Locust, to exploit that experience through a fictional attack on Hollywood). He had at last married a nice Gentile woman and was on his way home from a camping trip with her when they both died on Ventura Highway. West's remains were returned to New York where they were buried in a Jewish cemetery.

(1) Sandler’s ever-expanding list of people who are Jewish includes David Lee Roth, James Caan, Kirk Douglas, Rod Carew, Dinah Shore, and The Three Stooges.

A View of the Coast

F. Scott Fitzgerald

On the occasion of the 92nd Academy Awards, I quoted at length the decidedly dim view that Edmund Wilson took of the Hollywood scene in 1937. While he lacks the enthusiasm for the motion picture medium that his contemporaries Otis Ferguson and James Agee possessed, Wilson’s views were not as outlandish as they seem. It is by now a commonly held view, for example, that the quality of the Marx Brothers’ films suffered a noticeable decline when they left Paramount and signed with MGM.

Of the many novels that use Hollywood as a backdrop, there are two that stand out: Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, published in 1939, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, left unfinished at the author’s death in December 1940.(1) Edmund Wilson, who had been a close friend of Fitzgerald’s, and who had corresponded with him during the writing of the novel, undertook the preparation of The Last Tycoon for publication in 1941. Both Fitzgerald an West had worked in Hollywood movies as script-writers. The money they made there was outrageously disproportionate to their output, although the money that West made allowed him to live out his last years in comfort. And they both managed, with uneven results, to turn their experiences under what Wilson called “the insipid Hollywood sun” into compelling novels.

But I left out a particular passage from Wilson’s review of the book The Great Goldwyn because I wanted to expand on it. The passage was about Hollywood’s treatment of writers:

And the writers. Before the vultures have picked the bones of theatrical talent, the big white worms of the studios have grown fat on the decaying flesh. But the vultures get the worms, too. Have we not all had needy friends who have gone West with a smile on their lips and who have never returned again? – from whom we have ceased to hear and whose names we no longer mention, whom we remember as young people of promise, wondering what they have found to do and never thinking to connect them with the processed stuff we hear croaked out, between kisses and pistol-shots, by the smooth-faced gigantic phantoms, when we are foolish enough to go to the movies? It is true, as Mr. Johnston tells us, that Sam Goldwyn always wants the best writers; and there they are out on the Golden Coast, cooped up in their little cells, like school children in study hour. Teacher is the supervisor, and one hopes to be teacher’s favorite. There they are, blowing in their money on goofy Los Angeles houses and on ostentatious cocktail parties, at which they talk about their salaries and their options and always speak of their superiors with admiration, while they submit to being spied upon and having their correspondence opened. Those who do not care to admit surrender pretend to be uncompromising Leftists, getting together in little groups to give three discreet cheers for Stalin and to shed a tear for Republican Spain. But when the Writer’s Guild was organized, it took only one woof from Schulberg to send them running like prairie-dogs – leaving the job to the technicians and the actors. And now the blacklisted leaders ate creeping back, having become so profoundly habituated to high salaries for low work that, no matter how radical they claim to be, they don’t know how to get along without them.

As I mentioned above, Wilson had been in correspondence with Fitzgerald when he was at work on The Last Tycoon, which is an intimate portrait of a maverick young movie producer that resembled Irving Thalberg. Fitzgerald knew first hand how writers were valued by the big studios, and how their treatment by the producers exposed their utter incomprehension of what writers do. Fitzgerald introduces a character named Boxley in the novel and includes him in the following scene in which Monroe Stahr, the novel’s protagonist, tries to explain to him how to write a movie scene:

Stahr smiled at Mr. George Boxley. It was a kindly fatherly smile Stahr had developed inversely when he was a young man pushed into high places. Originally it had been a smile of respect toward his elders, then as his own decisions grew rapidly to displace theirs, a smile so that they should not feel it finally emerging as what it was: a smile of kindness sometimes a little hurried and tired, but always there toward anyone who had not angered him within the hour. Or anyone he did not intend to insult, aggressive and outright.

Mr. Boxley did not smile back. He came in with the air of being violently dragged, though no one apparently had a hand on him. He stood in front of a chair, and again it was as if two invisible attendants seized his arms and set him down forcibly into it. He sat there morosely. Even when he lit a cigarette on Stahr's invitation, one felt that the match was held to it by exterior forces he disdained to control.

Stahr looked at him courteously. "Something not going well, Mr. Boxley?" The novelist looked back at him in thunderous silence. "I read your letter," said Stahr. The tone of the pleasant young headmaster was gone. He spoke as to an equal, but with a faint two-edged deference.

"I can't get what I write on paper," broke out Boxley. "You've all been very decent, but it's a sort of conspiracy. Those two hacks you've teamed me with listen to what I say, but they spoil it - they seem to have a vocabulary of about a hundred words."

"Why don't you write it yourself?" asked Stahr.

"I have. I sent you some."

"But it was just talk, back and forth," said Stahr mildly. "Interesting talk but nothing more." 

Now it was all the two ghostly attendants could do to hold Boxley in the deep chair. He struggled to get up; he uttered a single quiet bark which had some relation to laughter but none to amusement, and said: "I don't think you people read things. The men are duelling when the conversation takes place. At the end one of them falls into a well and has to be hauled up in a bucket." He barked again and subsided. 

"Would you write that in a book of your own, Mr. Boxley?''

"What? Naturally not."

"You'd consider it too cheap."

Movie standards are different," said Boxley, hedging.

"Do you ever go to them?"

"No – almost never."

"Isn't it because people are always duelling and falling down wells?"

"Yes – and wearing strained facial expressions and talking incredible and unnatural dialogue."

"Skip the dialogue for a minute," said Stahr. "Granted your dialogue is more graceful than what these hacks can write - that's why we brought you out here. But let's imagine something that isn't either bad dialogue or jumping down a well. Has your office got a stove in it that lights with a match?"

"I think it has," said Boxley stiffly, "but I never use it."

"Suppose you're in your office. You've been fighting duels or writing all day and you're too tired to fight or write any more. You're sitting there staring - dull, like we all get sometimes. A pretty stenographer that you've seen before comes into the room and you watch her idly. She doesn't see you, though you're very close to her. She takes off her gloves, opens her purse and dumps it out on a table --" Stahr stood up, tossing his key-ring on his desk. "She has two dimes and a nickel and a cardboard matchbox. She leaves the nickel on the desk, puts the two dimes back into her purse and takes her black gloves to the stove, opens it and puts them inside. There is one match in the matchbox and she starts to light it kneeling by the stove. You notice that there's a stiff wind blowing in the window but just then your telephone rings. The girl picks it up, says hello - listens and says deliberately into the phone, 'I've never owned a pair of black gloves in my life.' She hangs up, kneels by the stove again, and just as she lights the match, you glance around very suddenly and see that there's another man in the office, watching every move the girl makes." Stahr paused. He picked up his keys and put them in his pocket.

"Go on," said Boxley smiling. “What happens?"

"I don't know," said Stahr. "I was just making pictures."

Boxley felt he was being put in the wrong. "It's just melodrama," he said.

"Not necessarily," said Stahr. "In any case, nobody has moved violently or talked cheap dialogue or had any facial expression at all. There was only one bad line, and a writer like you could improve it. But you were interested."

"What was the nickel for?" asked Boxley evasively.

"I don't know," said Stahr. Suddenly he laughed. “Oh, yes the nickel was for the movies."

The two invisible attendants seemed to release Boxley. He relaxed, leaned back in his chair and laughed. "What in hell do you pay me for?" he demanded. "I don't understand the damn stuff."

"You will," said Stahr grinning, "or you wouldn't have asked about the nickel."

Nearly a decade after Fitzgerald’s death, Wilson was asked to look at a movie adaptation of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, starring Alan Ladd. Stanley Kauffmann was at the private screening and provided the following account:

When I saw the 1949 film of The Great Gatsby, the only other person in the screening room was Edmund Wilson (whom I didn’t know). Afterward, as he left, a smiling Paramount publicity man asked him how he had liked the picture. “Not very much, I’m afraid,” said Wilson, and kept walking to the elevator. The Paramount man looked less disappointed than betrayed, as if saying, “We’ve gone to the trouble of making a whole movie out of your friend’s book and you don’t even appreciate it!”

(1) Fitzgerald died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940 and Nathanael West was killed in a car crash on December 22. Fitzgerald was 44, West was 37.

It Stinks!

“And yet this book makes one slightly sick.”


For me, watching the Academy Awards is not much different from watching the Grammys – a prolonged celebration of products to which I would otherwise pay no attention. The movies that are awarded by what I once called the Hollywood Institute of Self-Congratulation are the ones that uphold Hollywood’s dimly conceived standard of what a movie should be. But even bothering to state as much has become a whopping cliché. This is how it has always been. The vast majority of movies today are just as awful as they always were, from 1929 to to the present. As even a generous critic like Stanley Kauffmann believed, only less than one percent of them make the medium viable and keep it from veering into irrelevance.

So just now, instead of watching the ceremony, which has always left me feeling slightly sick, allow me to reprint a criticism of Hollywood by an interested outsider. Edmund Wilson is one of the preeminent American literary critics. So what qualifies him to write about movies? One thing qualifies him perfectly: he was not a fan. Being a fan is grounds for the immediate disqualification of any critic, yet the majority of people writing on the subject of film are unmistakable sufferers from this malady. Not only can they not distinguish between what they like and what is good, they refuse to believe there is anything like an objective standard – such as an aesthetic standard. 

Ask anyone who knows anything about the subject and they will tell you the same thing: the Hollywood’s Golden Era was the 1930s, and the Golden Year was 1939. Writing a review in 1937 called The Great Goldwyn by Alva Johnston, Edmund Wilson, who never warmed so much to the subject, suggested that this was a misconception, and that Hollywood had little to be so proud of. When Johnston asserted that “Next year is Sam’s silver jubilee [in the movie business]. It is something for everybody to feel patriotic about. The U.S.A. leads the world by a wider margin in pictures than anything else, and one of the chief reasons is the Great Goldwyn,”  Wilson took umbrage at the appeal to patriotism, and expounded his reasons why:


Well, I for one will be damned if I will feel patriotic about Sam Goldwyn’s silver jubilee. In what sense does the United States lead the world in moving pictures? We make more of them than any other country and are, I suppose, more proficient technically, but have we ever turned out anything that was comparable artistically to the best German or Russian films? I can think of nothing except Charlie Chaplin, who is his own producer and produces simply himself. There was a time – up to, say, 1930 – when our pictures seemed to be improving. There were new actors brought in from Europe and from the speaking stage in New York; there was mechanical experimentation and an aesthetic attention to photography;  intelligent directors were given their chance.

But then the depression fell; the producers were frightened and forced to retrench; and the whole movie business seemed to harden into something immovably banal. It nailed down its favorite formulas in all their vulgarity and falsity, and almost entirely abandoned any attempt to make the old situations seem lifelike or to point them up with novel direction. The actors who were brought to Hollywood were handled with extreme stupidity, and, if they stayed there, almost invariably ruined. A lot of talent has been fed into the studios, and what have our pictures to show for it? How shall we ever know now, for example, whether Katharine Hepburn – or, for that matter, Greta Garbo – ever really had anything in her? They set the talented Emil Jannings to performing over and over again wretched parodies of his German masterpieces, with everything that had given them reality and made them human and moving bleached out by the insipid Hollywood sun, until he could stand it no longer and departed. Charles Laughton has also escaped and has returned to England and the Old Vic. Marlene Dietrich, who must have had some ability at least as a night club singer, because she has made marvellous phonograph records in German, has been turned into something in the nature of one of those loose-jointed dolls  designed to be propped up against the pillows in boudoirs with sateen bedspreads, and has been made to appear in pictures so foolish, so unsightly and of such horrible taste that the most beautiful woman in the world could not play in them without looking ridiculous. But the only mirrors, apparently, in which film actors can look at themselves are the magazines that exploit the glamor of the trade and are edited for adolescent schoolgirls. That able Soviet actress Anna Sten the Great Goldwyn was unable to use at all; and I see that she is now making for another producer pictures with such titles as Love Me Again, Gorgeous and Orchid Girl. Mae West, whose peculiar attraction was that she worked up her own material and created a legendary world of her own, now has to have savorless imitations written for her by Hollywood hacks, who have quickly converted her fantasies into run-of-the-mill goods. The vultures of the Coast got them all. A director like King Vidor who has serious aspirations ends by turning out the worst kind of monstrosity: the bad serious picture. The shimmering polish of Lubitsch ends as a veneer on the awful old formulas. We have actually got to a point where features like Tarzan and Charlie Chan are the most satisfactory things one can go to. They are absurd, they are fairy tales; but they do have a certain independent existence.

The other day, after long abstinence from the movies, the result of having seen nothing but bad films for a year, I went to see one for the first time in months. I had assumed that the Marx brothers were indestructible. True, I had been reading the publicity stories about their new picture, A Day at the Races: how it had first been taken all over the country in the form of a stage entertainment, with a view to weeding out every gag that could not be immediately appreciated by the audience of the average town of over two or three thousand inhabitants. But I hadn’t foreseen that the result of this would be to deprive the Marx brothers of all their natural vitality and spontaneity. As if even popular comic art, if this is really to capture the public, were not more a matter of putting over an audience (as Charlie Chaplin and Walt Disney have) something from one’s own imagination than of finding an infallible formula to provoke its automatic reactions! The idea of establishing and exploiting the lowest common denominator of audiences has finally killed the movies. They are absolutely sterile and static. And even the Marx brothers are no longer the Marx brothers. Their corporate élan has been deadened by unnatural selection of their dullest gags; and they now fall asunder helpless. It would be amusing if A Day at the Races, after all the special trouble taken with it, should turn out to be a total flop.

I remember only one American critic who has seemed to me to do full justice to this subject of the Hollywood producers: Mr. George Jean Nathan in the Smart Set. Mr. Nathan had the rich and reckless language for it; I am sorry that my own powers are relatively feeble. That was ten years or more ago, but it is plain that today’s producers, including the Great Goldwyn and the late lamented Irving Thalberg, are the same megalomaniac cloak-and-suit dealers that their predecessors were. You have only to look at their products. You have only to look at their staffs. From the servant you may know the master. Mr. Johnston can have had only a brief submergence, and look at the book he has written. 

from "IT'S TERRIBLE! IT'S GHASTLY IT STINKS!" July 21, 1937 

Simon Said

Looking up articles by John Simon who, now 93, remains the sole surviving film critic of the Golden Age, I came across a querulous piece from 2015 that its author titled, "The Most Hilariously Damning Review Of The Original Star Wars". It was a post from one of the many blogs on which fans pour forth their seemingly unlimited adoration of pop culture fixtures - in this case the Star Wars movie franchise, created by George Lucas and now owned by Disney.

The author of the piece comes from a base of fans for whom Star Wars is unquestionably one of the pillars of movie art, along with what else I can only guess. His distaste for the "hilariously damning review" (by John Simon) derives from the assumption that the first Star Wars installment, released in 1977, is an inviolable film masterwork: "When Star Wars came out in 1977, nobody knew it would become the classic that we all recognize today. Some people were skeptical, for sure. But few reviewers were as hilariously savage as John Simon, with New York Magazine, who called it 'a set of giant baubles manipulated by an infant mind.'"

The author offers "some choice passages from Simon’s review," which I won't repeat here. Simon was possessed of two things that sometimes acted against each other: acute discernment and a sometimes brutal means of expressing it. While recognizing that shooting ducks in a barrel wasn't very sporting, he occasionally couldn't resist the sheer fun of it. Simon's conclusion ("Still, Star Wars will do very nicely for those lucky enough to be children or unlucky enough never to have grown up.") was virtually identical to Stanley Kauffmann's assessment: "This picture was made for those (particularly males) who carry a portable shrine within them of their adolescence, a chalice of a Self that was Better Then, before the world’s affairs or—in any complex way—sex intruded. Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and their peers guard the portals of American innocence, and Star Wars is an unabashed, jaw-clenched tribute to the chastity still sacred beneath the middle-aged spread."

When the 3rd installment of the Star Wars franchise was released, in 1982 I think, Simon appeared on ABC News Nightline in a "debate" with Chicago movie reviewers Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel. Simon repeated his opinion that the Star Wars films were made for kids, both underage and overgrown, and that they were trying to make kids dumber. Siskel & Ebert, smiling like they were in firm possession of the high ground, played straight into Simon's argument first by questioning Simon's upbringing (the only explanation they can imagine for why he chooses not to revisit his childhood), and by pointing out the overwhelming popularity of the films among children. Siskel told Simon he should've been with him at a matinee, surrounded by delighted kids who easily identified the good guys and the bad guys, cheering and booing in perfect synchronization (I'm paraphrasing).

What Simon should've asked Siskel was what was he doing sitting among a throng of squealing kids at an matinee? Didn't he feel even the slightest bit out of place? And would he try to smuggle a child into an audience of grownups at an R-rated movie, at the risk of getting kicked out of the theater? (I argued before that the MPAA ratings should cut both ways. Adults should be prevented from watching films marketed to children. But, of course, Star Wars wasn't marketed exclusively to kids. It was given a PG rating, after all -  albeit there wasn't much parental guidance at Siskel's matinee.)

John Simon, like myself, probably had a perfectly normal childhood, of a normal duration, ending some time in his mid-teens when self-knowledge and knowledge of the ways of the world impelled him to turn away from childhood and embrace adulthood. Speaking for myself, if you had asked me when I was 12 what I wanted to be when I grew up, I am confident that I would've replied that I wanted to be an adult. That's all. My profession was unimportant. I saw my childish condition as manifestly, if necessarily, unfair. I was at a disadvantage - one that grownups capitalized on. I wasn't taken seriously because I was a child. And, of course, adults who used physical violence against me as a form of coercion did so precisely because I was too small to defend myself. Why is it that no one remembers this about being a child, but only the endless process of discovery and wonder that is the natural result of being new to everything?

I read comic books when I was a kid and loved watching Western movies and cheered when the cavalry arrived in the nick of time to save the white settlers from the clutches of the the savage "injuns". Even John Ford's "masterpiece" The Searchers is informed by this creed. My heroes were Johnny Unitas and Wilt Chamberlain and Hank Aaron. I thrilled to the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper. On TV, I watched Daniel Boone and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and The Munsters. But when I arrived in my teens, I saw Fellini's La Strada (because it had two Hollywood stars, Anthony Quinn and Richard Basehart) and I was inadvertently made aware of a whole world of films that had been deliberately kept from me, just as they were kept from most Americans, by a monopolizing Hollywood.

What ultimately determines the value of any work - a book, a piece of music, a film? Not the opinions of critics, no matter how learned and deftly expressed. Longevity decides. Will it still be known and celebrated in 20, 50, 100 years? Only posterity will tell. Ask a film producer if he cares what posterity will say of his film. He only cares about the film's first run. Not even a cult following can make up for a film's disastrous first showing. The vast majority of what are stupidly called art-house films (by a generation of doofuses) are also known as "niche" productions. They aren't expected to make a killing at the box office. So when they don't, no one is surprised. But if a blockbuster bombs (the word blockbuster was first applied to an actual bomb), it sends shock waves through the film industry. A manufactured product designed expressly to put butts in movie theater seats has failed to function. The butts failed to materialize in sufficient numbers to offset the enormous cost of the production. Careers are in peril.

What can be done to prevent it? Is there no algorithm that can be used to guarantee box office receipts? I can tell you from experience, just as every other experiened critic can tell you, that there is no connection at all between critical success and sales. What is good and what sells exist in different dimensions that never touch. A good film can sometimes sell, but it is unlikely to. What sells, to the extent of its popularity, is mostly bad, but not invariably so.

The clash of sensibilities that the aforementioned Star Wars article highlights is not, of course, an isolated event. It happens whenever a believer comes in contact with the expressed views of a skeptic. I wrote about a similar encounter at the beginning of this month. A website for fans of J.R.R. Tolkien published a review of The Lord of the Rings (by Edmund Wilson) that was highly unfavorable. It was inconceivable to these fans that everyone couldn't share in their unquestioning enthusiasm for the books. Of course, it was also inconceivable to them that a literary world could exist in which Tolkien wasn't among the greatest writers who ever lived, even if they were unacquainted with the writing of Flaubert, Joyce, Mann, Fitzgerald, or any other writer whose work is esteemed to be great. Edmund Wilson came from such a literary world. Which is why, when his job as a professional literary critic required him to read Tolkien's books, because some misguided critics had praised their literary qualities, he had to denounce Tolkien as a writer for children. More recently, Harold Bloom denounced J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books for identical reasons.(1)

John Simon came from a world of film that Star Wars fans know nothing about. It is a world in which the standards were set by films that no Star Wars fan has probably even heard of. So when Simon was required in 1977, as the film critic of the weekly New York Magazine, to express his judgement of the first Star Wars movie, it wasn't at all in accordance with the feelings of its fans. Simon saw it as a poorly written, clumsily executed (however buttressed it was by technical effects) dud aimed at undiscerning children and adults whose childhoods never ended. It's no wonder, then, that Ebert & Siskel took exception to Simon's judgement, even if, as critics, they were miserably unequal to Simon's standard. Had they been book reviewers (which is unlikely), they would've mistaken Stephen King's phenomenal success as some dubious proof of literary prowess, not knowing that sales is never enough of a guarantee of quality.


(1) “The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character stretched his legs’. I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling’s mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.” 

Hobbitual

For everything, it seems, there is a category, a classification, or a genre to which it must be assigned before any discussion of it can get off the ground. I recently blundered onto a blog devoted to film wherein the author described what are now known as "art-house films" and their relation to "other film genres". It's probably no accident that the contemporary film consumer should have come up with the idea of placing films that defy categorization - like Renoir's The Rules of the Game, Antonioni's L'Avventura, Ozu's Late Spring, and our very own category-defying Citizen Kane - in a separate section of the Netflix catalog. There was simply nowhere else to put them. I posted a comment on the blog, asking, "Since when is art a 'genre'? Unless you have conceded, at last, that L'Avventura is art and The Searchers is a Western?"

Every writer who attempts a work of fiction works in two directions. They work to set down a record of the world as they see it or as they think it really is. But they also work, whether they know it or not, to record their visions, a world that exists only inside their heads. So however much they might strive to be "objective" and be nothing more than a pair of eyes, sacrificing their egos to the objects of their love, every word they write is a personal choice that inevitably reveals their presence in the created work.

For the past few decades, a seismic shift has occurred in American popular culture. Its first manifestations occurred in the mid-1970s, when two filmmakers, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, rose to such unprecedented prominence that they eventually established their own production companies, enjoying artistic freedom that rarely existed before. And they made a number of films that set box office records. The films they produced are examples of what I would call belated juvenilia - films that abide by an implied pact between the filmmaker and the viewer that adulthood is regrettable and that the point of their lives sometime prior to adulthood is not just preferable but endlessly renewable.

Go back still further in American pop culture to the 1950s, when the dictatorship of youth transformed popular music. A generation of Baby Boomer teens, with disposable incomes of their own, took music away from their parents' generation and haven't relinquished it since. So instead of songs written by and for adults, speaking from an experience of life and of love, exploring and satisfying that experience in creative ways, songs were passed into the hands of children who needed nothing but lyrics that strung together comforting platitudes through endless variations of cliché. A generation of singers, whose oldest survivor today is Tony Bennett, that responded to the challenge of singing and creating standards in ways distinctive enough to make the standards their own, were replaced by singers whose talents were drowned out by the screams of teen-aged girls, singing songs that addressed the problems of teenagers.

And if you look back still further to 1937, to popular fiction, an otherwise insignificant book called The Hobbit was published in England, quickly followed by an edition in America. It was an elaborate fantasy story marketed to children, replete with maps and illustrations of hobbit characters, as well as various elves and dwarves that inhabit an alternate world that existed long before industry and technology, where magic antedates religions, reminiscent of Europe's oldest fairy tales that emerged from extinct mythologies. The author of The Hobbit was J. R. R. Tolkien, a most unlikely teller of fairy tales: an Oxford scholar of philology, of ancient dead languages and the epics and sagas written in them. Spending most of his creative life with these languages and their obscure significance and meanings known only to him and his colleagues, Tolkien tried, evidently, to expand and improve on them, without having to appeal to any scholarly authority, but deriving from scholarship of the highest authority. But it was marketed as a children's book.

So serious was Tolkien, however, that his fairy tales should be taken seriously, when he learned of an American publisher's interest in The Hobbit that expressed their intention to publish color illustrations to supplement Tolkien's own drawings, Tolkien wrote to his British publisher, Allen & Unwin, “It might be advisable, rather than lose the American interest, to let the Americans do what seems good to them - as long as it was possible (I should like to add) to veto anything from or influenced by the Disney studios (for all whose works I have a heartfelt loathing).”

According to his biographers, Tolkien had gone to see Disney's first feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, accompanied by fellow Oxford don C. S. Lewis, and took umbrage at the depiction of the dwarfs. Who else but the creator of a (literary) world filled with elves and dwarves [to use Tolkien's spelling] should sit in judgement of Disney's silly misrepresentation of a classic fairy tale? What probably bothered Tolkien the most was that audiences took to Disney's film precisely because it is unlearned. Otis Ferguson, who called Snow White the best film of 1938, said that he found "something beautiful about all of it, I think, because it does not try to be wise about fairy tales, or fairy talish about its birds, rabbits, people." (1)

In 2009, I wrote in a post called "The Fairest of Them All" the following: "It was perhaps inevitable that folk tales should have been exiled to the nursery. before we renamed them fairy tales and heavily censored them, they were a kind of cultural subconscious. The original tales, like the ones collected by the Brothers Grimm, are filled with strange imagery and associations that only an ethnographer would understand." Or, indeed, a philoligist. But Tolkien rejected my hypothesis: "Folk-lore origins (or guesses about them) are here quite beside the point. It is of little avail to consider totemism." This line is from Tolkien's essay, "On Fairy Stories" in which he addressed the subject with much feeling and authority. What is most clear from my reading of the essay is that Tolkien wanted to rescue fairy tales from the nursery and convince people that they were worthy of being taken seriously. "Is there any essential connexion between children and fairy-stories? Is there any call for comment, if an adult reads them for himself? Reads them as tales, that is, not studies them as curios. Adults are allowed to collect and study anything, even old theatre programmes or paper bags."

Tolkien described how he himself came upon fairy stories:

"I was keenly alive to the beauty of 'Real things,' but it seemed to me quibbling to confuse this with the wonder of 'Other things.' I was eager to study Nature, actually more eager than I was to read most fairystories; but I did not want to be quibbled into Science and cheated out of Faerie by people who seemed to assume that by some kind of original sin I should prefer fairy-tales, but according to some kind of new religion I ought to be induced to like science. Nature is no doubt a life-study, or a study for eternity (for those so gifted); but there is a part of man which is not 'Nature,' and which therefore is not obliged to study it, and is, in fact, wholly unsatisfied by it."

But one important aspect of Tolkien's "escape" into fairy stories was his first-hand experience of war. He served in the British Army in World War I and his experience created in him a profound hatred for the modern world. "A real taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war." In other words, his discovery of ancient languages at university, followed by the traumatic experience of war, gave him a place of refuge from the modern world that could create such things as the maxim gun and mustard gas, whose effects on human beings he witnessed in the trenches.

But the subject of writing stories exclusively for children became an issue for Tolkien when his Lord Of the Rings trilogy was published, books that he insisted were written for an adult audience rather than for children. Literary critics (some of them anyway) took exception with Tolkien's claim. One review of The Rings that has had its own kind of immortality was written by Edmund Wilson. "Oo, Those Awful Orcs" is available for perusal in Wilson's collection, The Bit Between My Teeth, but, curiously, it is available online, quoted in its entirety, on some Tolkien fanzine sites, where Wilson's essay is used as an illustration of the lengths to which a literary critic will go to express his skepticism of their religion.

"Dr. Tolkien has announced that this series – the hypertrophic sequel to The Hobbit – is intended for adults rather than children, and it has had a resounding reception at the hands of a number of critics who are certainly grown-up in years." But Wilson, who had previously expressed his distaste of detective and horror fiction, refused to taken in by Tolkien's fairy stories. "One is puzzled to know why the author should have supposed he was writing for adults. There are, to be sure, some details that are a little unpleasant for a children’s book, but except when he is being pedantic and also boring the adult reader, there is little in The Lord of the Rings over the head of a seven-year-old child. It is essentially a children’s book – a children’s book which has somehow got out of hand, since, instead of directing it at the “juvenile” market, the author has indulged himself in developing the fantasy for its own sake ... An impotence of imagination seems to me to sap the whole story. The wars are never dynamic; the ordeals give no sense of strain; the fair ladies would not stir a heartbeat; the horrors would not hurt a fly."

Instead of simply dismissing Wilson's review as the expression of opinion that it is, and agreeing to disagree, some of these online Tolkien sites interrogate - feebly - Wilson's own motives for not falling in line with their orthodoxy. Especially since Wilson briefly examines the psychology of Tolkien's fiercest supporters - their insatiable taste for what I identified above as Belated Juvenilia:

"Now, how is it that these long-winded volumes of what looks to this reviewer like balderdash have elicited such tributes as those above? The answer is, I believe, that certain people – especially, perhaps, in Britain – have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash. They would not accept adult trash, but, confronted with the pre-teen-age article, they revert to the mental phase which delighted in Elsie Dinsmore and Little Lord Fauntleroy and which seems to have made of Billy Bunter, in England, almost a national figure. You can see it in the tone they fall into when they talk about Tolkien in print: they bubble, they squeal, they coo; they go on about Malory and Spenser – both of whom have a charm and a distinction that Tolkien has never touched."

Perhaps in anticipation of Wilson's incredulity, Tolkien, in his "On Fairy Stories" essay, attacks the criticism directly:

"I do not deny that there is a truth in Andrew Lang's words (sentimental though they may sound): 'He who would enter into the Kingdom of Faerie should have the heart of a little child.' For that possession is necessary to all high adventure, into kingdoms both less and far greater than Faerie. But humility and innocence - these things 'the heart of a child' must mean in such a context - do not necessarily imply an uncritical wonder, nor indeed an uncritical tenderness. Chesterton once remarked that the children in whose company he saw Maeterlinck's Blue Bird were dissatisfied 'because it did not end with a Day of Judgement, and it was not revealed to the hero and the heroine that the Dog had been faithful and the Cat faithless.' 'For children,' he says, 'are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.'”

The issue arises again whenever J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books are examined by anyone other than fans of the books. They wonder that such "young adult" fiction [a stupid term, equal to "old child" perhaps?] that centers on the fantastic adventures of adolescents in an imaginary world should attract adult readers. I won't go there, since I have never read any of Rowling's books, and the films did nothing to change my mind. (I loved, however, all of the great old actors in the films, some of whom we have since lost to various ailments of extreme old age.) I could, but I have not, expressed the wish that Harry Potter had come along in 1970, when I might have been (but wasn't) more amenable to its attractions.

Tolkien wrote about one of the requirements of reading fairy stories, the "suspension of disbelief."

"Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker's art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called 'willing suspension of disbelief.' But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a  successful “sub-creator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed."

But this is precisely where I find myself when I read Tolkien, or listen to popular music (which includes several genres, like rock, pop, rap/hip hop, country, et al), or watch the Indiana Jones or Star Wars movies - on the sidewalk outside, in the Primary World, my credulity reawakened, my disbelief functioning fully.

All of which reminds me of a remark made by G. B. Shaw in reference to the faith we have developed (even while some of us - including the current American president - seem to have abandoned) in Science:

"I have pointed out on a former occasion that there is just as much evidence for a law of the Conservation of Credulity as of the Conservation of Energy. When we refuse to believe in the miracles of religion for no better reason fundamentally than that we are no longer in the humor for them we refill our minds with the miracles of science, most of which the authors of the Bible would have refused to believe. The humans who have lost their simple childish faith in a flat earth and in Joshua's feat of stopping the sun until he had finished his battle with the Amalekites, find no difficulty in swallowing an expanding boomerang universe."

Look out. The Flat-Earthers are back.


(1) Otis Ferguson, "Walt Disney's Grimm Reality," The New Republic, January 26, 1938.

Scare Me

The problem I have with scary movies is that, with notable exceptions, they no longer scare me. I was plenty scared by them when I was a child, but it was because I hadn't yet figured out that the people who made them were simply using tricks of the motion picture medium to manipulate me as a member of the audience. Now that I am more knowledgeable about how movies are put together and how many quite simple technical devices are employed to create an emotional or sometimes visceral reaction, I can no longer suspend my disbelief long enough to get a good scare out of them. Like an old movie ghost, I find that I can see through the special effects to the trickery behind them.(1)

Of course, it's also because I have grown into a skeptical adult, and because horror, the distinct genre of stories and plays and films that have developed (if that is the word) since the 19th century, plays upon conventions - widely accepted formal requirements - that are far from the ordinary lives of human beings. I remain skeptical of the reality, of the existence, of much of its subject matter. Many famous people, some of them reputable, claim to have seen ghosts. Even George Orwell, who was probably the person least susceptible to such an experience who ever lived, described in a letter an encounter with a ghost in Walberswick cemetery: “I happened to glance over my shoulder, & saw a figure pass ... disappearing behind the masonry & presumably disappearing into the churchyard. I wasn’t looking directly at it & so couldn’t make out more than that it was a man’s figure, small & stooping, & dressed in lightish brown; I should have said a workman. I had the impression that it glanced towards me in passing, but I made out nothing of the features. At the moment of its passing I thought nothing, but a few seconds later it struck me that the figure had made no noise, & I followed it out into the churchyard. There was no one in the churchyard, & no one within possible distance along the road – this was about 20 seconds after I had seen it; & in any case there were only two people in the road, & neither at all resembled the figure.... The figure had therefore vanished. Presumably an hallucination." (Letter dated 16 August 1931 to Dennis Collings)

What else could it have been? However intrigued he was by the encounter, Orwell never wrote a ghost story. In fact, none of the great novelists or dramatists wrote what are narrowly identifiable as ghost stories. There are ghosts in Shakespeare's plays - the ghost in Hamlet even speaks. But none of his plays is about ghosts. Dickens wrote stories featuring ghosts, and even contributed the most famous ghost story for Christmas (a strange and delightful British tradition), A Christmas Carol, that contains no less than four ghosts who pay visits to Ebeneezer Scrooge one fateful Christmas Eve. But it's a Christmas story, not a ghost story.

Dickens was an admirer of Edgar Allen Poe, whose writings, however exceptional they are, are distinguished by a level of conviction that has given them, like Poe himself, a unique place in literature. None of the so-called "gothic" writers who preceded and succeeded him were nearly as good as Poe or as convincing.

There is a ghost story related by the near-insane character Svidrigailov in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. He claims to have encountered the ghost of his dead wife and of an old servant. Raskolnikov refuses to believe in them, but Svidrigailov leaves him with a disturbing metaphor for eternity: “We keep imagining eternity as an idea that cannot be grasped, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, imagine suddenly that there will be one little room there, something like a village bathhouse, covered with soot, with spiders in all the corners, and that’s the whole of eternity.” (Crime and Punishment, Part Four, Chapter Two) However convincingly strange Svidrigailov's accounts may be, Dostoevsky wrote no ghost stories.

Ambrose Bierce, who witnessed some of the bloodiest battles - like Shiloh - of the American Civil War, wrote of ghosts in his stories with a reporter's matter-of-factness that lends them an uncanny quality. I wrote about an excellent short film adapted from Bierce's story about a man about to be hanged for espionage from Owl Creek Bridge. Awaiting his execution, the man engages his imagination in a vivid daydream in which the rope that hangs him breaks and he swims to freedom, being chased and fired upon for miles. He reaches safety and finds himself in familiar surroundings. He finds his own house and his wife and, "As he is about to clasp her he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a cannon—then all is darkness and silence! Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge."

And Henry James, who liked reading ghost stories, wrote stories and a novel that could be classified as ghost stories. In fact, The Turn of the Screw is widely celebrated as a gripping, if extra-carefuly written, story of the haunting to two English children by two ghosts. In his close reading of the novel, however, Edmund Wilson concluded that The Turn of the Screw is ambiguous as to what actually happens, whether we can take it as a straight ghost story or as a subtle psychological portrait of an emotionally and sexually repressed English nanny. It is this ambiguity, I think, that makes the novel more fascinating than it would be if the reader weren't left wondering, if only in the back of his mind, exactly what he has read.

I have had encounters, two of them, that occurred when I was in the Far East, that have left me wondering about ghosts. The first encounter was in Okinawa when I was stationed there in the Navy. The Japanese island of Okinawa was the site of some of the most intense battles of World War Two. The base on which I was stationed, called White Beach, is on a peninsula on the eastern coast of the island. There are cliffs above the beaches that are pitted with caves, some of which are closed to the public and marked with signs designating them as tombs. Japanese soldiers withdrew from the fighting into these caves and committed suicide, sometimes using grenades to kill themselves. One night in 1993, I was walking with a few friends up the road that wound down from the front gate. I had to use an ATM first, so I told my friends to go ahead of me and I would catch up with them. As I was climbing the hill, I passed a young Japanese man who approached me and, putting two fingers to his lips, let me know that he wanted a cigarette. I gestured that I had no cigarettes, and the young man shrugged his soldiers and continued on his way down the hill. All I remember specifically about his clothes was the cap on his head, which looked like it was military issue, one that I had seen in old photos of Japanese soldiers. When I caught up with my friends, some of whom had cigarettes in their hands, I asked them why they hadn't offered the man who passed me - and who had to have passed them - a cigarette. "What man?" they asked. They had passed no one on the road. Ever since then, I have thought that it was perhaps the ghost of a soldier who had killed himself in one of the caves in the cliffs above White Beach.. Or else it was "an hallucination."

The second encounter took place in the Philippines, where I'm now living. In 2016, a Filipino man I knew died of a heart attack. His widow paid for a traditional funeral, which was preceded by a long vigil, like a wake, that lasted for days. I went to her house by the highway on the first day to give her my condolences. I sat down, but I did not wish to stay very long, because Filipino parties are segregated, with the men outside drinking and carousing, and the women inside cooking and preparing drinks (as well as drinking and carousing). The man sitting next to me was getting drunk, but I wasn't drinking at the time, so I excused myself and headed back down the highway toward home. As I was walking I kept an eye out for a ride, but there was no ride forthcoming. So, since it was another mercilessly beautiful day, late afternoon, I decided to walk the kilometer or so home. After I passed the crest of a hill, it was downhill the rest of the way, and I was alone on the highway. I rounded two curves down the highway until I saw a man standing ahead of me on my side of the highway. I noticed he was wearing a "barong," a traditional sheer long-sleeve shirt that covers a short-sleeved shirt underneath, with black trousers. But why was he standing there? If he wanted to catch a bus - out of town (which is the only bus to catch), he should've been on the other side of the highway. He was facing to the West, where the afternoon sky was already turning orange. And as I approached where he stood, watching my step along the edge of the highway, I recognized him as the man whose vigil I had just left, who was lying in his coffin in the front room of his house, dressed in the same clothes he was standing up in by the highway. He paid no attention to me as, without thinking, I crossed to the other side, while keeping my eyes on him. He was gazing at the sky to the west with a look of utter distraction and peace on his face. I walked past, keeping him in my peripheral view, and proceeded at a normal pace, turning my head every now and then, making sure he hadn't moved. But when the highway wound to the left, I picked up my pace for the rest of the way. It was the last I ever saw of the man. I didn't join the funeral procession to the cemetery a few days later. This Undas, November 2nd, the Filipino Day of the Dead, his widow will visit the cemetery with food and drink, enough for herself and some for her dead husband, and pay her respects. If she doesn't do it, Filipinos believe that his spirit will grow restless again and it will walk the earth. I won't be walking that particular stretch of highway again unless I am accompanied by another living soul.

But the real problem I have with ghost stoires, and with horror movies, is that the best writers and filmmakers usually avoid the genre, just like every other genre, because it imposes an artificial structure on the story or the film that interferes with their discovery of life, with the illumination of their characters with a light that seems to come as much from within them as around them. Hitchcock resorted to horror effects when he made Psycho, but even some of the critics who admired his work were appalled at the result. In his brief notice of the film, Stanley Kauffmann wrote, "Two murders and a third attempt are among the most vicious I have ever seen in films, with Hitchcock employing his considerable skill in direction and cutting and in the use of sound and music to shock us past horror-entertainment into resentment." Hitchcock drags us into an embezzlement scheme, makes us care about what happens next to Janet Leigh, only to then have us take part in her brutal murder by a knife-wielding mental case. Thanks, Al, but no thanks. Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Psycho only proved how uselessly formulaic the original was.

Effectively entertaining horror films have been made in the past by skilled filmmakers. I think of William Friedkin, fresh from The French Connection - an effective crime thriller - who made The Exorcist (1973), which is probably the scariest film I've seen. Even if one doesn't believe in God or the Devil, the film will make one jump at most of the carefully appointed moments. (Be careful how you're holding your popcorn.) But Friedkin's skill was just about up to the level of horror-entertainment and not higher. When he thought he was good enough to remake Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear, with a budget much greater than Clouzot's, the film (Sorcerer, 1977) was a failure on several levels, and it sent Friedkin's career on a circuitous detour.

Now there is CGI to further complicate matters. Now all manner of horrors can be visualized on the screen, including heretofore unimagined ones. Whatever can be conceived, in fact, can now be realized in a motion picture, including holographic three-dimensional images of actors and entertainers long dead. Such technical advances always have little or no effect on the quality of films.(2) If anything, technical advances set the art of the motion picture back a few years because it takes awhile for filmmakers to master them. As I wrote some time ago, CGI has now made film animation both easy and impossible. The best thing that the latest technical advances has done, I think, is to simplify filmmaking to the point at which it is now quite possible for a film to be made from start to finish and also to reach a mass audience with a great deal less money. If independent filmmakers find it easier to make a horror film (remember the success of the first Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity films), it shouldn't come as all that much of a surprise. Especially to horror movie fans.


(1) For similar reasons, I don't like magicians either. There can be only two reasons why people find them entertaining: it's either because they believe they're witnessing real magic or because they like to be fooled.
(2) It was Stanley Kauffmann who, writing film criticism for 55 years (1958-2013), came up with the statistical estimate that, "in a good year," 95% of the films realeased are trash, 4% are good entertainment [remember that number before underestimating good entertainment], and less than 1% are accomplished art. And that's in a good year.