"Midbrow in Paris"

For some time people had been saying that Woody Allen had shot his artistic wad. For me this has been true pretty much since Annie Hall, a film whose aggressive clichés were tempered (if that’s the right word) by Allen’s colorful neuroses, adding some breaths of fresh air to what would otherwise have been a pedestrian boy-meets-girl / boy-loses-girl story. After Crimes & Misdemeanors, I stopped bothering with Allen’s movies: by then he was well into his serious phase, and already I’d made up my mind that the words “serious” and “Woody Allen” didn’t belong in the same sentence. However, based on the recommendations of some friends whose opinions I respect, and several strong reviews of his latest film according to which, apparently, he has broken a long string of mediocrities, I decided to give Mr. Allen another chance.

Alas, Allen’s latest project merely exposes his long-running fraud. For all its superficial innocence, Midnight in Paris is a deeply cynical movie, shameless in its exploitation of his die-hard fans’ wish to take Mr. Allen—and, by extension, themselves—seriously. When not indulging in it outright, Allen has made his long career out of either plunging headlong into or skirting around the edges of lampoon. Or—less charitably—out of fooling otherwise reasonable people into mistaking for art what is, at best, burlesque and (at worst) utterly derivative.

Midnight in Paris tells the story of a “hack” Hollywood screenwriter’s (played as well as possible by Owen Wilson) wish to write a novel and (paradoxically, given the vehicle that conveys him) to be taken seriously as an artist. On a visit to Paris with his wealthy fiancée, at midnight, by means of a chauffeur-driven yellow 1920 Peugeot, Gil is transported to the Paris of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Stein, et al., to the “golden age” wherein Modernism was born. No sooner is this cute, clever, and extremely trite premise established than the movie descends (not that it has much altitude to fall from, having so far been nothing but a Cook’s slideshow tour of the City of Lights) into a hodgepodge of the most condescending clichés and stereotypes of that period, with Fitzgerald as Yuppie glamour boy, Zelda as air-head, Hemingway as pugnacious boozer, and Gertrude Stein as Bohemia’s answer to Aunt Bee.

As grotesque and insulting as these stereotypes are, in the hands of a better, less lazy auteur they might, at least, have offered some intelligent if negligible fun. Instead, by virtue of his miraculous carelessness, somehow Allen manages to render these characters not only trite and superficial, but stupefyingly dull. When not wielding a bottle of Calvados and spouting bad parodies of his own prose, Hemingway either invites his listeners on safaris or challenges them to boxing matches. Gertrude Stein, arguably the most brilliant literary mind of her generation, has nothing intelligent to say—but then neither do any of the characters (even Picasso, never at a loss of words in real life, finds himself utterly speechless, his hairdo doing all his acting for him).

But then—and though this is a movie about a man who finds himself transported to an age that, arguably, may have crowded more geniuses into one room than any other—except when gratuitously spouting familiar quotations (“the past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past”—Faulkner), none of the characters in this film ever speaks an intelligent word. The closest Allen comes to intelligence is pedantry, explaining why he’s most in his element when creating pedantic characters, like the fiancée's paramour, Paul. Yet even true pedantry is beyond Allen’s supremely limited grasp. In waxing pedantic about Monet’s water lilies, the best our snobby expert can do is spout vapid chestnuts out of a undergraduate art student’s notebook about “closure” and the “roots of abstract expressionism.” Later in the film, the already trite premise having descended to a deeper level of triteness (with the characters transported to the Paris of Moulin Rouge and the Impressionists), pressed to arrive at the last “golden age” before the belle époque, the best that Allen (via Degas and Gaugin) can come up with is the Renaissance, as if the Enlightenment, among other “golden” epochs, never happened. But then a grammar-school mentality might not know about, let alone remember, the Enlightenment.

Some will argue that this is irrelevant to a charming, lighthearted comedy, but where is it written that to be funny, let alone “lighthearted” or “charming,” a movie has to be stupid? In fact, in any one of Owen Wilson’s recent comedies (and I include the Jackie Chan films) I guarantee you that you’ll find, in approximately proportionate amounts, not only more intelligence and less pretension, but more humor.

The sad truth is there is no intelligence in Midnight in Paris, which exploits and insults its viewers’ innocent wish—shared by the main character—to rub shoulders with brilliant minds. Instead, we brush up against wax figures stuffed with heinous clichés, the kind designed to comfort middlebrows of the lowest sort—those who want to seem sophisticated without having to sacrifice their familiar, superficial comforts, or face up to their limitations. Hence, Hemingway the drunk; Fitzgerald the playboy; Picasso the womanizer; etc. Bottom line: it’s okay to appreciate “great artists,” so long as its understood that they also happen to be bums and jerks. It's a film custom-tailored to elicit knowing chuckles from latent philistines.

On one level I agree with the critics: Midnight in Paris isn’t another mediocre film by Woody Allen. It is, to quote Paul Fussell, Bad with a capital “B.” It is the worst kind of middlebrow art: that kind that passes itself off successfully as the real thing. Hermann Göring famously said, “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun.” From now on, whenever I hear the words “Woody Allen,” I will reach for whatever is left of culture, and hold on with all my might.

The Draw Fan

I remember the sound of the draw fan in the ceiling at the top of the stairs by the linen closet, thrumming through hot summer nights. My father, an inventor, had rigged up a crude timer switch, with a little pulley wheel for a dial. I used to imagine that a mysterious creature lived in there, half vulture, half vampire, a bird-monster that made its home in the fan’s louvered nest (that opened mysteriously when the fan turned on).

Though the fan was off-limits to me and George, my twin brother, I’d sneak out there in the middle of the night and give the dial a hefty turn, so it would go on and on all night long, billowing the blue curtains next to my bed. Most nights, my mother would wake up and sabotage my wish; I’d hear the closet door (where the switch was kept) open, and then the fan would stop, and I’d lie there, awake on top of the sheets, hostage to the sizzles and chirps of cicadas and crickets singing their stifling songs.

Running the fan all night was an extravagance, sure, but it comforted me. It wasn’t just coolness I was after, but the sound—that roaring, rumbling rhythm, like rolling thunder, or ocean surf, or the turbines of a passenger steamship—a sound that conveyed power, authority, and steadfastness: a soothing masculine growl that assured me that together, somehow, no matter how hot and humid and long, we’d get through the night.

How to Buy Hat Factory Painting

Bare walls give me the creeps. I'm always distressed and frankly a bit amazed especially in the homes of well-off people, homes equipped with the best appliances, expensive furniture, and two-hundred dollar faucets, when people either have nothing at all on the walls, or some very expensive signed stupid lithograph by a famous artist for which you know they paid way too much money at some gallery. These are the same people whose book shelves, if they have any at all, are lined with first edition hardcovers of worthless airport novels, still in their pristine dust jackets as if barely read or not read at all: in fact, one gets the sneaky feeling they bought them simply to adorn the shelves (in which case one wonders at the mentality that would do so, say, with novels by James Patterson and Jackie Collins rather than by Tolstoy or Proust).

But never mind; this post is about paintings, not books, and about the bare walls that should be under them. Bare walls disgust me. Every naked space on a wall is space that could be taken up by a piece of art, and not just some prefab kitsch like those horrible wide-angle framed photos of island beaches at sunset with corporate bromides typeset an small-caps with very wide kerning, a sure sign that whoever inhabits the place is a dyed-in-the-wool, card-carrying philistine. Nor do I mean commercial posters whose frame jobs cost twenty times more than the artwork they contain. Nor do I mean signed lithographs, silk-screens, or other expensive reproductions of Calders or Picassos or Dalis or any of the dead fat-cat artists on whose corpses the commercial fine art world continues to gorge itself, or try.

I mean the works of living and struggling artists who are not famous yet but trying mightily to be, or maybe they aren't trying at all, maybe they simply paint for the joy of painting. There are many of them, and their paintings belong on people's walls.

Why, when it comes to fine art, are so many otherwise intelligent people so willfully ignorant? It's not merely that they don't appreciate good art, it's that they don't even try, ever. They know less, most of them, about art than they do about the engines under the hoods of their cars. They think it's too complicated, elitist, an enterprise for snobs. They don't seem to get that a piece of art, a painting, a good painting, it very simply something done by an artist. Among all the living artists they are entirely free to choose those works that appeal to them: nothing wrong with that. They need not fear the scorn of critics who may not approve their choices. However, they deserve to be scorned when, rather than make any effort to live with genuine art, they put overpriced insincere bragging-point crap selected by experts on their walls, or worse, nothing at all.

How do you go about buying real art, then? Genuine art that isn't overpriced or otherwise out of reach? Let me show you how simple it can be.

A few weeks ago I happened to read in a back issue of a literary journal that had been left behind on a shelf in the office I've inherited with my new job a short story by a woman named Jennifer Moses. I enjoyed the story very much, though it is not the point here. In the back of the journal were biographical note on the authors, each of them accompanied by a small, personal photograph. In place a a photograph of Jennifer or her family, I found one of a painting. For Jennifer, it turned out, is a writer and painter.

Now, two things struck me about this painting. First, it was done in a naive style. Naive art, for those who may not know, is art that either purposefully or by accident dispenses with the "rules" of perspective, light, proportion, composition, scale, and so on. Rousseau was a naive artist, but there have been many. I myself am a naive, and proud of it. In fact I felt as if this painting could have been done by me, which, I guess, is a rather narcissistic reason for my liking it, but then why would I paint my paintings not to like them?

The second extraordinary thing about this painting is that it was a painting of a hat factory. And hat factories, as you may know, are central to the novel I have been working on.

So I checked the artist's website, and sure enough she had done many lovely paintings, but only this one of a hat factory. So I emailed her and asked: is it for sale? Mind you, I really can't afford to be buying painting these days, but I had to ask. She wrote me back very quickly saying a)that the painting had already been sold and b) but she would be glad to do another for me. The price: $200, framed. And (she added) if I was not pleased with the result I needn't buy it.

Well, I guess I don't have to tell you my response. The painting hangs in a place of honor in the university home where I am living, whose walls, when I moved in, were bare. And that's how you buy a painting.

From a Novel-in-Progress

I've been working hard on a new novel, and also on my "Your First Page" blog, and hence I have been neglectful of this blog. When that will change I don't know, but here at least I can offer my few intrepid followers a sample of my work-in-progress, from a novel I'm calling HATTERTOWN (the capital letters are important: they are meant to mimic the names of the towns extinct hat factories as they appear in block letters down the shafts of the equally extinct smokestacks that shoot up from the landscape like ruddy brick fingers.

The sample paragraph is from a scene fairly early in the book in which the narrator imagined his mother's reasons and regrets with respect to marrying his stepfather, the owner and operator of the town's last dying retail hat store. You'll read it and tell me if you think it's any good.

"From where I half-crouched behind the beaded curtain I couldn’t see my mother, but I could picture her lying there, spread out on the parlor sofa, her long former dancer’s legs hidden under a plaid throw, cigarette in one hand, sherry glass in the other, for to go with her smoking she had taken up this other habit, a glass of creamy sherry every evening before bed—and sometimes, lately, more than one. She drank, I suppose, for the same reason she’d started smoking again, to take the edge off her disappointment, the disappointment of a woman who, having married a second time not out of love but for money, discovers that in fact she has done so for neither. Had my mother, when she married him, the vaguest inkling that Walter J. Waple was in financial straights? Certainly not. Had she had any such inkling would she have married him? Again, no. But she’d had no such inkling. About Walter J. Waple she had known very little, as a matter of fact. She knew only that he was a widower who lived in a grand stone house on Crown Heights Boulevard with a wraparound porch and stained glass windows and a turret with a witch’s hat roof and a circular driveway edged with day lilies—or were they daffodils? He had a retarded son, poor man, and perhaps for this reason he was alone, though it seemed not a very good reason, not to my mother. He owned the town’s only retail hat store, and so he must have been rich; at any rate, he was not poor, and he did not work in a hat factory. He did not smell of fusty damp wool and harsh chemicals and sweat, but of sweet pipe tobacco and cologne. His fingernails were polished and trimmed square with no a trace of factory grime under them. He didn’t swill bourbon or try to drown or disfigure his children. He was courteous and well mannered and never once presented himself to her without a bouquet of roses. Perhaps he was not rich. Perhaps he was not worth a fortune but only earned a considerable income. Still, it would be enough. With said considerable income he would buy her gowns and in his shiny blue Buick would take her out to dine (not to eat, mind you, but to dine) at gentile New England establishments with names like The Cobbs Mill Inn, The Wild Turkey, The Old Oak, The Spinning Wheel, or to that Swedish place on the lake, what was it called, the Viking’s Table, the one with the smorgasbord, where the chef always came out to greet the patrons in his puffy hat. He’d order a martini, extra dry with a droll olive, and she a Brandy Alexander. At the long banquet table buckling under steaming vats of half-drowned meatballs, golden one-eyed fish, gleaming amber turkeys, diamond-scored, clove-studded hams, and pantied racks of lamb, Mr. and Mrs. Walter J. Waple would fill their plates and life would be good."

The Elephant in Marshall Field’s Window: My Glimpse of Saul Bellow

As we pulled up the driveway there he was, an old man with white hair sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch of his Vermont farmhouse, reading the newspaper. I was with my friend Oliver. We’d been invited to the Bellows for dinner that night. For a while we sat drinking beers in our own rocking chairs to either side of Saul as the sun started down and he turned the pages of his paper—the Sunday Times—though he wasn’t reading it. He was eighty-five years old then, still pretty much there, though he had stopped writing, and he tended to repeat himself. Otherwise, though, he seemed content in that way that only great men seem able to achieve, and only when they arrive at grand old age after long lives filled with struggle and success, the contentment born of finally laying down the sword and shield. As a writer Saul Bellow was finished and he knew it, but he had nothing to regret or apologize for, having done all anyone could have asked him to do and more.

And now he sat there in his rocking chair on the front porch of his Vermont farmhouse turning the pages of his paper with the sun about to go down, telling a story about Trotsky, probably his favorite story of all, how when he was an undergraduate studying anthropology at the University of Chicago he and a fellow student decided to hitchhike to Mexico and gain an audience with the expelled Bolshevik revolutionary.

“We got there a day too late,” Bellow said. Trotsky had been killed the day before. “But,” Bellow went on, “we were allowed to see the body.”

He and his friend were escorted to a room. There lay Trotsky, under a starched white sheet in a hospital gurney, his beard brown with iodine or blood—either he couldn’t recall or had never been sure. Both what he remembered he saw with perfect clarity, as if it hadhappened the day before. “It was the sort of thing you never forget,” he said.

Before the sun went down completely Oliver and I went for a swim in the Bellow pond, a Huck Finn style pond with a small sagging dock and bullrushes all around. The water was murky but cool. Some of the Bellow girls swam with us. Except for Saul and his three-and-a-half year old daughter, the rest of his family consisted of brunettes of all ages, all of them beautiful. We finished our swim and walked in wet bathing suits back to the house for dinner.

I forget what we ate. Something warm and good—stew with salad and warm beets, something like that, or a vegetarian dish, served with a red wine. Oliver, Saul, and I sat together at one end of the long rustic table (everything about the place was rustic). As Oliver tends to when we're with others, he let Saul and I do all the talking while he listened and laughed and smiled. Saul, on learning that I had written a children's book, said he once had an idea for one himself.

“Really?” I said, taking a more than polite interest. “What was the idea?”

“It’s called ‘The Elephant in Marshall Field’s Window.’”

“Sounds great. What’s it about?”

“I don’t know,” Saul leaned in close to me and whispered conspiratorially. “All I know is it’s called ‘The Elephant in Marshall Field’s Window.’ I haven’t worked out any of the rest.”

From there somehow he drifted back to seeing Trotsky when he was eighteen years old. This sensational episode of his young manhood, it occurred to me—an event that may or may not have played a role in his becoming an author—had become for him a sort of reference point, a lighthouse at sea, shining a beacon that lit up his past—but fitfully, as beacons will.

After dessert, and after watching Saul’s three-and-a-half year old daughter dance for us, Saul, who’d had a long day, said goodnight, and Oliver and I in turn bid our farewells to the rest of the Bellow clan. Saul died three years later. He was eighty-seven.

Among today's young writers and readers Bellow has since fallen into something like neglect, a shame, since his books remain worth reading. I still think of him as a literary Titan, our most legitimate heir to Melville. Those who wish to disparage his works point out that when writing fiction the man had trouble checking his intellect at the door—and that starting with Augie March he stopped trying. True, true. But then who among us wouldn't have trouble keeping Saul Bellow’s intellect at bay? Among all his books you'd be hard pressed to find a single uninspired line. The texture of his prose alone is worth the substance of most others'.

As for me, from now on I’ll think of Saul Bellow as a neat old man who once glimpsed Trotsky’s bloody beard and imagined an elephant in Marshall Field’s window. Oh, yes, and who wrote a few masterpieces and won the Nobel Prize.

Photo by Jill Krementz

Miss Connecticut

She must have gotten on in Springfield while I slept. I awoke to find her sitting there next to me, wearing a zippered down coat and looking, as far as I could see, much too pretty to have landed there beside me on a stinking Peter Pan bus bound for Danbury from Brattleboro. I must have been twenty-two, twenty-three, something like that. 1980, or thereabouts.

As dusk settled on the tobacco fields and barns and crowded in on the tired bus, fusing together shapes in the dim cabin, we got to talking. I explained that I was returning from a visit with some of my high school chums in Vermont, all artists of one sort or another, all waiting tables or washing dishes. She in turn and with a hint of reluctance confessed to having been crowned Miss Connecticut a few weeks before, and being on her way to New York City, where she would spend three all-expenses-paid days at the Grand Hyatt hotel before boarding a plane for Miami, to take part in the Miss America pageant there. Though in the darkness I couldn't see it, I heard the smirk in her voice, along with a note of sad disbelief, as if she considered the whole affair slightly ludicrous.

I myself had always thought beauty pageants silly, so why was I self-conscious sitting next to Miss Connecticut, as if she were a goddess or the Pope? In the darkness I imagined her in white taffeta with sash and crown, smiling for the cameras, her sparkling teeth throwing back the glare of flashbulbs. I cracked a bad joke about Bert Park’s dentures, to which she said, “Who?” betraying both our ages. We spoke of nothing for three or four miles before she turned to her book, and I to the dark window.

I wondered about physical beauty as applied to people. Is it really skin deep? Are physically attractive people not somehow superior to plain or ugly ones? I'd been reading Middlemarch, by George Elliot, and remembered her disastrous affair with the Darwinist Herbert Spencer, of his own conclusion that the end was a preordained by Elliot's famous ugliness by her "heavy jaw, large mouth and thick nose"—qualities no intellectual attraction could redeem. "The lack of physical attraction," Spencer admitted—bragged?—later, "was fatal. . . Strongly as my judgment prompted, my instincts would not respond." I wondered how many potential lovers I'd never given the time of day to for similar reasons? Do believers read divine judgment in the distribution of beauty? What makes less sense than a contest where the participants exercise no skill, where the winner is determined by the performance not of the contestants, but of the judges?

The bus rolled on. And though it remained too dark for me to see her, and though I did my best not to be moved by the received wisdom of a silly contest, the more it rolled, the more beautiful my fellow passenger grew there next to me. Or maybe I'd been dreaming. Maybe she wasn't so beautiful. Maybe she'd pulled my leg and had the face of a gorilla, or a lizard. But no, she was Miss Connecticut, and gave off the sweet, silent, secret, intoxicating essence of beauty.

By the time we pulled into Hartford she'd fallen asleep with her head on my shoulder. For the rest of the trip I didn't budge. I was very uncomfortable, but felt like the luckiest man alive.

Cornered by Criticism

It's been months now since my last entry here. I've been two-timing you, giving my attention to another blog, this one called "Your First Page." There, I invite authors to submit (anonymously) up to the first 350 words of a manuscript-in-progress, and offer a free critique. To date I've commented on 40 first pages.

It's been a lot of work, and fun. I worried first that no one would send me their pages, then that I'd be overwhelmed with submissions. Neither worry has materialized. I get a trickle of pages every week—usually no more than five or six—just enough to keep up with. When I've done 100 I'll stop.

I've enjoyed the process. Each page presents a sort of puzzle, or several puzzles. First, I have to decide what's working and not, and why. That's probably the easier part. The next task is to contextualize the issues raised by a first page. To give an example, one of the last pages I commented on was from a detective or crime novel. And so, along with the critique, I did a short historical overview of detective fiction. That sort of thing.

Then there's the challenge of offering advice and criticism that's honest without being brutal or condescending, or worse, belittling--a trap I fallen into at least once. The author let me know it. As his comment reveals he was angry. I don't blame him. In the end I made good, and he has since become one of the blog's biggest fans. You might say we "met cute."

Belittling people is one of the risks one runs when offering criticism—especially when trying to make the criticism relevant and entertaining not just to the authors of the works in question, but to others. Attempts at humor can easily come off as condescension, as humor at the expense of the authors who have bravely offered their works to public scrutiny.

There's an even worse risk with respect to my own writing. Criticism and creativity are at odds. I used to not think so; I used to tell myself, "Why can't critical commentary be an art form like any other?" Sure there's an art to it. Whenever we shape thoughts into paragraphs we create something. But it's a heady art, an intellectual art, and art that engages the brain, not the heart. And the more time you spend in your brain the less well you know your heart, until it atrophies, its tissues dry out and harden.

Have I sacrificed my own creativity at the alter of criticism? Will I finally be one of those who (as one critic said of my work recently) can't, therefore he teaches? I never wanted to be a teacher who writes; I wanted to be a writer who teaches. Speaking of another kind of art, actor Paul Schofield described himself between performances as an empty vessel waiting to be filled by the next role. Outside of his roles the actor has nothing to say or add. This is why (Schofield said) interviews with actors are terribly boring. There is nothing beyond the art itself. Any discussion or analysis of that art diminishes both the art and the performer. Between roles, the actor should disappear, or at least keep his mouth shut.

Schofield's words touched me. All this writing I do about writing—how much has it diminished me? Am I strangling myself? Cutting off the blood supply to my own creative work, turning it into dry criticism? It that what I really want, to be a critic and not an artist? For years now I've wondered if teaching has hurt or helped me as an artist. Now I worry and wonder if it's too late, if I've poisoned the well of inspiration with all my critical ink. Am I creating, or destroying?

Whatever we do with a generous spirit is creative. Whether we write criticism or poetry, whether we're paid or not, whether it's published in the Paris Review or the Cappuccino Foam Review (or nowhere at all) doesn't matter. What matters is intent. If the intent is pure, the work will be pure. If we write out of generosity and not out of ambition, whatever we write can rise to art.