Paul’s last days were filled with various illnesses, the usual fate. But there was a successful concert of his music in New York. There were still twilight Gutenberg ceremonies where his crystalline prose shone as though darkness did not exist. There was a conversation with his biographer about the great influences on his life and career, and he mentioned Gertrude Stein, Aaron Copland (of course, he added), Gore Vidal, and Tennessee Williams. He died November 18, 1999, missing the first years of the twenty-first century and the last years of the American Republic, which his ancestor Samuel Bowles had cared so much about.
TWENTY-TWO
I left myself at the end of my first memoir, Palimpsest, in the year 1964, when I was thirty-nine. It is now April 2005. I am in Los Angeles and at the beginning of May I shall have a cataract removed from my left eye. Everything they say about age proves to be true. For years I read to my blind grandfather and even led him onto the floor of the Senate. I also remember practicing being blind, eyes shut and walking, with arms outstretched. In World War Two, when we learned of the discovery of radar, my grandfather said, “Every blind man learns from personal experience about radar. As you walk toward a wall, say, you can feel the sound start to bounce off the wall, the principle on which radar is based.” Although he was not given to self-pity he did complain how slow reading was for him, being unable to glance through a book and determine what, if anything, was worth reading in it. He also had his own special marginal symbols for important passages. If there was something he might want to quote in a speech he would say “Q,” which one would write in the margin next to the passage to be remembered. In old age he lacked the phenomenal aural memory of his youth when he used to bemuse the Senate with long lists of statistics that he had memorized, all the time holding a text in his hand which he pretended to read.
“I now grow forgetful,” wrote Montaigne in old age. “Names refuse to come when bidden.” It is encouraging to know that Montaigne who had read and reread everything worried about loss of memory, too. He was also fascinated by the process of memory: after all, he was the first great memoirist of life not only as lived by himself but as reported by others and written down.
“Off I go,” Montaigne writes, “rummaging about in books for sayings which please me—not so as to store them up (for I have no storehouses) but so as to carry them back to the book, where they are no more mine than they were in their original place. We only know, I believe, what we know now: ‘knowing’ no more consists in what we once knew than in what we shall know in the future…”
It has been my experience that writers, myself included, often forget what they have written since the act of writing is simply a letting go of a piece of one’s own mind, and so there is a kind of mental erasure as it finds its place on a page in order to leap to another consciousness like a mutant viral strain. I have just recorded Jane Bowles’s uncharacteristic behavior as jealous wife only to recall that I had already quoted her letters to Paul in Palimpsest.
TWENTY-THREE
I have now had a researcher prepare an outline of what I was writing and sometimes doing over the last forty years. Immediately after my return to the novel with Julian, somewhat perversely I took on a great deal of film work. One project was at the request of Ray Stark, a Hollywood producer, who found himself burdened with an unmakable screenplay of a best-selling book about the Nazi occupation of Paris. René Clément, a much admired French director—not least, as it proved, by himself and his formidable wife. He told me once that he had perfect taste. Howard and I holed up in a flat under the eaves of the Hotel Plaza-Athénée where Billy, our black spaniel, had distinguished himself by relieving himself on the carpet in the lobby as we were checking in. But the French tolerance of pets is their most distinguishing amiable characteristic.
The making of Is Paris Burning? was, as so often happens, far more interesting than the finished product. The previous writer, an American Francophile, had all the underground French freedom fighters constantly shouting Vive la France! He must have worked at Warner Brothers where films set in France were popular and the actors were either French or spoke their American English dialogue with heavy French accents. The fact that a script written in English to represent French speech could also contain many French phrases bothered no one. I would try to explain that the English spoken by the actors playing Frenchmen was, in context, French, and to clutter it up with numerous zut alors did not make the whole thing seem more French but simply confusing. My metaphysical arguments seldom won the day.
In Los Angeles Ray Stark had hired a young would-be filmmaker, a graduate of film school, Francis Ford Coppola, who could write an entire screenplay in a day or two. He was just what Ray had been looking for. Ray would give Francis a book like Carson’s Reflections in a Golden Eye. Then, while Francis was working on the script, Ray would be persuading Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando to play the leads. When they finally asked to see a script, Ray would give them Francis’s handiwork with the explanation: “This is only a rough draft. Tennessee will be doing the final script.” Ray was a great salesman and, of course, Tennessee never did do a final draft nor, sadly, did Francis. Ray was also not particularly grateful for how well Francis was serving him. As soon as I got to Paris, I sat down with Francis to go over my predecessor’s script. There were a lot of “voilàs” and “Gallic shrugs” with strains of the Marseillaise on the soundtrack. I found Francis to be encyclopedic on anything that had to do with filmmaking. He was truly post-Gutenberg. Film was where it—all of it—was at. For him the written culture had passed into night, making him the first member of the total-film generation that I was ever to meet. Then I got a call from Ray: “Now that you’re here I can let Francis go.” I saw myself writing endless exterior shots: “Long Shot: German tank turns into Place de la Concorde—Day.” I said, “No. I need him. He’s done a lot of the exterior stuff already. I need him for that.” On the personal side, Francis was in Paris with a young wife and baby. Reluctantly, Ray kept him on. Recently, Francis told me that I had turned him onto wine which, in turn, led to his becoming one of the leading winemakers in the United States. I asked him how I’d made this contribution. “Remember when we’d go out to lunch and you’d have a glass of wine and so would I though I didn’t particularly like it at first? I associated wine with the older guys in the family who always drank red wine out of these Gallo jugs. I thought it was strictly for Italians hung up on the old country. Then you started talking about French wine and I was hooked.” The reader who finds moviemaking interesting will note at this point that the director René Clément has not yet made an appearance. I’m sure he did in life but movies in those days were strictly controlled by the producer while the director, with a few exceptions, was simply a technician under the producer’s guidance.