Write what?
JULIA
People in Vienna are really doing something to change the world. You must come. Then you’ll know what to write about.
Maybe that was it — I just couldn’t write right now. Because I hadn’t found anything to write about. Maybe writers really must go away somewhere, like Dash and Julia told Lillian, like John telling Louise she needed to run off to Moscow with him; writers must pack up their bags and wander off into another world, a foreign world, for focus, inspiration, adventure. Jack Nicholson went off to the mountain hotel, but took along his wife and child to go crazy on; perhaps you have to go further away from the familiar, be a stranger in a strange land, escape from your own insular little world and be absorbed into the more important world of others. Be both alone and, at the same time, with a cast of strangers.
Sophie’s Choice proved it.103 Young Stingo, at the beginning of the movie, is a fresh-faced Southern boy on a bus to somewhere, and we hear his inner thoughts:
STINGO VOICEOVER
I had barely saved enough money to write my novel, for I wanted beyond hope or dreaming to be a writer. But my spirit had remained landlocked, unacquainted with love and a stranger to death.
(I note that he doesn’t say he wants to write; he wants to be a writer. I find this very comforting.)
Stingo wanders into foreign-to-him, post — World War II Brooklyn to write his novel and meets up with Sophie, a gorgeous Polish refugee, and her brilliant boyfriend, Nathan, in their big pink Victorian boarding house. He’s a stranger in their strange land, with a small pocketful of cash to finance the writer’s voyage of discovery and a case of Spam to live on. We await the arrival of love and death. Sophie and Nathan accept him immediately as a Writer, giving him a book of Whitman to welcome this “young novelist from the South.” Stingo does write for us (manual typewriter, rumpled clothing, furrowed brow, slow-growing stack of pages), but it’s another mere montage of writing, a musical interlude intercut with Sophie and Nathan’s comings and goings, and the trio hanging out together. It’s another writing striptease, the appealing appearance of sweat without the strain of sore muscles or psyche.
Sophie and Nathan’s blind, unjustified faith in him is splendid. “You will move mountains,” Sophie assures him. Stingo is slightly uncomfortable with this.
STINGO
You don’t know if I’m really talented. You haven’t read anything I’ve written.
SOPHIE
Well, I don’t ask you about that work, what it’s about, because I know a writer, he likes to be quiet about his work.
Which launches Stingo into confession:
STINGO
It’s about a boy, a twelve-year-old boy.
SOPHIE
So it’s autobiographical.
STINGO
Well, to a certain extent, maybe it is. It takes place in the year his mother dies.
SOPHIE
Oh, I didn’t know your mother died.
STINGO
Yeah, when I was twelve.
At least we know what he’s writing about. So, clearly, he didn’t need to go away from his own life to find material; he only needs his spirit awakened.
Nathan pressures Stingo to let him read the novel, but Stingo protests — he promised himself when he started he wouldn’t show it to anyone until it was finished.
NATHAN
You mean you’re terrified someone won’t like it. What’s the worst that can happen? I might discover you can’t write.
Even as a joke, this makes fear cramp my gut. Nathan absconds with the precious pages, then later takes Stingo, Sophie, and a bottle of Champagne on a moonlit jaunt to the Brooklyn Bridge; Stingo is in a panic, like Lillian, awaiting judgment. Nathan climbs a streetlight and offers an elaborate and inflated toast:
NATHAN
On this bridge, where so many great American writers have stood and reached out to give America its voice, looking toward the land that gave us Whitman. . from this span for which Thomas Wolfe and Hart Crane wrote. . we welcome Stingo into that Pantheon of the Gods, whose words are all we know of mortality. To Stingo!
The music rises up, Nathan flings his glass into the Hudson, Stingo’s face is glazed with joy, and I think, Yes! I want to give America its voice, too! The lure of the beach house is gone — give me the writer’s penury and a can of Spam, if only I can be toasted on the Brooklyn Bridge, reach out and join the Pantheon of the Writing Gods. I’m madly in love, too — not with Stingo or Nathan, not even with the writer or with the writing, but with this kind of affirmation, this promise of glorious and eternal contribution. All I need to do, clearly, is go somewhere to awaken my spirit, to experience love and death (and write), and such riches can be mine.
Unfortunately, Nathan is also a paranoid schizophrenic, and it isn’t long before he becomes suspicious of Stingo’s friendship with Sophie and turns on him:
NATHAN
Baby Southern artiste, you have not fooled me, young Stingo. Since you so graciously allowed me to read your magnum Southern opus, your puling adolescent self-pity for your poor dead mother. .
We’ve been sucker-punched; here is that awful blow, the club in the hand of the thug. At least Dash offered Lillian the renewing, inspiring admonition of her talent; at least John Reed and Eugene stayed in love with Louise. Stingo, like Zhivago before him, is stricken; this is the most painful moment of the movie, for me, this crushing, annihilating pronouncement.
Which is odd, because this movie is not a story about Stingo the young writer, of course, not really — it’s about Sophie, and her horrific life in Poland, in Auschwitz, her struggle to survive in the face of evil. Stingo’s just a subplot, the film’s storyteller of someone else’s more important story. Sophie’s the one who suffers real pain, real loss; the annihilating moment of the movie is intended to be the moment she’s forced to choose between her children, a situation horrific on a scale beyond the ability to imagine. Sophie doesn’t save the world, she isn’t even able to try — her struggle is to save herself, and her children, and she ultimately fails at both. Stingo only tries to save Sophie, and fails. So he’s ultimately unheroic — his writing couldn’t save her, and, really, who would care about that self-absorbed mess of a puling adolescent book when people with real problems everywhere are dying like flies? How ridiculous to just write about your mother dying when you were twelve — who cares? Novels and Nazis; there’s no contest. All Stingo’s writing comes down to is the thing by which he is judged and found worthy of love or disdain. It’s ultimately meaningless, and I can’t forget Nathan’s annihilating blow.
But neither can I forget Sophie’s loving assertion of faith. (You will move mountains.) Or that moment of Champagne on the Brooklyn Bridge. And perhaps, after the movie, Stingo went on to finish his novel (and we can sort of assume he does, given the Styronic narration), and perhaps it became something very bold. Perhaps, now that he’s had his adventures, become acquainted with love and on intimate terms with death, he went on to move a mountain or two. Perhaps he saved someone, I tell myself.