Cultural Amnesia (67 page)

There is no point complaining about the working conditions in an industry which must resolve so many powerful forces if it
is ever to produce art. Better to be grateful that it sometimes does. The first credited writer on
Shakespeare in Love
is probably still cursing Tom
Stoppard, whom we bless, because he made the film a delight to listen to. But not even the first credited writer was really the first writer, who was, or were, an uncredited duo: Caryl Brahms and
S. J. Simon, joint authors of
No Bed for Bacon
, a comic squib from the days before Penguins had picture covers. Stoppard never read the book, and probably
still believes that some of the ideas he inherited from the first credited writer (the idea of Shakespeare practising his signature, for example)
were not lifted from it,
along with the basis of the plot. It scarcely matters, because the real first writer of the film was Shakespeare himself, and his co-opted spirit energizes the whole thing:
Shakespeare in Love
really does make language the true hero of a film, just as he made it the true hero of a play. Film scripts are developed properties, and their
written origins can lie far back in time. (Some of the properties are remade over and over: that perfectly shaped late Cold War thriller
No Way Out
, with
Kevin Costner and Sean Young, was built to a verbal template already perfected before World War II.) The confusion arises from the too-persuasive fact that since
The Jazz Singer
films have used words, and those of us who love literature are always looking for the author of them, because the films we love have words we love too.
But if words were as important for the people who make movies as they are for us, those same people would be trying to write books. Filming a documentary in Los Angeles, I met George Peppard at a
charity event and made the fan’s standard mistake of trying to impress him with one of his own memories. In
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, he had the
privilege of delivering one of George Axelrod’s most intricately crafted speeches: three short lines that captured the elegance of Capote’s novella, compressed it into a small space,
and demonstrated why Axelrod was the first-choice Hollywood scriptwriter of his time. Remembering, as I had always remembered, the precision with which Peppard had hit the stresses, I tried it on
him. “I’ve never had champagne before breakfast before. With breakfast, often. But never before before.”

Peppard had forgotten he ever said it. In retrospect, it is hard to blame him. He was in the movie for his face and his
acting, not for his sensitivity to language, which, had he let it rule his head, would later have kept him out of
The A-Team
and its attendant retirement
money. At least, when he got something good to say, he showed that he knew it by saying it well. In
Indecent Proposal
, Robert Redford, in full control of
the movie, delivered a speech that pitiably ripped off one of the most cherishable moments in
Citizen Kane
. The pastiche he permitted himself to deliver was
miserable stuff; he must have known it was; but he was working on the principle that he didn’t have to impress me. He just had to look as if he might impress Demi Moore. In screenplay
terms, the heist made sense. None of this means that the words in movies never count. They can: sometimes a single line can sum up the whole
screenplay, but only if the
screenplay exists as an experience that can be summed up. In
Bullitt
, the central conflict between the characters played by Steve McQueen and Robert Vaughn
takes the whole film to reach the point where it can be epitomized in a single word. McQueen says it. The word is “bullshit.” In the version edited for television in Great Britain,
that one word was snipped out by a blockheaded censor. All you saw was McQueen saying nothing. You could call it a momentary return to silent movies, but it was no return to purity. A good
picture had a tiny but vital piece of its heart taken out of it with a pair of scissors. Years later, when
Bullitt
was on TV again, the contentious word had
been magically restored. So the words do count, after all. They just don’t count the way we would like them to, as if nothing else did. But they don’t in life, either.

What we call a good movie is the product of collective talent. Occasionally it is the product of collective genius. In
Singin’ in the Rain
, the absolute concentration of an entire popular culture at its most powerful, every line of dialogue, and each line of every
lyric, is as good as it could be from one end of the miracle to the other. Both in its book and in its songs, it is the best writing by the best writers for film musicals there have ever been,
and in order for those writers to even exist, Broadway and Tin Pan Alley had to work like factories on a double shift for more than half a century. But not a word would mean a thing if the people
on screen didn’t look the way they do while singing the way they do and dancing the way they do. It is hard to imagine the movie without Arthur Freed, its producer, or Stanley Donen, its
director, or Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who concocted its marvellous story; but it is impossible to imagine it without Gene Kelly. Not even Fred Astaire would have fitted the same spot,
because the character has to be absurdly good-looking. Gene Kelly was an absurdly good-looking man who danced sensationally well, as well as acting well and singing well enough. It took the whole
of America, including all of its modern history, to produce one of him. Because he was there, the cast is there, and the immense confluence of productive effort is there, and all those
unforgettable words are there. As it happens,
Singin’ in the Rain
is the one film that comes close to the writer’s ideal of being written into
existence: the whole thing started from a single line, which in the end even turned out to be the title. It was a writer’s dream: a film
born from a phrase. But Gene
Kelly had to be born first. The right face in the right place at the right time in the story—it means that the movies, in their essence, are still silent. In
Heat
, it has to be Natalie Portman who tries to kill herself, and Al Pacino who discovers what she has done; and all with scarcely a word spoken. The hardest thing for
a literary critic to accept about the movies is that the writing in them is finally beyond analysis, because a large part of the writing is in genetic code. Finally, if the casting is right and
the emotion is unmistakable, it doesn’t matter what the characters say. They can say “Let’s violate his ass” and we will pretend to understand, because we have already
understood.

THOMAS MANN

So enormous at first glance that he might convince us he can safely be read about rather than
read, Thomas Mann (1875–1955) is nevertheless the twentieth-century cultural figure most likely to keep coming back into the student’s life. We begin by thinking we can do without
him, and end by realizing that there is no getting rid of him. In his life and in his art, he incorporated every question about the history of modern Germany, and its place in Europe and the
world. He began as a conservative believer in Germany’s national strength, a belief that was an early source of conflict between himself and his radical elder brother, Heinrich. His
novel
Buddenbrooks
(1901) was the story of a prosperous family that declined
because
it became artistically more
sensitive: still a usefully original emphasis, even today. The student would do better to begin, however, with the brief and easily memorable
Death in
Venice
(1912), and then move on, taking the journey by easy stages, to the monumental novel that set Mann on the path to world fame and the Nobel Prize,
The Magic Mountain
(1924). In the lofty setting of an Alpine TB clinic, the intensity of what does not happen between the young hero Hans Castorp and the bewitching
consumptive Claudia Chauchat raises the subject
of Mann’s sexuality, which remained a nagging question throughout his career. (The quickest answer is that Thomas
Mann the solid paterfamilias also led a fantasy life cast with handsome young men, most of them barely glimpsed in reality: a smile from a waiter could get him started on a novel.) In the
early 1930s, when he had already made his opinion well known that Hitler was a threat to all values, the incoming Nazis would have dearly liked to brand their most conspicuous literary enemy
as a homosexual. Though Mann’s wife, Katya, was a half Jew, Mann himself was all Aryan, but Reinhard Heydrich had correctly identified him as a friend of Jewish culture and had put his
name high on a list of those absentees to be dealt with if they came back to Germany.

Mann, out of the country on a reading tour when Hitler came to power, sensibly kept going. Eventually he went all the
way to America, where, in exile, he completed his seemingly inexorable rise to prominence as Germany’s most exalted cultural figure since Goethe. That he himself thought in those terms
should not be allowed to detract from our estimation of him. Like his snobbery, thin skin, theatrical fastidiousness and insatiable hunger for honours, his towering pride was a functional
element in his ability to focus his creative energy in circumstances that deprived many of his fellow exiles of their capacity to work at all. Even when occupied with such a huge task as his
sequence of novels about Joseph and his brothers, however, he found time to help some of his fellow refugees (Jews included: the idea that Thomas Mann was anti-Semitic is a calumny) and to
record radio broadcasts to Germany about what the Nazis were really up to. His long novel
Doktor Faustus
is often thought of as his final confrontation
with the totalitarian menace. The student is likely to find that its subject matter, the composition of music, yields no clear indication of the contending forces. A possibly more valuable,
and certainly much more immediately enjoyable, late response to the history he had lived through was
The Confessions of Felix Krull
. Against all
expectation, Mann, unshakeably established as the icon and titanic artist, the man of destiny and responsibility, produced,
with his time ticking away, a counter-jumping
con man of a character with no substance except his own vitality.
Felix Krull
is even funny, and therefore should be read early on, to provide the
student with a lifetime reminder that the sometimes ponderous gravitas of Thomas Mann’s career did not necessarily come from within himself, but was imposed on him by an historical
distortion that he would have given a lot to avoid. He would have preferred Germany to stay as it was: but it had already stopped doing that when he was a child.

There are several good biographies, but for readers of German there is nothing to beat Marcel
Reich-Ranicki’s sparkling book about the Mann clan,
Thomas Mann und die Seinen
(1987). Readers of German also have the advantage of a splendid,
lavishly captioned picture book,
Thomas Mann: Ein Leben in Bildern
(1997). Luckily the real treasures among the ancillary writings by and about Thomas
Mann, namely his
Tagebücher
(
Diaries
), have by now nearly all been translated and annotated. Read in
sequence, they are one of the most fascinating ways of following the history of the Third Reich from day to day, and of understanding why, in the end, it was doomed never to prevail. At the
very time of the battle of Stalingrad, Thomas Mann, alive and well in Los Angeles, could make an appointment for a manicure. Post-war German commentators who berated him for never coming home
(both the West and East German governments offered him every enticement) had a point, but he had the answer. He had never left Germany. Germany had left him. The shelves of any bookshop in
Germany today will show the extent to which the nation realized its mistake.