The Writerly Life
PODHORETZ, JOHN
The Writerly Life It’s even less exciting on fi lm. BY JOHN PODHORETZ Let me tell you about writers. Writers sit. Then, after a while, they stand. They pace. They sit again. Sometimes, they...
...He purses his lips when the young graduate student asks him a personal question and says, “There is such a thing as decorum...
...John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...At some point, they generate words...
...It used to be that writers in movies would scribble something on a yellow legal pad, then read it over, make a disgusted noise, crumple the yellow paper in a ball, and toss it at a garbage can...
...So she takes her typewriter and throws it out the window...
...This also might occur with a writer working on a typewriter, in which case he would pull the piece of paper out of the roller with a great fl ourish before crumpling it up...
...When a pretty graduate student expresses interest in writing a master’s thesis about his work, he refuses and says he does not approve of gossip and is far too busy being a novelist...
...The movie is serious, earnest, respectful, sober, and really, really terrible, as only movies about writers can be—especially if they’re movies about writers who are also intellectuals...
...And that bit has gotten so old already that it makes you long for the good old crumpled-up piece of paper...
...He says, “Excuse me for just a moment” when he gets up to go to the bathroom...
...He is courtly...
...He attends readings at the 92nd Street Y and says things like, “Her excerpt was read affectingly, I think...
...But this is not what highbrows are like, and it certainly isn’t what the New York intellectuals were like...
...It’s one thing to write a book in which a writer is a character, since novels can venture inside a character’s head and back out again...
...New York intellectuals were often extremely ill-mannered, especially to young women...
...They were just as likely to be the ones smearing the honey...
...That’s all well and good, but even New York intellectuals who hate ads in magazines use computers these days...
...Now there is a movie about a New York intellectual in his seventies called Starting Out in the Evening...
...In Julia, Jane Fonda plays Lillian Hellman...
...They go over those words...
...She is writing a play at a house on Martha’s Vineyard...
...They stand up...
...Lillian Hellman knew a lot of New York intellectuals...
...It’s a mark of how unimaginative a fi lmmaker Wagner is that he shows it to us 37 times in the space of two hours...
...He has been widely praised for the detailed accuracy of his performance by people who have probably never met an intellectual...
...You know Schiller is one of those oldtime intellectuals because he does not speak in contractions...
...The only clich...
...All of these traits are intended to make him appear to be a highbrow...
...Then they generate some more...
...Schiller is a very serious person and very dedicated to his novel-writing...
...And of course, Langella sits at an old Underwood typewriter, one of those heavy standing manual typewriters they stopped making in 1957, and bats away at the keys...
...New York intellectuals, you see, have far loftier goals in mind than writing for magazines with advertising in them (like, say, the New Yorker) or being the subject of master’s theses or having pretty young graduate students alone in their apartments with them...
...She doesn’t like what she is writing...
...For some reason—perhaps because writers write them—people frequently make movies about writers...
...He does not approve of magazines with advertising in them, because art and commerce are at war...
...But writers don’t do anything...
...Frank Langella plays the intellectual...
...It is based on a very good novel by Brian Morton about a New York intellectual in his seventies, an elegiac and dryly witty portrait of a day long since past...
...This is unwise...
...anyone has been able to come up with so far for the writer-with-computer is the repeated use of the delete key...
...These verbal tics are intended to make Schiller appear to be a literary highbrow...
...They sit down...
...I have just revealed to you the great secret life of the writer...
...After a while, it occurred to moviemakers that this was a clich...
...Langella’s character is a Jewish novelist named Leonard Schiller, who lives in a big Upper West Side apartment...
...Unfortunately, the real Lillian Hellman did not do such a thing, because even a Stalinist like Lillian Hellman would have known that if you throw a typewriter out the window, it will break...
...Langella isn’t playing a friend of Trilling and Howe and Wilson, as he claims...
...So they tried other bits of action...
...Speaking of which, the computer may fi nally be the thing that kills off movies about writers...
...Also, he enunciates every consonant...
...Sometimes, they talk on the telephone...
...And then you won’t have the key “a,” which you need if (as Mary McCarthy said) every word you write is a lie, including “a...
...Or they surf the Internet...
...Therefore, moviemakers are always trying to fi gure out how to make writers do things...
...Schiller has Old World manners...
...The camera would then pan over to the garbage can, which was full of other sheets of balled-up yellow paper and was surrounded by other paper balls...
...He’s more like the fussy and precise salesman at Brooks Brothers from whom they bought their suits...
...Highbrows use plenty of contractions...
...This gives the cowriter/director Andrew Wagner his chance at that chestnut, the you-just-see-the-writer’s-eyesandforehead-as-he-stares-with-deepconcentrationat-the-page shot...
...They did not run out of the room when a young woman smeared honey on their faces, as happens in a particularly risible scene here...
...In a movie, you have to watch a character do something...
Vol. 13 • February 2008 • No. 21
