The Book of Illusions

  A narrator spoke over the action, but I was too immersed in the scene to catch everything he said. Something about Hector’s mysterious exit from the film business, I think, and the fact that he was considered to have been the last of the significant two-reel comedians. By the 1920s, the most successful and innovative clowns had already moved into full-length features, and the quality of short comic films had suffered a drastic decline. Hector Mann did not add anything new to the genre, the narrator said, but he was acknowledged as a talented gagman with exceptional body control, a notable latecomer who might have gone on to achieve important work if his career hadn’t ended so abruptly. At that point the scene ended, and I started listening more closely to the narrator’s comments. A succession of still photographs of several dozen comic actors rolled across the screen, and the voice lamented the loss of so many films from the silent era. Once sound entered the movies, silent films had been left to rot in vaults, had been destroyed by fires, had been carted away as trash, and hundreds of performances had disappeared forever. But all hope was not dead, the voice added. Old films occasionally turned up, and a number of remarkable discoveries had been made in recent years. Consider the case of Hector Mann, it said. Until 1981, only three of his films had been available anywhere in the world. Vestiges of the other nine were buried in an assortment of secondary materials—press reports, contemporary reviews, production stills, synopses—but the films themselves were presumed to be lost. Then, in December of that year, an anonymous package was delivered to the offices of the Cinémathèque Française in Paris. Apparently mailed from somewhere in central Los Angeles, it contained a nearly pristine copy of Jumping Jacks, the seventh of Hector Mann’s twelve films. At irregular intervals over the next three years, eight similar packages were sent to major film archives around the world: the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the British Film Institute in London, Eastman House in Rochester, the American Film Institute in Washington, the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, and again to the Cinémathèque in Paris. By 1984, Hector Mann’s entire output had been dispersed among these six organizations. Each package had emanated from a different city, traveling from places as remote from one another as Cleveland and San Diego, Philadelphia and Austin, New Orleans and Seattle, and because there was never any letter or message included with the films, it was impossible to identify the donor or even to form a hypothesis about who he was or where he might have lived. Another mystery had been added to the life and career of the enigmatic Hector Mann, the narrator said, but a great service had been done, and the film community was grateful.

  I wasn’t attracted to mysteries or enigmas, but as I sat there watching the final credits of the program, it occurred to me that I might want to see those films. There were twelve of them scattered among six different cities in Europe and the United States, and in order to see them all, a person would have to give up a significant chunk of his time. No less than several weeks, I imagined, but perhaps as long as a month or a month and a half. At that point, the last thing I would have predicted was that I would wind up writing a book about Hector Mann. I was just looking for something to do, something to keep me occupied in a harmless sort of way until I was ready to return to work. I had spent close to half a year watching myself go to the dogs, and I knew that if I let it go on any longer, I was going to die. It didn’t matter what the project was or what I hoped to get out of it. Any choice would have been arbitrary by then, but that night an idea had presented itself to me, and on the strength of two minutes of film and one short laugh, I chose to wander around the world looking at silent comedies.

  I wasn’t a film person. I had started teaching literature as a graduate student in my mid-twenties, and since then all my work had been connected to books, language, the written word. I had translated a number of European poets (Lorca, Éluard, Leopardi, Michaux), had written reviews for magazines and newspapers, and had published two books of criticism. The first one, Voices in the War Zone, was a study of politics and literature that examined the work of Hamsun, Céline, and Pound in relation to their pro-Fascist activities during World War II. The second one, The Road to Abyssinia, was a book about writers who had given up writing, a meditation on silence. Rimbaud, Dashiell Hammett, Laura Riding, J. D. Salinger, and others—poets and novelists of uncommon brilliance who, for one reason or another, had stopped. When Helen and the boys were killed, I had been planning to write a new book about Stendhal. It wasn’t that I had anything against the movies, but they had never been very important to me, and not once in more than fifteen years of teaching and writing had I felt the urge to talk about them. I liked them in the way that everyone else did—as diversions, as animated wallpaper, as fluff. No matter how beautiful or hypnotic the images sometimes were, they never satisfied me as powerfully as words did. Too much was given, I felt, not enough was left to the viewer’s imagination, and the paradox was that the closer movies came to simulating reality, the worse they failed at representing the world—which is in us as much as it is around us. That was why I had always instinctively preferred black-and-white pictures to color pictures, silent films to talkies. Cinema was a visual language, a way of telling stories by projecting images onto a two-dimensional screen. The addition of sound and color had created the illusion of a third dimension, but at the same time it had robbed the images of their purity. They no longer had to do all the work, and instead of turning film into the perfect hybrid medium, the best of all possible worlds, sound and color had weakened the language they were supposed to enhance. That night, as I watched Hector and the other comedians go through their paces in my Vermont living room, it struck me that I was witnessing a dead art, a wholly defunct genre that would never be practiced again. And yet, for all the changes that had occurred since then, their work was as fresh and invigorating as it had been when it was first shown. That was because they had understood the language they were speaking. They had invented a syntax of the eye, a grammar of pure kinesis, and except for the costumes and the cars and the quaint furniture in the background, none of it could possibly grow old. It was thought translated into action, human will expressing itself through the human body, and therefore it was for all time. Most silent comedies hardly even bothered to tell stories. They were like poems, like the renderings of dreams, like some intricate choreography of the spirit, and because they were dead, they probably spoke more deeply to us now than they had to the audiences of their time. We watched them across a great chasm of forgetfulness, and the very things that separated them from us were in fact what made them so arresting: their muteness, their absence of color, their fitful, speeded-up rhythms. These were obstacles, and they made viewing difficult for us, but they also relieved the images of the burden of representation. They stood between us and the film, and therefore we no longer had to pretend that we were looking at the real world. The flat screen was the world, and it existed in two dimensions. The third dimension was in our head.

  There was nothing to stop me from packing my bags and leaving the next day. I was off for the semester, and the next term wouldn’t begin until the middle of January. I was free to do what I wanted, free to go wherever my legs wanted to take me, and the fact was that if I needed more time I could keep on going until I was past January, past September, past all the Septembers and Januarys for as long as I wished. Such were the ironies of my absurd and miserable life. The moment Helen and the boys were killed, I had been turned into a rich man. The first bit came from a life insurance policy that Helen and I had been talked into buying not long after I started teaching at Hampton—for peace of mind, the man said—and because it was attached to the college health plan and didn’t cost much, we had been paying in a small amount every month without bothering to think about it. I hadn’t even remembered that we owned this insurance when the plane went down, but less than a month later, a man showed up at my house and handed me a check for several hundred thousand dollars. A short time after that, the airline company made a settlement with the families of the victims, and as
someone who had lost three people in the crash, I wound up winning the compensation jackpot, the giant booby prize for random death and unforeseen acts of God. Helen and I had always struggled to get by on my academic salary and the occasional fees she earned from freelance writing. At any point along the way, an extra thousand dollars would have made an enormous difference to us. Now I had that thousand many times over, and it didn’t mean a thing. When the checks came in, I sent half the money to Helen’s parents, but they sent it back by return mail, thanking me for the gesture but assuring me that they didn’t want it. I bought new playground equipment for Todd’s elementary school, donated two thousand dollars’ worth of books and a state-of-the-art sandbox to Marco’s day-care center, and prevailed upon my sister and her music-teacher husband in Baltimore to accept a large cash contribution from the Zimmer Death Fund. If there had been more people in my family to give money to, I would have done it, but my parents were no longer alive, and Deborah was the only sibling I had. Instead, I unloaded another sackful by establishing a fellowship at Hampton College in Helen’s name: the Helen Markham Traveling Fellowship. The idea was very simple. Every year, a cash award would be given for excellence in the humanities to one graduating senior. The money had to be spent on travel, but other than that there were no rules, no conditions, no requirements to be fulfilled. The winner would be selected by a rotating committee of professors from several different departments (history, philosophy, English, and foreign languages), and as long as the grant was used to finance a trip abroad, the Markham Fellow could do anything with the money that he or she saw fit, no questions asked. A huge outlay was required to set this up, but large as that sum was (the equivalent of four years’ salary), it put no more than a small dent in my assets, and even after I had disbursed those various amounts in the various ways that made sense to me, I still had more money than I knew what to do with. It was a grotesque situation, a sickening excess of wealth, and every penny of it had been procured with blood. If not for a sudden change of plans, I probably would have gone on giving away the money until there was nothing left. But one cold night in early November, I got it into my head to do some traveling of my own, and without the resources to pay for it, I never could have followed through on such an impulsive scheme. Until then, the money had been nothing but a torment to me. Now I saw it as a cure, a balm to ward off a terminal collapse of the spirit. Living in hotels and eating in restaurants was going to be an expensive proposition, but for once I didn’t have to worry about whether I could afford to do what I wanted. Desperate and unhappy as I was, I was also a free man, and because I had gold in my pockets, I could dictate the conditions of that freedom on my own terms.

  . . .

  Half of the films were within driving distance of my house. Rochester was about six hours to the west, and New York and Washington were directly to the south—roughly five hours to cover the first leg of the journey, then another five to do the second. I decided to begin with Rochester. Winter was already approaching, and the longer I put off going there, the greater the chances would be of running into storms and icy roads, of bogging down in some northern inclemency. The next morning, I called Eastman House to inquire about seeing the films in their collection. I had no idea how one went about setting up such a thing, and because I didn’t want to sound too ignorant when I introduced myself over the phone, I added that I was a professor at Hampton College. I was hoping that would impress them enough to take me for a serious person—and not some crank calling out of the blue, which was what I was. Oh, said the woman on the other end of the line, are you writing something about Hector Mann? She made it sound as if there was only one possible answer to the question, and after a slight pause, I mumbled the words she was expecting to hear. Yes, I said, that’s it, that’s it exactly. I’m writing a book about him, and I need to see the films for my research.

  That was how the project began. It was a good thing it happened so early, because once I had seen the films in Rochester (The Jockey Club and The Snoop), I understood that I wasn’t just wasting my time. Hector was every bit as talented and accomplished as I had hoped he would be, and if the other ten films were up to the standards of those two, then he deserved to have a book written about him, he deserved the chance to be rediscovered. Right from the start, therefore, I didn’t only watch Hector’s movies, I studied them. If not for my conversation with that woman in Rochester, it never would have occurred to me to take this approach. My original plan had been far simpler, and I doubt that it would have kept me busy much beyond Christmas or the first of the year. As it was, I didn’t finish viewing all of Hector’s films until the middle of February. The old idea had been to see each film once. Now I saw them many times, and instead of visiting an archive for just a few hours, I stuck around for days, running the films on flatbeds and Moviolas, watching Hector for entire mornings and afternoons at a stretch, winding and rewinding the prints until my eyes wouldn’t stay open anymore. I took notes, consulted books, and wrote down exhaustive commentaries, detailing the cuts and camera angles and lighting positions, analyzing all aspects of every scene down to its most peripheral elements, and I never left a place until I was ready, until I had lived with the footage long enough to know every inch of it by heart.

  I didn’t question whether any of this was worth doing. I had my job, and the only thing that mattered to me was to stick with it and make sure that it got done. I knew that Hector was no more than a minor figure, an addendum to the list of also-rans and luckless contenders, but that didn’t stop me from admiring his work and taking pleasure in his company. His films had been knocked off at the rate of one a month for a year, and they were made on budgets so small, so far below the amounts required to stage the spectacular stunts and breathless sequences normally associated with silent comedy, that it was a wonder he had managed to produce anything at all, let alone twelve perfectly watchable films. According to what I read, Hector had started out in Hollywood as a prop man, scenic painter, and sometime extra, had graduated to bit roles in a number of comedies, and had been given his chance to direct and star in his own films by a man named Seymour Hunt. Hunt, a banker from Cincinnati who wanted to break into the movie business, had gone out to California in early 1927 to set up his own production company, Kaleidoscope Pictures. By all accounts a blustering, duplicitous character, Hunt knew nothing about making movies and even less about running a business. (Kaleidoscope shut down after just a year and a half. Hunt, charged with stock fraud and embezzlement, hanged himself before his case ever came to trial.) Underfinanced, understaffed, and plagued by Hunt’s constant interference, Hector nevertheless seized his opportunity and tried to make the most of it. There were no scripts, of course, and no prearranged setups. Just Hector and a pair of gagmen named Andrew Murphy and Jules Blaustein improvising as they went along, often shooting at night on borrowed sets with exhausted crews and secondhand equipment. They couldn’t afford to wreck a dozen cars or to mount a cattle stampede. Houses couldn’t collapse, and buildings couldn’t explode. No floods, no hurricanes, and no exotic locations. Extras were at a premium, and if an idea didn’t work, they didn’t have the luxury of reshooting after the film was over. Everything had to be cranked out on schedule, and there was no time for second thoughts. Gags on command: three laughs a minute, and then put another coin in the meter. For all the drawbacks to the arrangement, Hector seemed to thrive on the limitations that had been imposed on him. The scale of his work was modest, but there was an intimacy to it that held your attention and forced you to respond to him. I understood why film scholars respected his work—and also why no one was terribly excited by it. He hadn’t broken any new ground, and now that all his films were available again, it was clear that the history of the period would not have to be rewritten. Hector’s films were small contributions to the art, but they weren’t negligible, and the more I saw of them, the more I liked them for their grace and subtle wit, for the droll and affecting manner of their star. As I soon discovered, no one had see
n all of Hector’s films yet. The last ones had turned up too recently, and not one person had taken it upon himself to travel the whole circuit of archives and museums around the world. If I managed to carry out my plan, I would be the first one.

  Before leaving Rochester, I called Smits, the dean of faculty at Hampton, and told him that I wanted to extend my leave for another semester. He was a bit put out at first, claiming that my courses had already been announced in the catalogue, but then I lied to him and said that I was undergoing psychiatric treatment, and he apologized. It was a nasty trick, I suppose, but I was fighting for my life at that point, and I didn’t have the strength to explain why looking at silent movies had suddenly become so important to me. We wound up having a cordial chat, and in the end he wished me luck, but even though we both pretended that I would be returning in the fall, I think he sensed that I was already slipping away, that my heart was no longer in it.