Thinking about the “Flying to America” sequence. This will be the film’s climax. But am I capable of mounting such a spectacle? Fortunately I have Ezra to help.
“And is it not the case,” said Ezra, when we first met, “that I have been associated with the production of nineteen major motion pictures of such savage originality, scalding vérité, and honey-warm sexual indecency that the very theaters chained their doors rather than permit exhibition of these major motion pictures on their ammonia-scented gum-daubed premises? And is it not the case,” said Ezra, “that I myself with my two sinewy hands and strong-wrought God-gift brain have participated in the changing of seven high-class literary works of the first water and four of the second water and two of the third water into major muscatel? And is it not the living truth,” said Ezra, “that I was the very man, I myself and none other without exception, who clung to the underside of the camera of the great Dreyer, clung with my two sinewy hands and noble thighs and cunning-muscled knees both dexter and sinister, during the cinematization of the master’s Gertrud, clung there to slow the movement of said camera to that exquisite slowness which distinguishes this masterpiece from all other masterpieces of its water? And is it not chapter and verse,” said Ezra, “that I was the comrade of all the comrades of the Dziga- Vertov group who was first in no-saying, firmest in no-saying, most final in no-saying, to all honey-sweet commercial seductions of whatever water and capitalist blandishments of whatever water and ideological incorrectitudes of whatever water whatsoever? And is it not as true as Saul become Paul,” said Ezra, “that you require a man, a firm-limbed long-winded good true man, and that I am the man standing before you in his very blood and bones?”
“You are hired, Ezra,” I said.
Whose child is it? We forgot to ask, when we sent out the casting call. Perhaps it belongs to itself. It has an air of self-possession quite remarkable in one so homely, and I notice that its paychecks are made out to it, rather than a nominee. Fortunately we have Julie to watch over it. The motor hotel in Tel Aviv is our temporary, not long-range, goal. New arrangements will probably not do the trick but we are making them anyhow: the ransom has been counted into pretty colored sacks, the film placed in round tin cans, the destroyed beams blocking the path are pushed aside….
Thinking of sequences for the film.
A frenzy of desire?
Sensible lovers taking precautions?
Swimming with horses?
Today we filmed fear, a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, real or imagined. In fear you know what you’re afraid of, whereas in anxiety you do not. Correlation of children’s fears with those of their parents is .667 according to Hagman. We filmed the startle pattern—shrinking, blinking, all that. Ezra refused to do “inhibition of the higher nervous centers.” I don’t blame him. However he was very good in demonstrating the sham rage reaction and also in “panting.” Then we shot some stuff in which a primitive person (my bare arm standing in for the primitive person) kills an enemy by pointing a magic bone at him. “O.K., who’s got the magic bone?” The magic bone was brought. I pointed the magic bone and the actor playing the enemy fell to the ground. I had carefully explained to the actor that the magic bone would not really kill him, probably.
Next, the thrill of fear along the buttocks. We used Julie’s buttocks for this sequence. “Hope is the very sign of lack-of-happiness,” said Julie, face down on the divan. “Fame is a palliative for doubt,” I said. “Wealth-formation is a source of fear for both winners and losers,” Ezra said. “Civilization aims at making all good things accessible even to cowards,” said the actor who had played the enemy, quoting Nietzsche. Julie’s buttocks thrilled.
We wrapped, then. I took the magic bone home with me. I don’t believe in it, exactly, but you never know.
Have I ever been more alert, more confident? Following the dropped handkerchiefs to the vandal camp—there, a blue and green one, hanging on a shrub! The tall vandal chief wipes his hands on his sweatshirt. Vandals, he says, have been grossly misperceived. Their old practices, which earned them widespread condemnation, were a response to specific historical situations, and not a character trait, like being good or bad. Our negative has been scratched with a pointed instrument, all 150,000 feet of it. But the vandals say they were on the other side of town that night, planting trees. It is difficult to believe them. But gazing at the neat rows of saplings, carefully emplaced and surrounded by a vetchlike gound cover… A beautiful job! One does not know what to think.
We have got Mark Grunion for the film; he will play the important role of George. Mark wanted many Gs in the beginning, but now that he understands the nature of the project he is working for scale, so that he can grow, as an actor and as a person. He is growing visibly, shot by shot. Soon he will be the biggest actor in the business. The other actors crowd about him, peering into his ankles Should this film be made? That is one of the difficult questions one has to forget, when one is laughing in the face of unclear situations, or bad weather. What a beautiful girl Julie is! Her lustrous sexuality has the -vandals all agog. They follow her around trying to touch the tip of her glove, or the flounce of her gown. She shows her breasts to anyone who asks. “Amazing grace!” the vandals say.
Today we filmed the moon rocks. We set up in the Moon Rock Room, at the Smithsonian. There they were. The moon rocks. The moon rocks were the greatest thing we had ever seen in our entire lives! The moon rocks were red, green, blue, yellow, black, and white. They scintillated, sparkled, glinted, glittered, twinkled, and gleamed. They produced booms, thunderclaps, explosions, clashes, splashes, and roars. They sat on a pillow of the purest Velcro, and people who touched the pillow were able to throw away their crutches and jump in the air. Four cases of gout and eleven instances of hyperbolic paraboloidism were cured before our eyes. The air rained crutches. The moon rocks drew you toward them with a fatal irresistibility, but at the same time held you at a seemly distance with a decent reserve. Peering into the moon rocks, you could see the future and the past in color, and you could change them in any way you wished. The moon rocks gave off a slight hum, which cleaned your teeth, and a brilliant glow, which absolved you from sin. The moon rocks whistled Finlandia, by Jean Sibelius, while reciting The Confessions of St. Augustine, by I. F. Stone. The moon rocks were as good as a meaningful and emotionally rewarding seduction that you had not expected. The moon rocks were as good as listening to what the members of the Supreme Court say to each other, in the Supreme Court Locker Room. They were as good as a war. The moon rocks were better than a presentation copy of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language signed by Geoffrey Chaucer himself. They were better than a movie in which the President refuses to tell the people what to do to save themselves from the terrible thing that is about to happen, although he knows what ought to be done and has written a secret memorandum about it. The moon rocks were better than a good cup of coffee from an urn decorated with the change of Philomel, by the barbarous king. The moon rocks were better than a ¡huelga! led by Mongo Santamaria, with additional dialogue by St. John of the Cross and special effects by Melmoth the Wanderer. The moon rocks surpassed our expectations. The dynamite out-of-sight very heavy and together moon rocks turned us on, to the highest degree. There was blood on our eyes, when we had finished filming them.
What if the film fails? And if it fails, will I know it?
A murdered doll floating face down in a bathtub—that will be the Opening shot. A “cold” opening, but with faint intimations of the happiness of childhood and the pleasure we take in water. Then, the credits superimposed on a hanging side of beef. Samisen music, and a long speech from a vandal spokesman praising vandal culture and minimizing the sack of Rome in 455 A.D. Next, shots of a talk program in which all of the participants are whispering, including the host. Softness could certainly be considered a motif here. The child is well-behaved through the long hours of shooting. The lieutenants march nicely, swinging their arms. The audience smiles.
A vandal is standing near the window, and suddenly large cracks appear in the window. Pieces of glass fall to the floor. But I was watching him the whole time; he did nothing.
I wanted to film everything but there are things we are not getting. The wild ass is in danger in Ethiopia—we’ve got nothing on that. We’ve got nothing on intellectual elitism funded out of public money, an important subject. We’ve got nothing on ball lightning and nothing on the National Grid and not a foot on the core-mantle problem, the problem of a looped economy, or the interesting problem of the night brain.
I wanted to get it all but there’s only so much time, so much energy. There’s an increasing resistance to antibiotics worldwide and liquid metal fast-breeder reactors are subject to swelling and a large proportion of Quakers are color-blind but our film will have not a shred of material on any of these matters.
Is the film sufficiently sexual? I don’t know.
I remember a brief exchange with Julie about revolutionary praxis.
“But I thought,” I said, “that there had been a sexual revolution and everybody could sleep with anybody who was a consenting adult.”
“In theory,” Julie said. “In theory. But sleeping with someone also has a political dimension. One does not, for example, go to bed with running dogs of imperialism.”
I thought: But who will care for and solace the running dogs of imperialism? Who will bring them their dog food, who will tuck the covers tight as they dream their imperialistic dreams?
We press on. But where is Ezra? He was supposed to bring additional light, the light we need for “Flying to America.” The vandals hit the trail, confused as to whether they should place themselves under our protection, or fight. The empty slivovitz bottles are buried, the ashes of the cooking fires scattered. At a signal from the leader the sleek, well-cared-for mobile homes swing onto the highway. The rehabilitation of the filmgoing public through “good design,” through “softness,” is our secret aim. The payment of rent for seats will be continued for a little while, but eventually abolished. Anyone will be able to walk into a film as into a shower. Bathing with the actors will become commonplace. Terror and terror are our two great principles, but we have other principles to fall back on, if these fail. “I can relate to that,” Mark says. He does. We watch skeptically.
Who had murdered the doll? We pressed our inquiry, receiving every courtesy from the Tel Aviv police, who said they had never seen a case like it, either in their memories, or in dreams. A few wet towels were all the evidence that remained, except for, in the doll’s hollow head, little pieces of paper on which were written
JULIE
JULIE
JULIE
JULIE
in an uncertain hand. And now the ground has opened up and swallowed our cutting room. One cannot really hold the vandals responsible. And yet…
Now we are shooting “Flying to America.”
The 112 pilots check their watches.
Ezra nowhere to be seen. Will there be enough light?
If the pilots all turn on their machines at once …
Flying to America.
(But did I remember to—?)
“Where is the blimp?” Marcello shouts. “I can’t find the—”
Ropes dangling from the sky.
I’m using forty-seven cameras, the outermost of which is posted in the Dover Marshes.
The Atlantic is calm in some parts, angry in others.
A blueprint four miles long is the flight plan.
Every detail coordinated with the air-sea rescue services of all nations.
Victory through Air Power! I seem to remember that slogan from somewhere.
Hovercraft flying to America. Flying boats flying to America. F-llls flying to America. The China Clipper!
Seaplanes, bombers, Flying Wings flying to America.
A shot of a pilot named Tom. He opens the cockpit door and speaks to the passengers. “America is only two thousand miles away now,” he says. The passengers break out in smiles.
Balloons flying to America (they are painted in red and white stripes). Spads and Fokkers flying to America. Self-improvement is a large theme in flying to America. “Nowhere is self-realization more a possibility than in America,” a man says.
Julie watching the clouds of craft in the air …
Gliders gliding to America. One man has constructed a huge paper aircraft, seventy-two feet in length. It is doing better than we had any right to expect. But then great expectations are an essential part of flying to America.
Rich people are flying to America, and poor people, and people of moderate means. This aircraft is powered by twelve rubber bands, each rubber band thicker than a man’s leg—can it possibly survive the turbulence over Greenland?
Long thoughts are extended to enwrap the future American experience of the people who are flying to America.
And here is Ezra! Ezra is carrying the light we need for this part of the picture—a great bowl of light lent to us by the U.S. Navy. Now our film will be successful, or at least completed, and the aircraft illuminated, and the child rescued, and Julie will marry well, and the light from the light will fall into the eyes of the vandals, fixing them in place. Truth! That is another thing they said our film wouldn’t contain. I had simply forgotten about it, in contemplating the series of triumphs that is my private life.
Overnight To Many Distant Cities
A group of Chinese in brown jackets preceded us through the halts of Versailles. They were middle-aged men, weighty, obviously important, perhaps thirty of them. At the entrance to each room a guard stopped us, held us back until the Chinese had finished inspecting it. A fleet of black government Citroëns had brought them, they were much at ease with Versailles and with each other, it was dear that they were being rewarded for many years of good behavior.
Asked her opinion of Versailles, my daughter said she thought it was overdecorated.
Well, yes.
Again in Paris, years earlier, without Anna, we had a hotel room opening on a courtyard, and late at night through an open window heard a woman expressing intense and rising pleasure. We blushed and fell upon each other.
Right now sunny skies in mid-Manhattan, the temperature is forty-two degrees.
In Stockholm we ate reindeer steak and I told the Prime Minister… That the price of booze was too high. Twenty dollars for a bottle of J&B! He (Olof Palme) agreed, most politely, and said that they financed the Army that way. The conference we were attending was held at a workers’ vacation center somewhat outside the city. Shamelessly, I asked for a double bed, there were none, we pushed two single beds together. An Israeli journalist sat on the two single beds drinking our costly whiskey and explaining the devilish policies of the Likud. Then it was time to go play with the Africans. A poet who had been for a time a Minister of Culture explained why he had burned a grand piano on the lawn in front of the Ministry. “The piano,” he said, “is not the national instrument of Uganda.”
A boat ride through the scattered islands. A Warsaw Pact novelist asked me to carry a package of paper back to New York for him.
Woman is silent for two days in San Francisco. And walked through the streets with her arms raised high touching the leaves of the trees.
“But you’re married!”
“But that’s not my fault!”
Tearing into cold crab at Scoma’s we saw Chill Wills at another table, doing the same thing. We waved to him.
In Taegu the air was full of the noise of helicopters. The helicopter landed on a pad, General A jumped out and walked with a firm, manly stride to the spot where General B waited—generals visiting each other. They shook hands, the honor guard with its blue scarves and chromed rifles popped to, the band played, pictures were taken. General A followed by General B walked smartly around the rigid honor guard and then the two generals marched off to the General’s Mess, to have a drink.
There are eight hundred and sixty-one generals now on active service. T
here are four hundred and twenty-six brigadier generals, three hundred and twenty-four major generals, eighty-seven lieutenant generals, and twenty-four full generals. The funniest thing in the world is a general trying on a nickname. Sometimes they don’t stick. “Howlin’ Mad,” “Old Hickory,” “Old Blood and Guts,” and “Buck” have already been taken. “Old Lacy” is not a good choice.
If you are a general in the field you will live in a general’s van, which is a kind of motor home for generals. I once saw a drunk two-star general, in a general’s van, seize hold of a visiting actress— it was Marilyn Monroe—and seat her on his lap, shrieking all the while “R.H.I.P.!” or, Rank Has Its Privileges.
Enough of generals.
Thirty-percent chance of rain this afternoon, high in the mid-fifties.
In London I met a man who was not in love. Beautiful shoes, black as black marble, and a fine suit. We went to the theatre together, matter of a few pounds, he knew which plays were the best plays, on several occasions he brought his mother. “An American,” he said to his mother, “an American I met.” “Met an American during the war,” she said to me, “didn’t like him.” This was reasonably standard, next she would tell me that we had no culture. Her son was hungry, starving, mad in fact, sucking the cuff buttons of his fine suit, choking on the cuff buttons of his fine suit, left and right sleeves jammed into his mouth—he was not in love, he said, “again not in love, not in love again.” I put him out of his misery with a good book, Rilke, as I remember, and resolved never to find myself in a situation as dire as his.
In San Antonio we walked by the little river. And ended up in Helen’s Bar, where John found a pool player who was, like John, an ex-Marine. How these ex-Marines love each other! It is a flat scandal. The Congress should do something about it. The IRS should do something about it. You and I talked to each other while John talked to his Parris Island friend, and that wasn’t too bad, wasn’t too bad. We discussed twenty-four novels of normative adultery. “Can’t have no adultery without adults,” I said, and you agreed that this was true. We thought about it, our hands on each other’s knees, under the table.
Forty Stories (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) Page 20