“I am drawn to the Santa Monica Courthouse the way
some people are drawn to church. It is only a five-minute drive from my house,
five minutes through a time warp back into the concepts of sin and retribution
that were the underpinnings of my Catholic childhood. There in that antiseptic
institutional pile just a few hundred yards from the sand and the sea and the
Bain de Soleil I am exposed to a tapestry of transgressions scarcely imaginable
to those Sisters of Mercy who were the moral arbiters of my youth, a tableau of
sex and money and controlled substances, a world of the snortable, sniffable,
smokable, shootable, and swallowable.”—John Gregory Dunne, “To Live and Die in
L.A.,” in Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne (2006)
John Gregory Dunne, who died seven years ago, was born in
Hartford on this date in 1932. Calvin Trillin once remarked on his good
friend’s “lace-curtain Irish” background. “Boarding school Irish,” the
novelist-screenwriter corrected him.
Dunne’s response reflects a similarly acute class
consciousness that permeated the work of a couple of other writers born in
cities outside New York and Boston, F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O’Hara. But as
the “Quote of the Day” demonstrates, Dunne’s novels and nonfiction is harder
and more unsentimental than these two literary forebears. He might have lapsed from Catholicism, but its tenets about original sin informed how he viewed the
world. Even in sunlit California, the evidence of man’s dark impulses appears—especially
on the crime blotter.
Dunne himself lived in a way all too weighted down
by sin. Fans of himself and wife Joan Didion might have been dismayed by Atlantic contributor Caitlin Flanagan’s recent description of their “regular
discussions of divorce, kicked-down-door fights, sullen silences, nervous
breakdowns, psychiatric treatment, psychotic episodes, heavy drinking, and
amphetamine-taking,” but both frankly discussed in their work all of these episodes.
Yet as a writer—well, Dunne could be forgiven much
of this. Screenwriting work with Didion furnished him with a frequent source of
income, a month of Sundays regaling friends about crass Hollywood—and
the raw material for gritty novels such as True
Confessions, Dutch Shea Jr., Play Land, and Nothing Lost. In these, his instincts as a former journalist came
to the fore, as well as a colloquial, funny, cynical voice best exemplified by
this observation of his: “A writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed
against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material. Resentment sharpens his eye, hostility hones
his killer instinct.''
The title of his last novel, Nothing Lost, aptly described his own influences. Nothing was lost
on Dunne—someone who would go through an old phone directory for local color, or suddenly find an ideal, Dickensian nickname while talking with a friend.
Fourteen years ago, I attended a joint reading by Dunne and Didion at New York's 92nd Street Y. He seemed to enjoy the occasion more than his famously reticent wife. I'm only sorry I didn't have an opportunity to hear him speak more often.Few in our time have surpassed him for chronicling the weavers of our enormous "tapestry of transgressions."
No comments:
Post a Comment