Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

Lillian doesn’t like what she sees on the page — she tears the sheet from the typewriter’s grip, throws it in a trash can full of crumpled pages, and goes to the window; outside a worn-faced but handsome man is heading up from the ocean’s edge with a bucket, where he has obviously dug them a dinner of clams. The first line of dialogue, I remember so clearly:

LILLIAN

It’s not working again, Dash! It’s falling apart again.

I recall feeling that in-the-closet kind of frustrated panic, and watching Lillian confirm this idea is comforting; writing is effort — it wasn’t just me and my stupidity! — it is work, it’s something you have to build and then have to watch fall apart. It’s a rickety city of warped wooden blocks, a sand castle precariously close to sea. But she’s a Real Writer, so surely there are tricks to get you by, secrets to be learned. Maybe it’s just the effort of that manual typewriter that’s necessary, and then the rest is graceful ease.

I begin taking notes.

Dash — himself the Real Writer Dashiell Hammett, though at thirteen, I have no clue — tells her to put on a sweater and drink some whiskey, he’ll build a fire, and they’ll have dinner. We cut to her sitting before the fire, wearing a lumpy cardigan (I want that sweater), drinking the whiskey, and moping.

DASH

If you really can’t write, maybe you should go find a job. Be a waitress. What about a fireman, huh?

LILLIAN

I’m in trouble with my goddamn play and you don’t care!

He suggests she go to Paris to work on the play, or Spain, there’s a civil war going on there and maybe she can help somebody win it. Maybe she can visit her friend Julia there. She’s barely listening.

LILLIAN

I can’t work here!

DASH

So don’t work here. Don’t work anyplace. It’s not as if you’ve written anything before, you know. Nobody’ll miss you. It’s the perfect time to change jobs.

Okay, I tell myself; so she isn’t a writer, not really, not yet. No wonder she can’t do it. No wonder she’s struggling. Perhaps that’s why it’s so hard for her; she isn’t the Real Thing.

LILLIAN

You’re the one who talked me into being a writer, Dashiell. You’re the one who said stick with it, kid, you got talent, kid! You soft-soaped me with all that crap. Now look at me.

DASH

If you’re going to cry about it, go stand on a rock. Don’t do it around me. If you can’t write here, go someplace else. Give it up. Open a drugstore. Be a coal miner. Only just don’t cry about it.

She certainly should just give it up, I think. Why work so hard? In my mind, of course, that doesn’t mean she can’t still be a writer , at least in name. Just keep telling people you are one.

We retreat to Lillian’s childhood memories of her beloved friend Julia, where Young Lillian is unformed, bewildered and intimidated by this worldly, glamorous girl. They grow up; mature Julia is brilliant, idealistic, wholly committed to social justice and willing to fling herself into a crowd of marauding Fascist thugs. I don’t understand most of her politics or philosophies, but she’s clearly a muse for Lillian, with her lacy blond hair, her passion for an engaged life. There’s clarity and enlightenment in her very blue eyes. She’s damn intoxicating. I fall under her spell, too:

JULIA

Work hard! Take chances! Be very bold!

she calls back to Lillian as she leaves for Oxford, and I realize those are the very three things I’ve never done, I don’t know how to do, and they aren’t really necessary, really, are they? But if Julia wants me to, perhaps, perhaps. . I feel inspired, emboldened. I want to earn Julia’s approval.

Lillian visits her later and mentions she isn’t writing much; Julia urges her to get involved with people who are really “doing something” to change the world, then Lillian will know what to write about.

I will! I will! I make an italicized mental note of this: I will change the world! I feel raring to go. I will take up my mighty pen and do battle! As soon as the movie is over.

Lillian goes to Paris to write, as per Dash’s advice and on his money; she holes up in the charmingly crummy Hotel Jacob, for seven seconds of typing among scattered plates of bread and cheese and fruit and half-drunk glasses of red wine. By now I’m looking hungrily for such images, taking notes on the Writer Writing, so I can see the Working Hard, the Taking Chances, the Being Very Bold. It all looks marvelous. Lillian is wearing a white linen blouse, and I love bread and cheese and fruit, I’m sure I’ll love red wine some day, but it’s seven seconds, that’s all. A tease. So, how do you get from the cheese and the bread to saving the world? And what is she writing? Does that matter?

Lillian sees oppressed workers marching for their rights outside her window, and retreats, frightened — she’s no Julia. Julia is the one doing something; Julia has been fighting those thugs on her mission to stop Mussolini and Hitler, and Lillian finds her beaten to a pulp in a Viennese hospital. Soon afterward, Julia mysteriously disappears, and Lillian decides to go on home.

We’re back to the beach house and the bathrobe. A sandwich, a bottle of beer, and more thrilling but fleeting images of Lillian writing, images I scrutinize for their secrets. Is that how you sit, is that how you bite into bread, is that the pace one types at? (And what the hell is she writing?) She screams in frustration; she hurls the typewriter out the window. Then, a quick later, a proud smile as she types THE END five times at the bottom of a page. It’s an orgasmic fulfillment, an achievement of enormous weight. We never did learn what Lillian was writing, what she found that was so important to write about, but no, it doesn’t matter; the work is done and it took only a minute, even less. The Saving the World can begin.

Now Dash is seated in an Adirondack chair on the porch, reading the pages. Lillian watches him read, and my heart starts to pound. . because it isn’t finished, it isn’t all over. Someone must now read those naked, fuzzy, black-ink words. I remember awaiting my mother’s judgment, the proclamation of victory or defeat. This is horrible. I see Lillian’s anxiety, but I’m sure it will be fine for her — she’s done all the right things, hasn’t she? She’s in a beach house, she’s in Paris, in a chenille robe, in a linen blouse, she used a manual typewriter that demanded firm conviction. And Julia is her dear friend, believes in her, told her to be bold and work hard and take chances, and I’m sure she did, she’s actually written , we watched her do it. So she’s a writer now, right?

Then:

DASH

You want to be a serious writer. That’s what I like, that’s what we work for. I don’t know what happened, but you better tear that up. Not that it’s bad. It’s just not good enough. Not for you.

Again, still no idea what she actually wrote, only that it’s not good enough . I would be devastated, I’d fall apart, dissolve into tears at such lacerating dismissal, and I’m sure now she’ll walk away, become a fireman or a waitress. But I’m stunned by Lillian’s impassive face, by the fact that she doesn’t crumple; I’m even more stunned by the immediate return to work , by the black-and-red typewriter ribbon sent on its jerking, scrolling way, by the late-night and early-morning attacks on the keys intercut with more walks on the beach and chopping an onion and gazing at the ocean through a clapboard window. . then back at the desk, always, back to work. I’m amazed by this; it rivals, in my mind, Julia’s foolhardy courage and her subsequent beating. I don’t understand how Lillian has survived Dash’s brutal attack; I don’t get her willingness to hurl herself back into a crowd of thugs.