Writing & Other Bloodsports, page 15
The better teleplays television audiences deserve compared with current fare, even within the limits of present, crippling restrictions, will not be written until accomplished writers from other media take television seriously and recognize it as an art form of unlimited scope. If the networks were sincere in their appeals for better teleplays, they could encourage the interest of proven writers by setting up exhaustive training programs and by paying selected groups for their regular loss of income while they learned the rudiments of television production. Until a writer is given a free hand, and allowed to have his teleplay produced as it is written in its entirety, there will be no plays of artistic merit seen on television. A truly great teleplay, of course, will not be seen until restrictions of time limits, censorship, and the pressures of sponsors and minority groups are completely abolished. The plays of Shakespeare have not been able to survive television’s drastic cutting, and the broken continuity of anachronistic commercials every fifteen minutes.
I am by no means a defeatist, but I cannot agree with Mr. McCleery’s prediction of a “cultural explosion of unlimited magnitude” during the next ten years of television. The writers in television will make substantial sums of money, to be sure; but so long as every program must appeal to Grandma and her little grandson, as well as every cultural level and age group between these two extremes, The Hallmark Teleplay Writing Competition and the CBS Television Workshop will search their incoming mail in vain for “good” scripts.
Is it worthwhile, then, under the circumstances, to write for television?
My conclusion must be, of necessity, a gloomy but resounding, Yes. Like Mount Everest, television in all of its awesome beauty and ugliness is there. If two years are needed to write a novel, which will be read by 5,000 readers, with good luck, the facts of television writing must also be faced: a teleplay, which has a potential audience of thirty or more million viewers, of equal quality to a publishable novel, will also require two full years of work to lift it from the script to the dignity of the term, “play.” And if a writer decides to write for television, he must give it his best efforts; nothing less will salvage television from the mediocrity realized by radio— which was killed by censorship and a dearth of good writing. If the unwholesome barriers, restrictions, and censorship of good writing for television are allowed to flourish unchecked, unchallenged—and the nets draw tighter daily with threats of government control—writers will eventually be denied the greatest means of self-expression they have had at their disposal since the beginning of mankind.
* According to Eisenstein, “typage” is a cinematographic development of the seven (masked) stock characters of the Commedia del’arte, multiplied to infinity. Upon the first entrance of an actor in a film—who does not wear a convenient stock character mask to tell the audience what to expect of him—his characterization must be impressed so definitely upon the audience that subsequent reappearances of the same actor will be known by every member. With respect to “typage,” U.S. moviemakers have got the upper hand over the Russians. A leading actor is “typed” in his first movie, and he is not allowed to change this characterization until death; e.g., John Garfield, Humphrey Bogart. Television was quick to see the possibilities of permanent typage. In a continuing series, once the characters have been set, no one has to work very hard anymore; writers, directors, actors, not even the audience.
Characteristics of Gadgetry
(1959)
A few weeks ago I read a novel wherein one of the major characters was described as a wearer of glasses in the first chapter. In the remainder of the novel, however, his glasses were never mentioned again. He didn’t polish them; he evidently wore them in fist fights; he didn’t remove them to make love, and I presume that he even slept with the glasses on his nose.
Actually, the fact that this character wore glasses made little difference to the story, but there was no point in providing him with glasses unless the author was going to employ them as part of the plot or as an aid to his characterization. Glasses are a practical prop for characterization purposes, if for no other reason than to round out flat characters.
In a many-peopled novel or in a long story there must be, of necessity, a few “flat” characters for the purpose of moving the plot along in its predetermined groove. The judicious use of various “gadgets” provides a writer with a simple means of identifying these minor characters for the reader and for rounding out his major characters. The employment of gadgetry is the oldest gimmick in fictional character development. Almost every well-known fictional character has an identifiable object of some kind that sets him apart from the ordinary person.
There is Sherlock Holmes and his violin, Scarlett O’Hara with her cologne-soaked handkerchief, and I well remember the set of colored pencils Hyman Kaplan used to sign his name during his adult education English courses. The ashplant Stephen Dedalus carried is famous, and Mary McCarthy, in her Groves of Academe, once again used this fictional gadget to demonstrate how far her professor hero would go to emulate his hero, James Joyce, when she had him also carry an ashplant.
One can hardly think of Thomas Wolfe’s outsized heroes without being reminded of food, all types and varieties of food; or of Franz Kafka without recalling whips, teeth and walls of solid brick. But this is symbolic gadgetry. My concern here is with the simple devices any writer can employ to personalize his major and minor characters.
If we are to half-believe the advertisements we see and hear, none of us is without a flaw. A writer merely has to glance at the advertisements in any popular magazine to find all the gadgets he needs to make his characters human and lifelike. Is your hero a man who cannot take aspirin? If so, he can carry one of the headache remedies in his pocket that does not contain any aspirin. There are so many ads featuring gold toothpicks these days for the man who has everything, it wouldn’t do any real harm to allow a minor character to use one. And it would help the reader to remember him when he reappeared in the story.
The illustrated shopping sections featured by many general-type magazines provide the reader with a wealth of gadgetry. As I turn the pages of a magazine I can see a small slide-rule tie-clasp that actually works; a broken coin, one half to be worn by the husband and the other half by his mate; a pocket-sized plastic chessboard; a cheap pair of magnifying glasses for “folks over forty,” and, of course, the too-too familiar Diner’s Club card. Our smoking habits and the accompanying accessories provide writers with countless gadgets for characterization purposes. Who can forget the subtle distinction Frederic Wakenian employed so effectively in The Hucksters, to separate advertising men who owned a plain gold Dunhill lighter from those who had been elevated to the ribbed model?
It would be redundant to list the hundreds of gadgets a fictional character might carry on his person when any writer can so easily invent his own. In one of my novels I had the hero pay an artist five dollars to paint out the C. M. and a small crown on a Countess Mara necktie. He was afraid, you see, that his friends might think he had borrowed the tie from someone with the initials, C. M.
In a story published recently in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, my protagonist wore a West Indian obeah about his neck on a thong, a small leather bag containing one plastic toothpick (red); one small, round obsidian pebble; two withered jackfish eyes; one dried chameleon tail, approximately three inches long; one red checker; three battered Coca-Cola caps; one chicken feather (yellow); six assorted unidentifiable small dried bones, and one brass disc entitling the bearer to a ten-cent beer at Freddy Ming’s Cafe, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. Perhaps, in the latter case, I went too far. . . . But when a gadget is used for characterization purposes, or when it is integrated into the plot, there must always be a valid reason for its existence. Entire novels have been written around a single gadget.
In The Counterfeiters, Andre Gide used a false five-franc piece throughout to illuminate his theory of false morals. Dashiell Hammett employed a gadget as a focal object when he wrote his finest novel, The Maltese Falcon. Every character in the novel coveted this fabulous, bejeweled bird for various reasons, and there are few readers who can put this novel down without desiring the falcon for themselves. In The Caine Mutiny, the resolution hinged upon Captain Queeg’s peculiar habit of juggling two steel ball bearings in his hand— at the exact, psychological moment.
The possibilities of gadgetry in fiction seem to be limitless. To sum up: gadgets are an effective means of getting realism into fiction, and their use should not be overlooked in the preparation of biographical data for your characters.
End As a Nihilist
(1961)
At inopportune intervals I have been asked: “Where do you get your ideas for a novel, anyway?”
The query comes from those who are expressing an incurious interest; and the question has also been put to me by earnest, embryonic novelists with genuine sincerity crackling in their voices.
Not once have I ever been prepared for the question. No simplified answer ever comes to mind the way one can dismiss a child. “Where do babies come from, Daddy?”—“Go ask your mother.” And the alternative reply, a rambling discourse on purpose, plot, design, theme, characterization—the myriad details of the “well-made” novel—is the last thing a questioner desires to hear. He wants a concise answer, plain and to the point. When it is not forthcoming he concludes that either I do not know where my ideas come from, or that I do not desire to relinquish the information.
Both conclusions, I admit, are partially true, but not completely valid. There are missing elements which are not easy to explain. One cannot place with any degree of exactitude where the nascent idea for a novel came from, and the cumulative ideas that converge—when the novelist is lucky—into a malleable central theme, have no discernible continuity—at least, to me.
Preliminary ideas for a novel are comparable to the prolonged and dedicated study of darting infusoria in a drop of dirty water. If a person squints long enough, exercising the full weight of his past experience, he may be able to perceive a certain order, an underlying purpose behind the ostensibly aimless scurryings of these tiny creatures. It is life, is it not?— and the novelist, even more than the scientist who rarely reads his novels, is vitally concerned with teleological argument.
To satisfy my personal curiosity, if no one else’s, I have attempted here to trace the evolution of the ideas behind a novel I completed a few months ago, The Dark Field.
The first fifty pages, written more than ten years ago, were written as an exercise, without a definite plot in mind, with the vague hope that once my nebulous thoughts were down on paper I could study the MS. and perhaps find an opening in the unwieldy mass of protoplasm to insert the skeleton of a plot. Believe me, when I tell you now, that this is an idiotic way to begin a novel. The original penciled draft, a first person narrative of a man caught up in a web of unresolved frustrations, trapped by a job he detested and held against his will, rambled on and on for more than 20,000 words. Like Franz Kafka’s famous ape, who later became to all intents and purposes a human being, my protagonist/antagonist could only think of one thing: “Out!” But he desired to get out so intensely he could not rationally formulate a means of escape.
So here it was—the nucleolus of an idea—20,000 worthless words. The MS. was too long and formless to rewrite as a story, and it was too short and embittered to continue as a novel. I had managed to make the hero’s plight so wretched and hopeless I simply couldn’t help him. Tough.
Into the file folder went the MS. for The Dark Field. I wrote other novels instead. From time to time, however, as one year followed another, I removed the MS. from the folder and reread it—infrequently adding a denigrating comment to my hero’s characterization, or rewriting a sentence or two for clarity—but I was unable to begin Chapter II. At irregular intervals—often several months apart—I would reflect upon the predicament of the poor devil trapped in the file folder. A word he might utter, a sentence he might speak, a vagrant thought he might think, sometimes occurred to me. I would dutifully scribble these random, unrelated ideas down and drop them absently into the folder.
The file, as the years passed, was tumescent with burgeoning hopelessness, fraught with bitterness indeed. I knew my unfortunate hero well by now; I was the only friend he had or spoke to—at odd, inconvenient times, usually when I was happy, or when some delightful and unexpected surprise came my way, he spoiled the exuberance of my mood.
“Hey! What about me?” He snarled accusingly.
Inevitably, I decided to burn the file; the hero was a wretched failure; he would never amount to a hill of beans anyway; and I knew I would never have any real peace of mind until he was dead and cremated. The living are always in our thoughts; the dead are soon forgotten.
But murder is not a crime one commits easily. The man had been imprisoned for almost ten years, and he was entitled to one last appeal, an appeal to sound reasoning. So I gave him one final hearing. After forcing myself to reread once again the original MS., familiarizing myself with the futility of his situation, I sifted through his notes, the short, self-pitying messages he had been sending me irregularly throughout the years.
I shuffled and reshuffled these cryptic notes, seeking a hopeful pattern of some kind: “nihilistic determinism”; “Yes Is For A Very Young Man, by G Stein”; “When it’s Integration time in Ga. I’ll be studying Sociology at Washington and Lee”; “The Apes, Ivory and Peacocks you save, might be your own, your native land”; “Sympathy may be found in the dictionary between two words beginning with ‘S’ that are not”; “S. Beckett didn’t have to write Waiting For Godot; he could’ve married Joyce’s daughter and suffered more than the audience”; “Debits on the left, credits on the right—of Justice?”
There were more, many more, but this sampling will suffice. And as I rearranged these negative messages, I uncovered my hero’s secret desire, a secret he had never admitted, not even to himself! He didn’t really want “out”; he relished his martyr’s role. He considered success as too easy a matter for a mind as “brilliant” as his; success of any kind did not present sufficient challenge to his concealed ability. After all, he thought, only five or ten men out of a hundred honestly work for success. And there wasn’t enough competition in this mere handful of success-seekers to arouse his interest in such a simple goal.
On the other hand, he thought, thousands, nay millions, of men courted failure—consciously, subconsciously, self-consciously, and unconsciously—and my brooding nihilist had been hiding this knowledge from me all of these years; his subconscious will to failure.
Now that I had divined his secret plan, I could help him at last, and to the best of my skill and ability. He wanted to be a champion failure, did he? Well, I was just the writer to see to it, and with spades. A thousand, two thousands words a day were easy to write. I typed angrily, resentfully, and buried him as deeply as I could in 70,000 words of vitriolic prose.
The novel is now completed; my enemy’s failure is now achieved. Ignoti nulla cupido—but I honestly hope he is satisfied with the fate I gave him. In some ways, I sort of miss having the guy around.
“Preface”
(1962)
I don't like Charles Willeford particularly—pero es un artista de lapalabra. For one thing, he cheats at chess; for another, it is almost impossible to best him in an argument. Regardless of the subject under discussion he quotes from people nobody ever heard of before to reinforce his position: names like Ratzenhofer, Bergson, Reckless, Gumplowicz, and Lombrosso drip greasily from his lips. I suspect that he put in a Summer Session at the New School for Social Research, although he denied this when I asked him about it.
When he asked me (in a nice but offhand manner) to write a “Preface” to his novel I admit that I was rather surprised. I am a film director, not a writer, and I knew I would have to sweat like hell to put these thoughts on paper. It’s a shame that I can’t attach a five-minute film to this novel instead, the way you people in America put these little cardboard phonograph records in boxes of cereal; but it was logical, I suppose, for Willeford to come to me.
We have discovered that American critics and American movie audiences have a lot of trouble in understanding our films when we have them exhibited in the United States. To get around this problem we have been providing “program” notes—explaining the films—for the last five or six years. This practice has been rewarding. Not only do we get our “message” across—even when we don't really have one—we have learned that there is a certain snob value that drags Americans into “art” theaters where our films are shown. They can take our program home with them after the show, and our follow-ups reveal that they like to leave the program out on the coffee table for a couple of weeks or so. Their friends who call on them can then see the programs and know that they have seen the current “art film” from Spain or Italy or France or wherever. The French revived this practice after rereading Madame de Scudery, and we in Spain do not claim to be the originators of this practice. The programs have been even more helpful with U.S. film critics on the large daily newspapers. These men see a lot of films, and they have deadlines facing them daily. They can use the explanatory program notes on our films to fill up space—which they do—although they rarely quote the source of their information in their columns. But then, why the hell should they?
This “Preface” is the same sort of idea as the program notes for a new film: that is what Willeford has in mind, I am certain. He is afraid that the critics and readers won't get the message. And it makes a lot of sense. As I recall, some seventy percent of the American reviewers were of the opinion that Camus’ L’Etranger was a mystery novel when it was first issued in American translation.
