Personally, I don’t know what the first 100 days would look like, but I’d be very interested in seeing who was willing to shake his hand. (Ba-dum, bish!)
I telephone Aston Martin. They enthusiastically offer me an Aston Martin Vantage for three days. They love the Bond association.
“How much would the car normally cost?” I ask Matthew, Aston Martin’s press officer. “£82,000,” he replies. “Plus I’ve put in about £9,000 of extras.”
“Like an ejector seat?” I say.
“Extra soft leather,” he replies. “And a connection to plug in your iPod.”
There’s an unexpected amount of class hostility along the way.
I was expecting the hostile glares from passersby to continue into France, but once we reach Calais everything changes. I’m still getting constant looks, but now they are looks of adoration. For the first time in my life, I am interesting to Frenchmen. They’re finding me mysterious and fascinating. Frenchwomen, however, don’t seem attracted by me. I’d have assumed from the books that they’d all want to have sex with me the minute they saw the car, but they don’t seem to notice me. It’s the men and the adolescent boys who are smitten.
It also turns out that trying to match Bond’s consumption of food is even more difficult than matching his consumption of women.
I check into the Hôtel Terminus, on the edge of the railway station. Le Cosy is the nearest restaurant. It is 11pm. Usually I don’t eat after 7pm, but tonight I make a rare exception. I order everything Bond ordered - two oeufs en cocotte à la crème, a large sole meunière, an “adequate” camembert, a pint of rosé d’Angou, a Hennessy 3 Star and coffee. It is all incredibly delicious. I get drunk.
I am a happy drunk. The car is parked outside. I watch contentedly as a stream of adolescent boys stare adoringly and take pictures on their phones. Then my happy drunkenness turns to maudlin drunkenness. I’m sick of being the centre of attention. Having an Aston Martin is, I reflect, like having a face made of solid gold with diamonds for eyes. Some people are awed, others hate you and want to hurt you. And there’s nothing you can do to get rid of it. I can’t help thinking that an Aston Martin would be a liability for a spy.
The coffee and the camembert and the wine and the brandy swirl toxically inside my now churning stomach. I stumble back to the hotel and to bed. At 3.56am I awake with a confused shriek, grab my notepad and scrawl, “3.56 am. Hair triangle horse chest”, and then fall asleep again. I do not know what “hair triangle horse chest” means.
Bond awoke the next morning, fresh as a daisy, had breakfast and a double coffee at the railway station, and then jumped in his car to continue his pursuit of Goldfinger, motoring “comfortably along the Loire in the early summer sunshine. This was one of his favourite corners of the world.”
I awake the next morning feeling unbelievably nauseous and constipated, and stumble blearily across the road for breakfast at the railway station. If there ever was a restaurant here, there isn’t now, just a vending machine selling crisps and Twixes.
“Had this been the case in Bond’s day, would he have eaten a Twix for breakfast?” I wonder. “Probably, judging by his constant desire to fuck up his body.” I eat a Twix and begin to hate James Bond.
In the end, the writer doesn’t finish his journey the way Bond did — by being captured and tortured. Come to think of it, after all those opulent meals, he does experience a kind of torture, but . . . you know . . . not the same thing at all.
UPTON SINCLAIR (1878-196 America’s foremost Socialist, writer and activist was a Socialist and activist first and a writer second, as he himself was first to acknowledge. Sinclair defended the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti, plowed the money from his most successful book into a short-lived New Jersey commune, and ran for governor of California in the face of blistering attacks from William Randolph Hearst. (One of his campaign workers was future science fiction great Robert A. Heinlein.) Sinclair wrote his 90 or so books with torn-from-the-headlines urgency, with little regard for the niceties of character development and dialogue, and his many novels occupy a space somewhere between narrative outlines and political pamphlets. But throughout his life Upton Sinclair was the model of a publicly engaged intellectual, and his impact on American life was considerable, not least in the way his muckraking 1906 novel The Jungle helped bring about curbs on the meatpacking industry’s vilest practices. In the 1940s, dissatisfied with his own work, Sinclair conceived a massive series of historical novels built around Lanny Budd, the Swiss-born son of an American armaments manufacturers, whose life brings him into contact with every significant historical figure and event of the first half of the 20th century. Beginning with World’s End in 1940 and ending with The Return of Lanny Budd in 1953, the 11-volume Lanny Budd series remains Upton Sinclair’s most attractive and engaging work, with remarkably shrewd judgments and predictions about the influence of oil cartels, corporations and the press that still speak to our times. Though they are available in print-on-demand editions from Simon Publications, the Budd books are prime candidates for the black jacket club, in however many volumes are necessary. Another volume would suffice for the best of the muckraking novels: The Jungle, which every high school student knows; The Flivver King, a novel about Henry Ford that every high school student ought to know; Oil, about the early days of the California oil boom; The Wet Parade, the abstemious author’s denunciation of alcohol and its degradation of an American family; and the rueful story of his gubernatorial campaign: I, Candidate for Governor, and How I Got Licked. The videos posted at top and bottom are about Sinclair and his campaign.
PATRICIA HIGHSMITH (1921-1995) Though she was tagged early on as a writer of high quality crime fiction and thrillers, this Texas-born author had no use for the conventions of the genre — the standard tension and release structure of thrillers struck her as “a silly tease of the reader.” Instead, she wrote novels that slowly and steadily tightened their coils around the reader, plumbing the depths of criminal personalities or showing the shaky foundations of straight people. Highsmith’s characters have a tendency to lose, trade or steal their identities, or fall so deeply into fantasy that the real world becomes irrelevant. Though she was successful in her lifetime, Highsmith is an acquired taste. Even though I acquired it early on, I still need a long layover between her books — once I went on a Highsmith tear, reading six novels and two story collections in a month, and spent the next few weeks feeling like I was shaking off a bad acid trip. She’s best known for her 1950 debut novel, Strangers on a Train, which Alfred Hitchcock turned into one of his best films, and the five novels she called “the Ripliad,” following the career of Tom Ripley, an ingratiating psychopath with a taste for the good life. (There’s a bit of Ripley’s DNA in Hannibal Lecter, though Highsmith’s original is far more believable.) The elegantly vicious Ripley novels deserve a volume of their own: The Talented Mr. Ripley, about how to use an oar as an instrument of social-climbing; Ripley Under Ground, a tale of better living through art forgery; Ripley’s Game, a study of the vulnerability of innocence to calculating, ruthless evil; The Boy Who Followed Ripley, in which the hero gives a younger man a master class in sociopathy; and Ripley Under Water, about why there’s no percentage in being too snoopy when Tom Ripley lives in your neighborhood. A separate volume would serve for the best of her one-off novels: Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt (a lesbian romance, published in 1951, that defied convention by offering a way to happiness for its principals), Deep Water, The Cry of the Owl and Edith’s Diary. Several filmmakers have had a go at the Ripley novels: the ones who got it right were Rene Clement, who adapted the first book as Purple Noon (Plein Soleil), with Alain Delon as young Ripley; and Liliana Cavani, whose 2002 version of Ripley’s Game showcases John Malkovich as the definitive older Ripley.
FREDERICK MANFRED (1912-1994) He spent his career tagged as a Western writer, but there’s no whiff of Zane Grey in the works of Frederick Manfred. He wrote broad-shouldered novels that delved into the souls of the rough, violent people who inhabited the West, and though he evoked whites and Indians alike with great imaginative sympathy, he depicted their conflicts with unflinching realism: the atrocity at the start of Scarlet Plume is one of the most horrifying things I’ve read. Manfred doesn’t have a best-known novel, but one of his novels, Lord Grizzly, has a well-known subject: the 1823 ordeal of Hugh Glass, a mountain man left for dead after being ripped open by a grizzly bear, who then literally dragged himself hundreds of miles to Fort Kiowa on the Missouri River. The book is a tour de force exploration of the survival instinct, obsession and a quest for revenge that turns unexpectedly absurd. Manfred had no peer in evoking the mental states of men in extreme conditions, and novels like Conquering Horse have passages of almost hallucinatory intensity. The obvious place to start is the five-novel sequence called the Buckskin Man Tales: Lord Grizzly, Conquering Horse, Scarlet Plume, Riders of Judgment and King of Spades. But there’s plenty more to explore, and if Frederick Manfred ever wrote an inept sentence or a sloppy book, I have yet to see it.
Maybe someday I’ll get to go to a rilly big book festival, like the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. James Marcus went there, and he got to see Gore Vidal live in concert:
Vidal, in a wheelchair, was at the top of his game, whether he was taking Exxon to task for its mendacious, nature-loving commercials (”I sit there and pound the floor with my stick”) or putting George W. Bush through the wringer. His comic timing is better than ever–he works those pregnant pauses like a patrician Jack Benny. And as always, there’s a sense that the dramatis personae of American history are Vidal’s intimates, his playmates, his significant others. “I’ve been lying for a years about having read all of Aristotle,” he mused at one point. “Now I see what I’ve been missing.” For most writers, this would be an incidental mea culpa. But for Vidal, it’s merely a means of contact with the most pragmatic of our founding fathers, as if they belonged to the same book club: “Now, Benjamin Franklin was also reading Aristotle at one point….” Egged on by Smiley, Vidal gave Thomas Jefferson high marks for his prose: “He was the poet of democracy–until Whitman, who wrote a bit better.” He had less use for Ayn Rand: “Preaching greed? You don’t do that to Americans. It was in our first Christmas stocking.” Perhaps some of these zingers have been recycled from previous interviews, and as another friend (and Vidal zealot) later pointed out, he has “an entire herd of hobby horses tethered nearby.” Still, I felt very fortunate to be in the same room with this phenomenal man, who saved some of his best lines for the Q-and-A. Did he have any final thoughts on the late William Buckley? Long pause. And then: “I hope it’s not too hot.”
Site traffic must be falling off at Salon. That was my first thought when columnist Andrew O’Hehir boldly ventured forth to declare that he didn’t think it such a hot idea to have Guillermo del Toro direct a film version of The Hobbit. And if O’Hehir thought that riling the rubes — or, in this case, goading the geeks — would bring hordes of fans storming in to defend the honor of del Toro and Peter Jackson, who is producing the thing, he must be disappointed. As of this morning, I saw a mere 62 comments in response to his article after a week online. For a man who wanted to strike a mortal blow to the very heart of geekdom on earth, that’s pretty small potatoes. Why, the Tolkien fan sites do better than that in the first five minutes after posting such questions as: “Ian McKellen, Boxers or Briefs?”
The problem, I guess, is that O’Hehir’s argument is rather lame:
First of all, hasn’t anybody noticed that del Toro has repeatedly said he doesn’t like Tolkien, and that he never finished reading “The Lord of the Rings”? Here’s what he told me in Cannes in 2006, when I asked him about the influence of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis on his own work: “I was never into heroic fantasy. At all. I don’t like little guys and dragons, hairy feet, hobbits — I’ve never been into that at all. I don’t like sword and sorcery, I hate all that stuff.”
Let’s see, he doesn’t like “little guys and dragons” or hairy-footed hobbits, and “The Hobbit” would be a movie about what, exactly? Seriously, I think del Toro was speaking from the heart, and I think he’s right. His aesthetic is darker, more Gothic and more grotesque than the Tolkien-via-Jackson universe; it derives more from the medieval mire of middle-European fairy tale than from the high-toned, pre-modern northern European epics Tolkien was channeling. And I’m riding a major bummer if del Toro is shelving “3993″ (the third of his Spanish history-fantasy trilogy, after “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Devil’s Backbone”), his adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” or his “Doctor Strange” blockbuster. All three of those projects are vastly better fits than the hairy-footed little guys and dragons.
Oddly enough, the news that del Toro isn’t much of a Tolkien fan convinces me he’s the perfect director for The Hobbit. If love for the source material was all it took, then Richard Linklater’s adaptation of A Scanner Darkly would be the masterpiece too many Philip K. Dick think it is. Give me a filmmaker who combines respect for the material with clear-eyed understanding of the structural and narrative demands imposed by film. Del Toro’s movies may be closer in spirit to the Brothers Grimm than the Icelandic sagas, but his understanding and appreciation of fantasy will carry him over that gap.
Lest we forget, Peter Jackson and his screenwriting partners were pretty ruthless when it came to reshaping Tolkien’s baggy epic, and the three films of The Lord of the Rings came out all the better for it. I never much liked the books either — they had great scenes and characters in them, buried in great stretches of dreariness and inert plotting — but I’m a complete fool for the movies. Getting rid of Tom Bombadil, amping up the fear-factor for the Ringwraiths and turning Aragorn into a self-doubting hero rather than a confident king-in-waiting brought The Fellowship of the Ring to life, and while The Hobbit is a more focused work than its elephantine sequel, I’m sure Jackson’s team will do it the same service. And the skill with which they rescued the Arwen love story from the appendices and made it a significant part of the main story bodes well for the planned follow-up film, which will troll through Tolkien’s Middle-earth writings.
So, bring on The Hobbit and its hairy-footed sequel. I’m pumped. And this time, I’ll be able to take my kids to the theater with me. Bring it on.
Apparently the only way to get attention for your “literary” novel (apart from offering sacrifices to the gods and hoping Oprah will bring you into her club) is to write what people take to be a roman a clef about literary novelists, and therefore get columnists and journalists speculating about which literary authors you’re writing about. In other words, you make like Keith Gessen and write All the Sad Young Literary Men, and get the likes of Gawker wondering about the true identities of Keith, Mark and Sam. Hey, I subscribe to the NYRB and visit GalleyCat regularly, so I took a crack at the guessing game, but it turns out I’m still a piker at lit-gossip. And now Joyce Carol Oates and Scott McLemee point out that simply reading the book for its own literary sake would be a far better use of my time.
Dmitri Nabokov has finally decided to let the literary world off the hook. For years he’s been of two minds about whether to obey his father’s instructions and consign the manuscript of his last novel, The Original of Laura, to the flames. At last the decision: He won’t burn the thing. Instead, we’ll finally get to read Vladimir Nabokov’s final work.
While there have been a number of books dealing with the founding of Washington in the 1790’s, as well as a number detailing the dramatic story of its burning by the British during the War of 1812, I had not read any that connected the two threads in any substantial way when the idea began to form in my mind. Until the British thought enough of Washington D.C. to reduce its public buildings to rubble in 1814, the new capital was a source of great friction in our new nation–Northern interests found it too “Southern,” and Southerners found it not “Southern” enough. But that action by the British, meant to frighten an ill-prepared United States military into capitulation, had the opposite effect of what was intended. Americans were outraged, not intimidated–and when the British moved on from Washington to a true military target at Baltimore’s Fort McHenry, they were soundly defeated and the tide of the war changed. Washington D.C. was transformed from a locus of division to a symbol of pride and unity, and in essence, it was the desire to avenge the destruction of our “national city” that led to the final break from Great Britain.
In one way, the city itself is the “main character” of this book, though the attempts of George Washington, and Pierre L’Enfant and others to see a new capital rise from a wilderness (despite the heated opposition of Thomas Jefferson, for one) form the human story that came to fascinate me. L’Enfant was a brilliant man, but an eccentric and difficult one as well, and he was utterly consumed with the correctness of his “Grand Plan.” In essence, he was a poet, and though W.H. Auden has suggested that “poetry makes nothing happen,” L’Enfant made Washington happen, and exactly as he sketched it out on a couple of taped-together scraps of paper more than 200 years ago.
Les also has a new blog called Grand Standiford Station. His previous narrative histories, Last Train to Paradise and Meet You in Hell, were part of my relief reading when I was in the midst of writing The Last Three Miles and wanted something diverting that would keep my head properly calibrated to the task at hand. This led me to contact him for blurbage, which he graciously provided. There’s always a spot for Les Stdnaiford on my blogroll, and if he ever comes by this way I’ll gladly stand him a drink or two or three or . . . well, let’s just say I’ll make it worth his while.
I’ve heard some antagonistic interviews before — the mutual dissing between Gene Simmons and Terry Gross on NPR springs immediately to mind — but this 1953 roundelay between Evelyn Waugh and three interviewers who are, shall we say, not all that impressed with the great man sounds about as convivial as dinner and drinks in the Torquemada family rumpus room.
America’s foremost Socialist, writer and activist was a Socialist and activist first and a writer second, as he himself was first to acknowledge. Sinclair defended the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti, plowed the money from his most successful book into a short-lived New Jersey commune, and ran for governor of California in the face of blistering attacks from William Randolph Hearst. (One of his campaign workers was future science fiction great Robert A. Heinlein.) Sinclair wrote his 90 or so books with torn-from-the-headlines urgency, with little regard for the niceties of character development and dialogue, and his many novels occupy a space somewhere between narrative outlines and political pamphlets. But throughout his life Upton Sinclair was the model of a publicly engaged intellectual, and his impact on American life was considerable, not least in the way his muckraking 1906 novel The Jungle helped bring about curbs on the meatpacking industry’s vilest practices. In the 1940s, dissatisfied with his own work, Sinclair conceived a massive series of historical novels built around Lanny Budd, the Swiss-born son of an American armaments manufacturers, whose life brings him into contact with every significant historical figure and event of the first half of the 20th century. Beginning with World’s End in 1940 and ending with The Return of Lanny Budd in 1953, the 11-volume Lanny Budd series remains Upton Sinclair’s most attractive and engaging work, with remarkably shrewd judgments and predictions about the influence of oil cartels, corporations and the press that still speak to our times. Though they are available in print-on-demand editions from 