Report from the Interior (22 page)

I feel somewhat liberated, having no school to worry about …

O
CTOBER
3:
… things are far from ideal—in fact, downright confusing & often extremely depressing. (I’m writing so small because this is my last piece of paper.)—About 4 or 5 days ago I received a phone call in the middle of the night from my mother and stepfather … They seemed very worried about me—and asked me to come back to Newark for 3 or 4 days to “discuss matters.” I said I would, only to avoid senseless arguing over the phone—and the next morning wrote special delivery that I didn’t want to—at all. Going there, especially for such a short time, would utterly destroy my morale. I haven’t heard from them yet. I don’t want to create bad feelings—but will, if I have to. They seemed to be worried most about the draft.

On the brighter side, they told me that Allen was extremely impressed with the Dupin translations I sent him and would certainly get them published …

I see my old composer friend often. He has been ill. Has no money. I buy him food when I can.

The film business is held up until Monday—a question of money. To find out if it will be backed. How I detest the way the “producer” discusses money … So unctuous, obnoxious. He calls everyone “mon cher Monsieur X”—in the most sickening, ass-licking manner imaginable. I’ve rewritten about
¹
⁄
₃
of the script—have stopped for the time being. The woman, the author, seems pleased. Tonight I will read it to the director. His name is André S., one of the world’s best technicians—did the desert scenes in
Lawrence of Arabia.
This will be his first job as chief director—&, I assure you, this film, if it is made, will be nothing like
Lawrence of Arabia
 … At this point everything is very vague—I’m extremely pessimistic.

Will be able to earn several thousand dollars, however, if it does work out. At present, have another translation job, of a play, for which I’ll get about $100, I guess.

I mention all these money matters only because everything is swirling & I’m on my own—a new feeling.

I am writing the scenario for a short film … a “court-métrage.” I’ll be finished in another 5 days or week … I’ll send you a copy. I’d like to do it in England or Ireland in a few months, somehow. A matter of getting to know some technicians, actors, & raising the money …

Am also writing a series of prose poems, called Revisions, a reflection, so to speak, on my past.

All this makes me sound … very busy. Perhaps I am, but I don’t feel it. Most of the time I’m completely alone—in a profound & terrible solitude. In my little room, very cold, either working or pacing or paralyzed with depression. Walks, very lonely walks. And seeing the film people—all of which strikes me as unreal. I eat next to nothing …

I worry about what will become of me. The draft.

About the most exciting thing I did recently was go to a Communist Party rally—a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut, was the “special attraction.” I’ve never heard such noise, shouting, screaming, singing …

O
CTOBER
9:
In answer to your questions: yes, you’re probably right, if I remain obstinate, my parents, or at least my mother, will come to Paris to try to “pound some sense into my head.”—The balloon seller is away, le patron est toujours là, my composer friend I see frequently, but it is usually the other way around, I helping him rather than he helping me. Peter and Sue are still living in the hotel … Peter, though not happy about the program, is playing along because of the possibility of studying with Nadia Boulanger.—I see Peter and Sue quite frequently—we eat many meals together in a very good and extremely cheap Polish restaurant, and nearly every day, at some time or other, Peter & I play pinball together. There are machines in nearly every café. Also, I have gotten them both reading Beckett. Peter has read
Murphy
and is reading
Watt.
A few weeks ago, as a treat, Peter & Sue played out the chess match between Mr. Endon and Murphy for me.——As far as other things go, I should get word about the financial situation on the film today. I’m somewhat disenchanted … with the whole business. I’ve been keeping busy, though, with my own scenario. It’s grown into a full-length film. I’ve written about 50 pages so far, between
¹
⁄
₃
and ½ finished. Furthermore, I’m quite determined to film it and release it …

O
CTOBER
16:
I have had some unpleasant news. My parents are getting pretty frantic … and had Allen call—to ask me to go to back to America for a few days—“to talk”—saying that I, whose medium is words, have an unfair advantage over them in letters. That doesn’t make much sense to me, but I told him … I would go. About two days later I received a telegram from my mother, saying that Air France has an undated ticket for me. The next day I realized that I don’t have my health card … and wrote to them, asking them to send it. So, I don’t know exactly when I’ll be leaving—in a week or two, I imagine—but I will be leaving at some time. I’m a bit wary. In my letter I made them promise me a round-trip ticket.

Due to all this upset and imminent moving around, my advice to you is not to write to me until you hear from me again. I would probably not get your letter. I will be moving from here soon. When I’ve returned to Paris, I’ll write to you with my new address.

To continue with news—the film was accepted by Paramount, depending on Dalí’s response. To be filmed in March or April. Dalí will be in Paris on the 25th. Still, the whole thing seems a bit ludicrous to me—the script is not so good, at all.

I have finished my scenario … It took me 3 days to type the bloody thing—70 single-spaced pages. I’m not going to try to film it right away … I want to lock myself up and continue to write—everything, ideas, words … coming without pause. Everything is related to everything else. A universe. I find, now, my capacity for work greater than ever before. I have no trouble sitting all day in my room and writing. I have the freedom of loneliness, and somehow a new lucidity which comes, I think, from not having to worry about school …

You’ll hear from me in 2 weeks or so …

You kept your promise and wrote to her on November third, roughly two weeks later. Not from Paris, however, as you had expected to, but from New York, where your visit of “a few days” stretched on for more than three years. You were back in gloomy Morningside Heights, living across the street from a campus that would become a battleground of sit-ins, protests, and police interventions by the end of April, and when similar student uprisings occurred in Paris just a short time after, you understood that no matter where you had spent that year, you would have found yourself in the middle of a violent storm. Five months after the Columbia revolt, F. W. Dupee, a highly respected English professor in the College (you never studied with him, but you knew him by sight and reputation), published a long, carefully detailed article in the
New York Review of Books
about the events of the spring. Dupee was sixty-three years old at the time, and if you prefer to cite his article rather than one of the many other reports written by your contemporaries, it is precisely because he wasn’t a student, because he wasn’t a participant in the mayhem, and therefore he could observe what was happening with a certain wisdom and dispassionate calm. At the same time, you would be hard-pressed to think of anyone who has given a better account of the atmosphere on the Columbia campus in the months before the explosion.

“It was one of Columbia’s virtues,” Dupee wrote, “that it allowed its teachers … plenty of intellectual and social freedom and plenty of good students. It is true that my habitual detachment from campus politics had recently broken down as I saw the students growing more and more desperate under the pressures of the War. The War’s large evil was written small in the misery with which they pondered hour by hour the pitiful little list of
their
options: Vietnam or Canada … or jail! Naturally they were edgy, staying away from classes in droves and staging noisy demonstrations on campus. To all this, the Columbia Administration added further tension. Increasingly capricious in the exercise of its authority, it alternated, in the familiar American way, between the permissive gesture and the threatened crackdown.

“So little unchallenged authority survives anywhere at present, even in the Vatican, that those who think they have authority tend to get ‘hung up’ on it. Many of my fellow teachers shared the Administration’s ‘hang up.’ One of them said to me of the defiant students, ‘As with children, there comes a time when you have to say no to them.’ But the defiant students weren’t children, and saying no meant exposing them to much more than ‘a good spanking.’ The War was doing far more ‘violence’ to the University than they were. Altogether, Columbia (especially the College where I teach and where the big April disturbances began) had been grim throughout the school year. And while nobody—not even the student radicals—expected any such explosion as actually occurred, I would not have been surprised if the year had ended with an epidemic of nervous breakdowns.”

That was the place you returned to, that epicenter of potential nervous breakdowns, and whatever private struggles you might have been going through that year, they cannot be separated from the general sense of doom that hovered in the air around you …

In the letter written on November third, you report that you are back in school, reinstated at Columbia, and that you are about to move into a new apartment (601 West 115th Street) with the modest rent of eighty dollars per month. The person responsible for persuading you to reverse your plans was your Uncle Allen. After your return, you spent several days at his apartment in Manhattan “talking about all kinds of things,” in particular the mess you had made for yourself and your future. You write how good it was to talk to him, praise his intelligence and understanding, and admit that you were wrong to drop out of school—not because school is important to you but because of the war and your opposition to the war, which would have led to much trouble with the draft. By reentering Columbia, you will be able to postpone that battle for another eighteen months.

“I’ve worked out a schedule of 4 courses—2 graduate, 2 undergraduate—only 5 class meetings a week—all on Mon., Tues., & Wed., giving me a four-day weekend. I’ve nearly caught up with the work already…”

N
OVEMBER
17:
To tell the truth, I really don’t mind being here. Uprooting myself so much … in the past few years, I’ve achieved an equilibrium with my environment: indifference, or to put it better, calm—all places are both good & bad; the important thing is to go about the business of living, to fulfill the inner imperatives that keep me going. About America, the place is such a festering infection, a great boil of troubles … it’s quite exciting to be around.

I stay up til about 4 every night. I did more Dupin translations (about 20 all together now), Allen very pleased, giving them to James Wright—our friend—tomorrow. He is editor of the magazine
The
Sixties
 … I hope, in the near future, to do translations of several other poets. I find it a good exercise. Also, revising & expanding my scenario, doing preliminary sketches for other things, fiction … more films. Have been in contact with a filmmaker—now know where to get a cameraman. Must soon start working on raising money. Plus, of course, I’m going to school. So, you see, I’m rather busy …

Read poems of Pierre Reverdy. See films
Hunger
,
Young Törless
 …

N
OVEMBER
23:
About the scenario. I have just gotten hold of a typewriter—a huge machine, rented at the price of $6 a month, and have not yet begun the rewriting … only mental revision, addition. The biggest task is the physical work—the typing—there are so many pages. So I won’t send it in the mail right away—rather, bring a copy with me at X-mas … I’ll also bring the Dupin translations, and translations of 2 other French poets: Jaccottet and du Bouchet. I’m doing a little book of the 3 poets for my French course—translations (about 20 poems of each), a general introductory essay, an article on each poet, and commentaries. How academic! But it’s much better than doing an ordinary paper. I have a novel that I’m about to begin. Have also written some poems, which I will send to you in the next letter. They still need a bit of work.

Bad news: received a letter from the Mexican woman. While she was away from Paris, the director and the producer stole the script—rewrote it completely—making it crude & commercial—and signed a contract with Paramount and Dalí to make a million-dollar film. She has been left in the cold, and, needless to say, so have I. Such greed and chicanery. All behind her back. Dalí, she says, is only concerned with money … Perhaps, for me, it is all for the best—being left independent, to my own devices. But I feel sorry for her.

I don’t want to be pedantic, but in answer to your previous questions … read these 2 books by Marx:
The German Ideology
&
The Economic and Philosophic Mss. of 1844
. Very precise, very illuminating … And don’t let the Fanon book—
The Wretched of the Earth
—slip away.

You remember writing the screenplay, the work you refer to as your
scenario,
which indeed was rather long, close to a hundred single-spaced pages, not so much a movie script as a present-tense narration crammed with minute details about the settings and elaborate descriptions of gestures, pratfalls, and facial expressions, and because it was supposed to be a black-and-white silent film, that is, a film with no dialogue, there were none of the blank spaces one associates with a normal script, and in your memory you can still see what the pages looked like: dense with words, a swarm of black marks with just a few bits of white peeking through, which meant that it was far and away the longest piece of finished work you had ever done. If you are not mistaken, the title of the film was
Returns,
a dream-like philosophical comedy about an old man wandering around a largely uninhabited landscape looking for his boyhood home and encountering various adventures along the way. You remember thinking it was quite good, but that doesn’t mean your judgment was correct, and even if you hoped to have it produced, you never thought of it as anything more than a novice work, an experiment. What astounds you now is how deluded you were in thinking you could mount a production, how ignorant you were about the ways of filmmaking, how ridiculously naïve and foolishly optimistic you were about the whole business. You knew nothing, absolutely nothing, and unless you had been endowed with a small private fortune to squander on the project, the chances of such a film being made by a twenty-year-old boy were zero, absolutely zero. In any case, by the time you had completed the final version, you were already thinking about other things you wanted to write, and when you weren’t busy with those things, you were busy keeping up with your schoolwork. Some months later, you gave the manuscript to a friend who’d said he wanted to read it, and the manuscript was lost. Xerox machines were new in those days, and you hadn’t been able to afford the expense of making copies, and because you had neglected to use a carbon while typing up the final version, the manuscript that disappeared was the only copy in existence. It made you unhappy, of course, but not desperately unhappy, not crushed or despondent, and before long you stopped thinking about it. Close to twenty-five years would go by before you tiptoed into the world of film again.