LIFE AND FICTION NEED TO DO SOME NEGOTIATING, IT seems to me. They have never really settled what amounts to a boundary dispute. Where does one start and the other stop? Who has to give back what territory and, once that’s settled, who will oversee the relations between these two great powers?
It’s a commonplace that life is stranger than fiction, but the commonplace was yielded up by a time without much semantic rigor. What its unidentified author said was that truth is stranger than fiction, perhaps little suspecting that a time might come when truth would be equated with life, but when no one could agree on what any of his terms meant: not “truth,” not “life,” not “fiction”—not even “strange.”
An example from recent folk art perfectly illustrates the kind of difficulties fiction has begun to have with life. A kind housewife, in an effort to be neighborly, makes some chicken soup for an ailing friend—in this case, a basketball coach. The coach’s team is in the cellar, and he is distraught, anxious, unable to sleep. In fact, he has not slept for several days. The considerate neighbor brings in the bowl of chicken soup and sets it before him—or rather, since he is pacing the floor in distraction, sets him before it. Then she launches into a housewifely discussion with the coach’s wife.
The coach, soothed by the smell of soup and the familiar buzz of female voices, grows drowsy. The weight of his days has been too much for him. He nods off, slumps forward, and drowns in the bowl of chicken soup. Mary Hartman, the neighbor, is aghast at this unforeseen outcome. Not only is the coach dead, but once again life has refused to reward her benevolence or even to give her an honest answer. She, Mary Hartman, has taken a life with a bowl of soup, and there’s nothing to be done and little to be said.
When I saw the episode of the drowning, I was wildly elated—art had finally overtaken American life and pulled it down. Obviously, the anxiety of coaches is central to the drama of our national life. It is on our sports pages day after day. For most of the year, anxious coaches can be seen on television almost constantly pacing various sidelines, barking out grim and frequently futile commands. These, of course, are superstar coaches, their tensions born of success; but behind them are the less visible desperations of thousands of little men, the high school and junior college coaches and assistant coaches across the land, whose car payments and baby food are dependent upon goading a group of inchoate youths into an occasional victory. Art, hitherto, has left coaches to the tender mercies of life, where, for all we know, dozens of them may have drowned in chicken soup, to only local surprise.
The point of distinction is that life’s little killings—however bizarre and inappropriate—are all faits accomplis, played to a small audience of friends and relatives, all of whom are easy to convince where death is concerned. When first informed that old Coach Winafew Loseafew has just drowned in some chicken soup a few skeptical villagers may exclaim, “I don’t believe it!” but they are just availing themselves of a handy exclamation. They believe it.
Art has no such automatic credit. Life effortlessly brings off the accidental, but art has to deal with the knowledge that what can easily happen can’t easily be made believable, much less effective. Drowning a basketball coach in a bowl of chicken soup may sound easy, but making it work requires supreme confidence on the part of the artists involved. Any hesitancy, any self-doubt, any too cautious attempt to motivate this freak occurrence, and half the audience will respond to the doubt and say, “Aw, I don’t believe that, that could never happen,” although they habitually read about stranger happenings in their morning newspapers.
In the case of “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” the gamble was somewhat covered by the pretense that the show is a parody of soap opera; had the episode not convinced, it could have claimed the license of parody. In fact, it didn’t need to; by then the series had transcended its original intention. Now, if it’s parodying anything, it’s parodying American life. But, as parody rises to art, the line between the real thing and the imitation grows indistinct, the admixture of the real increases, and the degree of exaggeration becomes ambiguous. As our finest serious novelists constantly remind us, American life is itself an exaggeration, filled with grotesquerie. To the extent that our lives are what they appear to be on the surface, their emotional tenor is positively gothic; the soap operas that “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” ostensibly parodies are sort of emotional gothics, as are a good number of our serious fictions.
Obviously, where art has it over life is in the matter of editing. Life can be seen to suffer from a drastic lack of editing. It stops too quick, or else it goes on too long. Worse, its pacing is erratic. Some chapters are little more than a few sentences in length, while others stretch into volumes. Life, for all its raw talent, has little sense of structure. It creates amazing textures, but it can’t be counted on for snappy beginnings or good endings either. Indeed, in many cases no ending is provided at all. The kind of work that Maxwell Perkins did for Thomas Wolfe, or, more recently, that Verna Fields did for Stephen Spielberg, doesn’t get done in life. Even in a literary age like the nineteenth century it never occurred to anyone to posit God as Editor, useful as the metaphor might have been.
It seems to me of more than minor interest that so vividly American an episode as that of the basketball coach drowning in the bowl of chicken soup came from a gifted group of TV writers, not from the pen of one of our major novelist-satirists. Certainly we have novelists who would have been capable of—not to say proud of—the conception, but these—among whom one could quickly number Joseph Heller, John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Thomas Pynchon, Bruce J. Friedman, Philip Roth, William H. Gass, Robert Coover, Walker Percy, Frederick Exley, J. D. Salinger, and John Updike—are the very novelists who have had the most difficulty in getting their fictions filmed at all, much less filmed well. A number of their colleagues who are less explicitly satiric in intent—notably Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, William Styron, and Bernard Malamud—have also been poorly served by Hollywood.
Or should that charge be turned around? Have the postwar novelists—and particularly the black humorists—been poorly served by Hollywood? Or is it, conversely, that the postwar novelists have themselves served Hollywood poorly, by offering up a body of elaborated, obsessively stylistic fiction that is so dense in reference to itself that no filmmaker can penetrate it effectively? Has Hollywood turned its back on a generation of novelists, or has the novel abruptly and perversely turned its back on Hollywood?
One has only to drop back a generation or two to see that something has changed. The major American novelists of the twenties and thirties—namely Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Steinbeck—were filmed repeatedly, if seldom brilliantly. At last count, Hemingway has yielded a dozen films, Faulkner six, Steinbeck nine, Fitzgerald five. Contrast that with Vonnegut’s one, Heller’s one, Malamud’s one, Updike’s one, Mailer’s two, Roth’s two, Nelson Algren’s two, James Jones’s three, plus a long string of zeros for the other guys, and it is evident that something has changed. Clearly, the fictional genre most accessible to filmmakers is the genre of narrative realism with its emphasis on character and story. Satire, particularly satire delivered with a great deal of stylistic flourish, is considerably less accessible. A satiric fiction, in which what happens to the characters is of less interest to the writer than what is happening with his style, may be a fiction which interests filmmakers personally, but is not a fiction they can easily use.
On the baldest level, one might say that the principal reason a novelist like Bellow has never been filmed is because filmmakers don’t read him. Bellow is a hard read, and hard reads aren’t welcome in the studios. Bellow’s fiction, particularly his late fiction, is full of visual riches, as well as riches of character, but he has been essentially a novelist of ideas, and even if he were fully appreciated in Hollywood, it is doubtful that there is a director alive who is capable of disentangling Bellow’s stories from his themes to produce a workable script.
A number of the other postwar novelists are also hard reads, sufficiently so that one wonders if anyone in Hollywood nowadays really has the energy to try and adapt them. Pynchon’s V., for example. Extracting a movie from it would require an effort almost equal to what it took to write the novel; extraction is just what would be required. The wonderful South African material in chapter nine (“Mondaugen’s Story”) could be a movie in itself. And what might a director with a sense of humor do with Benny Profane’s service on the Alligator Patrol, stalking great blind albino alligators through the sewers of New York City? Or with the wonderful seduction sequence in The Crying of Lot 49? Nonetheless, it would be naive to think that either book could be brought to the screen in anything like its totality, or to hope that anyone will bother to construct a story that might make it possible to use these visually tempting fragments.
One of the many projects I would love to see film scholarship attack is a history of unmade movies. It would be interesting to know how many of the fifty or sixty books by the postwar novelists have been seriously considered by filmmakers. How many were optioned, how many actually scripted, and at what stage and for what reasons were the projects aborted?
Failing a detailed history, certain generalizations suggest themselves. One is that by the early fifties narrative realism was in a state of exhaustion, perhaps permanent, perhaps temporary. From Here to Eternity was one of its last real triumphs, and Hollywood promptly snapped that up and dealt with it creditably. Hollywood was less successful with Jones’s next book, Some Came Running, but the novel, which was more substantial than its reception suggested, was firmly within a tradition with which Hollywood felt comfortable. Jones, like Theodore Dreiser, succeeded on the force of his feeling, his enormous sympathy for the frustrations and limitations of his characters. His understanding of a certain level of American life was unmatched—as Dreiser’s had been—and his ability to evoke this life was at first unhampered by anything resembling literary sophistication, again, like Dreiser’s. And this Hollywood could use, as it had used Dreiser in A Place in the Sun.
But narrative realism—the solid, stolid novel of character and event—was not something that excited many of Jones’s contemporaries. Realism had triumphed, and then, inevitably, had become cliché. All the realistic scenes conceivable, whether in the bedroom or on the battlefield, had been written, and written by people who were good at it. The need for something new was real, and it immediately asserted itself. The something new might be political ideas (Mailer’s Barbary Shore), or it might be a high style (Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness), but it was soon clear that few were going to be content to tell the same old stories of growing up and getting lost in the same old way.
The resource that the more inventive of the younger writers of the fifties looked to was language; and the mode, in contrast to decades of heavy-handed realism, was an almost frivolous strain of satire. Black humor was a response to the problem of cliché, of exhausted form. Touches had already appeared in Algren and Salinger, and by the early sixties the mode was in full flower with Barth, Heller, Vonnegut, Nabokov, and a host of others.
Hollywood, to its sorrow, was mostly left out in the cold. The energy of black humor lay chiefly in language, not in story, and you can’t film language. Stanley Kubrick seized one of the true masterpieces of the genre, Lolita (a book that had both language and story), and did his best with it. His best was only a partial success, certainly a very partial treatment of the book, but it was considerably superior to Mike Nichols’s strained effort with another masterpiece, Catch-22.
This sad effort took years to work up to, and there may well be people in Hollywood who are even now trying to work up to other black-humorist extravaganzas—to V., The Sot-Weed Factor, Omensetter’s Luck, or William Gaddis’s recent JR. From the perspective of the Beverly Hills pool, or Studio City, these prolix, roaring fictions must look like ungainly monsters indeed. That they are: so unmanageable that it is probably a boon to everyone’s digestion that our drowning coaches be left to TV writers.
Who is to say to what depth these TV writers’ sensibilities have been affected by the very novelists it is most impossible to film? Perhaps these novelists’ screwy vision is even now relentlessly making its way into American living rooms via the TV screen, delivered by writers of another medium, in the full confidence of their craft. Not only are we getting inspired television; we are, concurrently, being spared a lot of awkward movies.