Robert Pirsig - Lila. An Inquiry Into Morals

Other subjects come up but they don’t seem to be quite to the point. Eventually Redford looks at his wrist watch.

Well, I guess there are no big problems at this point, he says, I’ll go ahead and call the writer and see where he’s at on this.

He sits forward. I’m really tired, he says, and there’s no point in romancing you all night about all this… I’ll call the others and then, sometime after that, our agency will get in touch with you.

He gets up, goes to the hall closet and, by himself, gets his cap and coat. At the door he says, Where are you living now?

In my boat. Down on the river.

Oh. Is there any way of reaching you there? No, I’ll be gone tomorrow. I’m trying to get south before it freezes around here.

Well, we’ll contact you through your lawyer then. At the door he adjusts his hat and glasses and jacket. He says goodbye, turns and moves down the corridor with a tense springiness, like a skier or a cat — or like the Sundance Kid — and vanishes around a corner.

Then the corridor becomes just another hotel corridor again.

Phædrus stood in the hotel corridor for a long time without thinking about where he was. After a while he turned back, went into the room and closed the door.

He looked at the empty couch where Redford had been sitting. It seemed like some of his presence was still there but you couldn’t talk to it any more.

He felt like pouring himself a drink… but there wasn’t any… He should call Room Service.

But he didn’t really want a drink. Not enough to go to all that trouble. He didn’t know what he wanted.

A wave of anticlimax hit. All the tension and energy that had been built up for this meeting suddenly had nowhere to go. He felt like going out and running down the corridors. Maybe a long walk through the streets again until the tension wore off… but his legs already ached from the long walk getting here.

He went to the balcony door. On the other side of the glass was the same fantastic night skyline.

It looked more stale now.

The trouble with paying high prices for places with a view like this was that the first time it’s wonderful but it gets more and more static until you hardly notice it’s there. The boat was better, where the view keeps changing all the time.

He could see from the blurring of the skyline lights that rain had started. The balcony wasn’t wet, however. The wind must be blowing the rain away from this side of the building.

When he cracked open the door a howling rush of cold air poured through. He opened the crack wide enough to pass through, then stepped out onto the balcony and closed the door again.

What a wild wind there was out here. Vertical wind. Crazy. The whole night skyline was blurring and clearing with squalls of rain. He could only see distant parts of the park from the way the lights stopped at its edges.

Disconnected. All this seemed to be happening to somebody else. There was excitement of a kind; tension, confusion; but no real emotional involvement. He felt like some galvanometer that had been zapped and now the needle was jammed stuck, unable to register.

Culture shock. He guessed that’s what it was. This schizy feeling was culture shock. You enter another world where all the values are so different and switched around and upside-down you can’t possibly adapt to them — and culture shock hits.

He was really on top of the world now, he supposed… at the opposite end of some kind of incredible social spectrum from where he had been twenty years ago, bouncing through South Chicago in that hard-sprung police truck on the way to the insane asylum.

Was it any better now?

He honestly didn’t know. He remembered two things about that crazy ride: the first was that cop who grinned at him all the way, meaning We’re going to fix you good, boy  — as if the cop really enjoyed it. The second was the crazy understanding that he was in two worlds at the same time, and in one world he was at the rock bottom of the whole human heap and in the other world he was at the absolute top. How could you make any sense out of that? What could you do? The cop didn’t matter, but what about this last?

Now here it was all upside-down again. Now he was at some kind of top of that first world, but where was he in the second? At the bottom? He couldn’t say. He had the feeling that if he sold the film rights big things were going to happen in that first world, but he was going to take a long slide to somewhere in the second. He’d expected that feeling might go away tonight, but it didn’t.

There was a something wrong — something wrong -something wrong feeling like a buzzer in the back of his mind. It wasn’t just his imagination. It was real. It was a primary perception of negative quality. First you sense the high or low quality, then you find reasons for it, not the other way around. Here he was, sensing it.

The New Yorker critic George Steiner had warned Phædrus. At least you don’t have to worry about a film, he’d said. The book seemed too intellectual for anyone to try it. Then he’d told Steiner his book was already under option to 20th Century-Fox. Steiner’s eyes widened and then turned away.

What’s the matter with that? Phædrus had asked.

You’re going to be very sorry, Steiner had said.

Later a Manhattan film attorney had said, Look, if you love your book my advice is don’t sell it to Hollywood.

What are you talking about?

The attorney looked at him sharply. I know what I’m talking about. Year after year I get people in here who don’t understand films and I tell them just what I told you. They don’t believe me. Then they come back. They want to sue. I tell them, Look! I told you! You signed your rights away. Now you’re going to have to live with it! So I’m telling you now, the attorney said, if you love your book don’t sell it to Hollywood.

What he was talking about was artistic control. In a stage play there’s a tradition that nobody changes the playwright’s lines without his permission, but in films it’s almost standard to completely trash an author’s work without even bothering to mention it to him. After all, he sold it, didn’t he?

Tonight Phædrus had hoped to get a contradiction of all this from Redford, but it was just the opposite. Redford had confirmed it. He agreed with Steiner and the attorney.

So it looked as though this meeting wasn’t as important as Phædrus had expected. The celebrity effect had created all the excitement, not the deal itself. He’d told Redford, You’ve got it, but nothing was settled until the contract was signed. There was still a price to settle on and that meant there was still room to back off.

He felt a real sense of let-down. Maybe it was just normal anticlimax, maybe Redford was just tired from his flight in but whatever he was really thinking about, Phædrus didn’t think he’d heard it tonight, or at least not all of it, or even very much of it. It was always exciting to see a famous person like that up close but when he subtracted that excitement he saw that Redford was just following a standard format.

The whole thing had a lack of freshness about it. Redford had a reputation for honest dealing but he operated in the middle of an industry with the opposite reputation. No one was expected to say what they really thought. Deals are supposed to follow a format. Redford’s honesty wasn’t triumphing over this format or even arguing with it.

There was no sense of sharing. It was more like selling a house, where the prospective owners don’t feel any obligation to tell you what color they are going to paint it or how they are going to arrange the furniture. That’s the Hollywood format. Redford gave the feeling he’d been through so many of these bargaining sessions it was a kind of ritual for him. He’d done it a dozen times before, at least. He was just operating out of old patterns.