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

Nathan pressures Stingo to let him read the novel, but Stingo protests — he promised himself when he started he wouldn’t show it to anyone until it was finished.

NATHAN

You mean you’re terrified someone won’t like it. What’s the worst that can happen? I might discover you can’t write.

Even as a joke, this makes fear cramp my gut. Nathan absconds with the precious pages, then later takes Stingo, Sophie, and a bottle of Champagne on a moonlit jaunt to the Brooklyn Bridge; Stingo is in a panic, like Lillian, awaiting judgment. Nathan climbs a streetlight and offers an elaborate and inflated toast:

NATHAN

On this bridge, where so many great American writers have stood and reached out to give America its voice, looking toward the land that gave us Whitman. . from this span for which Thomas Wolfe and Hart Crane wrote. . we welcome Stingo into that Pantheon of the Gods, whose words are all we know of mortality. To Stingo!

The music rises up, Nathan flings his glass into the Hudson, Stingo’s face is glazed with joy, and I think, Yes! I want to give America its voice, too ! The lure of the beach house is gone — give me the writer’s penury and a can of Spam, if only I can be toasted on the Brooklyn Bridge, reach out and join the Pantheon of the Writing Gods. I’m madly in love, too — not with Stingo or Nathan, not even with the writer or with the writing, but with this kind of affirmation, this promise of glorious and eternal contribution. All I need to do, clearly, is go somewhere to awaken my spirit, to experience love and death (and write), and such riches can be mine.

Unfortunately, Nathan is also a paranoid schizophrenic, and it isn’t long before he becomes suspicious of Stingo’s friendship with Sophie and turns on him:

NATHAN

Baby Southern artiste, you have not fooled me, young Stingo. Since you so graciously allowed me to read your magnum Southern opus, your puling adolescent self-pity for your poor dead mother. .

We’ve been sucker-punched; here is that awful blow, the club in the hand of the thug. At least Dash offered Lillian the renewing, inspiring admonition of her talent; at least John Reed and Eugene stayed in love with Louise. Stingo, like Zhivago before him, is stricken; this is the most painful moment of the movie, for me, this crushing, annihilating pronouncement.

Which is odd, because this movie is not a story about Stingo the young writer, of course, not really — it’s about Sophie, and her horrific life in Poland, in Auschwitz, her struggle to survive in the face of evil. Stingo’s just a subplot, the film’s storyteller of someone else’s more important story. Sophie’s the one who suffers real pain, real loss; the annihilating moment of the movie is intended to be the moment she’s forced to choose between her children, a situation horrific on a scale beyond the ability to imagine. Sophie doesn’t save the world, she isn’t even able to try — her struggle is to save herself, and her children, and she ultimately fails at both. Stingo only tries to save Sophie, and fails. So he’s ultimately unheroic — his writing couldn’t save her, and, really, who would care about that self-absorbed mess of a puling adolescent book when people with real problems everywhere are dying like flies? How ridiculous to just write about your mother dying when you were twelve — who cares? Novels and Nazis; there’s no contest. All Stingo’s writing comes down to is the thing by which he is judged and found worthy of love or disdain. It’s ultimately meaningless, and I can’t forget Nathan’s annihilating blow.

But neither can I forget Sophie’s loving assertion of faith. ( You will move mountains .) Or that moment of Champagne on the Brooklyn Bridge. And perhaps, after the movie, Stingo went on to finish his novel (and we can sort of assume he does, given the Styronic narration), and perhaps it became something very bold. Perhaps, now that he’s had his adventures, become acquainted with love and on intimate terms with death, he went on to move a mountain or two. Perhaps he saved someone, I tell myself.

I tried. I went away, to have adventures; I’d lived a sheltered,landlocked life, too, and maybe I needed that shock and grope we experience when stripped of our context. What the hell had I experienced? What real experience had I even seen? I lived in France for a year, ate the bread and cheese and drank the red wine, hoping the babble of another language would send me scurrying back into my own. I traveled a lot, Italy and Russia and Greece, sat for hours in cafés thinking profound thoughts, pen frozen in hand, as everything ticked away. I berated myself for wasting time, for being a big lazy adverb of a person. I did write stacks of cheery, chatty postcards and voluminous letters, about food and hairstyles and the latest fresco or fountain I’d seen, the latest guy I’d slept with, the magnificent inspiration with which I was constantly being suffused — five hundred words a day was easy, as long as they weren’t intended to be five hundred words of real writing . I tried to meet Sophie or Nathan or revolutionaries, people with bigger stories I could learn from, but it was mostly other American students with backpacks looking for adventures of love and death to write about, too. Everywhere I went I bought blank books — charming French schoolchildren’s notebooks, Florentine hardcovers with bargello or marbled designs — that I was too scared to stain with my puling adolescent self-pity or insignificant observations. I amassed a large collection of them, lugged them around from country to country, and waited for border guards to menacingly ask me what my occupation was and would I write of my impressions . I took good care of those empty, hopeful books, because I hoped one day I’d open them and find them magically full of words.

Because, I realized, I still had no clue where those words came from. Not only did I have nothing to write about, I couldn’t even get past the mechanics; I couldn’t translate real thought out of myself and into the written word and onto the page. I was full up on images of the Writer at Work, the montage of typing and drinking beer, the European wandering. But I wasn’t getting how words — real words, serious, written-down words — take shape to form people and pictures and tales that burst Athena-like out of your brain. Even if I found something to write about , I still had no idea how to make the writing happen . I’d learned all I could about How to Be a Writer; but without the writing, I was nothing. I stopped telling people I was going to be a writer. It was too late. If it hadn’t happened by now, it never would.

What a failure. What a fraud. How would I ever face Julia again?

It’s difficult to capture and depict the internal creative process visually. Movies about painters or dancers can show us how early daubs of paint evolve into Art on the canvas; the dancer straining to stretch at the barre can suddenly break into graceful grand jetés. We can watch the dance; we can gaze at the painting. Movies about musicians might show us Mozart or Beethoven in the messy, cacophonous act of composition, but then we get to hear the magnificent opera or concerto; a sculptor’s lump of clay or block of marble becomes the Pietà or Camille Claudel’s famous foot. Perhaps we can’t touch, but we can still study and appreciate the product, not just the process. We can watch a writer write (or eat a sandwich or stretch or gaze out the window), but you can’t visually depict the inner workings of the writer’s brain, the translation of cerebral electricity to language, the actual transformation of thought, image, theme, emotion, character, into mere words on a page. Thank God movies show us writers doing battle and making love! You can see the product only at a remove — that book on the shelf, that one perfect page of a Lara poem, perhaps a scribbled line or two of text — and you can’t see the process at all, not really.