Film Critic's Fiction
MERKIN, DAPHNE
Writers & Writing FILM CRITICS' FICTIONS BY DAPHNE MERKIN Periodically we try and do away with certain troublesome notions, like God and the novel, by issuing them death-notices. And, indeed, we...
...But the truly persistent, it seems, are those professional viewers known as film critics...
...Hounded for his Tory views, Peregrine nevertheless airs them everywhere he can: in print, to his devoted sibling and to the suffering reader...
...Eventually, he wins the admiration of his uniformly loutish peers by seducing a beautiful, magnificently endowed black maid named Geth-semane...
...And don't tell me Hitler was a house painter because I know...
...Peregrine and Benedick are the sons of one Professor Corbett, a venerable if eccentric scholar who leaves their upbringing to nature and to Nanny, "a woman of termagant character...
...Unhappily, this same malleability has rendered the novel the most victimized of literary genres, prey to the creative aspirations of anyone who can set pen to paper...
...he can't get his theories discrediting the Albigenses' claims to perfect chastity published, and he has been through two marriages...
...And against the family.'" Peregrine, the elder by three years, eventually becomes a barrister and, "as a writer of journalistic broadsheets and of diatribes against the modern heart," a celebrated maverick...
...One may prefer Dante to Shakespeare, or claret to champagne, but that ends it...
...Joanna and Benedick get divorced and the two brothers live on and off with each other in various European spots...
...His current flame, Jacqueline Gold, is a New Woman, a beautiful and brainy writer of New Journalism...
...She is also Jewish, and being Jewish she devotedly visits her parents, who live in Fort Lauderdale and are the butt of some of Marshall's Catskill-comedian lines: "Do they rise at six, have their prunes and then immediately take up their missionary positions in front of the television set...
...Marshall remains a distant curiosity rather than the touching survivor lie is meant to be...
...The reader, meanwhile, remains v cry much on the outside, wondering what all [he damned fuss is about...
...Marshall is shunted off to a series of boarding schools while his parents arrange a divorce...
...He is the proverbial loner, forever on the lookout for a quiet spot in which to take another crack at Proust...
...Except for those of us who drink Coke...
...They go back to wake up Joanna and the puzzle of their existence together and apart, the Riddle of the Self, is mused upon once again: "But who will ever know which brother she was angry with and which one she loved...
...The Cutting Edge is, in a word, insufferable...
...Politicians and actresses, hookers and firemen have all taken stabs at novel-making...
...By the novel's close, she will have dumped Marshall for an editor at Esquire...
...At 17, Marshall has a mysterious accident at school and is paralysed from the waist down, "but," as he candidly informs us, "I've been spared the worst traumas of paraplegia...
...His older brother, Tom, shoots himself after a fight with their father...
...Baby Pru, it turns out, is the son of none other than 'ole Gethsemane and, Marshall belatedly suspects, himself...
...Finally, she confuses issues of taste with issues of morality, and her confusion is indicative of the novel's ultimately shallow level of preoccupation: "Values can't be measured against each other...
...They're incommensurable...
...I'm in full command of my bowels and my bladder and, most important, of my cock...
...The humor seldom penetrates...
...There is also a militant black leader by the name of Baby Pru who appears on talk shows and makes statements that infuriate and fascinate Marshall-"Liberalism is just an extension of paternalism...
...I kept thinking she had wandered in from aroman a clef, but I never found the clef...
...Peregrine: "I never had tact...
...That Penelope Gilliat's heart belongs to the bookshelf rather than to the silver screen has been apparent all along...
...They allow no reduction below themselves...
...There is much coming and going of house guests, including Peregrine, Professor Corbett and an exiled theatrical impresario by the name of Sergei Sergeivitch...
...Both, in both cases, it seemed, as is the way of things...
...They looked at each other, mirror images of each other: Benedick become like he, with spectacles, standing taller...
...Far too many mild witticisms are bandied about, presumably to reveal how intelligently out-of-step these characters are...
...Their dilemma is brought to an end not a moment too soon, when the brothers wind up sitting several rows apart at a boring "all-night cinema...
...When the honky asks w hat he can do for me, I say he can give me some guns...
...alongside these are contrasting elements of dissipation and familial violence that typify novels dealing with the Southern gentry...
...Benedick plays the electronic harpsichord and marries Joanna, "a tender girl with a clown's heart...
...The one genuinely and maliciously laugh-provoking scene is an interview with a porn queen, Merrie Ball, a cousin of Marshall's: "Q: You must be our brainiest fuck-film queen, as well as the prettiest...
...he become like Benedick, with blue eyes, slumping...
...It is not entirely clear to me, moreover, what Gilliatt had in mind with her portrayals of Peregrine and Benedick...
...A: Well, I'd say that I'm probably more brainy than Linda Lovelace...
...The book is admittedly entertaining in parts, yet only because it is so furiously an courant...
...The boys are allies and develop their taste for the idiosyncratic in thought and deed: "One New Year's Eve, when Peregrine was 13, he burst into the drawing room at midnight and said to an assembled house party, 'The subject of the next year will be genius breaking out in the family.' He took a swig of champagne...
...Q: 1 take it your family is conservative...
...I'm moving from a period of the sublime to a period of the Gor-blimey...
...He is not too lucky with either...
...The Culling Edge (Coward, Mc-Cann & Geoghegan, 150 pp., $8.95) is her third novel...
...His book whirrs with rapid, centrifugal force, yet gives little indication of the generative impulse behind all the noise-other than possibly an interest in the geographical lore of the state of Virginia...
...Tact is hobbling round a subject like a donkey tied to a tree...
...Mathews-a parody of the sort of institution that often invokes cherished memories-where he strenuously avoids all efforts to engage him in mental or physical activity...
...I love both of you...
...perhaps she thought she was illuminating the fallacies of a populist age through the brothers' tetchy resistance to them...
...They live like bon vivants in Wiltshire: "there was conviviality, games, card tricks, meals in the middle of the night...
...In the off times they send one another tiresomely arch letters: "Dear Benedick, All right, I should have been a house painter...
...He bumps into Joanna in Paris, where a play of his is opening, and they become lovers, amid much talk of identity and rivalry and betrayal: "I don't know whether you're in love with me because I'm like Benedick or because I'm not like Benedick...
...I think I always loved you but Benedick was the one who loved me...
...Canby orchestrates his novel like a ringmaster at a three-ring circus, constantly sparking the flagging attention of his audience with new acts and daredevil performers...
...v incent Canby is the film critic for The New York Times and Unnatural Scenery (Knopf, 274 pp., $8.95) is his second novel...
...A: Somewhere to the right of the Sun King...
...Marshall Lewis Henderson, the narrator, is one of those larger-than-life figures who is, at best, representative of the world around him and, at worst, an oafish presence...
...Unfortunately, the two are less rugged individualists than priggish separatists and Gilliatt's fatuous elitism is made to stand in for more valid protestations...
...The tale centers around an unusually strong fraternal bond...
...To begin with, she reviews movies for the New Yorker as if they were novels: You could have read her laudatory piece on Tony Richardson's Joseph Andrews, for instance, in sheer ignorance of the fact that she was writing about a primarily visual medium...
...The novel, however, is alive and kicking...
...At the end, Marshall leaves New York together with his faithful housekeeper, Margaret, for his native Virginia, where he sets a match (literally) to the debris of his past...
...Still, for all its efforts Unnatural Scenery palls frequently, mainly because Canby supplies us with heaps of information in place of characterization...
...She has also written the screenplay for the remarkable Sunday Bloody Sunday and several collections of short stories...
...Ever, Peregrine...
...Unnatural Scenery is "antic," which means that believability is sacrificed in the interests of diversity...
...And, indeed, we appear to have more or less successfully evicted the divinity from our precincts...
...It is self-congratulatory in the way of novels that presume shared allegiances with the reader, without bothering to establish them...
...His childhood is depicted from a bewildering variety of angles, featuring elements of gentility and reclusiveness that usually characterize wasp boyhoods...
...His longest stay is at St...
...the suicide is referred to as "Tom's accident, which is what everyone called it, including the Cook County coroner who found that Tom had been cleaning his gun with his right foot in the middle of the night...
...So while one would hardly think of pulling up one's sleeves and trying one's hand at an essay on avian imagery in the films of Alfred Hitchcock without the proper knowledge and experience, similar considerations do not apply in the realm of fiction...
...Gilliat's characters are also given to using the kind of Britishisms I assumed went out with Arnold Bennett: "I daresay," "Dear old thing," "Does he feature you...
...Marshall's father is a dashing boozer, unhappily married to a dissapproving heiress...
...The survival of the form undoubtedly has much to do with its infinite adaptability, allowing it to swell to Proustian dimensions or to contract to the slender lineaments of, say, a Carson McCullers...
...A hefty inheritance from his mother's side provides him with the means and the leisure to pursue his two consuming interests-the Albigen-sian heresy, and women...
Vol. 62 • January 1979 • No. 3
