R.I.P. Charles Grodin

Charles Gordon died a few weeks ago. It’s always strange how children learn about movie stars, which is often strange accidents of what our parents let us watch and what we encounter, but for me, no matter how many of his other works I’ve seen, Charles Gordon will always be Nicky Holiday from The Great Muppet Caper.

It’s not because I think of him primarily as a jewel thief romancing Miss Piggy (while wearing flowered socks and being Diana Rigg’s brother) that I was so unaware of much of his career. To read his obituaries I discovered that he was an award-winning writer and director working in theater and television. An old episode of Saturday Night Live he hosted where the conceit was that he had skipped rehearsals and he didn’t know that the show was live has to be one of the funniest in the history of the show. There were talk show appearances with Johnny Carson and David Letterman which are online which are hilarious. The best ones are honestly when he doesn’t have anything to plug (or just doesn’t care) and he’s just being entertaining and making the host and the audience laugh.

As an actor, Grodin had an impressive career. Over the past fifty years he was in The Heartbreak Kid, Catch-22, Heaven Can Wait, Real Life, Ishtar, Midnight Run. I keep thinking how his performance in The Heartbreak Kid really made the film work. His performance and Elaine May’s direction were so critical because it’s such a delicate dance. In Midnight Run, Grodin was hilarious as the mob accountant. There’s a reason why the film has been called the great buddy film of all time. Those scenes between Grodin and co-star Robert De Niro, which were often improvised, were the highlight of the film. The famous scene of the two in the box car talking about the good looking chickens is a highlight.

I always think of Grodin as working in the same vein as Elaine May and not because he was in two films she directed (The Heartbreak Kid and Ishtar) but because they shared a comedic sensibility that was character driven and character focused. It was affectionate and probing humor, but it also wasn’t afraid to get dark. Grodin was one of the actors who came up in the wake of what Nichols and May and others had been doing. He was a great talker, a skilled improviser, but he could also say more with a silent look than most actors could manage.

Of course Grodin was also restless. Or maybe he wouldn’t have been so restless if he’d had better material to work with and was offered funnier and smarter movies. But he had a talk show for years and wrote books and recorded radio commentaries.

It’s two of the roles he took towards the end of his life that really stick with me. In part because they are recent, but also because I think in both cases the writer/directors understood Grodein’s sent eof humor and his style and his work and were able to craft roles that managed to be great roles and be great roles for him.

One is Louie, and Louie CK is, well, the less said about his behaviors the better, but Grodin’s role is simply some of the best writing CK did on the series. It’s the perfect pairing of actor and material, and the way that Grodin is so disinterested in his patient’s back pain. And then he explains how the spine evolved, how walking vertically changed how the spine works and in another 20,000 years it should be done evolving. Or a later monologue that Grodin delivers about love and loss which is so sad and beautiful, and whether one believes that is what love is or not, it says so much in such a short time.

The other great role he had was in Noah Baumbach’s film While We’re Young which starred Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried. He plays Watts’ father, a legendary documentary filmmaker and there’s one exchange with his daughter before going to a celebration that has stayed in my mind:

“You know, looking back on my career, I wonder, how did I accomplish so much? If I'm honest with myself, it sometimes took being a selfish prick at the expense of you and your mother. Of course, I don't say that. I say talent, work, luck. Your husband doesn't realize what it takes, he... He still believes the speeches.”

Yes, they’re Baumbach’s words, but I like to think that with those two roles, one of the reasons that Grodin said yes to doing them, was because they had something to say. Old men who have come to an age where they understand the world better in some ways than they ever have, but few have much interest in their insights. But there is a sad weariness with which they look back. They did a lot and they haven’t had a bad life. They don’t regret what they did. But they realize what it cost and what they’ve lost and they feel that very acutely.

So many of Grodin’s characters seemed self aware, almost too self aware. they were looking out for all the angles, they were manipulating people, and in some of his final roles, he was still playing those characters. But older and less interested in trying to play all the angles. Instead they’re trying to get by. They have work, which they still care about, and little else, but they’re okay with that. There’s work. Even if work becomes annoying (like having to deal with people complaining about back pain, because that’s just an engineering problem). They may be louts. They may be jerks. Worse, they may be right. To find a darkness and pathos to his characters and life, but he sees life as being light and not heavy in the philosophical sense, and operates from that principle. Which is why when he was funny, when he found honesty in a character or a scene, it hit so deep and rang so true. It takes a special kind of performer to embody all of this – and make us like them. Hell, make us love them. Charles Grodin was that kind of talent.

R.I.P. Larry McMurtry

To my mind, Larry McMurtry was one of great writers of America in the postwar era. Part of a group of writers who sought to examine and lay bare what they saw as the hypocrisy of American values, the history we ignored, the concerns we repressed. Of course the New York Times in his obituary wrote that McMurtry was “a Novelist of the American West” but the Times has often argued that a writer not living in the trial-state area is a “regional” figure, but that’s a separate issue. And misses the point of what the West - in fact and in myth - has meant to this country.

Perhaps it took a man born and raised in rural Texas to see so sharply the distinction between the myth of the West and its reality. The myth of the cowboy and the West was so central to his work which were often about people who lived in the shadows of those myths. Or sometimes as in the case of Pretty Boy Floyd, they were about a real person whose myth was something else entirely. The characters of Brokeback Mountain, which McMurtry adapted with Diana Ossana from the short story by E. Annie Proulx, want to be cowboys like they’ve seen onscreen green and read about, but of course there are no cowboys. They’re ranch hands, and they discover a loathing for the work.

Lonesome Dove, which won the Pulitzer Prize and will be the book he’s best remembered for, has all the elements of the Western mythology. The story of two former Texas rangers on an epic cattle drive from the Rio Grande to Montana. The TV miniseries did as well – mores, really, since the miniseries had those sweeping vistas. But it wasn’t a story about that. McMurtry wrote the book to go after the myth of the cowboy from people like Louis L’Amour and John Ford and others.

Lonesome Dove also stands out because it has more plot than most of his books. And I say that loosely because it’s about a cattle drive, but it’s not really about a cattle drive. It’s an armature that McMurtry used. So many of his books - look at Last Picture Show or Terms of Endearment - are character driven stories. The books could be comic and melancholy, small and epic, stoic and epicurean, in ways that made ordinary characters sometimes seem bigger than life.

I think that’s one reason Hollywood fell for his work, and one reason why they were able to make the transition to the screen so well. Film and TV served McMurtry as well as it has any writer. Movies like Hud and The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment and miniseries like Lonesome Dove are classics. And not because of their great plots but for the indelible characters. And you could see actors loving those roles, which were so rich and complicated and alive.

I’ll admit to a love for McMurtry’s nonfiction, about Texas and Hollywood, books and travel, and especially his 1999 book Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. But I struggle to think of anyone else I know who’s read it.

McMurtry was perhaps his own harshest critic. Perhaps because he had such high ambitions for his own work. To take aim at the myths of the Unites States, and yet, instead of chipping away at the bullshit, the myth remained. And instead of denting that myth, his work only bolstered it in the eyes of so many. I don’t quite know what to make of that. I think McMurtry spent decades trying to understand that. I’m not sure he ever did. As he said more than once that “Lonesome Dove is the Gone with the Wind of the West” which he knew was good and bad.

One reason I’ve admired McMurtry was simply the life he led. Born the son of rancher, he eventually left Texas to study at Stanford on a Stegner Fellowship where his classmates included Wendell Berry and Ken Kesey, only to return and teach for years. He ran an antiquarian book store for decades. He lived in Washington DC. He was the President of PEN America, where he led the group’s efforts to defend Salman Rushdie. He received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama. When he won his Oscar, he thanked booksellers, and famously wore cowboy boots on stage. He also had something of a colorful life as a ladies man. But he was also a man who was always writing. And he was upfront about hating his own work, about the shifts in what he wrote and wanted to write, about his illnesses and depression.

He was a writer who worked in many forms, and in the end, I felt like I understood him a little bit as a person. Not abstractly but simply because he wrote about his life and his passions, he wrote travelogues and about books. He was a hard working and thoughtful lover of writing and reading. He wrote a lot of books and I won’t claim they were all good, but we never judge a writer for their worst work, only their best. And there’s a handful of his that I think stand up as well as any of his contemporaries.

As McMurtry once said about something else “it’s not simple, but it’s practical.” One could say that about his life. A child born in a house without books who became a man of letters, who traveled the world, dined with Presidents and Princes, and kept returning to Archer City, Texas.

R.I.P. Jessica Walter

The actor Jessica Walter died at the age of 80 this week. She’s had a long and colorful career. And it’s strange because I can name multiple films she was in at the start of her career, and I can name work she did in the last two decades of her career, but much of it – and I don’t think I’m alone in this regard – is unknown to me.

She started her career in theater before appearing in film and TV in roles in The Group and Bye Bye Braverman, both directed by Sidney Lumet, and Grand Prix, directed by John Frankenheimer. And in one of her biggest early roles, Play Misty for Me in Clint Eastwood’s directorial debut.

Oddly enough in the past month I watched Grand Prix – impressive but had a weak script – and the episode of Columbo from 1974 where she guest starred. And it takes a moment, because of course she’s younger and her voice isn’t quite the same, but it is unmistakably her.

She kept busy and kept working, which I think is often a great compliment for an actor. She won an Emmy along the way. She was a voice actor, did all kinds of parts, but there is something about the fact that she got one of her very best roles in her sixties. Arrested Development has one of the great casts of any TV show that I can think of, and Walter was brilliant.

And of course Archer, where she did some of her best voice work. Plenty of people have referenced what Arrested Development and Archer have in common - Walter’s characters especially - but both shows knew how to write for her in ways that were really exciting to see.

Walter died in her sleep at the age of 80. Which is something I think most of us wish for and wish for the people we know. But I can imagine Walter’s voice calling out about how boring that is and she isn’t going to settle for dying in her sleep and being upstaged by someone else dying slowly and making a big show of people shuffling in to say their goodbyes…

It’s also nice to hear from people that she was as nice and generous as one might hope.

R.I.P. Adam Zagajewski

One of the world’s great contemporary poets, Adam Zagajewski, died this week at the age of 75.

I’ve been reading his poetry, his essays, for decades. There’s a weight to his work, a heaviness. In his obituary in The New York Times, the paper called him “Poet of the Past’s Presence” which is quite a lovely and very apt way to describe so much of his work.

Born in Love, which at the time was part of Poland, and after World War II when the borders of Europe were redrawn, the city became a part of Ukraine, and the family moved to Poland. He was a dissident poet and with another poet wrote a manifesto, a cal to arms in which they encouraged their contemporaries to avoid allegory and embrace realism and “speak the truth you serve.” His work was banned in the 1970s by the government, and he eventually went into exile in Paris. As Zagajewski would later say “I lost two homelands, but I sought a third: a space for the imagination.”

I’ve always been moved by what Robert Pinsky wrote about Zagajewski years ago, and I’m not always a fan of Pinsky but in this case I can find no fault with his words when he described the poems as “about the presence of the past in ordinary life: history not as chronicle of the dead, or an anima to be illuminated by some doctrine, but as an immense, sometimes subtle force inhering in what people see and feel every day—and in the ways we see and feel.”

His poem Try to Praise the Mutilated World was written in early 2001 but was published in The New Yorker afterwards (translated by the great Clare Cavanagh) and the reason was that he was able to do what poetry can do so well. What great poets are capable of doing.

I still remember some of his lines from Reading Milosz, Mysticism for Beginners, and especially To Go to Lvov, which is a poem that struck me just now as powerfully moving as it did years ago.

I will also admit to being sad that he never received the Nobel Prize. Not simply because his work stands alongside the work of Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska, two other Novel laureates whose work I think Zagajewski can stand alongside. Of course he had a long list of awards and prizes ranging from the Neustadt International Prize to the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award, recognition by Poland and Germany and France. In the end, no one will remember what we won or didn’t. Those lines, though, I believe will echo forward and be read by many who are not yet born.

R.I.P. George Segal

George Segal died the other day at the age of 87

For people my age, he was a sitcom actor in two long running series, Just Shoot Me! and The Goldbergs, where he could often be the funniest part of the show. But he was also playing an elder role in an ensemble cast and he did so with ease.

Of course his career was a lot longer and more colorful than those roles would suggest. He studied at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg and Uta Hagen. After being an understudy in the legendary 1956 production of The Iceman Cometh that starred Jason Robards and was directed by Jose Quintero, Segal worked under Joseph Papp at the Public Theatre, was a member of the legendary improv troupe The Premise, and appeared on Broadway before he went to Hollywood in the early 1960’s.

Segal spent years working in TV and film, in ensemble casts (The Longest Day) and leading roles (King Rat) before his biggest role, the 1966 adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? where he starred with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Sandy Dennis. The Mike Nichols production is essential viewing, one of the key texts in understanding and thinking about how to translate theater to the screen, about Albee’s language, and these four characters and indelible performances.

For the next fifteen years or so, Segal had a great run as an actor. There were flops, of course, but he worked with some of the best American directors on comedies, dramas, and a lot of work that straddled the genres and were a part of that era’s efforts to craft a new language and style of film.

California Split (Robert Altman). The Terminal Man (Mike Hodges). Bye Bye Braverman (Sidney Lumet). Blume in Love (Paul Mazursky). Where’s Poppa? (Carl Reiner). That doesn’t even mention films like A Touch of Class, Loving, The Hot Rock, The Owl and the Pussycat, Fun with Dick and Jane, Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?

For more than a decade Segal had the enviable career of being a leading man and a character actor. Which I suppose must have made the fall even worse. Apparently there was bad behavior, there were drugs, but Segal turned things around and by the nineties was a character actor again in film, he returned to Broadway. And then found success in television. Along the way he was also a noted banjo player and recorded a few albums,

Segal had that quality that so many successful actors. There was charm, there was intelligence, and maybe it’s just me but he always felt deeply familiar in so many ways. He lived a full life and there’s nothing sad in an old man dying after a long, full life. But it’s worth raising a glass over such a life.

R.I.P. Jan Morris

I am one of those people who wanted to be Jan Morris.

Admittedly some of that was simply the job description which involved traveling the world, spending long periods of time in a place, trying to get beneath the surface of things in different ways. That was how Morris wrote about Venice and Trieste and Hong Kong and elsewhere. Morris hated being called a “travel writer” - though I feel like everyone who’s been described as such hates the term. But I understand the annoyance because of course Morris didn’t want to write about travels or traveling, but rather about places and the people there.

Most people’s experience of travel writing is short bullshit articles (pardon my French) in newspapers and bad magazines about traveling to places, naming a few restaurants and sights. But what Morris did is in a long tradition of Robert Byron and Freya Stark, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Rebecca West, Bruce Chatwin and Peter Matthiessen.

Morris understood the conventions of travel writing and used them to good effect in her two novels, which were recently collected into a single volume as Hav. The Book Prize nominated work isn’t a great novel but for lovers of Morris’ work and travel writing, it’s a strange work of speculative fiction and just a delight on many levels.

But I always come back to her memoir Conundrum. Because Morris wasn’t born Jan, but James. In 1974 Morris published a memoir about the experience and what it meant and years ago, when I first read it, at a time when trans wasn’t something people talked about or acknowledged, and it was eye-opening.

Many people cite Morris’ books about Venice as a career highlight and others point to the Pax Britannica trilogy. My favorite book of Morris’ would have to be Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. And explaining my love of the book is relatively easy - a lot easier than explaining to people who have not read the book why I have so long been obsessed with and fascinated by Trieste. Maybe some of that is imply because I had been obsessed with and fascinated by Venice - it’s hard not to be - but to become obsessed with Trieste, that requires time and effort and the skills of a writer and observer. It was a lesson about being a writer and about life.

For all her travels, though Morris loved Wales, and always identified as Welsh. She wrote a lot about the region in different ways and I always think about what her tied to the land. Despite traveling to every corner of the globe, she always wanted to come home. One reason was her marriage. Married in her twenties, they had five children together, but were forced to divorce when Jan transitioned. But they continued to live together, raised their children, and when civil unions between same sex couples were allowed in Britain, they made their partnership official, again. It’s the kind of love story between two friends that most of us can only envy.

Morris’ best work remains insightful and fascinating. And points to what good travel writing can be. Because it’s not about an up to date guide of what’s on this street now, and the best place for a falafel. But about something deeper and truer, about a sense of place and of what it means. Of history and what it means. This complex web that is life. And making a foreign place something understandable in different ways. Morris did that to places and with her own life and we all owe her a debt.

R.I.P. John Le Carré

David Cornwall, aka John Le Carré, died on December 12, 2020, and in a long year of so much death, it’s hard to process the passing of people we didn’t know, and yet, his death has been so affecting to so many people and not just the bookish sorts like myself who often feel a loss when great writers and artists die. The way so many people and publications wrote about Le Carré’s death felt empty, though. Admittedly I often feel this as significant artistic talents get less coverage than celebrities or nonsense, but Le Carré has long been under appreciated, and that has continued sadly.

There’s the way that everyone felt the need to call him a “spy novelist” and of course that’s true. But it also minimizes how he was a novelist who wrote primarily about spies and espionage. Most writers have a relatively limited range of topics, ideas, places and concerns they write about. Some of deeply specific, some are much more universal. I think what so many people writing about Le Carré miss is that he was our generation’s Graham Greene.

I am not the biggest fan of Greene, admittedly, but one reason he was so beloved by so many people is that he was the first serious adult novelist they read and related to and that shaped so much of how they thought about literature. Part of the reason for Graham was that he had absorbed a lot of crime stories, adventure stories and so he was able to craft work that played with many of those tropes and ideas in different ways. And sometimes it was simply a matter of writing a philosophical version of a thriller with actual characters and political issues. Le Carré was able to do similar things. Both were writers who knew about spies, but they were interested primarily in other issues. They didn’t want to write thrillers or pulp novels, but they had been influenced by them far more than they were more ostensively literary work.

Another similarity is that Le Carré, like Greene, was a moralist. Greene of course was a Roman Catholic and religious themes and concerns run through his work in different ways, perhaps most notably in The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair, but agree with him or disagree (and I know plenty of people who love him who don’t share his politics), Le Carré was as much of a moralist as Greene in his own way.

“Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.” It should stand as one of Le Carré’s great quotations, but it also gets at the heart of so much of what he believed and how he saw the world.

There is enough written about his own background, his father, his childhood that I don’t need to get into, but I think it was clear in many ways from the start that Le Carré was something of an outsider. That was one of the ways he was able to see the world so clearly, or at least avoid the sharp lines and idea that defined so many people. There are many who loathed how Le Carré wrote about the Cold War, but there is a reason why he’s not a “spy novelist” but a novelist. And that’s in what happened after the collapse fo the Soviet Union. Le Carré didn’t spend years writing period pieces or find other countries to be the replacement villain, but he wrote novels that were in some ways torn from the headlines.

Le Carré wrote about money laundering and arms dealers, medical experimentation, covert operations, governmental corruption, the War on Terror. In many ways he was one of the first adult authors many of us were introduced to. And often introduced to by adults. We didn’t read Le Carré in school, but were given his books by relatives or teachers. Le Carré was an entertaining writer. He could craft these incredibly tense thrilling scenes, but those moments were never the heart of the novels. The heart of the novels were these characters and the insight he had into them. Even if not spelled out, the ways that Le Carré built characters often through actions was so exciting.

I’ve often joked that for all my obsession with great prose and great writing, I love a good story. I love writers who can tell an entertaining plot driven story. But what separates Le Carré, like Greene before him, from writers who can only write thrilling plots is the characters. That he can craft believable and real characters. That he can manage to do conduct such research and impart it to the reader so thoughtfully and digestible. All these vital but often invisible aspects of crafting a story, the building of a fictional world, of being able to convey complicated ideas and structures.

Of course not every book was a winner, they never are, but Le Carré was more productive than a lot of writers – well, far less productive than your run of the mill thriller writer, but far more productive than other literary writers. But through it all he sought to try something different, to explore a new place, to play with structure. He could have simply retired after the end of the Cold War. A Perfect Spy, which was published in 1986, was probably his finest work. But he kept writing. It was by the end, simply how we able to process the world and his own feelings. Plus if he had stopped, we never would have had The Tailor of Panama or The Constant Gardener, and what a loss that would have been.

He wrote a lot about orphans – his complicated relationship with his father meant he likely found that easier – and he was so good at capturing how childhood was important. So many of the books touch on characters’ childhoods in different but important ways, which Le Carré could write about movingly, but he did so to show how our character and our values are formed early. We were playacting at that age in so many ways of course, trying to act older than we were, trying to fit in some way, which helped us find a way into these stories about people pretending to be someone or something they’re not, avoid having our secrets discovered. I think that’s one reason adults suggested these books to us when we were young. To tell us that those years, those struggles, which seemed both so big and so small, mattered. That our lives wasn’t something ahead of us, but that it had started.

Le Carré understood this. He wrote about individuals and systems and being trapped and finding escape. He didn’t make espionage romantic and exciting, like Fleming and others have done. Instead he was realistic about the world and what happened in it. He wrote about childhood and the world and didn’t tell us lies. The world was big and strange and full of possibility. Full of tragedy, yes, but also full of so many things bigger than us, which would both save us and destroy us, and give it meaning.

And in writing two of his best books - The Constant Gardener and Absolute Friends - in his seventies, it serves as a vital reminder for those of us who are now adults. That our best work, our best days, are not necessarily behind us.

Rest In Peace, David John Moore Cornwell.