376
PARTISAN REVIEW
The work itself, hours and hours of typing and retyping, was
torture but always relieved by flights to New York and L.A., fine
hotels and restaurants, and kicks with Howard. Once, in a hotel lob–
by, waiting for him, I spotted a university colleague. His limp, his
cane, his silvery head with black framed glasses, the lenses turning
to me, perhaps seeing but not yet recognizing me before I slipped
behind a pillar. I'd known him for years. I liked him, but didn't want
to say hello. The hotel was too classy, not my style, not me, I wasn't
here . When Howard appeared I darted to his side, then out to the
street. We were off to a great dinner, rattling together about the
movie. I lived in two worlds, the university and this one of cryptic
pleasures.
He knew the movie business, its intricacies of money, power,
and talent. He'd worked with the greats, had had success. I didn't
learn much about the business, except that it really is a business, but
I learned about myself, discovering a weird susceptibility to self–
violation and the curiosity it inspired, watching myself as in a
penitential exercise, perversely moral, without a god. It was impos–
sible to write one line without caring, and yet everything was com–
promised, even the caring. The soul has ways of
s~g
through
compromise, continuing to care, like discovering your kid is hooked
on drugs when he swears he isn't - repelled, infuriated, refusing ever
again to care, you care. Lewis B. Mayer puts it differently: "A
screenwriter is a schmuck with an Underwood." I used an Olivetti,
small grey machine, nice touch.
After years in the business, a screenwriter might come to feel,
always and only,
"If
they like my work, I like it." Liking their liking
as one is turned on during sexual intercourse by the partner's
moans. The phenomenon is represented in the hysteria of movie
reviewers: "Wow!" "The best!" They remind you that a movie is
registered in the
kishkas,
a physical occasion.
Lights go down and fantastic sensations of goodness begin.
When the movie ends, it's also physical. Like being ripped untimely
from the womb, you're disoriented, adrift, homeless, and burdened
by regret, as if something could have been other than it is for you. A
small, unacknowledged misery of modern times. You see it in the
emerging faces, lashed by the electrical marquee, unready to go, get
out, give up their dreams to others. Some remain forever in love
with Tuesday Weld or Cary Grant. For others it doesn't matter what
movie they've just seen. Compared to feeling real, a movie is really
feeling.
