WE DISCOVER the relevance of creative or imaginative literature to our lives through the universality of language. We pick up a novel, collection of stories, poems, etc, and begin to read, and continue to read, mainly because of the attraction of the writer’s language; its tone, what mood, or scene, or moment it describes.

Whoever decides that the book we pick up must be based on where we live, our region, our nation etc, before reading it may never discover the miracle of human relevance that is the distinct gift and excitement of creative literature, despite its inescapable diverse origins.

In the early 1960s, we walked into the Bookers book department, and among the many Penguin, Pan and Fontana paperback editions of novels were the Penguin titles, ‘Butterfield 8’ by John O’Hara and ‘The Misfits’ by Arthur Miller.

We can smell the fresh ink and paper off the pages of ‘Butterfield 8’ under the striped orange cover with an illustration of the novel’s central 18-year-old character, Gloria, walking along a New York sidewalk in a mink coat.

But right now, the name John O’Hara does not ring a bell, even though we might have seen films like ‘Pal Joey’ and ‘From The Terrace’, yet failed to notice or remember John O’Hara’s name on the screen, or poster as the writer of the novels both these films are based on.

Neither did we know that shortly thereafter, another film with lead stars, Elizabeth Taylor and Laurence Harvey, and based on the very novel in our hands, would appear at one of the local cinemas.

Glancing at the back cover’s biography notes, it piqued our interest to read that O’Hara had only graduated from High School, going on to a variety of low-status jobs such as ship’s steward, railway freight clerk, gas meter reader, fun park guard, steel mill labourer, soda fountain jerk, and lastly, reporter for many New York papers, mainly writing on films.

Eager to sample the sort of writing that had made someone with such an unglamorous background become a first-class, celebrated, sought-after novelist, we finally turn to Chapter 1 of ‘Butterfield 8’ and begin to read: “On this Sunday morning in May, this girl, who later was to be the cause of a sensation in New York, awoke much too early for her night before. One minute she was asleep, the next she was completely awake and dumped in despair. It was the kind of despair that she had known perhaps two thousand times before…”

O’Hara’s style
Yet, suddenly, we may become acutely aware that we are in a society, a nation, Guyana, seemingly very remote from the contents of ‘Butterfield 8’. So what can this North American novel mean to a large amount of locals with a history of crude, rudimentary colonial labour, colonial prohibitions and dismissals of ethnic customs and religious/cultural lifestyles? What can it mean to a society that places all its values in political policies, self-governance at any price, and gullible beliefs about material prosperity, corrupt strategies, moral dogmas, and uneducated passions that lead to crime, misinterpretation, social violence, as well as fashionable ‘revolutionary’ platitudes which culminate in the destruction of beautiful civic architecture, and decades of retardation for commercial progress?

The difference between typical or predictable novels, stories and poems produced by many local writers, and which often derive from all the above local history, and a foreign novel like O’Hara’s ‘Butterfield 8’, is that this novel arrives at a more personal or individual human and local relevance by focusing intensely on the everyday lives of various characters who interweave and connect in the novel’s short time-span.

Such lives exist everywhere, despite ‘history’. The very beginning of each separate chapter and paragraph creates the impression that the novel is starting over again and again, and that we have no idea of anything other than these present events which keep us reading.

This reading is like living or experiencing everyday real life, rather than searching doggedly for a plot in a book. Indeed, Gloria’s familiar despair, which we learn of in the first paragraph, is never explained but shown as we read on.

‘Butterfield 8’, though about girls or women who like to have ‘cocktails’, socialise, or sell themselves to bored wealthy married men; about callous prejudicial class conventions and a writer’s moral conscience, clarifies the obvious pitfalls and despair that comes along with trying to enjoy human life.

The location of New York does not deny its relevance to Guyana on an individual therapeutic level. Here is an example of the novel’s understanding of powerful personal moments that can change one’s life anywhere.

“’Aren’t you interested in knowing why I like you now, after not liking you for such a long time?’

‘Of course, but if you want to tell me, you will, and if you don’t, there’s no use my asking.’

‘Come here,’ she said. He sat beside her on the sofa and took her hand. ‘I like the way you smell.’

‘Is that why you like me now, and didn’t before?’

‘Damn before!’ She put her hand on his cheek. ‘Wait a minute,’ she said. ‘Don’t get up. I’ll do it.’ She went to one of the two large windows and pulled down the shade. ‘People across the street.’

He had her then and there. And from that moment, he never loved Emily again.”

Because any intelligent Guyanese writer knows that literature does not begin or end with him or her, the entire history of literature, up to its very latest developments, becomes potentially relevant.

The Misfits
From O’Hara to Arthur Miller is therefore an instructive direction for a further exploration of the universality of human experience. Not only Miller as playwright, but author of one of the most original, lucid, refreshing, and humane novels to ever come out of the USA: ‘The Misfits’, first published by Penguin in 1961 and released as a film the same year.

Unlike ‘Butterfield 8’, whose novel is far more interesting and stylish than the film, both novel and film of ‘The Misfits’ are of the highest creative order. This is because ‘The Misfits’ is written as a cinematic novel; its narration and description conveyed with a camera’s precision and a director’s intention to capture intangible human nuances and moods, which film director, John Huston does brilliantly, in the same manner as Alain Robbe-Grillet’s fiction and films.

Interestingly, Robbe-Grillet’s precise fictional style matured in the same year, 1961, as Miller’s cinematic novel was published. Here is an example from the first page of ‘The Misfits’:

“It is a quiet little town. We can see through our windshield almost to the end of Main Street, a dozen blocks away. Everything is sharp to the eye at this altitude, the sky is immaculate, and the morning Jazz coming from the dashboard is perky. It is a clean town.”

The characters of ‘The Misfits’, a beautiful young woman and an adventurous older one; an easy-going mechanic and flyer; and two modern-day cowboy drifters in love with the land while living by their skills, are an exciting congenial bunch . They are unforgettable, kind, thoughtful, loving characters, vividly conveying a real and practical morality, contradicting the usual stereotype of such people as uprooted, lazy, un-ambitious bohemian misfits. Here is a sample of their relaxed interaction:

“He works the ground again. Squatting on the stone, she seems to join the sun and earth in staring at him, watching his hoe awakening the soil around the plants. He senses an importance for her in his expertness, and he winks down at her.

She smiles and breaks her stare. ‘I like you, Gay.’

‘That’s good news.’

‘You like me?’

‘Well, its close to ninety degrees out here, and I’m hoeing a garden for the first time since I was ten years old, so I guess I must like you pretty good.’”

The local relevance of such a scene, out in Colorado’s western landscape, from such a new novel like ‘The Misfits’, has to do with revising, rethinking any pessimistic view of our own social and national environment tarnished by our persistent historical interpretations of our everyday life.

People want to experience their everyday lives calmly, pleasurably. Refugees who flock to calmer nations do so because their nation’s everyday lifestyle is ruined. Yet, to regard looking for a job, or wanting to be loved, etc, as related only to colonial or political problems, is to fabricate the nature of reality.

Such necessities and desires existed long before political organisations began. It is not surprising that novelist, Arthur Miller dedicated ‘The Misfits’ to the film’s great leading actor, Clark Gable, with these words:

“To Clark Gable, who did not know how to hate.” That is the beauty of Gable’s entire career, not one role that supported despair or hatred. Maybe Miller’s dedication ironically suggests that his characters were ‘misfits’ because they, too, did not know how to hate.

Literature, Cinema, and Guyanese Creativity (Part VI)

WE DISCOVER the relevance of creative or imaginative literature to our lives through the universality of language. We pick up a novel, collection of stories, poems, etc, and begin to read, and continue to read, mainly because of the attraction of the writer’s language; its tone, what mood, or scene, or moment it describes.

Whoever decides that the book we pick up must be based on where we live, our region, our nation etc, before reading it may never discover the miracle of human relevance that is the distinct gift and excitement of creative literature, despite its inescapable diverse origins.

In the early 1960s, we walked into the Bookers book department, and among the many Penguin, Pan and Fontana paperback editions of novels were the Penguin titles, ‘Butterfield 8’ by John O’Hara and ‘The Misfits’ by Arthur Miller.

We can smell the fresh ink and paper off the pages of ‘Butterfield 8’ under the striped orange cover with an illustration of the novel’s central 18-year-old character, Gloria, walking along a New York sidewalk in a mink coat.

But right now, the name John O’Hara does not ring a bell, even though we might have seen films like ‘Pal Joey’ and ‘From The Terrace’, yet failed to notice or remember John O’Hara’s name on the screen, or poster as the writer of the novels both these films are based on.

Neither did we know that shortly thereafter, another film with lead stars, Elizabeth Taylor and Laurence Harvey, and based on the very novel in our hands, would appear at one of the local cinemas.

Glancing at the back cover’s biography notes, it piqued our interest to read that O’Hara had only graduated from High School, going on to a variety of low-status jobs such as ship’s steward, railway freight clerk, gas meter reader, fun park guard, steel mill labourer, soda fountain jerk, and lastly, reporter for many New York papers, mainly writing on films.

Eager to sample the sort of writing that had made someone with such an unglamorous background become a first-class, celebrated, sought-after novelist, we finally turn to Chapter 1 of ‘Butterfield 8’ and begin to read: “On this Sunday morning in May, this girl, who later was to be the cause of a sensation in New York, awoke much too early for her night before. One minute she was asleep, the next she was completely awake and dumped in despair. It was the kind of despair that she had known perhaps two thousand times before…”

O’Hara’s style
Yet, suddenly, we may become acutely aware that we are in a society, a nation, Guyana, seemingly very remote from the contents of ‘Butterfield 8’. So what can this North American novel mean to a large amount of locals with a history of crude, rudimentary colonial labour, colonial prohibitions and dismissals of ethnic customs and religious/cultural lifestyles? What can it mean to a society that places all its values in political policies, self-governance at any price, and gullible beliefs about material prosperity, corrupt strategies, moral dogmas, and uneducated passions that lead to crime, misinterpretation, social violence, as well as fashionable ‘revolutionary’ platitudes which culminate in the destruction of beautiful civic architecture, and decades of retardation for commercial progress?

The difference between typical or predictable novels, stories and poems produced by many local writers, and which often derive from all the above local history, and a foreign novel like O’Hara’s ‘Butterfield 8’, is that this novel arrives at a more personal or individual human and local relevance by focusing intensely on the everyday lives of various characters who interweave and connect in the novel’s short time-span.

Such lives exist everywhere, despite ‘history’. The very beginning of each separate chapter and paragraph creates the impression that the novel is starting over again and again, and that we have no idea of anything other than these present events which keep us reading.

This reading is like living or experiencing everyday real life, rather than searching doggedly for a plot in a book. Indeed, Gloria’s familiar despair, which we learn of in the first paragraph, is never explained but shown as we read on.

‘Butterfield 8’, though about girls or women who like to have ‘cocktails’, socialise, or sell themselves to bored wealthy married men; about callous prejudicial class conventions and a writer’s moral conscience, clarifies the obvious pitfalls and despair that comes along with trying to enjoy human life.

The location of New York does not deny its relevance to Guyana on an individual therapeutic level. Here is an example of the novel’s understanding of powerful personal moments that can change one’s life anywhere.

“’Aren’t you interested in knowing why I like you now, after not liking you for such a long time?’

‘Of course, but if you want to tell me, you will, and if you don’t, there’s no use my asking.’

‘Come here,’ she said. He sat beside her on the sofa and took her hand. ‘I like the way you smell.’

‘Is that why you like me now, and didn’t before?’

‘Damn before!’ She put her hand on his cheek. ‘Wait a minute,’ she said. ‘Don’t get up. I’ll do it.’ She went to one of the two large windows and pulled down the shade. ‘People across the street.’

He had her then and there. And from that moment, he never loved Emily again.”

Because any intelligent Guyanese writer knows that literature does not begin or end with him or her, the entire history of literature, up to its very latest developments, becomes potentially relevant.

The Misfits
From O’Hara to Arthur Miller is therefore an instructive direction for a further exploration of the universality of human experience. Not only Miller as playwright, but author of one of the most original, lucid, refreshing, and humane novels to ever come out of the USA: ‘The Misfits’, first published by Penguin in 1961 and released as a film the same year.

Unlike ‘Butterfield 8’, whose novel is far more interesting and stylish than the film, both novel and film of ‘The Misfits’ are of the highest creative order. This is because ‘The Misfits’ is written as a cinematic novel; its narration and description conveyed with a camera’s precision and a director’s intention to capture intangible human nuances and moods, which film director, John Huston does brilliantly, in the same manner as Alain Robbe-Grillet’s fiction and films.

Interestingly, Robbe-Grillet’s precise fictional style matured in the same year, 1961, as Miller’s cinematic novel was published. Here is an example from the first page of ‘The Misfits’:

“It is a quiet little town. We can see through our windshield almost to the end of Main Street, a dozen blocks away. Everything is sharp to the eye at this altitude, the sky is immaculate, and the morning Jazz coming from the dashboard is perky. It is a clean town.”

The characters of ‘The Misfits’, a beautiful young woman and an adventurous older one; an easy-going mechanic and flyer; and two modern-day cowboy drifters in love with the land while living by their skills, are an exciting congenial bunch . They are unforgettable, kind, thoughtful, loving characters, vividly conveying a real and practical morality, contradicting the usual stereotype of such people as uprooted, lazy, un-ambitious bohemian misfits. Here is a sample of their relaxed interaction:

“He works the ground again. Squatting on the stone, she seems to join the sun and earth in staring at him, watching his hoe awakening the soil around the plants. He senses an importance for her in his expertness, and he winks down at her.

She smiles and breaks her stare. ‘I like you, Gay.’

‘That’s good news.’

‘You like me?’

‘Well, its close to ninety degrees out here, and I’m hoeing a garden for the first time since I was ten years old, so I guess I must like you pretty good.’”

The local relevance of such a scene, out in Colorado’s western landscape, from such a new novel like ‘The Misfits’, has to do with revising, rethinking any pessimistic view of our own social and national environment tarnished by our persistent historical interpretations of our everyday life.

People want to experience their everyday lives calmly, pleasurably. Refugees who flock to calmer nations do so because their nation’s everyday lifestyle is ruined. Yet, to regard looking for a job, or wanting to be loved, etc, as related only to colonial or political problems, is to fabricate the nature of reality.

Such necessities and desires existed long before political organisations began. It is not surprising that novelist, Arthur Miller dedicated ‘The Misfits’ to the film’s great leading actor, Clark Gable, with these words:

“To Clark Gable, who did not know how to hate.” That is the beauty of Gable’s entire career, not one role that supported despair or hatred. Maybe Miller’s dedication ironically suggests that his characters were ‘misfits’ because they, too, did not know how to hate.