Category: Uncategorized (Page 909 of 1102)

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‘Terence Davies specializes in outsiders; his characters are often solitary, melancholy figures contemplat­ing a world of both immense sadness and intense pleasure. It’s a perspective this autobiographical filmmaker clearly shares, and one that extends to his place in British cinema. Thanks to a low profile that’s at once scrupulously self-maintained and a product of his industry’s never having known quite what to do with him, Davies has not achieved the household-name status he so richly deserves, despite widespread admiration from peers and critics (he’s “regarded by many as Britain’s greatest living film director,” wrote Nick Roddick in the London Evening Standard in 2008). Still, this modest Liverpudlian has, with only six features and three shorts over a thirty-seven-year career, staked out a unique spot in his national cinema, creating films that defy easy categorization. Do his wrenchingly personal works fit within the long tradition of British realism or stand in contrast to it? Are they of a radical or conservative temperament? Do they convey despair or elation? The answer—all of the above—speaks to the films’ rich, strange, and emotionally complex beauty.

‘Though Davies earned his reputation mainly for the poetically rendered autobiographical films he made in the first sixteen years of his career (from 1976 to 1992), his cinema has since come to encompass many forms, including adaptations of American literature (John Kennedy Toole’s The Neon Bible, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth) and classic British theater (Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea) and documentary (his idiosyncratic, mostly found-footage Of Time and the City). In addition, he’s written a novel and produced radio plays, including one based on Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. The unapologetic classicism of much of this later work sits surprisingly comfortably alongside his more experimentally minded personal films—all center on social outcasts, and all use their narratives as a way of playing with the nature of time on-screen. Nevertheless, it’s Davies’s early work that bears the true mark of his singular vision. During those years when he was unwaveringly focused on the particulars of his own experience—his difficult family history, his tortured relationship with his sexuality, his fears and hopes and dreams—he burrowed to places in himself that most artists wouldn’t dare go.

‘The last of ten children, only seven of whom survived infancy, Davies grew up in working-class Liverpool, the introverted son of a kind mother, to whom he was deeply devoted, and a tyran­nical father, who died when he was seven. Davies has said that much of the abuse his father unleashed on his family was so unimaginable as to be untranslatable to the screen (“I couldn’t put in many things that happened, because nobody would have believed it. He was so violent,” he told me in a 2012 interview). This cruel man is a central figure, if at times as a specter, in Davies’s first five films: the shorts Children (1976), Madonna and Child (1980), and Death and Transfiguration (1983), which constitute what is now titled The Terence Davies Trilogy; Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988); and The Long Day Closes (1992). In the hauntingly austere, black-and-white trilogy, the first part of which Davies made when he was thirty and studying acting at Coventry Drama School, he reimagines himself as the closeted Robert Tucker, whose life he chronicles from abject childhood to miserable adulthood to lonely death. (In 1983, Davies con­tinued to dramatize the life of this surrogate character in his novel, Hallelujah Now, a devastatingly candid study of a frag­mented mind.) In Distant Voices, Still Lives, Davies removes himself from the picture, focusing on the lingering effects of his father’s violence on his mother and three of his siblings. But he returns as protagonist in The Long Day Closes, the culmination of this period of unbroken cinematic introspection, a mesmerizing memory piece on Liverpool in the 1950s that presents a subjec­tive, impressionistic experience of childhood.

‘Concentrated as it is on a fleeting era in his life—the years that Davies has called his happiest, after the death of his father and before the acute terrors of puberty set in—The Long Day Closes is all about the moment as it’s experienced. It offers a cinematic lushness—of cinematography, set and sound design, music—that constitutes a sort of constant ecstasy. Davies’s personal obsessions, forged during childhood, are on majestic display here: the songs of Doris Day and Nat King Cole, the escape of the movies, the enveloping comfort of friendly neighbors, the camaraderie of holiday celebrations. “Everything seemed fixed, and it was such a feeling of security that this is how it will be forever, and I really believed that,” Davies said of this period. Yet there’s an underlying sadness encroaching on those joys, an awareness that it all must end. In The Long Day Closes, we’re essentially seeing the world through the eyes of a child alive to its sensations, yet whose astonishment is bridled by the wisdom of a middle-aged man aware of its disappointments. The effect is an almost unbearable poignancy.

‘Davies may seem to be entering well-trodden generic territory in relating the experiences of young Bud (played by onetime actor Leigh McCormack, who has the mournful stillness of a Renaissance angel), living in harmonious grace with his beatific mother (Marjorie Yates) and jocose older siblings (Ayse Owens, Nicholas Lamont, and Anthony Watson). In outline, it could sound much like such other coming-of-age tales as Lasse Hallström’s My Life as a Dog (1985) and John Boorman’s Hope and Glory (1987). But unlike those more straightforward films, Davies’s unfolds in a highly unconventional narrative that collapses past and present; rather than a story, the film offers impressions and traces of childhood. Davies similarly forsook strict linearity for the trilogy and Distant Voices, Still Lives, but The Long Day Closes is his least orthodox, most visually and aurally layered work, a reminiscence with no discernible beginning or end, as given to flights of fancy as doses of reality. This, like his earlier work, is hardly the stuff of bleak kitchen-sink realism, despite the authentic working-class milieu; in fact, Davies has said that he finds the famed British New Wave films of the late fifties and early sixties, such as Look Back in Anger (1959) and This Sporting Life (1963), “dreary” and “drawn from the middle-class point of view.” Davies’s films seem made to attest to his belief that “working-class life was difficult, but it had great beauty and depth and warmth.”

‘With its purposeful lack of breadth, The Long Day Closes is all depth. Focused on a short period in a boy’s life, the film is less about events than the profundity of a child’s inchoate feelings. One is likely to take away from the film not a crucial narrative “moment” but an image or a sound—the fragment of a song, the odd audio clip from a movie wafting across the soundtrack like a radio transmission from some deep psychological recess. Still, this is not an anything-goes work that’s been assembled in the editing room; Davies always meticulously plans every camera angle and movement, cut, musical cue, lighting effect, and sound bridge as early as the first draft of the screenplay, and rarely deviates from this blueprint. To date, Davies has made only two films that move in strictly chronological fashion—The Neon Bible (1995) and The House of Mirth (2000)—although even these play with duration and temporal ellipses. He told me, “It’s not interesting to say this happened, then this happened, then that happened. When people remember, they remember the inten­sity of the moment and nothing else.” The intensity of the moment is what defines The Long Day Closes, which is as engrossed in the nature of time itself as in its maker’s own past.

‘Davies announces that preoccupation with time, in charac­ter­is­tically subtle fashion, in the film’s opening credits. The Long Day Closes commences with a beautifully composed still life of a bowl of roses, illuminated against a shadowy nothingness by a shaft of dusty sunlight. Though unrelated to the rest of the film in any literal way, the image is a natural one if we know of Davies’s devotion to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, a group of poems concerned with the mysteries of time and memory, first published together in 1943. The first, “Burnt Norton,” opens with an evocation of mortality and decay, symbolized by “a bowl of rose-leaves.” For three and a half minutes, Davies allows the entire credit list to play out over what seems like a static image. But if we look closely, we notice that the roses are slowly wilting, an effect achieved through a series of nearly imperceptible dissolves. Finally, dead petals are scattered across the table. The film has scarcely begun, but already Davies has made us aware of our experience of time. There is a quiet message here: Look closely and patiently. This beauty will surely, sadly pass.’ — Michael Koresky

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Terence Davies Official Website
Terence Davies @ IMDb
‘The Inner Light of Terence Davies’, by J. Hoberman
‘Terence Davies on religion, being gay and his life in film’
TD @ TSPDT
‘A SINGLE CONSCIOUSNESS: THE CINEMA OF TERENCE DAVIES’
Terence Davies Filmography
‘Five sublime sequences in Terence Davies films’
‘Life And Truth: Director Terence Davies Interviewed’ @ The Quietus
‘Terence Davies: How This Gay Filmmaker Channels His Feelings of Ostracism’
‘Criterion Corner: Discussing Terence Davies with Michael Koresky
‘Terence Davies: Slow dissolve’
‘The Liverpool I knew has all gone now, says Terence Davies’
‘TERENCE DAVIES VISITS THE U.S. – AND US’
‘Sing, Memory: The Postwar England of Terence Davies’
‘QUEERNESS AND MELANCHOLIA: An Excerpt from Terence Davies’
‘A Lover’s Discourse: Terence Davies’s Films’
‘Exploring the melancholy early work of Terence Davies’
‘TERENCE DAVIES DIVES IN’

 

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Extras

Terence Davis – In Conversation

Terence Davies on Ealing

‘2001- A Space Odyssey (Film Club intro by Terence Davies)’ 1989

Terence Davies: Reverse Shot Direct Address #13

It’s Personal: Memories of Terence Davies

 

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Interview (1988)

 

Are you still Catholic?

Terence Davies: God, no! I gave that up at 22. I suddenly realized then that it was a con. I was a very devout Catholic, I really did believe. But it gave me no succor. And when I realized I was gay, and was getting absolutely guilt-ridden about it and not doing anything, I knew something was deeply wrong. I prayed until my knees were raw and finally went to Mass one Sunday evening, and just before the offertory I thought: It’s a lie, it’s actually a lie; they’re just men in frocks. And I got up and walked out. And I never went back – it was that sudden. It was like the Emperor’s New Clothes. And I was so angry. I’m still very angry about it, because it wasted a lot of my emotional time.

Was this just an emotional rejection? Or do you think Catholicism is logically and intellectually flawed as well?

TD: Well, for me it’s flawed because it starts from the premise that we’re all sinners. I don’t accept that. I think original sin is a monstrous idea. I don’t believe most people are evil, though some undoubtedly are. The majority of people are basically good, they don’t go around killing six million people. But it’s all a question of belief or disbelief. If you look at it quite dispassionately, it’s as remote, as unmeaning, as the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It’s that remote to me now, and it’s as exotic, as theatrical. The Catholic Church, if nothing else, has a great sense of thea­ter. In a sense it’s like watching a film. After two minutes – if you believe, then that’s fine. If you don’t believe, forget it. No matter how good it might be.

Your Catholic background seems to have left one mark on your movies: they’re structured like altarpieces. Why is the new movie in two separate parts?

TD: Well, I feel they complement one another. All the terrible family history is packed into Distant Voices, which is about the nature of time and memory. But in Part 2 – Still Lives – life has reached an even keel. I wanted to make something interesting out of our lives as stasis. The first part throws the second part into relief. And in Part 2 we see the chains that bind this family to­gether beginning to loosen and the family drifting apart. Imperceptibly: they don’t realize it. And that’s why at the end, one by one, they go into the dark. “Dark, dark, dark, they all go into the dark.” A kind of metaphorical death.

How much of the movie is direct au­tobiography?

TD: Well, all the things that happen ac­tually happened. If not to me, to my family. They told these stories when I was very young, so they became part of my memory, almost as though they happened to me because they were so vivid. But some things I remember being part of. The Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing sequence was based on a visit to the cinema one hot Satur­day; my two sisters took me, and every­one was weeping away in the audience. And I wanted to have the irony of the two men falling through the glass roof in the scene we cut to. The idea is that life is much harsher than what you’ve seen on the screen. And it disorients you, which I think is interesting. You don’t know quite where you are. There are other things in the sequence. The umbrellas are a direct homage to Singin’ in the Rain. I was determined to have umbrellas with rain on them! And then you go inside and everyone’s weeping. And then – suddenly – their brother and Eileen’s husband have this huge accident. Out of the blue, you re­alize your hold on life is tenuous.

How closely do you structure the movie when you write the script?

TD: I write down everything as I hear and see it in my mind – every track, pan, dissolve, crane, piece of music. So the script becomes an aide-memoire, which is why I never do a storyboard. But con­tent dictates form, so I’m not conscious of how or why I structure certain things in a certain way. Mahler said, “One does not compose, one is composed.” And that’s what happens with a film: it will tell its story in the way it wants to be told. And, you know, you want to tell it in the most succinct way, because that’s always much more powerful. You learn how long to hold a shot, for in­stance – and how long not to hold one. There’s a two-minute take with a static camera in Trilogy, the boy’s bus jour­ney with his mother, which I always call my Angora sweater shot; because by the time it’s over you could have knitted one. There’s a point where a shot dies.

Did you decide ahead of shooting on a specific style for the film, an aesthetic?

TD: If there was an aesthetic, it was that I wanted to show life the way it was back then. It was much more gentle and polite; there was much more of a sense of community. England is very philistine today. Also, I wanted to show real people. The working classes of that time have always been used as comic turns, on the stage or in films like Brief Encounter. Noel Coward couldn’t tell the difference between compas­sion and condescension. It’s the same in This Happy Breed – chirpy cockneys, you know, chirpy cockney voice: “We’ve survived the war!” It’s about as relevant and as real as the Man in the Moon.

And so I had a specific idea of how I wanted the cast to act. I didn’t want them to act, I wanted them to be. And I said to all of them, you must see the Trilogy first and you must not act. You’ll get the script a week before shooting. Just read it twice, once for sense and once for character, and then don’t read it again. Learn the scenes we’re going to shoot only the night be­fore. We’ll rehearse for ten minutes be­fore we start, and then we’ll do it in under ten takes. Because after ten they get repetitive. And very often we got it in three.

What about the colors in the film? You use a very rich range of browns and earth colors.

TD: I knew I wanted a certain type of color, so we did a test with Kay Laboratories. I wanted tones of red and brown, but not sepia, because you can’t watch sepia, it’s impossible. So we used a coral filter and took out all the primary colors from the decor and costumes, except the red in the lip­stick. Then we used a bleach bypass process that leaves the silver nitrate in the print and desaturates the color.

Do you look at paintings for inspira­tion?

TD: I know nothing about art. I’ve never gone and looked at pictures, I have no vocabulary to discuss them. Obviously there are painters I like. I like the Im­pressionists, I like Modigliani, Seurat. I think Turner’s paintings of Venice are stunning. But I don’t like, for in­stance, Picasso. I can’t respond to some triangular woman with her tits on the side of her body. It may be great art, but it doesn’t mean anything to me.

Did you shape the visual sequences to the music, or vice versa?

TD: You never cut the picture to the mu­sic. That’s the mistake I made with the two-minute shot in Trilogy. If a scene is visually right, then you can use just a snatch of a song and it’s enough. For instance with Love Is a Many-Splen-dored Thing we did it without the end­ing chord. That was the editor’s idea. And because the phrase is not finished, your inner ear is waiting for the reso­lution. And what I’ve found – and it’s what I did here – is that you can resolve it visually with another shot, and then you resolve it aurally in the shot follow­ing that.

Are you part of the British cinema tradition?

TD: Well, I don’t feel part of a British tra­dition, because I don’t think there is one. I think every once in a while we produce films in spite of our lack of film tradition, like Powell and Pressburger or the Ealing comedies or Nic Roeg’s Bad Timing. But one problem is, we share a common language with the Americans, and they’ve always made films better than we have. They see film as film, they see the way it works. Our culture is centered on the spoken word, and the theater has always had more prestige. We’ve produced great theater actors, but we cannot produce good cinema actors. The same with writers. What you get, when your writers come from theater and televi­sion, is a record of the spoken event. And that’s not cinema.

Were you influenced by Dennis Potter – by Pennies from Heaven or The Singing Detective – in your use of pop­ular song as a substitute for dialogue?

TD: [Aghast] No. I saw one episode of The Singing Detective and I found it unwatchable. They’re records of people talking, and I just get bored with that. The music is not integrated into the plot. The best example of how to use music in a film is Meet Me in St. Louis, because everything arises from that plot. It is so perfect. You have to use that as a touchstone.

I heard you quoted as saying you wanted to be reborn as Doris Day.

TD: Well, I think she’s wonderful. Particularly in The Pajama Game. My great passion is Hollywood musicals. That and the symphonic tradition. I can’t sing or play an instrument, but I can recognize a symphonic argument, par­ticularly in Mahler, Bruckner, or Shostakovich. And so that really strong idea of how something should be organic, coupled with popular American music, which I was brought up with – that cu­rious combination has been very, very helpful to me. Because the thing one has to steer clear of is sentimentality. You can get away with it in America, for the simple reason that Americans aren’t the least bit embarrassed by sen­timentality. The English are terribly embarrassed by it. They think it’s vul­gar. Like passion, they think it’s vul­gar. What you do is find ways to use a song that negates the sentimentality. There’s something wonderful about songs as over-the-top as “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,” but you must use them with images that are not over the top: like Mum being beaten up to “Taking a Chance on Love.” I knew the scene would work as soon as I wrote it.

Why is passion vulgar in England?

TD: Because we’re a very odd nation. There is that innate reserve. I was talk­ing about this to a friend, and she said something I think is true: that the idea of English exoticism has turned in on itself. The reason we’re such a philis­tine country now, and a lot of the peo­ple are so horrible and the place is so dirty, is that we’re no longer a colonial power and we’ve turned our colonial­ism in on ourselves.

We befoul our own nest because we’ve got nowhere else to do it. I think, too, that the British think passion is a badge of insincerity, that it’s some­thing only “they” do, the dagos abroad. It’s the same as the 18th cen­tury ideal of the “gifted amateur.” To be professional is really rather vulgar. And it is exacerbated by our caste sys­tem, which is as rigid as anything in India or Japan.

It sounds as if America is the place for you.

TD: Well, you get welcomed in America, whatever class you come from. I re­member when Trilogy was going to be shown at the New York Film Festival, a girl asked me when I was coming over. I told her, and she said, “Come and stay in my flat, I’ll be away then.” And it was No. 1, Fifth Avenue, and there were real Matisses on the wall. Extraordinary hospitality.

But the thing I don’t like about America is that in Britain you can fail, and fail honorably, but you can’t over there. There’s a cruel competitive edge. I remember the first time I went to Chicago, I was in a restaurant sitting in one of those half-moon open booths. And I overheard the people in the next booth, who were talking loudly, and I thought they were planning a murder. I was literally on the verge of saying to the waiter, “Look, I think you’d better call the police.” By the time my food came, it transpired that they were opening a graphics office in the next state. I find the cutthroat attitude quite awful.

What films have influenced you?

TD: I can’t say that particular films have influenced me. There are films that I’ve been absolutely knocked out by. When I was 18, I saw Bicycle Thief. And then there was Rocco and His Brothers. Of course they were revelatory at 18, one had never seen anything like them. And then one discovered Berg­man and Kurosawa and Ozu, Les Quatre Cent Coups and things like that. But I can’t really say, “Oh, well I saw Donald O’Connor in Francis the Talk­ing Mule and it changed my life.” [laughter]

The reason I love American musi­cals, though I don’t know how much they influence me, is, one, that I thought America was like that. I thought, when I go I know I’m going to find a place where they all burst into song and dance! Just like that. And I know if I go there often enough, I’ll find it.

The other thing is, they gave me the most enormous pleasure I’ve ever had. When I play the soundtracks now, I can remember where I saw them. It re-creates my childhood. Every time I watch Singin’ in the Rain I cry. Because I re­member being taken to see it as a child and seeing this perfect world. Because that’s what the Hollywood musical cre­ated. When you grew up in a Liverpool slum and you saw these films, that’s what you thought America was like. Everyone was rich, everyone was beau­tiful. There was no want, no poverty; it was always summer. That’s very po­tent. It’s as potent as religion. In fact, for me it’s very much become a reli­gion.

Is Distant Voices, Still Lives the last autobiographical film?

TD: I want to make one more piece of au­tobiography. It’ll be a 90-minute film, in one part, and it’ll be about the three years that precede the Trilogy. So the story will come full circle. It’ll be about the children who’ve not been ex­plored, my younger brothers and sis­ters. It’s the three years between the time my father died and when I left pri­mary school, Those three years were just ecstatically happy.

Since you’re gay and you’re not going to have a family of your own, are these films, in a way, your children?

TD: Yes, I think these are my children. I’ve got nothing else.

Do you think that’s sad?

TD: Yes, I do, I think it’s pathetic. It’s far better to actually have a family of your own. Because at the end of the day most people don’t give a toss whether it’s a beautifully made piece of cinema. They don’t care. So you can pour your soul into something, and yes, some people care, but most people don’t. It’d be very nice just to be doing Rambo 27, because you’d make a lot of money and materially you’d have a very nice life. But (a), I haven’t got the talent and (b), I haven’t got the inclination. I’m very puritanical; I want the films to be good films, cinematically. But at the end of the day does anyone care? I re­member reading an article about the scherzo in Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, which is a miracle of the sonata form. But think of all the people in the world who’ve never heard of Mahler and don’t even want to.

When people see Distant Voices, Still Lives, what sort of feeling do you want them to leave with?

TD: I’ve no idea. I was constantly asked at film school, “What is your audi­ence?” I say, “I don’t know.” I make the films because I need to make them. I know that what I want from film is what I want from music: to be emo­tionally moved and intellectually stim­ulated. And I think all great art does that. Which is why one constantly re­turns to the late string quartets of Shostakovich, the symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler, to Citizen Kane. You go back and you rediscover something every time. And that’s a joy.

 

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11 of Terence Davies’s 12 films

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Children (1976)
‘Davies wrote the script for Children (1976) while at drama school, and made the film with funding from the British Film Institute; Madonna and Child (1980) was produced at the National Film School as his graduation film; Death and Transfiguration (1983) was made three years later with the backing of the BFI and the Greater London Arts Association. Already in this early work, Davies shows adeptness and precision in his handling of sounds and images and in bringing an extraordinary intensity of emotion to the screen. While bearing the hallmarks of the personal, the evocations of the past – or of different pasts – throughout Children develop a cinematic language which expresses the universality of the experience of remembering.’ — screenonline

the entire film

A discussion between Terence Davies and Mamoun Hassan on his film, Children

 

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Madonna and Child (1980)
‘Between 1976 and 1983, before Terence Davies became the most heralded British filmmaker of his time with his films Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, he made this Trilogy of short films. The first, Children, was made during his second year at art school on a minuscule budget and chronicles the life of Davies’ alter-ego, Robert Tucker, from a young adolescent at primary school where he suffers both unprovoked bullying at school and his father’s abusiveness at home, up to his young adulthood. The second, Madonna and Child, finds a middle-aged Tucker stuck in a wearisome, life-sucking office job, suffering guilt over his closeted homosexuality because of his Catholic upbringing. The third, Death & Transfiguration, finds Davies imagining himself as an elderly stroke victim, reminiscing over his life, especially the death of his mother, while preparing for death himself. Of all the films in the Trilogy, Madonna and Child finds Davies most distinctly exploring his central themes, especially those of Catholic guilt, his homosexual fantasies, his relationship with his mother, and his oppressive isolation and devastating depression. But Davies is also displaying a remarkable growth as a directorial technician, and Madonna and Child is full of mature, cinematic devices. One of the most notable is his pervasive use of high contrast black & white, which moves the film into a darker world than the more gradated grays of Children. The high-contrast galvanizes scenes such as when Tucker knocks on the door to an exclusive gay club, whose framing and look is echoed later during Tucker’s confession scene at Church.’ — Forced Perspective

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Death and Transfiguration (1983)
‘The anguished finale of the Terence Davies Trilogy opens with the death of Robert Tucker’s beloved mother, jumping forward in time to show an elderly Robert bedridden in hospital (an astonishing appearance by Steptoe and Son’s Wilfrid Brambell). Fragments of his past – a school nativity play, male physique magazines, a tender moment with mum – build to an unforgettable closing scene.’ — bfi

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Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988)
‘The relative scarcity of films by writer-director Davies – whether owing to lack of funding or the obstinacy of a vision that brooks no compromise – is one of the great tragedies of British cinema. His first feature, which traces the life of a Catholic family in 1940s and 1950s Liverpool, is widely regarded as being among the finest depictions of British working-class life on film. It is divided into two chapters: the first reflects the trauma of war and growing up under an abusive father, the second, the struggle of his children to achieve happier lives as they build their own marriages and families following his death. The film is bleached of primary colours so that the action unfolds largely in drab greys and browns, but is enriched by a backdrop of radio, film and musical samples that reflect the wider narrative of a city re-establishing itself after the war.’ — The Guardian

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The Long Day Closes (1992)
‘The Long Day Closes is the most gloriously cinematic expression of the unique sensibility of Terence Davies, widely celebrated as Britain’s greatest living filmmaker. Suffused with both enchantment and melancholy, this autobiographical film takes on the perspective of a quiet, lonely boy growing up in Liverpool in the 1950s. But rather than employ a straightforward narrative, Davies jumps in and out of time, swoops into fantasies and fears, summons memories and dreams. A singular filmic tapestry, The Long Day Closes is an evocative, movie- and music-besotted portrait of the artist as a young man.’ — The Criterion Collection

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The Neon Bible (1995)
‘The evolution of Davies’s career up to this point would make one wonder whether fragmented memories were all he was capable of summoning. His next film, though a wild departure in many ways, did not provide easy answers. The Neon Bible (1995), adapted from John Kennedy Toole’s slim bildungsroman about a sensitive boy’s coming-of-age in the deep American South, represented a striking change of milieu for Davies, yet many of the director’s already established hallmarks were in full view: taciturn young male protagonist, colorful and more outspoken older relative, the tyrannies of bullies and teachers, the comfort of movies, the birth of religious skepticism. If this alien landscape introduced a new (and probably healthy) awkwardness in Davies’s filmmaking, it also resulted in a singular hybrid of Davies’s poetic British lyricism and stoic American gothic. Davies’s long, steady tracking shots and unbroken single takes register as dissociated and surreal when reconfigured into a Georgia-shot tale that features one character’s dramatic descent into madness and another’s violent, climactic killing.’ — Roger Ebert

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The House of Mirth (2000)
‘There are some films that are such pure, unpretentious exemplars of the medium—that are slavish only to their own being and rationale—that of course they were destined to be either forgotten or gently patted on the head before being sent away. Terence Davies’s The House of Mirth is such a film, one so exquisitely wrought and seamlessly shaped that it almost needs to be scrutinized with a magnifying glass as though a diamond. The problem with such subtle artistry is that you actually need to be looking at it to notice its flawlessness; that might have been too tall an order in 2000, when Davies’s film was released up against such flashier gems as Requiem for a Dream, Dancer in the Dark, and Bamboozled, all of which, for better or worse, were embracing and foregrounding new forms of moviemaking. The House of Mirth was hardly such a headline-maker: its greatest claim to fame outside of rarefied, art-house circles seemed to be its dramatic star turn from The X-Files’ Gillian Anderson. Otherwise this was merely the latest offering from a critically acclaimed British filmmaker whose difficulty in financing his few-and-far-between projects had hardly made him a household name with audiences, and for some the film’s origins as an Edith Wharton novel gave it the whiff of a high-school requisite.’ — Reverse Shot

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Of Time and the City (2008)
‘Of Time and the City is Terence Davies’ first documentary — although “documentary” is hardly an adequate description of this fierce and loving film-essay on his native Liverpool — and, more significantly, his first film in eight years. Any new film from Davies is an event in its own right given his status as arguably Britain’s greatest living filmmaker. Yet he’s someone who has been almost unable to work in a film culture that’s essentially inimical to the kind of filmmaking he represents. Of course, he’s not the only British filmmaker to suffer from this — whatever happened to Carine Adler (Under the Skin, 1997), or Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher, 1999; Morvern Callar, 2001)? — but the situation with Davies is a particularly bitter one simply because of the stature of his work. There is plenty for unsympathetic viewers to resist in Davies’ idealisation of the past. For one thing, he doesn’t hide his distaste if not disdain for subsequent decades. Near the end of the film he offers us some scenes of inner-city night life, of the nightclubbing, pub-crawling, binge-drinking contemporary leisure culture, scenes that are a clear rebuke to the world of the present. Even the footage he chooses from the seventies serves to emphasise the decline in civic life, with the demolition of the tenements of Davies’ youth and the move — keyed ironically to Peggy Lee singing “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” — of the working-class into high-rise tower blocks. Gone are the children at play in street or playground, the crowds enjoying themselves at the New Brighton seaside. Instead, lonely figures wander down empty streets, and the camera picks out the ugliness of the graffiti-strewn buildings and mourns the demolished old residences.’ — Bright Lights Film Journal

Trailer

Excerpt

Terence Davies talks about his film, Of Time and the City

 

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The Deep Blue Sea (2011)
‘The agony and perverse ecstasy of unrequited love permeate Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea. Adapted by the director from Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play and set in a dank, depressed London still recovering from the Blitz, it tells the story of Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz), a 40ish beauty dashed on the rocks of masochistic passion. She has left her older husband, Sir William (Simon Russell Beale), a judge still under the thumb of his ironhearted mother (Barbara Jefford), and their life of stifling middle-class conformity to move into a dingy rented flat with the young lover, Freddie (Tom Hiddleston), a former fighter pilot, charming and exciting in bed, with whom she has become obsessed. Though not without glimmerings of conscience, Freddie is feckless and inconstant. He cannot reciprocate Hester’s romantic intensity, and when he spends her birthday weekend on a “golfing trip” she methodically tries to gas herself. That’s where Davies’ sublime evocation of amour fou, the hallmarks of which are self-confinement and humiliation, begins.’ — Film Comment

Excerpt

Excerpt

The Deep Blue Sea: Behind the scenes, on-set footage

 

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Sunset Song (2015)
‘What is most surprising about Terence Davies’ film adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song is how close the director seems to his material. The novel, published in 1932, is the story of a sensitive young woman growing up in a rugged, rural community in the north-east of Scotland just before the First World War. It is a world away from the working-class Liverpool of the director’s own childhood in the late 1940s, so movingly depicted in his autobiographical Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), and yet the two films sit together as companion pieces. They are both deeply felt family dramas with the same mix of lyricism and extreme brutality. They both feature abusive father-figures who terrorise their wives and children. There is plenty of music and communal singing in each of the films. The interior of the little farmhouse in which the family lives in Sunset Song isn’t so different from that of the home depicted in Distant Voices. Sunset Song may be uneven but it’s a film no other British director would have made in the same way as Davies. One of the reasons Davies has struggled to get his work financed is that he resists the pressure from interfering front-office executives to tailor his movies in the way that they demand. His films, whether they’re autobiographical or adapted from Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth) or Grassic Gibbon novels, or even if they’re nostalgic, newsreel-based documentaries such as Of Time and the City, always feel utterly personal. His new feature is entirely consistent with its predecessors both in its intimacy and in its ability to be lyrical and harrowing at the very same time.’ — The Independent

Trailer

Excerpt

Agyness Deyn and Terence Davies talk Sunset Song

 

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A Quiet Passion (2016)
‘Just a few months after Terence Davies’ last drama, Sunset Song, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, his new one, A Quiet Passion, made its debut at Berlin. How did he complete it so quickly? Maybe the trick was that he shot almost all of it in one location with just a handful of actors. The film is a biopic of Emily Dickinson (Sex and the City’s Cynthia Nixon), the great American poet who spent much of her adult life as a recluse in her parents’ house in Amherst, Massachusetts, so there is some logic to the action being confined to a couple of adjoining rooms and a sunny front garden. But Davies breaks several other rules of the literary biopic in ways that are harder to justify. The acting and camerawork can be stilted, the actors are decades older than the people they are playing, the dialogue is crammed so tightly with polished witticisms and epigrams that it sounds like Noël Coward arm-wrestling Oscar Wilde, and the choice of scenes seems so random that Davies could have picked them out of a hat: some of the most important people in Dickinson’s life, including her sister-in-law and a supportive editor, are reduced to blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos. But while there is plenty about A Quiet Passion that doesn’t work, Davies’ willfully demanding curio is so unconventional and sincere that it’s easy to admire, and it has a few moments of magic which make it all worthwhile.’ — BBC

Excerpt

Terence Davies. At work. On ‘A Quiet Passion’

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** JM, Hi. Well, thank you. I never even read the Bible, so you’re one up on me. He’s kind of like an evil Kardashian to me. The pedal’s to the metal on my end, but only for a couple of more days maybe. What are you squeezing out? ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, D. I personally have always considered Jesus to be a meta-Santa Claus kind of construct without Santa’s charm. Never saw that Pasolini. Maybe I should try to get into his work for the dozenth time via it. Thanks for the Jesus backstory stuff. I’m always curious about how such a superstar came about. Nice panning shot in that ‘Cool Hand Luke’ clip. And that was the dad on ‘The Waltons’ in there, huh. ** Robert Siek, Hi. Ah, West Hollywood, well, lots of places to eat within walking distance. Maybe you’ll find WH charming. I tend to try to drive around it when I’m out and about in LA, but you know me. Three days is definitely really quick for LA. Best in that case to stay on the move if you want to get a feel for the place, but hang time in Silverlake/Echo/Los Feliz remains a recommendation. That is a horrifying dream. Jesus looks scary in that kind of Charles Manson kind of way. I hope you have a most splendid day too, and I’d love to hear how LA treated you. We’re just going to miss each other as I’ll be there at the very beginning of Feb. to show PGL. Take care! ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Never saw ‘The Passion of Christ’. I tend to stay away from Christianity-milking films because I know next to zip about that religion. I hope it works out with Schroeder, obviously. I haven’t heard one good thing about ‘Vice’ other than props for my friend’s turn in it. Everyone, Want to know what Mr. Erickson thinks of that new Cheney-centric film ‘Vice’? Well, easy peasy. I don’t know what CBD is, so I would guess it’s not on sale every ten feet here. Roasting chestnuts are, however. I’m assuming CBD isn’t a nickname for roasting chestnuts. Chestnuts Burning Daily? ** Bill, Ah, you’re a Grinch-y guy. That makes sense somehow. I haven’t done a tree and presents in years, but I do like doing that, I don’t know why. There’s a little plastic Xmas tree with little fake presents underneath it in the entranceway to my building at the moment, and I do admit it does some kind of tiny, positive thing to my heart when I pass by it. Thanks about the crunch. It does seem to be doing what crunches are supposed to. I’ve seen that book on a table or two here. Perhaps I’ll lift it and flip around. ** Sypha, Yeah, I thought the ‘big’ guy seemed like post fodder of a certain timely sort, and it doesn’t take much for me to want to swipe hundreds of gifs and stack them up. That Doobie Brothers track is a cover version of the original by The Byrds which is much, much, much better. But memory’s coziness output always wins. ** KeatoV, Your new name configuration reminds me of something, but I can’t remember what that is for the life of me. Christianity is just one of the weirdest, longest lasting fads in the world to me. Are you reviewing what I think you’re reviewing, and, if so, how did you see it, and maybe I don’t want know how because that’s not good if it’s via the way I fear, but, all that aside, if I guessed right, thank you! ** _Black_Acrylic, Ben, sir, maestro. Oh, right, I remember you did an interview for that doc. They wanted to interview me, but I didn’t end up doing one for reasons I can’t remember. I suppose that doc must be on youtube or Vimeo. I’ll go look. Christmas wrapping? How particular and fetish-y are you about the wrapping you use and the precision with which you wrap things? ** Misanthrope, Hi. Oh, so CBD is related to pot? Okay, mystery solved. Hm. Maybe your body is desperately remembering the med’s effect and able to fake it for a brief amount of time. Either that or you’re cured. So unless I’m getting the news wrong over here, it sure does seem like you’re going to shut down, job-wise, starting tomorrow. If so, I hope for silver linings galore. Oh, wait, you’re ‘excepted’, never mind. I should read whole comments before I leap forth with my responses. Then enjoy the five days of freedom, buddy. ** Josh, Hi, Josh! Well, ditto! ** Nik, Hi, N. Yeah, like I said elsewhere, I honestly know nothing about the Jesus dude, but maybe ignorance is post-making bliss in that case. Satan, him, I do know a bit about him. Excellent if Conjunctions lets you have some kind of creative input! I will start crossing my fingers when late January appears on the horizon. Xmas plans … eating a buche. I think that’s entirely it. I’m going to the Xmas makeover — ‘Santa Claus is a Zombie’ — of Paris’s haunted house attraction on Saturday night. That’s probably the most Xmas-y things will get. You? Do you do the family getting together thing or an equivalent? Bon Friday! ** Right. Again, as is frequently the case, someone here or somewhere asked me to bring back the dead Terence Davies post, and today has  ended up being the day the restoration transpires. Enjoy it and yourselves. See you tomorrow.

 

‘It’s become fashionable these days to say that the writer writes because he is not whole: he has a wound, he writes to heal it. But who cares if the writer is not whole? Of course the writer is not whole, or even particularly well. There’s something unwholesome and self-destructive about the entire writing process. Writers are like eremites or anchorites—natural-born eremites or anchorites—who seem puzzled as to why they went up the pole or into the cave in the first place. Why am I so isolate in this strange place? Why is my sweat being sold as elixir? And how have I become so enmeshed with words, mere words, phantoms?

‘Writers when they’re writing live in a spooky, clamorous silence, a state somewhat like the advanced stages of prayer but without prayer’s calming benefits. A writer turns his back on the day and the night and its large and little beauties, and tries, like some half- witted demiurge, to fashion other days and nights with words. It’s absurd. Oh, it’s silly, dangerous work indeed.

‘A writer starts out, I think, wanting to be a transfiguring agent, and ends up usually just making contact, contact with other human beings. This, unsurprisingly, is not enough. Making contact with the self—healing the wound—is even less satisfactory.) Writers end up writing stories—or rather, stories’ shadows—and they’re grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough.

‘E. M. Forster once told his friend Laurens van der Post that he could not finish a story that he had begun with great promise, even brilliance, because he did not like the way it would have to finish. Van der Post wrote, “The remark for me proved both how natural stories were to him and how acute was his sense of their significance, but at the same time revealed that his awareness was inadequate for the task the story imposed upon it.”

‘I like van der Post’s conception of story—as a stern taskmaster that demands the ultimate in awareness, that indeed is awareness. The significant story possesses more awareness than the writer writing it. The significant story is always greater than the writer writing it. This is the absurdity, the disorienting truth, the question that is not even a question, this is the koan of writing.

‘Malcolm Muggeridge wrote in an essay on Jesus, “When a person loses the isolation, the separateness which awareness of the presence of God alone can give, he becomes irretrievably part of a collectivity with only mass communications to shape its hopes, formulate its values and arrange its thinking.”

‘Without the awareness of separateness, one can never be part of the whole, the nothingness that is God. This is the divine absurdity, the koan of faith.

‘Jean Rhys said that when she was a child she thought that God was a big book. I don’t know what she thought when she was no longer a child. She probably wished that she could think of a big book as being God.

‘A writer’s awareness must never be inadequate. Still, it will never be adequate to the greater awareness of the work itself, the work that the writer is trying to write. The writer must not really know what he is knowing, what he is learning to know when he writes, which is more than the knowing of it. A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light. The writer is separate from his work but that’s all the writer is—what he writes. A writer must be smart but not too smart. He must be dumb enough to break himself to harness. He must be reckless and patient and daring and dull—for what is duller than writing, trying to write? And he must never care—caring spoils everything. It compromises the work. It shows the writer’s hand. The writer is permitted, even expected, to have compassion for his characters, but what are characters? Nothing but mystic symbols, magical emblems, ghosts of the writer’s imagination.

‘The writer doesn’t want to disclose or instruct or advocate, he wants to transmute and disturb. He cherishes the mystery, he cares for it like a fugitive in his cabin, his cave. He doesn’t want to talk it into giving itself up. He would never turn it in to the authorities, the mass mind. The writer is somewhat of a fugitive himself, actually. He wants to escape his time, the obligations of his time, and, by writing, transcend them. The writer does not like to follow orders, not even the orders of his own organizing intellect. The moment a writer knows how to achieve a certain effect, the method must be abandoned. Effects repeated become false, mannered. The writer’s style is his doppelgänger, an apparition that the writer must never trust to do his work for him.

‘Some years ago I began writing essays. They were strident, bitter pieces on topics I cared about deeply. I developed a certain style for them that was unlike the style of my stories—it was unelusive and rude and brashly one-sided. They were meant to annoy and trouble and polarize, and they made readers, at least the kind of readers who write letters to the editors of magazines, half nuts with rage and disdain. The letter-writers frequently mocked my name. Not only didn’t they like my way with words, my reasoning, my philosophy, they didn’t believe my name. My morbid attitude, my bitter tongue, my anger, denied me the right to such a name, my given name, my gift, signifier of rejoicing, happiness, and delight.

‘But a writer isn’t supposed to make friends with his writing, I don’t think.

‘The writer doesn’t trust his enemies, of course, who are wrong about his writing, but he doesn’t trust his friends, either, who he hopes are right. The writer trusts nothing he writes—it should be too reckless and alive for that, it should be beautiful and menacing and slightly out of his control. It should want to live itself somehow. The writer dies—he can die before he dies, it happens all the time, he dies as a writer—but the work wants to live.

‘Language accepts the writer as its host, it feeds off the writer, it makes him a husk. There is something uncanny about good writing—uncanny the singing that comes from certain husks. The writer is never nourished by his own work, it is never satisfying to him. The work is a stranger, it shuns him a little, for the writer is really something of a fool, so engaged in his disengagement, so self-conscious, so eager to serve something greater, which is the writing. Or which could be the writing if only the writer is good enough. The work stands a little apart from the writer, it doesn’t want to go down with him when he stumbles or fails or retreats.

‘The writer must do all this alone, in secret, in drudgery, in confusion, awkwardly, one word at a time.

‘The writer is an exhibitionist, and yet he is private. He wants you to admire his fasting, his art. He wants your attention, he doesn’t want you to know he exists. The reality of his life is meaningless, why should you, the reader, care? You don’t care. He drinks, he loves unwisely, he’s happy, he’s sick … it doesn’t matter. You just want the work—the Other—this other thing. You don’t really care how he does it. Why he does it.

‘The good piece of writing startles the reader back into Life. The work—this Other, this other thing—this false life that is even less than the seeming of this lived life, is more than the lived life, too. It is so unreal, so precise, so unsurprising, so alarming, really. Good writing never soothes or comforts. It is no prescription, neither is it diversionary, although it can and should enchant while it explodes in the reader’s face. Whenever the writer writes, it’s always three o’clock in the morning, it’s always three or four or five o’clock in the morning in his head. Those horrid hours are the writer’s days and nights when he is writing. The writer doesn’t write for the reader. He doesn’t write for himself, either. He writes to serve … something. Somethingness. The somethingness that is sheltered by the wings of nothingness—those exquisite, enveloping, protecting wings.

‘There is a little tale about man’s fate and this is the way it is put. A man is being pursued by a raging elephant and takes refuge in a tree at the edge of a fearsome abyss. Two mice, one black and one white, are gnawing at the roots of the tree, and at the bottom of the abyss is a dragon with parted jaws. The man looks above and sees a little honey trickling down the tree and he begins to lick it up and forgets his perilous situation. But the mice gnaw through the tree and the man falls down and the elephant seizes him and hurls him over to the dragon. Now, that elephant is the image of death, which pursues men, and the tree is this transitory existence, and the mice are the days and the nights, and the honey is the sweetness of the passing world, and the savor of the passing world diverts mankind. So the days and nights are accomplished and death seizes him and the dragon swallows him down into hell and this is the life of man.

‘This little tale with its broad and beastly strokes seems to approximate man’s dilemma quite charmingly, with the added caveat that it also applies to the ladies (“she” being “he” throughout here, the writer’s woes not limited by gender; like Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit, the writer knows there’s no enjoyment to be had in this life). This is the story, then, pretty much the story, with considerable latitude to be had in describing those mice, those terrifying mice. But it is not for the writer to have any part in providing the honey—the passing world does that. The writer can’t do better than that. What the writer wants to do, to be, is to be the consciousness of the story, he doesn’t want to be part of the distraction; to distract is ignoble, to distract is to admit defeat, to serve a lesser god. The story is not a simple one. It is syncretistic and strange and unhappy, and it all must be told beautifully, even the horrible parts, particularly the horrible parts. The telling of the story can never end, not because the writer doesn’t like the way it must end but because there is no end to the awareness of the story which the writer has only the dimmest, most fragmentary awareness of.

‘Why do I write? Writing has never given me any pleasure. I am not being disingenuous here. It’s not a matter of being on excellent terms with my characters, having a swell time with them, finding their surprising remarks prescient or amusing. That would seem to be a shallow pleasure indeed. Rewriting, the attention to detail, the depth of involvement required, the achievement and acknowledgment of the prowess and stamina and luck involved—all these should give their pleasures, I suppose, but they are sophisticated pleasures that elude me. Writing has never been “fun” for me. I am too wary about writing to enjoy it. It has never fulfilled me (nor have I fulfilled it). Writing has never done anyone or anything any good at all, as far as I can tell. In the months before my mother died, and she was so sick and at home, a home that meant everything and nothing to her now, she said that she would lie awake through the nights and plan the things she would do during the day when it came—she would walk the dog and get birdseed and buy some more pansies, and she would make herself a nice little breakfast, something that would taste good, a poached egg and some toast—and then the day would come and she could do none of these things, she could not even get out the broom and sweep a little. She was in such depression and such pain and she would cry, If I only could do a little sweeping, just that. … To sweep with a good broom, a lovely thing, such a simple, satisfying thing, and she yearned to do it and could not. And her daughter, the writer, who would be the good broom quick in her hands if only she were able, could not help her in any way.     Nothing the daughter, the writer, had ever written or could ever write could help my mother who had named me.

‘Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve—hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve—not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace which knows us.

‘A writer I very much admire is Don DeLillo. At an awards ceremony for him at the Folger Library several years ago, I said that he was like a great shark moving hidden in our midst, beneath the din and wreck of the moment, at apocalyptic ease in the very elements of our psyche and times that are most troublesome to us, that we most fear.

‘Why do I write? Because I wanna be a great shark too. Another shark. A different shark, in a different part of the ocean. The ocean is vast.’ — Joy Williams

 

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Further

‘Joy Williams, The Art of Fiction No. 223’
Joy Williams @ Wikipedia
Joy Williams @ goodreads
‘Karen Russell on how Joy Williams writes the unspeakable’
‘Our Heroes Simply Write: Joy Williams, Unedited’
Podcast: Joy Williams on Bookworm
‘REMEMBERING ROBERT STONE: JOY WILLIAMS’
Joy Williams page @ Facebook
‘The Mission’, by Joy Williams
‘Some thoughts on Joy Williams
‘Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp’, by Joy Williams
‘Joy Williams is an unsettling genius’
‘Ode to Joy Williams’
Buy ‘The Visiting Privilege’

 

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Extras

Joy Williams reading “George & Susan”

Joy Williams reading her essay ‘Why I Write’

Joy Williams’ “Baba Iaga and the Pelican Child” – An Electric Literature Single Sentence Animation

 

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Joy Williams interviewed by Tao Lin
from Bookslut

 

Tao Lin: In your story, “Yard Boy,” from your first story-collection, Taking Care, and in many stories since, you talk about being enlightened, about seeing things without preconception, which means allowing the possibility that inanimate objects have feelings and thoughts, that everything is relative and arbitrary, and other concepts involving “enlightenment” such as that the physical world is an illusion and that nothing can be “known.” In those worldviews “morals” seem irrelevant, or aren’t addressed, since they require assumptions and those worldviews tend to not want to assume anything. In your nonfiction, though, you seem to have morals, and seem to be “against” certain things like hunting, cruelty against animals, destroying the environment, etc. How do you reconcile that in your life? When you are making choices in your life, like choosing whether or not to pay more money for food or transportation that won’t destroy the earth, what do you think about? Do you more live your life like a work of art (fiction), or like a work of rhetoric (nonfiction) or some other way?

Joy Williams: You can get away with a lot more writing nonfiction (I’m not talking lies as has been the trend but attitude) than you can writing fiction. In a work of rhetoric you can take a stand, make a case, inform and inspire, scream and demean. You can’t be angry in fiction — it’s all about control. You create worlds in order to accept them. You create worlds open to interpretation. Facts have limitations. At the Univ. of Wyoming where I’m in residence for a year, there is this wonderful little geological museum wherein there is THE FLUORESCENT MINERAL ROOM. There are maybe thirty rocks in there sitting quietly on shelves, modest rocks, nice rocks, but nothing lovely or extraordinary about them. But when you flip a switch — Press Switch Here — the room goes dark and the rocks blossom into the most intense and varied colors. They are really expressing… something. Now the explanation for this is helpfully posted on the wall: Certain stimuli, such as ultraviolet light, disturbs the atomic structure of certain minerals. The energy released as the structure returns to normal results in the emission of visible light.

And there you don’t have it. Far better to have a fictional Yard Boy, prone to love and awe, come to his own understandings which he certainly would have had if he had been fortunate enough to find himself in the Fluorescent Mineral Room at the University of Wyoming.

TL: When I read your stories I feel that everything becomes more accurately balanced out and then I feel calmer, I feel “better.” There is an attempt, I feel, in your writing, to not give anything more “importance” or “weight” than anything else, and to not “rule out” anything. It is like how a child sees things — without preconception. Or more accurately, maybe, how a robot or tree would see things — without even the preconception of consciousness. Do you write or read to feel calmer, to feel less scared of death and other mysteries, to feel less “bad”?

JW: No.

TL: You write about nonexistence a lot, about being either not-yet-born or “dead,” and have been focused on this pretty steadily, in your writing, for more than 30 years — speculating on what it actually is (to not exist), making jokes about it, and “trying out” ways to feel and think about it. Has this affected your life in concrete reality, do you think, as opposed to someone who thinks less, and less creatively and originally, about not existing?

JW: Annie Dillard quotes someone who ventured that “the worst part of being dead must be the first night.” The themes you mention are in the new novel I’m working on as well. Back to the non-expressible. I so wish I were smarter! All art deals with the peculiarity, the strangeness of our situation. We do all this stuff — we think, we marvel, we despair, we care — and then we die. That makes no sense. Surely we should be spending our time differently since that is the case, but how? With the injustice, the political stupidity, the destruction of the natural world, it is tempting to believe (in our non-believing) that things are not what they seem, that there is a link between the dead and the unborn that can replenish the void we know awaits each of us and all we love.

TL: What things have made you feel excited in your life?

JW: Excited? Why do you ask?

TL: You said about The Changeling, “That book was just destroyed. It was an awful experience. […] I felt at the time that some of the reviewers wanted me to die. They just wanted me to stop writing. They were saying, ‘We have other writers out there who we have to deal with and all the writers yet unborn, so please go away.’” Your recent novel, The Quick and The Dead, however, received a lot of praise from almost every reviewer and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Why do you think “critics” reacted differently to the two different novels?

JW: The late ’70s were a tough time for women novelists. We were supposed to be feminist, engaged, angry. It was really, weirdly, a very conformist time. (Of course, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon came out around then and she avoided those problems profoundly and beautifully.) The Changeling is about a guilty young drunk named Pearl on an island with feral children. The prose is lushly stark and imaginative, the method magical, even demented. Feminism did not need a guilty drunk! The Quick and the Dead had larger, more charming and annoying characters and a bigger theme. It’s a better book. It was published in 2000, a millennium baby. Maybe people were more willing to contemplate the straits between the living and the dead. Still, the critics didn’t like it that much.

TL: Throughout the ’70s and ’80s there was a term, “K-Mart Realism,” or “Minimalism,” that journalists used for a group of writers you were sometimes mentioned with — Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, Frederick Barthelme, etc. Did — and are — you interested or excited by work from that “group” of writers?

JW: Of the ones you mention, it’s Carver who’s the stand-out, and he very much disliked the term minimalism as it was applied to his own work. The editor Gordon Lish was the maestro of minimalism and under his uncanny pencil, many an ordinary story became a very good one. Minimalism as a productive style can be very affective, alarming and satisfying, but I don’t think there ever was a pure strain of it. For a time, it was just a kettle into which many a strange fish were flung. Now with America’s miniaturization of not irrelevance in the world, it might return to the short story in grim and freshened renewal. Certainly the days of the giddy blowhard are over. I hope.

TL: I feel like your writing has become more concrete and less abstract over time. There are more scenes and more of a narrative, I feel, especially in your last two books, The Quick and the Dead & Honored Guest, than in your first books, specifically State of Grace & The Changeling. I like your writing more with each new book. It seems funnier and calmer now to me, I can picture things easier, the sentences feel to me more interesting like you spent more time selecting each sentence that is allowed in each story. I feel like most writers become more abstract over time, you seem like the exception to me. Do you ever think about this? Why do you think you became
more concrete over time, or do you not think (or have not thought about) that?

JW: A writer is always seeing pitfalls inherent in a skill he thinks he’s already mastered. You write, you change, everything changes. The pressures on language fail to evoke the desired effect. The “gift” you feel you may have undeservedly received can’t be used for everything. The dependable friend has become untrustworthy. Your ear goes, or confidence that the delivering word will appear, erodes. You get sick of fulfilling your characters, your ease with Time evaporates. Endings, beginnings, impossible. Strategies change. It never gets easier, that’s for certain. Abstraction in fiction is supposed to be bad, but it can be just the struck match that illuminates. Much of a writer’s work is to unexpress the expressible as well as the opposite. And the “concrete” is essential to both.

TL: At the end of one of your essays on writing you said, “None of this is what I long to say. I long to say other things. I write stories in my attempt to say them.” Is there mostly just one thing that you long to say, so that you try, in each story, to “say it all,” to express that one thing, or are there different things that you long to say, each requiring a different story?

JW: The conundrum of literature is that it is not supposed to say anything. Often a reader can enjoy a story or novel simply because he can admire the writer’s skill in getting out of it.

In Corinthians there is this passage: Behold, I show you a great mystery: we shall not all sleep but we will all be changed… in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye… This is one of those terrifying Biblical passages, though not as terrifying as many others, that addresses the unspeakable heart of our human situation and commands us to be aware. The best stories, I think, always contain this annunciation of awareness, no matter how cloaked. Emerson said, “No one suspects the days to be gods.” Stories can’t be gods of course. Maybe little godlets.

TL: Do you have an “ideal” that you strive for (some already existing story, novel, movie, or song that you think of) when you write a short story? A novel?

JW: No. The first note must be sounded and why have it be another’s? To name an ideal and then seek to riff it anew is an exercise for writers’ workshops.

TL: What story or novel writers, if any, do you feel are (or were) trying to “get at” the same things you are?

JW: I can tell you who I admire greatly — writers who always move and trouble me — Sebald, Coetzee, Delillo. They are rigorous, merciless novelists of great beauty and integrity.

TL: Do you like to be around people and go to parties and drink alcohol?

JW: Not really. I’m shy.

 

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Book

Joy Williams The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories
Knopf

‘The legendary writer’s first collection in more than ten years—and, finally, the definitive one. A literary event of the highest order.

‘Joy Williams has been celebrated as a master of the short story for four decades, her renown passing as a given from one generation to the next even in the shifting landscape of contemporary writing. And at long last the incredible scope of her singular achievement is put on display: thirty-three stories drawn from three much-lauded collections, and another thirteen appearing here for the first time in book form. Forty-six stories in all, far and away the most comprehensive volume in her long career, showcasing her crisp, elegant prose, her dark wit, and her uncanny ability to illuminate our world through characters and situations that feel at once peculiar and foreign and disturbingly familiar. Virtually all American writers have their favorite Joy Williams stories, as do many readers of all ages, and each one of them is available here.’ — Knopf

 

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Excerpt

The Bridgetender

I am trying to think. Sometimes I catch myself saying just those words and just in my head. It seems I got to start everything in my head with something in my head saying I am trying to think. I remember how it begins but can’t remember how it ends. Even though it’s over now. It don’t seem right that it could be over and me back where I’ve always been not even knowing what it was she gave me or what I should do with it.

Because the bridge is still here and the water and the shack. And though I haven’t been to town since she disappeared, I imagine the town’s still there too. Her fancy car is still here sitting on the beach, though it seems to be fading, sort of like a crummy photograph. It’s a black car but the birds have crapped all over it and it’s white now like the sand. Sometimes it hurts my eyes. The chrome catches the sun. But as I say, sometimes I can’t hardly make it out at all. It ain’t really a car anymore. It wouldn’t take nobody anywhere.

What it is I think is that before she came I knew something was going to happen and now that she’s been, I know it ain’t. She didn’t leave a single thing behind. Not a pair of panties or a stick of gum or nothing. Once she brought over a little round tin of chicken-liver patay. Now I know I’ve never eaten chicken-liver patay so it must be around here somewhere, but I can’t find it. My head’s fuller’n a tick on a dog. Full of blood or something. And my prick lies so tame in my blue jeans, I can’t hardly believe it’s even gone through what it’s been through.

She was like smoke the way she went away. She was like that even when she stayed. She’d cover me up, wrapping herself around me tight, tasting sweet and as cool as an ice cream cone, smelling so good and working at loving me. Then she would just dissolve and I’d fill right up with her like a water glass. I can’t recall it ending, as I say, but I know it’s stopped. Black rain at four in the afternoon like it used to be. Black trees and empty sky. And the Gulf running a dirty green foam where it turns into the pass.

But I can think about it beginning. So. That first morning I come back to the shack to get a bottle of beer and there’s a big brown dog sitting there drinking out of the toilet bowl. He’d drained it. And looked at me as though it was me and not him that had no right being there. Drained it and sat and stared at me, his jaws rolling and dripping at me. Now, I like dogs all right but I could see this one was a bum. In the Panhandle, I had two catch dogs that was something to watch. Them dogs just loved to catch. They was no nonsense dogs. But this canlicker was a bum. Somebody’s pet. A poodle or something. The big kind. Before I got around to giving him a good kick, he pushed the screen door open with his paw and left.

I was so mad. It ruined my beer because I drank it all in one swallow and it was just too hot for that. I got a headache right away. And an ache around my ribs. So I got another beer and drank it real slow, thinking of how I could really cream that dog. I figured I wouldn’t hunt him out. I got better things to do than that, I hope. But I’d coax him along and then push him off the bridge and that would be one sorry dog when he finally dimed out. And I was thinking and figuring how to get that brown dog, not even thinking then how queer it was that there should be any dog at all, because I hadn’t seen a thing for six months around the
bridge or on the beach except wild. And I hadn’t seen another person in that time either and then as soon as I remember this, I see the girl walking along the beach with the dog.

She’s in a bright bikini and long raggedywet hair and I remember how long it had been since I’d seen a girl in a bikini or any girl at all because my wife had left me a long while ago, even then having stopped being a girl in any way you could think of, and went back to living in Lowell, Massachusetts, the place she come from and left just to plague me. Somewhere, in that town, setting on a lawn outside a factory, is or was a chair fit for a giant’s ass. Forty or fifty times bigger and crazier than a proper chair. And she come from that town. And she sold off my dogs to get back to it on a one-way ticket on a bubble-topped Trailways.

I never knew her real well. She wore more clothes, jesus, you’d think she was an Eskimo. Layers and layers of them. I never knew if I got to her or not and she’d be the last to tell me. She never talked about nothing except New England. Everything was better there, she’d say. Corn, roads, and movie houses. The horses ain’t as mean, she’d say. The bread rises better up North. Even the sun, she’d say, is nicer because it sets in a different direction. It don’t fall past the house this way at home, she’d say. I was a young man then and I never cheated. I was a young man and my balls were big as oranges. And I threw it all away, god knows where. She caught my stuff in her underwear and washed it away in the creek.

When I think about what a honey bear I was and how polite and wonderfully whanged and how it was all wasted on a loveless woman… She had a tongue wide and slick as a fried egg. And never used it once. I guess that’s what I was waiting on but I might just as much have hoped for oil in the collards patch. She said she was a respectable woman and claimed to have worked in an office in Boston. But she didn’t have no respect for the man and woman relationship and she didn’t have no brain. She couldn’t bring things together in her head. I’d bring her head together all right if I ever see her again. I’d fold it up for her so she’d be able to carry it in her handbag. Selling the best catch dogs in the State of Florida for a bus ticket.

So. I see the girl in the bright bikini and all I can think of is the old lady. It’d been so long and all I could think of was that witch I once had or maybe never had. I spent all this time here over the water not imagining anything. I just see that when I see the girl. And I got scared. I felt as though I caught myself dying. Like you’d catch yourself doing something stupid.

I walked across the bridge and climbed up into the box and got the binoculars. They belong to the state but they’re mine as long as I leave them here. And, I figure, the girl’s mine as long as she keeps herself in range. She’s walking down the beach, stopping every few yards and squatting down and setting out a stick. She’s got a bathing suit on that’s like two Band-Aids. Promising but not too promising. She had a knife strapped around her waist and wore a big wristwatch. She also had a notebook.

It wore me out watching her. She’d squat down and write something and then spring up again so graceful like she knew someone was watching her and gave the bottoms of her bikini a little flip with her finger. I watched her for a long time, but she didn’t do nothing spectacular. I was real happy just watching a near naked woman move. Every once in a while she’d go into the water and swim out a few hundred yards, that damn dog swimming beside her barking like hell, and each time when she come out it was like that bikini had shrunk a little bit more and she was falling out of it every which way all plump and bubbly white.

I watched her until she got out of sight, around a bend in the beach, and then I started looking at other things. Mess of birds in the mangroves. Mullet boats way offshore. And what I’d later know was the girl’s car parked on the hard sand under some cedars. A weird-looking vehicle. I know right away it’s from Europe or someplace foreign. A mean car shaped like a coffin. But it reminded me of sex too, you know, though I never seen a machine that reminded me of sex before. But that car set me to feeling things, like the girl, that I hadn’t felt maybe never. Though I knew what they were. And it felt so good feeling them.

I finally put up the binoculars. Wiped them off. The glass was getting milky from all the wetness in the air. As a matter of fact, I think they was shot from my never using them, never caring for them at all. Lots of things are like that. Life, you know, it begins to rot if you don’t use it. Everything gets bound or rusted up. Tools especially. Gear. My tool. Ha ha.

It worried me a little about the binoculars since they belong to the state. They could hassle me about them. Like they could about the bridge. Because the bridge sure ain’t being what it’s supposed to be. If a boat ever wanted to come through and I had to wind this devil back I believe it would just fall apart, the whole apparatus, like one of them paste and paper bridges you see blowing up in war movies. But no boats come through anyhow. It just ain’t a proper waterway. The channel needs to be redug or a good hurricane’s gotta come through here and clean everything out. A pretty beach. Good fishing but no boats come and no people either. Something happened here years ago, I heard. A sickness or something. In the water. An attack or something coming in on the tide. Somebody died or got hurt. You know the way these things are. People remember bad news even though they might never have heard it in the first place.

So the state has let it slide. Though you never know when they’ll show up and raise all sorts of hell because things ain’t how they want them. But it was them and not me who built this crazy beach and it was me and not them who saw, on my first day on the job, the sign just above them rotting joists around the crank that says caution when installed proper this sign will not be visible.

Well, it ain’t my concern. And I’ll tell you I never really expect the state to come and hassle me. They know they got a bargain. It takes a special man to put up with living out here. I don’t think anybody will come at all. Though I’d been waiting on this girl. It sure is easy to see that now.

So. After she got out of range, I went back to the shack and took a shower. Goddamn frogs come out of the wood and sat there while I did it. Like to have broke my neck slipping on them. Put on clean clothes and cut my nails. Prettied myself up like a movie idol. Had a beer and fell asleep right in the chair in the middle of the day. Which was unusual. And when I woke up it was practically black out and the girl was there looking at me.

She was feeding Corn Flakes to her dog. Piece by piece. My Corn Flakes. She was so brown from the sun, she was shining. And she was so warm-looking that I started to sweat. And she started right in, hardly saying anything but chatting like we were old pals. Then she come over to me and darn if she didn’t sit on my lap and blow in my ear. God, she was warm. It was like being baked in a biscuit. And chatting all the while. I’d forgotten, you know, it’s a whole new vocabulary with a good woman.

So the first night went by and the sun come out. The dog was still working on his balls over by the sink. And my baby tickled me up with a pink bird’s feather. Bright pink like it come out of a cartoon. A roseate spoonbill feather, she said, for her specialty was birds. Ha ha, I said. Because I knew where her talent was.

But she was a nut on seabirds. She talked about them all the time she was frying up breakfast. Eggs and side meat and pancakes. She made up the best plates of food every day she stayed and we fed each other up. But that first day she entertained me… honey and butter dripping all over. Like I had died and gone somewheres a lot better than heaven.

But when she wasn’t tending to me and making up inventions, she was always going on about them birds. She had a canvas bag she was always toting around and damn if inside there weren’t two dead birds, perfect in every way except for their being dead. She didn’t know what kind they was and she was toting them around until she could find a book that would tell her. And there were little speckled eggs in that bag too, no bigger than my thumbnail, with a hole in them and all the insides gone. And other crap she picked up along the beach. And the knives. Dinky little things. She said they was for predators on land or in the sea but they couldn’t do no real damage, I told her that. Do in a splinter is about all.

What she was doing with them birds was making a study on how they copulate. And what I learned, I’ll tell you, is that them terns are dumb. They don’t know what they’re doing because all they’re really thinking about is making nests and eggs. This is because, the girl said, they don’t have the time. Their hearts beat so fast they don’t live long and their heads are only full of getting food and keeping alive. But I never seen anything sloppier with screwing. No wonder I never noticed them doing it in other springs. It don’t look like nothing at all, not even the big birds, the pelicans and whatever.

But that girl’s big pretty eyes would fill up with tears when she talked about them. She told me to respect them because they live their lives so close to dying.

OK, I said. I understood that.

But it’s the inventions she made up that I can’t quite puzzle out. And she started in on them the first day directly after I lapped up all them pancakes. She never made me pretend to be things I wasn’t. Only things I was. But I believe we went through a hundred changes the days she stayed with me. We didn’t have costumes or nothing naturally but it was like we were playing other people doing things. Though all the time it was us. I was a gangster and she was the governor’s daughter, you know, or I was a bombardier and she was the inside of the plane. Or I was a preacher, maybe Methodist, and she was a babysitter. And even her dog did it because sometimes he was like a whole other object, you know. Or like he became a feeling in the shack and quit being a dog.

She messed up time and place for me. And just with her, I felt I was loving the different women of a thousand different men. We just went on for five days with them inventions and never did the same one twice. She’d go off sometimes in her fancy car, I don’t know where. I’d lie there while she was gone, not even able to move hardly nor sleep neither. Lie there with my eyes open, trying to think what was happening, listening to the sound her car made traveling over the bridge, and it was like the bridge went on for miles, it was the only car I’d heard traveling for so long. There were four silver pipes sticking off the end of that car. I never seen anything like it. I was trying to think, but never once did I think about her not coming back. She always come back.

On the fifth day, I went down with her to the beach. First time I been out of the shack. Hotter than a poor shotgun. No wind. We was walking over the bridge to the beach when she said, This isn’t a drawbridge. It’s a solid piece. There isn’t any grid. And so what do you tend, I’d like to know?

Well, of course it ain’t a drawbridge. Did she think I’d been here for all these years paid by the country, here every day with no vacation and never no real quitting time without knowing that the goddamn thing wasn’t a drawbridge?

I didn’t say nothing but just gave her a look telling her that she should tend to what she knows about and I’ll tend to what I know about.

The beach was full of eggs. She kept steering me around so I wouldn’t step on them. All them eggs cooking in the heat and the birds going crazy over us as we walked along. Diving down and screaming, shitting on our heads. I went down to the water to get away from them. I was still put out with the girl and wasn’t paying her any mind. She was trotting up and down the beach, slaving like a field hand, writing things down in her book. Finally she run right by me and fell in the water. Tried to tease me in. Took off her suit and tossed it in my face. Skin there like the cream in a chocolate eclair. But I paid her no mind. That day was so white my eyes ached. I was floating and felt sick. All that sun, it never bothered me before. She come out and sprinkled water all over me from her hair and even that wasn’t cool. It was hot as the air. I was mad because I felt she was thinking my thoughts weren’t real. But then I said, Come on, I been without loving too long. Because I thought her loving would pick me up. And we went back to the shack, me with my eyes closed and my arms resting on her because it hurt so bad looking out on that day. It ain’t never been that bright here before or since.

So we went back. And I was a lumberjack and she was a dancehall cutie. And I was a big black lake and she was a sailboat coming over me. But that night she and that dog was gone.

There are sharks, I know. I seen them rolling out there. And the bars sometimes are tricky. They change. Fall off one day where they didn’t the day before. But it don’t really seem dangerous here. I just don’t know where she went to. Leaving nothing except that car, which like I say is sort of fading out. Rats building their nests beneath the hood. I hear them in it when I walk close.

So it’s over but I can’t help but feel it’s still going on somewheres. Because it hasn’t seemed to have ended even though it’s stopped. And I don’t know what it was she gave me. Maybe she even took something away. And I don’t really even know if she’s dead and it’s me sitting here in the pilothouse or if I was the one who’s been dead all the while and she’s still going on back there on the Gulf with the birds in the sun.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Scunnard, Hey, Jared! Cool. My Donald Sutherland story isn’t that exciting, but one time back in the early 80s when I was living in NYC, a few other young writers and I organised a birthday dinner for John Ashbery at this swank restaurant on the Upper West Side. So we were having dinner, and at the next table, I noticed that Donald Sutherland was having dinner with his son Kiefer and that it was not a pleasant dinner. They were arguing and glowering at each other. At some point Donald S. looked over and saw John Ashbery, and he was clearly very in awe, jaw dropped and everything. Kiefer, who didn’t seem to know of John Ashbery, got really pissed at his father for being so distracted from their argument, and he threw his glass of water in Donald S.’s face and stormed out. At that point, John Ashbery noticed Donald Sutherland sitting there, and he was clearly in awe, jaw dropped and everything. And Ashbery and Sutherland, with water all over his face and shirt, just sat there staring at each other in awe for a moment until Donald S. stood up, and started to leave. As he did, he said loudly to John A., referring to his face and shirt, ‘Sorry I’m so pathetic.’ And John Ashbery said back to him, ‘Not a problem, so am I’. ** David Ehrenstein, He’s cool. Granted I haven’t watched ‘Fellini’s Casanova’ in ages, but I remember really digging it. I might have been on acid or something though. ** Bill, Hi, B. The protests were down a notch in intensity, so it was relatively only mildly raucous. ‘Nocturama’ is nice, very odd. ** Dominik, Hi, D! My back is not quite normal, no, but it’s edging towards normalcy, I think, I hope. No, your cough came back full force? Yes, antibiotics, do it, go for it. You shouldn’t have to deal with that coughing shit. Cool you hate parties too. Yeah, I just feel extremely uncomfortable at them. I’m much better one on one. All that small talk and randomness just doesn’t suit my personality or something. Plus I don’t like alcohol, but, even back when I did, I still got bored and angsty at parties. The Saturday’s protest was way down in intensity. The mostly far right infiltrators who caused all the violence and destruction either didn’t show up or were probably arrested before they reached the city center. Yes, I was watching on TV last night the protests there where you are. They looked intense, as intense as ours if not even more so. It seems good, though, in theory, or at based on the little I know about your country’s awful government, or maybe I’m wrong? Work-filled weekend, it was, yes. Seemingly by the end of next weekend we will have turned in the full script and will then hopefully have something of a break for about two weeks. Snowing! Aw, I do envy you. I guess there’s still a chance we’ll get snow here, however unlikely. It has been cold enough. You have a great, great week, and definitely do what you must to kill that cough. ** Nick Toti, Hi, Nick! How are you? Good to see you, man! Oh, wow, thanks a lot for writing that thing about ‘PGL’ for your Hammer to Nail list. That’s awesome. Everyone, The fine and eminent filmmaker and more Nick Toti has made a “best of the year” list for the Hammer to Nail site, and, sorry to toot my own horn, but ‘PGL’ gets some props on it, and, plus, it’s a chewy, enlightening read in general, so read it, yes? I think the way I found out about that Kobek book about XXXTENTACION was via a post you did on Facebook. How odd indeed. Must read, clearly. Thanks a lot, man! ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Hm, I don’t know. About that connection or not. Great your film will get a public screening! Sounds sweet: the psych screening. Will you list the videos you showed somewhere?And a punk and post-punk sequel sounds tasty, obviously. Everyone, Here’s the Gay City News version of Steve Erickson’s 2018 film top 10 list, which I guess means a somewhat more gay version? ** Kewatyne, I watched all the ‘Hunger Games’ movies on plane flights, and I remember that time consequently passed, which was nice. Things are fairly chillin’ here, I think. I don’t know why ‘evil Chevy Chase’ sounds promising, but it does! It goes fine here, just workin’ on stuff, no big. ** Misanthrope, Dude has definitely done some movie role stooping in return for more than his usual fee at less than his usual commitment, but who hasn’t? Well, yeah, there are the now-dead former bad boys. Quite a few in my experience. I wasn’t going to mention them. All you can do is be your usual pillar of virtue around the lad and hope that deep down he’s learning by viewing. Whatcha doing for Xmas itself? ** Right. It’s not that uncommon that I suddenly decide to use the blog to spotlight the great, great Joy Williams, and it has happened again! Enjoy the spoils should they seem like spoils to you. See you tomorrow.