Warren Who?

This review ran, in an edited version, in the Washington Post. 

STAR: How Warren Beatty Seduced America

By Peter Biskind

Simon & Schuster, 627 pp., $30

It's bad to get a sinking feeling at the start of a book, but Peter Biskind gives the reader just that in the introduction to his new book.

“Why Warren Beatty?” Biskind asks. “It's distressing to have to make a case for his importance just because no one under forty (maybe fifty?) knows who he is.”  Beatty made his last movie, Town & Country, nine years ago. And it has been 19 years since his last major film, Bugsy, which was a critical success but a box office disappointment.

Since Beatty left the screen, his friend and contemporary Jack Nicholson has made half a dozen films. His rival Robert Redford is still acting on screen, as is Dustin Hoffman, with whom Beatty shared the ignominy of Ishtar.  His older sister, Shirley MacLaine, is still a working actress. Woody Allen, two years older than Beatty, continues to write and direct at the film-a-year pace he set three decades ago, and Clint Eastwood, seven years Beatty's senior, is perhaps the most successful actor-turned-director of our time. In 1994, former studio executive Robert Evans said, “How many pictures has Warren made in his career? Twenty-one? How many hits did he have? Three! Bonnie and Clyde, Shampoo, and Heaven Can Wait. That’s batting three for twenty-one. In baseball, you’re sent back to the minors for that.”

But Biskind is determined to persuade us that Beatty was “one of the foremost filmmakers of his generation.” Biskind’s earlier book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls was a chronicle of American filmmaking in the 1970s, an era heralded by Beatty’s breakthrough movie, Bonnie and Clyde, and he has been trying to get Beatty to agree to cooperate on a book for years. For this book, Biskind agreed to leave Beatty’s current life, as husband to Annette Bening and father to their four children, “off limits.”  And many of the people who know him best, such as MacLaine and Nicholson, as well as many of Beatty’s more famous ex-lovers, such as Leslie Caron, were “all afflicted with a contagion of silence.”  Biskind also refuses to psychologize, telling us almost nothing of Beatty's childhood and youth, other than that he remained a virgin until he was “19 and ten months.” That leaves a 600-plus-page biography with some rather large biographical gaps.

“Even the promiscuous feel pain,” Beatty once said.  If he had gone on to add that obsessive perfectionists cause pain, he would have summed up the twin themes of Biskind's book. Much of it is a chronicle of fighting and fucking. Biskind opens with a scene in 1959 at a Beverly Hills restaurant where Beatty, dining with Jane Fonda, gets his first look at Joan Collins. And so the account of Beatty’s already well-chronicled sex life begins, and the reader who is so inclined can find plenty about what he did and whom he did it with, including not only the usual suspects – Collins, Natalie Wood, Caron, Julie Christie, Diane Keaton, Madonna, and so on – but also some unusual (and questionably documented) ones: Vivien Leigh, Brigitte Bardot, Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

But Biskind clearly intends the sexual escapades to be a sideshow. For him the main attraction is how Beatty’s movies got made. And so he gives us behind-the-scenes accounts of the making of not only Beatty’s best films (among which Biskind includes Splendor in the Grass, Bonnie and Clyde, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, Reds, Bugsy, and Bulworth) but also disasters like Ishtar and Town & Country. The trouble with behind-the-scenes stories is that there are a lot of rumors to sort through, and the sources have memories clouded by time, resentment, pride, and occasionally illicit substances. For every allegation there’s almost always a denial.

Biskind makes it clear that Beatty, “a self-described obsessive-compulsive,”  could be maddening to work with, even on his best films. Trevor Griffiths, hired to write the screenplay for Reds, which Beatty took over from him, calls him “a brute” and “a bully.”  On Reds, Beatty shot what one source estimates as 3 million feet of film – enough for a movie two and a half weeks long -- and he worked a team of editors nearly to death.  There are those who blame Beatty’s flops on his extravagance, his meddling and his sometimes indecisive ways, but Biskind prefers to focus on directors – Elaine May for Ishtar, Glenn Gordon Caron for Love Affair, Peter Chelsom for Town & Country – who were unwilling or unable to collaborate effectively with Beatty.

Beatty holds an Oscar record for having been twice nominated as producer, director, writer, and star, for Heaven Can Wait and Reds. To date, the only other quadruple-threat nominee in Oscar history is Orson Welles, for Citizen Kane. Beatty won only one Oscar, as director of Reds, but the Academy also gave him the Irving G. Thalberg Award as a producer, even though all but two of the films he produced were those he starred in. And in the end, it may be as producer that Beatty deserves the most recognition. Richard Sylbert, the production designer who worked on many of Beatty’s films, claimed that Beatty made the people who worked for him “dramatically better.”

One problem with this book is that it’s too early for a definitive assessment of Beatty and his career. Cultists have been known to save films from scorn and obscurity before, and there are even those who love Ishtar. Some of his hits, including Bonnie and Clyde, Shampoo, and Heaven Can Wait, are beginning to look glossy and tricked-up. Reds has suffered from the current distaste for historical epics. Ten years from now Bulworth may look a lot better, and Bugsy may look worse. Or vice versa.

Beatty himself may yet be seen as either a visionary who deserves more respect or a man who never fully developed his talent. Jack Nicholson became perhaps the most successful of any actor of his generation by working with Roman Polanski, Milos Forman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Stanley Kubrick, John Huston, and Martin Scorsese. But after his early movies with Elia Kazan (Splendor in the Grass) and George Stevens (The Only Game in Town), the only director of the first rank that Beatty worked with was Robert Altman, on McCabe & Mrs. Miller. They fought bitterly, but it’s one of Beatty’s best performances and one of Altman’s best films.

And Beatty could still choose to make Biskind’s book premature. He’s 72, not too old to make a film he has always planned about Howard Hughes, or at least Hughes in his old age, which Biskind tells us “Beatty considers more interesting than the first half of his career.”  And much of Biskind’s book deals with Beatty’s political activities. He worked for George McGovern, who called him “one of the three or four most important people in the campaign,” and Gary Hart. Arianna Huffington urged him to run for president in 2000. He wisely declined, but one wonders what might happen if Dianne Feinstein decides not to run again for the Senate. It’s not like California is averse to actors going into politics.

The Proust Project, Day 59

Where this began
Day 58

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 391-404.

The narrator gets drunk at Rivebelle and gives us a tipsy view of the dining room with its waiters dashing about, at first seemingly chaotically but then, as he mellows, "turning into something nobler and calmer" with "a soothing harmony." He sees the tables as little planets "as depicted in allegorical paintings from earlier times," or as a "planetary system, designed in accordance with the science of the Middle Ages." There is something in the passage reminiscent of Dickens or Twain when they adopt the Martian view of a familiar setting. 

I felt rather sorry for the diners, because I sensed that for them the round tables were not planets, and that they were unpracticed in the art of of cross-sectioning things so as to rid them of their customary appearance and enable us to see analogies.

But what follows is unmistakably Proustian, an analysis of the effect of music on his intoxicated mind: "each musical phrase, though as individual as a particular woman, limited the secret of its sensual thrills not to a single privileged person, as she would have done -- it offered them to me, it ogled me, it accosted me, it toyed with me in seductively whimsical or vulgar ways, it caressed me, as though I had suddenly become more attractive, powerful, or wealthy.... I felt endowed with a power that seemed to make me almost irresistible."


Moreover, the alcohol liberates him from past and future: "I was trapped in the present, as heroes are, or drunkards." It makes him reckless: 

In fact, what I was doing was condensing into one evening the unconcern that others dilute in their whole existence: every day they take the needless risk of a sea voyage, a ride in an airplane, a drive in a motorcar, when the person who would be stricken by grief if they were to die sits waiting for them at home, when the book, as yet unrevealed to the world, in which they see the point of their whole life, still lives only within their fragile brain.

For the moment, even the quest for Mlle. Simonet seems "a matter of indifference, since nothing but my present sensation, because of the extraordinary power of it, the euphoria afforded by its slightest varations, and even by the mere continuity of it, had any imporance.... [D]runkenness brings about, for the space of a few hours, subjective idealism, pure phenomenalism; all things become mere appearances, and exist only as a function of our sublime selves." 


When he gets back to the hotel, he crashes into a sleep that lasts until the afternoon, and is filled with dreams. "The difficulty of digesting the Rivebelle dinner meant that it was in a more fitful light that I visited, in incoherent succession, the darkened zones of my past life, and that I became a creature for whom supreme happiness would have been to meet Legrandin, with whom I had just had a dream conversation." Awake he remembers a woman he had seen the night before: "the young blonde with the wistful look who had glanced at me at Rivebelle. During the evening at the restaurant, many other women had seemed just as nice, yet she was the one who now stood alone in my memory."

No Time for Politics

Jon Stewart takes on Robertson and Limbaugh on Haiti. But he also zings Rachel Maddow.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
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Exhuming McCarthy

REM was right:

When we last checked in on the U.S. history textbooks standards setting process down in Texas, the conservative-dominated State Board of Education was mulling one-sided requirements to teach high school students about Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly, and the Moral Majority.

Now, in the home stretch of a process that will set the state's nationally influential standards, a liberal watchdog group is worried that the State Board of Education will try to push through changes to claim that communist-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy has been vindicated by history, among other right-wing pet issues.

The Rehabilitation Of Joseph McCarthy? Texas Textbooks Process Grinds On | TPMMuckraker

From Russia With Stories

The following article appeared, in another version, in the January-February issue of Stanford Magazine. 

The title of Elif Batuman's new book, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), echoes that of Dostoevsky's strange, dark novel, which is also known as The Demons. In the introduction to her book, Batuman, PhD '07, tells us that Dostoevsky's novel “narrates the descent into madness of a circle of intellectuals in a remote Russian province: a situation analogous, in certain ways, to my own experiences in graduate school.” But the adventures that Batuman recounts in her book are more like those of Alice in Wonderland than like those of Stavrogin in provincial Russia. 
 

Batuman grew up in New Jersey, the daughter of Turkish-born physicians who emigrated to the United States in the 1970s. When she graduated from Harvard, she wanted to be a writer, but although she was offered a fellowship at a writers' colony housed in a former lumber mill on Cape Cod she chose graduate school at Stanford instead. She recalls her first impressions in the introduction to her book: “Under rolling green hills, positrons were speeding through the world's longest linear accelerator; in towers high above the palm trees lay the complete Paris files of the Russian Imperial secret police. Stanford was essentially the opposite of a colonial New England lumber mill.”

She now teaches a workshop for seniors in Stanford's Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities program, but she has also fulfilled her goal of becoming a writer. Keith Gessen, editor of the magazine n+1, saw the work she had published in the Harvard Advocate as an undergraduate and asked her to write for him. “Babel in California,” her account of her participation in a conference at Stanford on Isaac Babel's life and work, appeared in the second issue of n+1 in the spring of 2005. There it caught the attention of David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, who assigned her a piece on Thai kickboxing that appeared in 2006. She has written several more pieces for the New Yorker, as well as for the Guardian and for Harper's. In 2007, Batuman received a grant from the Rona Jaffe Foundation for women writers, which gave her some leisure to work on the novel that's her next major project.

It was Gessen who urged her to collect several of her articles in book form. The Possessed recounts some of the things that happened to Batuman in the course of obtaining her doctorate in comparative literature: She encountered Babel's eccentric relatives; journeyed to Samarkand to study Old Uzbek (a language that her instructor claimed has a hundred words for crying); attended a conference at Yasnaya Polyana where she pursued a (mostly) tongue-in-cheek theory that Tolstoy was murdered; explored a palace made entirely of ice in St. Petersburg; and experienced the friendships, frustrations, and challenges of graduate school.

Batuman has an almost Dickensian eye for precise and unusual detail and a gift at vivid characterization, and her sharpness of wit and slyness of tone are reminiscent of such humorists as Twain and Thurber. She acknowledges a fondness for all of those writers, but cites another influence: Haruki Murakami, for “the way the real shades into the surreal in his stories.” Batuman says her essays are the result of “copious note-taking,” and the abundance of often hilarious, occasionally poignant, and invariably off-beat details about people and places -- the unexpected and sometimes bizarre experiences of living and studying in Uzbekistan, the aura of decadence of the St. Petersburg ice palace, the obsessive scholars at the Babel and Tolstoy conferences – does lend an aspect of the surreal to her work.

But while the essays in her book present graduate study as a kind of “descent into madness,” she admits that graduate school is “one of the last spheres where private life and 'interpersonal relationships' -- relationships with other students, with professors, with the books you're reading, between the books you're reading, within the books you're reading – are accorded the highest priority and become the subject of attention, description, and study.” She sees literary scholars as “progressing toward a cumulative understanding of literature,” and cites as her mentors such professors as Gregory Freidin, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Monika Greenleaf, Franco Moretti, and Joshua Landy. In the book she concludes, “If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find them.”

The Proust Project, Day 58

Where this began
Day 57

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 380-391.

Preparing to go out to dinner at Rivebelle with Saint-Loup, the narrator summons the "lift," who makes small talk as they ascend, giving the narrator some insights into "the working classes of modern times," such as their efforts "to remove from their speech all reminder of the system of domestic service to which they belong." The "lift" (Proust always puts the word in quotation marks) says "tunic" for "uniform" and "remuneration" for "wages," and puzzles the narrator by referring to "the lady that's an employee of yours." The narrator thinks, "'we're not factory-owners -- we don't have employees," before he realizes that the "lady" is Françoise and that "the word 'employee' is as essential to the self-esteem of servants as wearing a mustache is to waters in cafés." 

But mostly his mind is on the group of girls he has seen on the esplanade. He had overheard a woman comment, "she's one of the friends of the Simonet girl."

Why I decided, there and then, that the name 'Simonet' must belong to one of the gang of girls, I have no idea: how to get to know the Simonet family became my constant preoccupation. ... The Simonet girl must be the prettiest of them, and also, it seemed to me, the one who might become my mistress, since she was the only one who, by turning slightly away two or three times, had appeared aware of my staring eyes.

When asked if he knows anyone named Simonet, the "lift" says vaguely that "he thought he had 'heard tell of some such a name,'" so the narrator asks him to have a list of the latest arrivals to the hotel sent up to him. He also lets the reader know that "the name of 'the Simonet girl'" was to become important to him "several years later."

In his room, the narrator reflects -- in one of those extended, minutely observed, but seemingly skimmable Proustian passages -- on the view from the window, until it's time to dress for dinner, full of anticipation of seeing again "a particular woman whom I had noticed the last time we had gone to Rivebelle, who had appeared to look at me, who had even left the room for a moment, conceivably for the sole purplose of giving me the chance to follow her out."  Then Aimé arrives with the list of new arrivals and the comment that "there could be no doubt that Dreyfus was guilty, totally and utterly." This dates the stay at Balbec to 1897 or 1898, which means that if the narrator is Proust himself, he is at least 26 -- a more advanced age than the reader might expect from his frequent childishness. 

More important for the story, however, is that "not without a little palpitation ... I read, on the first page of the list of newcomers: The Simonet family.... I had no idea which of these girls -- or, indeed, whether any of them -- might be Mlle Simonet; but I knew that Mlle Simonet loved me and that, because of Saint-Loup's presence, I was going to try to make her acquantance." This fantasy so delights him that he surprises Saint-Loup when they arrive at Rivebelle by letting the servant take his overcoat despite Saint-Loup's warning that "it's not very warm here." "I had lost all fear of being ill; and the need to protect myself against the possibility of dying ... had likewise vanished from my mind."

From that moment on, I was a different person, no longer the grandson of my grandmother, to whom I would not give another thought until after having left the restaurant, but briefly the brother of the waiters who were about to serve us.

Things Are Really Foxed Up

Andrew Sullivan views Palin's Fox News contract with great alarm:

This FNC/RNC merger is another threat to reasoned discourse in public life, because it is a showman's concoction of very powerful emotional elements: resentment, sex, religion, anger. It creates its own reality. "We Do Not Torture"; everyone in Gitmo was the "Worst of the Worst"; the stimulus lowered growth; all the debt is Obama's fault; Obama is a Muslim and non-American; the White House is stacked with the Islamist/socialist enemy within; if we had not bailed out the banks, we would be roaring back from the recession; Obama wants to ignore the war in order to effect a radical transformation of America into some kind of scary version of France and Waziristan. And on and on. I'm not exaggerating. Listen to these maniacs.
...
Non-believing people have a hard time swallowing all this. It seems so wacko. Religious people who have had any experience of fundamentalism in their lives know it all too well.

Ailes' New Political-Media Party: The FNC-RNC Hostile Take-Over - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

How Do You Say...?

So it seems that we're pronouncing "Haiti" wrong. Or are we?

Language Log » Hatey?

The Proust Project, Day 57

Where this began
Day 56

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 369-380.

A passage that reflects both the actual title and the more approximate one -- Within a Budding Grove -- of the Scott Moncrieff translation. 

The narrator tells us that his "health was going from bad to worse" and that he "was at one of those times of youth when the idle heart, unoccupied by love for a particular person, lies in wait for Beauty, seeking it everywhere, as the man in love sees and desires in all things the woman he cherishes." And he finds it, while waiting outside the Grand-Hôtel for his grandmother, in a "gang of girls" that he first glimpses far away along the esplanade. One girl pushes a bicycle, two others carry golf clubs, "and their accoutrements made a flagrant contrast with the appearance of other young girls in Balbec." They stride along together, swaggering almost, and careless of other people strolling in their path, sometimes even bumping into them. 

He characterizes their attitude as one of complete indifference to others, which he regards as unique. 

[F]or love, hence fear, of the crowd is one of the most powerful motives in all individuals, whether they wish to please others, astonish them, or show that they despise them. In a recluse, the most irrevocable, lifelong rejection of the world often has as its basis an uncontrolled passion for the crowd, of such force that, finding when he does go out that he cannot win the admiration of a concierge, passerby, or even the coachman halted at the corner, he prefers to spend his life out of their sight, and gives up all activities that would make it necessary to leave the house.

Is Proust talking about himself here? 

Gradually he begins to distinguish one girl from another as they draw closer, but before he does he perceives "the uninterrupted flow of a shared, unstable, and elusive beauty." They represent for him "the new interest in sports, spreading now even among the working classes, and in physical training without any concomitant training of the mind.... For surely these were noble and tranquil models of human beauty that met my eye, against the sea, like statues in the sun along a shore in Greece." 

Their erotic potential becomes strong as they come nearer, for "in none of my conjectures did I entertain the possibility that they might be chaste." He is struck in particular by "the brunette with the full cheeks and the bicycle," and though she is not the one he liked the best, because Gilberte's golden skin and "fairish ginger hair" had become his "unattainable ideal," he centers his attention on her after their eyes meet. 

I knew I could never possess the young cyclist, unless I could also possess what lay behind her eyes. My desire for her was desire for her whole life: a desire that was full of pain, because I sensed it was unattainable, but also full of heady excitement, because what had been my life up to that moment had suddenly ceased to be all of life, had turned into a small corner of a great space opening up for me, which I longed to explore.

We have seen him obsessed with the desire for possession -- both body and mind -- before, in the encounter with the village girl in Carqueville, where he similarly experienced the concept of "replacing sensual pleasure with the idea of penetrating someone's life." And he likens his experience with "this little sauntering gang of girls" to his encounters with "those fleeting passersby on the road," the ones he fantasizes about but knows he will never re-encounter. "If they had been offered to me by a madam -- in the sort of house that, as has been seen, I did not disdain -- divorced from the element that lent them so many colors and such attractive imprecision, they would have been less enchanting." 

No actress, no peasant girl, no boarder in a convent school had ever been so beautiful to me, so fascinating in a suggestion of the unknown, so invaluably precious, so probably unattainable. The exemplar these girls offered of life's potential for bringing unexpected happiness was so full of charm, in a state of such perfection, that it was almost for intellectual reasons that I despaired of ever being able to experience ... the profound mystery to be found in the beauty one has longed for, the beauty one replaces ... by seeking mere pleasure from women one has not desired ... with the result that one dies without ever having enjoyed that other form of fulfillment.

He knows that "having botanized so much among such young blossoms, that it would be impossible to come upon a bouquet of rare varieties than these buds."

The Proust Project, Day 56

Where this began
Day 55

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 359-369.

Bloch mystifies the narrator by his effect on Françoise, who seems to have expected some "prodigy of nature" and is disappointed when she meets him: "She seemed to bear me a grudge, as though I had misled her about him, or exaggerated his importance." She's also disappointed when she finds out that Saint-Loup, "whom she adored, ... was a Republican." But Françoise, who is a royalist, gets over it, "and when she spoke of Saint-Loup, she would say, 'He's just a hypocrite,' her broad, kindly smile showing that she thought a well of him as before and that she had forgiven him."

We learn more about Saint-Loup and his mistress, whom the narrator credits with a positive effect on him. His family "did not understand that, for many young men in fashionable society, who might otherwise never acquire a certain cultivation of mind or a measure of mildness in friendship, who might never be exposed to good taste or gentler ways of doing things, it is often in a mistress that they find their best teacher, and in relationships with such women that they make their only acquaintance with morality, serve an apprenticeship in higher culture, and learn to see the value of knowledge for its own sake." (Imagine an English or American writer contemporaneous with Proust making such an assertion.)

An actress of sorts, the mistress made Saint-Loup "see the company of fashionable ladies as insipid and the requirement to attend their functions as intolerable." She thereby "saved him from snobbery and cured him of frivolity." But things do not go well between them. Her friends, writers and actors, make fun of him, and she asserts that "their worlds were too dissimilar." There's also an implication that she is gold-digging, and that "she would wait quietly until she had 'made her pile,' which, in view of the sums doled out by Saint-Loup, looked as thought it might take a very short time." His ill-advised suggestion that she perform a scene from an avant-garde symbolist play for guests of his aunt is also a disaster.

And then the narrator goes into a fit of jealous pique because Saint-Loup asks his grandmother if he can photograph her before he leaves Balbec. His grandmother and Françoise make so much fuss over the request that the narrator gets huffy and the grandmother takes offense at his attitude. He retreats into childishness again.