Screenplay: A Novel, by Macdonald Harris
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Screenplay: A Novel, by Macdonald Harris
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Another stunning reissue by "one of our major novelists" (Los Angeles Times): a beguiling novel of old Hollywood that calls to mind the time time-traveling magic of Midnight in Paris and The Purple Rose of Cairo.
Alys is a wealthy young dilettante, as out of place in 1980s Los Angeles as he would be in the film sets of the 1920s. And yet that is exactly where he ends up, thanks to the intervention of the mysterious time-traveling Nesselrode, who seems to have originated at the dawn of film. Nesselrode and Alys descend into the catacombs of an abandoned movie theater and emerge in in a black-and-white fantasia―a Los Angeles on the verge of becoming itself―where silent films dominate the landscape. Alys soon finds his home in the pictures and falls in love with the seductive siren Moira Silver. But as he finds himself bewitched by old Hollywood, the present proves more and more distant, and Alys ends up lost in time, trapped between here and now. Screenplay is a delirious, erotically charged, and wildly inventive novel of faded glamour and elusive love by a master of the form.
Screenplay: A Novel, by Macdonald Harris - Amazon Sales Rank: #4053281 in Books
- Brand: The Overlook Press
- Published on: 2015-10-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .80" w x 5.50" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 272 pages
Screenplay: A Novel, by Macdonald Harris Review "Life and art become strangely and gloriously confused when Harris's narrator, Alys, does some time traveling and falls in love with a star of the silent screen...This novel hasn't lost any of its luster since its original publication…it's both ingeniously plotted and lyrically written." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"An enthralling, time-traveling version of Alice, in dual wonderlands of 20th-century Hollywood." —Shelf Awareness (starred review)
About the Author Donald Heiney (MacDonald Harris was a pseudonym) was born in 1921 and died in 1993. He is the author of sixteen novels, including The Balloonist and Tenth. In 1982, he received the Award in Literature of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Sciences for the sum of his work.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Also by MacDonald Harris
Private Demons
Mortal Leap
Trepleff
Bull Fire
The Balloonist
Yukiko
Pandora’s Galley
The Treasure of Sainte Foy
Herma
The Carp Castle
Tenth
The Little People
Glowstone
Hemingway’s Suitcase
Glad Rags
A Portrait of My Desire
The Cathay Stories and Other Fictions
FOR ROBBIE
The onlie begetter of this insuing boke
Copyright
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love and she be fair!
KEATS
1.
I was born in 1950 in a rather odd part of Los Angeles that not very many people know about. If you are like most people, you probably don’t regard Los Angeles as a very enchanting city. But I can assure you that St. Albans Place is a very enchanted street indeed. It is a private drive that you enter through a large and ornate iron gate on Wilshire Boulevard, where a guard is always on duty in a small kiosk like a miniature alpine chalet. From there it winds its way—sending off a number of tributary streets with names as spuriously English as its own—through a park of enormous trees and well-kept lawns, to end at Olympic Boulevard at another iron grille that is never opened, although there is a small pedestrian gate at one side that can be unlocked, if you know of its existence and have the right key.
The park was subdivided and most of its houses built in the Twenties, when the city first left the confines of the downtown area and began moving out to the west. The trees were planted at that time. Now they are huge—elms and sycamores for the most part, with gnarled trunks and thick over-arching branches. When you come into it from the traffic of Wilshire Boulevard the place has something of the atmosphere of a bird sanctuary, or a cemetery. The noises of the city are shut out by the trees, and you are conscious only of quiet and isolation, of the pastoral and shady green light that pervades everything, and of the sense of privilege that comes from being very wealthy. The street is broad and curves its way with a kind of negligent magnificence through the sylvan atmosphere of the trees and lawns. The houses on it have only one quality in common—they are all large and expensive. Except for that they are a kind of anthology of all the pretentious and derivative architectures of the time—fake Florentine villas, English country houses, Venetian palazzos, stucco Spanish palaces with tiled roofs, and one house with eaves curled up and stone lions in front of it that vaguely attempts to be Chinese—we always called it the Pagoda. The one I grew up in is a large shingled house with overhanging eaves, a kind of Cape Cod cottage magnified to the dimensions of a mansion. It was built by my grandfather, a Harvard professor who lived most of his life in Cambridge and spent his summers on Martha’s Vineyard. He was independently wealthy (the family came from a plumbing manufactory that owned the patent on the flush toilet, in case anyone is curious), and when he was widowed in his fifties he retired early and came to Los Angeles, bringing with him my mother, who was born late in his marriage and still a small child. He acquired a large lot in St. Albans Place, and there he built an exact replica of what he regarded as an ideal habitation, even though it was far too large for a middle-aged professor and a small child—a Cambridge townhouse like those along the winding and shady sanctuary of Brattle Street.
The furnishings of the house, as I remember it from my childhood, were expensive but ill-sorted—some heirlooms, some acquired at a later period. Most of the furniture was that left by my grandfather, whereas the bric-a-brac and small objets d’art had been acquired by my mother and father, or, as I always called them, Astreé and Dirk. (My grandfather was a professor of French literature, and it pleased him, out of a kind of antiquated perversity, to name his only child for a character in a seventeenth century pastoral.) There was a pair of Sisleys, said to be authentic, on the wall by the mantelpiece, and a photograph of my mother by Man Ray. In the dining room there was an extraordinary piece of furniture: a Louis Quinze sideboard with gilded legs and a large ornate mirror covered with gray splotches, which in my childhood I endowed with all the mystery and significance of a map of an unknown land. I identified continents in it, rivers, and even cities, which I inhabited in the secret reveries of my imagination. The house was full of a clutter of other odd things: a camel saddle, a bronze Pompeiian figurine with a phenomenal erection (when I was small I thought it was only the way he carried his sword), an arquebus which worked and could be fired on the Fourth of July, and a toilet in the downstairs bathroom so old that it might have been the original of the family patent, with a brass chain hanging from the tank on the ceiling and a pattern of stains, in the bowl, almost as complex as those on the tarnished mirror. This we called the Infernal Machine. It had a sound all to itself: a wheeze, a gurgle, a chuckle or two, and then, after a pause, a great rush of water that went on for a long time and left all the pipes in the house humming. Finally it shut itself off with a snap, the gasp of a person suddenly throttled with an iron hand.
My grandfather died when I was still very young, so that I hardly remember him and I think of the house mainly as a place where Astreé and Dirk and I lived together. We must have seemed an odd family to others, although, since we lived almost entirely to ourselves, our way of life seemed to us perfectly natural. Both Astreé and Dirk were exceptionally good-looking and seemed eternally young. They were always blithe and happy and gave the impression somehow that they were living in a romantic comedy rather than a life in the real world. Sometimes they sang to each other, trading lines like characters in a Noel Coward musical as they moved through the house from room to room. “Many’s the time that we feasted …” “And many’s the time that we fasted …” “Oh well, it was swell while it lasted …” “We did have fun …” “And no harm done …” And then, with a look of mock sentiment and a glance through the doorway between them, they would join together in two-part harmony for “Thanks … for the memory …” Astreé had difficulty taking things seriously, including her own unique and striking boyish beauty, the wealth she had inherited so effortlessly, and even the house itself. Sometimes, when the three of us came back at night from the noise and traffic of the city and stopped the car in the drive, in the silence and the dank, slightly foreboding shade of the old trees, she would intone in a fakey theatrical voice:
“A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover!”
They lived their lives almost entirely together and for each other, so in some ways they hardly paid attention to me. They were always going on motor trips, burning the toast, quarreling and making up, trying to outspend each other for clothes, and having disagreements which turned into torrid clinches and then ended in the bedroom. When they went away on trips, often for a week or more, they left me with a sitter, a disagreeable middle-aged woman named Mrs. Bent whom I detested. Mrs. Bent, however, was engaged more to satisfy the legal requirements about child care than out of concern for my own security or welfare. If it hadn’t been for the law, they would probably have gone off and left me alone in the house when I was a boy of ten. It wasn’t that they were lacking in affection for me or that they were bad parents. It was simply that they had no experience of children and didn’t understand them very well. They had no friends who had children, and neither of them had had brothers or sisters. So they hardly knew how to regard me, and they ended by regarding me simply as a person like themselves. It was true that I was physically smaller than other people, so that my chin came only to the edge of the table and my clothes had to be bought in the boys’ department at Bullock’s, but they saw this as no reason not to treat me exactly as an adult—a friend perhaps of whom they were very fond, and yet didn’t mind leaving for a week or two when they went away on a trip. They were aware, of course, that this behavior was unconventional, but rather than address themselves seriously to the question of what childhood was or how a child ought to be brought up they preferred to regard the situation as a joke. “I was certainly never ten years old,” said Dirk, regarding me gravely over the dining-room table, “and neither was anybody on my side of the family.”
Still I had an intimate, if intermittent, relationship with the two of them. Dirk called me “old fellow” even when I was seven, and had long conversations with me in which he would explain to me, for example, that the reason Astreé was out of sorts today was that she was having her period. Women were difficult at such times, he advised, and it was best to have nothing to do with them. Having married into the family money, he had no need to work and never did so, even though he had a university degree in architecture. He had a single passion, antique cars. He bought and sold at least two dozen of them during my childhood, spending great time and effort searching for rare parts to restore them before, reluctantly, selling them to make room for others. Sometimes there were four or five of them in the enormous garage behind the house. The ones I remember most clearly, from the time of my late adolescence, were three: a rare Invicta three-liter touring car, a 1929 Duesenberg Model J, and a dual-cowl Hudson phaeton of the same period with coach work by Biddle and Smart. The actual restoration work, of course, was done by professionals. But Dirk was assiduous in his attention to details and meticulous in his taste, sometimes making trips East in search of a rare hood ornament or an authentic magneto—once even to England for a pair of headlamps for the Invicta, the ones on his own car being too rusted to be re-plated. The Invicta was his favorite: a lean and elegant machine from the period of the mid-Twenties, with long sweeping fenders, a riveted hood with a sharp chine, nickel-plated headlamps mounted on a crossbar, and a thermometer emerging from the nickel-plated radiator cap. It was painted a beautiful rich deep persimmon color. I remember once watching him polish it with a can of Simoniz wax, while he explained to me the aesthetics of automobiles and other things. “It’s when you are polishing a car that you are most aware of the beauty of the design,” he told me. “It’s because your hand goes over and follows all the curves, in addition to your eye. You feel the body kinetically. The curves, you see, of the fenders, and the place where the hood joins the body.” He demonstrated as he worked the rag into the hollow curve between the fenders and the hood. “And it’s the same,” he went on, “when you’re making love to a woman. It’s when your hand follows the curves of the body that you become fully aware of its beauty.” Here he put the lid back on the Simoniz, got out some metal polish, and began polishing the large round headlamps at the front of the car, glancing sideways at me with a little smile.
He was a slender, handsome, courteous, joking, good-natured man who charmed everybody who came into contact with him. When he took off his clothes he had the body of a twenty-year-old. We often took baths together, in an enormous enameled tub that stood on four clawed legs in the bathroom upstairs. “Always wash your pecker carefully, old fellow,” he advised, while doing so to his own. “That way, you form the habit and you won’t pick up something nasty from some tart later.” I was curious that he had no foreskin. “It’s because I’m Jewish, old fellow,” he told me. At that time I had no very clear notion what a Jew was, and he didn’t explain any further. He never mentioned the subject again.
Astreé too was strikingly beautiful, in a style more of the Twenties than of the mid-Fifties when I first became aware of her as a person. She was slim, with a not very pronounced figure, and she emphasized this boyishness by wearing straight clothes with simple short skirts. She had a perfect ivory complexion, a heart-shaped face, and short hair that she tossed carelessly back from her head; she looked something like Mary Pickford. She had only one passion, and that was herself—her own body and her beauty. Yet it could hardly be said that she was vain; taking care of her beauty was simply what she did, as Dirk lovingly took care of his old cars. She was perfectly objective about herself and would often ask others’ opinions about her body—whether the faint rings under her eyes were enough yet to justify cosmetic surgery, or whether she ought to wear the tight turtleneck jerseys that were coming into fashion considering her rather small breasts. (“Yes,” was Dirk’s opinion. “It’s the gamine look. My own taste, darling, doesn’t incline to the bovine, so be happy about it.”) She spent several hours of each day in her dressing room, before a table fitted with a mirror framed in light bulbs, like that of an actress. Yet she was careless of her makeup and clothes, once they were on, and would enthusiastically engage in pillow-fights, wrestle in the straw with Dirk on our visits to the country, or impulsively take off her clothes and throw them into the sand when the three of us, hand-in-hand, strode naked into the Malibu surf at midnight.
It was Astrée who, for reasons best known to herself, decided to name me Alys. Perhaps because she had really wanted a girl, or perhaps because she did not distinguish the two sexes very clearly in her own mind—there was some evidence for this. I was subject to a certain amount of satire on account of this, especially when I was away at school, but it never particularly bothered me. I felt that I too was special, like Astreé and Dirk, and it seemed natural that I should have a special name. After all what other boy had a mother like Astreé? To me she behaved exactly as she did to the rest of her friends; she was affectionate without sentiment, she confided every intimate thought that came to her without hesitating, she often asked my advice on things, and when I came home at the end of the day she embraced me as she did her other friends, male and female, as was the custom in their set— in the French manner, a quick hug and a touch of the lips on both cheeks. I still remember, from the time I was fifteen or so, the soft bittersweet sensation of her small breasts pressing against my own thin and boyish chest. It fixed my notions for a long time, permanently, of what women were like. I was not interested in ordinary girls. There was nothing wrong with me physically; all my male reflexes worked perfectly. It was just that, living with Astreé and Dirk, I had no need of anyone else.
I have said that she was affectionate toward me, and she was, but no more than she was to her other friends; and she didn’t care to have me around all the time any more than she wanted the house always full of her friends. I was sent to private day schools, and later for a brief period they sent me away to an exclusive prep school in La Jolla, perhaps as much to get me out of the house as to provide me with the excellent education they could easily afford. It was an excellent school, in a kind of English manor house set in well-kept landscaping at the edge of the sea, and the pseudo-Etonian curriculum, with its classical languages and its emphasis on mens sana in corpore sano (we played soccer and even cricket) was also excellent. But I was unhappy there, or so I told Astreé and Dirk; in actual fact I was only bored. I didn’t mingle much with the other pupils, most of them the children of wealthy lawyers and physicians. I had no interest in their giggling and goosing, their flatulence jokes, their snobbish gangs and hierarchies. It wasn’t that I felt superior to them; it was just that I had nothing in particular to say to them. I couldn’t succeed in thinking of myself as someone like them, that is to say as a child, because Astreé and Dirk had never treated me like a child.
So I came home again. It was the end of my formal schooling. After that I did nothing but get up late in the morning, read the books in the house, and play records. As a matter of fact I ended up reasonably well educated, even though along slightly old-fashioned lines, because my grandfather had left us his books along with the house. I remember, at the age of seventeen, reading Adam Smith, Proust (my French was excellent), Newton’s Principium, Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Goethe’s Gespräche mit Eckermann, and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. One of my favorite books, which I found tucked away on a high shelf where my grandfather, evidently, had kept volumes of special interest, was Une semaine de bonté, a kind of surrealistic novel in collage by Max Ernst—a book full of odd nudity, scenes of levitation, scissors, sadism, and scenes in which fin-de-siècle maidens were abducted by frock-coated men with birds’ heads. It goes without saying that I had no friends my own age, even though there were other families with children in St. Albans Place. I couldn’t have discussed Une semaine de bonté with them, and their concerns—bicycles, rock music, girls, skateboarding—I viewed with all the contempt of an over refined adult intellectual.
I have said that Astreé and Dirk liked to go away on motor trips leaving me alone in the house, and I have explained too that they engaged Mrs. Bent to take care of me in their absence simply because of the law regarding the supervision of minors. Through consulting an attorney, they found out that this obligation ended when a child became eighteen. As a result, as my eighteenth birthday approached they looked forward with anticipation to the time when I could legally be left in the house alone. Mrs. Bent (who for some time now had been referred to as a “housekeeper” rather than a “sitter”) was getting rather aged in any case. So, according to a plan that I agreed to quite willingly, they celebrated my eighteenth birthday in a way which might have seemed odd to some people. They went off on a trip to San Francisco to stay at the Mark Hopkins for a few days, go to the opera, shop at Gump’s and Abercrombie & Fitch, and dine out in their favorite places like the Blue Fox or the Basque restaurant in North Beach.
The Invicta was too delicate and too unreliable for a long trip, so they went in the Duesenberg. It was a powerful roadster with an enormous long hood, a set of chrome-plated exhaust headers curving down over the side, and a canvas top with a small window in the rear. They put their bags in the rear and the Duesenberg started off down the drive with its characteristic exhaust noise: a deep syncopated rumble from the twin chromed tailpipes. Astreé turned once to raise her hand in a kind of distracted “Bye” sign to me. As they disappeared down the street I saw them kissing, framed in the small rear window of the car.
And so I was left to my own devices in the big house for a few days. Astreé telephoned once; it was three o’clock in the morning and they had just got back to the hotel from the Hungry I in North Beach. Over the phone I could hear Dirk murmuring as he nuzzled her neck from behind. That was the last I heard from them. The trip evidently went more or less as planned. Coming back along Highway 1, they had reached the scenic stretch on the coast just south of Big Sur when a van driven by a long-haired youth under the influence of some hallucinogen or other crossed the center line and crashed straight into the front grille which Dirk had gone to such pains to have re-plated. The wreckage burned fiercely, and the undertaker advised burying them both in the same grave, since the two sets of ashes were so mingled that it was almost impossible to separate them—I expect he meant it was too much trouble.
2.
The bank, the trustees, and the attorneys took care of everything. To my surprise Astreé and Dirk had executed an elaborate will in my favor, too complicated for me to understand in all its details, in fact, setting up a trust that provided me with a generous monthly allowance and leaving the management of the estate to the trust department of the Sunset Bank. I had nothing much to do in those first few days except to think how to respond in some way to the profuse if somewhat conventional expressions of sympathy that I received from Astreé’s and Dirk’s many friends. Naturally I was afflicted with a certain amount of grief. I wasn’t a monster, and I had been genuinely fond of Astreé and Dirk. But I kept this pain to myself, as I had always done with my other expressions of feeling, and I confined myself to formulas of gratitude as conventional as the sympathy of the friends. I would sooner have taken off my clothes in front of those people than revealed my innermost feelings to them. At the funeral, since I had excellent hearing, I caught a distant murmur across the crowd, “He always was a cold boy.” And perhaps I was; it seemed to me to be better to be cool about things than too hot. The hurt I felt over the loss of my parents was something like a thumb struck with a hammer, very painful for a while, interfering to an extent with one’s proper functioning in the world, and impossible to conceal entirely from others. But I recovered. One always does, from a struck thumb. When I hurt myself as a child, Astreé would kiss it to make it well, then she would forget it and go on blithely about her own affairs. Neither she nor Dirk ever dwelt much on private misfortunes. As casual and even negligent as they had been in my upbringing, they gave me excellent training in this respect.
For a number of years I went on living alone in the big house in St. Albans Place. I had few friends and nothing to do in particular except to do what I wanted. It shouldn’t be imagined that I was lonely or unhappy in any way. I enjoyed this solitary life intensely. My only enemy was boredom, and I found a thousand ingenious ways to combat this. Of course I had access to my grandfather’s excellent library. Now and then I enrolled in a course at UCLA, in eighteenth-century French literature perhaps, or something more esoteric like the history of the Albigensian heresy, but for the most part I educated myself through private reading—like Proust and Virginia Woolf, or the Baron Corvo, that odd and elaborate impostor who was perhaps my favorite author in the panoply of eccentrics, recluses, and decadents I had collected for myself. I began exploring the top shelves of my grandfather’s library, in the locked glass cabinets where years before I had found Une semaine de bonté. Here I discovered books that for a long time I thought nobody else knew about: Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial, Baudelaire’s Paradis Artificiel, and Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus. Roussel’s elaborate and slightly mad world of the imagination, filled with its ingenious, complex, and totally useless mechanical contrivances, seemed to me a satisfactory analogue to the predicament of modern man—hypnotized by his elaborate technology until he spent his whole existence watching its wheels go around—in my case a seven-hundred-dollar turntable with its diamond needle, carving away in its groove like the torture machine of Kafka’s tale “In the Penal Colony.”
One of the first things I bought, after the fuss over my sudden orphaning had died away, was an excellent stereo system, the best that money could buy. It filled one whole end of the living room in its custom cabinets, and each piece of equipment was duplicated in the bedroom upstairs, so I could lie on the bed and control the whole thing with an array of electrical buttons at the bedside. As for music, I had no strong preferences, except for my dislike of the deafening electronic cacophonies of my own generation, so I started with what was in the house. There was a large glass case in the library downstairs full of old records. Most of them had been acquired by Dirk and Astreé—big-band swing from the Forties, musical comedy albums, old Cole Porter songs. But farther back in the cabinet, so covered with dust that it was clear nobody had touched them for years, I found a hundred or so old seventy-eights in faded paper covers. The collection included the French court musicians from Mouet and Philidor to Couperin, Lully, and Marin Marais; D’Andrieu and Loeillet; most of Telemann including the Fantasien for flute and orchestra; and scratchy arias from the operas of Galuppi and Paisiello. Evidently my grandfather had made a kind of professorial and erudite hobby of this music that corresponded to the period of his academic specialty in the French pastoral. This was long before the contemporary fad for the baroque, and he must have gone to a good deal of effort to acquire these fragile old shellac records at a time when no one in particular could have been interested in them but himself, playing them, no doubt, on an old wind-up Victor phonograph that was still preserved, with a rug over it, in the attic in St. Albans Place.
In time I began to develop my own addiction to the music of this period, for reasons in myself that at first I didn’t identify, or wasn’t interested in analyzing. Like many people who live alone I was an insomniac, and often when I couldn’t sleep I would spend half the night drinking—moderately, and staying carefully away from the thin edge of intoxication—and listening to these old records. With a little dry vermouth in my glass, sipping at it now and then, I could lose myself for hours in these highly symmetrical, highly intricate chamber pieces with their complex harmonies, their intricately interlaced fugal structures, the solemnly funereal, weirdly graceful stateliness of the slow movements. Their beauty and grace were quite obsolete; it was an elegance of court and drawing room, the music of a time when a tiny fraction of humanity enjoyed their exquisite and overrefined pleasures at the expense of the brute labor of the others. I preferred the past, almost any past, to the present. There was no reason why you had to live in the present, I thought, especially if you had a little money. Partly through the accident of birth, partly through my own preference, I had arranged a life for myself in which I was surrounded by obsolete things, by anachronisms: old music, the old house with its stately and slightly spurious charm of a New England university town, old cars, the old books in the library. When I had to make an occasional foray into the flashy modern world of the “L.A.” outside, to buy food or on some other errand, it was like stepping into the sunlight from a darkened theater—a sporadic and ephemeral expedition into the present, a harmless jag to the nerves. There is a story by Kafka called “The Burrow” in which the narrator—an animal of an unidentified species—creeps out of his burrow now and then to contemplate its entrance from a distance and enjoy the mild sense of danger that this produces, knowing that security is immediately at hand whenever he wishes to return to it. This was exactly my impulse.
I was soon adding to the collection by buying records of my own, and in time I even became a fairly competent amateur musicologist in the period, just as I had become something of a scholar by reading the books in my grandfather’s library. As I explored further into the subject I began to make a specialty of music played on authentic period instruments—the viola da gamba in place of the cello, the lute rather than the guitar, the recorder instead of the flute, or even odder old and unwieldy museum pieces like the krumhorn or the tromba marina. I would lie sometimes until daylight on the bed, listening to the thin and acerbic, slightly twangy tone of a Renaissance oboe, or a concerto played on an antique valveless horn—archaic, muffled, slightly brassy, like a hunting horn echoing in the depths of some medieval forest. Such records were hard to find, but I became an expert in searching them out, sometimes ordering custom pressings from specialty music houses in Europe, or rerecording my own cassettes from rare records in libraries. I corresponded with other rare-music collections in America and Europe, and I had a whole file cabinet full of notes and cross-references, rather badly organized, but which I hoped to make use of some time. Once, when I was taking a musicology course at USC, I even started to write a monograph on Pergolesi’s string concertos and their possible sources in the works of Ricciotti, but I quit when I ran out of typewriter ribbon. I still have the manuscript, about thirteen pages, marked with the date when I abandoned it: June 14, 1976.
Still it was on account of this monograph, or at least of my efforts to write it, that I met Belinda, who in time became a good friend and perhaps even something more. I had been doing some work on Pergolesi in the Doheny Library, and when I went for a coffee break in the student union I took my book with me and went on reading it while I sat at the long coffee-spotted wooden table. The atmosphere in the union was very informal. Everybody talked to everybody else. After a while I heard someone inquire, “Why are you reading a book about Pergolesi?”
I looked up. She was a tall girl with sun-bleached California hair, blond at the ends and darker down inside, and a tennis player’s tan. Her clothes were casual, a cashmere sweater and a skirt. She looked much like any of the other students on the campus, except perhaps for her lipstick, which was a very pale pink, almost white, so that in contrast to her tanned face it gave her the slightly disorienting look of a photographic negative in which light and dark are reversed. That and her crisp and self-assured way of speaking, with a faint touch of irony.
“You know Pergolesi?”
“La Serva Padrona. The Stabat Mater.”
“Of course. Those are the ones that everybody knows. I’m interested in the concerti for string orchestra, which aren’t as well known.”
She regarded me appraisingly for a moment, as though I were a picture she were contemplating in a museum.
“What about them?”
“I have a theory that they may owe something to an obscure Italian composer named Carlo Ricciotti, about whom almost nothing is known except that he was Musikmeister in The Hague around 1740. Pergolesi’s concerti are different from the rest of his work. The mode is no longer high baroque, it’s pre-classical. The whole harmonic development, and especially the way the accidentals are handled, very much resembles Ricciotti. It’s even possible, in fact, that four of the six concerti are Ricciotti’s work and not by Pergolesi at all.”
“Ricciotti was in The Hague in 1740. But Pergolesi lived to be only twenty-six, and died in 1736.”
Now it was my turn to give her a long thoughtful look. She was still the same, a tall girl with pale lipstick, a little more mature and self-assured than the ordinary coed.
“Yes. But no one knows Ricciotti’s dates. He could have been working in northern Europe in the early 1730’s, at the time when Pergolesi was supposedly composing his concerti. In any case the attribution of the concerti to Ricciotti has to be made on stylistic and harmonic grounds rather than biographical evidence, because there is no biographical evidence.”
This lecture of mine seemed to amuse her more than anything else.
“Who in the world are you, anyhow?” She added, “If you were anybody I would have heard of you.”
“Why should you have heard of me?”
“Because I know everybody who works in early music in L.A.”
“I keep pretty much to myself.”
It was a double misunderstanding; we each took the other for a student—which was an easy mistake to make, since we met in the student union and I looked a good deal younger than my age—whereas in fact I was a rich dilettante, and she was a professional musicologist who just happened to be on campus to do some work in the library. She was a programmer for the classical FM station KUSC, which had its studios near the campus, and she had her own weekly program of early music called Quires and Consorts. In fact I had occasionally listened to this program at home, although it was some time before I connected the voice that came out of the speakers with the Belinda I met in the union.
After we got over our initial amusement at this malentendu we became friends and frequently went out together—to concerts and ballets, to dinner where we went Dutch and split the bill, or to old films. Out of boredom, more or less, I had developed an addiction to the primitive pictures that were put on by the classic films series at the County Art Museum or at UCLA. I liked them best when there was no sound at all except for some scratchy music, or some inexpertly dubbed dialogue tacked on in a later epoch by hacks who scarcely cared whether they did a good job or not. Like my walks, the films for me were a kind of vulgar relaxation, a retreat from the excessive refinement of the world of books and baroque music which I inhabited in the house in St. Albans Place. I had my own private fantasies about them, which I didn’t communicate to Belinda. For me, the world of the silent film was another world than our own—an artificial and synthetic world in which there existed another life parallel to our own and yet different—a world where other physical laws operated so that impossible athletic feats could be performed and devastating accidents happen without harm to the victim—where even the laws of psychology and character were different, where there was a freedom, an invulnerability, a kind of zany marionette behavior that made everything simpler and less complex than life in our real world of three dimensions. In spite of the stiffness of their movements and the rigid conventionality of their behavior, these black-and-white figures moving jerkily across the screen seemed to bear a charm that freed them from the limitations of the ordinary human condition. One envied, almost, their doll-like posturing, their kisses that produced soulful expressions but were followed only by fade-outs, the comedians in baggy pants who were run over by buses but only got up and dusted themselves off, the orphans who were certain to find in the end that they were the lost children of millionaires. There was no real suffering in this world, no boredom, and no mortality. When people were shot they only fell down, dramatically and with pathos, as they had been taught to do by directors with the aesthetic sensibility of second-hand pants dealers. If they were young they were always young, and if they were old they were always old. And if they were young they were beautiful—as I was myself. In the projection hall I almost forgot my three-dimensional existence and lost myself in this play of jerky cardboard figures on the screen.
I can’t think that Belinda really cared much for these primitive works of art, but she came along, probably more amused at me than she was at the pictures. Sometimes after a concert or a movie I would bring her back to the house in St. Albans Place. She was impressed with the house, and with my general way of life, no doubt, but always with the touch of irony with which she regarded most things. We would have a drink or two and we would kiss sometimes, lightly, as friends. Nothing more. I don’t know what she wanted of me. Perhaps a more intimate physical relation—if so she never spoke of it or made any sign, even though it was she who had made the first overtures in asking me from across the table in the union, with her distant little smile, “Why are you reading a book about Pergolesi?”
As for me, I knew very well why it was that I felt no desire for Belinda, at least no overt sexual desire. Partly it was her general tone of an emancipated young woman, her self-assurance and aggressiveness in a conversation, her tenacity in adhering to a point when she knew she was right, her private air of amusement at my own little quirks. But above all it was her status as a professional musicologist, one who made her living from her profession. While I was confident enough of my own expertise in this field not to feel any sense of disadvantage, it nevertheless prevented me from feeling toward Belinda as I would have to feel toward her if I were to desire her sexually. There was no emotional jealousy—it was a purely physical matter. It was simply that I felt myself incapable of going to bed with a person who knew more about music than I did. If we did, I felt, she would have to be the one who was on top. So nothing happened, beyond our friendly kisses.
Meanwhile, unknown to Belinda, I was experimenting in a light-hearted way with other forms of carnal amusement—some a little dangerous, enough to lend them spice. I became a frequenter of those specialized places of encounter that are provided in Los Angeles, as they are in other large cities, for ephemeral adventures with persons of one sex or another, discreet bars with names like Foxey’s and Just for Tonight. The people I met in such places, on the whole, were impressed with the house in St. Albans Place when I brought them there, and unlike Belinda they didn’t smile at my eccentricities. They also did what I wanted them to do, and not what they wanted. Some of them I didn’t even have to pay. It was enough for them to have brushed up briefly against a fantasy that was beyond their imagination, a refinement of decadence that afterward must have seemed to them something encountered only fleetingly in a dream. When I grew tired of this game I turned to sidewalk hookers, expensive call girls, and even the boys in tank tops and tight jeans who hung out late at night along Santa Monica Boulevard. I discovered, somewhat to my satisfaction, that I was polymorphous-perverse enough to be capable of almost any sexual bizarrerie to be found in this complex and cynical city where practically everything, from a joint of grass to a cold-blooded murder, could be bought for a price. I was incapable, it seemed, of only one sexual variation, that of going to bed with Belinda. My friendship with her continued on for a number of years, more or less in the same vein, or according to the same rules. I don’t think she had any other suitors. In my private thoughts I jokingly referred to her as my fiancée—she herself always told people we were “just friends.”
Where to Download Screenplay: A Novel, by Macdonald Harris
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Stunning achievement by a brilliant writer By John Joss Fantasy. Time travel. Historical and modern Los Angeles. Sexual tension. Moral ambiguity. Youth and age. Life and death. Suspension of disbelief. Harris put it all together with Screenplay, among his more outrageous books and the source of divine speculation about the history of the movie industry and Hollywood. Originally published in 1982, it was republished by Galileo in England (2013) and Overlook in the U.S. (2014). It exemplifies the author’s originality and audacity, and his stunning literary skills.Screenplay traces the background and adventures of Alys, a wealthy young man orphaned at 18, living in a secluded, antique mansion on a private street in central Los Angeles, who falls into polymorphous perversity upon the death of his parents.He is visited upon by the mysterious Nesselrode, a shabby old man who claims to be a film director and producer. Nesselrode leads Alys to a crumbling, boarded-up movie theater, the Alhambra, and takes him ‘through the screen’ into the crystalline air of pre-smog LA to the black-and-white world of 1920s silent film-making. Here Alys falls in love with the beautiful actress Moira Silver and performs with her, first in a ‘falling-down’ part and later in a featured role. Besotted with Moira, he is determined to take her back through the screen into the modern world, to have and to hold. He achieves this, but with a diabolical twist. The time machine exacts a price.In a period when much fiction in some loftier ‘literary’ magazines features introverted and basically banal overwriting, Harris’ first-person ruminations in Screenplay—the book is written in the first person—have an illuminating and fulfilling quality that engages the mind with arcane detail. Thus, whereas one may want to skim much of today’s fiction and know less of the unnecessary and obvious trivia, Harris’ powers of observation and explication are so extraordinary that one wants to know more. The reader is drawn into the story, inexorably. His research, as always, is impeccable and his detailed examinations of locations, characters, attitudes and physical detail are absorbing.Intriguingly, while showing the white-on-black banner text of the silent-movie era, Harris contrasts a stricture placed on current screenplay writing, in which only basic scene data and dialog are permitted: he reveals the director’s instructions, screamed over a megaphone, and the actor’s expected emotional and physical responses that in today’s screenplays are never shown. Modern film actors don’t want to be told how to act, react or interpret a role, at least not in the script.British actor Simon Callow’s elegant Afterword to the new edition draws strong comparisons with the wildly inventive Lewis Carroll’s Alice (note the name similarity of ‘Alys’) and traces his own personal struggle to get Screenplay filmed. Callow was allowed $40,000, around the amount of a typical green-light party or maybe a Hollywood big shot’s walking-around money. Draw your own conclusions. In Harris’ lifetime, Herma was proposed as a film but its likely high budget precluded production, sadly.
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Screenplay: A Novel, by Macdonald Harris
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Screenplay: A Novel, by Macdonald Harris
Screenplay: A Novel, by Macdonald Harris
Screenplay: A Novel, by Macdonald Harris
