For Valentine's Day: An Edward Gorey Review: The Black Doll: A Silent Screenplay

This book is something special, primarily for Gorey fans (this is admittedly true of everything he wrote). The book opens with a rare interview with Edward Gorey that is full of enchanting and informative tidbits; Gorey himself is charming and fun, as you would expect.

The screenplay of "The Black Doll" is mysterious, macabre, and full of references to films both familiar and obscure.  It has the satisfying inscrutability of a Robbe-Grillet novel—but with much more charm and friendliness. I suspect that this screenplay would not make a terribly watchable film--much of the action and information about the characters appears in explanatory texts within the screenplay, but not in dialogue or explicit action--but that is sublimely unimportant.  All in all, The Black Doll is a book to go back to, and puzzle over and delight in again and again over a glass of port (or three).

Speaking of the unfilmability of things:  this is as good a place as any to call you attention to the utterly amazing Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story,  a delicious and hilarious film of (and ode to) Sterne's 'unfilmable' Tristram Shandy.  I've never been able to finish the book, so I can't in good conscience write anything about the film's relationship to the book, or vice versa--but the film is endlessly surprising in its sophistication and delicious literary whatnottery.  Check it out!

City Boy, by Edmund White

Edmund White's City Boy is a memoir of the author's growth as a writer during the 1970s, primarily in New York. It is full of anecdotes and stories about real people--of varying degrees of fame--like Robert Wilson, James Merrill, William Burroughs, and Harold Brodkey, among many, many others. All of the characterizations are fascinating, capturing the particular impact that this or that person had on the author. These passages are the kind that inspired me to track down some of the people that were new to me and thus discover something wonderful and unexpected; and on the other hand, to be reminded of old favorites now also seen in the new light of White's sensibility.

The description of Jasper Johns in Chapter 15, whose "house had the sort of simplicity that only money could buy" (214) is especially powerful. His description of Johns starts on an intimate, personal level and then opens into a discussion (one of many) about the differences between artists of the time who were publicly out (like White) and those that were closeted (like Johns, Sontag, and many others). This chapter especially exemplifies White's charm, and the mixture of his thoughtfulness, his awe for the people who inspired him, and (not least) his vanity. Like he does in most of the book, in this chapter he balances the nostalgic voyeurism of his past with a thoughtful criticism of the attitudes of his younger self.

The book is solidly interesting and rewarding--up until the last chapter, which seems rushed and awkward. White doesn't seem to know how to talk about Susan Sontag, and ends up shifting suddenly, through a discussion of the impact of AIDS on the 1970s New York scene, into a weaker, maudlin prose unlike anything that precedes it. The impulse to grieve rings true, but his writing is clearly more effective in remembering earlier, happier times than it is eulogizing the loss of them.