Garp’s first book confirms he’s a Real Writer; he and Helen marry, buy a house (not a beach house — no need for a beach house, not for a real writer!), and all is well, but: Garp’s mother, Jenny, has also written a first book, which becomes an enormous cultural phenomenon, and from this point on the writing’s over; we’re suddenly back to the paint job, to the quandary about sable coats. Garp becomes increasingly concerned with his mother’s fame at the expense of his own. “Nobody is buying my book!” he complains, “I’m starting my second and the same nobodies are going to line up not to buy that one, too,” while his mother’s book is being translated into Apache. Helen tries to console him — he’s an artist, Jenny is merely a cult of personality, but:
GARP
I don’t want reviews! I want an audience!
And we never see him write again. The movie turns cloyingly domestic: Taking care of kids, extramarital affairs, hanging with a transgender buddy. I’m disappointed in him. He has one more writing flurry — a book about a young traumatized girl, and writing becomes, briefly, an explicitly political act. My admiration for him is refueled; he is compelled to tell the story of this one girl because she cannot tell it herself, and I find that noble and worthy. It’s a small cause, perhaps, the recording and thus saving of one small life in a world full of Nazi-size evil, but sweet Garp gets all riled up about it, and it confirms my suspicion — that all the Lara and lily poems, the retreat into navel-gazing introspection, the logging in of mere ordinary people’s lives, doesn’t really count; a real and serious writer takes on Real and Serious things, bigger than one’s petty self.
But it’s just a flurry. His identity, his calling as a writer, is over.
HELEN
Do you miss writing?
GARP
No, not at all. If I do, I’ll start again.
I feel betrayed; Garp’s definition of himself as a writer is too casually elastic for me, too slippery. Isn’t there destiny involved? Where is his dedication, his passion, his commitment to Art? Doesn’t he want to save the world, join the Pantheon of the Gods? Why doesn’t he get his ass in the chair; he’s supposed to be a writer, and a writer writes; why doesn’t he just do his job?
But this line of thinking becomes increasingly uncomfortable to me. It isn’t fair for me to take it out on Garp; I don’t have a leg to stand on here. And, I remind and console myself, he does die young at the end. Maybe that’s what kept him from becoming a real writer, from fulfilling all that looming, burdensome potential.
I graduated college with my BA in English literature, emphasis: Creative Writing — the lie that appears on my transcripts — and took a job at a property development company in Westwood for $18,000 a year. I was relieved to have found a job and equally terrified this was the fence my life was now teetering on. Peep: I’m a writer—I still wanted to assert that at dinner parties, but I knew I had no right. I was merely one of tens of thousands of English lit grads and Creative Writing emphasizers, and there was no beach house in sight, no handsome literary lover to dig me a dinner of clams. But two months later a friend and I sold a screenplay we’d been working on nights and weekends, and I leapt — stumbled? — off that fence onto another one, a higher, prettier fence, one that felt more like a pedestal, if you were willing to look at it the right way.
So, I was a screenwriter. I told myself it counted. I bought an expensive linen vest that looked a bit Edwardian and bohemian writer glasses; I bought my first computer to replace the IBM Selectric and process all those screenplay words, a laser printer, a copy of Syd Field, brass brads and reams of three-hole-punch paper to stack in my writing space. When my partner and I wrote at my house, I remained assertively in pajamas and bathrobe. But being a screenwriter isn’t so much a literary enterprise as a social one; it’s talking a lot about writing. It’s going to pitch meetings and story meetings and talking to death about plot points and act breaks and character arcs; it’s going to screenings and long, overpriced lunches with other screenwriters to piss and moan about development hell. It’s meeting your agent or producer for dinner at Spago and trying to feel like you’re Jacqueline Bisset at the Algonquin. I told myself I loved it, all of it, and much of the time I did.
My partner and I watched movies about screenwriters. The Big Picture made us laugh hysterically but also wince; early in the movie an earnest young screenwriter, fresh from winning an award at film school, eager to make important and powerful movies, is wooed over lunch by a potential agent:105
AGENT
Look, I’m not going to bullshit you. . I’m going to be straight with you. I don’t know you. I don’t know your work. But I know that you have enormous talent.
It doesn’t feel like Sophie’s groundless assertion of faith; it’s grounds to snicker at them both, and the earnest young screenwriter slowly succumbs to the slick Studio Executive who forces the evolution of his story from a nuanced study of love among a quadrangle of mature adults to a romp about ghost stewardesses in bikinis. (My writing partner and I soon learned that, as satire goes, this was not farfetched.) Sunset Boulevard has a gigolo hack screenwriter promising to write a script in exchange for being kept by a delusional and faded movie queen — but the screenwriter never writes, not even in a montage; screenwriting is a party game, a power play, a flirtation.106 Barton Fink tries to write, in Barton Fink, and pity poor Barton Fink for trying; this Clifford Odets — style Real Writer is trapped in a seedy Hollywood hotel room, on a deadline to deliver a fluffy, trivial script, watching the wallpaper peel and sweat while slowly losing his writerly mind and his literary pride from having made this deal with the devil.107
Sullivan’s Travels has a successful writer/director who makes fluffy, trivial movies; he decides he wants to make an important film, something real and serious, and he hits the road in search of true suffering, in order to properly document the human condition.108 Through a series of zany adventures Sullivan winds up convicted of a petty crime and sentenced to hard time on a chain gang, where he is among, finally, the suffering dregs of humanity. One night these beaten-down, wretched beasts of burden are treated to a fluffy, trivial movie; the poor, suffering men start to laugh; the successful writer/director learns the value of offering the world something fluffy and trivial, how we all need those mindless moments of joy, and he is humbled. My partner and I felt smug because we identified with all these screenwriter anguishes; it meant we were the real thing.
The real thing, as in screenwriters, and I had to learn the screenwriter’s rules: You force your fine prose into screenplay format (which as a form is more rigid and less organic than a sestina); you don’t overwrite description (i.e, leave a lot of white space so the exhausted, overworked reader doing coverage can make it a quick read); you write only what the camera sees, capture the externals, reduce human existence to slug lines (INT. JACK’S BEDROOM — DAY, EXT. MEXICAN RESTAURANT — NIGHT) and make sure characters speak with an eye toward their dialogue margins on the page.