LIME ROCK
I took a Formula 1–ish driving course. The instructor’s opening remarks: “There are two things you can’t tell an American man he doesn’t know how to do. One of them is drive a car.”
But there is a third thing, and it is “write.”
No fooling, this calls up as much rage as the other two.
I know it’s true of me, as you will have seen in these essays. And it’s true of you.
From the time we cry, we make sounds to influence those around us. With the exception of exclamations of joy, hurt, or surprise, this is, in fact, the sole reason anyone makes these sounds.
And we all love to tell stories. They, after all, are one means—their other excellences aside—for immobilizing a group (audience or dinner party). That is, for exercising power.
Bores are practicing a long-perfected skill. The bore can keep an audience as surely as a good raconteur, and more certainly than a poor one.
I turn now to advice given gratis, and recall, to readers, the words of A. E. Housman:
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away.”
He is, of course, talking of the Tender Passion, where, we know, it is true. But it’s even truer of Free Advice on writing.
This one or that would send me scripts, either to admire or with hope I could advise them. It was easy to gauge them—three or four lines would reveal whether the chap could write or not. How many bites of fish does one need to determine it’s tainted?
I could then, with a clear conscience, write back that I loved it. This was all most wanted, and I was free and clear. Some, having snared their fish (me), would respond, then, why not pass it along to your agent or producer?
Le Carré writes of his master spy, Smiley, that he had spent his life in deception but still didn’t know how to get out of an unwanted dinner invitation. Who does?
Asked to “pass the thing along,” and tired of the natural result of my prevarication (aren’t we all), I would have to improvise the “They aren’t taking on any new clients,” or “The producer is retired, and I myself can’t get my newest work placed.” And so on, self-maneuvered into a certainly transparent falsity; this, at least, putting me on the same degraded level as the plaintiff.
How to avoid the (self-imposed or not) impositions?
First, to explain that my lawyer advised me that I could not expose myself to their efforts, lest someone somehow publish, stage, or film something in which the supplicant might recognize (wrongly, but arguably) something of the work submitted to me.
Why, no (however), he might say, under no circumstances would I traduce my respect for you by suggesting such a thing.
And here is the genius riposte: Of course not, I would say; but, should you, may God forbid, die, and your heirs stage, publish, or film your work, OR should you sell it to another producer, and he, doing the same, perceive the similarity in a work of mine and compare the copyright dates (the other fellow’s work being registered first), that litigious bastard might sue me or my heirs for plagiarism.
This is, of course, the very long way around the barn. I liked it for its suggestion, to the applicant, of the eventual production of his work. Perhaps I liked it more than they did; but in the exchange, as I was not dismissing but endorsing the work’s worth, my listener was not called upon to defend his creation (whether or not I was a superior); and might, thus, accept my demurrer without danger to his self-esteem.
Yeah yeah yeah.
I got thrown out of Williams Sonoma for the following:
I’d entered by a parking lot door marked NO ADMITTANCE, PLEASE GO TO THE FRONT ENTRANCE.
A young employee called my attention to my gaffe. I said, “It’s alright, I’m an Illegal Immigrant.”
She said she found that deeply offensive, and I was escorted out.
Okay. It was not farting in church, she and I each had the joy of our umbrage, but I didn’t get my wife’s requested Jordan Almonds.
And this got me thrown out of USC film school.
I was invited to talk to some class about Dramatic Writing. One student asked, “What’s the best thing I can do to increase my chances of writing for television?”
I considered dissuading him with the end of the Housman poem:
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
“The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
’Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.”
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.
I thought better of it and replied, “Cut off your dick and eat it.”
