Let me tell you about my day

Yesterday, I received an email that my inter-library loan request for a book which I didn't think would come actually arrived! I was excited, and headed down to the San Francisco Public Library later in the day. Little did I know that this email would set off a chain of events . . . .

The book in question was Jacques Arnaut (or Jacques Arnaut et la Somme Romanesque as it is sometimes listed) by Leon Bopp, a French novelist, literary critic, and philosopher born in 1897. I had come across the book while searching through Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. My search of the keywords "Louise Brooks" revealed that the actress was mentioned in this French-language work published by Gallimard in 1933.

I had blogged about this book and my discovery of its Brooks' connection back on January 22. And subsequently, I put in an inter-library loan request in hope of borrowing the title. According to a search of WorldCat, there were a few copies (7 to be exact) in the United States. There are barely twice that number listed in libraries around the world. Though I don't read French, I wanted to try and find the reference to Brooks, and perhaps determine the context of what is a rather early literary reference to the actress.

Well, the book arrived - or rather, a facsimile of the book arrived. I guess it really is rare. Wow.

What I took home with me was a bound hardback copy of a photocopy of Bopp's 1933 book. The item I received came from the library of a major American university; and I wonder what happened to the original. I am not complaining about receiving a facsimile. And I am really, really, really glad to be able to borrow books via ILL and to examine the text of this elusive title. Here is a peak inside this curious sub-species of printed publication.

Bopp's Jacques Arnaut is more than 600 pages long. Originally, I thought it was a short story collection. But that turns out not to be true. Rather, it is a long work of fiction composed of many short and shorter passages. There don't see to be any chapters. From what I have been able to gleam from the internet, the book was considered an experimental novel at the time and it's story was concerned with the life of an artist. Who knows? Perhaps it is some early kind-of metafictional mash-up of James Joyce's A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man with Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. Proto Jorge Luis Borges anyone?

I don't read French, so it is going to be at least a few days before I am able to visually skim the entire book and spot the reference to the actress - which reads in part, "comme ceux de Louise Brooks." That snippet is all that I got from the Gallica database. On first glance, I did notice a character named Lola. That's all I can say at this time.

But let me tell you about my day . . . libraries are wonderful places. Especially the San Francisco Public Library. It is one of my favorite places in The City. There is still so much to be discovered in libraries - so much beautiful information. So many unexpected connections.

For example, one of the women working at the information counter where I picked-up my facsimile book was none other than Penelope Houston. No, not Penelope Houston the well known film writer and editor of Sight & Sound (who as such had her own connections to Louise Brooks), but Penelope Houston the singer / songwriter for The Avengers, the seminal 1970's San Francisco punk band. How cool. I like her recordings. 

Libraries are indeed wonderful places filled with unexpected connections . . . . However, the best was still to come. 

Browsing the CD and DVD room, I found a few things to borrow including Julian Schnabel's filmed performance of Lou Reed's Berlin, a video of the Theater Music of Brecht & Weill with Lotte Lenya and Gisela May, and Rufus Wainwright's tribute to Judy Garland - which I am enjoying as I write this; Wainwright's interpretation of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" as performed here with his late mother, Kate McGarrigle, is lovely. Afterwords, I headed on over to the library bookstore / gift shop.

I was browsing their selection of donated, mostly second-hand books when I noticed someone enter and begin to look over the cart of new arrivals. It was none other than the San Francisco Poet Laureate Jack Hirschman.

I had been meaning to get in touch with this acclaimed writer because, as I explained after approaching him, I had recently come across his name in a 1962 newspaper article about a screening of Pandora's Box in Monterey, California. According to my research, this was the first time the film had been shown anywhere in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, or Northern California.

I wasn't sure what Hirschman, a poet and translator (I cherish his 1965 Artaud Anthology from City Lights Books) would have been doing at a screening for what was then a somewhat obscure foreign silent film at a small college south of San Francisco. Hirschman was described in one article I found about the event as a "film authority" who would be joining the film critic Pauline Kael and the film curator James Card (who brought the print of Pandora's Box from George Eastman House) in a series of formal and informal discussions. Perhaps there was another Jack Hirschman in the world?

When I asked Hirschman if he had attended this 1962 screening in Monterey, he immediately interjected in his tender singular raspy voice, "ah, Louise Brooks."

"Yes, I was there," Hirschman explained, "along with Pauline Kael." The poet remembered seeing Pandora's Box nearly 50 years ago, and said that the film and Brooks were a favorite of those in attendance.

We chatted a bit more - about the actress, poetry readings (I had put on an event with him a few years back - and took the snapshot of the poet pictured here), the actress and model and muse Tina Modoti, and  the filmmaker Bruce Conner (who not only aspired as a child to take dance lessons with Louise Brooks but also years later took photographs of Penelope Houston during her punk days). And, we spoke briefly about Wichita, Kansas and Detroit, Michigan. Hirschman described himself as a fan of the Detroit Tigers, and I grew in Motor City suburbia. . . .ah, unexpected connections.

An email alert just popped up. I got a message from the San Francisco Public Library.  Some microfilm I requested just came in. There are bunch of rolls of microfilm of the San Jose Mercury Herald, Lodi Sentinel, and Delta News (from Sacramento County) awaiting me. I will head to the library tomorrow to look at what arrived. Hopefully, more beautiful information will be found.

New Louise Brooks book coming in Spring

There is a new Louise Brooks book on the horizon! 

It's called LULU, and its by longtime Louise Brooks Society member and Hollywood writer / screenwriter Samuel Bernstein. The author describes the book as a non-fiction novel, and it centers on the actress and the time around the making of Pandora's Box.The book is due out from Walford Press in the Spring of 2010. There is a bit more info from the publisher here.

I have an advance copy, and am looking forward to reading it.

I've been in email contact with Samuel for a number of years. He, like most all of us, is a sincere and longtime fan of Louise Brooks.

Just who is Samuel Bernstein? "Born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1970, Samuel Bernstein is the award-winning author of Mr. Confidential, winner of a 2008 Hermes Award for Non-Fiction, and which is now being adapted into a stage musical. He is the writer and producer of the Paramount and Showtime film Bobbie's Girl and the multi-festival award-winning Silent Lies, in addition to writing for various television programmes. He is the winner of a Stonewall Book Award from the American Library Association for his work on Uncommon Heroes." Check out his IMDb entry or his website for his various projects at Babyhead Productions.

re: Michel Mohrt's "Un Soir, A Londres"

In a recent blog post discussing some recently uncovered references to Louise Brooks in modern French fiction, I mentioned the now elderly writer Michel Mohrt. From what I discovered through a search of Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Mohrt mentioned Louise Brooks in a couple of books.

I put in a request for those books, and one arrived via inter-library loan just the other day. It was Mohrt's 1991 novel Un Soir, à Londres. Though I don't read French, I paged through the novel and found the page which includes the reference to the actress. Here it is.

I would certainy appreciate it if any French speaking Louise Brooks fans could provide a quick translation into English of the sentences around the reference to the actress. The search goes on . . . .

Pandora's Box screens in upstate New York

Pandora's Box, starring Louise Brooks, will be shown on January 30, 2010 at the Butterfield Library in Cold Spring, New York. The program will start at 7 pm and will be accompanied by the performance of a live, original musical score by Cary Brown.

The Putnam County News and Recorder ran a small item about the event. Futher details may be found on the Butterfield Library website.

J.D. Salinger & Louise Brooks

J.D. Salinger, the novelist and short story writer and the author of Catcher in the Rye, has died at the age of 91. Today, the New York Times ran a long obit about this equally renown and reclusive author.

I am sure that Salinger never met Louise Brooks (though I can imagine them somehow  encountering one another in NYC in the late 1940s or early 1950s), nor is it known if the author was especially aware of the actress. However, they did have something in common.They both had the same editor, William Shawn.

A good deal of Salinger's short fiction appeared in the New Yorker* magazine, where Shawn was its legendary editor. Salinger considered Shawn a good friend, and even went so far as to dedicate one of his works to Shawn. Shawn also edited and wrote the introduction to the first edition of Louise Brooks' own book, Lulu in Hollywood.

Besides a common friend, Salinger and Brooks also shared something deeper - a psychological impulse which shaped their lives. In 2008, Forbes.com ran interview with Kevin Bazzana, author of Lost Genius, a biography of the eccentric Hungarian pianist Ervin Nyiregyház. A child prodigy, Nyiregyház was acclaimed on two continents and championed by the likes of Bela Lugosi and Arnold Schoenberg before giving up performing in public.

In the interview, Bazzana is asked "Are there historical figures in music, or in the other arts, who, by virtue of their combination of talent and lack of success, might be compared to Nyiregyházi?" The biographer answered with something I thought quite interesting.

"In the conclusion of the book, I wrote: 'The spectacularly gifted but psychologically cursed artist who seems reluctant to practice his art is a type uncommon but not unknown.'

When I wrote this, I was thinking of artists like the writer J. D. Salinger, the conductor Carlos Kleiber, the pianist Glenn Gould, the actors Louise Brooks and Marlon Brando, the chess master Bobby Fischer. These are artists of incredible talent and individuality, yet the price of their particular gift was the kind of psychology that seemed not to permit them to enjoy an ordinary career and the high productivity that their fans would have liked.

Salinger simply couldn't stand being famous, and so refused to be a public figure any longer, even to the point of refusing to publish anything. Kleiber is widely considered the greatest conductor of our time, yet his perfectionism made it scarcely possible for him to conduct; his output was tiny, highly selective--yet of unrivaled quality. Gould had so many personal and musical hang-ups about live performance that he quit the concert scene entirely and retreated to the recording studio. Brooks and Brando simply couldn't stomach what was required to have a Hollywood career; you are left with the irony of someone of Brando's talent and individuality being so convinced of the triviality of what he does that he's scarcely willing to do it anymore! And Fischer, well …

Some of these figures had huge success; some had limited success; some had success and then failure. But what they all had in common was a particular kind of gift that was incompatible with the normal professional exercise of that gift.

It's a tragedy, really, because those artists with that particular kind of career-sabotaging psychology are often the greatest and most individual of all. We can only sigh heavily, and accept them as they are and be grateful for what little of them we have."

* The New Yorker also published Kenneth Tynan's celebrated essay about Louise Brooks, "The Girl in the Black Helmet."

Louise Brooks on the cover of new book

Because she passed away 25 years ago, and hadn't appeared in a film in more than 70 years, its a bit curious that Louise Brooks continues to fascinate. And, she continues to adorn the covers of new books.

Just out from Berghahn Books is The Concise Cinegraph, edited by Hans-Michael Bock & Tim Bergfelder. Its an expensive, information packed, dense, 575 page, nearly 3 pound  encyclopedia of German cinema now in English translation. It's also an outstanding resource. In his forward, film historian Kevin Brownlow laments the fact that this book hadn't been translated and published earlier at the time he was working on his outstanding documentary, Cinema Europe.

The American-born Louise Brooks is depicted on the cover, as is the Austrian-born director G.W. Pabst. One might ask, "what are they doing on the cover of a German film encyclopedia?" The short answer, of course, is that Brooks and Pabst made two films together in Germany, Pandora's Box and The Diary of a Lost Girl. Both were released in 1929. Each also receives an entry in the book, with Pabst's being more substantial. Pabst is a far more significant figure, and is widely considered one of the great directors (along with Murnau and Lang) working in Germany during the interwar period.

The long answer lies in the scope of the series to which this book belongs. The Concise Cinegraph is volume 1 in Film Europa: German Cinema in an International Context. It's description reads, "German cinema is normally seen as a distinct form, but this new series emphasizes connections, influences, and exchanges of German cinema across national borders, as well as its links with other media and art forms. Individual titles present traditional historical research (archival work, industry studies) as well as new critical approaches in film and media studies (theories of the transnational), with a special emphasis on the continuities associated with popular traditions and local perspectives."

Together, the work of Brooks and Pabst certainly does represent "connections, influences, and exchanges of German cinema across national borders." And is thus a fitting cover.

In her entry, the Kansas-born Brooks is described as"one of Weimar cinema's most recognisable icons." I agree. However, I have a tiny quibble with a few details in the entry.

The entry states, "First performing in public alongside her mother at fairgrounds in Kansas, Brooks was by 1922 a member of the Denishawn Dancers, supporting Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn throughout their East Coast appearances."

If by "alongside her mother" the editors mean to imply that they danced together, that's not true. According to the biography by Barry Paris, Brooks' mother only accompanied her child on piano at dance recitals and performances around the state. As well, Brooks later tour with the Denishawn Dance Company rambled not only up and down the East Coast (as the entry states), but the American South, Midwest, and Far West. Their tours went as far west as Texas and Colorado, and even ventured into Canada. Otherwise, the entry is right on and a worthwhile summation of Brooks life and career.

The Concise Cinegraph is an exceptional resource which covers German cinema from its beginnings through today. It's also a work anyone serious interested in the subject will want to own. The Concise Cinegraph is available on amazon.com.