I thought it might be of interest to myself, perhaps to you, to give the classic bibliographic list of books and films that are very much current in my mind, and for that matter, in my literary and cinematic genetic database. Here, first, is a list of books, stories or authors that have impacted upon my thinking and feeling. When I was a history major I used to enjoy reading the bibliographic essays at the end of a book in which the author let his hair down and made comments about what he had read; I enjoyed the good-natured criticism or pleasure that the author had in excavating his pearls from the select oysters he chose. So it will be here.
As to plays, Sartre’s The Flies, was for me the best introduction I ever had to Existentialism and a goddam delight to read. Miller’s Death of a Salesman moved me but Miller pulled his punch; it was a play about a Jewish salesman, for I feel Miller sanitized it for the public as he also kept the fact he had a retarded child away from the public as if some slur on his self (my personal crankiness about him). If you get a good translation, Moliere’s The Misanthrope is a soaring and scathing commentary on what each of us has to do to defeat the grind. It is also called the French Hamlet, although it is often performed as high comedy. I may return to this but I am trying only to list those artistic works that bring a sweet or sharp taste to my mind after all these years.
As to short stories, I am always charmed and swept into the arms of Conrad, remembering his “The Lagoon.” Crane’s The Open Boat is a seamless story in which not one word is out of place, pure as a crystal marble. The Martian Chronicles for its remarkable creation of a world; I Have No Mouth and I Want to Scream, absolutely brilliant science fiction psalm, title story in the collection; I am only, again, citing books that have moved me in one way or another and sometimes I remember only snippets or the tone and sometimes forgetting who wrote the story. What I consider perhaps as the geatest collection I’ve read for sheer humanity is Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. If you want epiphanies and glorious and practical insights about human beings, read and study him, in fact, Hemingway did just that and never gave Anderson his due.
I move on. As to novels, Mary Renault’s volumes, The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea are magnificent recreations of ancient Crete in all its glory. I remember reading her description of a gem -encrusted saddle and I could almost touch the facets of the jewels; you want to learn how to write description — seek out that one paragraph (epic). The Nigger of the Narcissus by Conrad is profoundly psychological and it is like reading one of Freud’s works but it had magic for me and I was thrown off by its depth and brilliance, insights dripping off it like a steak. The great novels I’ve read must include very high on the list The Last Temptation of Christ by Kazantzakis, a genius. He had the audacity to write a sequel — in verse — to the Odyssey (in two volumes) and by all literary accounts equaled Homer before he began writing novels in his seventies. Wrenching, powerful, all powerful, mystical, earthy, when Kazantzakis wrote about a bowl of grapes in a bowl you not only could see them, you could taste them. I loved his willingness to be ornate if need be, to be a Gaudi — in his time he was a diplomat, a Communist, broke out in stigmata, a mystic and god knows what else he was. Krishnamurti was a friend — one can only imagine what they spoke of over a cup of Turkish coffee. Kazantzakis was a Cretan, not Greek — a significant difference to my mind. Report to Greco, his confessional, is ranked up there with St. Augustine, but Kazantzakis is so very much more real as a human being. His St.Francis gave one the suffering in the man without Bambi and flitting birds; intensely and agonizingly is the prose so that you feel what this man felt for life. I remember asking people to read him and offering to girlfriends, etc a copy of the book just to have someone talk to me about that.
I enjoyed reading John Hersey’s The Wall, a terrific recreation by a non-Jew about the Warsaw Ghetto; his identification with the Jewish mentality was spectacular, his ability to identify really remarkable. Gulliver’s Travels is far from a children’s book but a very dark and scathing depiction of human beings, its misanthropy is a delight and right on target. At the end Gulliver is so sickened by human nature that he at first refuses to be rescued at sea — now that is darkness to be relished.
Let us casually move on to other tomes. Elias Canetti’s, Crowds and Power, is probably one of the best books of the 20th Century dealing with the psychological and sociological and emotional analyses of human beings in groups — he was a novelist and it reads beautifully. His chapter on the Xhosas, a tribe, will make your shudder in its retelling of an actual event; his prose is impeccable. Freud’s Moses and Monotheism and DaVinci are examples of a master at play whose data later on proved unsound but whose prose is wonderful. St. Exupery’s small series of essays, Wind, Sand and Stars, is a mystical reflection on flight and simply sweet existential wonderings. In one essay he is forced to land on a sand dune in the desert. It takes off from there (no pun intended). Loren Eiseley’s The Immense Journey combines the thinking of a scientist who writes like the poet he was; the prose is entrancing. Again, all of the above left reminiscences within my mind, traces of having read something that touched me and that returns not necessarily to haunt or nag at me, but to wash across my soul in pleasure and fond remembrance.
As to the movies of my mind before they became art works to be studied. I was deeply affected by movies. In the late 40s and all of the 50s my childhood was not glued (I actually played in the streets) to the TV set but to the actual seeing movies on the screen where they had much more impact. For its emotional impact, The Thief of Bagdad grabbed my heart. Starring June Duprez, John Justin, Conrad Veidt, and Sabu, the adolescent mischief maker, the film is now seen as one of the great epic fantasies ever put up on the screen — I can still hum a few notes of the magical score, revel in the glorious technicolor and find Veidt’s performance as the evil vizier and magician lithographed in fear and acid — a remarkable performance. I first saw Welles’ Citizen Kane at the Lakeland, an old movie house affectionately called the “dumps,” in the 40s and I knew on some level I was watching something very special. How special? The burning of Rosebud burned in me for decades until I finally put it to partial rest by writing a few articles about it as well as other articles about early movies that moved me deeply. In fact the publisher of an old movie magazine that published some of my essays in the 80s just retired and published a book about his film magazine. Sure enough I’m listed in the table of contents. Goddam! The circle is complete. Got to buy that book! One other movie, The Search, starring Monty Clift, about a soldier tying up with a waif in postwar Germany who is searching for his mother, eviscerated my gut. The loss of a parent is mind-boggling and Zinneman caught that in his direction. Remember when you are 8 or 9 you are in many cases just an empty vessel for what is put into you. It takes centuries of psychic time to turn all of that into feelings, observations and sympathies. I end here; perhaps more some other time.
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