A Handsome Ivanhoe

Back in the day, when novels were being published serially in popular magazines and illustrators made a living, the best that even the most popular novelists could do was to pick or approve the artist, suggest and correct what they could, and live with the results. It was the convention of the time, illustration, and helped to sell magazines, which in turn helped to sell the finished books thereafter. Some, like Dickens, who wrote his first book, and the first of Pickwick to the illustrations provided by an editor, eventually became powerful enough to dictate, but that was a rare thing. Dickens himself becoming a hugely successful magazine editor, at least in part, to excise more complete control over his own work, down to the hiring, firing and management of the pictures published with it. Thackeray tried his hand as an illustrator and cartoonist before his first novel was even written. In fact, he auditioned to illustrate for Dickens. He was not hired. Eventually, he did the illustrations for his books himself, and did them well, but this too was an exception. There were, even then, writers who did not much care to have their characters depicted but with the words that made them up, but that was not a fight really won until the illustrated magazines were done. Most writers simply had to accept the pictures they got.

Modern authors, disdainful of, when not in open rebellion against, this, as well as most Victorian conventions, eventually escaped the illustrators and decorators completely, save for the "wrappers" or dustjackets, as we would call them, though even now there are doubtless fights still being had about what's now called "cover art," with or without pictures. (Authors still lose this fight, usually without a word being said.)

Another issue in Dickens' day was piracy. Copyright was a battle he fought all his career, and not only against the gross plagiarism of hacks and publishers, but also the often simultaneous, if not preemptive, stage adaptations of his successes that sprang up like weeds, everywhere. He was prepared to be amused by some of these, sought to shut down many, and was even known to offer advice and collaboration, here and there, in an attempt to at least control the better representations of his work. (But being a devoted amateur actor and playwright himself, he sympathized with the actors and theater technicians in these bowdlerized productions, even when he sued.)

Living writers lucky enough to sell a novel or story to the movies or television, still tend to have no more say in what happens to their books when adapted than did Dickens. A writer of mystery novels I once knew fairly well, when three of his funny crime novels in a row were "optioned," and none of them made into anything much but incomplete or unproduced scripts, told me he'd cashed the checks, and then tried never to think about the subject again. This had been the advice he'd received from an older, more experienced novelist and it proved good. I've never met one novelist whose work has been adapted to the screen, large or small, who was wholly happy with the result, though they were all of them glad of the checks.

A friend at work not so long ago purchased one of the grand boxed-sets of BBC literary adaptations and this weekend lent me the 1997 BBC/A&E coproduction of Ivanhoe, I'd never seen it before. It was rather wonderful: handsomely, if not lavishly produced, with a large and attractive cast and, at a running time of five hours, quite surprisingly faithful to the book. A certain psychological sophistication, unknown, perhaps unnecessary and possibly even shocking to Scott, had he been alive to see the show, was folded in, but this did the story no harm, and frankly did the female characters some good. If there is anything unlikely to appeal to modern audiences so far as Scott is concerned, it is probably the undeniably stiff virtue of his ingenues. Here both of Scott's central women, the good Saxon maid, and the noble Jewess, unwittingly made her rival and otherwise much abused in the story, benefited from being given more to play than bravery, chastity and charity, and from being given more to do than lament, suffer and sacrifice. Even Ivanhoe himself was here allowed a deeper gloom than usual, with a rather cynical reading of a noble line, here and there, and many a baleful glance, and was all the better for it.

But what I like best in these extended TV adaptations is always the room provided for the supporting characters, so that here Prince John is allowed something more than his usual cretinous pout and has a full share as co-conspirator. Robin Hood, Tuck and the rest of the merry band were not the usual cameos, The nasty Normans all had a go at something more than the usual snarling, and the most endearing supporting characters from the novel, the unsurprisingly wise fool, Womba, and his friend, the swineherd/squire, Gurth, both followed their stories out to their ends. This was at least as delightful to me as all the history bits, the daring doings, and the romance. Scott created wonderful minor characters. It was good to see them accounted for.

Scott on the page nearly always seems to me eminently suited to being put up on his feet and before the cameras. His is an imagination made for real horses, the clank of prop swords, the playing of death scenes, fires, fights, castles, intrigues and rescues. The expense of recreating medieval England, or Jacobean Scotland is probably prohibitive, and it is by now doubtless less so to reproduce the more familiar London of the middle and late Victorians, as much of it survives in places other than London. But Scott's voice is gentler than Dickens, or the Brontes, and more easily translated into television or film situations, his characters easier to watch, in a way, for their greater simplicity. His plots multiply like rabbits and leap about, but none is so involved as to require explanation outside the narrative. His use of histories now unfamiliar to television audiences should, I think be more an advantage than not, as there is always something fresh there for a modern audience, and because he never introduces history but through situation, character and action, dramatizing, in other words, anything that might otherwise seem daunting or confusing in a summery of one of the novels -- which is presumably the most one might expect a television or film producer to read. I wish more Scott made it onscreen. (If for no other reason than to spare us the twenty sixth British or American television adaptation of Jane Eyre in as many months, or so it can sometimes seem.)

As for what Scott might have made of this recreation of his Ivanhoe, I should think he would have been pleased. I don't doubt he would have been glad of the check.

Wickedness Proceedeth

The books one can not read but wish to are perhaps the largest part of any bookish person's mental inventory. The books I will never read in their original languages come first to mind. I'll never learn French, let alone Russian. More's the pity, but there it is. There are all the subjects for which the inclination is too slight, but present: the physical sciences, in my case, into which I finally peeked a few years back, and not without instruction and some surprising pleasure, or philosophy, moral or pure, for which I haven't a steady head. The most basic mathematics are well beyond me. There are any number of academic disciplines, newly coined in my own lifetime, that sound fascinating: bio-this and socio-that and anthro-the-other-thing, they might all be well worth a glancing investigation, but beyond quizzing customers in the bookstore as to just what any given subject new to me is, I know I will never go on to study a one of them.

Even within literature proper, there are authors in their hundreds if not their thousands, recommended by readers and writers whose opinions I well respect, but whose books I will never open. The shortest version of such a list would shameful to make, but to illustrate the point with but one recent example, Kobo Abe, who's Woman in the Dunes left me so exhausted from shoveling through its grim and endless story of shoveled sand that my arms ached every time I picked up the little book. Now Abe's name is enough to weigh my eyelids. And there are so many, many more.

But perhaps saddest for me personally are the genres in which I can no longer read. I've addressed before here my failure to sustain an interest in science fiction. Likewise most mysteries and thrillers are best met now in film and television where the supporting players are sorted for me by the screen-time each is given, by the number of close-ups, and the stature of the actor cast, etc. Film is so efficient.

True crime is wholly the invention of booksellers. As genre, it was born in the last century, when court reporting graduated from newspapers to magazines and thence to books. Some Scots reporter, who's name I don't recall, spent decades in court watching murder trials and making of them popular anthologies that sold and sold. Such of true crime as I can and do still read is now almost always of the length of one good magazine article. Needn't be a murder, the crime considered. I still look at "Vanity Fair Magazine" for the lovely pictures, but I tend to religiously read now only the monthly feature of criminality among the ridiculously rich. (Imagine my delight in having still a third part to which I may look forward in the ongoing profile of arch shit Bernie Madoff, King of All the Ponzis!) There's nothing so pleasant with my hand-packed lunch as another DuPont heir gone bad, or the grotesque divorces of billionaires, or the fall some powerful, respectable criminal with a yen to own an entire coastline so that he might upon the sands of Florida decree his Xanadu built without neighbors, common sewage or zoning regulation.

Some rare thing happens, now and again, and a good or even great writer, Truman Capote, say, or V. S. Naipaul, decides to take up the facts of a murder, a scandal or coup and make of it real literature. But this is not to be counted on. There is a standard though, for what makes plain crime reporting better than it ought to be. What's required is not genius but journalism of the first rank: disciplined and objective observation and review of the case, curiosity, doggedness, and wit, the drier the better, thank you. Crime reporting should never be breathless. All the emotion stirred: pity, outrage, sympathy, disgust, should be made to rise without inflation, naturally from the facts and in the reader, without pleading or manipulation, or seemingly so, on the part of the reporter. Wry, if not raw, is how crime is best served.

That's where TV usually gets things wrong. Voice-over-narration, unlike good reporting on the page, augmented if not often overwhelmed by sickeningly heavy musical clues, tends to signal every emotion, every suspicion, every revelation and break in the case with all the subtlety of a Baptist sermon, and with something of the same dry-mouthed, lip-smacking relish for sin, flagrantly detailed, complete with violent consequences, and then eventually, piously condemned. I watch the best of this sort of thing, like A&E's "First 48", but recorded, so as to skip as much as might be avoided of the repetitious narration and swelling score, as well as the commercials. (My favorite camp crime TV "reporting" is done by dear old Dominick Dunne on his own Tru TV show, Dominick Dunne's Power, Privilege, and Justice. He's filmed in inserts seated in well-earned his easy-chair, on a set presumably meant to be his fabulous NY apartment, and narrates throughout in a masterly drawl that ranges from a snappy rage to the weariest resignation. Dunne is the last of the "distangay" old gentleman-gossips, of the Clifton Webb school, the greatest example of sour-puissance on reality series television, now that Paul Winfield's dirty-minded baritone, alas, is no longer to be heard on A&E's "City Confidential." That queen could make the word "mailbox" sound filthy.)

Much if not most of what gets between the covers of a true crime book, by even the most seasoned or celebrated crime reporters, is so much padding. Few if any criminals, and fewer crimes, need ever be treated at book-length. Most true crime books are either cobbled reportage, or produced by specialized hacks, seemingly paid by the word. Even the bloated bestsellers by the most easily recognized practitioners tend to be pointlessly long winded, when not completely insipid. Dear ol' Ann Rule never met a cop who wasn't her hero, saw a female corpse that wasn't once "a great beauty" or at least "a pretty, innocent girl," or learned of a sexual deviation that wasn't "shocking."

The standard for me of what true crime reporting can and should be was set by Calvin Trillin in "The New Yorker," and in the 1984 collection of his crime stories, Killings. He still occasionally returns to a courtroom, but not often enough. But at least we have this one book. In its introduction, he explains, in his best, iconic laconic, the place of crime in the series he was then writing as he traveled around American, "I went every three weeks not to a place but to a story -- to an event or a controversy or, now and then, to a killing." He goes on to justify this curiosity by explaining, wickedly, "A killing often seemed to present the best opportunity to write about people one at a time." The word he uses later, to say this again, is "specificity," and in that word is all that is best in the best true crime reporting.

He describes place perfectly, as here, Coalport, Pennsylvania, in the piece "Called at Rushton":

"It is a small, gray town in a part of central Pennsylvania where the towns tend to be small and gray and to have movie houses that have been closed for years."

I grew up in just such a place.

And Trillin can address the criminal underclass without condescension, and still score a joke, as here, in "Jim, Tex, and the One-armed Man":

"Like Jim, Tex had ended up in his wife's home county, having come up from Dallas a couple of years before. He had three rifles and a pistol. Tex was a machinist by trade, but, like Jim, he didn't make a fetish out of steady work."

But Trillin's sympathy, if reserved, is real. His piece "Melisha Morganna Gibson" is a masterpiece of horror, of the real and usually too little recorded or reported kind, here reported without resort to commentary, exaggeration or a single wasted word. Trillin never claims to understand or explain the violence he tells of, but understands the real power of its consequences, for good and ill. It is not his place, as a reporter, to call this story a tragedy, but he communicates just how tragic the preventible death of a child feels, even to a stranger, even now, more than thirty years after a little girl's death at the hands of her parent.

Calvin Trillin spoils most other crime writing for me, when I reread him, by reminding me just how well it can be done.