The Best American Poetry

Acting Noir [by David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis]

Who’s Your Favorite Noir Actor?

Suzanne Lummis:

I can’t choose between Richard Widmark [left] and Dan Duryea, both consummate artists, absolute originals who enlivened every scene of every movie they appeared in with their idiosyncratic expressions of evil, villainy or rascally mischief—lowlifes but so alive.  

Dan Duryea’s the only actor I can think of who could inhabit characters who were not only bad, not only murderous, but downright smarmy, and still seem weirdly attractive.  Often his characters slap women around, in Scarlet Street, Woman in the Window, Too Late for Tears… One of the women noir scholars contributing to the commentary on a DVD said, “I find Dan Duryea sexy, which is really disturbing.” That made me laugh. - Problem is, confidence and energy combined with focus is sexy, and nothing can be done about that.  In life, though, I’d loath that type of abusive person, but in the movies…  In the movies, what you’re looking at is talent.

Widmark played strong, good guys, too, especially in Westerns, but in Noir, oh anything from the hapless grifter in Night and the City, a loser forever a step away from the Big Break, to the maniac in Kiss of Death. It’s said he’s the only actor ever to become famous for his first scene in his first movie. And it haunted him; he got so freaking sick of people asking him to giggle like Tommy Udo. It went on for years. I adored Richard Widmark, who was commanding in all his roles, and I sympathize with his disappointment that the public tended to reduce him to one role, one scene. Stupid public.

I especially love that Duryea [right] and Widmark lived lives that dramatically contrasted their screen images. It’s not simply that they were nice—nothing surprising about that. These guys were absolute sweethearts, known as a couple of the kindest, most honorable men in Hollywood, both with happy lifelong marriages to high school or college girlfriends, not a trace of scandal. When asked why he didn’t flirt around Widmark said, “I happen to like my wife—a lot.” When she got Alzheimer’s, he gave up acting to nurse her for seven years till her death. 

They were smart as hell, both of them. Before Widmark came to Hollywood he taught acting at the college level. At Cornell, Duryea was elected to the most prestigious honor society.  They read, these guys.  The sleazeball hustler in Scarlet Street majored in English.  The Psycho in Kiss of Death lived in a home packed with books. I love that both were able to capture that raw, streetwise (or street-dumb) darkness and wildness but knew not to live it.   It’s called acting.   

David Lehman:

Edward G. Robinson gets my vote because of his amazing versatility. He can be the indomitable investigator (Double Indemnity),the relentless G-man and Nazi hunter (The Stranger), the nasty villain (Key Largo), the poor sucker who loses everything and ends up on a park bench (Scarlet Street), or the genial clubman who kills a man in his sleep (The Woman in the Window). In each case he knocks it out of the park.

May I also cast a ballot in favor of Ida Lupino the director. I love her movies, “The Hitchhiker” and “The Bigamist.” Very daring. She is a wonderful actress, too -- for example in 'The Bigamist," about which I wrote this poem:

The Bigamist

I saw The Bigamist, maybe the best
movie Ida Lupino directed, though
The Hitchhiker gives it a run for the money.

Edmund O’Brien has
one wife in San Francisco
(Joan Fontaine, who wants a baby),
and another wife in Los Angeles
(Ida herself, who has a baby).

Watching The Bigamist, you realize
how hard it is to be a bigamist.
Bigamy is a full-time job,
especially in 1953,
requiring
two wardrobes with one or two overlapping suits
enough money to pay the bills for both households
an excellent memory to keep everything straight
a poker face
a creative mind
a happy childhood but troubled adolescence
no siblings
deceased parents
an active libido
plus the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in the mind at the same time
          and continue to function,
an even more difficult challenge when the contradictory ideas are Joan
          Fontaine and Ida Lupino.

This is the fourteenth in a series of exchanges about noir. For previous posts, click here. 

Fred and Peggy in "The Best Years of Our Lives"

Dana Andrews, left, and Teresa Wright, steering the wheel, in The Best Years of Our Lives.

And he's thinking: if only I could get a good job. 

And she's thinking: when I think that he's married, I sob. 

And he's thinking: I married a stranger.

And she's thinking: a divorce would be a game-changer.

And he's thinking: wait till my friend gets married and I'm the best man, Okay?

And she's thinking: Okay.

Well, it's been a long war. . .

"Visitation" [by Tony Hoagland (1953-2018)]

Now when I visit Ellen’s body in my memory,
it is like visiting a cemetery. I look
at the chiseled, muscular belly
and at the perfect thirty-year old breasts
and the fine blond purse of her pussy
and I kneel and weep a little there.
I am not the first person to locate god
in erectile tissue and the lubricating gland
but when I kiss her breast and feel
the tough button of her nipple
rise and stiffen to my tongue
like the dome of a small mosque
in an ancient, politically-incorrect city,
I feel holy, I begin to understand religion.
I circle around to see the basilica
of her high, Irish-American butt,
and I look at her demure little asshole
and am sorry I didn’t spend more time with it.
And her mouth and her eyes and white white teeth.
It’s beauty beauty beauty which in a way Ellen
herself the person distracted me from. It’s
beauty which has been redistributed now
by the justice of chance and the temporal economy.
Now I’m like a sad astronaut living
deep in space, breathing the oxygen of memory
out of a silver can. Now I’m like an angel
drifting over the surface of the earth,
brushing its meadows and forests
with the tips of my wings,
with wonder and regret and affection.

for The Best American Erotic Poems, I asked Tony to name his favorite erotic book or author, and he replied:

<<
Some of the most exciting erotic writing I know is  Rilke’s famous “Ninth” of the Duino Elegies,
in which the poet queries,  demands, praises, promises and then swooningly yields to be entered completely by earth—“Earth, isn’t this what you want? An invisible re-arising in us? …What is your urgent command, if not transformation?” (translation Spender / Leishman)

The extended passage is unmistakably the address of an ardent lover to  beloved, and Rilke’s athletic, tremulous syntax, in its urging, falling back, swooping climaxes and surrenders, is thrillingly sexy in its brilliant performance of both masculine and feminine roles.  Rilke reminds us how dramatically, heroically, erotic spiritual life can be, and his enactment of inner life sweeps through categories in glorious encounter and catharsis. It’s hot stuff, and it always makes me want to pray harder.
>>

Elizabeth Turk, Sculptor Extraordinaire [by David Lehman]

Do you know the work

Of Elizabeth Turk?

You should!

It's awfully good.

http://www.elizabethturkstudios.com/

"We'll catch up some other time. . ." [by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green]

Just listen. 

Haven't done half the things we wanted -- 

There's so much more embracing
still to be done, but time is racing

O well --

Never have seen you do the dishes --

Seeing you there without your make up --

O well, we'll catch up / some other time

Just when the fun is starting / Comes the time for parting --
But let's be glad / for what we've had / and what's to come -- 

O well --
we'll catch up
some
other
time

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gDYVwtEp_Y

Poem for Rosh Hashanah: "For I Will Consider Your Dog Molly" [poem by David Lehman]

 

Molly with Stick, Cayuga Lake, 1981 (c) Glen Hartley

For I will Consider Your Dog Molly 

 

For it was the first day of Rosh Ha'shanah, New Year's Day, day of remembrance, of ancient sacrifices and averted calamities.

For I started the day by eating an apple dipped in honey, as ritual required.

For I went to the local synagogue to listen to the ram's horn blown.

For I asked Our Father, Our King, to save us for his sake if not for ours, for the sake of his abundant mercies, for the sake of his right hand, for the sake of those who went through fire and water for the sanctification of his name.

For despite the use of a microphone and other gross violations of ceremony, I gave myself up gladly to the synagogue's sensual insatiable vast womb.

For what right have I to feel offended?

For I communed with my dead father, and a conspicuous tear rolled down my right cheek, and there was loud crying inside me.

For I understood how that tear could become an orb.

For the Hebrew melodies comforted me.

For I lost my voice.

For I met a friend who asked "is this a day of high seriousness" and when I said yes he said "it has taken your voice away."

For he was right, for I felt the strong lashes of the wind lashing me by the throat.

For I thought there shall come a day that the watchmen upon the hills of Ephraim shall cry, Arise and let us go up to Zion unto the Lord our God.

For the virgin shall rejoice in the dance, and the young and old in each other's arms, and their soul shall be as a watered garden, and neither shall they learn war any more.

For God shall lower the price of bread and corn and wine and oil, he shall let our cry come up to him.

For it is customary on the first day of Rosh Ha'shanah to cast a stone into the depths of the sea, to weep and pray to weep no more.

For the stone represents all the sins of the people.

For I asked you and Molly to accompany me to Cascadilla Creek, there being no ocean nearby.

For we talked about the Psalms of David along the way, and the story of Hannah, mother of Samuel, who sought the most robust bard to remedy her barrenness.

For Isaac said "I see the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the offering?"

For as soon as I saw the stone, white flat oblong and heavy, I knew that it had summoned me.

For I heard the voice locked inside that stone, for I pictured a dry wilderness in which, with a wave of my staff, I could command sweet waters to flow forth from that stone.

For I cast the stone into the stream and watched it sink to the bottom where dozens of smaller stones, all of them black, gathered around it.

For the waterfall performed the function of the chorus.

For after the moment of solemnity dissolved, you playfully tossed Molly into the stream.

For you tossed her three times, and three times she swam back for her life.

For she shook the water off her body, refreshed.

For you removed the leash from her neck and let her roam freely.

For she darted off into the brush and speared a small gray moving thing in the neck.

For this was the work of an instant.

For we looked and behold! the small gray thing was a rat.

For Molly had killed the rat with a single efficient bite, in conformance with Jewish law.

For I took the rat and cast him into the stream, and both of us congratulated Molly.

For now she resumed her noble gait.

For she does not lie awake in the dark and weep for her sins, and whine about her condition, and discuss her duty to God.

For I'd as lief pray with your dog Molly as with any man.

For she knows that God is her savior.

David Lehman, "For I Will Consider Your Dog Molly" from Operation Memory (Princeton University Press, 1990)

-- sdl

Straight Down the Line: Noir Dialogue [by David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis]

Name some striking lines of noir dialogue that stick with you?

Suzanne Lummis:

Some might see this coming, since it’s shown up a couple times--in my poem called “Venetian Blinds: Ghazal-like Noir” and in one my of my They Write by Night installments—maybe the one that featured you [David Lehman].  It’s in The Maltese Falcon, when Sam Spade opens the door and a thug comes through with a firearm. Spade just laughs, “My, my, my! Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains.” Immortal line, and truer now than ever. Every time I hear it I think, no freakin’ kidding. If I knew how to do needlework, I’d stitch that on a sampler.  The rest of his line goes, “You know, you're the second guy I've met today that seems to think a gat in the hand means the world by the tail.” I love what it says, and I envy Spade’s cool in the face of danger. He’s got a gun on him but he’s cracking jokes. That’s some French Existentialism slipping in, though the Existentialists weren’t much good for laughs.  But mix it with hardboiled American lingo…    

And I like another one, not spoken as a line of dialogue but by a woman in life, outside of any movie script – but referencing one of the most famous films noir.

Rita Hayworth, married five times, talked about the difficulty of living up to the femme fatale fantasy and her most unforgettable character, “Men go to bed with Gilda but they wake up with me.” (It was either that, or “Every man I knew went to bed with Gilda and woke up with me,“ or “Men fall in love with Gilda but wake up with me,” depending on the biography or newspaper story.) It’s a snappy line but, also, there’s wisdom in it. And disappointment. A loneliness. And the savvy to sum up her life in one crackerjack line.  Real life noir. 

David Lehman:

From DOA, the two-word interrogative sentence that informs all film noir is spoken by Bigelow (Edmund O’Brien): “Why me?”

From Out of the Past
Kathie (Jane Greer): I think we deserve a break.
Jeff (Robert Mitchum): We deserve each other.

From Laura:
Clifton Webb as celebrity critic Waldo Lydecker: “I don't use a pen. I write with a goose quill dipped in venom.” And I don’t remember the exact words, but in a restaurant scene, doesn’t he tell Gene Tierney that she seems “to be completely disregarding something more important than her career.” What? “My lunch.”

Dana Andrews: “A dame in Washington Heights once got a fox fur out of me.”

From Double Indemnity:

Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck): There’s a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles an hour.
Neff (Fred MacMurray): How fast was I going, officer?
Phyllis: I’d say about ninety.
Neff: Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.
Phyllis: Suppose I let you off with a warning this time.
Neff: Suppose it doesn’t take.
Phyllis: Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles.
Neff: Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder.
Phyllis: Suppose you try putting it on my husband’s shoulder.
Neff: That tears it.

“Straight down the line.”

This is the thirteenth in a series of exchanges about noir. For previous posts, click here.

"Opening Shot" [by David Lehman]

Marsh Hawk Press has sponsored the wonderful Chapter One project, brief memoirs "on becoming a poet,"  a new chapter each month, with contributions from Denise Duhamel, Phillip Lopate, Eileen Tabios, Jane Hirshfield, Burt Kimmelman, Sandy McIntosh, and other redoubtable writers. My own contribution is entitled "Opening Shot" and is the project's choice for October 2019. Section two of five bears the part title "A Pair of Odes," and follows:

<<<
When I was seventeen, I wrote two poems that eventually were published. Both consisted of four lines. To both I gave the title “Ode.” I had never heard of Horace or Pindar and didn’t know what went into the making of an ode as composed by Jonson, Marvell, Gray, Shelley, or Keats. But the word was lovely and in the atmosphere of the 1960s it was okay to break rules, even to be ignorant of what they were.

The first of the odes to be written appeared in a broadsheet published by the poet John Fuller in Oxford, England, summer 1968:

                        I asked a fat man,
                        Do you enjoy being fat?
                        Yes, he said,
                        that is the only thing that I enjoy.

It pleased me that the last line of this simple poem scanned perfectly as iambic pentameter, as if to demonstrate that it is the natural flow of the English language – what we today might call the default meter.

The second ode made a hit with Columbia University radicals during the campus strike of spring 1968, perhaps because it made people laugh when I read it aloud:

                       As long as I live,
                       there shall never be
                       another Harry
                       Truman.

What made me break up the lines as I did? What made me think that these were poems? I don’t know the answer to these and other legitimate questions except to say that I let instinct guide me where it will, and in the end, instinct is what we have to fall back on.
>>>

For more about the project, click here.  For more of my own piece, for example the sections entitled "Whitman in the Eleventh Grade" and  "Frankly. . . you're okay," click here. Photo credit: Catherine Arra.

https://marshhawkpress.org/david-lehman/

"You're My Thrill" [by David Lehman]

 "You're My Thrill"

-- as sung by Helen Merrill (1965)

1.

You’re my thrill,
my joint, my shot, my magic pill.

I dwell in that gaudy den
of smoke and mirrors where, when

you close my eyes,
I take a trip

to paradise:
a casino where I always win

as long as I’m within
the grip

of the labyrinthine dream I’m in.
I may never get wise,

may never disbelieve these lies.
Yet I know I must get high.

2.

Admit it. You’re one of us.
You didn’t miss the bus.

You need to get drunk
on wine or weed or stronger junk.

Maybe you’re addicted to kinky sex,
bouncing your checks,

blaming your ex,
imitating Oedipus Rex.

Or maybe you need a fix
of speed, acid, ecstasy, sin,

coke, angel dust, gin,
or the white magic of heroin.

“You’re my thrill. . .
Where’s my will?”

To you therefore I repeat
the sweet

immortal words of Charles Baudelaire,
and declare,

drink in hand, bidding you goodbye:
you must get high.

[from the Spring / Summer 2019 issue of Literary Matters]

Why Poets Love Noir #12: The First Time [by David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis]

 What about film noir first appealed to you, and has that changed over the years? Or not?

Suzanne Lummis:

Initially, it wasn’t film noir that hooked me—it was classic crime fiction, the hardboiled stuff of the early years, particularly the poet of crime fiction, Raymond Chandler. That hard wit, both mocking and self-mocking, Chandler’s extraordinary eye for detail, and that voice, Philip Marlowe’s, stripped of all sentimentality and self-pity and yet deeply human—that’s what I loved.   No writer in any language ever sounded like Raymond Chandler, except for his forebears, who had elements of his style but weren’t as good, and those who came after, his imitators, never as good.

I was a young poet studying at Fresno State (now CSU Fresno)  and absorbing that sensibility and approach to poetry and language that’s now recognized as the Fresno signature style. And I liked that just fine, but it wasn’t quite…I don’t know. Enough?  All that down-to-earthedness didn’t lend itself to mischief and dark humor.  And mischief and dark humor was what I’d begun to feel. I found a model for that not in poetry but prose like this:

<<<
    The first sensation was that if anybody spoke harshly to me I should burst out crying….I rolled over gently and sat up and a rattling noise ended in a thump.  What rattled and thumped was a knotted towel full of melting ice cubes.  Someone who loved me very much had put them on the back of my head. Someone who loved me less had bashed in the back of my skull. It could’ve been the same person. People have moods.

[from Playback by Raymond Chandler]
>>>

From there I found my way to the movies.  That tone of detachment and, in some movies, a sort of offhand wit, together with the stark black and white patterns created with lowkey lighting, gave me what I needed to pull off certain challenging poems—poems that were at risk of being melodramatic or just plain predictable. I could not have pulled off “Letter to My Assailant” without the influence of crime fiction and film noir.

David Lehman:

          In my senior year at Columbia, I went one night with David Anderson, a brilliant writer, to the old New Yorker theater on Broadway and 88th Street, to see a double bill of The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. That double-bill did it. The characters, the women, the "dingus" in the former and the real and fake bookstores in the latter, Joel Cairo and the Fat Man on the one hand, and the casino owner and hit man on the other. David gave me a book of Chandler's stories, "Trouble Is My Business," which was great.

A few months later, studying at Cambridge, England, homesick for New York, I read as many murder mysteries and saw as many noirs as possible. Every college in Cambridge had its own film society, and the Arts Cinema on Rose Crescent was also devoted to great movies of any era in any language. I saw Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Wages of Fear, Dark Passage, Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet and Robert Montgomery in the role in The Lady in the Lake, Clint Eastwood and Lee J. Cobb in Coogan’s Bluff, and a bunch of Hitchocks, including Vertigo, Stage Fright, North by Northwest, Strangers on a Train, and Shadow of a Doubt. At the time, Vertigo was out of circulation, and I have no idea how the film society got their hands on a copy of this amazing movie.

In my second year at Cambridge, I decided to devote my master's thesis on Hammett and Chandler. This was at a time when detective novels were not considered literature worthy of study. Some of the dons wrote detective novels, really good ones like those of Michael Innes, but always under a pseudonym, to protect thereby their more serious selves.  During that year four movies came out that fit in the category of murder mystery or crime story: The French Connection, Klute, Dirty Harry, and The Godfather.

Finishing my thesis did nothing to diminish my interest in murder mysteries, espionage, thrillers, and the movies based on them. It was only later that I made a proper study of the subject.

The effect of that double-bill of The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep was matched only when, two years later, a month before finishing up at Cambridge, I saw Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Top Hat and Swing Time, another double-bill that changed my life. Leaving the theater that evening my friends Charlotte, Rob, and I danced on the pavement. It was the first time I heard those scores by Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern.

"Get Drunk" [Baudelaire, "Enivrez-vous," trans. D. Lehman]

You must get drunk. That’s it: your sole imperative. To immunize yourself from the backbreaking, body-bending burdens of time, you must get drunk and stay that way.

But on what? On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, your choice. But get drunk.

And if sometimes, while on the steps of a palace, on the green grass beside a marsh, in the morning solitude of your room, you snap out of it, your drunkenness has worn off , has worn off entirely, then ask the wind, ask an ocean wave, a star, a bird, a clock, every evanescent thing, everything that flies, that groans, that rolls, that sings, that speaks, ask them what time it is; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, will tell you: “It’s time to get drunk! To avoid being the martyred slaves of time, get drunk, get drunk and stay that way. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, your choice.”

-- trans. David Lehman

"Enivrez-vous" is one of the fifty prose poems that constitute "Petits Poemes en prose," also known as "Spleen de Paris," the book by Baudelaire [pictured above] that launched the prose poem as a genre (or a form.)  This translation appeared in Alan Ziegler's excellent volume "Shorts" (Persea Books). I am working on a complete translation of "Paris Spleen," which is how I'd render the title. The poems have not been sdatisfactorily translated since Arthur Symons did it in the first decade of the twentieth century in Edwardian England. -- DL

Three Books, One Reading: Powerhouse Arena, Thursday, Sept 26, 7 -9 PM

Book Launch: Best American Poetry 2019 and two new books by David Lehman

who will read from

Playlist: a poem in 57 daily parts (U of Pittsburgh Press)

One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir (Cornell University Press)

&

The Best American Poetry 2019 (guest ed. Major Jackson; Scribner)

Thursday Sep 26, 2019
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

POWERHOUSE @ the Archway
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street @ the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY 11201

<<<

We are celebrating two new books by David Lehman – the memoir One Hundred Autobiographies and the poetry collection Playlist, and the 2019 edition of The Best American Poetry—“one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets)—which he edits (this edition guest edited by Major Jackson, award-winning poet and poetry editor of the Harvard Review.)

 

In One Hundred Autobiographies, David Lehman "brilliantly captures the despair, uncertainty, and anger he felt [upon receiving a cancer diagnosis] in these 100 short reflections on life, death, and writing." (Publisher's Weekly, starred review) 

Since 1988, The Best American Poetry has been the leading anthology of contemporary American poetry. The Washington Post said of the 2017 edition, “The poems…have a wonderful cohesion and flow, as if each contributes to a larger narrative
about life today…While readers may question some of the selections—an annual sport with this series—most will find much that resonates, including the insightful author notes at the back of the anthology.”

The state of the world has inspired many to write poetry, and to read it—to share all the rage, beauty, and every other thing under the sun in the way that only poetry can. Now the foremost anthology of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Major Jackson, the poet and editor who, “makes poems that rumble and rock” (poet Dorianne Laux). This brilliant 2019 edition includes some of the year’s most defining, striking, and innovative poems and poets.
>>>

This is a free-access event — entrance will be on a first-come, first-served basis. Find more information here.

"Next Line, Please": In One Era and Out the Other [by David Lehman]

In my farewell address, I warned against the military-industrial complex and made an allusion to "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," by John Donne, whose moral compass I honor.

<<<
Well, it had to happen. This is my last column as your ringleader. I know the news will surprise and perhaps disappoint many of you. It saddens me too, and I’ll miss the party. But it’s time. I’ve directed us since we started “Next Line, Please” back in May 2014, and I’ve always felt it is wiser to part a month early rather than a week late.

My next months are crowded with deadlines and occasions. They always are, but this season more so. One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir will be published in October, and I will be expected to promote it and my recently published books of poetry, Playlist and Poems in the Manner Of.

“Next Line, Please”—the brainchild of Robert Wilson, editor of The American Scholar—has been a great success by any criteria, including the quality of the writing; the enthusiasm and commitment of the participants; and the establishment of a community of very smart individuals who enjoy the free exchange of ideas and practical criticism, value civil discourse, and eschew the gratuitous meanness that one so often encounters on the Internet. Cornell University Press thought enough of our project to publish Next Line, Please: Prompts to Inspire Poets and Writers in 2018. Some of our more assiduous NLP regular are at work on an anthology of poems that will highlight some of our all-star performances.
>>>

Read on, dear reader, here.

What is the Sexiest Film Noir? [An exchange between David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis]

Suzanne Lummis

For the chemistry between Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, as “Slim,” the drifter who’s been living by her wits and an occasional lifted wallet, and Harry “Steve” Morgan, expatriate American with a fishing boat for hire, and for their subtly charged exchanges, that’d be To Have and Have Not.  And, of course, it includes perhaps the most sexually electric lines of dialog on film—certainly from that era—beautifully delivered by Bacall in her low, sly, silky voice: “You know you don’t have to act with me, Steve. You don’t have to say anything, you don’t have to do anything. Or, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you Steve…”

Director Howard Hawks, together with the writers, primarily Jules Furthman, William Faulkner, and some contributions from Papa himself, pulled apart and re-imagined Ernest Hemingway’s story, setting it in the French territory of Martinique during the Nazi occupation of France.  So, in this 1944 movie the balmy island paradise becomes a microcosmic setting for the global battle between good and bottomless evil, while the evolution of the script involved a dance between the Production Code people and the writers.  The censors curtailed what the movie-makers could show, and the writers kept striving to outwit them with smoky, sultry dialog.  Amidst this battle, and this dance, Bacall, the young actress in her first role, and Bogart, by now a star, were falling in love. Does it come across on camera? Does it ever. 

Small wonder that shortly after this movie wrapped, Bogart ended his fraught, unhappy marriage, and Bogart/Bacall became one of the most celebrated couples in Hollywood history. 

If some know To Have and Have Not only from the "...you know how to whistle" line, c'mon now. Take the time to see the whole movie.  Like Casablanca, it charts the evolution of a laissez-faire type of guy coming into his own sense of moral conscience. However, it includes some flavors Casablanca does not. 

David Lehman

Many would say Out of the Past should get the award for sexual heat. Three reasons are Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and Kirk Douglas. Greer is as fatal as cyanide without the after odor of almonds, and the dialogue is hot. For example,

Kathie (Jane Greer): Did you miss me?
Jeff (Robert Mitchum): No more than I would miss my eyes.

 

While I would divide my own vote between Out of the Past and Double Indemnity, I would also register my admiration for the sexuality of Gun Crazy (1950). Joseph H. Lewis directed, and the script was written by MacKinlay Kantor and the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo. The leading characters, Bart (John Dall) and Laurie (Peggy Cummins), seem young and ordinary; they’re not stars on the magnitude of Mitchum or Barbara Stanwyck, and you can see in them younger versions of yourself. There’s all that phallic imagery, all the guns, and how comfortable she is handling one. It’s significant that Dahl is a pacifist before sharpshooter Cummins casts her spell over him. She is the “bad” one, and it is the power of the fatal female not only to corrupt her partner but to bring out the manly beast in him. The partnership between hero and heroine is a bond which they can’t dissolve, try as they might. They are in it till death do them part. They go on a robbery spree, though they know it will lead to a fatal end after, of course, one last job. They can’t help themselves. Their very desperation adds to the sexual energy between them.

This is the eleventh in a series on film noir. Click here to see the others.

Reid Hall Gets a Re-do [by David Lehman]

Years ago, as a graduate student shuttling between England and France, I spent a lot of time at Reid Hall in Paris, Columbia's footprint in the city of lights. It was and is at 4 rue de Chevreuse, near the corner of boulevards Montparnasse and Raspail, an easy walk from the Vavin and Notre-dame-des-champs metro stops. Reid Hall served as headquarters for many junior year abroad students. (I am pretty certain that Jacqueline Bouvier spent time at Reid Hall in her year in France.) When I got the news that the buildings are getting a make-over, I excitedly phoned Oscar Hammerstein, who evoked the time and place, the romance of being young in a foreign tongue, and suddenly we were at a nearby cafe. "No matter how they change her, / I'll remember her that way."

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The 18th-century rue de Chevreuse building has a new roof and facades, and the repurposed southwest corner building is now home to Columbia's Institute for Ideas and Imagination. The institute, a presidential initiative led by Columbia Professor Mark Mazower, aims to promote collaboration across the arts and academia through fellowships, workshops, conferences, exhibitions and events. Plans are being finalized to create new gardens and restore the Grande Salle.
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For more, link here: https://news.columbia.edu/news/fresh-start-reid-hall-paris

Ithaca Alert: Lehman to give "Lecture with Musical Illustrations" at IC Monday 9/16

Ithaca alert:

On Monday evening,
September 16, 2019,
at 7:30 PM
I will give a talk
-- punctuated by wonderful music --
about the great American songbook.
at Ithaca College, Textor 101.

The talk is based on my book
A Fine Romance:
Jewish songwriters, American Songs
and will include songs by
the brothers Gershwin,
Jerome Kern & Dorothy Fields,
Irving Berlin,
Rodgers & Hart,
Ziggy Elman,
Leonard Bernstein
Betty Comden and Adolph Green,
Kern & Oscar Hammerstein.

Steven Rea, Guest Author September 9-13

This week we welcome back Steven Rea as our guest author. Steven is the author of The Hollywood Book Club: Reading with the Stars, just out from Chronicle Books, and also Hollywood Cafe: Coffee with the Stars and Hollywood Rides a Bike: Cycling with the Stars. Formerly the film critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, he lives and works in Philadelphia and Maine, and keeps a collection of archival Hollywood photographs that now numbers in the thousands. He posts new photos several times a week at Rides a Bike. Follow Steven Rea on Facebook and Twitter, @Steven_Rea.

Welcome, Steven.

In other news: Don't miss the Best American Poetry 2019 launch reading on September 19, 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM (EST) at the New School. (The Auditorium, Room A106, Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall, 66 West 12th Street, New York, NY 10011. More information here) 

-- sdl

Smoking Noir [by David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis]

What do you make of the cigarettes that get smoked in any Noir movie?

David Lehman:

Goddamn, they’re sexy.

Suzanne Lummis:

Sure are, and it’s clear that cigarettes had to go—no question about that—but the cinema lost a language. Aside from the smoking, the lighting of the cigarette could be handled so many ways with such different effects. Richard Conte, Robert Mitchum, all those guys—in two smooth gestures they’ll slide out that silver lighter and make the flame leap up, and we get the message—this is what unflappable cool looks like, virile confidence. 

Sometimes, men light each other’s cigarettes and that has meaning; often it’s about camaraderie. In Out of the Past, an easy-going ritualistic exchange occurs at the start of the first meeting between Mitchum’s Jeff Bailey and Kirk Douglas as the gangster Whit Sterling. Whit offers Jeff a cigarette almost before he’s got his foot in the door, but he already has one so he smoothly lights Whit’s who is reaching for his matches. It’s all quite friendly. Then, the camera cuts to Whit’s unsmiling gunman, Joe, whose eyes shift darkly between the two, sizing up this new guy, watching for unconscious indicators or one false move.

Those who don’t watch much noir, early or neo-, probably think a woman never has to light her own, a man’s always near-by and quick on the trigger, but, no, not always. For example, Faye Dunaway in Chinatown shakily lighting up, and Nicholson’s nasal drawl off-camera, “You’ve already got one going, Misses Mulray.” (The camera shows us her bejeweled hand rubbing out the live cigarette in the ashtray.) “Does my talking about your father make you nervous?”

Most often, and most memorably, men light women’s cigarettes.  I like Clare Trevor everywhere I see her, and I like a moment in Murder, My Sweet, when Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) fires up his lighter and she puts her hand on his and moves it toward the tip of her cigarette, “You will help me, won’t you?”  Marlowe: “Am I doing this for love, or will I get paid with money?”

But those moviemakers could achieve other affects outside of social interactions. I’ve never come across a mention of this in any writings about film noir, but I spot an eerie, ominous illusion near the end of Murder, My Sweet when, outdoors, Marlowe’s starting to make his way up to the luxurious piece of property perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. It’s night. He’s going to confront Helen, who is actually Velma, who is actually a killer. Inside the shadowy beach house, the camera focuses on the couch sunk in darkness. Heavy smoke rises from it and, all along, specks of light begin to glint like embers. Someone, something, set fire to the couch—this whole place is going to go up. Then Velma rises from the shadows with her cigarette, in her gown slashed with stripes of glinting sequins.   It’s a premonition of danger embodied by this woman. Soon, characters will be lying all over the room, dying of bullets.  

And me? I smoked for years then gave it up overnight. It was easy. It was nothing—I was never hooked on caffeine.  I did love the play of hands, the motions, the waving away of smoke, that mysterious shared thing between myself and whomever I was talking to, man or woman, who, without fail—in those days—was also smoking, both of us reaching for the same ashtray. Nothing can replace that wordless, silent lexicon of gestures, and I will never stop missing it. It just wasn’t worth dying for. 

David Lehman                   

I miss them. If I may quote myself, "Watching the stars / as they smoke in film noirs" makes me want to throw caution to the winds and light up an unfiltered Camel or Lucky. There’s an entire ritual involved: pulling the cigarette out of the pack, tapping it (if it’s unfiltered), lighting it with a match or lighter, taking the first satisfying long drag.  I have considered writing an ironic “modest proposal” in the vein of Jonathan Swift advocating the return of cigarettes to movies, but people have dissuaded me on the grounds that the irony would not be grasped.

This is the tenth in a series of exchanges about noir. For previous posts, click here 

"Opening Shot": Toward "Chapter One" [by David Lehman]

Marsh Hawk Press, under the direction of Sandy McIntosh, has launched a monthly on-line feature in which poets are asked to write up the "chapter one" of their vocations. Among those who have written for the project are Denise Duhamel, Philip Lopate, and Jane Hirshfield. My own contribution is up now. I've called it Opening Shot and this is how it begins: 

<<<
In high school I read “Song of Myself” in a course in American literature that began with the poets who had three names (William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Julia Ward Howe, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) and never reached the moderns who went by their initials (T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden). In that context it meant something that Whitman used no middle name and only a shortened version of his forename. I liked this fellow who was “mad for it to be in contact with me,” whether “it” stood for nature, the grass, a particular person, a brook—that was how I felt, too, in my more uninhibited moments. I liked the anthology excerpts so much I bought, with fool’s luck, a thin paperback of Leaves of Grass that called itself the “original edition,” edited by Malcolm Cowley. To this day I maintain that the 1855 edition is the greatest version of this great American poem, which Whitman revised often and not always for the better. >>>

Pictured above: David Lehman Stacey Lehman, Yukiko Kaneda

Four Amazing Quotes from Schopenhauer

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Consciousness is conditioned by the intellect, and the intellect is a mere accident of our being, for it is a function of the brain. The brain, together with the nerves and spinal cord attached to it, is a mere fruit, a product, in fact a parasite, of the rest of the organism, in so far as it is not directly geared to the organism’s inner working, but serves the purpose of self-preservation by regulating its relations with the external world

*
All philosophers before me, from the first to the last, place the true and real inner nature or kernel of man in the knowing consciousness. Accordingly, they have conceived and explained the I, or in the case of many of them its transcendent hypostasis called soul, as primarily and essentially knowing, in fact thinking, and only in consequence of this, secondarily and derivatively, as willing .... My philosophy . . . puts man’s real inner nature not in consciousness but in the will.

*

For years we can have a desire without admitting it to ourselves or even letting it come to clear consciousness, because the intellect is not to know anything about it, since the good opinion we have of ourselves would inevitably suffer thereby. But if the wish is fulfilled, we get to know from our joy, not without a feeling of shame, that this is what we desired….

*

[Satisfaction can never be anything but temporary, because] it is always like the alms thrown to the beggar, which reprieves him today so that his misery may be prolonged till tomorrow. Therefore, so long as our consciousness is filled by our will, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with its constant hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of willing, we never obtain lasting happiness or peace.

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The painting on the right is by Gail Campbell, 2016.