Free More Baths Less Talking by Nick Hornby Page A

Elizabeth Bishop after reading The Anthologist . I downloaded an MP3 of her reading “The Fish,” and on an overnight work trip to Barcelona I took with me a copy of Bishop’s collected poems but no clean socks, which is exactly the sort of thing that Paul Chowder might have done. I would say that in my half century on this planet so far, I have valued clean socks above poetry, so The Anthologist may literally have changed my life, and not in a good way. Luckily, it turns out that you can buy socks in Barcelona. Nice ones, too.
    Pretty much everything I have read in the last month is related to the production of art and/or entertainment. Unlike all the others, Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn is not about art (and don’t get sniffy about Céline Dion until I tell you what Carl Wilson has to say about her); it’s about a young girl emigrating to the U.S. from a small town in Ireland in the 1950s. But as I am currently attempting to adapt Brooklyn for the cinema, it would be disingenuous to claim that the production of art and/or entertainment didn’t cross my mind while I was re-reading it.
    I haven’t read a novel twice in six months for decades, and the experience was illuminating. It wasn’t that I had misremembered anything, particularly, nor (I like to think) had I misunderstood much, first time around, but I had certainly forgotten the proximity of narrative events in relation to each other. Some things happened sooner than I was prepared for, and others much later—certainly much later than I can hope to get away with in a screenplay. You can do anything in a novel, provided the writing is good enough: you can introduce rounded, complex characters ten pages from the end, you can gloss over years in a paragraph. Film is a clumsier and more literal medium.
    One thing that particularly struck me this time around is that though Tóibín’s prose is precise and calm and controlled, Brooklyn is not an internal book. This is good news for a screenwriter, in most ways, but it did occur to me that if you strip away, as I have to do, all the control, then the story becomes alarmingly visceral. When Eilis travels third class on a ship to New York and ends up getting violently seasick and expelling her dinner through every available orifice… Well, if we show that on-screen, it will lose Tóibín’s Jamesian poise. What you’ll see, in fact, is a poor girl shitting copiously into a bucket. And Colm’s devoted fans, aesthetes all, will say, Jesus, what has this hooligan done to our beautiful literary novel? There might be art riots, in fact, similar to those that greeted The Rite of Spring when it was first performed, in 1913. People will throw stuff at me, and I’ll be running out of the premiere shouting, “ There was diarrhea in the book! ,” but nobody will believe me. I’m going to blame the director. Who made the Porky’s movies? We should hire him.
    The invention of the iPad means, as I’m sure you have discovered by now, that you can watch Preston Sturges movies pretty well anywhere you want. I have seen Sullivan’s Travels , The Lady Eve , and The Palm Beach Story , and though Sullivan’s Travels remains my favorite, the minor characters in The Palm Beach Story are Dickensian in their weirdness and detail. It occurred to me that I know a lot more about, say, Montaigne and Richard Yates, having read very good books about them, than I do about Preston Sturges—a regrettable state of affairs, seeing as Sturges means more to me than either.
    After reading Sarah Bakewell’s brilliant How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer , I came to understand how Montaigne invented soul-searching; after reading Blake Bailey’s A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates , I saw why Yates’s books are so incredibly miserable. Well, Donald Spoto’s Madcap: The Life of Preston