What is it about stones? Their presence in a title seems to herald a good book: witness José Saramago’s The Stone Raft; Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries; Ursula Hegi’s Stones from the River; even Harold Robbins’s A Stone for Danny Fisher, not quite in the same league but a classic of its kind. Now, as befits the shift from books to movies as the common coin of imagination’s realm, there’s Mark Moskowitz’s 2003 documentary film, Stone Reader. Apart from the producer’s ambitious claim that it’s about “the reading culture,” Stone Reader shows just how far a book lover will go in pursuit of his fantasy.
Moskowitz produced TV political campaign ads as well as publicity spots for CEOs, athletes and other notables. In private life, he loves to read. Ever since he was entranced by Harold and the Purple Crayon, his reading habit has run rampant. He wonders, in a New York Times promotional piece, “What have I done with my whole life? I’ve spent a huge amount of time sitting around doing nothing.”
Of course he knows it’s not “nothing.” He knows we read to generate our inner lives, and that this lifelong task becomes its own end. He harbors the secret yearnings of all dedicated readers: beyond seeking diversion or data, beyond confirmation of who we are or challenges to what we think, we long to inhabit the mind of a congenial other. When we find this rare intimacy, this affinity with a stranger’s voice draped in the sheerness of language, we enjoy what James Joyce called enchantment of the heart.
Moskowitz found that enchantment in a novel called The Stones of Summer, by Dow Mossman. The director was a student at the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 when the book appeared to a handful of rave reviews. Moskowitz gave up after a few pages, but twenty-five years later tried reading it again and loved it. (“Unbelievably great . . . Amazing.”) He couldn’t fathom why no other books by Mossman exist. What gives? What happened to the young writer who was hailed as the voice of a new generation? To find out, he embarks on a year-long quest for the forgotten author of the forgotten novel.
If The Stones of Summer is as “unbelievably great” as Moskowitz claims, and if, as he hopes, his efforts get it back into print, he will have performed a worthy deed. Nonetheless, the premise at the heart of his movie is a confusion that bears pondering. As Yeats memorably asks, how can we tell the dancer from the dance? We love the book; ergo, we love the author. We want to meet him or her (with Moskowitz’s favorite books, it’s always him) in the flesh—this sorcerer, this soul mate, this ghostly familiar we call the writer. From the long-ago packed appearances of Dickens and Wilde to today’s ubiquitous public readings, fans flock to see the person who has given them pleasure, just as the consumers of phone sex may yearn to meet the purveyors.
But you cannot see or touch a voice. Its evanescence is what makes it endlessly alluring. The writer “in person” is no more the solitary voice whispering in our ear than the murmurer of salacious tidbits is inclined to stir us in actual life. The voice is possessed temporarily, on loan. It lends itself and we do the same, a mutual and ephemeral exchange, like love. But a love never meant to be consummated outside the pages. Reading is the consummation—a miracle, really, as the emotive powers of the book pass safely from writer to reader, renewed and available whenever we open it. The writer himself is a creature of our fantasies. Reading his or her book, we may fashion an image, which has a sort of existence, but never in the flesh of the person bearing the author’s name.
Most readers simply dream on, or grow up and attend a few readings, but Moskowitz was hell-bent on grabbing hold of the ineffable. Much of his quest consists of interviews with famous and not-so-famous literary men, several of them writers who attended the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop around the time that Mossman studied there. Except for John Seelye, who wrote a New York Times review, no one has heard of the book or remembers the author. A mystery. One that has Moskowitz tooling around the country dropping in on anyone with some connection with Dow, as he’s called from the start: after reading his novel, the director fancies they’re intimates. Lots of scenery, lots of driving (while NPR’s Terry Gross talks to writers on the car radio). Seasons pass. We see the hero raking leaves in his yard; that means it’s fall. It’s an inept and circuitous quest, with no stone unturned. Anyone familiar with publishing could have told him that the jacket designer is unlikely to know the author’s whereabouts. John Kashiwabara can’t even recognize the jacket he did some thirty years ago: “I’ve done hundreds of books!”
What the interviews do yield is the camaraderie that springs up among book lovers, a luscious phenomenon we’ve all known. How fine it would be, then, to hear about the complex interaction of mind and book, the intimate geological history of evolving taste. Or about what happens when a stranger’s words course through us, offering unimagined possibilities, a future cut loose from expectations. Instead we hear dozens of names dropped like code words or private jokes—books and authors Moskowitz and his new friends dote on. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is “so great, so great.” The Old Man and the Sea is “good.” Wright Morris is “fabulous.”
And The Stones of Summer? That’s what matters, after all, the enduring best of the writer distilled and transformed. We learn that it’s a long novel of youthful rebellion set in the Vietnam War years; its composition was arduous, its tone is impassioned, its language lyrical and dense. What it’s about is the real mystery.
Moskowitz, for his part, is mystified by the notion of the one-book author in general. He seeks answers from the late critic Leslie Fiedler, the editor Robert Gottlieb, and Mossman’s agent, Carl Brandt, among others. Who can say why? Each one-book author is different. Temperament, money, the vicissitudes of private life, the changes in public taste all play a part. Publishing is notoriously unpredictable. It happens that Mossman’s publisher, Bobbs-Merrill, was shortly engulfed by a corporate takeover—maybe not the only reason, or even the main one, for the book’s disappearance, but it certainly didn’t help.
Each case is different. It is surpassingly naïve to lump under one rubric writers like Ralph Ellison, Margaret Mitchell, Henry Roth, and Joseph Heller, to name just a few. (Why call Heller a one-book author? Or does Moskowitz mean a one-famous-book author?) “Emily Brontë died,” Gottlieb notes. That explains that. By the time Frank Conroy, author of the 1965 memoir Stop-Time and, at the time of the interview, the Iowa Workshop’s director, is asked to account for the gap in his publishing curriculum vitae, the viewer, if not the producer, grasps that the “mystery” of how a writer writes, and why, and when, with what motivations, roadblocks, spurts and aridities, will never be solved by a succession of talking heads.
Eventually Moskowitz hits pay dirt by going where he should have gone an hour and a half (in real time, over a year) earlier: to the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City, where he leafs reverently through old cartons containing early drafts of The Stones of Summer. The sight of a copy editor’s markings makes him quiver, like a dance historian stroking Ulanova’s toe shoe. The elusive writer’s last known address turns out to be his childhood and present home. So a mere phone call might have saved much peregrination (but not supplied material for a film).
The person who puts Moskowitz directly in touch is the novelist William Cotter Murray, a former Iowa Workshop teacher and Dow’s mentor, as Murray describes himself. In the film’s most engaging scenes, the pink-faced, white-haired, beguiling Murray is overcome with delight that someone cares about his former protégé, and promptly supplies a phone number in nearby Cedar Rapids. Bingo.
And there’s Dow Mossman, a seedy-looking fifty-six-year-old in a moth-eaten sweater (we get a close-up of the holes), living in a fading two-story frame house. “Welcome to the House of Usher,” he quips as he leads the way to the upstairs clutter. The viewer may squirm at the gross intrusion, the existential illogic of the whole enterprise, but the modest writer is thrilled. After thirty years, a besotted fan wants to do lunch, and brings along a camera crew to boot. Mossman’s quicksilver intelligence and wit—apparent from the moment he opens his mouth—make him worth the long delay. In fact, if the dancer and the dance are to be inseparable, he should have been allowed to talk for the entire 127 minutes; his tossed-off remarks on Shakespeare, Casanova and the Bible are entertaining and fertile, leaving Moskowitz somewhat out of his depth.
But no, Mossman is used as the catalyst for the director’s emotion and performance. Moskowitz, not Mossman, is the star. Clearly the faux-impromptu scenes have been arranged and manipulated for optimum display. What we’re invited to marvel at is not the author’s gift but the director’s fervor and tenacity in the service of his passion. There’s actually a shot of the triumphant hunter and his bemused prey walking off into the sunset. A fantasy come to life and thence to the screen.
Moskowitz is hardly alone nowadays in conflating the book and the author, but he does so with the greatest degree of disingenuousness in the guise of humility. In this regard he’s made a thorough study of Michael Moore. In spirit, the two have little in common: Moskowitz is a romantic, not a muckraker. What he’s learned is stylistic. Yet despite the jeans and baseball cap, he lacks his model’s disarming and genuine grubbiness; he’s not funny-looking, but a smooth, confident, take-charge kind of guy. His approach to the literary men is a peculiar blend of adulation and condescension, and in the effort to sound ingenuous he comes off as merely ignorant, a six-foot Alice in the baffling Wonderland of publishing.
Moore’s sly antagonism would be out of place in any event, since Moskowitz seeks out only the benign members of “the reading culture.” Musing over one-book authors, he doesn’t question the heads of the half-dozen media conglomerates that regulate most of what we read or see, or inquire into their demand for profits beyond what serious books can reasonably earn. He doesn’t interview the chain-store owners whose strangling influence controls what gets published. How many copies of The Stones of Summer would Barnes & Noble order, were it reissued? The publishers would surely find out beforehand.
For publishing is not Wonderland. It is all too workaday and comprehensible. The facts that determine today’s reading culture are the industry’s huge and risky advances, its failure to maintain the backlist, and the pressure on editors to acquire lucrative books rather than to cultivate talent like Mossman’s. (Not to mention the proliferation of e-books and the great effect they are having on the book business; Moskowitz’s film was made a few years before e-books appeared and before the ascendance of Amazon.) But such facts would not make a heartwarming story. Sentimentality trumps economics. It’s easier to sit by in rueful commiseration as again, the elegant Carl Brandt murmurs enigmatically about Mossman, “We do that to people in this culture.”
Were stones not so propitious, a more fitting title would have been Mark’s World. The film shows his buddies, his kids, snatches of his commercial work, his house, his car. And as in submarine movies, it’s a guys-only world. The single female speaking part is allotted to the director’s mother, who delivers some funny lines on her son’s early reading habits. There is one walk-on role, literally: while Moskowitz takes a stroll with John Seelye, Mrs. Seelye (I presume) walks a few feet off, stealing glances at the men rapt in conversation. The absence of women is noteworthy because, unlike the submarine milieu, the reading culture is one in which they are known to participate as eagerly as men, if not more so.
Women are likewise absent from Moskowitz’s bookshelves, which the camera pans lovingly. (I did spy one Virginia Woolf title.) His taste is educated and solidly mainstream except for this omission, a curious one in a devoted reader who reached adulthood in the 1970s, a time that witnessed a surge of distinguished women writers.
Moskowitz’s wife refused to be in the film, he notes with amused and amusing regret: she’d only agree to show her hands and feet. The latter—actually her legs to about the knee—appear as she opens the front door to get the mail. The mail is, largely, used copies of The Stones of Summer, which Moskowitz has been ordering online and stockpiling. (A friend justly remarks that he’s making it impossible for anyone else to read the book.)
Moskowitz says of his film, “People have told me it’s the closest they’ve come to reading a book in a movie theater.” If Stone Reader is like a book, it’s a memoir of the self-serving variety. But of course nothing is “like” a book. For all his labors, Moskowitz cannot make reading a public act or reduce its power to chumminess. Reading is the most uncommunal activity in the world: above all, it requires and teaches solitary stillness and attentiveness. Movies exist for the eye and ear, but there is no sense organ that printed words fit like a glove. However many copies we own, the true book has no sensory existence. It is the prince hidden inside the frog. We open it, and our eyes give the kiss of regeneration. Then we embrace it, alone, without the barrier of anything tangible.