Robin
Richard Lester's Robin is middle-aged and more than a little weary from the Crusades, and he returns home to find Marion a nun and the Sheriff of Nottingham as villianous as ever. Nothing has changed then. A virgin and a villain, not waiting for him, both ambivalent about seeing him again. One gets fucked, willingly enough, and the other gets killed, not altogether unwillingly. It was a good fight after all. As the dying Robin says at the end of the movie, it was a great day. Marion poisons him and and herself, since he will die anyway of his wounds, and since, I suppose, she didn't want to live without him. Even God lost out to Robin, a warrior, first for King Richard and then, in this movie, for the people. I suppose he thought that fighting for Richard was the same as fighting for God, and fighting for the people was the same as fighting for Richard. Did he think about that when he realized that Marion the nun had poisoned herself? The poison acted fast and he spent some time protesting her deceit and then shooting an arrow out the window and telling Little John to bury him and Marion wherever it landed. Romance wins the day, as is only fitting. Robin is a romantic hero, with or without Marion at this side, with or without God, and with or without King Richard. The Sheriff and the people are what Robin needs. Lester's Sheriff is magnificent, the devil himself, charming, cunning, unscrupulous, deadly. Only Robin could make him a fool, and he doesn't in this movie. He's a worthy opponent, but he's the anti-Robin only because of his contempt for the people. That's what separates them, their politics. The Sheriff is an elitist, Robin a populist.
Huck
So is Huck Finn. A populist but not a warrior, or reluctantly so. An underdog himself, one of the people, which is probably why I never warmed up to him until I was in college. A typical American hero, perhaps, a trickster, an outsider, like Robin in that regard, always getting into and out of scrapes, narrow escapes, daring, pluck. The Mississippi River, Sherwood Forest. Huck and his merry men. Outside the law on more than one occasion, but especially in the case of Jim, that for a good cause, arguably not a populist cause, since there was a whole group of the people against it, so what is it then, when one group of the people is set against another? Was Huck really a populist? Or just an ideal of one, as in his way, Robin was too. I'm not sure why I didn't warm up to him as a boy. Maybe it was all just over my head, or maybe Huck wasn't old enough to look up to and not enough like me, or like I wanted to be, to identify with. Only later could I identify with the breaking away from convention, having a different set of values from the mainstream. I was a straight arrow in grade school. Was Robin like that at all? An outsider in that sense? No, outlaws just know they're right. I recall no agonizing inner struggle in Robin. He was clearly wronged, as were those he helped.
Aram
Aram is a dreamer and a trickster, but like Huck, not a hard core outlaw. He sneaks a beautiful white horse that doesn't belong to him out for a ride in the early morning, but he never thinks of stealing it, and mostly he's just interested in listening to the stories and wisdom of his relatives. Life for Aram is an easy going luxurious experience. He makes his own trouble, usually from wanting something, like riding the horse, that he's not supposed to have. Wanting something perfectly understandable and not at all questionable or controversial except in the small world of his family. His faults, usually dishonesty, come from an excess love of life, not from any darker human traits. That makes Saroyan fluff, and hard to read as an adult, the magic lost somewhere along the way. Why was it magic then? Armenians and the Fresno valley were both exotic, for one thing. And Aram was a little more daring and a lot more outgoing than most sensitive, artistically inclined boys, at least in literature. It was easy to admire him, want to be like him, even him. He had the best of both worlds: an American boy with an ethnic family. He always knew the score in the outside world, and they lived in their own little world, but he never held it against them. In fact he had great pride in them. That's fluff too, of course. Glossing over the troubles that first and second generation kids have with their more traditional parents.
Sal
Sal Paradise was no outlaw, nor was Dean in any serious way. Sal grooved on the people. He was a populist, a poet of the people. The people didn't read him, but they didn't really read Whitman either. Sal sang of himself and all America, not to mention Mexico. An outsider, yes, but not an outlaw. A prankster? No, but Dean was. So take Sal and Dean together and you have the dreamer prankster.
football books by a guy whose name I'll look up later,
Wizard of Oz,
orange biographies of presidents,
history books about the civil war.
Texas history,
a bio of Ty Cobb and one of
Lou Gehrig,
My Friend Flicka (read to us by fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Cheney),
Miss Minerva and William Green Hill (totally racist),
Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn,
Hardy Boys.
Some books stay with you because of what was happening when you read them. The Wizard of Oz is like that for me. My youngest brother was born 3 months premature and my mother and he were in the hospital for quite a while. For a very long time after, emeralds were my favorite stone and green my favorite color. I hadn't seen the movie when I read the book. It may be the first book I really got lost in. I'd just turned ten. My dad remembered going to see the movie and how everyone was so amazed when it turned into color. He told the story as if it were one of his favorite memories. He remembered the theater and who he went with. I liked the movie, but it never had quite the same magic as the experience of reading it. In both, I think the friendship among Dorothy and her companions is what stands out.
The Ty Cobb and Lou Gehrig biographies were perfect foils. Cain and Abel. Rich man, poor man. That despite the fact that they sanitized the Cobb story. No racism. As I remember it, he was presented in much the same way Pete Rose would like to be presented. Or so I suspect: PG rated grit. Maybe even PG-17, as long as you leave racism and gambling out of it. The way I read the Cobb biography, as far as how he got along with people, he was maybe a little too sensitive but mostly was just standing up for himself. And as far as how he played the game, he simply used his head and his will to win to turn his average natural ability into greatness. Stealing home? How can you get more brilliant than that? Intimidating the opposition by sharpening your cleats on the dugout steps? It's called hardball. In the Cobb versus Ruth argument, even now not totally irrelevant, I became a life-long Cobb advocate. Ruth and his home runs ruined the game. Baseball should be a game of cunning, not power. If I had my way, the out of the park home run would be banned. A ball hit out of the park in fair territory should be a foul or an out. I tend to think of that famous picture of Cobb sliding into third as a work of art.
Worship of the natural is of course just as American as admiration for grit and cunning, and Ruth's tendency to show up at the ballpark hungover or drunk just made it better. Mantle. Elvis. Bonds. I didn't read the Roy Hobbs story until much later, but in case it doesn't come up again, Robert Redford should thrash himself daily for the rest of his life for allowing himself to hit that home run. The scary part was that there wasn't more of a protest about it.
Adolescence
Saroyan. I first read a Saroyan story in Escapade, the main rival to Playboy in the late fifties. I don't know how old I was. Somewhere between 13 and 16. The story was about hanging out in San Francisco. As far as I can remember, that was the point of it. How cool it was to be in a pool hall and drinking beer in San Francisco. I was convinced. The next Saroyan I read was My Name is Aram, short stories about being a kid in an Armenian family in Fresno. And again, for me at least at the time, that was the point. How cool it was. The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse especially. I also liked the titles, e.g., The Barber Whose Uncle Had His Head Bitten Off By A Circus Tiger. Not sure about the caps on that one. And The Human Comedy and The Time of Your Life were basically the same. The voice carried all of it: American, open, innocent, smart, naive, and trying to be a little funny and a little sad all at once. The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze was different. Political. Not at all optimistic. Bitter. I've probably outgrown Saroyan. I don’t know. I’m afraid to go back now.
Inge, though, is a good, maybe better, case in point. People (is this a straw man? Don’t think so) want Picnic to make a point about small town America, about privilege, outsiders, etc., whereas the genuineness of character and place is what makes the play, or at least the movie. Saroyan of course never thought of himself as an outsider. Nor did Kerouac. Both would interpret Whitman as expressing the mainstream soul of America, thought that’s pretty optimistic isn’t it? Question remains: why did this speak to me? Did I see C as an ideal? Or just want it to be? Wanting to be in a different world of course is common to all reading, or at least all youthful reading. I see fondness for ethnic starting here, but of course that’s everywhere in American lit. What brings the color, the life, is the ethnicity, whereas what has been American is always bland. And that of course contradicts the Whitman strain.
Kerouac On the Road, The Dharma Bums. It may be that friends thought this was my seminal book because it was more fashionable than Saroyan. I pushed it; they helped. How much could you talk about Saroyan? It’s true, however, that I took a road trip of my own while in college. Must have been 1965 since I’d just turned 21. Summer of. August. Took a bus to Chicago, then hitchhiked to San Francisco. Took bus back. Many adventures, recorded elsewhere.
Salinger Nine Stories, Catcher in the Rye. This could have been the one, but friends I hung out with later in college weren’t that interested in neurotic Easterners. Nor was I. Kerouac, metaphorically, was western. B & S tho liked Salinger. B identified with him, his heroes, more than I did.
Roth, Goodbye, Columbus. Same goes for this, in re to East vs. West. Another motif. Another duality motif.
Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat, Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden. I was supposed to get political message of Grapes. Jimmy J., Buddy S., Sharon S., all emphasized that, which I passively went along with. I think I liked Tortilla Flat better, because of local color, and liked Grapes for color. Don’t think I read East until later.
Hemingway The Sun Also Rises. A good one for color and also Western. Probably influenced me for the worse for long time, because of hipness, café society yearnings, as probably did La Dolce Vita, which I saw in high school at the Ideal theater, the one town where blacks could go but only sit in the balcony. Don’t know if there were any black people watching La Dolce Vita that day. Went with Jimmy J., weekday afternoon. The Old Man and the Sea.
Spillane I the Jury, My Gun is Quick. I remember him as if he were Chandler. That’s how I read him, what I liked about him. No doubt unreadable now, but Mike Hammer was my original Marlowe. The informal voice, never embarrassed about anything, city atmosphere.
Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged. In an intro to one of these, she talked about how she never re-wrote or doubted herself, which was first thing to give me pause about Ms. Rand.
John D. MacDonald, Area of Suspicion. Recommended by Sharon S. Brother-in-law she looked up to worshiped it, so to speak. Thought it was okay, but I didn’t get the excitement, still don’t to some extent. About MacDonald in general, except The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything.
Lawrence Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Byatt’s take on Lawrence, or Fredericka’s in Babel Tower, F’s on Lady Chatterley, as analogous to her own situation, marrying the wordless hunk, how one would feel trapped after a while, is bullshit. Some would, of course. And some wouldn’t. That’s the trouble with pedantic prose. Maybe Byatt redeems herself later, but I don’t have patience to find out. For me, it is the basic modern return to the native fantasy. Archetypal in that sense. Easy to identify with either character.
McMurtry Horseman, Pass By. Liked but didn’t love. Read it mainly because my girlfriend's sister knew McMurtry in college. I was always getting hand me down advice about how to be a writer.
No comments:
Post a Comment