Monday, March 18, 2024

Movie Review: L'Eclisse (The Eclipse), Starring Monica Vitti and Alain Delon, Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (1962)

Original poster for L'Eclisse, starring Monica Vitti and Alain Delon, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962.

Monica Vitti and Alain Delon make a gorgeous couple in L'Eclisse, 1962.

The 1962 Italian film
L’Eclisse, (The Eclipse in English) is a fascinating film. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, it’s considered the last in a trilogy, with the other films being L’Avventura and La Notte. L’Eclisse stars the beautiful Monica Vitti and the beautiful Alain Delon.  

As with many European films of the 1960’s, to sum up the plot of L’Eclisse would be superfluous. The movie is not about the plot, it’s about the feeling that the movie gives you, the emotions it evokes. And from the very beginning, L’Eclisse puts the viewer in a specific emotional state. The first few minutes of the movie are a great example of how little a film has to do to evoke a certain mood. Without music or flashy editing, Antonioni perfectly evokes the stagnant atmosphere of a study/living room as Riccardo (Spanish actor Francisco Rabal) and Vittoria (Monica Vitti) wordlessly pondering their situation. We don’t need dialogue to tell us what is happening, we can see it all on the faces of Rabal and Vitti. Vittoria leaves Riccardo, and walks from his apartment (or house? I’m not sure) to her apartment building. The architecture of Rome and the EUR district plays a huge supporting role in this movie.  

Vittoria’s mother (Lilla Brignone) is often at the stock exchange, where her investments are handled by Piero, a handsome young stockbroker (Alain Delon). Unfortunately for Delon fans, his voice was dubbed in Italian. The actor who dubbed Delon has a harsher cadence and a lower tone than Delon’s speaking voice, which is too bad. The dubbed voice makes Piero come off as more arrogant. But I can offer no critique of Delon’s appearance in L’Eclisse, as he looks super handsome, as always.  

Piero makes a pass at Vittoria, but she dodges his kiss. She says at one point that she’s “bored and depressed,” which makes sense, given that she’s just coming out of her relationship with Riccardo. But many viewers will probably question her sanity as she avoids kisses from 1962 Alain Delon. Eventually, Vittoria and Piero kiss, after first kissing through a glass several times 

The movie ends with Vittoria and Piero both promising to show up the following evening for another date. Then there’s a seven-minute-long montage as night falls, and we see that they both fail to show up at the meeting spot.  

What does it all mean? L’Eclisse is definitely a study of loneliness, and the film takes an existential view of modern life. I think part of the point of L’Eclisse is to show how difficult it is to maintain a relationship, romantic or otherwise, in modern life, something that has only accentuated in the 62 years since L’Eclisse was released. With new relationships, it’s almost always easier to say “no” than to say “yes.” It’s easy to find reasons why you shouldn’t do something, it’s more difficult to find reasons why you should do something. To have a relationship begin, both people need to be willing to say “yes.” To have two people say “yes” at the same time is a rare and special thing that shouldn’t be taken for granted.  

L’Eclisse is a film that will stick with you long after you watch it.  

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Book Review: Thomas Wolfe: A Writer's Life, by Ted Mitchell (1999)

The cover of the paperback edition of Thomas Wolfe: A Writer's Life, by Ted Mitchell, 1999. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Thomas Wolfe and his mother Julia on the steps of the house where he grew up, which is now the Thomas Wolfe Memorial.

There have been several biographies written about the American author Thomas Wolfe, and Ted Mitchell’s 1999 book
Thomas Wolfe: A Writer’s Life, fills an important gap by giving the reader a shorter overview of Wolfe’s life and work. Coming in at 120 pages, it’s more concise than the full-length Wolfe biographies by Andrew Turnbull, Elizabeth Nowell, and David Herbert Donald.  

Mitchell gives the reader a good sense of Wolfe’s personality and psychology. The Thomas Wolfe Memorial is the house where Wolfe grew up in Asheville, North Carolina. Tom’s mother operated it as a boarding house from the time Tom was 6 years old. When I visited the house last week, I was puzzled that the site director hadn't pointed out Tom’s bedroom to me. As we were about to leave the second floor I asked, “Which bedroom was Tom’s?” She said “Tom didn’t have one. He moved around from room to room depending on which rooms weren’t being rented.” It struck me immediately that this was a key fact about Thomas Wolfe.  

Wolfe stood 6 feet 6 inches tall, and he wrote “the world of six feet six...is the strangest and most lonely world there is.” (p.43) Wolfe was always searching for a home, for a sense of belonging. Mitchell quotes from a letter of Wolfe’s written towards the end of his brief life: “although you can’t go home again, the home of every one of us is in the future: there is no other way.” (p.80)  

Mitchell paints a portrait of Wolfe as sometimes difficult, sometimes pleasant, but always devoted to his work and craft. After going through the exhibit on Thomas Wolfe’s life in the Thomas Wolfe Memorial and seeing all of the photos of Wolfe throughout his life, I was struck by how serious Wolfe looks in almost every photo. You can tell this is a man who was thinking deeply about life and art.  

I don’t know Thomas Wolfe’s work very deeply, but I found it moving to see the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, the site where he was born (it’s now a YMCA parking lot) and his gravesite during the same afternoon. It’s hard to explain exactly why I was so moved. Part of it is the tragedy of a life being cut short, wondering what might have been. And part of it is the sense I get from Wolfe of devoting himself so fully to the creative life. I was moved when I walked through beautiful Riverside Cemetery, on top of rolling hills, on a gorgeous sunny afternoon, and came upon Thomas Wolfe’s grave. Part of the inscription reads, “A beloved American author.” As someone who puts words to paper, you can’t ask for a better tribute than that. There is a small urn in front of Wolfe’s grave. Instead of bouquets, it’s filled with pens. I was annoyed with myself for not having anything with me, no coin, no rock, nothing to deposit in homage. But as I stood at Wolfe’s grave, I saw a penny in the mud in front of the stone. I picked it up, brushed it off, and put it on his headstone. I felt much better. The next day, on a rainy afternoon, I returned to Wolfe’s grave with a pen, which I put in the urn. The gesture was now complete, homage had been properly paid.  

I learned many interesting facts about Thomas Wolfe from this book. One of them was that when Wolfe was preparing to attend college, he wanted to attend Princeton. Had he gone to Princeton, Wolfe likely would have encountered another young man with literary aspirations: F. Scott Fitzgerald. Wolfe would have overlapped with Fitzgerald at Princeton for a year, but Wolfe ended up going to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he didn’t meet Fitzgerald until 1930, when they were both in Switzerland.  

Mitchell gives the reader an excellent overview of the illness that struck Wolfe down in his prime. What seemed at first to be a high fever and pneumonia was actually miliary tuberculosis. When doctors thought that Wolfe might be suffering from a brain tumor as well, he was sent to the finest brain surgeon in the country, Walter Dandy. Dandy soon discovered that the disease had spread to Wolfe’s brain, and during surgery, he knew it would be impossible to remove all the tubercules. Wolfe died three days later, at just 37.  

Ted Mitchell’s book Thomas Wolfe: A Writer’s Life, is an excellent overview of Wolfe’s life and art.  

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Book Review: The Autobiography of an American Novelist, by Thomas Wolfe, Edited by Leslie Field (1983)

The oddly designed paperback cover of The Autobiography of an American Novelist, by Thomas Wolfe, Edited by Leslie Field, 1983. Why so much blank space? (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Author Thomas Wolfe, 1900-1938.

Thomas Wolfe’s
untimely death in 1938, at the age of 37, stilled the voice of one of America’s leading writers of fiction. Although Wolfe only published two novels during his lifetime, he left behind enough material that two more novels were published posthumously. Wolfe’s 1936 book
The Story of a Novel detailed the writing and editing process of Wolfe’s mammoth second novel, Of Time and the River, published in 1935.  

The 1983 book The Autobiography of an American Novelist collects The Story of a Novel and “Writing and Living,” a May 1938 speech that Wolfe delivered at Purdue University that proved to be his final public speech before his death in September of 1938. The title of the book is a bit of a misnomer, as Wolfe doesn’t recount his entire life story. If you want to read Thomas Wolfe’s autobiography, go read his novels.  

The Story of a Novel tells us how Wolfe found it difficult to follow up the success of his first novel, 1929’s Look Homeward, Angel. A popular and critical success, Wolfe’s first novel thrust him into the position of “the next great American novelist,” the same position F. Scott Fitzgerald had occupied at the beginning of the 1920’s, and Ernest Hemingway had occupied in the middle of the decade.  

Wolfe was taken aback at the negative reaction in his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina to Look Homeward, Angel. Note for authors: people generally do not like to see themselves portrayed in novels. It makes me wonder if there’s been a novel that was instantly embraced by the people of the real town portrayed in the novel?  

As Wolfe found out, sometimes success can be as hard to deal with as failure. And because Look Homeward, Angel was a success, now there were lofty expectations upon him. The longer it took for Wolfe to publish a second novel, the louder the murmurs were that he was “just a one book author,” that he had said all he had to say with his first novel.  

To counter the critics, Wolfe kept writing. And writing and writing. He eventually delivered a manuscript to his editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribners in a giant crate. Wolfe estimated the manuscript was about 2 million words long. (p.58) Or about 4 times as long as War and Peace. Wolfe had written 100,000 words just about a train journey across Virginia. (p.76) That’s about twice the length of The Great Gatsby.  

Maxwell Perkins must have been a pretty amazing person to deal with his three star authors: Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. Any one of those geniuses would be enough for most people to handle. Perkins helped Wolfe transform his massive manuscript into Of Time and the River. Perkins goes unnamed in The Story of a Novel, but of course modern readers know he’s the editor to whom Wolfe is referring.  

I think Wolfe honestly depicted the editing process of his manuscript in The Story of a Novel. It was a true collaboration between Wolfe and Maxwell Perkins. However, after The Story of a Novel was released, it became the subject of a scathing take down by critic Bernard DeVoto. In a piece titled “Genius is Not Enough,” published in the Saturday Review of Literature, DeVoto attacked Wolfe, charging that the writer was overly dependent on Perkins’ help.  

DeVoto described Wolfe’s “incompleteness,” charging that “one indispensable part of the artist has existed not in Mr. Wolfe but in Maxwell Perkins.” DeVoto wrote that it was not enough to be a genius when it came to writing novels, “it must be supported by an ability to impart shape to material, simple competence in the use of tools.” (Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, p.295-6)  

Wolfe was deeply wounded by DeVoto’s blistering personal attack, and it was a key factor in Wolfe’s eventual break with Perkins. I think DeVoto’s criticism was worthless and cruel. However much Maxwell Perkins helped Wolfe in editing the book, the words on the page were still Wolfe’s, and Wolfe’s alone. Perkins helped in the arrangements of those words, but the words were Wolfe’s. DeVoto portrayed Wolfe as a kind of idiot savant, smart enough to write the words, but not smart enough to put them in the right order.  

I think Wolfe was honest in writing The Story of a Novel, but DeVoto then used that honesty against him, as though Wolfe’s struggle with the raw material of the novel was something to be ashamed of. In a way, DeVoto’s attack on Wolfe was an attack on Wolfe’s masculinity. DeVoto was advocating for a type of literature based on rugged individualism, where an author shouldn’t need the editor’s help to put things together. The editor should just correct spelling errors. But Wolfe was admitting that he needed help, and there’s no shame in that.  

In The Story of a Novel, Wolfe touches on what it meant to be a boy growing up in Asheville, North Carolina who wanted to be an author. “I may have thought that it would be a fine thing to be a writer because a writer was a man like Lord Byron or Lord Tennyson or Longfellow or Percy Bysshe Shelley. A writer was a man who was far away like these people I have mentioned...it seemed to me that a writer was a man from a kind of remote and unknowable people that I could never approach.” (p.5) I was struck by that quote, and thinking about how Wolfe didn’t have a role model for the kind of writer he would become. He had to make his own way and forge his own path.  

In “Writing and Living,” Wolfe wrote of Look Homeward, Angel: “It is what is called an autobiographical novel—a definition with which I have never agreed, simply because it seems to me every novel, every piece of creative writing that anyone can do, is autobiographical.” (p.120) 

In The Story of a Novel, Wolfe wrote: “It is literally impossible for a man who has the stuff of creation in him to make a literal transcription of his own experience. Everything in a work of art is changed and transfigured by the personality of the artist.” (p.20) 

I like these two ideas of Wolfe’s: that creative writing may draw its spark or inspiration from real life, but that it is inevitably changed and altered by the artist through the creative process. And whatever you choose to write about is autobiographical because it inevitably reveals something about your personality.  

Wolfe name-checked F. Scott Fitzgerald in “Writing and Living,” and although Wolfe didn’t say anything about Fitzgerald’s writing, I took it as a sign of respect that Fitzgerald was one of the few authors mentioned by name in “Writing and Living.” Although they were very different stylists, I think Wolfe and Fitzgerald respected each other’s talent.  

There is an inevitable sadness in “Writing and Living,” as Wolfe writes of “the cycle of my thirty-seven years,” and the reader knows that he will not make it to thirty-eight. (p.145) Wolfe was putting a period on this cycle of his creative life. “The circle ends full swing: this period of every man—a phrase in the great lexicon of what all living in the cycle now is ended, and I say farewell...I know now that you can’t go home again.” (p.152) 

“Writing and Living” ends with the word “hope,” as Wolfe described charting a new course into a new phase of his creative life, but sadly he didn’t have time to fully explore this new land. The Autobiography of an American Novelist, imperfect as its title may be, is still a fascinating look at a man who devoted his energies to the creative life.