Call If You Need Me (24 page)

So all of the stories here have been reworked, to a greater or lesser degree; and they are somewhat different now than the original versions published either in magazines or in
Furious Seasons
. I see this as an instance in which I am in the happy position of being able to make the stories better than they were.
At least, God knows, I
hope
they’re better. I think so anyway. But, truly, I’ve seldom seen a piece of prose, or a poem—my own or anyone else’s—that couldn’t be improved upon if it were left alone for a time.

I’m grateful to Noel Young for giving me the opportunity, and the initiative, to look at the work once more and see what could be done with it.

In early September 1982, the director Michael Cimino called to ask if I would be willing to rework a screenplay on the life of Dostoevsky. After we talked and I’d expressed interest, we decided to talk further, once the business side of things had been worked out. His agent contacted my agent, an agreement was made, and then Cimino and I arranged to meet for dinner in New York. At the time I was teaching at Syracuse University and the semester was under way. I was also writing the last story for
Cathedral
, and editing and arranging the work that would go into
Fires
. I didn’t know where I was going to find the time to work on a screenplay, but I’d decided it was something I wanted to do.

I called Tess Gallagher, who was spending that fall out in Port Angeles, Washington. She was on leave from her teaching duties at Syracuse so she could help attend to her father, who was dying of lung cancer. I asked if she wanted to work with me. This project had to be done in a hurry and I knew I wouldn’t have time to do research or reread the novels. Tess agreed to help. She would research and write new scenes where necessary and edit what I’d done. In general she would co-rewrite with me—or, as it turned out, cowrite an entirely new script.

Cimino and I met for dinner at Paul and Jimmy’s, an Italian restaurant near Gramercy Park. After dinner, we got down to business: Dostoevsky. Cimino said he wanted to make a movie about a great writer. In his opinion, it hadn’t been done before. He cited
Doctor Zhivago
as an example of what he didn’t want to do. As we talked about the movie, I recalled that Zhivago, the writer-physician, is seen only once in the film trying to write
something. It is winter, the height of the Bolshevik civil war, and Zhivago and Lara, his mistress, are hiding out in an isolated
dacha
. (In case anyone has forgotten, Omar Sharif and Julie Christie played these roles in the film.) There is a scene with Zhivago at a desk, wearing woolen gloves against the cold, trying to write a poem. The camera moves in for a big close-up on the poem. Granted, the writing of poetry or fiction is not in itself exactly show-stopping material. Cimino wanted to keep Dostoevsky the novelist visible throughout. His idea was that the dramatic, often melodramatic, circumstances of Dostoevsky’s life, played out against the obsessive composition of the novels, offered a wonderful opportunity for a movie.

Carlo Ponti, who wanted to produce the Dostoevsky film, had already made a movie in Russia in the early 1970s called
Sunflower
starring his wife, Sophia Loren, and Marcello Mastroianni. Ponti was friendly with Soviet filmmakers and had friends among some members of the political leadership. As a result, Cimino hoped to be able to shoot on location in Russia, including Siberia and other areas normally closed to westerners.

I was thinking about the script when I asked if the Russians would want to exercise censorship of any sort. Cimino said no, they intended to be cooperative in this matter. In the first place, it was the centennial year of Dostoevsky’s death. (Actually that was 1981.) They were hoping for a big film down the road to celebrate the man and his work. There’d be no censorship. The film wouldn’t even be processed in Russian film laboratories; instead, each day’s “rushes” would be sent out to France.

At this point Cimino took out the script, a thick manuscript in a black folder, and put it on the table. I picked it up and flipped through some pages, reading a few lines to get an idea of it. Even dipping into it like that, I could tell at once this wasn’t a happy prospect. “Is there a story line here?” I asked. “Does it have a dramatic narrative?” Cimino shook his head. “That’s one of its problems. But I think there’s a spiritual development to it.” He said that and didn’t bat an eye. I was impressed. I could go on
that, but what I’d been scanning hardly seemed like English, and it wasn’t just that there were a lot of Russian names. “Maybe after you’ve read it you’ll just want to throw up your hands and forget it,” Cimino said. The script had a strange look to it—dismayingly long passages of narrative occasionally interspersed with dialogue. I’d never seen a film script, but this didn’t even vaguely resemble my idea of such a work. But knowing, as he did, that I’d never seen one before, polished or otherwise (I’d warned him beforehand), Cimino had brought one along for me so that I would have a clear idea of the correct form. (When I looked at the sample screenplay he’d brought along, I had to ask what the letters INT. and EXT. stood for. “Interior” and “exterior,” he explained. V.O. and OS.? “Voice-over” and “offscreen.”) I went back up to Syracuse the next day and began work.

Spiritual development or not, the work turned out to be inconsistent with everything I knew about Dostoevsky’s life. I was baffled and didn’t know where to start. It did cross my mind that it might be better if I simply “threw up my hands.” Working night and day, with time away from it only long enough to meet my classes, I roughed out a long savage draft which I immediately sent to Tess. Meanwhile, in preparation, she had read all the biographies she could get her hands on, as well as
Crime and Punishment, The Gambler, The House of the Dead
, and
The Diary of Polina Suslova
. She went to work, adding many new scenes and expanding everywhere. Then she copied the work and sent it back to me. I went to work on it again. It was retyped once more, and again it went back to Tess who did still more work. I remember her telephone calls at odd hours to talk about Dostoevsky. Now and again she read me a scene she had just pulled out of the typewriter. The script came back to me and once more I worked on it. It was typed again and then again. By this time it was late November and the script was 220 pages long—prohibitive, that’s the only word for it. (An average screenplay falls somewhere between 90 and 110 pages; a rough estimate for gauging the length of a film is a page a minute. And
Cimino is not one to speed up the process. His screenplay for
Heaven’s Gate
was 140 pages in length; the resulting film was nearly four hours long.)

Despite everything that had been going on in our respective lives, Tess and I had been working like crazy on the script during this period. “I wish it had come at any time but this,” she told me during one of our many phone conversations. But she was excited about it, too. “Just imagine,” she said once. “Dostoevsky! We’re making him
live
again.” Her own father was losing his battle with cancer, and I was aware of the background of daily loss she worked against. “Dostoevsky gives me courage in all this,” she said to me. “And he lets me cry, too.”

At the end of November, I sent the completed script to Cimino. Would anyone besides Tess and me feel it was as good as we thought? However, Cimino called at once to tell me how pleased and surprised he was with what had happened. Despite its length—he’d never seen a screenplay as long as our
Dostoevsky
—he was immensely happy with the result.

I don’t know when or even if the screenplay will ever be turned into a movie. Cimino tells me that Carlo Ponti has moved from Los Angeles, presumably back to Europe, has dropped out of sight and is not making any efforts on behalf of producing the script. Cimino has put the 220-page screenplay aside and moved on to other projects.

When I was invited to join the “Back-to-Back Series” I thought it might prove interesting if we could extract some material from the screenplay and present it in a coherent fashion. We excerpted material from the early pages of the script as St. Petersburg is torn by revolution and Dostoevsky is visiting a young writer in the mental ward of a hospital. Then we move to the time just after Dostoevsky’s arrest and confinement on charges of treason. Along with several coconspirators, he faced a death sentence. (Interestingly enough, Vladimir Nabokov’s grandfather was one of the judges in the case.) Then we skip and pick up the story just after Dostoevsky’s sentence has been
commuted and he’s in prison awaiting deportation to Siberia.

After the scenes in Siberia, we jump ahead and pick up the narrative ten years later, after Dostoevsky’s return to St. Petersburg and his involvement with Polina Suslova, the woman Dostoevsky drew on to create the heroine for
The Gambler
.

The last section deals with Dostoevsky and Anna Grigoryevna, the woman who became his second wife. (His first died of tuberculosis two years after his return from Siberia to St. Petersburg.) Anna went to work for Dostoevsky as a stenographer, fell in love with him, and married him. She saw to it that Dostoevsky’s last years, the period of
The Possessed
and
The Brothers Karamazov
, were years of peace and tranquility.

Every poem I’ve written has been, for me, an occasion of the first order. So much so, I believe, that I can remember the emotional circumstances that were at work when I wrote the poem, my physical surroundings, even what the weather was like. If pressed, I think I could come close to recalling the day of the week. At least, in most instances, I can remember whether the poems were written during the week or on a weekend. Most certainly I can remember the particular time of day I wrote them—morning, midday, afternoon or, once in a great while, late at night. This kind of recall is not true of the short fiction I write, especially the stories I wrote early in my career. When I look back at my first book of stories, for example, I have to glance over the copyright dates to even get a fix on the year the stories were published, and from that I can guess—give or take a year or two—when they must have been written. It’s only in a few isolated instances that I can recall anything in particular, or out of the ordinary, about when I wrote them, let alone what I was feeling at the time I did so.

I don’t know why it is that I recall so clearly the time and circumstances surrounding each poem, yet don’t recall much about the composition of these stories. I think partly it has to do with the fact that, in truth, I feel the poems are closer to me, more special, more of a gift received than my other work, even though I know, for sure, that the stories are no less a gift. It could be that I put a more intimate value finally on the poems than I do the stories.

My poems are of course not literally true—the events didn’t
actually happen, or at least the stuff in the poems didn’t happen in the way I say it does. But, like most of my fiction, there is an autobiographical element to the poems. Something resembling what happens in them did happen to me at some time or another, and the memory stayed with me until it found expression. Or often what is being described in the poem was to some degree a reflection of my state of mind at the time of writing it. I suppose in a large way then the poems
are
more personal than my stories and hence more “revealing.”

In poetry, my own or someone else’s, I like narrative. A poem doesn’t have to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end, but for me it has to keep moving, it has to step lively, it has to spark. It may move in any direction at all—back in time, far into the future, or it may veer off onto some overgrown trail. It may even cease to be earthbound and go out seeking habitation with the stars. It might speak in a voice from beyond the grave or travel with salmon, wild geese, or locusts. But it isn’t static. It
moves
. It moves and though it may have mysterious elements at work in it, its development is intrinsic, one thing suggesting something else. It shines—or at any rate I hope it shines.

Each of my poems that the editor has seen fit to include in this anthology touches upon a real-life concern or situation that pressed upon my life with some degree of urgency when that particular poem was written. To that degree I suppose the poems could be called narrative or story poems for they are always
about
something. They have a “subject.” One of the things each one is “about” is what I thought and felt at the time I wrote it. Each poem preserves a specific moment in time; and when I look at one I can see the frame of mind I was in at the time I wrote it. Reading my poems now, I am in a very real sense looking back over a rough, but true map of my past. So in a way they are helping hold together my life, and I like that idea.

“Bobber,” the oldest poem in the group, was written one fine June morning in a motel room in Cheyenne, Wyoming, on my way from Berkeley to Rock Island, Illinois. A year and a half later,
in the fall of 1969, I was living in Ben Lomond, California, a few miles north of Santa Cruz, and it was there I wrote “Prosser.” I woke up one morning thinking about my father. He’d been dead for two years, but had appeared that night in the margins of a dream I’d had. I tried to pin something down from the dream, but couldn’t. But that morning I began to think about him and began to recall some hunting trips we’d made together. Then I clearly remembered the wheat fields we’d hunted over together, and I recalled the town of Prosser, a little place where we often stopped for something to eat in the evening once we’d finished hunting. It was the first town we came to after we left the wheat field country, and I suddenly remembered how the lights would appear to us at night, just as they do in the poem. I wrote it quickly and, seemingly, effortlessly. (This may be one of the reasons I’m especially fond of this poem. But if I were ever asked which is the favorite of any poem I’ve written, this one would be it.) A few days later that same week I wrote the poem “Your Dog Dies.” That one, too, came quickly and didn’t seem to require much revision.