I have been reading Henry James - his first five novels. I make no bones about admitting this, even though it won't earn my any brownie points in the same world where Snooky holds her existence.
I'm currently on James' second, Roderick Hudson, about the attempt of a cool connoisseur of men, Rowland Mallet, to interrupt the channel circumstance had led the young sculptor the eponymous Hudson along, and divert it from 19th century Northhampton (in Massachussetts) to the Roman Campagna, home to American intellectual wanders like James himself. And this, I've decided, is the right time and set of texts in which to encounter James: it's in the "Library of America" series, where James' original documentation of his mid-twenties unsentimental accession to the modes of intellectual upheaval in post Civil-War America are undiluted by his later, more self-conscious revisions, in which he attempted to graft in his then immeasurably greater literary sophistication.
I have been wanting to blog about James ever since starting the book, and I was sure that James would offer an "in", which came at 6.22 a.m. this morning, after I awoke from a dissolute night at the club event Real Bad, part and parcel of the bigger intrusion in culture, the Folsom Street Fair. Rowland Mallet is interviewing Miss Light, this fearsomely dangerous beauty cast into the Roman Scene by a hapless mother whose sole guiding light is the hope of a brilliant marriage with the second sub-tier of European royalty. The interest in the story comes from the prospect of Mr. Mallet and Mrs Light's collaboration in an unstated and unlikely venture to throw up a dam to carry Roderick safely around the dangerous shoals of Miss Light and the intellectual dissolution in the 19th century Roman equivalent to the Folsom Street Fair/American reality TV culturplex, to their hoped for harbor filled with the blinding light of great achievement.
I'm also writing with the memory of chatting with another man of great promise last night - an acquaintance from LA - at the Real Bad party last night. G is this rare superluminary in the world of gay party culture, a man of undeniable beauty and personal magnetism who is comfortable both walking naked down Folsom Street in the daylight, his member boxed in for display in some sort of metal contraption while his beguiling face and penetrating, soulful eyes are concealed behind a gas-mask (one has to understand the cross-currents at a great, gay leather fair to understand why this is comprehensible behavior), and coordinating a multidisciplinary center of quantum physics exploration at NASA Ames.
In the same way Roderick Hudson may have to contend with the current of genius sweeping through dangerous and unproductive waters, G too must swim in the eminently lucid waters of cutting-edge physics research while gay the rapids of gay party culture try to drag him under and dash him against the great rocks underlying the water. (Let's also dash this river metaphor against the great rocks before it does any more harm.)
At any rate, I found my pedagogical moment this early morning when reading of Rowland's portentous encounter with Miss Light at the Colosseum, and ... and ... I'm becoming uncomfortably aware, at this point that I'm beginning to ape James himself in my style here, when what I really want to write about is how much I long to be able to do what James does. He'll spend two pages describing a character he's introducing, and it will seem at the outset not like a dash of this and a little bit of that, but a set of inward and outward characteristics that seem organic. And as you see this newly created being enter the world fully realized you begin to suspect that James is merely describing someone who's long been fully alive in his imagination, and what he's doing at creation time is setting him loose and observing and noting, rather than directing. And because these people are complex, they have complex interactions, and the story tells itself.
It is now 11.30 pm on the same day, and in the intervening hours I've read most of the rest of the book, and have come away convinced that this is one of the greatest novels I've ever read. And it is so cinematic, I'm just astounded that nobody has filmed it. I'm not going to read it when I go to bed just now, because it's going to keep me up.
Funnily enough, as I came off my flight home from San Francisco today, I happened to notice a man who'd been just ahead of me in the plane, who'd also been near me in American's Admiral Club. The reason I'd noted him was because his voice was a dead ringer for one of my favorite actors, Tom Wilkinson. I knew he was a screenwriter, as he was working on something on the plane, but I actually see people working on screenplays almost every day, at Starbucks in West Hollywood. You know, writing is not a lucrative profession, but something told me this was probably not one the hopeful writers I see at Starbucks, since he was flying first class. I went up to him and said that I'd thought he was Wilkinson until I turned to look at him at the airport, and then something didn't stop me from gushing out, with a sheepish I-know-people-must-do-this-to-you-all-the-time smile an idea for his next book, and I told him about ... no, not my memoir silly ... Roderick Hudson.
He seemed a very nice gentleman, and I think he asked me if I was a writer - I'm not sure if that was how it happened. My mind was still running hot on the novel I'd been consuming right up until we positively had to deplane, so I wasn't in full possession of myself. But I told him yes, and that I'd written a memoir last year, which had been published. He asked if I'd tried writing it as a screenplay, and I told him that several people had suggested that, but I think I'm probably too close to it, even after five years. But then he surprised me by pulling a new copy of his own book on screenwriting out of his carry-on and pressing it into my hand.
You know, when something happens to you like that, and you live in Hollywood, a part of you can't help saying, however silly it sounds, could this be a sign. Regular readers of my blog will know that I don't believe in signs, fate, and do not think God plays dice with the universe. But I will read Mr. (Pen) Densham's book Riding the Aligator, since ... well ... you never know.. I will of course let you know if I see any more signs.
My recent resolution to write shorter blogs is forcing me to end this before I even get into Roderick Hudson. Next time. And I can't even read more of it before I fall asleep, darn it.
|
