Get a Job 19 comments

By A.G. Harmon

When asked to accept the Nobel Prize in Stockholm—back when it was given for writing, not politics, and therefore carried more prestige than the People’s Choice Awards—Faulkner said that he couldn’t get away from home because he was a farmer.

I don’t think he meant it sarcastically; though an excuse to avoid going, in his mind, the answer was plausible. He had business to do (most of it while drunk, yes—but nevertheless), and his business trumped receiving awards for it. That kind of thing always made me fond of William Carlos Williams, who didn’t stop doctoring, and Wallace Stevens, who didn’t stop working at his insurance company, in order to pen great poems. They could do both just fine.

In contrast, the milieu of “writers” who have “writing lives” inside “writing spaces” and seek sustenance from “writing communities” is a cause of great, abiding revulsion. It’s hard to find people making bigger fools of themselves than those who blather about how they fill a piece of paper with something that came out their heads (one of my favorite movie lines is from Barton Fink; when the Faulkner character replies, irked, to a labored question about how and “why he writes”: “I just like making stuff up”).

Of course there’s genuine worth in criticism and instruction, and plenty to be gained from those who know better; it’s just all the other junk that all too often accompanies it. A grown person who secludes himself from his family and mistreats his girlfriend and begs money from his brother just to write and complain about the whole thing deserves a horsewhipping from a big doctor who farms and owns an insurance company. It’s enough to make you side with Plato, until you find a refreshing person who has six children and teaches first grade and also manages to write—very well, in fact—because she enjoys it.

But the worst part of this unholy mess is the sadness. Was it ever thus? Having hung out in my more Byronic, long-haired days with such a crowd, the truth was brought home by a discerning comment from someone older and wiser than this set of friends: “Why do they all have to be so strange and dirty?”

I couldn’t answer that then, but it seemed a fair appraisal. Soon thereafter, another thing became unsettlingly clear: joy in life, happiness and contentment, had become marked as “simplistic” (it’s hard to pull off an artistic reputation when cursed with a sunny disposition).

Then I noticed something else yet: that this whole creative thing can become something akin to an Orphic mystery, with its rituals and votives and sacrifices, its vatic inspiration, its dark gods of murky complexity, absinthe-laden and grave-bound. The aesthetic movement had that kind of alluring—but in the end, perverse—love of itself, the sort that ends up cloying like arrases of black and red velvet inside a rococo boudoir. You lose your breath and want to heave the chaise lounge through the window to let some air in.

Art as ersatz-religion is a bitch of a thing.

All this is a long, roundabout way of giving a bad movie review, but I’ve been saving it for a while. Living in a big East Coast city, I can see films that never make it out of Big East Coast cities, such as Starting out in the Evening. The teaser caught my attention: a once-notable, now obscure writer, Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella) is approached by a graduate student named Heather (Lauren Ambrose) who wants to resurrect his works through her master’s thesis. I expected some routine conflicts and balefulness, but hoped for something David Mamet might do, as in Oleanna.

Instead, Schiller mopes around most of the movie, locking himself into rooms during his “writing” time and having predictable conflicts with his attentive daughter (Lili Taylor). Heather makes a weirdo idol out of him, kissing his hand, stealing his pictures, stripping herself for the bloated old man to grope—then pushing him away when he takes her too seriously. The two have discussions about stock stuff: influences and anxiety regarding the same; the liberation or inhibition of characters; accusals of artistic dishonesty and recriminations of commercial compromise. With seemingly nothing else to do, the entire cast constantly attends bookstore readings, where dreary women read in dreary NPR voices, then attend heavy hors d’oeuvres parties to make snide remarks. Art means something to these people—in fact, it means everything, they’re glad to say—and they’re willing to knife you in the ribs to prove it.

There are a few nice moments, as when some characters are less selfish than usual, but nothing convinces you that they’ve found any sense of proportion about life. The old idols are still there, standing at every front and blocking every retreat; there’s no life outside them, and so they become life’s end, purpose, point. Their world is too close, living off its own carcass, and fooling them to bow down before something they’ve only just now made up themselves.