Longhand and a Smith-Corona

From Robert Caro’s Working: Research, Interviewing, Writing (New York: Knopf, 2019). Caro recalls what Princeton professor R.P. Blackmur said to him, after first saying something complimentary: “But you’re never going to achieve what you want to, Mr. Caro, if you don’t stop thinking with your fingers.”

“Thinking with your fingers.” Every so often, do you get the feeling that someone has seen right through you? In that moment, I knew Professor Blackmur had seen right through me. No real thought, just writing — because writing was so easy. Certainly never thinking anything all the way through. And writing for a daily newspaper had been so easy, too. When I decided to write a book, and, beginning to realize the complexity of the subject, realized that a lot of thinking would be required — thinking things all the way through, in fact, or as much through as I was capable of — I determined to do something to slow myself down, to not write until I had thought things through. That was why I resolved to write my first drafts in longhand, slowest of the various means of committing thoughts to paper, before I started doing later drafts on the typewriter; that is why I still do my first few drafts in longhand today; that is why, even now that typewriters have been replaced by computers, I still stick to my Smith-Corona Electra 210. And yet, even thus slowed down, I will, when I’m writing, set myself the goal of a minimum of a thousand words a day, and, as the chart I keep on my closet door attests, most days meet it.

If I were teaching a writing course, I’d show my students Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (dir. Lizzie Gottlieb, 2022).

Related reading
“Robert Caro’s Favorite Things” (The Wall Street Journal ) : “Turn Every Page: Inside the Robert A. Caro Archive” (New-York Historical Society) : “Why Robert Caro Now Has Only Ten Typewriters” (The New Yorker )

Editing

From Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (dir. Lizzie Gottlieb, 2022). Robert Gottlieb speaking:

“Editing is intelligent and sympathetic reaction to the text and to what the author is trying to accomplish.”

And:

“Making things better, saving things, is the editorial impulse.”

And I like what Bryan Garner says:

“Editing is an act of friendship. A good editor is making you look smarter than you actually are — smarter and better.”

Also from this movie
Taped to the lamp

Taped to the lamp

From Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (dir. Lizzie Gottlieb, 2022). Robert Caro speaking:

“How do you make the reader feel how desperate a man is, not just read it, but feel it, but see it, and feel it himself, feel this desperation of Lyndon Johnson himself? And right on an index card and Scotch-taped to the lamp in front of me: ‘Is there desperation on this page?’ And I can't tell ya how many days that card stays up there.”

In the documentary, there’s a different card taped to the lamp.

[“The only thing that matters is what is on this page.” Click for a larger view.]

Also from this movie
Robert Gottlieb on editing

F.S. Royster Guano Co. notebook

[An antiques-mall find ($2.00). 5¼″ × 3″. Click for a larger view.]

According to a 2019 newspaper article, the F.S. Royster Guano Company began in 1885 in Tarboro, North Carolina. This notebook gives Norfolk, Virgina, as the main office, with sixteen other plants and offices in the south and midwest.

Inside this book, useful information — brief explanations of what different plant foods do, guidelines for measuring grain and lumber, a recipe for house paint (lead and zinc), 1943 and 1944 calendars on the inside covers. And thirty-two pages for writing, each with seventeen lines below a heading, a different heading on each page. For instance,

        With ROYSTER’S Under Your Crop
                a Load is Off Your Mind.

I’m not sure if that’s meant to be funny. If it is meant so, it’s the only such heading that is.

As you may know, agricultural notebooks are a primary inspiration for the contemporary Field Notes Brand.

Pocket notebook sighting

[Dayton Lummis as Dr. Carl Morris. From The Flight That Disappeared (dir. Reginald Le Borg, 1961). Click for a larger view.]

If you knew what was on that notebook page, you too would tear it out and tear it up — I hope.

More notebook sightings
All the King’s Men : Angels with Dirty Faces : The Bad and the Beautiful : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : Bombshell : The Brasher Doubloon : The Case of the Howling Dog : Cat People : Caught : City Girl : Crossing Delancey : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : Deep Valley : The Devil and Miss Jones : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : The Face Behind the Mask : The Fearmakers : A Foreign Affair : Foreign Correspondent : Fury : The Girl in Black Stockings : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : I See a Dark Stranger : If I Had a Million : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Lost Horizon : M : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : Now, Voyager : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Scarlet Claw : Sleeping Car to Trieste : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Stranger Things : Sweet Smell of Success : Time Table : T-Men : To the Ends of the Earth : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Vice Squad : Walk East on Beacon! : What Happened Was . . . : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once : Young and Innocent

From 1945 and 1943

From today’s installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American:

Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.”

On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”

The fascist playbook, as described in this pamphlet, repeats as the playbook of today’s hard right: cast one’s cause as “super-Americanism,” foment domestic disunity and hatred of minorities, reject the need for international cooperation, and label one’s opponents communists.

You can read the pamphlet at the Internet Archive.

And from 1943, there’s the anti-fascist short film Don’t Be a Sucker.

Where did the hats go?

[The Flight That Disappeared (dir. Reginald Le Borg, 1961). Click for a larger view.]

I’ve sometimes thought it’d be fun to take along a nice straw when flying, but what to do with it? Certainly not keep it on my lap for the length of the flight. No way! Which made me wonder: what did men on planes do back in the day, when everyone wore a hat? This movie let me know.

The above flight is a fiction, but any number of photographs will confirm that hats went above the seats. For instance. Baggage, at least most of it, would have been checked. Women would most likely have kept their hats on.

*

A reader passed on a link to an advertisement for the Mallory “Air Cruiser,” a hat “styled for the skyways,” “for gentlemen who travel.” N.B.: “Exclusive Mallory Cravenette process withstands varied types of weather throughout the world.” I think that means that the hat was meant to serve as a beater.

Thanks, reader.

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, Netflix, TCM, YouTube.]

Big Eyes (dir. Tim Burton, 2014). Amy Adams as the mid-century American artist Margaret Keane, whose husband Walter Keane took credit for her paintings of children with big, sad eyes. The lie, with Margaret complicit, ran for years. Adams gives a great performance as a woman with and without agency, sitting (like Rapunzel) in a locked room, cranking out paintings for which she can take no credit — until she does. As Walter Keane, Christoph Waltz is all charm, deception, desperation, and, finally, rage. ★★★★ (N)

[If you’d like to see the Life magazine article seen in the movie, it’s here.]

*

The Depraved (dir. Paul Dickson, 1957). To say that it’s more than slightly reminiscent of Double Indemnity is no spoiler: you can see where the story is headed from its first minutes. As a U.S. Army captain stationed in England, Robert Arden has the advantage of even looking as bit like Fred MacMurray; as the calm, cool Laura Wilton, Anne Heywood makes a marked contrast to the weird glamour of Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson. The most interesting performances are those of Basil Dignam (nasty, domineering Tom Wilton) and Denis Shaw (an implacable inspector). Only seventy-one minutes, so the thought of murder comes up as soon as the principals meet — there’s no time to lose. ★★★ (YT)

*

Hunted (dir. Charles Crichton, 1952). A man, Chris (Dirk Bogarde), and boy, Robbie (Jon Whiteley), no relation, fleeing London and the authorities, civil and parental. Overtones of Huck and Jim; much stronger overtones of Alfred (Hitchcock), with bumbling policemen, rural innkeepers, and danger in every circumstance. As almost-seven Robbie, Jon Whiteley has little to say, but his silent sorrow and his devotion to Chris are the moral center of the movie. We know what’ll happen to Chris, but what will become of this poor boy? ★★★★ (YT)

*

Room 222, first season (created by James L. Brooks, 1969–1970). I think I owe some explanation of how this viewing effort (twenty-six episodes!) came about: program notes for an orchestral work by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson mentioned that he wrote the Room 222 theme. No, that was Jerry Goldsmith (Perkinson wrote some incidental music for the series), but the mistake was enough to get our household watching. This series was well ahead of its time, depicting life in a multicultural Los Angeles high school and touching on a wide array of topics (though not, at least in this first season, the war in Vietnam): overcrowded classrooms, outdated pedagogy, economic disparity, global warming, the exploitation of college athletes. History teacher Pete Dixon (Lloyd Haynes), guidance counselor Liz McIntyre (Denise Nicholas), principal Seymour Kaufman (Michael Constantine), student teacher Alice Johnson (Karen Valentine), and student regulars (Heshimu as Jason Allen, Howard Rice as Richie Lane, Judy Strangis as Helen Loomis) make up an earnest, endearing, sometimes contentious, mostly groovy bunch. ★★★★ (YT)

*

A Damsel in Distress (dir. George Stevens, 1937). Story by P.G. Wodehouse, music by George and Ira Gershwin, with Fred Astaire as an American entertainer (what else?) in London. There’s a love interest (Joan Fontaine), who has just one, barely one, dance with Fred. The fireworks kick in when Astaire dances with his press agent and his secretary, George Burns and Gracie Allen, first in a manor house (“Put Me to the Test”), then in a fun house (“Stiff Upper Lip”). The grand finale: “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” with Astaire dancing and playing a drum kit (with both hands and feet). ★★★★ (TCM)

*

The Flight That Disappeared (dir.Reginald Le Borg, 1961). “This whole business has a strange, abnormal ring,” says an airline exec. Indeed, it has the feel of a Twlight Zone effort, with a Rod Serling-like nobility of purpose: to warn against the peril of nuclear weapons. The acting is passable; the sets are low-budget; but the story is imaginative, even daring. And now I know that men’s hats went on the shelf above the seats, where the pillows were kept: “May I take your hat?” asks a flight attendant. ★★★ (YT)

*

I’ve Lived Before (dir. Richard Bartlett, 1956). First it’s 1918; then it’s 1931; then it’s modern times: and it’s all about a commercial pilot who’s convinced he’s the reincarnation of a WWI pilot. Jock Mahoney is the pilot; John McIntire is the psychiatrist presiding over his care; their exchanges are soporific. The big flaw: there’s no sense of eerieness here, just too many dull conversations. Ann Harding’s dignified, understated performance as the WWI pilot’s sweetheart walks away with the movie. ★★ (YT)

*

It Happens Every Thursday (dir. Joseph Pevney, 1953). Capraesque comedy: a New York couple, Jane and Bob MacAvoy (Loretta Young and John Forsythe) buy a dinky newspaper in Eden, California, and wouldn’t you know it, lots of things go wrong — one of which is that the press breaks down every Thursday. Jane is plucky and quick-thinking; Bob is hardworking and cheerful. A great number of familiar faces make for an appealing cast: Edgar Buchanan, Jimmy Conlin, Jane Darwell, Gladys George, Frank McHugh, Regis Toomey, Willard Waterman, Eddy Waller (yes, we watch a lot of older movies). I reached a Capracorn breaking point seeing Jane and Bob’s new baby, “Sister,” nestled in an open file cabinet, and I watched in fear that the movie would end with Jane and Bob realizing — gosh! — that they had forgotten to give her a name. ★★★ (YT)

*

Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (dir. Lizzie Gottlieb, 2022). A writer and editor, talking about and working out their almost-fifty-year collaboration. Wonderful stuff: a search for a pencil, a search in a margin for the best word, arguments about semicolons, a tower of manuscript pages, a brief discourse about the catalogue of ships in the Iliad (which inspired a passage in The Power Broker ), a visit to the daunting archives of the LBJ Presidential Library, a massive multipage outline thumbtacked to a corkboard that fills a wall. The best moment: writer and editor at work, with mics off — because the work is private. A bonus: music by Olivier and Clare Machon (both formerly of Clare and the Reasons). ★★★★ (YT)

*

Modern Romance (dir. Albert Brooks, 1981). Albert Brooks is Robert Cole, a film editor whose major professional accomplishment in the movie’s 133 minutes is dubbing louder footsteps as George Kennedy runs through the corridor of a spaceship. The movie charts the course of Robert’s relationship with Mary Harvard (Kathryn Harrold), a bank executive who seems to be miles ahead of him in maturity. A funny, sad picture of male insecurity and mistrust. As Elaine wondered, is this what men are really like? ★★★★ (CC)

*

Conspirator (dir. Victor Saville, 1949). It’s like a cross between Jane Austen and Alfred Hitchcock: Melinda Greyton (Elizabeth Taylor), a young American abroad, sits at a London gathering, waiting to be asked to dance; a dashing somewhat older man, Michael Curran (Robert Taylor), a major in the British army, steps into the room; and marriage follows. In the Austen world, that would be the end of the story, but here it’s the beginning, with Melinda’s playful spirit coming up against her husband’s odd absences and unpredictable moments of anger. As the movie’s title suggests, this major harbors a dark secret. Strong overtones of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, with discovery, danger, and a lie to preserve a status quo. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Crime Unlimited (dir. Ralph Ince, 1935). A new recruit to Scotland Yard (Esmond Knight) goes undercover to infiltrate the Maddick gang, jewel thieves flourishing in London. Nothing especially original in the story, but there’s atmosphere abounding, with dark rooms, glaring lights, odd camera angles, a glamorous Russian (Lili Palmer) who may or may not be trustworthy, and a criminal mastermind seen only as a hand over a chessboard. When the mastermind reveals himself, it’s like seeing Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse. But it’s the Hitchcock influence that carries the day and makes the movie watching. ★★★ (TCM)

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

Succession and poetry Now with a thought about the John Berryman titles.

Books UnBanned

An initiative from the Brooklyn Public Library: Books UnBanned, “to help teens combat the negative impact of increased censorship and book bans in libraries across the country.” Books UnBanned offers readers between the ages of thirteen and twenty-one, anywhere in the United States, a year’s free access to the BPL’s e-books and audiobooks.

Nick Higgins, Chief Librarian:

Brooklyn Public Library stands firmly against censorship and for the principles of intellectual freedom — the right of every individual to seek and receive information from all points of view without restriction. Limiting access or providing one-sided information is a threat to democracy itself.

Young readers should know about this offer. Please spread the word.