Wasn’t That A Time-With Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris In Mind

Wasn’t That A Time-With Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris In Mind

From The Pen Of Zack James 

Sam Lowell, who had usually an easy going guy when not preoccupied with his profession, his lawyerly profession, was frustrated. No, better, was, had been, beside himself with frustration for a fairly long time. He had, as he wound down the management of the day to day operations of the small independent law firm that he had helped start with a fellow law school student, Ben Ames, decided that finally he could begin to pursue an avocation as a writer that he had been eager to do since high school. Back then the war, the Vietnam War if anybody is asking, intervened, and had caught him up in the draft call and after his tour of duty into the counter-culture night around San Francisco which had set him back several years when he couldn’t/did not want to face the return to the “real” world for a while.

More than that Sam found as he foundered and as his new “real” world foundered that he needed to move on. Moving on in the direct sense by taking up the law career that his mother, grandfather and several others had been harping on him since his youth. But he still hankered after that idea of being a writer, being a writer maybe in Paris, San Francisco, or some other town where blossoming the written word counted, counted a lot. But time and tide had passed that idea by and it had only been the previous decade or so that he got back to writing just for the hell of it.

Fortunately the times he choose to come back in were very propitious for amateur writers, writers who were not making their livelihoods trying to eke out a living at so many words per day. He had over the course of that decade, first very sporadically then more consistently, joined several writing-oriented blog and other self-publishing enterprises.        

That return to recreational writing however was really what Sam had been frustrated by. Or rather as he took his writing more seriously he realized that he had come to a block in the road, not a writer’s block fortunately because one way or another he could still produce the words, sometimes a torrid of words, but an understanding that he would always be a first rate third rate writer as somebody back in the day had said about some public servant whom the person who said the words was trying to smear.

This is the way Sam explained it to his long-time companion Laura, Laura Perkins, who had encouraged him in his writing as best she could. He had just written a short story based on a few episodes in the current love life of his old schoolboy friend, Bart Webber, from Carver where they grew up together. Bart had had a short torrent affair with a fellow student in their class, Melinda Loring, whom he had rekindled a relationship with after their 50^th anniversary class reunion. The affair, in the end, floundered on Bart’s inability to meet Melinda’s demands that they think about marriage which Bart, having suffered through three failed marriages (and more alimony, child support and college tuitions than any man should have rightly been required to do in that loveless legal world Sam inhabited along with some nasty judges),    was adamantly against, although he was open to the idea of living together or some such non-legal arrangement. Bart’s position set off a firestorm from which the relationship could never recover.

Bart, in telling Sam the details of the split up between him and Melinda, mentioned that he suddenly realized what the author Thomas Wolfe meant when he titled one of his books You Can’t Go Home Again. That idea, that hook, the notion that in some things you cannot go back stirred Sam into the thought of writing up a sketch, duly fictionalized, about Bart’s affair as some kind of cautionary tale for the generation of ‘68 now filled with plenty of regrets and sorrows about their pasts-and time to think about them as well. Bart agreed, although he was skeptical that anybody could learn anything from the exposition. In any case Sam wrote the piece up, about three thousand words, let Bart look it over and make corrections as well as check for any incidents revealed that might be tied to anything real that had happened in the Bart-Melinda relationship.

Bart satisfied, Sam sent the piece to various publishing outlets where there was a certain small interest expressed in publishing the story especially by one young female editor. It was a comment by that editor, Julie Stern, which riled Sam and set off his latest round of frustration. She said that the way he wrote the story, the way he defended his protagonist Jack Callahan, the piece as a whole read like, and this is a direct quote, “the closing argument of legal brief.”          

Initially stung by the comment Sam later, after several days’ reflection, realized that Julie was right, was right not only about that piece which she had read but after looking over some of his other earlier writings he had the same sense that she was onto something. All the years of dry legal writing had atrophied his creative writing skills, had left him thinking strictly inside the box. Had made him realize that he was a prime example of that first rate third rate writer he dreaded that he might become when he was young despite his junior and senior year English teacher, Miss Soros, at Carver High encouraging him in his creative endeavors.        

Sam thought it was funny that back in high school he had had such creative bursts, had stirred Miss Soros and his classmates with a few of his efforts mostly about the absurdities of teenage life, angst and alienation. He had fashioned himself, maybe imitated is a better word, after various heroic writers that he had read. In those days he was crazy for Ernest Hemingway’s sleek style, meaning crisp dialogue, clear short sentences yet with words that were power-packed to descript not only the action of the story but the environment in which the characters worked out their particular problems. Sam had been crazy to study about the Spanish Civil War after he had picked that event as the subject of his first term paper in high school. Along the way he found out that many Americans, not all of them communists or socialists, had supported the Republican side against the Nazi-infested Fascists and that Hemingway was one of them. Had written For Whom The Bells Toll as a result of his experiences (Sam would not find out until later that the American Communist Party and the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigades were not at all happy about Hemingway’s work on that book, its’ what would be today called its political incorrectness. Many years later when he had run into a veteran of the Lincolns at a conference at Brandeis where the Lincoln Archives were housed he had been still incensed that Hemingway had slighted them.

Sam had not known Hemingway’s work before his efforts around his term paper except maybe some film adaptation of one of his short stories, The Killers, but he was in thrall ever after, thought everybody wherever they might end up on their literary journeys should write following his style. Naturally, something that Sam was inclined to do when he was “hot’ on a writer he would read (and re-read later several times) all Hemingway’s works that he could get his hands on. Never could then though figure out why a guy who could write like a whirling dervish, a mad monk if you don’t like the dervish description, took his own life. That was then and like in a lot of things later Sam could understand that a person with declining stamina, some form of writer’s block, and a feeling that his best work was behind him, could take that way out. Not a way Sam’s would be inclined to take for those reasons since a first rate third rate writer would only bring laughter from the crowds upon himself if he fancied himself enough of a driven writer to contemplate that.    

Jesus, Sam thought, thinking back to the time when he first heard about how guys like Hemingway and Fitzgerald abandoned the vacuity of post-World War I America for the bright lights of Paris, or France anyway. Yeah, if Hemingway gave Sam pause on style then Fitzgerald was the master of the narrative, of telling a great story letting the reader sink beneath the pauses. Like the first time he read The Great Gatsby and realized that Jay Ganz was just like a lot of guys he knew, corner boy guys who had big dreams. Except Jay driven did more than dream about what he wanted. He had had to read that famous last page about the Dutch sailors reaching the New World around New York Harbor way and seeing the possibilities of the fresh new start once they had seen that unsullied “fresh green breast.”  Yeah, Fitzgerald knew a certain milieu and worked that minefield for all it was worth.

As Sam dozed off a bit while thinking about all the great literature around, all the stuff that was worthy of being read he was dazzled by the progression of great writers who had influenced him at various time. Thomas Wolfe, Edith Wharton (even though he was not at all familiar with Brahmin life), Dorothy Parker and her Big Blonde, the max daddy detective story writers Raymond Parker and Dashiell  Hammett (who Sam swore learned their dialogue  craft from Hemingway after reading The Maltese Falcon  and the Big Sleep by them) and a whole bunch of others. And now he is to go without a bang but with a whimper, maybe better a sigh. Sighs the fate of first rate third rate writers.