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“My Dinner with Andre”

Does anyone talk about Louis Malle anymore? It’s been more than thirty years since Ebert wrote that he “seems to dare himself to find acceptable ways of filming unacceptable subjects.” He was talking about “Pretty Baby,” a film about an older man and the pre-teen daughter of a Storyville prostitute. (He was probably also referring to “Murmur of the Heart,” a rather gentle treatment of incest.)

I admit I’ve only seen three of Malle’s movies — “Au Revoir Les Enfants,” which remains, to my mind, the most moving film about the Holocaust; “Atlantic City,” the romance of an aging gambler and a junkie’s girl in old-school Jersey; and now “My Dinner with Andre.”

And having seen them, I think I know what that “acceptable” way is. There’s an unforced, attentive quality to Malle’s filmmaking, as though the camera were paying so close attention to these characters that it quite forgot itself.  There’s no character to act as judge, no plot device to punish or reward. He simply listens.

Listening is the chief activity in “My Dinner with Andre,” which consists of one long conversation between two friends in the New York theater scene. They’re real friends talking in real time, after years of separation, about why Andre dropped his directing career, vanished abroad, and became known as a most peculiar man.

The avuncular Andre has a soothing voice and a friendly twinkle; you’d think he was advising a kid about college, not admitting he saw a blue beast by the altar at Christmas with pansies sprouting out of its eyes. Once a successful director, he talks of finding a Japanese monk to play “The Little Prince” in the Sahara with only themselves for an audience, and hosting  “workshops” in a Polish forest that involve dancing and emoting at random with strangers who speak no English. Oh, and getting buried alive. These activities help Andre cut past the routine, the artificiality, the falsity of New York life. His crisis of faith, as it were, ends with his ability to feel and respond more authentically in his own life.

Observing that he was finally able to express his annoyance with his wife, he adds:

And when I allowed myself to consider the possibility of not spending the rest of my life with Chiquita, I realized that what I wanted most in life was to always be with her. But at that time I hadn’t learned what it would be like to let yourself react to another human being. And if you can’t react to another person then there’s no possibility of action or interaction. And if there isn’t, I don’t really know what the word “love” means, except “duty,” “obligation,” “sentimentality,” “fear.”

Meanwhile, his friend Wally listens for three-quarters of the film with a “Hmm” and a “So then what happened?” and, now and then, a baffled look. (You may know Wallace Shawn as the portly assassin in “The Princess Bride,” as a son of the New Yorker editor William Shawn, or a playwright in his own right, which is how he appears here.) Wally allows that he doesn’t always see the falsity of role-playing in his life.

But finally Wally bursts out: “”I just don’t know how anybody could enjoy anything more than I enjoy reading Charlton Heston’s autobiography, or, you know, getting up in the morning and having the cup of cold coffee that’s been waiting for me all night, still there for me to drink in the morning! …I just don’t think I feel the need for anything more than all this. Whereas, you know, you seem to be saying that it’s inconceivable that anybody could be having a meaningful life today.”

He concludes: “I know what you’re talking about, but I don’t really know what you’re talking about.”

From one man’s midlife crisis, the conversation veers into talk of Martin Heidegger and Buber, Bertolt Brecht and V. Gordon Craig. The Brecht reference is an apt one. Andre mentions Brecht’s “alienation effect” that creates a sense of distance between the viewers and the play, a distance that helps them approach the play intellectually rather than being played by it emotionally. “My Dinner with Andre” uses this effect to advantage. At first, the viewer seems to participate in the film, sharing Wally’s normal-guy point-of-view, his status as a listener, and literally, what he sees. We spend much of the movie looking at Andre’s face, since he is usually the one talking.

When Wally starts to talk back, the camera cuts away to show both men from a greater distance. The viewer’s sense of participating in the action is disrupted; the scene calls attention to the viewer’s status as an onlooker who is now hearing two arguments. Where viewers once shared Wally’s point-of-view, they are now called on to consider both.

I imagine there’s something to be said about the actors, who have the same names as the characters, playing “themselves” in a movie that explicitly critiques role-playing as an inauthentic mode of being. Or something about the popularity of this film in the early 1980s despite the apparently risky device of the real-time chat. I’m sorry if I find the conceit rather dated and the matter rather like a late-night conversation in my dorm, once-upon-a-time, with smart, insulated theater kids. I confess, when I was drafting this post, I got so distracted that I veered off into a discussion of the most effective films about WII-era trauma, and why. I’ll see if I can shape that material about “Au Revoir, Les Enfants” — another Malle movie – and “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” into another post.

In the interest of more posting and less agonizing, I’m going to adopt a zuihuitsu — follow the brush — style. Think stream-of-consciousness, if not quite automatic writing. (No tender buttons here, sorry.) The results should be more conversational, if less polished, and will help me return to writing as often as I work out, which is to say, daily. My only hope is that the pen proves mightier than the bicep. Twenty pounders, woe is me. Twenty books, I can do — especially if the Metro delays continue.

At any rate, my latest read was The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan. It’s less a straightforward history than a series of lives, some famous, some less so. You’ve got Henry Adams trawling Japan for models for a gravemarker after his wife’s suicide; Melville casting Japan as the mysterious other in Moby Dick, although his own whaling adventures never quite made it there; Teddy Roosevelt, a childhood weakling who was determined to learn jujitsu in the White House.

Few conclusions are drawn, other than the rather obvious point that New England intellectuals pursued desires that could not be fulfilled closer to home. I wouldn’t say it hones in on Japan, either. The domestic arrangements of Mabel Todd, whose husband David cheerfully supported her affair with Austin Dickinson, or the fact that David insisted he found signs of life on Mars, are rather interesting but not, as far as I could tell, related to Mabel Todd’s efforts to collect Ainu artifacts for a Boston museum or write articles about climbing Mount Fuji. Rather, The Great Wave is a richly textured series of biographical sketches that cover the a-ha moments and the drives that propel these figures, with an eye to themes personal and psychological.

Most of these figures meet and inspire each other at some point, or just miss each other despite strikingly similar journeys. More than an erudite Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, this synchronicity seems intended to unify an otherwise disparate series of portraits. Benfey splices the journey of Melville with that of Kakuzo Okakura, a shipwrecked sailor who becomes a favorite of the Boston Brahmins and spokesman for Japanese culture. The two come and go within months of each other. Ernest Fenellosa’s notebooks of poems translated from Chinese, which his widow gives to Ezra Pound to edit, influence Pound’s poetry in turn, and that of his friend T.S. Eliot. These encounters bridge what is essentially a series of essays on, say, jujitsu, the art of a weaker fighter using his opponent’s strength against him, and whether that strategy was employed by Japan in the Russo-Japanese War.

The Great Wave combines traditional research in diaries, newspapers, biographies and other primary documents with narrative techniques like suspenseful plotting and leitmotifs. For instance, Lafcadio Hearn’s novel Chiquita, in which a typhoon leaves a child adrift with his mother, becomes a metaphor for his past as an abandoned child. This approach certainly makes for a readable book. I sped through it in five days, four of which I didn’t get home until 10 pm. The pleasures of the “lives” format reminded me, of course, of Plutarch. In this case, though, the miniatures didn’t seem to add up to conclusions; they were simply close-ups of, say, a lonely, wealthy Bostonian turning to Buddhism, or the charismatic Japanese man who could fulfill her desire for attention and the exotic.

A note on this and future choices of books: I’m reading around the period after Reconstruction and just before World War I in search of a place to hang my research hat. The dramatic changes of that era are pretty obvious. The American population and geography doubled, became more urban. Electricity came home; so did telephones and elevators and electric lights. Film. Robber barons. Industrial Revolution. The assassination of three presidents. Connections to Asia, through worlds fairs and immigration restrictions and protests. The country we know today — its academic and business institutions, its bureaucracy and technology — has taproots in this era. (My masters thesis focused on this period, specifically on increasingly highbrow attitudes toward classical music.) Institutions and policies that are getting a shakedown today, especially newspapers, arts and culture organizations, university disciplines, publishing, and immigration policy — and motorcars, for that matter — were taking on new, even first forms then. I do see contemporary connections, although I don’t want to push the relevance bit too far. Will I find an anchor amidst these wild generalizations?

Saul Bellow, Herzog

Older men always want to set me up with Saul Bellow. He’s both popular and prestigious, having ruled the bestseller list and racked up three National Book Awards, a Pulitzer, and the Nobel Prize. The Nobel committee praised him for

exuberant ideas, flashing irony, hilarious comedy and burning compassion… the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age.

Whew. Renown aside, my connection with Bellow should be personal, they say. We’re alums of the same schools and share a love of that great city, Chicago.

I smile at the suggestion and say I’ve heard about his tragicomedy of intellect and flesh, like Woody Allen on Paxil.  The truth is, Bellow reminds me that I’ve always been a nice girl. When my elders — which is to say critics and scholars — introduce me to a book, I treat it with respect. If I dislike it, I make small talk (see above) and secretly light another candle at my altar to Henry James.

The problem with Bellow’s Herzog, however, was not that I disliked it. It left me so baffled that it took a few weeks before I could sit down and write an honest post. This tells us two things. One, that I am very young indeed. Before I explain the second, more about the novel.

Herzog follows a scholar whose wife left him for his best friend and took their daughter with him. Cuckolded and professionally impotent, Moses Herzog examines his life for a meaning that he finds in focusing on “private life,” in living intensely, in writing fiction in which the characters of his life come to a reckoning.

As the novel opens, Herzog has already begun his all-consuming project: writing letters “endlessly, fanatically, to the newspapers, to people in public life, to friends and relatives and at last to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally the famous dead.”  Through these letters we learn of  his childhood, his siblings and lovers, and ramblings on the likes of Pascal and Hegel.

The plot elements that emerge in this meandering journey — a car crash, a visit to his ex-wife’s with a loaded gun — are not climaxes but rather afterthoughts that are comically deflated in their avoidance of high drama. Herzog returns to his house in the Berkshires, which he had fixed up with money inherited from his father.  He returns, too, to his current lover, a florist in her late 30s named Ramona.

Herzog’s remembrances of his lovers loom large in this story. He pursues, not merely flesh, but intimacy: baths and Japanese massages with Sono, shrimp Arnaud and Armagnac in Ramona’s s boudoir. There’s an element of male fantasy in a virile older man — he’s 47 — who beds multiple, beautiful young women, who enjoys domestic comforts with minimal responsibility. Here’s Herzog taking stock of himself:

That’s okay, he thought; if the light’s not too bright, you’re still a grand-looking man. For a while yet, you can get women. All but that bitch, Madeleine, whose face looks either beautiful of haggy. Go, then — Ramona will feed you, give you wine, remove your shoes, flatter you, smooth down your hackles, kiss you, pinch your lip with her teeth. Then uncover the bed, turn down the lights, and go into the essentials.

Herzog is a picaresque hero, to be sure, a likable rogue who gets what he pleases, conventional morality be damned. In a successful picaresque, however, the women are fairly one-dimensional. They’re conquests, and often they’re as wily as the hero himself and partly complicit in the adventure. A flicker of sympathy for them causes the whole project to come into question. It’s easier to cheer for the guy who beats the system — the system being conventional courtship, marriage, commitment — when the system is faceless or corrupt, not a sweet, chatty lover he leaves in bed with pneumonia for a month while he cheats on her (and his first wife, if I have this right) with a new mistress. Ramona, for her part, wear fetching red dresses, plays exotic Turkish music, and shows up near his home in the Berkshires, supposedly to attend a friend’s party. Not merely the vamp, she listens to, cajoles, and worries about him.

Herzog recognizes (and is flattered) that her considerable arts of seduction are trained on winning him as a husband. He thinks of her with a vague sense of guilt, brief flickers in the long self-involved monologue that is this novel. He acts with precise calculation: how can he maintain the relationship without seeming too committed? Picking flowers for her is dicey — but he can allow her to kiss him in front of his brother because he likes to appear manly. His notion of living intensely amounts to his living the same way as he did before his crisis, except this time he’ll avoid commitment.

Herzog, like most of us, believes he’s a good person. Because he does no harm, others should not try to harm him. His ramblings about morality don’t jibe with the deceit he practices in life, but whose do? Bellow gives us a plausible, nuanced portrait of one man’s mind, and remarkable sketches of secondary characters to boot.

I remain perplexed by the heroic overtones at the end of the novel, when Herzog escapes death, returns home, and moves on. The ending seems almost grandiose: “At this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word.”  What messages? He wrote letters that were never sent. Their function was to arrange his past into a story that proved he had not failed as a man or done wrong.

Disappointed with his career and his wife’s betrayal, Herzog decides, not only that “personal life” is more important than career, it’s the telos of history. In his version, he can depict the cheating wife as a crazy bitch with no sympathetic qualities whatsoever.  I read Herzog, possibly perversely, as being a very human story about a man who refashions his experience into a version he can live with. He then sets the past behind him and does as he pleases.

Ramona is trying her best to be seductive, playful, not needy, but wanting to be sympathetic and yet completely shut out of whatever’s going on in his life, to the point that he has his brother send her letters from Chicago; she figures out where she is and shows up, always hopeful but not wanting.

In Pursuit of a Nose

And so, after two years of the Asian Classics Project, I’m going to embark on readings of American literature and film. Two epigraphs will shape the posts to come.

One is from Antonin Dvorak, who puzzled one listener with his Symphony No. 9, “From the New World.” What was so New Worldly about the music, anyway? Said the composer, cryptically, “The influence of America can be felt by anyone who has a nose.” Or to borrow the title of a lecture by John Updike, “What is American About American Art?”

The other is from the Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra. He suggests that, as American prestige and economic power decline, so will the status of American literature that requires “cultural decoding.”

When I recently compiled a reading list of modern fiction for a very young aspiring writer in an Indian small town, I found myself excluding the best-known American novels on the grounds that their main preoccupations – angst and adultery in suburbs or university campuses, the sexual-spiritual torments of second-generation immigrants – would appear too abstract to a reader living in India’s poorest and most violent state. When he insisted on a separate recommendation of American fiction, the list I compiled leaned heavily towards novels of the late 19th and early 20th century.

I’m not saying I agree, but it’s a point I’d like to consider in the course of reading. To steal the title of Joyce Carol Oates story — so out of context, I know! –  “Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?”

I ask these questions because I want to be literate in the broad sense: to see texts in the contexts of history, genre, interplay with other texts. My background is in both arts journalism and academe, where I focused on 20th-century British literature (undergrad) and Classics (grad). While I certainly read American works for pleasure, I haven’t studied them formally.

I’d also like to develop that elusive quality, taste. I can read only a fraction of the 206,000 books published in the U.S. each year, let alone older titles. In which do I invest my time and suggest that others do the same? Obviously there are lists of all stripes put out by universities, newspapers, publishers, and reading gurus. These are good places to start, and you’ll find that my reading selections appear on many such lists. But someday I’d prefer not to take things at second- or third-hand, but to be free-thinking, discerning, and confident in my assertions.

This could very well be a reading memoir, in the brief tradition of Wendy Lesser, Laura Miller, and a recent book about reading the Harvard Classics, The Whole Five Feet. If I can pull it off without self-indulgence or irrelevance, I will. Of course, traditional criticism can be read as autobiography, one’s choices as a reader taken as a synecdoche for one’s approach to memory, experience, culture. To speak of life broadly is to descend into generalization, but to anchor it in specifics — in this case, readings of certain books — is to get at truth slant. Or, at least, to try.

I’m not saying I agree, but it’s a point I’d like to consider in the course of reading.