There are writers whose works you like, and there are writers whose works you love. Then there are what I call “DNA writers.”

DNA writers are, simply, those whose works are so central to you—to your own writing, to your understanding of what writing is, to your consciousness of the world, your very sense of self—that it’s as if they’re somehow imprinted on your DNA. Their words and worlds exist in a very private place within your mind and soul, one that has permanent meaning and relevance to you. Of DNA writers you don’t think, “I’d write differently if I hadn’t found them”; you think, “I’d be a different person if I hadn’t found them.”

It’s possible that someone has had another kind of experience, but it seems almost inevitable that you find your DNA writers when you’re young—when you’re still creating yourself. Some DNA writers arrive during childhood, some in adolescence; all have arrived by the conclusion of your young adult life—certainly by the end of your twenties. After that, you’re too experienced, too formed, to be hit so profoundly, so deeply, by another’s talent.

There can still be writers whose works you fall in love with, of course. It still happens to me with pleasing regularity. But, as great as some of these folks are, I know that they won’t live within me the way that my DNA writers do. I might enjoy these newer (to me) writers, appreciate them deeply, learn from them—but my essential sense of self will be unaffected. I’ll recognize them as great writers, that’s all. Not as part of myself.

A list of one’s DNA writers won’t necessarily be a list of the greatest writers in the history of the world. It will simply be a list of those whose works you found at the right time, under the right circumstances, for their words to sink into you in a different, extraordinarily profound way—a way that continues to develop and change and ramify throughout your life, even if you never read a particular writer again after that initial DNA-altering exposure. Often such writers are relatively minor, in the general scheme of literary things. The giants, the Shakespeares and Miltons, are generally too utterly colossal to be DNA writers. I love Lear above all plays, for instance, but it feels dishonest to list Shakespeare as one of my DNA writers. He’s too formidable, too awe-inspiring; and too many of his works, especially the early comedies, leave me cold. Shakespeare is one of the world’s greatest writers, and a handful of his works are among my lifetime favorites; but he’s not quite what I mean by a DNA writer. At least not for me (he certainly could be for others).

A DNA writer is one who, to quote Yeats completely out of context, lives in the deep heart’s core.

So who are my DNA writers? Here are the ones who spring to mind. (To keep the list manageable, I’ll limit myself to prose writers—poets would require another list entirely.)

Edgar Allan Poe. As I’ve often said, Poe was my first favorite writer; but my response to “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Raven” (the Poe works I encountered first) went far beyond that of most grade-school students, who enjoyed the creepiness well enough but who weren’t moved and shaken by Poe’s language and his extraordinarily modern sense of what might be called homegrown fear: the concept that horrors can exist within one’s own house, side-by-side with you—beating hearts under the floorboards, bodies walled up in the cellar, ominous birds flying in and delivering messages of doom. It was a message and a sense of the world that a young boy growing up with two alcoholic parents took very much to heart. Poe, I thought, understood me—knew me. He felt, across the chasm of centuries, like the most secret of secret friends. He still does.

Rod Serling. Fast on the heels of Poe I discovered The Twilight Zone and its creator/host/main writer, Rod Serling. At age eleven or twelve it seemed that I’d found Poe’s lost spiritual son—his stories were in some ways similar to Poe’s, though less overtly ghastly for the most part. Still, Twilight Zone did in a more contemporary context what Poe had done in his nineteenth century fashion—reflect the strangeness and ever-threatening disequilibrium of so-called “normal” life. Writers Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, George Clayton Johnson, and Earl Hamner were all part of the show’s overall gestalt, and were—and have remained—important to me. But it was Serling, the guiding spirit and the first writer I was able to actually see and hear, who seemed to be speaking straight to me, saying in essence: “You’re not wrong. Life really is as frightening and unpredictable as you think it is.” The fact that Serling recognized this, and shared this knowledge with me, was as comforting and validating as having Poe as my secret friend.

Anne Frank. A different category here, surely—a teenaged diarist hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam during World War Two. But like any number of boys who first read the diary when they were too young to have yet had a girlfriend, I found reading the book an astonishingly intimate experience. Since I had no sisters, I’d never been on close terms with any female my age. For the first time in my life it seemed that I felt what it was like to be close to a girl, if only on paper—to share her excitements and intimacies and insecurities. I loved her, as much as a boy can love the images and emotions his brain processes from words on a page. Re-reading the diary as an adult was also a revelatory experience, if in a completely different way—when I was young I’d loved the book for Anne herself, the thrill of knowing her, listening to her most private thoughts. As a grown-up I was instead overcome by a shattering sense of loss, a realization of just how young she had truly been, of how truly brief a life she’d been allowed to live.

Tennessee Williams. I wish I could recall my first experience of Williams—it may have been in high school, when I was too raw and inexperienced to grasp his mastery of language, of form, his profound connections of desire, loss, and mortality, his unequaled ability to take material which in lesser hands would have been luridly grotesque and turn it into (to quote one of his published letters) “pure art, which is pure light.” I believe that The Glass Menagerie must have been the first for me, with Tom’s remarkable opening and closing monologues—surely two of the most pitch-perfectly beautiful speeches in the English language, on a par with Shakespeare’s. But it was A Streetcar Named Desire that sank Williams into my DNA forever—perhaps the harshest and most nightmarish of all modern tragedies, yet written in language that, while it admittedly bears no resemblance to actual human speech, soars on its own rhythms to create a kind of heightened poetic realism. His understanding of “the wild at heart that are kept in cages” informs all his great plays, as well as the less famous great stories (“Desire and the Black Masseur,” “One Arm,” a dozen more). Any writer—that is, any whose writing is organic and honest and not merely commercial hack work—is an outsider; Williams wrote about them, about us, better than anyone.

Truman Capote. I found Capote’s work at the perfect time—just as I was broadening my horizons past the genre fiction I’d spent most of my young life reading. His early Gothic stories—“Miriam,” “Shut a Final Door,” “The Headless Hawk”—had sufficient horrific content to appeal to my still-unformed sensibilities, but these pieces were written on a completely different level than the kind of thing typically found in the genre sections I frequented at bookstores. The prose was intricate, subtly shaded, vivid, alive; his rhythms made the language itself an integral part of the experience, rather than simply being the necessary delivery system for “the story.” In Capote, the language is, in some sense, the story. Other Voices Other Rooms, A Tree of Night, and his masterwork, In Cold Blood—certainly one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read—completely altered my conception of what prose is and what it does, or can do. A bit like Serling, too, Capote was there—present on countless talk shows of the era, another model for what a writer could be: in this case flamboyant, witty, outrageous, unforgettable.

Anton Chekhov. Just as I was discovering via Williams and Capote how literary fiction could take tropes familiar to me from horror pulp magazines and turn them inside out, make them into another kind of vastly heightened reading experience, I discovered (through Capote’s published recommendation) the world of the great Russian master Chekhov. At first stories like “A Calamity” and “The Lady With the Pet Dog” puzzled me—they seemed to have no point, in the sense that I’d grown to expect short stories to have a point. But the more I read The Portable Chekhov, which I purchased in the Humboldt State University Bookstore in 1986 or 1987, the more his world opened to me. It was an ordinary, human world, yet within it the events of regular people lives took on a kind of mystical significance that could leave me dazzled and nearly in tears. This was, simply, life—life as it’s lived, portrayed in words with a deeper and more moving sense of reality than any writer I’d ever encountered. Chekhov’s plays are wonderful, but for me it’s the short stories which are his true masterworks.

William Styron. As a young writer in college it didn’t take me long to begin thinking big—to conclude that short stories and poems were fine, but that the serious writer, the real writer, thought in terms of large-scale projects. Nobody thought larger than William Styron, whose novels The Confessions of Nat Turner and, especially, Sophie’s Choice were revelations to me. Here was a writer as surefooted within the labyrinths of the English language as Capote, but who applied his supple prose not to private, inwardly-drawn narratives, but to some of the biggest themes of all. Slavery. The Holocaust. Yet the stories themselves were intimate, first-person tales, offering an unprecedented sense of the individual within the whirlwind of a larger history. Styron brought an intellect and philosophical bearing to his highly emotional, gorgeously written, brilliant novels.

Marcel Proust. Sequentially speaking—in terms of my own life, that is—Proust is the last of all my DNA writers. I read Remembrance of Things Past in its entirety during my off-hours as a teacher as Tsabong Community Junior Secondary School in Tsabong, Botswana, which is in the middle of the Kalahari Desert. I was twenty-eight. Perhaps nowhere else on earth could I have found the time and the quiet, steady focus which Proust’s writing, even in translation, requires. (Years later I read the whole again, and lived to tell the tale: see “Proust in Africa,” available for perusal on my website, http://christopherconlon.com.) Yet Proust’s massive (3000+ pages) novel with its hundreds of characters is at its core an intimate tale of just one person, in this case the unnamed Narrator. A sensitive would-be writer on the one hand, a social snob on the other, he ascends through the artistic and social world of nineteenth- and early-twentieth century France. No one ever understood time and its effects on the human psyche better than Proust, or wrote about it more powerfully. This may sound almost masochistic, but really: the novel is even better the second time, when the characters are already clear in your head and you understand the grand architectural scheme of the entire narrative. I don’t know if Remembrance of Things Past (or as it’s translated now, In Search of Lost Time) is the greatest novel ever written, since I haven’t read every novel ever written; but it’s the greatest novel I’ve ever read.

Though neither was primarily a writer, I’d be remiss if I didn’t also name Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles. Both of these narrative artists (narratives on film rather than in print) affected me as deeply and profoundly as anyone on this list; Hitchcock for some of the same reasons mentioned for Poe and Serling, Welles because...hell, because he’s Orson Welles. What more need be said? Hitchcock I found first through his TV series, shortly thereafter through Psycho; Welles I discovered after learning that the obese gentleman on all the TV talk shows was in fact the same man who had directed a film I’d read a great deal about called Citizen Kane—a film I proceeded to tape off late-night TV, and which proceeded in turn to change my life.

This is an eccentric list, as you can see. It’s not a list with any particular consistency or coherence, and it certainly isn’t balanced—ten people, nine male, one female, all white. But DNA writers are about emotional responses, not rational ones. These are the writers who live in a place in my brain and imagination that no one else has ever touched, or ever will.

These are my DNA writers.

Who are yours?

I hereby confess that I’m an inveterate viewer of CNN.

This embarrasses me a little, because so much of CNN is really nonsense: the hyped-up “Special Reports,” the meaningless onscreen countdowns to mostly insignificant events, the cringe-inducing Lou Dobbs, the endless Whack-a-Mole appearances of a ragtag collection of talking heads the network forever trumpets as “the best political team on television,” as if sheer repetition will somehow make it so. Certainly CNN has its value, particularly in covering sudden major crises in real time; but on a slow news day, lo! the brainless infotainment takes over, to the detriment of the network’s credibility and the audience’s senses.

A couple of weeks ago, however, on the fortieth anniversary of the first communication between two computers—a milestone that would ultimately lead to the World Wide Web—Jack Cafferty, another cringe-inducer, offered a question to his viewers on one of his frequent “Cafferty File” appearances: “How,” he wanted to know, “has the Internet affected your life?”

I realized that I’d never really thought about it.

Not, at least, in those terms. I’ve certainly growled enough over the years about the Internet, about teenagers spending their lives sitting before computer screens, about the unreliability of Internet connections, about the increasing difficulty of protecting copyrights in the Internet age...But to ask me, simply, “How has the Internet affected your life?”

It’s an interesting question.

I grew up, of course, not only well before the Internet, but even before PCs. There was an old Royal electric typewriter in our house, which I used to finger-stab experimentally from time to time; but I actually learned to type as a high school freshman, sitting day after day in front of a rather battered Olympia manual machine in Mrs. Mercure’s Typing 1A class along with some 25 other students. To be honest, I remember virtually nothing about Mrs. Mercure. I can’t picture what she looked like. Can’t recall her voice. Can’t think of a single pearl of wisdom she ever offered me.

But she taught me how to type. And so, by any practical measure, she was the most important teacher I ever had.

Simply put, typing made it possible for me to become a writer. It set me free. It pulled me away from scribbled sheets of schoolboy notebook paper and allowed me to take my work and myself seriously. It gave me the grounding I needed to be able to present professional-style manuscripts which I soon began submitting to real magazines—and which just as soon came right back to me, but at least they’d been read. Occasionally an editor or editorial assistant even offered an encouraging scribble on the rejection slip I invariably received. In that small way, then, I was in the game. I was a writer, if only an unpublished one. And all because of my newfound skill at typing.

I don’t remember the first PC I ever saw, but I know that I first became truly aware of PCs in college. My girlfriend of the time had one, and would occasionally make efforts to teach me to use it; but it seemed impossibly complicated and brain-busting to me, with all sorts of strange codes that had to be memorized to even get the damned thing to work. (This was long before Windows would make computers comprehensible to virtually anyone.) In those years—the mid-’80s—I made no headway with the newfangled technology, which seemed pretty much irrelevant to me anyway. Two years with the Peace Corps, in a remote village in the Kalahari Desert, did nothing to improve matters; a computer would have been impossible there for any number of reasons, including a notable lack of electricity. I was happy enough with the Sears portable typewriter I’d purchased shortly before heading overseas. In fact, though I haven’t tried to use it in fifteen years, I still own that machine today.

It was around Christmas 1990 that I returned to the States, and what I immediately noticed was that in my absence computers had become ubiquitous. Even my terminally unhip father had a Mac of his own, which I—slowly, hesitantly, grudgingly—began to learn to use, though I still held to my Sears typewriter for most of my writing. But when my father died a year and a half later, I inherited the Mac...and the jig was up.

I was forced to enter the modern age.

I still vaguely recall how odd it felt to write on a computer—to not have an actual sheet of paper in front of me, and to constantly see that blinking cursor waiting for my next word (just as it does now, as I write this). At first I wasn’t sure I could handle it. But after a few false starts, I got going on a story called “The Unfinished Music” (you can find it in my collection Thundershowers at Dusk) which seemed good—as good as something I would have written on a typewriter. I was off and running!—and, truly, never looked back.

The arrival of the Internet not long thereafter was something of a blow to me. After all, I was feeling pretty spiffy about my grand technological knowledge—I’d even survived my first system changeover, as my wife (we got together in 1995) convinced me we needed a more contemporary machine than my dad’s now-ancient Mac, and so we switched to some sort of IBM-compatible device.

I can recall first hearing about the Internet in a series of TV commercials narrated by Tom Selleck. “Have you ever sent a letter—without a stamp?” he asked. “You will! And the company that will bring it to you is...” Was it AT & T? Anyway, I didn’t really know what he was talking about. But I learned soon enough.

It took us a long time to get around to going online. Again, I was resistant. What was the point? I remember seeing the Internet on a computer at work, and a few times in the local library; it seemed a sort of amusing toy, nothing more. Someone—it may have been my wife—showed me what Google was, and how you searched out information using it; naturally one of the first searches I ever did was on the words “Christopher Conlon,” and when I found nothing, it was obvious that this great new technological marvel wasn’t worth much.

Still, the Internet slowly took over the world—our world, at least—and in 1999 we purchased a modem and got ourselves a dial-up Internet connection at home. We’ve modernized again and again since then, of course, but as with learning to use a computer in the first place, once we had the Internet available to us, there was no turning back—neither of us would ever dream of suggesting that we disconnect ourselves, certainly. And of course it would be all but impossible for a writer today to not be connected to the Internet, if for no other reason than e-mail.

E-mail! That was one aspect of the World Wide Web which I embraced from the very first time I used it (in an e-note to the poet Lyn Lifshin). For years I’d mourned the loss of the kind of correspondences I’d enjoyed in the Peace Corps, and even earlier, with friends—old-fashioned letters written (or typed) on old-fashioned paper, put in an envelope, stamped, and mailed in a process that back then no one ever thought to prefix with the word “snail.” No one wrote to each other anymore, I groused—now it was all just phone calls. But, at least for me, e-mail quickly proved to be the rebirth of personal correspondence, with the added benefit of undelayed delivery of message. While some claim that it’s impossible for a lengthy, seriously considered, revised letter to be written as an e-mail, I’ve never found this to be true; indeed, some of my personal e-letters are as long as some of my current blog entries, as a few of my (possibly unfortunate) correspondents can attest. All it takes is a liberal use of the “Save” button, after all.

I loved e-mail right from the beginning. I still do, even as new communications technologies threaten its dominance and force me to begin grumbling again about changing things that already work just fine.

The Internet certainly altered some of my shopping habits as well, if not as profoundly as some of the early Silicon Valley gurus said it would. (Remember the wild claims that brick-and-mortar stores would soon be a thing of the past?) It’s an enormous boon to the book collector; before, if one wanted to find an out-of-print book, there were few alternatives to simply searching for it in shop after shop. There were “book finders” who advertised in the pages of Harper’s and the like, and I used them occasionally, but I discovered that they typically charged four times the volume’s market value. As a result, there were countless books I’d wanted for years that the Internet allowed me to find with a point and a click. It was wonderful.

But it didn’t feel right, and quickly enough my wife and I discovered that, while the Internet was a superb tool, it was only a tool. There’s no substitute for actually walking into a bookstore and browsing the shelves. None. It’s how the magic happens for us book people. Even the most sophisticated Internet “browse” feature is a feeble substitute for actual hold-it-in-your-hands book shopping.

But I think the way that the Internet has most affected me is how it’s affected my use of time.

Like millions of others, I spend too much time in front of the computer—and I’m online virtually all of that time. For all its valid and practical uses, the Internet is surely the greatest time-waster ever invented by mortal man—far greater than television, exactly because of the Internet’s “interactive” nature. It’s truly frightening to think of how many hundreds—thousands?—of hours I’ve spent simply clicking on things, following links to no real purpose, Google-searching information of no importance (including, inevitably, about myself). Early on, before I learned to discipline myself at least somewhat, I would sometimes get ready to leave the computer, thinking I’d been staring at the Internet for twenty or thirty minutes, only to realize that I’d been there for over two hours. There’s always something new to see and discover in the Wild West of the World Wide Web.

I don’t worry about this too much in connection to myself—as I say, I got a handle on “Internet time” early in my discovery of the Web. But I do feel concern about younger people, those who never experienced an unwired life. If the Internet is the greatest source of information on the planet—and it is—it’s also the greatest attention-buster, the profoundest source of young people’s fragmented and incomplete focus. I worry that they may not ever know the pleasures of sinking deep into a long novel for hours and hours on a summer’s afternoon, or of going for a long walk in autumn woods with the earthy smell of fallen leaves rich around them. It’s so very difficult to be here when the Internet, now accessed by tiny handheld devices most kids use incessantly, so enticingly beckons us to be somewhere else—anywhere but here, now, which is the only place and moment any of us ever really have.

How has the Internet affected my life? Very profoundly.

But the more important question may be how it will affect the lives of those who’ll never know a world without it.

#

In response to a friend’s request, here’s an updated list of my forthcoming publications.

The major project right now is, of course, A Sea of Alone: Poems for Alfred Hitchcock, the original poetry anthology I’m editing for Dark Scribe Press, which is scheduled for release in 2010. We’re open for submissions right now—interested parties should visit http://alfredhitchcockpoems.blogspot.com for details.

As for my own writing, I have four anthology appearances coming up in the near or not-so-near future.

The one that will most likely appear first is Apparitions, an original anthology of stories on the theme of hauntings. This book, edited by Michael Kelly, will be a trade paperback published under the new imprint of Undertow Books. My story “A Certain Slant of Light”—a long one, over 8000 words—is in the book, along with new tales by Gary A. Braunbeck, Barbara Roden, Gemma Files, and others. This looks to be a very fun collection. Check out all the details, including a look at the lovely cover illustration, at:

http://www.undertowbooks.com/

The Bleeding Edge, edited by William F. Nolan and Jason Brock, is also due in the next month or two. It’s an original hardcover anthology of dark fiction from Dark Discoveries Publications, and includes unpublished work by such luminaries as Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Joe Lansdale, John Shirley, Earl Hamner, and Norman Corwin, among many others. My own contribution, “Triptych: Three Bon-Bons,” is a group of three very brief, very strange short-shorts—little finger exercises in fantasy and surrealism which I write when the mood hits, and which I call my “bon-bons.” Few of these miniatures have ever been published, so I’m delighted to bring this trio of them forth into the world. Learn more about The Bleeding Edge here:

http://www.jasunni.com/shop/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=1

I got involved with Rich Ristow’s poetry anthology Death in Common (Daverana Enterprises) through my friend Marge Simon, who urged me to write something for the book. Death in Common has a very intriguing premise—all the poems focus in one way or another on the victims of a (fictional) serial killer. My own contribution is called “He Goes to Funerals”; other writers in the book include Michael Arnzen and Steve Vernon. The last I heard, this trade paperback was virtually done—so it should be appearing soon, too.

http://www.daverana.com/book.php/death_in_common

My single anthology appearance which won’t be showing up in the next month or three is “Christmas Night,” a short-short story that will be published in Tasmaniac Publications’  Festive Fear 2, edited by Steve Clark and scheduled for release around Christmas 2010. It’s a collection of holiday-themed horror and suspense tales. The book hasn’t even been open for submissions for long yet, but some preliminary information about it can be found here:

http://tasmaniacpublications.com/Annual.htm

Finally, I hope that folks have also noticed that a video podcast of a brief interview with me, conducted by Judy Comeau last month at the Horrorfind Convention in Hunt Valley, Maryland, has gone up at the Count Gore website. Anyone who hungers to behold my screen-star good looks or hang on every mellifluously-intoned word from my mouth should visit:

http://www.countgore.com/gore/vault.htm 

What’s next? As I mention in the video interview, I’m writing a novel, provisionally titled Lullaby for the Rain Girl; it’s an ambitious project, much longer and more complex than Midnight on Mourn Street, and will include several of my previously-published works as stories (and poems) within the story. I’m perhaps two-thirds finished, and hope to have a complete (first) draft completed by the end of next summer. But I’ve learned over the years that these things happen on their own schedule, not on mine.

It will be finished when it decides that it wants to be....

#   

The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps by William Styron. New York: Random House, 2009.

When news of William Styron’s death came in November of 2006, some of us who had loved his writings for decades but who had never known the man himself felt a distinct sense of anticlimax, as if the announcement were a mere redundancy—an unnecessary reconfirmation of something we had already known for a very long time. After all, Styron the man departed this world three autumns ago; but Styron the writer had already left the building many years earlier.

Writing was never easy for William Styron. He was one of the least prolific of all major American literary figures—in terms of authors who enjoyed similarly long lives (Styron was 81 when he died), only Ralph Ellison and the still-living Harper Lee come to mind as writers with less actual finished, published work to their credit. (History has yet to judge whether J.D. Salinger will be accorded the status of “major writer” or instead be considered a minor one who happened to pen a single freakishly popular novel.) Ellison and Lee, however, were essentially one-book writers. Styron, indisputably a major voice from the day Lie Down in Darkness was published in 1951, had much more to say, and said it in a string of highly popular and critically-respected works including The Long March (1953), Set This House on Fire (1960), the explosively controversial Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), and finally the novel universally regarded as his masterpiece, Sophie’s Choice (1979).

It’s an impressive resume, yet it’s hard not to notice that in twenty-eight years Styron managed only four full-length novels (The Long March is a novella). There was also an indifferently-received play, In the Clap Shack (1973), a few abortive screenplay projects, and the occasional stray essay, but in terms of sheer volume, Styron’s collected works were dwarfed by those of his contemporaries John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, and Norman Mailer, among others. But Styron remained a heavy hitter his entire career, each of his books heralded as a major publishing event. The Confessions of Nat Turner won him the Pulitzer Prize and made him genuinely famous—famous, that is, outside the narrow world of people who read serious fiction—and the celebrated Sophie’s Choice cemented his status as a modern literary icon, especially after the Academy Award-winning film version with Meryl Streep appeared in 1982.

Oddly, however, this literary lion would all but cease to roar after the fabulous success of Sophie’s Choice. Thereafter his work surfaced occasionally in magazines, and throughout the 1980s and 1990s he became an increasingly familiar figure on television, being interviewed by the likes of Charlie Rose and hobnobbing with the Clintons on Martha’s Vineyard. But those of us who waited for the next Styron novel were doomed to disappointment. Though he lived for nearly three decades after the appearance of  Sophie, no new full-length fiction ever materialized. Styron nonetheless managed to keep afloat his reputation as a major figure with one more work, the nonfiction Darkness Visible (1990), an account of his experiences with depression—a powerful and memorable piece, certainly, but at a mere 88 pages—very small pages with very wide margins—it hardly qualified as a book at all. A final volume, a slender collection of stories called A Tidewater Morning, appeared in 1993. And that was the end.

Throughout this post-Sophie period, however—and, in fact, even before it—Styron insisted he was hard at work on another novel, this one to be based on his experiences in the Marines and titled The Way of the Warrior. He began this project, he said, in the early 1970s, and worked at it for some two or three years before breaking off from it to write Sophie’s Choice; after that novel was completed and published, he returned to Warrior, talking it up in interviews all the way through the 1990s.

Now, in the posthumously-published The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps, we have some of the tattered remains of the never-completed Way of the Warrior. The subtitle of the collection is misleading, for none of these works are truly “tales”; with one exception, they are all extracted from various versions of Styron’s unfinished novel. (That single exception is “Blankenship,” an early long story which, according to Styron biographer James L.W. West, is an unfinished fragment—though nowhere in the text of The Suicide Run is its incomplete nature acknowledged.)

Reading The Suicide Run—as with a lot of posthumously-published books—is occasionally moving, but mostly, alas, depressing. The experience rather reminds me of Truman Capote’s early “lost” novel, Summer Crossing, found a few years ago and finally published: Capote himself had referred to the supposedly destroyed manuscript as “thin, clever, unfelt,” and to actually behold the thing itself was only to realize what a perceptive judge the author was of his own work (though to be honest I failed to find Summer Crossing particularly clever). So too with Hemingway’s posthumous books: Scribner’s managed to cobble together a fragmented but engrossing work in Islands in the Stream, but later published something called The Garden of Eden, purporting to be a novel by Hemingway but in fact stitched together from fragments of a much larger project—reports have it that fully two-thirds of Hemingway’s material was deleted. An even later Hemingway publishing project, True at First Light, appears to have gone much further in editing and altering the actual material Hemingway left behind—all for a result that received uniformly poor reviews, but which will certainly make a great deal of money. As will, one assumes, The Suicide Run.

From the evidence in this book, it appears that Styron worked seriously on at least two different versions of The Way of the Warrior over the years. The first, from the early ’70s, is represented here by the fragments “Marriott, the Marine” and “The Suicide Run.” Both are first-person narratives from the point of view of an unnamed World War II veteran who is recalled to active duty with the coming of the Korean War. The narrator is mostly indistinguishable from Styron himself; he has even written a novel which arrives in galley proofs during his initial officer training and re-orientation, just as happened with Styron and his Lie Down in Darkness. There is a great deal of powerful and specific writing in “Marriott, the Marine” (originally published in Esquire in 1971), and even some good humor, as in the narrator’s reaction to the first review—a bad one—his novel receives, from a trade journal unnamed in the story but clearly intended to be Publishers Weekly, in which the biggest compliment that the anonymous critic, identified only as ‘L.K.,’ can muster is to grudgingly call the narrator a “skilled wordsmith”:

“...I had been cruelly clobbered. I can remember every nuance of my misery and mortification, even—even today—recall each raw detail of my thoughts as they sought to liberate me from this outrage, strove to diminish the intensity of the hurt. ‘L.K.’ Who the fuck was ‘L.K.’? Lydia Kerr, surely—some smart-ass twenty-three-year-old Vassar graduate, an English major with a fabricated passion for medieval poetry looking down her snoot at every American novelist since Melville, a parched little dyke with blotched skin living in a Village walk-up filled with Partisan Reviews, Agatha Christie mysteries, and annotated editions of Piers Plowman—but no, a Vassar graduate wouldn’t write ‘wordsmith,’ or, well, would she? A hater of southerners, then, Leo Kolodny, some failed writer turned hack reviewer, a CCNY type with a heart murmur, piles, and joyless Talmudic eyes, probably teaching a seminar in modern lit at a dismal uptown night school, where he purveyed muddy wisdom about Bellow, Malamud, and the Jewish renaissance. Leo Kolodny would use ‘wordsmith.’”

Anyone who has ever been “cruelly clobbered” by a review in PW can only laugh in complete understanding of this narrator’s impotent, spluttering rage.

Yet despite some strong characterizations and finely-wrought descriptions (the narrator summarizes his brief glimpse of General Douglas MacArthur by writing that “his eyes appeared as glassily opaque and mysterious as those of an old, sated lion pensively digesting a wildebeest or, more exactly, like those of a man whose thoughts had turned inward upon some Caesarean dream magnificent beyond compare”), neither “Marriott, the Marine” nor “The Suicide Run” satisfy as fiction, precisely because, despite the publisher’s identification of them as “tales,” they simply don’t go anywhere. “Marriott” in particular seems as if it might have made a fine beginning to The Way of the Warrior—but after he’d broken off for several years to write Sophie’s Choice, Styron clearly reassessed his Marine novel and decided on some fundamental changes.

When he returned to the material, it was very different. The first glimpse the world received of Styron’s new approach came with his novella “A Tidewater Morning” (included in his collection of the same name), a gorgeous piece about a young boy, Paul Whitehurst, growing up in the Tidewater Virginia of the 1930s and trying to comprehend the fact of his mother’s imminent death. When “A Tidewater Morning” originally appeared in Esquire in 1987, it was billed as the opening chapter of The Way of the Warrior—just as “Marriott, the Marine” had been sixteen years before. In this period he was also discussing the novel in highly altered terms. Instead of it being a story set during the Korean War, now it took place at the end of World War II: “What it’s about,” Styron told interviewer Georgann Eubanbanks in 1984, “is the last military engagement in World War II and the last man who died in combat, that is, outside of the bombs that were dropped on Japan...the book ends when the atomic bomb drops.” This plot outline bears no resemblance whatsoever to the material in “Marriott, the Marine” and “The Suicide Run.”

Well and good; it’s the wise writer who realizes when a project isn’t going as it should, and who has the courage to stop, reconsider, and start all over again, even if it means sacrificing years of effort. But this new version of The Way of the Warrior was doomed to suffer the same fate as the first. Curiously, the publishers of The Suicide Run never admit that the book’s major novella “My Father’s House” was ever intended for The Way of the Warrior at all; they claim the piece was the opening section of a different, unnamed novel. But this cannot possibly be correct, as everything in “My Father’s House” is completely consistent with “A Tidewater Morning”: the same Paul Whitehurst as narrator, with the same father, same house, same bedroom, same housekeeper (“Flo”). Moreover, the piece was written in the exact same period as “A Tidewater Morning.” The difference is that “My Father’s House” is set much later, a year after Paul has returned from service in World War II. It’s possible that Styron had decided to cut “A Tidewater Morning” from the novel and open instead with “My Father’s House,” but they are certainly both part of the same project—which was The Way of the Warrior.

Unfortunately, “My Father’s House” has little of the power of “A Tidewater Morning,” and it’s obvious why Styron elected not to publish it separately in magazine form, as he had with the other story. In fact, despite some typically lush and lovely writing here and there, “My Father’s House” is disorganized and clunky, with virtually no transitions at all between his narrator’s various disconnected thoughts and a tendency to allow characters to jump in and out of the piece with little apparent rhyme or reason (this is especially disappointing with the sudden reappearance of Flo, vivid and memorable in “A Tidewater Morning,” uncomfortably close to a black servant cliché here). It’s possible that some of this would have been clarified in the later chapters of the revised version of Warrior, but Styron was unable to bring the novel anywhere near completion.

The Suicide Run ends on the most discouraging note of all: a very brief “sketch,” as the publisher calls it, titled “Elobey, Annobón, and Corisco,” said to have been written in 1995—as such, surely one of the last pieces Styron managed to complete. Yet the writing in this brief sketch, which focuses on Styron’s narrator thinking of his stamp collection and the faraway places depicted therein as he is on the island of Saipan, is aimless and ineffective. It’s difficult to believe that Styron would ever have wanted these few feeble paragraphs published.

But then that’s the issue with the whole of The Suicide Run, just as it is with Capote’s Summer Crossing and the various posthumous Hemingway projects. If the writing is bad—and in The Suicide Run some of it is, bearing the unfortunate hallmarks of Styron at less than his best: the bloatedness, the obscure show-off vocabulary, the general sense of a pretentious windbag at work—it can hardly be blamed on William Styron, who, except for the two pieces which first appeared in magazines, never authorized the publication of these writings at all.

Yet, though even the best of the material here is second-rate, Styron fans everywhere simply must read The Suicide Run. The book shows us clearly—all too clearly—how the author’s talents declined in his later years, but there are moments of beauty and clarity in the writings here which could have been achieved by no one but William Styron. Consider the opening of the one non-Warrior piece here, the 1953 fragment “Blankenship.”

“Amid the smelly stretch of riptides and treacherous currents formed by the confluence of the upper East River and Long Island Sound stands a small low-lying island. Surmounted for most of its length by ancient prison buildings, it is an island hardly distinguishable, in its time-exhausted drabness, from those dozen or so other islands occupied by prisons and hospitals which give to the New York waterways such a bleak look of municipal necessity and—for some reason especially at twilight—that air of melancholy and erosion of the spirit. Yet something here compels a second glance. Something makes this island seem even excessively ugly, and a meaner and shabbier eyesore. Perhaps this is because of the island’s situation; for a prison island it just seems to be in too nice a place. It commands a fine wide view of the blue Sound to the east and the white houses on the mainland nearby—houses which, though situated in the Bronx, are so neat and scrubbed and summery-looking as to make New York City seem as remote as Nantucket. One passing by the island might more logically envision a pretty park here, or groves of trees, or a harbor for sailboats, than this squalid acre of prison buildings. Yet perhaps it’s the buildings themselves which make the place look more than ordinarily grim and depressing—so that the cleanly utilitarian, white marble structures on the other of the city’s islands seem, by comparison, almost beguiling sanctuaries. These date back nearly a century, soot-encrusted brick piles of turrets and fake moats and parapets and Victorian towers. With these, and with their crenellated battlements and lofty embrasures and all the sham artifices of fortressed power, the buildings possess a calculated, ridiculous ugliness, as if for someone locked within the walls they must add to the injury of simple confinement the diurnal insulting reminder—in every nook and cranny unavoidable and symbolic—of his incarceration.”

That voice—commanding, portentous, profoundly in tune with the words and rhythms and subtle shadings of the English language—is magnificently William Styron’s.

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I’ve given an awful lot of poetry readings in my life, but this will be a new experience for me: reading at a horror convention! I’m scheduled to perform poems from my latest (admittedly horrific) collection, Starkweather Dreams, Saturday morning at 10:30, September the 26th, at the Hunt Valley Inn in Hunt Valley, Maryland. Lots of film people and writers and intense rabid fans will be there. See all the details below....

Horrorfind Weekend 11

September 25-27, 2009

Marriott Hunt Valley Inn

Hunt Valley, Maryland

http://www.horrorfindweekend.com/

Readings will take place in Salon EF.

Friday
5:30pm - 6:30pm Bob Ford / Bill Carl
6:45pm - 7:45pm Mark Justice & Jacob Haddon
8:00pm - 9:30pm Raw Dog Screaming Press - D. Harlan Wilson / Donna Lynch / John Edward Lawson

Saturday
10:30am - 11:30am Christopher Conlon / Brian J. Hatcher
11:45am 12:45pm Ed Lee
1:00pm - 2:00pm Norman Prentiss / Michael Hughes
2:15pm - 3:15pm Elizabeth Blue & Lisa Mannetti
3:30pm - 4:30pm R. Allen Leider
4:45pm - 5:45pm Stu & Dru Show (M. Steven Lukac / Drew Williams)
6:00pm - 7:00pm Gary Frank / Jason Gehlert

Sunday
12:00pm - 1:30pm Black Bed Sheet Books (Nicholas Grabowsky / Ryan B. Clark / K.K.)
1:45pm - 2:45pm Antonietta Wallace / Kevin Lucia

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Writers read.

At least they damned well better. And most do—the good ones, anyway. I don’t think I’ve ever met a writer worth much who wasn’t also an inveterate, obsessed reader.

Yet I’m constantly surprised to meet writers—or rather people who want to be writers—who by their own admission “don’t read much.” Or, if they do read, they limit themselves to a single extremely narrow channel: prospective horror writers, for instance, who spend their entire reading lives with nothing but Stephen King and the latest paperbacks from Leisure. They can tell you anything you might want to know about Richard Laymon or Brian Keene or Edward Lee, but ask them about José Saramago or Jorge Luis Borges—surely two of the greatest horror (among other things) writers of the past hundred years—and they will look at you blankly. Their idea of “branching out” might be to occasionally pick up a recent bestselling fantasy or mystery novel.

But at least genre hopefuls tend to be somewhat familiar with their chosen field—that’s what leads them to try to write in it, after all. Prospective poets often seem to have read no poetry whatsoever, or nothing beyond what they were assigned years ago in school. They probably remember “The Raven,” and maybe something by Keats or Shelley or Dickinson. But as for what’s been happening in poetry for the past fifty or hundred years...nothing. They might vaguely recall that T.S. Eliot was that guy they were assigned in college who wrote that weird modern stuff that was impossible to understand. The name Allen Ginsberg might be familiar, if more for his chanting at Vietnam protest marches than for any actual poem. The names Donald Hall, William Stafford, Adrienne Rich, Robert Bly, Rita Dove, Jack Gilbert, C.K. Williams, and Sharon Olds ring no bells.

It’s obvious that if you want to be a horror writer you need to familiarize yourself not only with Stephen King and Co., but with Saramago and Borges and dozens more.

It’s obvious that if you want to be a poet you need to familiarize yourself with the poets I listed, and dozens more.

What may be less obvious is that if you want to be a horror writer, you should also familiarize yourself with those poets I listed. And if you want to be a poet, you should familiarize yourself with Saramago, Borges—and, for that matter, with Stephen King.

Why?

Because that’s how it’s done.

The reading that may seem the most distant from your writing goals may very well prove to be the reading that sets your imagination and voice free—that allows you to write in a unique and powerful way that’s not merely an imitation of other currently popular figures (or, with poets, an imitation of verse modes a hundred years out of date).

Writers read.

A student of mine once asked me to summarize how I thought I’d changed since I was his age (fifteen). I answered, only somewhat facetiously, that I hadn’t changed at all; I was exactly the same person I’d been then. There was no difference.

Now, on one level that’s obviously absurd. I’m much better looking than I was at fifteen, and even more of a chick magnet now than I was then.

But on another level it’s true.

Why?

Because, though I wasn’t yet published at fifteen, I was already a writer.

And I read.

At that age I read science fiction most passionately, but I read everything. I read Ellery Queen and Agatha Christie and 87th Precinct mysteries. I read poetry—Edgar Allan Poe at that age, T.S. Eliot a year or two later. I read biographies of artists and actors and film directors. I read American history (though I haven’t picked up the book in thirty years, the description of the massacre of the Sioux at the climax of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is scorched into my memory forever). I also read newspapers. I read comic books. Still years away from my first girlfriend, reading was my preferred activity—the best and most enjoyable thing I could imagine doing with my time, along with writing.

None of that reading was wasted. To this day, while writing, I hear echoes at the strangest moments—echoes of other writers, of rhythms and resonances that have been in my bones and brain for two or three full decades, waiting for their moment to step forward and guide me. I’ve sometimes joked, for instance, that I’m probably the only American poet in history to list Richard Matheson as an influence. No, he didn’t influence the verse itself, but the “page turner,” “couldn’t put it down” quality that some ascribe to my poetry sequences has its roots in the Matheson’s suspense techniques. I was learning from him by the time I was twelve or thirteen, lessons that wouldn’t come into clear use for me for years—but come they did. Matheson is one writer—one of many, but a significant one—I hear somewhere in the distant under-frequencies of Gilbert and Garbo in Love and Mary Falls and Starkweather Dreams. I know I couldn’t have written those books in quite the way I did without having absorbed his writing as a boy.

So, I read. I read then and I read today. It could be that, later on, certain activities involving the female of the species also took their rightful place on the list of the most enjoyable things I could imagine doing with my time, but reading always remained high on the list.

Reading isn’t all I do over the summer, of course. Writing is really the major focus of the season for me, my reason for getting up each morning—and between early June and the end of August I managed something in the vicinity of 50,000 words on my current novel-in-progress; also a couple of short-short stories and a stray poem or two. I negotiated a contract for a new anthology I’m editing, received some new publications with my work in them, and saw, at the very beginning of the summer, my fourth book of poems, the aforementioned Starkweather Dreams, appear.

But when I’m not writing, it’s a good bet that I’m reading.

It’s what writers do. They read.

Each summer my wife and I agree on a major classic novel or writer to experience together—not literally together (she reads far faster than I do), but at least around the same time. Generally we search for something neither of us has ever read before—those touchstones that somehow managed to escape our notice over the years. One summer it was Don Quixote; another, The Brothers Karamazov. Once it was Remembrance of Things Past (a re-read for me); once it was The Moonstone (a re-read for her). One recent summer we decided on Theodore Dreiser and plowed through both Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy.

Well, this summer saw the most ambitious plan of all (well, except perhaps for Proust): we would navigate our way through not one, not two, but five major Thomas Hardy novels. Neither of us were particularly familiar with him. My wife had read Tess of the D’Urbervilles as a teenager, and I had studied a few of his poems as an undergraduate; other than that, the world of Hardy was dark for us.

No more. In the past two months we’ve read Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Far From the Madding Crowd, and Return of the Native, while I’ve read for the first time and she has re-read Tess. In fact, I fell in love with Hardy’s work so thoroughly that I went rogue and also read the Penguin edition of his Selected Poems and a recent biography, Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin. We also watched film versions of each of the novels as we finished them.

Hardy is obviously a wonderful novelist, though in a sense his popularity is surprising, given how unremittingly grim his stories are. All of them—all the ones we read, at least—are cast more or less as tragedies, though Far From the Madding Crowd has a happy ending (sort of). His fictitious Wessex County, where all the books are set, is as vividly rendered as Hemingway’s Spain or Faulkner’s Mississippi: if you immerse yourself in these books for awhile the place will come to seem almost as real as wherever it is that you live. But it’s a dark, grinding, poverty-stricken locale, and the people there are as often as not struck down horribly by the indifferent machinations of fate.

Yet Hardy’s novels are fun, too, in the sense that so many Victorian-era novels are fun. Hardy makes full use of the 19th-century storyteller’s arsenal of narrative devices: mistaken identities, unlikely coincidences, characters supposedly dead who suddenly pop up alive and well. In that way they’re delightful books, even as we encounter in them some of the darkest scenes that anybody has ever written. Jude the Obscure, in particular, features one of the most horrifying moments in all of literature—I won’t spoil it except to say that it involves the death of several children. If you’ve read the novel, you know what scene I’m talking about. If you choose to read it sometime in the future, you’ll know it when you get there. Trust me. I guarantee it.

It would be difficult for me to name a favorite among the novels. The final thirty pages or so of Tess of the D’Urbervilles are luminously beautiful and almost unbearably sad—possibly my favorite section of any of them. But if my hand is forced, my choice would be The Mayor of Casterbridge, which begins with a scene almost as horrifying as the one from Jude: good-for-nothing Michael Henchard, in a fit of drunken pique, sells his wife and daughter to a gentleman at a county fair, then goes on to live a respectable life for decades until, inevitably, the birds come home to roost. Henchard is surely one of Hardy’s greatest characters, which is to say one of the greatest characters in literature: a man fatally flawed by his own hubris and self-destructive impulses.

Hardy’s poems are equally compelling. Claire Tomalin’s biography shows us that Hardy always felt himself, at heart, a poet who only wrote novels in order to make money; ironically, his novels are read more today than the poems. Yet Hardy is indisputably a major poet as well—the only writer I can think of, in fact, who has become truly canonical as both a novelist and a poet. Any anthology of “Great English Verse” will invariably include a section of Thomas Hardy, though the section is likely to be shorter than the ones devoted to his forebears Keats and Shelley or his descendants Auden and Yeats. Hardy is considered, if such a thing is possible, something of a minor major poet.

But some of his verse is among the most powerful I’ve ever read, especially the Poems of 1912-13, a sequence of astonishing elegies to his wife Emma, who had died in 1912 after many years of emotional estrangement from her husband. In these poems Hardy ignored all the bitterness and acrimony of their later years and returned to the pure love and devotion of the Edenic period when they first met, conjuring up poem after poem of stunning beauty and clarity. They’re in the public domain and freely available in lots of places online; I urge you to look them up.

But Thomas Hardy was by no means my only reading of the summer. I also picked up second-hand copies of two books by another favorite English novelist of mine, H.G. Wells—The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman and The Passionate Friends. I wrote about these books in another recent blog entry (see 11 July 2009, “H.G.’s Passionate Friends”), so I won’t belabor the point here except to say that the later career of H.G. Wells is much misunderstood. It’s true enough that many of his later books are political treatises, and that even the novels can be infected by Wells’ unfortunate lecturing about socialism and one-world government and such. But many of those later books are nonetheless worth reading, and both Wife of Sir Isaac Harman and The Passionate Friends are in that category. However, for the student of Wells who wishes to go beyond the early science fiction stories, they’re not the place to start—for that I’d recommend Kipps, Tono-Bungay, Love and Mr. Lewisham, or Ann Veronica. All are marvelous reads. (Ann Veronica and Wife of Sir Isaac Harman are also important early feminist texts.)

It wasn’t all old English literary novels this summer. I read a new one, too: Anita Brookner’s Strangers. Brookner has been one of my favorite writers for two decades, and I’ve read every one of her twenty-four novels—some multiple times. Strangers will be familiar to frequenters of Brookner-land: a lonely protagonist trying to come to terms with his sad, limited life. (No one does domestic despair like Anita Brookner.) Strangers isn’t her best novel, but it’s vastly better than her previous one, the painfully anachronistic Leaving Home. If Strangers turns out to be her final book, as rumor has it, it’s an appropriate and effective farewell.

Many years ago Charles Van Doren wrote a book called The Joy of Reading. For some time I’ve been tempted to write a similar volume with the title The Joy of Re-Reading. The older I get, the more I’m drawn back to what I’ve read before; it’s a different kind of pleasure, without the delight of surprise that a first reading brings, but with a deeper understanding and appreciation than you can get from that initial pass. This summer I re-read several books, including James Baldwin’s Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, a novel of his from the 1960s which seems to have been largely discredited today, like all his later fiction. Yet I like it very much. Leo Proudhammer, the protagonist, is a successful black actor who suffers a heart attack and in his convalescence looks back over his life. Leo is supposedly based partly on Sidney Poitier, but of course he’s really James Baldwin, and shares many of Baldwin’s early experiences. The novel is too diffuse, and the scenes of drinking and partying go on far too long (as they always do in Baldwin), but it’s a compelling read nonetheless.

Another re-read was Gateway by Frederik Pohl. It was one of my favorite books when I was a teenager, and I’ve read it a couple of times since. It still holds up very well, I think, even if this mid-’70s science fiction novel does have a few touches which are inadvertently amusing today (including people smoking in spaceships!). Still, what an idea: mankind finds an asteroid containing the remnants of an ancient alien civilization, including hundreds of their spacecraft. Incredibly, the spacecraft are still operable, and capable of intergalactic flight. The only trouble is, we can’t understand how the ships work—except, basically, where the “Go” button is. You might be sent off to a world that will have resources to make you rich forever (the ships automatically return to Gateway), or you might find yourself in the middle of a supernova. There’s no way of knowing; by getting into a ship you roll the dice. Few SF novels have a stronger basic premise than that, and Pohl makes the most of it. Gateway is a science fiction classic.

Perhaps my favorite new book of 2008 was Wild Nights! by Joyce Carol Oates, and that also got a re-read this summer. Oates is probably my favorite living writer of fiction (only Gore Vidal and the aforementioned Saramago and Brookner come to mind as credible alternatives); I’ve had mixed experiences with her many novels, loving a few (You Must Remember This, We Were the Mulvaneys) but feeling relatively indifferent toward the rest. Her short stories and novellas, however, are a different matter—in these genres Oates reigns supreme, it seems to me, and Wild Nights! has to be ranked with her very best collections. It’s a unique book—the subtitle reads “Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway,” but that’s a bit misleading, since it implies that the stories are based on fact. They aren’t, except in the broadest possible terms. One, in fact, isn’t even really about the writer in question. My favorite of the works, EDickinsonRepliLuxe,” is actually a science fiction / fantasy tale about an unhappy wife (a would-be poet) who talks her husband into buying a RepliLuxe of Emily Dickinson as a companion for her. What is a RepliLuxe? “A brilliantly rendered mannikin,” according to the company’s salseman, “empowered by a computer program that is the distillation of the original individual, as if his or her essence, or ‘soul’—if you believe in such concepts—had been sucked out of the original being, and reinstalled, in an entirely new environment, by the genius of RepliLuxe.” A familiar enough science fiction idea, to be sure—but Oates gives it a totally different spin here. I never imagined that the writing of Joyce Carol Oates would ever remind me of the work of Ray Bradbury or Rod Serling, but at least in terms of plot, the story is clearly reminiscent of, say, Bradbury’s “Marionettes, Inc.” and Serling’s “You Can’t Get Help Like That Anymore.” A magnificent collection, without a bad story in the bunch.

On the subject of SF, Damon Knight’s anthology Science Fiction of the ’30s was surprisingly engaging. Like a lot of SF fans, I’ve long accepted the basic line that good commercial SF pretty much started with the arrival of John Campbell at Astounding Stories in 1938; this collection proves that to be untrue. Some of the stories here are on the corny side, but all of them at least feature some interesting ideas, and a fair portion are genuinely compelling. I especially enjoyed “Out Around Rigel” by Robert H. Wilson (rip-roaring space adventure); “Alas, All Thinking!” by Harry Bates (author of the story on which The Day the Earth Stood Still was based); Lester del Rey’s thoughtful reflection on evolution, “The Day is Done”; and David H. Keller’s “The Lost Language,” a fascinating and emotional tale which is, indeed, focused on the nature of language.

The only other genre-related fiction I read this summer was Steve Gerlach’s Within His Reach, a very fun, fast-moving novella in the tradition of The Twilight Zone. Gerlach is known for violent and extreme horror writing, but Within His Reach is completely different, with a consciously 1950s retro style and feel. I was lucky enough to obtain a .pdf of the text, which was sent to me by the publisher in hopes I might provide a blurb (I did). The story will be brought out next year as a limited-edition book by Australia’s Tasmaniac Publications.

Poetry is always with me, and this summer was no exception. In addition to Hardy’s Selected Poems, I read (and re-read) a number of volumes of verse, including:

* White Apples and the Taste of Stone by Donald Hall. This amounted to a re-read for the most part, since Hall has been one of the basic poets for me for over twenty years and this volume is a new collection of poems selected from his earlier books. I’ve already read to tatters my copy of Old and New Poems, his original “selected poems” from 1990, and every book he’s come out with since, so there was little here that was unfamiliar except the “New Poems” section at the end and a nice hour-long CD of Hall reading his work which was included with the volume. (I bought the book at close-out for $5.99, mostly for the CD.) Although I’m less impressed with his work of the past ten years—there are simply too many elegies to his late wife Jane Kenyon, each less interesting than the last—Hall is one of the great contemporary poets and one whose work has long meant a great deal to me. His magnificent long poem The One Day should be enough to secure his place in the pantheon, along with the first book about his wife’s illness and death, Without.

* Endpoint and Other Poems by John Updike. This was a re-read; I first read this when it came out in April, and fell in love with it. Updike isn’t a writer who, until recently, has meant much to me; his late poems (some of which I originally spotted in The New Yorker) proved a revelation. The long section at the start of the book, “Endpoint,” is a loose collection of somewhat prosy reminiscences of the past (similar to Donald Hall’s The Old Life, actually) interspersed with often wry but always painful poems of the author’s rapidly disintegrating health. Updike was a master primarily of light verse, however, and there are charming poems later in the book on such subjects as reunited doo-wop groups, a dying computer, and, perhaps best of all, a sonnet about—and I’m not kidding—Helen of Troy’s intestine, and what it contained. Oates’ Wild Nights! was my favorite new book of 2008; Updike’s Endpoint and Other Poems bids fair to become my favorite of 2009.

* While preparing the writers’ guidelines for the Hitchcock-themed poetry anthology I’m now editing, the question came up of whether I would accept prose poems. Yet despite the fact that I’ve written and actually had published a few prose poems myself (“Political Poem,” Potomac Review; “The Arrival,” Thomas Wolfe Review), it occurred to me that I wasn’t a hundred percent sure exactly what a prose poem really is. Therefore I ordered up two anthologies, Great American Prose Poems edited by David Lehman and Models of the Universe: An Anthology of the Prose Poem edited by Stuart Friebert and David Young, and read them straight through. My conclusion? Both books contain a great deal of powerful and beautiful writing. But having finished both of them, I find myself still not exactly sure what a prose poem is. It’s not a regular poem—that’s obvious because it’s written in sentences, not verse lines. But neither is it a story, quite, because the emphasis is not on plot or character (a prose poem may contain neither) but rather on language. Maybe the issue of “prose poetry” is best settled along the lines of the old Supreme Court definition of pornography: I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I see it.

As a result of my reading the Great American Prose Poems anthology, I picked up two books by poets whose work had been more or less unfamiliar to me.

* Mark Strand’s Selected Poems introduced me to a major figure whose verse had somehow escaped my attention all these years. His early prose poem “In the Privacy of the Home,” in  the Lehman anthology, alerted me to his brilliance (in fact, I’m going to use an excerpt from it as an epigraph for my novel-in-progress); the Selected Poems have shown me a master of structure and rhyme, especially off-kilter slant rhymes using assonance and consonance. Who else would think to  rhyme “wind does” with “windows,” “half-moon” with “half man,” or “feel dead” with “folded”?

* James Richardson’s Vectors is not exactly poetry, though there are some prose poems in it. The subtitle is “Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays,” and that pretty well describes it. Richardson may be the finest aphorist in English since Gore Vidal. Here are a few samples:

            - “Those who demand consideration for their sacrifices were making investments, not sacrifices.”

            - “To paranoids and the elect, everything makes sense.”

            - “The first abuse of power is not realizing that you have it.”

            - “Of all the ways to avoid living, perfect discipline is the most admired.”

There are no fewer than five hundred such tidbits in Vectors. Some are instantly quotable, like the ones above; others are stranger, more thought-provoking and elusive. All are fascinating.

In general I’m not a big fan of books on writing, but twenty years ago I read Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life and I pulled it down from the shelf again this summer. Like a lot of Dillard’s writing, this book is difficult to describe—it’s part memoir and part philosophical treatise, all focused on how the author views writing; what it is, how it works, what it means. It’s a slender volume—only 111 pages—and can be read in an hour or two, yet some of its reflections have stayed with me for two decades. In some ways the book is a bit highfalutin’ for my tastes—Dillard is clearly puzzled, for instance, by commercial fiction, asking why anyone would write or read such books—“Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?” she asks. Well, my goodness—some people really just want to pass a few hours with a good story. And that’s okay; we don’t always need to be probing the deepest mysteries. Still, here’s a section I love, in a way the ultimate answer to a young writer’s question of how one learns to write:

“Who will teach me to write? a reader wanted to know.

“The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time’s scrawl as a right and your daring as necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nevertheless, because acting is better than being here in mere opacity; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut; the page in its purity of possibilities; the page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellences as you can muster with all your life’s strength: that page will teach you to write.”

An answer which is a prose poem itself...

I’m not sure that this qualifies as a re-read, since it was mostly a re-look, but I did spend time with Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist edited by Susan Earle, a combination art and essay book celebrating the great American muralist Aaron Douglas, long one of my favorite artists. I was fortunate enough to be able to see the large exhibition of his works last summer at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, of which this is the sumptuous accompanying volume. Amy Helene Kirschke’s essay “The Fisk Murals Revealed” is a sad but riveting account of how Fisk University in Tennessee allowed one of Douglas’s greatest mural projects to fall into terrible disrepair, and the recent triumphant efforts to restore it. This book, though, is really all about the art. Admittedly there’s no replacement for actually seeing Douglas’s work full-sized and in all its majesty, but this huge full-color volume can give newcomers to the art some sense of this wonderful and much underappreciated master.

Last but hardly least, in the category of experiences that felt like re-reads even though they involved no actual reading, my wife and I saw a new production of my all-time favorite play, King Lear, at Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre in July. Stacy Keach played Lear in a production which was a bit too eccentrically “modern” for my taste, but which nonetheless had the effect of making me hunger for the play again. We rented the recent Ian McKellen video of Lear shortly thereafter, and both of us were moved, shaken to the core by it—quite a tribute to the performance, since we’d just seen Lear onstage two weeks before. It’s a superb version which inspired me to watch again my favorite of all filmed Lears, the 1970 Peter Brook production with Paul Scofield, and even to re-watch the early (1953) television version with Orson Welles (Lear in seventy-five minutes flat!). Kurosawa’s magnificent Japanese variation on the story, Ran, topped everything off. I think I’ve had enough of the King and his daughters and Gloucester and his sons now, but it was a hell of an immersion—and a great way to reconnect with one of the basic dramatic works of my life.

And that seems to be it. Looking over the list, I’m struck happily by its variety, though I’m a bit surprised to see that I never touched the work of numerous old favorites who usually come off the shelf around this time of year: Tennessee Williams, Somerset Maugham, Truman Capote, Chekhov, Turgenev, Edith Wharton, Clifford D. Simak, William Heyen.

Maybe next summer. That’s the one sure thing: that as long as I remain at least of sound mind and body—however minimally!—I’ll be reading. Because that’s what writers do.

Writers read.

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For anyone who just can’t get enough Conlon (and who can, really?), here are two brand-new interviews with me.

www.darkscribemagazine.com/feature-interviews/christopher-conlon-poet-first.html

and

the-black-glove.blogspot.com/

(Scroll down for the Black Glove interview.)

Enjoy!

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For Immediate Release

Contact:

Publicity & Marketing Department

DarkScribePress@aol.com

www.DarkScribePress.com

Conlon to Helm Hitchcock Poetry Anthology for Dark Scribe Press

LONG ISLAND, NY, July 27, 2009 — Dark Scribe Press announced today that it is partnering with award-winning poet Christopher Conlon on A SEA OF ALONE: POEMS FOR ALFRED HITCHCOCK, an anthology of poetry focusing on the late master of suspense. Slated for publication during the third quarter of 2010, the collection will be an exploration of Hitchcock’s life and work through poetry. Conlon will serve as editor on the collection.

Hitchcock is arguably the most popular and influential film director of Hollywood’s classic age, and nearly three decades after his death, his image and voice are still instantly recognizable throughout the world.  A Sea of Alone: Poems For Alfred Hitchcock will celebrate this one-of-a-kind figure in a suitably unique way — through verse. To that end, the anthology will feature original, unpublished poems on the subject of Hitchcock — his life, his films, his impact, his legend.

Conlon is the author of four books of poems, most recently STARKWEATHER DREAMS , and a novel, MIDNIGHT ON MOURN STREET, which was a finalist for the prestigious Bram Stoker Award.  His work has appeared widely in magazines and journals including Dark Discoveries, Poets & Writers, America, Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Poet Lore, The King’s English, and The Long Story, as well as in such anthologies as Masques V and California Sorcery. As an editor his credits include He Is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson, Poe’s Lighthouse, and The Twilight Zone Scripts of Jerry Sohl. A former Peace Corps Volunteer, Conlon hails from Silver Spring, Maryland, where he writes, teaches, and hosts a popular quarterly poetry reading series.

Dark Scribe Press launched in 2007. In addition to its popular virtual publication, DARK SCRIBE MAGAZINE, the press published UNSPEAKABLE HORROR: FROM THE SHADOWS OF THE CLOSET in 2008 to widespread acclaim. The collection of GLBT horror originals went on to win the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in an Anthology — the first time a GLBT anthology won the award in its sponsoring organization’s 22-year history. In addition to Conlon’s forthcoming Hitchcock collection, the company is readying IN THE CLOSET, UNDER THE BED, a short story collection from award-winning writer Lee Thomas, and BUTCHER KNIVES & BODY COUNTS, a collection of non-fiction essays on the formula, frights and fun of the slasher film.

“As a lifelong Hitchcockian,” Conlon says, “I’m thrilled to be working with Dark Scribe Press on this unique anthology. I first discovered the Master of Suspense when I was a child, through reruns of his TV series and a late-night broadcast of Psycho; his work has been a central passion for me ever since. Poetry came into my life at around the same time – Edgar Allan Poe was an early favorite – and it too has remained a lifelong love of mine. The idea of combining these two passions in a project for a hot new award-winning press like Dark Scribe is more thrilling than I can say.”

DSP President and CEO Vince Liaguno is equally excited by the prospects of what promises to be a singular collection. “We strive to acquire projects that are unique, projects that explore their subject matters in fresh and stimulating ways. When Chris approached us with his inspired concept, we were immediately struck by how perfect the marriage of Hitchcock, who was such a cinematic lyricist himself, and the poetic form was. I think the lyrical interpretation of Hitchcock’s life and works will add an entirely new perspective to the Hitchcock canon.”

For more information on Christopher Conlon: www.christopherconlon.com

For more information on Dark Scribe Press: www.DarkScribePress.com

For submissions guidelines: www.alfredhitchcockpoems.blogspot.com

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The Passionate Friends
by H.G. Wells (1913). London: Hogarth Press, 1986.

The Passionate Friends (1949) starring Ann Todd, Claude Rains, and Trevor Howard. Screenplay by Eric Ambler; adaptation by Stanley Haynes and David Lean, based on the novel by H.G. Wells. Directed by David Lean.

The Passionate Friends

Is there any writer more desperately in need of critical reevaluation than H.G. Wells?

Time has not been kind to this protean figure who bestrode two centuries as a literary colossus. In his day (his first novel, The Time Machine, was published in 1895, when he was twenty-nine; he died, some one hundred books later, in 1946) he was the most famous and influential writer in the world. Critically celebrated, bestselling (his 1920 Outline of History remains one of the top-selling books of all time), Wells himself was also a world statesman (he was involved in drafting the original United Nations charter) and, for his entire adult life, an agent provocateur who passionately supported, among other causes, feminism, free love, socialism, and one-world government. It was scarcely possible to be alive during his lifetime and not know who H.G. Wells was.

Wells is hardly forgotten today, of course, but now he’s known entirely for the handful of early “scientific romances” with which he made his original reputation, all published between 1895 and 1904: The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, When the Sleeper Wakes, and The First Men in the Moon, along with a handful of speculative short stories. But to think of Wells as nothing but a science fiction writer borders on calumny, even if he (along with Jules Verne) practically invented the entire genre, including its most basic tropes—time travel, alien invasion, trips to other worlds, alternate history. And there is no question that those early novels maintain their magic—their sense of wonder—especially for young readers.

But even as Wells was building his reputation with those classics near the end of the nineteenth century, he was writing other novels, as well—novels that were fabulously successful in his time, and which were often considered among his best. Semi-autobiographical novels such as Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900), Kipps (1905), and Tono-Bungay (1909) are all stories of disadvantaged young men, born poor and apprenticed to unappealing jobs (in real life Wells had been a draper’s assistant), who struggle for better lives. These books all have a distinctly Dickensian flavor, and make for compulsive reading today. Another early work, The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll (1897), has often been dismissed as a potboiler, but for me it’s one of his finest novels—a charming light comedy-romance about a Mr. Hoopdriver’s brief bicycling holiday from his stultifying job during which he meets and ends up involved with a rebellious “New Woman,” Jessie Milton. Much of the story takes place as the characters ride their bikes, and this makes The Wheels of Chance a wonderful travelogue of a rural England that was even then rapidly vanishing. (Merchant-Ivory really needs to film The Wheels of Chance.)

The so-called New Women—proto-feminists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—were a great fascination for Wells both in his personal life (he was romantically involved with a number of passionate, independent women) and as fictional characters, never more memorably than in his novel Ann Veronica (1909), in which a young woman of Edwardian England slowly comes of age (and politically aware) amidst reflexively sexist and patronizing men. Neglected now, this first-rate novel was a sensation in its day.

A few years later he penned several of what he called “discussion novels”—books specifically designed to illustrate and discuss issues of the moment, especially issues surrounding women, marriage, and sexual relations. The best of these may be The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman (1914), in which Lady Ellen Harman, who marries very young, slowly seeks her freedom over her tyrannical husband, yet finds that English laws of the time provide her virtually no rights whatsoever.

Another of the discussion novels, The Passionate Friends, written in 1913, focuses on the relationship of narrator Stephen Stratton to a woman, Mary Ladislaw (Stephen’s “passionate friend”), who is considerably above him in social class. In love with each other as children, they are unable to continue the relationship as they grow older and Mary is put under pressure to become engaged to Howard Justin, “incredibly rich and powerful, whose comprehensive operations could make and break a thousand fortunes in a day” (39). The writing in the first half of The Passionate Friends is powerfully emotional, never more so than as Stephen pleads with Mary to break off her engagement:

“Why not?” I cried. “Even now. Why not run away with me, throw our two lives together? Do as lovers have dared to do since the beginning of things! Let us go somewhere together—”

“But Stephen,” she asked softly, “where?”

“Anywhere!”

She spoke as an elder might do to a child. “No! Tell me where—exactly. Where would it be? Where should we go? How should we live? Tell me. Make me see it, Stephen.”

“You are too cruel to me, Mary,” I said. “How can I—on the spur of the moment—arrange—?”

“But, dear, suppose it was somewhere very grimy and narrow! Something—like some of those black streets I came through to get here. Suppose it was some dreadful place. And you had no money. And we were both worried and miserable. One gets ill in such places. If I loved you, Stephen—I mean if you and I—if you and I were to be together, I should want it to be in sunshine, I should want it to be among beautiful forests and mountains. Somewhere very beautiful…”

“Why not?”

“Because—to-day I know. There are no such places in the world for us. Stephen, they are dreams.”

“For three years now,” I said, “I have dreamt such dreams. Oh!” I cried out, stung by my own words, “but this is cowardice! Why should we submit to this old world? Why should we give up—things you have dreamt as well as I? You said once—to hear my voice—calling in the morning…Let us take each other, Mary, now. Now! Let us take each other, and”—I still remember my impotent phrase—“afterwards count the cost!” (57)

In his Experiment in Autobiography (1934), Wells described his discussion novels this way: “…the interest centers not upon individual character, but upon the struggles of common and rational motives and frank enquiry against social conditions and stereotyped ideas. The actors in them are types, therefore, rather than acutely individualized persons.” True enough, though perhaps Wells shortchanges himself here; Lady Harman, for instance, is sufficiently individualized to be vivid and memorable. But on the whole the author is correct. In The Passionate Friends Stephen and Mary are indeed types, placed within a particular scenario in order to allow Wells to make the points he wishes to about society and marriage. As with many of Wells’ later novels, the latter part of the story is given over to proselytizing and arguing over social issues, rather than having believable characters interacting in recognizably human ways. Here’s a short part of a letter from Mary to Stephen late in the book:

“What you call ‘social order,’ Stephen, all the arrangements seem to be to be built (as you say) on labour subjection. And this is an age of release, you say it is an age of release for the workers and they know it. And so do the women. Just as much. ‘Wild hopes’ indeed! It is not only the workers who are saying, ‘Let us go free; manage things differently so that we may have our lives relieved from this intolerable burthen of constant toil,’ but the women are also saying ‘Let us go free.’ They are demanding release just as much from their intolerable endless specialization as females. The tramp on the roads and the exploiter who contrive not to work, the strikers who throw down their tools, no longer for twopences and sixpences as you say, but because their way of living is no longer tolerable to them, and we women, who don’t bear children or work or help; we are all in one movement together. We are part of the General Strike. I have been a striker all my life…”

Mary certainly sounds like she’d be a sparkling party guest, doesn’t she?

But in truth, Stephen is no better. Much of the novel’s second half is devoted to extended exchanges of ideas  like this, exchanges which bear no resemblance to how two people, once very much in love but forced to separate, would actually communicate with one another. This is a flaw inherent in many of Wells’ later writings, but it’s not necessarily fatal. The ideas themselves can be interesting enough in their proper historical context, and in truth, once the reader wades through many pages of such dry theorizing toward the end of the novel, The Passionate Friends does come to a powerfully tragic conclusion, as the story returns to the full-blooded, realistic human beings we knew from the first half. As a polemic, The Passionate Friends is of historical interest only; as a novel, as a story, it retains a good deal of its power.

It’s the story of The Passionate Friends, not the polemic, which David Lean chose to film in 1949—a film which was recently restored for the Lean centenary and which can now be seen on Turner Classic Movies. Lean, already famous for the love-affair-in-a-train-station classic Brief Encounter (1945)—he would go on to direct The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Doctor Zhivago, among other greats—made major cuts and alterations when turning the Wells novel into a screenplay. So numerous are the changes, in fact, that it’s sometimes difficult to see the film as a version of the novel at all. Mary is the narrator, not Stephen; the action is moved to just before World War II, instead of just before World War I; virtually all of the discussion-ideas are dropped in favor of a more traditional romantic melodrama. What’s more, though I won’t go into specifics, the ending has been radically altered, and not for the better.

Still, Lean’s The Passionate Friends is an interesting movie for fans of the director or, more generally, fans of British films of that era—some of which are among my all-time favorites, including The Browning Version, Dead of Night, the Somerset Maugham anthology pieces Quartet, Trio, and Encore, and, of course, Lean’s own Brief Encounter. The Passionate Friends utilizes (possibly unwisely) a rather elaborate flashback structure to tell the tale, beginning near the end, when Stephen and Mary have a chance encounter at a hotel in Switzerland, and then jumping backwards and forwards, with flashbacks within flashbacks. It’s not hard to follow, but the technique does seem to interrupt the natural flow of the story (the novel itself was strictly linear).

In Lean’s hands, The Passionate Friends becomes the kind of “woman’s picture” common to the time. There is much emotion, a plethora of meaningful glances, and Ann Todd’s clothes look just great. The movie has no meaning beyond itself, though I can’t say that Wells’s lecturing in the novel is missed; but one has the feeling that the film was meant to be something more than romantic melodrama—that it’s aiming for the same deep, abiding place that Brief Encounter had so successfully found. Comparisons between the two films are inevitable, considering that they share a director, a star (Trevor Howard), and a theme (adultery). There are scenes near the end of The Passionate Friends, in fact (when Mary enters the train station), which practically seem lifted from the earlier film.

But the characters in The Passionate Friends are more well-to-do, live more glamorous lives; there is none of the quasi-seediness, the desperate straining to maintain respectability, that made the emotion in Brief Encounter so memorable. Trevor Howard’s performance is perfectly competent—it’s the same performance that he gave in Brief Encounter—but Ann Todd offers only a shallow, pale version of Mary, hardly even a shadow of Celia Johnson’s agonized Laura from the earlier film. In any event, both Howard and Todd are completely upstaged by the ever-reliable Claude Rains as Mary’s husband. Howard Justin is given far more time “on stage” in the film than he is in the novel, and Rains makes the most of it; he’s dark, dangerous, and seemingly about to explode at any moment. Despite the fact that Mary narrates the movie, it’s Rains’ Howard Justin you find yourself remembering later, almost as the main character of the film.

But the cinematography of The Passionate Friends is excellent, and, as one would expect from Lean, there are several sequences which are stunningly well-directed, including one involving Mary’s deceitfulness about some theatre tickets as well as the climax of the story, which takes place amidst the contrasting lights and darknesses of a London subway station. At times the director is better than the material he’s filming.

David Lean would go on to make much better films than The Passionate Friends, and as an adaptation of H.G. Wells it must be acknowledged that the movie pretty well eviscerates the original novel. But the film, for all its flaws, remains worth a look. If you believe, as I do, that Brief Encounter is one of the greatest love stories ever filmed, give a try to Lean’s slightly later and admittedly lesser take on similar material. In its best moments, The Passionate Friends will take you back to that earlier masterpiece—moments in which emotion and image mesh into something truly passionate, and undeniably magical.

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An Enemy of the People (1978) starring Steve McQueen, Charles Durning, and Bibi Andersson. Screenplay by Alexander Jacobs, based on Henrik Ibsen’s play as adapted for the American stage by Arthur Miller. Produced and directed by George Schaefer.

Though many of his films weren’t really to my taste, I must confess that I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Steve McQueen.

There was a time in the late 1960s and early ’70s when McQueen was arguably the biggest movie star in the world—only Paul Newman could claim equal popularity. In fan polls and annual box-office receipts the two stars regularly ran neck-and-neck, first one pulling ahead, then the other, with no clear winner.

The racing metaphor is not accidental. McQueen’s basic film character was the quintessential man of action, and his best and most typical movies put him on leaping motorcycles, in fast cars, or on charging horses, usually with a great big gun in his hands.  Of all the major male stars, only John Wayne had a stronger physical presence on film; but John Wayne would have looked bizarre on a motorcycle.

Steve McQueen, who died of cancer in 1980 (he was all of 50 years old), is mostly forgotten today. Young people have never heard of him. And for those of us creaky enough to recall his glory days, we can certainly picture him—his distinctively lean, leathery face, those incandescently blue eyes. His movies are harder to recall. His filmography lists a total of twenty-eight features; yet few are revived today. The Great Escape is well-remembered, but it’s an ensemble film in which McQueen is only the most memorable performer in a large and distinguished cast. The Magnificent Seven, as its name implies, also has a group cast; McQueen’s performance is undeniably powerful, but in terms of screen dominance he fights the movie’s star, Yul Brynner, only to a draw. And as for what was probably his single greatest achievement as a film-carrying superstar, Bullitt, everyone remembers the extended car chase in the middle of the movie—but who remembers the story, or McQueen’s performance?

Of the rest of his films, while some are quite noteworthy, there isn’t a single one which has established itself as a bona fide classic. He received his only Academy Award nomination for The Sand Pebbles, an overlong epic which has few adherents now.  Papillon and The Getaway both have their fans, as does The Thomas Crown Affair (though in the last case I’m not one of them, since to me McQueen is quite unconvincing as a rich playboy crook; the remake was better). In any event, in the scheme of Hollywood history, all of these are minor works.

In fact, McQueen’s single most popular film today—though he would have died a second death, this one of embarrassment, to realize it—may very well be The Blob, the 1958 schlock masterpiece in which a 28-year-old McQueen plays a vaguely James Dean-like high school student who must warn his hometown against the invasion of an ever-growing—well, blob from outer space. The movie is hilarious—sometimes intentionally, oftentimes not. For his participation McQueen, very early in his career (he’s billed as “Steven McQueen”), was offered the choice of a $3000 flat fee or ten percent of the film’s gross. Believing that The Blob would vanish without a trace along with the hundreds of other Z-grade sci-fi movies of the time, he opted for the $3000. If he’d gone for the percentage, The Blob would have made him a millionaire—though he achieved that status soon enough anyway.

No, McQueen’s filmography is, for a major star, surprisingly undistinguished. (Compare what Paul Newman accomplished in the same time period: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Hustler, Hud, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting.)  And yet McQueen’s persona remains vital on film, even if the actual movies are less than spectacular. The actor’s own well-known expertise with all things mechanical lends his performances a credibility and authenticity no other actor could match when he’s behind the wheel (as in Bullitt) or on a motorcycle (The Great Escape). Stuntmen were used minimally in these films; McQueen did most of the work himself, and it shows.

He was, in his time, the epitome of cool.

By the mid-’70s, however, McQueen had tired of being a superstar. No longer interested in acting as a craft, he took jobs strictly for the money, as happened with 1974’s The Towering Inferno (in which he co-starred with—and received top billing over—Newman). But, owing Warner Brothers a film and very much not wanting to make one—yet having almost total contractual control over what film he could do—he made what seemed a bizarre decision. Steve McQueen, man of action, veteran of a thousand movie gunfights and car chases, announced that his next film would be an adaptation of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s classic 1882 drama, An Enemy of the People.

As McQueen biographer Christopher Sanford writes, “At first even friends thought it was a joke. It was as if John Gielgud…had decided to play Conan the Barbarian.”

But McQueen was deadly serious. His motives remain unclear to this day—some feel he chose the play as a method of expressing his contempt for the entire Hollywood money-making machine, selecting a property all but guaranteed to fail commercially. Yet the story—which centers on Dr. Thomas Stockmann’s efforts to have a local spa shut down due to what he’s learned about its contaminated water supply—had elements that surely appealed to McQueen. He had played any number of rebels against the system, after all. But this time his characters’ weapons would be his intellect and eloquence, not a gun or a fist.

“The play,” wrote Arthur Miller, whose adaptation of the Ibsen original would serve as the basis for the filmscript, “is the story of a scientist who discovers an evil and, innocently believing that he has done a service to humanity, expects that he will at least be thanked. However, the town has a vested interest in the perpetuation of that evil”—after all, the spa is the town’s main source of tourist dollars. Ibsen’s original plot, according to Miller, “is supposed to have come from a news item which told of a Hungarian scientist who had discovered poisoned water in the town’s water supply and had been pilloried for his discovery.”

Provocative stuff, and with obvious relevance to latter-day environmental issues. But the finished film of An Enemy of the People was destined to suffer what is surely one of the strangest fates of any movie ever made with a major star.

It was never released.

One Warner Brothers executive went on record that the film was “a goddamn embarrassment, a piece of junk,” and after test screenings went poorly, An Enemy of the People was shelved.

A famous classic play. The biggest star in the world. And the movie never came out.

In retrospect, the shelving is puzzling. It’s true that the studio was unable to come up with a viable advertising campaign for the film, but to simply put aside—in essence, to throw away—such a high-value property is an odd decision. Surely at the very least An Enemy of the People might have been sold to PBS—I suspect it could have become the highest-rated presentation in the history of the network. (Imagine all those teenagers staying home to watch Steve McQueen’s newest movie—and all those delighted English teachers seeing their students willingly subjecting themselves to Henrik Ibsen!) But then McQueen had alienated most executives at the studio anyway. There was little sympathy for him or his attempt at a socially-relevant “art” film.

In truth, An Enemy of the People did eventually begin to ooze forth, Blob-like, from the studio vaults. There was never any proper theatrical release, but it did play in an individual theatre here and there in a few major cities in the late seventies. By the early eighties it surfaced on cable television, where it was broadcast a couple of times (and where I first saw it). Then it seemed to sink without a trace once again until just a few years ago, when Turner Classic Movies screened it for the first time—on, I believe, McQueen’s birthday. They’ve repeated it once or twice since then.

And now it’s on DVD. Well, sort of.

True to the history of this seemingly cursed film, you can purchase a fully-legal, authorized copy of An Enemy of the People. But good luck finding it, because Warner Brothers has brought it out in its so-called “Archive Collection,” a grouping of old movies seemingly of insufficient commercial value to bother with a proper release—i.e., with digital remastering, bonus features, a strong advertising campaign to support them.

Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of the Warner Brothers Archive Collection—as with the original non-release of An Enemy of the People, the studio seems determined to keep these films from finding an audience. You won’t find them at your local video store. They’re unavailable on Amazon. They can’t be had from Netflix. Pretty much the only places you can find them is on the Warner Brothers and Turner Classic Movies websites.

http://www.wbshop.com/Warner-Archive/ARCHIVE,default,sc.html?adid=wacurl

The Archive Collection is well worth checking out for the vintage film fan—all sorts of lesser-known classics can be found there, including features with Joan Crawford (This Woman is Dangerous, Chained, and others), Montgomery Clift (The Defector, his last film), lots of Greta Garbo (The Kiss, Love, The Temptress, Wild Orchids), and cult items (Doc Savage, They Only Kill Their Masters). Clark Gable’s there, Lana Turner, Spencer Tracy—all in films unavailable anyplace else. And they issue new releases regularly.

These DVDs are, however, done on the cheap. There has been no work performed at all on refurbishing the pictures or sound and there are no extras other than, if you’re lucky, a trailer. In fact, the discs don’t even have chapters, just a menu which generally offers two options: “Play Film” or “Play Trailer.”

That said, at least Warner Brothers has finally gone to the trouble of making An Enemy of the People available to the public—if only in an unpublicized, low-end release.

So—what can one make of Steve McQueen’s An Enemy of the People today?

I wish I could report that the film is a lost masterpiece. Alas, I can’t. At the same time, however, it’s hardly “a goddamn embarrassment, a piece of junk.”

In truth, McQueen’s An Enemy of the People is a solidly competent version of Miller’s adaptation of Ibsen. Director George Schaefer went to great lengths for period authenticity, and it pays off—in the sets, the costumes, the exteriors. On that level, it’s a good-looking film, though visually rather cramped. (It feels like a movie that needs to be opened out somehow; what we have is too much like a filmed play.) The cinematography is prosaic but effective. The orchestral score by Leonard Rosenman is highly lyrical and evocative. As for the performances, Bibi Andersson projects the proper sympathy and concern as Thomas Stockmann’s wife Catherine (though her Swedish accent, which sounds different from anyone else in the cast, goes unexplained). Robin Pearson Rose is luminous as the Stockmanns’ politically passionate daughter, Petra. It’s Charles Durning, however, as Stockmann’s brother Peter (and mayor of the town) who all but steals the show here—his morally slippery bluster enlivens every scene he’s in.

But this film is all about Thomas Stockmann. Any performance of any version of An Enemy of the People lives or dies on the strength or weakness of the actor in this leading role. So how is McQueen?

As with the film itself, I wish I could report that he’s brilliant—but he’s not. Yet he’s also not an embarrassment. If McQueen doesn’t leave the viewer wishing that he’d also essayed other great roles in the classical theatre—Steve McQueen as Hamlet, anyone?—it can’t be denied that his performance is completely committed and professional (even if he’s difficult to recognize with all that long hair and a rather wild beard). He moves naturally and delivers his long speeches with clearly-communicated passion. Overall, he’s quite believable in the part.

Yet there is little of the electricity which ignited the screen in his great roles. Part of his problem, I think, is that for Stockmann’s characterization he has buried his two greatest assets as a screen actor—his beautiful, expressive eyes (here hidden behind glasses) and, for want of a better phrase, what I’ll call his silence.

McQueen is well-remembered by his contemporaries for being perhaps the only major star in film history to routinely subtract dialogue from his own parts. Don Gordon, his co-star in Bullitt, has said that McQueen regularly blue-penciled his own lines, telling Gordon, “You say this, okay?” Another McQueen friend and observer, Robert Relyea, remarked: “McQueen always felt that he, his virility and body language, were better than dialogue. And he was right.”

Indeed he was. And that’s the problem with McQueen as Thomas Stockmann. It’s not that he’s incapable of delivering all those high-flown, philosophical words—he does it quite well, actually. But endless verbiage simply does not play to McQueen’s basic strength as a screen personality. Just one of his silent, knowing looks in The Magnificent Seven or The Great Escape is worth pages of Stockmann’s speeches—at least in screen-star terms.

Yet I can’t help but admire McQueen in this role, and in this film. An Enemy of the People was a daring, even reckless choice for someone with McQueen’s image to attempt; and, hidden behind his glasses and hair and beard, he brings it off—if not exactly triumphantly, at least successfully. What a pity that the executives at Warner Brothers were unable to appreciate the flawed but real gem McQueen had given them.

Loren James, another of his friends, attended one of the doomed previews of An Enemy of the People with a disguised Steve McQueen. As they were leaving, one teenager in attendance—clearly bewildered by the entire film—was heard to say, “Well, hell, which one was Steve?”

According to James, McQueen loved that.

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