If The Stones of Summer is as “unbelievably great” as Moskowitz claims, and if, as he hopes, his efforts get it back into print, he will have performed a worthy deed. Nonetheless, the premise at the heart of his movie is a confusion that bears pondering. As Yeats memorably asks, how can we tell the dancer from the dance? We love the book; ergo, we love the author. We want to meet him or her (with Moskowitz’s favorite books, it’s always him) in the flesh—this sorcerer, this soul mate, this ghostly familiar we call the writer. From the long-ago packed appearances of Dickens and Wilde to today’s ubiquitous public readings, fans flock to see the person who has given them pleasure, just as the consumers of phone sex may yearn to meet the purveyors.
But you cannot see or touch a voice. Its evanescence is what makes it endlessly alluring. The writer “in person” is no more the solitary voice whispering in our ear than the murmurer of salacious tidbits is inclined to stir us in actual life. The voice is possessed temporarily, on loan. It lends itself and we do the same, a mutual and ephemeral exchange, like love. But a love never meant to be consummated outside the pages. Reading is the consummation—a miracle, really, as the emotive powers of the book pass safely from writer to reader, renewed and available whenever we open it. The writer himself is a creature of our fantasies. Reading his or her book, we may fashion an image, which has a sort of existence, but never in the flesh of the person bearing the author’s name.
Most readers simply dream on, or grow up and attend a few readings, but Moskowitz was hell-bent on grabbing hold of the ineffable. Much of his quest consists of interviews with famous and not-so-famous literary men, several of them writers who attended the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop around the time that Mossman studied there. Except for John Seelye, who wrote a New York Times review, no one has heard of the book or remembers the author. A mystery. One that has Moskowitz tooling around the country dropping in on anyone with some connection with Dow, as he’s called from the start: after reading his novel, the director fancies they’re intimates. Lots of scenery, lots of driving (while NPR’s Terry Gross talks to writers on the car radio). Seasons pass. We see the hero raking leaves in his yard; that means it’s fall. It’s an inept and circuitous quest, with no stone unturned. Anyone familiar with publishing could have told him that the jacket designer is unlikely to know the author’s whereabouts. John Kashiwabara can’t even recognize the jacket he did some thirty years ago: “I’ve done hundreds of books!”
What the interviews do yield is the camaraderie that springs up among book lovers, a luscious phenomenon we’ve all known. How fine it would be, then, to hear about the complex interaction of mind and book, the intimate geological history of evolving taste. Or about what happens when a stranger’s words course through us, offering unimagined possibilities, a future cut loose from expectations. Instead we hear dozens of names dropped like code words or private jokes—books and authors Moskowitz and his new friends dote on. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is “so great, so great.” The Old Man and the Sea is “good.” Wright Morris is “fabulous.”
And The Stones of Summer? That’s what matters, after all, the enduring best of the writer distilled and transformed. We learn that it’s a long novel of youthful rebellion set in the Vietnam War years; its composition was arduous, its tone is impassioned, its language lyrical and dense. What it’s about is the real mystery.
Moskowitz, for his part, is mystified by the notion of the one-book author in general. He seeks answers from the late critic Leslie Fiedler, the editor Robert Gottlieb, and Mossman’s agent, Carl Brandt, among others. Who can say why? Each one-book author is different. Temperament, money, the vicissitudes of private life, the changes in public taste all play a part. Publishing is notoriously unpredictable. It happens that Mossman’s publisher, Bobbs-Merrill, was shortly engulfed by a corporate takeover—maybe not the only reason, or even the main one, for the book’s disappearance, but it certainly didn’t help.
Each case is different. It is surpassingly naïve to lump under one rubric writers like Ralph Ellison, Margaret Mitchell, Henry Roth, and Joseph Heller, to name just a few. (Why call Heller a one-book author? Or does Moskowitz mean a one-famous-book author?) “Emily Brontë died,” Gottlieb notes. That explains that. By the time Frank Conroy, author of the 1965 memoir Stop-Time and, at the time of the interview, the Iowa Workshop’s director, is asked to account for the gap in his publishing curriculum vitae, the viewer, if not the producer, grasps that the “mystery” of how a writer writes, and why, and when, with what motivations, roadblocks, spurts and aridities, will never be solved by a succession of talking heads.
Eventually Moskowitz hits pay dirt by going where he should have gone an hour and a half (in real time, over a year) earlier: to the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City, where he leafs reverently through old cartons containing early drafts of The Stones of Summer. The sight of a copy editor’s markings makes him quiver, like a dance historian stroking Ulanova’s toe shoe. The elusive writer’s last known address turns out to be his childhood and present home. So a mere phone call might have saved much peregrination (but not supplied material for a film).
The person who puts Moskowitz directly in touch is the novelist William Cotter Murray, a former Iowa Workshop teacher and Dow’s mentor, as Murray describes himself. In the film’s most engaging scenes, the pink-faced, white-haired, beguiling Murray is overcome with delight that someone cares about his former protégé, and promptly supplies a phone number in nearby Cedar Rapids. Bingo.
And there’s Dow Mossman, a seedy-looking fifty-six-year-old in a moth-eaten sweater (we get a close-up of the holes), living in a fading two-story frame house. “Welcome to the House of Usher,” he quips as he leads the way to the upstairs clutter. The viewer may squirm at the gross intrusion, the existential illogic of the whole enterprise, but the modest writer is thrilled. After thirty years, a besotted fan wants to do lunch, and brings along a camera crew to boot. Mossman’s quicksilver intelligence and wit—apparent from the moment he opens his mouth—make him worth the long delay. In fact, if the dancer and the dance are to be inseparable, he should have been allowed to talk for the entire 127 minutes; his tossed-off remarks on Shakespeare, Casanova and the Bible are entertaining and fertile, leaving Moskowitz somewhat out of his depth.
But no, Mossman is used as the catalyst for the director’s emotion and performance. Moskowitz, not Mossman, is the star. Clearly the faux-impromptu scenes have been arranged and manipulated for optimum display. What we’re invited to marvel at is not the author’s gift but the director’s fervor and tenacity in the service of his passion. There’s actually a shot of the triumphant hunter and his bemused prey walking off into the sunset. A fantasy come to life and thence to the screen.
Moskowitz is hardly alone nowadays in conflating the book and the author, but he does so with the greatest degree of disingenuousness in the guise of humility. In this regard he’s made a thorough study of Michael Moore. In spirit, the two have little in common: Moskowitz is a romantic, not a muckraker. What he’s learned is stylistic. Yet despite the jeans and baseball cap, he lacks his model’s disarming and genuine grubbiness; he’s not funny-looking, but a smooth, confident, take-charge kind of guy. His approach to the literary men is a peculiar blend of adulation and condescension, and in the effort to sound ingenuous he comes off as merely ignorant, a six-foot Alice in the baffling Wonderland of publishing.
Moore’s sly antagonism would be out of place in any event, since Moskowitz seeks out only the benign members of “the reading culture.” Musing over one-book authors, he doesn’t question the heads of the half-dozen media conglomerates that regulate most of what we read or see, or inquire into their demand for profits beyond what serious books can reasonably earn. He doesn’t interview the chain-store owners whose strangling influence controls what gets published. How many copies of The Stones of Summer would Barnes & Noble order, were it reissued? The publishers would surely find out beforehand.
For pu
blishing is not Wonderland. It is all too workaday and comprehensible. The facts that determine today’s reading culture are the industry’s huge and risky advances, its failure to maintain the backlist, and the pressure on editors to acquire lucrative books rather than to cultivate talent like Mossman’s. (Not to mention the proliferation of e-books and the great effect they are having on the book business; Moskowitz’s film was made a few years before e-books appeared and before the ascendance of Amazon.) But such facts would not make a heartwarming story. Sentimentality trumps economics. It’s easier to sit by in rueful commiseration as again, the elegant Carl Brandt murmurs enigmatically about Mossman, “We do that to people in this culture.”
Were stones not so propitious, a more fitting title would have been Mark’s World. The film shows his buddies, his kids, snatches of his commercial work, his house, his car. And as in submarine movies, it’s a guys-only world. The single female speaking part is allotted to the director’s mother, who delivers some funny lines on her son’s early reading habits. There is one walk-on role, literally: while Moskowitz takes a stroll with John Seelye, Mrs. Seelye (I presume) walks a few feet off, stealing glances at the men rapt in conversation. The absence of women is noteworthy because, unlike the submarine milieu, the reading culture is one in which they are known to participate as eagerly as men, if not more so.
Women are likewise absent from Moskowitz’s bookshelves, which the camera pans lovingly. (I did spy one Virginia Woolf title.) His taste is educated and solidly mainstream except for this omission, a curious one in a devoted reader who reached adulthood in the 1970s, a time that witnessed a surge of distinguished women writers.
Moskowitz’s wife refused to be in the film, he notes with amused and amusing regret: she’d only agree to show her hands and feet. The latter—actually her legs to about the knee—appear as she opens the front door to get the mail. The mail is, largely, used copies of The Stones of Summer, which Moskowitz has been ordering online and stockpiling. (A friend justly remarks that he’s making it impossible for anyone else to read the book.)
Moskowitz says of his film, “People have told me it’s the closest they’ve come to reading a book in a movie theater.” If Stone Reader is like a book, it’s a memoir of the self-serving variety. But of course nothing is “like” a book. For all his labors, Moskowitz cannot make reading a public act or reduce its power to chumminess. Reading is the most uncommunal activity in the world: above all, it requires and teaches solitary stillness and attentiveness. Movies exist for the eye and ear, but there is no sense organ that printed words fit like a glove. However many copies we own, the true book has no sensory existence. It is the prince hidden inside the frog. We open it, and our eyes give the kiss of regeneration. Then we embrace it, alone, without the barrier of anything tangible.
Intimacy. Anger
I stood on the sidewalk as the movers hauled my family’s belongings up the cement stairs fronting our new house. They were preparing to move the piano, an old black baby grand, and this promised to be dramatic. The legs had to be unscrewed and the body brought through the front casement windows of the living room, which gave onto the porch. An audience of curious neighbors had gathered to watch. In the midst of this scene I was surrounded by a clump of girls just my size, all telling me their names at once. It was my future, come to greet me. I was three and a half years old.
By pure coincidence, six girls of about the same age lived on the same block, scattered a few houses apart, on either side of the street. To this day, I can recite each girl’s address, the names of their parents, brothers, sisters, and, in a few cases, live-in grandparents, as well as the fathers’ occupations: one in the diamond business on Canal Street, one shoe salesman, one podiatrist, one buildings department inspector . . . Two of the mothers were schoolteachers, and the others were housewives.
Over time we girls evolved into a family of sorts, parallel to our individual families, possibly more tightly knit than our own families. Or a pack of street children, with tacit codes and survival mechanisms, but privileged street children. After hours spent sitting on stoops, leaning on car fenders, playing ball in between the occasional traffic, we returned at night to dinners and parents and warm beds—a double life.
Like family members or packs of street kids, we might not have chosen one another if not for proximity. Circumstance, habit and the simple pack instinct kept us entwined, accumulating our group history. Together we learned what intimacy was. We invented intimacy, both its benefits and its horrors.
And in the course of our inventing that intimacy, my natural evolution took an arbitrary turn, a detour. I’ve wondered ever since who I would have been without the two critical events in my eighth year that caused the detour. I might even say, who I was supposed to have been. During that year something wrenched inside, a wrench of the spirit like a sudden wrench of the back that leaves you stiff and barely able to move, and even after the spasm has passed, you never again move with quite the same nonchalance, taking ease of movement for granted.
The block was part of a new Brooklyn development begun in wartime: modest two-story attached row houses called Trump Homes, built by the father of the present tycoon, a man whose ambitions or at least whose practical achievements were considerably more humble than those of his son. Before that new house, my family had lived in a two-family house about a mile away, and across the street lived my paternal grandparents in a ground-floor apartment whose tiny, shadowy rooms held a tangy smell of rotting apples, a smell I always connected afterwards with old people.
My grandparents were small and stooped and wrinkled, like shriveled apples themselves, and spoke no English. They shuffled around the apartment in their ancient cardigans drinking tea out of glasses and seemed quiet and harmless, though my mother said that in their prime they had both been forceful characters and strict disciplinarians. This must have been the source of my father’s periodic shouts of “Discipline, discipline,” when his children irritated him—impotent outbursts, uttered for form’s sake only. Although he was a habitual shouter, rage being his first resort in moments of frustration, which were frequent, he was not a strict disciplinarian. Real discipline took more time and effort, more courage, than he had the will to give, so he left that heavy lifting to my mother.
Everyone in the family seemed to accept my father’s sudden and frightening eruptions as unfortunate but incorrigible, like a limp or a stammer or a physical handicap. His tantrums left me sick with disgust, but since I couldn’t see any other tangible repercussions, I must have assumed there were none. I must have thought one could behave that way with no consequences. Somehow I didn’t count my disgust as a repercussion, maybe because it couldn’t be seen. It festered, though, and I came to accept its festering as I would have accepted any accommodation I might have made, had my father indeed been physically disabled.
Of course there were tangible repercussions, but I didn’t recognize them as such. Certain friends of my parents would disappear for months or years at a time: I suppose my father’s insults at the weekly pinochle games—Moron, he would shout, or, Idiot—at some point went beyond the tolerable. After a while these friends would reappear; maybe he apologized, or my mother interceded, or they forgave him, and the whole cycle—Moron, Idiot—would start all over again.
I too had a violent temper and a very short fuse. Nature and nurture contributed. Aside from whatever incipient anger resided in the DNA, I was schooled by my father. I never used the words moron or idiot, as he did, but with my friends—the girls—I would occasionally erupt in rages and storm out of rooms. Resolving a difference reasonably was not something I had ever witnessed or imagined as a possibility. I was famous for storming out of rooms. Then I would quickly forget all about my outbursts and departures and was surprised if anyone else remembered them. My mother warned me that if I didn’t control my temper, no one would want to play with me. It was, in its bluntness, an appalling thing to say to a child—hardly the sort of thing today’s enlightened pa
rents would say—but time would prove her right.
But back to the girls. Shamelessly, heedless of privacy or discretion, we told each other what went on in our houses, all of which I recall in precise detail. I knew the textures of the lives in each house, the unique, intimate tone of each family: the kinds of arguments they had, the nature of the parents’ dissatisfactions with each other and with their children, the smell that met you in each doorway, the foods they ate, the sleeping arrangements. Our front doors were rarely locked. We didn’t knock, just walked in and announced ourselves. A meal might be in progress. Did you eat yet? our friend would say. If not, we’d be given a plate. Or we might say, I ate already, but can I watch you? Watching each other eat was a chance to glean more intimate information, to be sifted later and added to the database.
I knew the life of that block so well that everywhere I’ve lived since then is measured against it and what it signified, measured mostly in terms of how far behind I’ve left it—a distance that can vary from day to day, not in miles but in consciousness. It’s not that I think of the block with nostalgia—hardly. Rather, it is memory’s default setting, permanently fixed.
I knew what phrases Lois’s mother, Myrna, used when she cursed at her antic teenaged son, a Lenny Bruce precursor whom Myrna, to our delight, would sometimes chase up the stairs armed with a wooden hanger. (Among ourselves we called all the parents by their first names, which we would never have dared to do in public—Mr. and Mrs. were the custom.) Not every house was so entertaining. Brenda’s was more formal—we weren’t allowed to sprawl on the puffy living-room furniture. Annette’s I tended to avoid, because one of her older brothers was sullen and menacing, and the other intimidatingly handsome. Diane’s house was a favorite. Her frivolous mother would join us in the living room, contributing to our gossip, advising us to put on lipstick whenever we went out: you never know who you might run into, Prince Charming might be walking down the street. Though we didn’t have a term for it, we all knew there was something wrong with Cynthia’s mother, who would preen in front of the mirror that covered one entire wall of their living room, smiling and chatting with her reflection. One day she disappeared and months later returned chastened, back in the kitchen and helping in her husband’s shoe store a few blocks away.
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