Quote of the Day (William Cowper, on the Perils of ‘The Castaway’)

“No voice divine the storm allay'd,
         No light propitious shone;
When, snatch'd from all effectual aid,
         We perish'd, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelm'd in deeper gulfs than he.”—English poet William Cowper (1731–1800), “The Castaway” (1799)
 
I know what you’re thinking: that picture sure doesn’t look like any William I know. And you are right.
 
A week ago, after not encountering it since it first played in theaters, I watched the 1990s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, directed by Ang Lee.
 
It includes this scene with Kate Winslet, in one of her earliest screen roles, as Marianne Dashwood—who, in a display of her sensitive, romantic, at times overwrought, temperament, reads from this Cowper poem—an embodiment of her emotional crisis of the moment. (Austen, it turns out, greatly admired Cowper's work.)

Flashback, March 1961: Richard Yates’ Searing Suburban Satire, ‘Revolutionary Road,’ Published

Even though it depicted a postwar trend—Americans’ adjustment to suburban life—Revolutionary Road, published in March 1961 by Little, Brown & Company, harked back to earlier sources of inspiration. 

The attractive couple at its heart—Frank and April Wheeler, in their late 20s with a pair of children, about to plunge into infidelity, alcohol abuse and despair—are reminiscent of the troubled married duo Dick and Nicole Diver of Tender Is the Night, and its realistic, irony-tinged style owes much to that novel’s creator, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

At the same time, critics hailed Richard Yates for his unique, melancholy recounting of the dream that beckons to the Wheelers: chucking their humdrum, materialistic lives in Connecticut for a more low-cost, bohemian and creative existence in Paris—the same aspirations that lured Fitzgerald and wife Zelda to become expatriates in the 1920s.

Some critics have felt that Yates never equaled his achievement in this first novel of his. But the same might be said of Orson Welles with Citizen Kane.

(As I mentioned in a blog post from 12 years ago, by no means do I share this dismissive view of Yates’ other fiction. Whether in his short stories or novels, he is, I believe, our postwar bard of disenchantment.)

“The emotions of fiction are autobiographical,” Yates once observed to friend Grace Schulman, “but the facts never are.” That applied to Revolutionary Road. Although the novel was not strictly speaking a roman a clef, it reflected Yates’ frustration in simultaneously trying to write fiction, stay financially solvent, and maintain a marriage crumbling under the strain of his affairs and alcoholism.

The wonder is that his portrait of Frank is shot through less with self-pity than with withering scorn for his self-delusions and failures of will. Frank works in New York for ''the dullest job you can possibly imagine,'' with the New York firm Knox Business Machines, but he thinks he’s made for another life “as an intense, nicotine-stained, Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man.”

Having returned in the early 1950s from just the kind of expatriate life Frank desires, Yates saw the dangers lurking for the intellectually pretentious: someone culturally aware enough to speak of the latest philosophical fashion, but all too willing to surrender to the all-too-easy office girl, to the liquor that takes the edge off the day, and to the better-paying job supposedly needed to keep up with the Joneses in the new suburban nirvanas cropping up around the country. Or, as Yates sums up Frank’s thinking:

“Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstances might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.”

Unfortunately, Frank’s existence has been bound up in forgetting who he is. He welcomes “being contaminated” as his means of avoiding discovering whether he really is talented and ambitious enough to make a career of writing fiction.

In the book’s opening scene, April realizes the limits of her creative talents far more quickly and painfully. Despite her good looks (“a tall, ash blonde with a patrician beauty that no amount of amateur lighting could disguise”), she flops even in the “little theater” amateur production mounted in their town. The aftermath of that disaster—a bitter post-performance argument on the drive home with Frank—prefigures the volatile summer that follows.

At least April has the energy to plan for a more fulfilling life, as well as a touching if absurd faith that Frank is gifted and dogged enough to achieve it. But, as they come face to face with the collapse of their hopes, Yates also presents her with the novel’s most pungent, memorable line: “No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying.”

The address that becomes the scene of the Wheelers’ undoing—Revolutionary Road—is ironic, implying that Wheelers are unequal to the spirit of independence that founded the nation and that they seek to embody in their quest for the creative life.

“Pessimistic,” “depressing,” “bleak”—all adjectives that aptly describe Yates’ work without adequately conveying the power of it. For that, it might be best to absorb passages like the following, where Yates evokes the deadening routine experienced by the commuters who stream daily into the city:

“How small and neat and comically serious the other men looked, with their grey-flecked crew cuts and their button-down collars and their brisk little hurrying feet! There were endless desperate swarms of them, hurrying through the station and the streets, and an hour from now they would all be still. The waiting mid-town office buildings would swallow them up and contain them, so that to stand in one tower looking out across the canyon to another would be to inspect a great silent insectarium displaying hundreds of tiny pink men in white shirts, forever shifting papers and frowning into telephones, acting out their passionate little dumb show under the supreme indifference of the rolling spring clouds.”

Revolutionary Road was a finalist for the National Book Award the following year, losing out to Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. After abortive attempts by director John Frankenheimer and actor Patrick O’Neal to bring the book to the screen in the 1960s and 1970s, director Sam Mendes succeeded in doing so in 2008, in an adaptation starring wife Kate Winslet and Leonardo di Caprio (in the image accompanying this post).

Though faithful to the book and critically acclaimed, the movie enjoyed only tepid results at the box office. Its subject matter is dark at any period, but Americans plunged into a recession during the 2008 holiday season were particularly not in a mood for the romantic hopes and tribulations of the Wheelers.

In other ways, though, the times may have caught up with Yates and his vision. The world he depicted with such unflinching fidelity to truth in Revolutionary Road—the synthetic suburban dreams, the Madison Avenue suits who manufactured a glossy future by day when they weren’t carrying on trysts afterward, the photogenic, seemingly perfect couples who ended up in drunken screaming matches—was recreated by AMC for Mad Men. (Indeed, that series’ showrunner, Matthew Weiner said he would never have bothered to create it if he had read Revolutionary Road beforehand, remembered ChristinaWayne, who was senior VP of scripted series/miniseries for AMC at that time.)

But it appears now that the book’s admirers have succeeded in moving the novel from cult to more mainstream status, where it can be appreciated for what Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford called “its apparent effortlessness, its complete accessibility, its luminous particularity, its deep seriousness toward us human beings -- about whom it conjures shocking insights and appraisals.”

Flashback, September 1945: Who Murdered ‘Mildred Pierce’?

Warner Brothers was delighted to see that Mildred Pierce, which premiered 70 years ago this month in the U.S., fulfilled all its hopes as a comeback vehicle for leading lady Joan Crawford (pictured). But readers of the 1941 novel by James M. Cain might have had a far different reaction. After reviewing the characters and the plot, they would have legitimate reason to ask who had killed this book they had taken so to heart.

The question becomes more relevant today for home viewers of the five-hour 2011 HBO adaptation starring Kate Winslet. Free of heavy-handed censors, with no need to shoehorn the plot into a two-hour film that could accommodate double bills and restless audiences (not to mention reaffirm traditional views of morality and the proper role of the sexes), its creators could remain unusually faithful to its source material, even including sexually explicit scenes not commonly seen in the interwar period.

Cain himself was pleased with how Crawford embodied the all-too-loving mother at the center of his book, and Oscar voters agreed with him, as they voted her an Oscar—the only one of her long career. But, by inserting a killing into the plot, Warner Brothers turned the film, paradoxically, into exactly what Cain—one of the progenitors of “hard-boiled” crime fiction—was trying to transcend this time: the film noir genre. 

This was not completely—or even mostly—the fault of Warner Brothers. For two decades, from the 1930s to the 1950s, directors and screenwriters worked in a creative straitjacket: the “Hays Code,” the rules to which the film industry bowed to ward off outside boycotts and censorship. It wasn’t enough that a nearly finished movie would be brought before this unit for its approval; in a preemptive move, studios screened material even in early stages, to smooth out problems that could develop later.

It didn’t matter how prominent a property or its creator was: if the screenplay violated one of the dicta of the Hays Code (e.g., crime doesn’t pay, no extramarital sex allowed), that book or play would have to run a gauntlet to make it onto the screen. Such works as Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, and Henry Bellman’s Kings Row ended up onscreen in heavily compromised form, and Mildred Pierce was no exception.

Specifically, the title character’s “immoral activities” in the novel made her “unscreenable,” the studio’s general counsel, Roy Obringer, recalled in a 1949 memo reproduced in Inside Warner Brothers (1935-1951), a compendium of memos, letters and production reports from the studio. 

Joseph Breen, the head of the Production Code Administration, Hollywood's censorship enforcement office, pointed to the novel’s inclusion of extramarital sex as among the “many sordid and repellent elements” that would make adapting this highly problematic.

That meant, for instance, that Mildred’s one-night stand with neighbor Wally Burgan, the former business partner of soon-to-be-ex-husband Bert, would raise immediate red flags. So would her weekend fling with a Pasadena playboy, which in the end got shortened to a midnight swim.

Right away, the idea that had drawn Cain to this material in the first place—a screenwriter friend’s suggestion that he write about "one story that never fails, the woman who uses men to gain her ends"—had been watered down.

Nor was this the end of this reengineering, which began with decisions forced by censors but soon proceeded to elements of plot and characterization far more extensive and creatively problematic. 

The man behind this was Jerry Wald, a producer not as well-known to the general public as Samuel Goldwyn or Irving Thalberg, but just as colorful—and, in his heyday, almost equally significant—as they were.

A former screenwriter of ferocious energy, Wald has sometimes been regarded as a possible inspiration for Sammy Glick in the blistering Hollywood satire, What Makes Sammy Run? But he had a wider cultural range than Budd Schulberg’s opportunistic anti-hero. His mind, as screenwriter-director Philip Dunne wrote in his 1980 memoir, Take Two, "was a magpie's nest crammed with situations, characters, and plot devices he had gleaned from his omnivorous reading of every writer from Euripides to Proust."

Roughly halfway through his time at Warner’s, the 33-year-old Wald now latched onto Mildred Pierce as the first movie that Crawford would carry at Warners—the studio to which she had decamped after realizing that her prior employer, MGM, saw her, in her late thirties, as a fading star. He would need all his story moxie to guide to the screen this quintessential “woman’s picture.”

Wald “does not develop a story from script to script in chronological fashion,” explained an assistant story editor at Warner’s, Tom Chapman. “He employs the services of a number of writers, many of them working without previous acquaintance with the work of others on the same script, in order that a full scale original contribution may be made by each writer. Mr. Wald organizes the story in his own mind on the basis of his selection and synthesizing of the work of the different writers. He must, therefore, be considered the originator and organizer of the story, regardless of a chronological line of development.”

Film aficionados will recognize that same almost maddening individual balancing of multiple story contributors in another Hollywood legend: David O. Selznick, as he steered Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind to the screen. With this kind of modus operandi, Wald has to be regarded as the prime suspect in determining who killed Mildred Pierce.

But before we convict him—or even decide if he had any accomplices—we should consider first the nature of the property being “murdered.”

There is a crime—not murder—in the book, but it is almost incidental to the tale’s themes: desire and the realities of class in the U.S. A Glendale, Calif., housewife who becomes a “grass widow” when she leaves her adulterous, unemployed husband, Mildred Pierce is forced to make a living to keep herself and her two daughters afloat. Finding herself in the Great Depression to be temperamentally unsuited for nearly every job she applies for, she leverages her ability to bake delicious pies into a thriving restaurant chain in the growing roadside landscape of Southern California.

But Mildred is like a distaff version of Theodore Dreiser’s George Hurstwood in the 1900 novel Sister Carrie: an able manager who falls vertiginously from a high economic perch through a disastrous sexual relationship. 

In Hurstwood’s case, his desire for the much-younger Carrie Meeber leads him not only to escape from his marriage, but to facilitate his flight by embezzling from the upscale Chicago saloon that he manages. On the other hand, to maintain her lover and eventual second husband, Monty, in the luxurious style to which he’s been accustomed all his life—and, even more important, maintaining the esteem of her snobby daughter Veda— Mildred keeps two sets of books for her eateries, with attendant calamity, both financially (she loses her business) and personally (this woman, once known for her gorgeous legs, ends up “thirty-seven years old, fat, and getting a little shapeless”).

The size of his two prior successes, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity combined, Mildred Pierce was Cain’s most ambitious work to date. It was not only his first novel written from the consciousness of a woman, but also his first foray out of crime fiction into a more realistic mode. Indeed, in its grim determinism, the novel verged into Dreiserian naturalism—perhaps not surprising, as he and Dreiser were lapsed Catholics who, though rejecting the authority of the Church, believed that greed and lust were as ineradicable in the human condition as original sin.

Mildred works fiercely hard, only to lose all she had worked for, ending up not only back in the lower middle class she had sought to rise from but even remarried to Bert. In contrast, Monty, depicted from his earliest encounter with Mildred as parasitic, survives, having found someone new to feed off. The message—that the rich, even though they contribute nothing useful to society, are far more likely to survive economic upheavals than the lower classes—was not lost on an America barely out of the Depression.

Eight different screenwriters labored over Mildred Pierce, including William Faulkner. If that seems a ridiculous amount of talent to devote to a literary property with some intrinsic worth, you’ll be dismayed to learn that Hollywood still assigns that many scribes to a single screenplay, even those of far less distinguished origin. (A comparable number of screenwriters worked on one of Tom Hanks’ less memorable films, Turner and Hooch.)

Each screenwriter added his or her own spin to the source material. Sole credit was awarded to Ranald MacDougall, who ended up writing along the lines envisioned by Wald: telling the story about the events leading up to a murder in flashback, much like Billy Wilder’s acclaimed version of Double Indemnity. MacDougall’s opening, by showing Mildred contemplating suicide over Monty’s death, could demonstrate immediately to the Hays Office that the title character was suffering for the sins about to be revealed.

Another screenwriter, Catherine Turney, had been asked to write for the film largely because she was a specialist in “women’s pictures.” Wald, in fact, would later credit her with “breaking the back of” the episodic novel by finding a structural narrative line. But even she seconded Cain’s objection to Warner that Wald’s murder and flashback devices represented “a very thin springboard into the story.” She ended up sidelined from the project because of this philosophical difference.

That difference, Turney and Cain realized, was hardly small. Cain described his work as “one woman’s struggle against a great social injustice—which is the mother’s necessity to support her children even though husband and community offer her not the slightest assistance.” The onscreen murder was not an alternative method of relating this story, he felt, but an unnecessary distraction from it.

(Wald had approached Cain himself about doing the adaptation, but the novelist—by now a screenwriter himself, for MGM—passed on the project. It might have been just as well, as he was uncomfortable with this massive change in the plot.)

It was not enough that the army of scribes employed by Wald deleted anything from their treatments that could provoke the Breen Office. No, they also, at the producer’s instigation, set about making Mildred and other characters more sympathetic. 

Thus, Mildred’s friend and sounding board Lucy Gessler is eliminated, with her function assumed by a character left from the book, the waitress Ida (embodied memorably onscreen by Eve Arden, who practically invented a film archetype: the wisecracking Best Female Friend). Bert, who in the novel did not see through Veda until too late, is given in the film an early line where he warns Mildred about spoiling their daughter. Mildred herself is transformed from a lower-middle-class woman into an upper-middle-class one victimized by circumstance, and—more significantly—from a mother shockingly grateful that death has taken her younger daughter rather than favorite Veda into a parent simply and understandably shattered by her loss.

The effect of all of this was to sandpaper the sharp edges off any character even relatively close to winning the audience’s affection and to allow not a single grace note for the two villains, Monty and Veda. The change is particularly pronounced—and objectionable—in the case of Veda.

Only with the greatest reluctance did Turney go along with Wald’s insistence that Veda be turned from a world-class opera diva into a no-talent nightclub singer. She was right to drag her heels on this. 

It was not only because Cain wrote with considerable knowledge about classical music (both his mother and one of his wives were opera singers), nor even because Veda’s talent allows people to see her, however briefly, as recognizably human, but also because her gifts explain much about the character’s motivation.

Take, for instance, this scene from the book, a dialogue between Veda's imperious opera teacher and Mildred--a set of lines jettisoned in the 1945 film, but retained in the HBO mini-series. Ignore, as much as you can, the stereotypical broken-English Italian dialect, and focus on what is actually being said, which is anything but funny:

“You go to a zoo, hey? See little snake? Is come from India, is all red, yellow, ver’ pretty little snake. You take ‘home, hey? Make little pet, like puppy dog? No—you got more sense. I tell you, is same wit’ Veda. You buy ticket, you look at a little snake, but you no take home. No.”

“Are you insinuating that my daughter is a snake?”

“No—is a coloratura soprano, is much worse. A little snake, loves mamma, do what papa tells, maybe, but a coloratura soprano, love nobody but own goddamn self. Is son-bitch-bast’, worse than all a snake in the world. Madame, you leave dees girl alone.”

In other words, in all her unrelenting snobbery and desire for the finest things in life, Veda displays the sense of entitlement so often felt by the inordinately gifted and talented--in this case, to proportions dangerous even to those who care for her most.

But there is another aspect to coloratura sopranos that Cain could not make explicit at this point in his plot. NPR contributor Tom Huizenga explained in 2011 that they are blessed with “supreme agility and glass-shattering high notes.” For Veda, that “agility” is hardly confined to the opera stage. It characterizes a cunning that can capitalize on almost any unexpected event and turn it to her adventure, as we learn at several points in the plot.

On the big screen, the teenaged Ann Blyth was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Veda. But, because of the limits placed on her character by Wald, Blyth can’t do much more than portray her as simply petulant. 

Cain’s vision of her talent, in contrast, permitted infinitely greater complexity—and the chilling realization, as the novel ends, that an entertainer of great talents and sociopathic instincts was about to be let loose on the world. That is just one reason why Laura Lippman, in a 2006 essay for Slate, writes that Cain’s book “delivers much more of a wicked kick than expected, especially if you've been raised on the saccharine pieties of the film.”

In one sense, though, Lippman is being a little hard on the film. Its sleek storytelling and slick production values can be appreciated on their own terms. Critic James Agee noted that the most interesting part of the film was not its mystery format but its focus on class. Moreover, in a country that had just gotten used to Rosie the Riveter, it struck a chord with a public awakening to the thought of competent female performance in the workplace, and in more recent decades it has even been regarded as proto-feminist. 

But greater creative freedom and the more hospitable environment of cable TV have allowed modern viewers to appreciate Mildred Pierce on Cain’s own terms, at last.