Kill the Pig

My standard and no doubt obnoxious line about William Golding's 1954 novel Lord of the Flies is that next to Richard Hughes's similarly themed A High Wind in Jamaica from 1929, it's kind of a pile of garbage. Apart from Golding's prose being lugubrious and Hughes's decidedly not being that, what it comes down to is using something that is observable as fuel for an allegory and fueling something that is observable with genuine understanding. Lord of the Flies does the former. I read both novels as an adult, and there's really no contest, although when it comes to film versions of both novels all a cinematic adaptation of Lord of the Flies needs to do to top Alexander Mackendrick's gutless take on A High Wind in Jamaica from 1965 is keep its head down and not make any trouble. Of course, the Hughes novel is a nearly forgotten obscurity, and therefore more vulnerable to the kind of vivisection that's meant to discover the secret of popularity, but vulnerable or not the film we're left with is a travesty. Lord of the Flies, on the other hand, is an established classic of the Western world, and consequently much harder to monkey with. After a bit of a false start immediately following its publication, it had reached this status by 1963 when Peter Brook first turned it into a film.

That film has just been released on Blu-ray by Criterion, and I had the chance to watch it last night. Through this film, my dislike of Golding's novel has transcended into something close to ambivalence. I mean, the basic premise, that of plane carrying a group of English (this is important) schoolboys crashing on a deserted island and leaving the children, who are the only survivors, to descend into savagery, is pretty much a can't miss idea. But while A High Wind in Jamaica is about the natural, human, casual, and ignorant cruelty of children, Lord of the Flies is about "We British think we're so great, well think again, bub." This is decidedly less interesting, to me anyway. And being this, a story with a point, or message, shortcuts must be made to get there, so that what's compelling about the idea is given short shrift. Furthermore, Peter Brook and his crew seem to have approached the material with the thought that somebody was bound to make this movie, so it might as well be them. Much of the film lacks imagination, in my view, and this is surprising given Brook's reputation -- my only other experience of Brook's work is his film adaptation of the Peter Weiss play Marat/Sade, which is not the kind of film you make because you crave mainstream acceptance. Not that Lord of the Flies does feel like that kind of film, but it's also not going to allow you to miss its point. To begin with, composer Raymond Leppard's score has essentially two modes: lazily martial, in a "our trumpets are satirical" sort of way, and lazily tribal, in a "our drums are foreboding" sense. I can't remember, Golding's novel feeling hazy to me even as I read it, if Golding hammered on this particular nail so ruthlessly, but the withering simplicity of all this makes me wonder if it to some degree explains the somewhat curious fact that this rather horrifying story has been a required-reading perennial in schools for the past half century.

In any case, the premise being can't-miss and all, Brook's unwillingness to break away from That Which Needs to Be Said makes much of the movie feel like a formality. In the first third of the film, a group of schoolboys led by Jack (Tom Chapin), whose nasty charisma will lead most of the kids into savagery earlier than they might otherwise have, go off to kill a pig for food. The subsequent eating scene is simply ridiculous, with Brook piping in loud chomping and sucking sounds that never convince that they could possibly be coming from these images -- even if they did, it's too early going for me to accept that killing for food, and for survival, adequately tips off the horrors to come. At the same time, there is something about the loose style Brook employs that allows for glimpses of natural and naturally weird child behavior, and the loony ways a child off to the edges of the action will start twisting his body and making odd faces, just for something to do. Similarly, if their is a casting triumph here, it's Hugh Edwards as the notoriously ill-fated Piggy. As seemingly untrained as everybody else in the cast, Edwards is nevertheless able to naturally be himself, and his brief monologue about the facts behind the name of Camberly, his hometown, is both hilarious and so well-written that it feels like Brook just planted the camera down and told Edwards to tell his Camberly story. Which maybe he did.

Obviously, this film, and Golding's novel, wouldn't be so frustrating if I thought it was a complete wash. One strong memory I have from the novel is of a sequence involving one boy walking through the forest and coming upon the severed head of a pig stuck on a post and covered with flies -- I thought it was the most effective bit, and Brook vividly translates it here. A greater success is nighttime beach bonfire, with the Jack-led children running wild and throwing fire and losing their heads in frenzy that will culminate in the story's first death. In the film, it's pretty blood-curdling, and it seems clear to me that Brook, as a film director rather than a herder of children, is most at home when simulating chaos. For a brief stretch, his Lord of the Flies feels as Satanic as its title implies. But the allegory-above-all philosophy is too overwhelming, and is perhaps best illustrated by the choice (originally, I've been reminded, from Golding) to make some of the children -- the bad ones -- eventually wear tribal war paint. The belief seems to be that native tribes that do paint their faces or bodies do so only because, well, they're natives, and it seems like the thing to do. As if there was no cultural significance to the colors or patterns they choose. So that when a group of white English kids find themselves free of adult supervision, plus there's trees everywhere, in a matter of days they're painting their bodies, because of savagery. It's a meaningless nothing of a symbol that thinks it means everything in the world.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 15: An Orchid Thus Come By

Glancing over the contents page of my copy of John Collier's Fancies and Goodnights is kind of depressing. It's dotted with hashmarks, indicating which stories I've read so far. Not counting what I've read over the last couple of days, there are a total of eighteen hash marks, which is over half the stories. And what do I remember from all that reading? I remember a reasonable amount of "Evening Primrose", and the ending of "Witchs Money", and what kind of story "Back for Christmas" is...and that's about it. Nothing whatsoever remains in my brain of "Squirrels Have Bright Eyes" or "Thus I Refute Beelzy" or "A Touch of Nutmeg Makes It" or "Wet Saturday" or "Another American Tragedy" or "Without Benefit of Galsworthy". I do have a vague sense of two other stories that I'm pretty sure were by Collier, but I don't remember what they were called. I think one might have been "Bottle Party" and the other "Little Memento", but I don't know for sure.
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I read all those stories many years ago, so I suppose it's not so strange that my memory can't hold onto all of them. But it's depressing -- and it's only so depressing, because I can, you know, just read the stories again if I want to, which I do -- because Collier is one of those writers that I'd heard about for years, first from Harlan Ellison, and then as I researched the name and tried to find Collier's books, from a host of other writers who praised the man almost as highly as Ellison himself, if not more. And as big a pain in the ass as Ellison can be, anyone who's read him knows that when he recommends other writers, he recommends the shit out of them, to the point where you almost can't sleep until you've at least gotten a taste (see also: Gerald Kersh). Then, when you finally track down some of the writer's work, it's like you've just won something. You're not only about to read something really good, but considering how hard you've worked to get to this point, you're going to be in on something, as well. Pretty soon, the number of people who've read John Collier and who are still alive will swell by one. It'll be Harlan Ellison, maybe three other guys, and you.

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So, having ascended to that magical sphere as it pertains to John Collier, it's kind of a pisser that I can't remember very much of what I've read. I do know he's good, though. I know this despite the almost inevitable twinge of disappointment that follows the completion of the sort of quest described above, a twinge I do remember feeling when I first started reading Collier. Because of course I expected him to be the most unusual and brilliant writer I'd ever read -- if you don't have unreasonably high expectations for this sort of thing, you'd give up in a week. One of the reasons I think I remember "Evening Primrose" better than many of the other Collier stories I've read is because that was the first one that I finished without any of that twinge remaining ("Witchs Money", too), though it would return in a little while.

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The main reason that I know John Collier is good is because of a book called His Monkey Wife, or Married to a Chimp. This is one of Collier's novels -- his first one, in fact -- and I think that title speaks for itself. That title is what the book is about, as a matter of fact, and it's a stunning piece of work. His Monkey Wife is basically a send-up of English, upper-class, early 20th Century romance novels, where one member of the loving couple is from some class below said upper-class. In the case of Collier's novel, that class is the ape class. Except the novel isn't quite the goof that description implies. It's also weirdly dark, beautifully written, discomfiting, and you almost can't quite believe the damn thing ever got published. My edition of Fancies and Goodnights, by the way, is part of an old Time/Life series, and in the preface, some chowderhead who identifies himself as "The Editors" calls His Monkey Wife "not very remarkable", outside of its basic premise. He can't have actually read the book, or he'd never say that. Then again, Collier himself wrote a review of the book -- privately, for himself only -- in which he said of the author of His Monkey Wife:

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From the classical standpoint, his consciousness is too crammed for harmony, too neurasthenic for proportion, and his humour is too hysterical, too greedy and too crude.

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Oh, what does he know*.

As a writer of short horror fiction, the best, and laziest, way I can think to describe Collier is as a cross between P. G. Wodehouse and Roald Dahl. Dahl's fiction for adults was often incredibly nasty and dark (and, while I'm at it, pretty terrific, too), while Wodehouse's stories were all light and froth, and, most importantly, lifted up by a mastery of the language, an ability to show that the English language was the greatest comedic tool ever devised. Collier possessed Wodehouse's skill with words, and Dahl's sardonic mean streak. At its best, it's an awfully nice marriage..

The first story I read is called "Bird of Prey", and it tells the story of Jack and Edna Spalding, and of their parrot Tom. One day, Tom is attacked by something; he's not killed, but Jack and Edna find him sprawled on their front porch, a clump of feathers ripped away. Edna believes a cat did it, but Jack saw something else:
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He went to the rail and looked out and around, but there was no sign of a cat. Of course, it was not likely there would be. Jack was more interested in the fact that the swaying vines were spread over a length of several feet, which seemed a very great deal of disturbance for a fleeing cat to make. Finally he looked up, and he thought he saw a bird -- a big bird, an enormous bird -- flying away. He just caught a glimpse of it as it crossed the brightness of the moon.

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And that giant bird didn't exactly attack Tom, either. What it did do, and what comes of it, parallels, at least thematically, a particular rift in the Spalding's marriage, a rift that is ultimately exploited in an ending that is both horrible, cruel, detached and bizarre. This story is only ten pages long, and to quote more -- to quote the best of it -- would be to spoil it, but there is a particular description of action, thrown away in the middle of a sentence, in the last paragraph that I've read over several times, because its very vagueness is so awful. I sit there imagining what Collier could mean, while Collier sits back chuckling at what people are willing to do to each other, and themselves.

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As good as "Bird of Prey" is, the other story I read, "Green Thoughts", is something of a small masterpiece, and is closer in style and effect to His Monkey Wife than any other Collier story I've read (at least that I can remember). Our hero is Mr. Mannering, an amateur but enthusiastic botanist, who, at the story's beginning, receives a very special flower in the mail:

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The orchid had been sent among the effects of his friend, who had come by a lonely and mysterious death on the expedition. Or he had brought it among a miscellaneous lot, "unclassified," at the close of the auction. I forget which it was, but it was certainly one or the other of these. Moreover, even in its dry, brown, dormant root state, this orchid had a certain sinister quality. It looked, with its bunched and ragged projections, like a rigid yet a gripping hand, hideously gnarled, or a grotesquely whiskered, threatening face. Would you not have known what sort of an orchid it was?

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Mr. Mannering did not know. He read nothing catalogues and books on fertilizers. He unpacked the new acquisition with a solicitude absurd enough in any case toward any orchid, or primrose either, in the twentieth century, but idiotic, foolhardy, doom-eager, when extended to an orchid thus come by, in appearance thus.

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I've quoted the beginning of "Green Thoughts" so extensively because how often, when reading horror fiction, do you get to revel in the language itself, to be so grabbed by the words, as Collier allows you to be here? I wasn't even sure I was going to read "Green Thoughts" -- technically, I'd read enough other Collier stories to get by tonight -- but when I read about Mannering's particular doom-eagerness when faced with an orchid thus come by, I was set. I thought, "This is my story."

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The orchid first takes out a cat belonging to Mr. Mannering's Cousin Jane, with whom he lives, and then Cousin Jane herself. And then -- I'll just tell you -- Mr. Mannering himself. Each are consumed, though not killed, and while much of their bodies are subsumed into the giant plant, their heads bloom again, fully formed, as flowers. And that's actually the story -- it's not about a monster plant rampaging through Torquay (yep, Torquay), but rather what would it be like to find yourself turned, literally, into a vegetable? Mr. Mannering handles it pretty well, initially, with some exceptions:

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The impossibility of locomotion, for example, did not trouble him in the least, or even the absence of body and limbs, any more than the cessation of that stream of rashers and tea, biscuits and glasses of milk, luncheon cutlets, and so forth, that had flowed in at his mouth for over fifty years, but which had now been reversed to a gentle, continuous, scarcely noticeable feeding from below. But the physical is not all. Although no longer a man, he was still Mr. Mannering. And from this anomaly, as soon as his scientific interest had subsided, issued a host of woes, mainly subjective in origin.

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Eventually, a more objective woe will appear, in the form of Mannering's miserable no-good nephew, who takes legal possession of Mannering's home and all his possessions, including his greenhouse, in which he makes a fairly shocking discovery. And this strange and amusing story about death, rebirth and plants turns very cold-blooded and distanced. As in "Bird of Prey", what the reader becomes witness to is made all the more unhappy and unpleasant because Collier holds us back, with him, watching it from a hill. Even the words don't seem to care that much. They're interested, of course, but that's hardly the same thing.

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Thinking about it now, I'm reminded of another masterpiece of this kind of writing: Richard Hughes's A High Wind Jamaica. That brilliant novel could be reasonably termed a horror story, as well (if we're going to expand the definition to include Lord of the Flies, then throw Hughes's novel in there, too: it's twice as frightening, and ten times better). Both Hughes and Collier are on that hill with us, watching the nightmare unfold, and they show us where to look, and tell us what it all looks like, so that we may see it more clearly. They're smiling, but we're not. Except when we are.

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*Information on Collier's self-review is taken from Paul Theroux's introduction to His Monkey Wife, published by Robin Clark Books.

Writers as Actors

Actors, it would seem, very often want to be doing something else with their lives. The old joke is "What I really want to do is direct", but often what they want to also do is write, and they don't necessarily want to write screenplays. The actor-as-writer is not really a recent phenomenon -- Shakespeare was an actor, after all -- and even the idea of a movie star writing novels stretches back several decades. Robert Shaw was a respected novelist and playwright, as was Peter Ustinov. Both were prolific enough as writers, in fact, that they could reasonably be said to be both things equally.
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But being both things at once -- the modern version of being a true Renaissance Man -- is kind of a dying art (Stephen Fry, with, I think, five ten books under his belt, is the only guy I can think of who can be said to fit in the Ustinov and Shaw mold) and nowadays we have a lot of actors who dabble in writing. The most prominent of these would probably have to be Ethan Hawke, who has written two novels that apparently nobody likes (I haven't read either, and never will). Other than that, you have Hugh Laurie, whose one novel, The Gun Seller, I have read (and it was darn good, too, until the American Military showed up to play the role of "cartoonishly evil bad guys"), or Michael Palin (one novel also, called Hemingway's Chair, which I plan on reading soon), or fellow Python Eric Idle (two novels, actually, one hard-to-find novel from the 70s called Hello, Sailor, and another, Douglas Adams-esque, except supposedly far less good, SF comedy called The Road to Mars), or David Thewlis (one novel, called The Late Hector Kipling). One day, I'd like to gather up a bunch of these novels, the ones I haven't read (well, except for Hawke's), and plunge in. Maybe write them up as a kind of series. That might be interesting.

But anyway, what about the reverse? What about when writers choose to be actors? It doesn't happen often, because writers tend to be content, if that's really the word I want, with being writers. Still, it does happen, and the results are often surprising, or interesting, or maybe bad and weird. It depends.

First off, I'm going to cheat, because look below:

That still is from Alexander Mackendrick's A High Wind in Jamaica, and the blonde-headed lad is Martin Amis, world-famous and highly-respected as the author of Time's Arrow, Money, London Fields and many others. Obviously, when Amis did this film, he wasn't in the position of moving from the role of novelist to actor, but I've been a fan of Amis for quite a long time, and when I first heard that, as a boy, Amis appeared as an actor in this film, I became extremely interested. I didn't see the film until a year or so ago, after I'd read the source novel by Richard Hughes. The novel is a chilling masterpiece, and the film is, well, not. And Amis, as I remember, has almost nothing to say in the film, even though in the novel his character was pretty chatty. The film is a wash, really, and even if you're a fan of Amis, the novelty of the idea of seeing him in a film isn't actually heightened by actually seeing the film.

Above we have an image from Werner Herzog's remake of Nosferatu. To the right of Klaus Kinski is Roland Topor as Renfield. Topor isn't exactly a household name, but he was, among other things, a Kafka-esque, surrealist writer whose most famous novel, The Tenant, was adapted by Roman Polanski as The Roman Polanski Story (better known as The Tenant). Herzog says he cast Topor because of his laugh, but unfortunately all of Topor's dialogue had to be re-dubbed by another actor (the reasons for this escape me) so you don't even get to hear it. And as much as I love Herzog's film, Topor has always seemed like the weak link to me (well, Topor and whoever dubbed his voice), because he plays Renfield as a scampering cartoon loony, with none of the insectile creepiness that Kinski brings to his role. It always felt like a bad match, to me.

The way I remember hearing it, John Boorman agreed to cast James Dickey in the role of Sheriff Bullard in the film version of Dickey's Deliverance pretty much just to get Dickey off his back. Dickey was notoriously difficult to work with, or drink with, or sit in the same room with, or be a family member of, and it was no less difficult for the cast and crew to have him wandering around, insulting people, lying to them, and then slapping them on the back later as though they were old pals. But Boorman -- and anyone who cares to can correct me if I'm wrong in the comments -- achieved some sort of peace by casting Dickey as the sheriff who, in the last section of the film, suspects that our heroes are hiding something from him. And as it happens, Dickey is terrific in the role, the one roaring success of this kind of writer-to-actor leap I can think of. He brings a great authenticity and sharpness to a small role, and his performance is one of the most memorable in the whole film.

And then Salman Rushdie played himself in Bridget Jones' Diary. I don't remember anything about the film, or even what Rushdie did or said in his small amount of screen time, but I do remember thinking, "Well. That's kind of odd, isn't it?"

So who am I forgetting? Any other writers who made a brief foray into film acting that deserve a mention here? Let me know.

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Update:

Where do I begin? In the comments section, many, many, many other examples of writers-as-actors have been pointed out to me, many I simply didn't think of, others I had no idea about. And now I feel mighty embarrassed, but oh well. I asked, didn't I? So, from the likes of Marilyn (who's probably mad at me), Mariana, Greg F., Pat, ND, here's some more...

Sam Shepard in a whole shitload of movies, most notably The Right Stuff and Days of Heaven

Norman Mailer in Ragtime, as well as some of his own films

Marshal McLuhan in Annie Hall

Robert Benchley in a whole lot of stuff

While I'm at it, Peter Benchley in Jaws

Paul Auster in The Music of Chance (that one was mine!!)

Stephen King in Creepshow, Sleepwalkers, Knightriders, Creepshow 2, and etc.

Truman Capote in Murder by Death

William S. Burroughs in Drugstore Cowboy

Colin McCabe in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid

Jerzy Kosinsky in Reds

George Plimpton in Reds, Good Will Hunting, and etc.

Antonin Artaud in The Passion of Joan of Arc

And, it just occurred to me, Saul Bellow and Susan Sontag are both in Zelig.