I've posted on a film of a book that I recently re-read titled: Starting Out in the Evening.
Here's what I wrote:
Starting out in the Evening is a quiet, graceful film about Leonard Schiller, a New York writer who is working on what could be his final book, and Heather, a young, aggressive graduate student who disrupts his life to do research for her master's thesis on him. Leonard is initially taken in by this bold young woman, and reluctantly agrees to her regular visits to interview him. He admires her persistent and intelligent personality. But he refuses to answer personal questions, saying that explaining his books and the ideas behind them is sufficient.Starting Out in the Evening is a book about the importance of writing, and the importance of conveying ideas through writing. Schiller, the protagonist, is a writer who tries to distance the personality of the author as far away from the content of the writing as possible. He is not writing a confessional book, nor really a book about personal perceptions. His quest is a quiet and determined one to bring literature to the forefront of writing.
Here is a paragraph from the book:
The thought crossed his mind that if greatness had eluded him as a writer, perhaps this was why: because he'd never wanted to make a scene. Subtlety and indirection are important tools, but you can't scale the highest peaks with these tools alone. [P. 174]Writing is like a weapon. It critiques, and often criticizes, the culture it is in. It is not a "stream of consciousness" of the artist's confessions, and who really cares about the author's "personal stories" unless you're a one-in-a-million writer like Dickens or Shakespeare? Even when available, the personal stories of writers tell us very little about the literary aspects of the book. Just because we know that Hemingway liked to watch bull fights doesn't give us any further insight into Hemingway's fascination in brute force. He could have equally watched contemporary football games and written similar books on "sports and force."
Schiller is right. Subtlety and indirection can help some parts of writing, but at the end of the day, the writer has to bite the bullet and write the real story. He has to find other tools to scale the highest peaks. I think you can do that with truth. And often truth is difficult to write, and difficult to accept. And it can lead to serious repercussions, from loss of a career to loss of life, for the writer.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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