Gotham Diary:
So, after dinner last night
8 May 2014
So, after dinner last night, I watched Roger Michell’s Enduring Love. Before the first half hour was out — once the London Review Bookshop scene was over — I couldn’t wait for the whole thing to come to an end.
It wasn’t the faithlessness of the adaptation per se. Ian McEwan’s novel is an intensively literary document, abounding in quietly reverberant echoes from and references to other books and even to older styles of reading books. As a work of art, it cannot be adapted to the screen without sacrificing what makes it a literary achievement. Adaptations are necessarily violent affairs, which is perhaps why so many people, whether they prefer movies to novels or the other way round, feel obliged to make a choice as to which is “better.” Since novels enlist the reader’s imagination to supply the countless details that novelists, over the past two or three hundred years, have learned to exclude from their texts, anyone who “loved” the book is almost bound to be disappointed by the movie, because of course the filmmaker will have imagined many of those details differently.
But Joe Hall’s screenplay does something besides translating the novel into film. It brutally reconfigures the characters of Joe and Clarissa. Why, I don’t know. Clarissa, a Keats scholar in the book, becomes Claire, an oppressively non-verbal sculptor. Worse — far worse — Joe’s clear-eyed sense of adventure is chucked in the course of transforming him from a contemporary Candide into a standard-issue, mid-century, disaffected British intellectual, the sort of crank that obsessed John Fowles. No longer a science writer, Joe is now just another teacher of some vague humanities course; the film’s most tedious scenes show him bloviating cynically in front of his students. Daniel Craig invests Joe with a distinctly uncivilized fury that does not fit his professional milieu. I am sure that the actor is simply providing what was asked for, but neither his performance nor anything else in the film can explain why Joe is so self-absorbed and unpleasant. The heartbreak of the novel is that the aftermath of the balloon catastrophe might have destroyed not just one man’s life but the equilibrium of many others’. There is no equilibrium in the movie worth worrying about. Claire turns away from Joe not because he is obsessed with Jed but because, for some reason or other, Joe has become a dreadful boor.
Jeremy Sams’s score is lovely, though.
***
The other day, needing something to dip into, I pulled The Pillow Book off the shelf. I didn’t read very much of it, but then it doesn’t take very much to bring back the world recorded by Sei Shonagon nine hundred years ago. To bring back, that is, what one already knows: the fastidiously acerbic observer of courtly mores, with her eye for beauty and her unblushing contempt for the lower orders; the preoccupation with garments; the understatements about love, so discreet that one wonders if the lovers are ever actually in the same room (that they keep most of their clothes on is hard to doubt); the annual round of glacially-paced festivals; the fragrance of unimaginable antiquity that betrays more recent inventions. These are the things that you can learn from simply reading The Pillow Book, or at least understand a little better with reference to Ivan Morris’s notes, or to his book about Heian high culture, The World of the Shining Prince.
But never has that world seemed so lost, so twisted by time and change into inaccessibility. Nothing can bring Sei Shonagon’s world back. It has vanished into the interstices of living language. The courtier filled her notes and accounts with descriptions of the details that interested her, but she never attempted a comprehensive survey of court life. Why should she? Her readers would know all of that already. Her scribbling is like the decoration of a fan — highlights and accents marking up an implicit context. That context would be disrupted within the century following Sei Shonagon’s death. The pudgy gentlemen with their bows and quivers would give way to leaner and far more martial aristocrats; the life of the court would shrink into a parenthesis from which it would not emerge until the Nineteenth Century.
The Pillow Book is one of the great works of literature, partly because it encompasses an aesthetic vision that is unhampered by preciosity — always a problem in the West — and partly because it places strenuous demands on the imagination. Unlike a work of science fiction, it does not describe an alternative way of life, but rather takes such descriptions for granted. The reader knows only that the world of The Pillow Book really did exist at one time, in a Kyoto much farther off in time than it is in space. (You can visit only the latter.) How to make sense of what Sei Shonagon has to say? Morris is a great help, of course; it is also very likely that he himself is salient in his inflection of her ancient text. But how do you flesh out the following?
When one is sitting in front of someone who is writing, it is very unpleasant to be told, “Oh, how dark it is. Please get out of my light.” I also find it painful to to scolded by someone when I have been peeping at his calligraphy. This sort of thing does not happen with a man one loves.
True, modern verse — inspired to an enormous extent by contact with the elliptical, symbolic styles of China and Japan — has accustomed us to open-ended, tentative meanings; we don’t have to be told everything. But what it is it, exactly, that does not happen “with a man one loves”? Is the light better? Is the lover more forgiving of inconvenience? What does “sitting in front of someone who is writing” even mean? I ask that as someone who rarely writes a word when another person is in the room.
And yet, just by turning the page, I come upon a note of clearly recognizable humanity that brings Proust to mind:
A man’s heart is a shameful thing. When he is with a woman who he finds tiresome and distasteful, he does not show that he dislikes her, but makes her believe she can count on him. Still worse, a man who has the reputation of being kind and loving treats a woman in such a way that she cannot imagine his feelings are anything but sincere. Yet he is untrue to her not only in his thoughts but in his words; for he speaks badly about her to other women just as he speaks badly about those women to her. The woman, of course, has no idea that she is being maligned; and, hearing his criticisms of the others, she fondly believes he loves her best. The man for his part is well aware that this is what she thinks. How shameful!
What is shameful is listening to other people’s criticisms. I always assume that what people say about others gives a good indication of what they will say about me — the best possible encouragement to keep my business to myself.