David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

Love is a long, close scrutiny

IN OTTO PREMINGER’S Laura (my wife’s name is still Laurie ), a body is discovered in the apartment of Manhattan socialite Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney). The corpse is at first assumed to be Hunt, since the body was dressed in her clothes and the deceased’s face has been obliterated by a shotgun blast. Homicide detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) has three suspects: Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), a closeted, high society gossip columnist who virtually “created” Laura; Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price, ludicrously miscast as Laura’s hunky fiancé, a rube from Kentucky); and Ann Treadwell (Judith Anderson), Laura’s wealthy, soignée aunt who purchases Shelby to serve, essentially, as her gigolo.

Both as narrator and as actor within the drama, Lydecker overanalyzes the action as it unfolds, often deconstructing the drama before it happens. He’s Writer Man, Language Man, solipsism incarnate. When McPherson arrives and asks him if he’s Lydecker, Lydecker says, “You recognized me. How splendid.” Laura returns. He says to her, in a flashback, “In my case, self-absorption is completely justified. I’ve never discovered any other subject quite so worthy of my attention.” (In other words, he’s an essayist.) Though the film’s charm rides heavily on his wit—“I don’t use a pen; I write with a goose quill dipped in venom”—it must finally reject him, as do so many other narratives that feature introverted narrators contemplating more physically prepossessing specimens: The Great Gatsby , The Good Soldier , Cat and Mouse , A Separate Peace . I love/hate that I’m a writer rather than an action figure, so I compose works that celebrate and then desecrate my word-trapped half-life.

Lydecker is too clever, too too. When Laura introduces herself to him, interrupting his lunch in order to ask him to endorse a product her advertising firm represents, he says, “Either you have been raised in some incredibly rustic community where good manners are unknown, or else you suffer from the common feminine delusion that the mere fact of being a woman exempts you from the rules of civilized conduct, or possibly both.” Carpenter is not enough. Prone to waxing rhapsodic over “lunch, beautiful lunch, day after day,” he doesn’t “know a lot about anything, but I know a little about practically everything.” McPherson is just right, a regular Joe who is both smart and handsome, heterosexual yet clever, verbal but physical, the smallest man in the movie but the only one who lands a punch. It’s 1944: there’s a war on, and the hero can’t be an artist or a playboy. He needs to be someone who can get the job done.

There is, I swear, more smoking in Laura than in any other movie ever made. In Laura’s apartment, perusing her journals and diaries, McPherson builds a veritable pyre of butts. The most interesting thing that happens to the cigarettes in this hilariously Freudian movie (why do you suppose McPherson’s second in command is named McEveety—pronounced “McAvity”?) is that in the last twenty minutes the cigarettes disappear and become guns: the fireworks get bigger. And when Laura inspects with admiration the long shotgun McPherson is holding in his lap, she doesn’t need to ask if he’s happy to see her. Lydecker, of course, can’t control his gun: he kills the wrong girl earlier in the movie (Diane Redfern rather than Laura), and when he later tries to complete the act, even Laura can outmuscle him, causing him to misfire. He’s quickly mowed down by McPherson’s boys. There’s control (verbal), then there’s control (physical). There’s language, then there’s blood.

The people I’ve met who most closely resemble Carpenter are my jock friends from high school: dense galoots unaware that there’s anything to say about anything other than truistic bullshit. In my experience, the Mark McPhersons of the world don’t hide irrationalities beneath their controlled exteriors. Their interiors are equally logic-based (I’m thinking here of Laurie). Lydecker, on the other hand, c’est moi , trapped in his own wildly subjective invention of reality. In this movie, though, I get to banish him, exorcise him, tell myself I’m not him, tell myself a WWII-era fairy tale: she’s rich, he’s smart, she’s beautiful, he’s brave, Mark+Laura4Ever. Theirs is the one uncorrupt relationship in a film otherwise populated by “kept” couples—Lydecker and Laura, Carpenter and Ann. The only way the movie makes any real sense to me is if I understand Lydecker’s behavior to be just a more extreme version of the other characters’ behavior. “We are adrift, alone in the cosmos, wreaking monstrous violence on one another out of frustration and pain,” Woody Allen informs us. No punch line. “As history has proved, love is eternal,” Lydecker says just before raising his gun and attempting, woefully, to murder his beloved.

Love is a long, close scrutiny

FROM THE SOUND of things, the girl who lived next door to me my sophomore year of college was having problems with her boyfriend. One night Rebecca invited me into her room to share a joint and told me she kept a journal, which one day she hoped to turn into a novel. I said Kafka believed that writing in a journal prevented reality from being turned into fiction, but as she pointed out, Kafka did nothing if not write in a journal. I liked the way she threw her head back when she laughed.

The next day I knocked on her door to ask her to join me for lunch. Her door was unlocked; she assumed no one would break into her room, and in any case the door to the dormitory was always locked. Rebecca wasn’t in and neither was her roommate, who had all but moved into her boyfriend’s apartment off campus. Rebecca’s classes weren’t over until late afternoon, I remembered, and I walked in and looked at her clothes and books and notebooks. Sitting down at her desk, I opened the bottom right drawer and came across a photo album, which I paged through only briefly, because underneath the album was a stack of Rebecca’s journals. The one on top seemed pretty current and I started reading: the previous summer, she’d missed Gordon terribly and let herself be used on lonely nights by a Chapel Hill boy whom she had always fantasized about and who stroked her hair in the moonlight and wiped himself off with leaves. When Rebecca returned to Providence in the fall, she knew she wanted romance, and after weeks of fights that went all night and into the morning, she told Gordon she didn’t want to see him anymore.

Me, on the other hand, she wanted to see every waking moment of the day and night. As a stutterer, I was even more ferociously dedicated to literature (the glory of language that was beautiful and written) than other English majors at Brown were, and I could turn up the lit-crit rhetoric pretty damn high. She loved the way I talked (my stutter was endearing); her favorite thing in the world was to listen to me rhapsodize about John Donne. She often played scratchy records on her little turntable (this was 1975), and when I said, “The Jupiter Symphony might be the happiest moment in human history,” her heart skipped a beat. Toward my body she was ambivalent: she was simultaneously attracted and repelled by my strength. She was afraid I might crush her. These are near-verbatim quotes.

I finished reading the journal and put it away, then went back to my room and waited for Rebecca to return from her classes. That night we drove out to Newport, where we walked barefoot in the clammy sand and looked up at the lighted mansions that lined the shore in the distance. “The rich, too, must go to sleep at night,” I said, offering Solomonic wisdom. We stood atop a ragged rock that sat on the shoreline; the full tide splashed at our feet. The moon made halos of our heads. I put my hands through her hair and kissed her lightly on the lips. “Don’t kiss hard,” she said. “I’m afraid I’ll fall.”