Posts Tagged ‘Anton Chekhov’
“Ilya did not turn away from the window…”
Note: This post is the thirty-third installment in my author’s commentary for Eternal Empire, covering Chapter 32. You can read the previous installments here.
Last year, in a revealing profile of Al Pacino in The New Yorker, the actor’s agent said: “In his halcyon days he made around fourteen million a picture, but the industry’s changed. Nowadays, he gets five million. With a gun—seven million.” I love that extra two million dollars, which tells us so much about how the entertainment industry works, both for better and for worse. It’s safe to say that if the handgun didn’t exist, Hollywood would have been obliged to invent it: just as the cigarette is the ultimate prop for actors, the revolver is the perfect narrative device, and in both cases, unpleasant collateral consequences have arisen in the real world from what originated as a convenient storytelling tool. In my recent post about Friends and the logistics of set design, I pointed out that the homes we see on television shows are implausible large for a practical reason—they’re built to accommodate the blocking of a three-camera sitcom—but they can also affect the inner lives of viewers who come away with unrealistic expectations about how much house they can afford. Cigarettes and guns work in much the same way. They’re so useful to actors and writers that I don’t expect that they’ll ever disappear from our movies or novels, but there’s a troubling sense in which real people continue to make bad decisions because of the image these tools accidentally create.
I don’t mean to reduce the problems of smoking and gun ownership solely to the influence of the media: there are countless other factors at play here, and both issues are more complicated than either side likes to admit. But it’s safe to say that we think about cigarettes and guns more often than we otherwise would because actors and writers like to use them for purely pragmatic ends. For an actor nervous about what to do with his hands, a cigarette is inexhaustibly useful; for writers trying to figure out a story or a scene, a gun is equally valuable. Raymond Chandler’s famous advice—”When in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns”—may be apocryphal, but it’s amply borne out in practice. Inserting a gun into a scene raises the tension level automatically: an otherwise routine conversation gains a modicum of interest if one character happens to be holding a revolver, even if there’s no explicit threat involved. A handgun can be used to solve narrative problems, and, more helpfully, to create them, as Chekhov knew. It’s violence or action in potential form, a symbol so potent that consumers can learn a lot from book cover or movie poster that displays a girl with a gun, sometimes clumsily photoshopped into place. And a big part of the reason we see so many stories about cops is that they’re among the few members of society who can go about their business with a pistol always at the ready.
And this troubles me, despite or because of the fact that gun violence—or just the use of guns as props—occurs so frequently in my own novels. From the very beginning of The Icon Thief, we’re treated to scenes in which a gun is present simply to send a message from one character to another, and, more subtly, from the author to the reader. And I do it because it works. As no less than Tennessee Williams once said to The Paris Review:
What shouldn’t you do if you’re a young playwright? Don’t bore the audience! I mean, even if you have to resort to totally arbitrary killing on stage, or pointless gunfire, at least it’ll catch their attention and keep them awake. Just keep the thing going any way you can.
Whether or not most suspense novelists have heard this particular admonition, there’s no question that they’ve taken it to heart. I don’t really blame them, any more than I blame myself: the number of useful tricks writers have is so limited that we’re often obliged to take the easy way out, if only to keep the story going in more important ways. But if we used fewer guns, we’d have to think harder. And occasionally, when I look back at my own work, I’m all too aware of the places where I’ve used violence or its threat as an impersonal device, just because my attention was elsewhere at the time.
Take, for instance, Chapter 31 of Eternal Empire. It’s a scene that consists almost entirely of the kind of talky exposition that I find hard to avoid, if only because it’s so central to the conspiracy genre. Maddy is on the phone with Powell and Adam, seated in the garden at Peles Castle, and after updating them on her progress so far, she receives an infodump about Gleb Boky, Alexander Barchenko, and the historical obsession of the Russian secret services with the myth of Shambhala. This is interesting stuff in itself, and it’s going to pay off later on. Still, it’s really just four pages of dialogue, so I heighten the tension in the most straightforward way I can: I establish in the previous chapter that Maddy is being watched through the crosshairs of a sniper’s rifle. It doesn’t require a single line of the scene itself to be changed—the gun, and the threat it presents, is kept completely offstage. Reading it over again now, I can’t quite decide if this represents an admirable act of narrative economy, a huge cheat, or both. (It’s a device that you see frequently in movies, like the Bourne films, since it allows a threat to be introduced from outside without the director having to worry about any particular problems of staging.) Obviously, Maddy survives the scene unscathed, and I don’t think there’s any real fear in the reader’s mind that she’s going to be dispatched here. But the rifle serves its purpose, even if I’d be happier if it didn’t have to be there at all…
“There is always a sacrifice…”
[Chekhov] made a mistake in thinking that if he had had more time he would have written more fully, described the rain, and the midwife and the doctor having tea. The truth is one can get only so much into a story; there is always a sacrifice. One has to leave out what one knows and longs to use. Why? I haven’t any idea, but there it is. It’s always a kind of race to get in as much as one can before it disappears.
Quote of the Day
A writer should sit down and write only when he feels cold as ice.
“Nobody gives a damn about the cherry orchard…”
I recently worked on an adaptation of The Cherry Orchard.
My newfound intimacy with the play led me to look past the quiddities of characters and examine what it is that they are actually doing. I saw this:
The title is a flag of convenience. Nobody in the play gives a damn about the cherry orchard…
Chekhov has thirteen people stuck in a summer house. He has a lot of brilliant scenes. [He needs] a pretext which will keep all thirteen characters in the same place and talking to each other for a while. This is one of the dilemmas of the modern dramatist: “Gosh, this material is fantastic. What can I do to just Keep the People in the House?”
One can have a piece of jewelry stolen. One can have a murder committed. One can have a snowstorm. One can have the car break down. One can have The Olde Estate due to be sold for debts in three weeks unless someone comes up with a good solution.
I picture this pretext occurring to Chekhov, and his saying, “Naaaa, they’ll never go for it. I picture him watching rehearsals and wincing every time Lopakhin says (as he says frequently): “Just remember, you have only three (two, one) weeks until the cherry orchard is to be sold.” Fine, he must have thought. That’s real playwriting. One doesn’t see Horatio coming out every five minutes and saying, “Don’t forget, Hamlet, your uncle killed your dad and now he’s sleeping with your ma!”
Oh no, he must have thought, I’ll never get away with it. But he did, and left us a play we cherish.
Becoming a writer for the wrong reasons
Earlier this week, I finished reading Anthony Storr’s The Art of Psychotherapy, which is probably the best book I’ve seen on the subject—it’s humane, richly informed, and full of useful details and advice. As I’ve written elsewhere, I’ve long been interested in the parallels between writing and psychoanalysis, and with that in mind, I was particularly struck by the following passage:
I once had a conversation with the director of a monastery. “Everyone who comes to us,” he said, “does so for the wrong reasons.” The same is generally true of people who become psychotherapists. It is sometimes possible to persuade people to become psychotherapists who have not chosen the profession for their own personal reasons; but, for the most part, we have to put up with what we can get; namely, ourselves.
Storr’s point is that psychoanalysis tends to attract people of an inward, reflective temperament who are looking for insights into their own emotional problems, a quality that can turn into a liability in a field in which the therapist necessarily needs to remain in the background. And much the same is true of novelists, who generally find that the reasons that drew them to the profession in the first place aren’t the ones that end up keeping them there.
Personality issues aside, it’s sobering just to look at the math. It’s often said that you need to write a million words or more before you develop your own voice as a writer, and although we can argue over specific numbers, the underlying principle remains sound. Ten years or more of focused work on different projects usually lie behind any debut novel, which means that, aside from the rare case of a writer who found his or her calling late in life, the majority of authors devoted themselves to writing sometime in their teens or twenties. Writing for a living often amounts to the systematic working out of a childhood obsession, as if you decided after college that you really did want to become both an astronaut and a ballerina, and there’s something inherently irrational about that decision: you’ve chosen to pursue it despite strong evidence that it will never become a viable career, regardless of how talented you might be. It’s the kind of idealistic gesture that a young, inexperienced person is predisposed to make. And if I’d be inclined to be skeptical of any major life decisions I made in my early twenties, why should my choice of career be any exception?
Fortunately, what usually happens is that a writer’s original motivations, once they’ve been tested by the everyday experience of trying to tell stories for a living, are gradually replaced by their opposites. We’re driven early on by ego and ambition, a desire for fame, or simply to see our names in print, all of which yields over time to a realization of how much of himself an author needs to give up: far from enjoying the kind of fame we once imagined, we’re working in solitude, and days may go by before we have a meaningful conversation with anyone outside our immediate families. A writer may start with an urge for self-expression, only to find that detachment—or the ability to give voice to perspectives far outside one’s own—is much more important. (Storr usefully quotes Jung on the subject: “Feeling only comes through unprejudiced objectivity.”) Even if you begin with nothing more than the desire to tell a good story, you quickly find your attention being distracted by everything else: language, discipline, structure, the tedious housekeeping of keeping your ideas straight. By the end, even if you do start to think of yourself as a writer, it’s as a very different animal than the one you first envisioned when you put words on the page.
The writing life, like any other calling, shapes its practitioners in surprising ways, and the instruments that it chooses aren’t always the ones you initially expect. An aspiring monk soon finds that monastery living is less about ceaseless contemplation of the divine than about scrubbing floors, washing pots, and digging ditches, and a writer discovers that he’s defined less by his moments of inspiration than by what he does in the long stretches between those transformative insights. It reminds me a little of the protagonist of Chekhov’s “The Bet,” who agrees to spend fifteen years in solitary confinement to win a wage of two million rubles, then ends up—through long reading and contemplation—despising the physical world so completely that he leaves five minutes before the term is up. A writer’s situation isn’t so stark, and he never entirely gives up the reasons that brought him to writing in the beginning, even they ultimately give way to others. Sooner or later, though, he’s bound to wake up, look around, and realize that he’s no longer the same version of himself who made the wager on which he staked the best years of his life. The wager itself remains in effect, and the stakes, if anything, are higher than ever. But the person who made the bet has changed.
Quote of the Day
One usually dislikes a play while writing it, but afterward it grows on one.
Quote of the Day
Whatever I read—my own work, or other people’s—it all seems to me not short enough.
Alec Nevala-Lee 