December 26, 2000

New movie genre: Reclusive authors anonymous

By ROGER ANDERSON Scripps Howard News Service

A recent spate of movies should serve to remind us that, believe it or not, there are great artists who don't want to be the subject of People magazine cover stories.

Two such artists are the legendary writers Cormac McCarthy and J.D. Salinger. Do you know how many interviews these famous scribes have granted between the two of them? The answer is zero.

McCarthy was that all too familiar phenomenon, a literary novelist whom critics praised till they were blue in the face but who never experienced a lick of commercial success. This was hardly surprising, given that the books he wrote ("Blood Meridian," "Child of God," "Outer Dark" and several others) are unbelievably grim affairs in which rural Americans become involved in degrading circumstances beyond their control.

Then, in 1992, McCarthy's  “All the Pretty Horses" garnered him a National Book Award, and suddenly he was rolling in fame.

The award was, of course, his cue to be lionized like crazy in the manner of such publicity-hound scribblers as Norman Mailer and/or Tom Wolfe and others who never miss an opportunity to hold forth on weighty matters in the pages of the nearest periodical. But McCarthy missed his cue, instead maintaining a policy of sitting still for no interviews whatsoever.

Someone did, however, prevail upon him to sell the movie rights to "Horses," which is now on screens as directed by Billy Bob Thornton and with Matt Damon in the starring role.

Another film reminding us that top-flight literature produces its share of shrinking violets is "Finding Forrester," with Sean Connery as a reclusive author.

No one could read a blurb for this movie without jumping to the probably very reasonable conclusion that it's a spinoff on the life of Salinger, famous for writing "Catcher In the Rye," which inspired whole city blocks full of anti-social boys to grow up to be anti-social men. Salinger, as all the world knows, has spent several decades being churlish enough to refuse to cooperate with reporters or publicists or, for that matter, moviemakers in the prosecution of their trades.

In recent years he's learned, presumably, what such reticence gets you: pilloried in unauthorized bios and memoirs written by former intimates and other people who don't mind sullying a literary icon who doesn't deign to reply.

The one highly sequestered author who currently is the subject of a movie but who didn't intentionally make himself unavailable to reviewers and the public is that fun French nobleman, the Marquis de Sade.

Currently the central character in the movie "Quills," Sade, whose deviant proclivities didn't endear him to the bluenose authorities of his time, spent a good many of his prime years in the Parisian hoosegow. There, instead of pressing license plates, he spent most of his time writing and smuggling out of prison whole volumes of the most scurrilous and demented literary pornography ever known.

All that we're missing presently in terms of movies about authors who steer clear of the limelight is one about Thomas Pynchon, who wrote "Gravity's Rainbow" and who has never once offered a few candid, or, for that matter, uncandid remarks to any journalist.

Legend has it that Pynchon, the literary master of paranoia, once was run to ground by Norman Mailer, who approached the house where Pynchon happened to be staying in hopes of having a heart-to-heart with him. The story goes that Pynchon, upon seeing the author of “The Naked and the Dead" coming up the walk, jumped out of a back window to avoid meeting him.

No doubt this is an apocryphal tale, but wouldn't it make a nifty scene for some movie?

Roger Anderson is arts and entertainment editor at Scripps Howard News Service.

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