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Interpretation of Language, Lives and Spies
by Larry Rohter
YOUR FACE TOMORROW
Volume Three: Poison, Shadowand Farewell
By Javier Marías
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
Illustrated. 546 pages. New Directions. $24.95.
For the best part of a decade the Spanish novelist Javier Marías occupied himself with “Your Face Tomorrow,” an ambitious, sprawling project that became both a commercial and critical success across Europe. The third and presumably final volume, “Poison, Shadow and Farewell,” has finally appeared in English, and for better or worse, it is largely of a piece with the 700 pages that preceded it.
On the surface “Your Face Tomorrow” is a strange hybrid. It is almost as if Henry James or Marcel Proust decided to write a novel set in John Le Carré’s world. There are occasional bursts of action and much clandestine skulduggery. But “Poison, Shadow and Farewell,” like the two previous volumes, “Fever and Spear” and “Dance and Dream” is essentially a rumination on several of the Really Big Themes that tend to captivate great writers: love and death, power and violence, and, above all, betrayal, loyalty and deceit, both personal and at the level of the state.
“Your Face Tomorrow,” whose title comes from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2, is not a trilogy. It is a single novel that because of its bulk has been published in three parts, so a reader starting with “Poison, Shadow and Farewell” is certain to be puzzled by many of the final volume’s references, characters and themes as Mr. Marías tries to tie things up. In Spain, where Mr. Marías, 58, also writes a column for El País, the leading newspaper, his publisher did the logical thing and reissued “Your Face Tomorrow” last month as a single volume. That is a step that sooner or later ought to be emulated here.
The protagonist of all three books is Deza, a middle-aged Spaniard called Jaime by his estranged wife but known to others variously as Jack, Jacobo, Jacques, Diego and Iago. At the start Deza has just left Madrid, fleeing his crumbling marriage, for London, where he is recruited from a job at the BBC to offer “translations of persons or interpretations of lives,” working in “a building without a name” for what he believes, at least initially, to be a particularly shadowy branch of British intelligence.
Most of “Fever and Spear” takes place on a single night, during and after a party at the house of an Oxford don and retired spy who is Deza’s intellectual mentor, with a bit of mystery thrown in regarding the origin of a spatter of blood on the stairway. In “Dance and Dream” Deza, now working for the spy agency, becomes the accomplice, at first unwittingly and then unwillingly, to a chillingly measured act of violence that his boss unleashes in the handicapped restroom of a tacky London nightclub.
The focal point of “Poison, Shadow and Farewell” is another outburst of violence, but this time Deza is its initiator and not an observer. This both exhilarates and perturbs him, and it underlines the significance of a declaration by Iago in “Othello,” cited throughout the novel’s three volumes: “I am not what I am.” Though Deza is extremely skilled at divining the character and motives of others, from military officers contemplating coups to mobsters and decadent pop stars, he appears unable to understand himself or even anticipate his own behavior.
“Poison, Shadow and Farewell” opens and ends with a dedication to Mr. Marías’s father, the philosopher Julián Marías, who died in 2005, and to Peter Russell, an Oxford professor and former intelligence operative who was Britain’s leading academic authority on Iberian history and culture until his death in 2006. In a fundamental sense all of “Your Face Tomorrow” is an extended homage not just to the two men, both of whom appear in slightly altered guise in the novel, but also to their entire generation. During the course of the work Mr. Marías turns repeatedly to the times of World War II and the Spanish Civil War, which he seems to view as more serious than ours, for examples of the moral dilemmas that are perhaps his central concerns, drawing on the experiences of his father and Russell.
Mr. Marías is a writer of enormous erudition, and he is not shy about demonstrating it. At various points in “Your Face Tomorrow” he offers disquisitions on topics ranging from medieval swords and the best sources of bespoke shoes to the London underworld of the 1960s. Shakespeare, Cervantes and other towering literary figures are constant references, and though Mr. Marías often treats popular culture with disdain, he doesn’t stint on that count either: Henry Mancini and the country music ballad “The Streets of Laredo” both figure in the plot, as do the B-movie bombshell Jayne Mansfield, her breasts and her grisly death.
Mr. Marías spent parts of his childhood in the United States while his father was in exile from Franco’s fascism and is essentially bilingual. As a younger man he had a parallel career as a translator; his credits include renderings of “Tristram Shandy” and works by Conrad, Faulkner, Nabokov and Updike into Spanish. That background clearly influences “Your Face Tomorrow.”
It is not just that Deza, like characters in some of Mr. Marías’s earlier novels, is a type of interpreter who has sacrificed his own voice, but also that he becomes a vehicle for Mr. Marías’s fascination with the relationship between Spanish and English and how the differences, similarities and false cognates shape the way speakers of each language experience the world. (Margaret Jull Costa’s translation, it should be mentioned, is superb.)
But the enormous breadth and length of “Your Face Tomorrow” are both strengths and liabilities. Mr. Marías often embarks on elaborate divagations that sometimes prove hard to sustain. His style is anything but crisp: a random count revealed numerous sentences that run for 200 words or more, and Marías often resorts to three or more verbs or adjectives when one will do.
Even allowing that some of his characters are intellectuals given to philosophic speculation, their conversations, though absorbing, do not ring true. Instead they have the ring of monologues that are thought or written rather than spoken.
“Your Face Tomorrow” requires patience, effort and intellectual discipline of the reader. “Poison, Shadow and Farewell” delivers a payoff at the end, but the real challenge, and pleasure, is in getting there.
Even now, I cannot be sure whether his intentions were purely romantic-as he reiterated far too often-or if his many strategies were in fact a belated attempt to reestablish his somewhat faded reputation as an intrepid adventurer; or if they were a response to the shameless offers of some or other scientific institution, though I sincerely doubt that was the case. What I can say, however, is that those of us who found ourselves entangled in this allowed ourselves to be seduced by his passion and persistence, and I would even go so far as to say-though it pains me to say so given what happened in the end-that when the first few obstacles began to materialize when we were still on dry land, and there was talk of abandoning something that was still a mere proposition, it was our little coterie-and not the opportunistic men of science whose influence with the authorities had secured them a place on the trip-that was the most determined to overcome these problems and set sail, despite the adversities and the very abominable conditions under which we would do so.
Perhaps it is not very honest of me to say so, and perhaps I am only trying to console myself with false conclusions, but I do think that under other circumstances-in Paris, for example-things would have unfolded in a very different manner indeed. Had we first met on the Boulevard des Italiens some spring morning or at the opera, during a delectable intermission in Mme D'Almeida's box, instead of the middle of those vast, nauseating waters that surrounded us on all sides, day in and day out, it is entirely possible that the grievances I now harbor would be expressed with a bit more savoir-faire and a bit less bile.
In Alexandria, the climate is quite unpredictable from December to March, though in general the days are sunny and cold, and only on the odd occasion is the city battered by heavy precipitation, sleet, and thunderous wind. August is the balmiest month, and though the sea breeze does alleviate the high temperatures at this time of year, the humidity is considerable and, I might add, quite bad for the health. The city, known as Al Iskandariyah to its inhabitants, is located on a strip of land that separates the Mediterranean from LakeMareotis, a T-shaped promontory dotted with ports to the east and west alike. Long ago, the vertical arm of the T was a landmass that stretched all the way out to the island of Pharos, the eastern edge of which was outfitted with a lighthouse under the orders of Ptolemy II, for the exorbitant price of 800 talents. The prettiest part of the city may well be the port; if not, it would have to be the Grand Square (formerly known as the Place des Consuls), the northern face of which is graced by the Anglican Church of St. Mark, which sits atop a piece of land that Mohammed Ali the Great bequeathed to the British Community here in 1839. It is without a doubt the most European part of the city.
The feeling that you have made a fool of yourself, that you have wasted an opportunity you have sought for so long, that you have acted dishonorably, forever ruined a very well laid plan, failed to rise to the occasion, lacked tact and self-control, seemed impertinent and unpleasantly obvious, lost someone's respect-in short, the feeling that you have behaved like a perfect lout, is perhaps one of the most painful and humiliating sensations a man can ever know.
A few hours later, however, when I reexamined all the facts of the story, as the light evening breeze cleared and calmed my mind, I felt my chagrin alleviated and my serenity restored. You see, I am a man who tends to be acquiescent and easy to please, and when people like myself abandon an endeavor or illusion we usually have little trouble finding the right arguments to convince us that our plans were in fact quite insipid; these arguments, in turn, allow us to actually feel thrilled and relieved when our endeavor goes awry. And so, the following morning, everything-or at least nearly everything-had already been forgotten.
Chapter Two
BOOK TWO
Upon hearing the name of a man who, according to one of the other guests, had enjoyed a lofty position in society for many years until he died penniless as the result of his excessive love for painting, the gentleman before me-whose name I hadn't quite caught when he had been introduced to me two hours earlier-grimly acknowledged the chillingly similar and recent demise of a good friend of his, a man who had spent both his life and his fortune trying to discover the reasons for which Victor Arledge, at the beginning of his so-called "golden years," abandoned literature and locked himself away in a distant relative's mansion in Scotland, where he died three years later at the age of thirty-eight. After some very intense questioning by a woman who, I later learned, had written a thesis about the famous author but knew nothing of the existence or the literary investigations of this second unfortunate soul, the gentleman before me, Mr. Holden Branshaw (or Hordern Bragshawe, I cannot be certain), responded that although his friend had been unable to fully establish the complete set of causes that had led to the demise of such an accomplished writer as Victor Arledge, his friend had indeed succeeded in gathering enough information to cobble together an ambiguous, intriguing story about the writer in question. According to Mr. Branshaw-or was it Bragshawe?-his friend had spent the final year of his life weaving all this information together into a novel that he entitled Voyage Along the Horizon, and Mr. Branshaw, who had this novel in his possession, firmly believed that once it was published, his friend would finally be recognized as one of the great novelists of his time, which would prove that though this endeavor may have cost him both his fortune and his life, at the very least it had not been a waste of his time.
Mr. Branshaw's categorical affirmations to this effect elicited no reaction whatsoever from any of the people standing with him, and after about another half an hour, as the evening began to wane and the gathering fell into a bit of a lull, the guests all rose in unison-such a like-minded group, down to the tiniest detail-and bid me goodbye, though not without thanking me profusely for inviting them to enjoy such a pleasant evening at my home. And they left. When I returned to the salon, I saw that neither Mr. Branshaw nor the lady who had written her thesis on Victor Arledge had moved from their chairs, and were now chatting away with tentative but quite genuine enthusiasm. After pouring myself a glass of port, making as little noise as possible so as not to disturb them, I sat down in an easy chair. The rather petite lady, whose age was as elusive to me as the color of her simple dress and the reason for her presence in my living room, continued questioning Mr. Branshaw about his friend's novel with courteous if rather poorly concealed excitement, and at the end of this subtle battle in which Branshaw clearly held the upper hand (his replies to all her questions were laconic even though it was obvious she was terribly eager to hear them), the lady finally ventured to ask him if she might borrow the novel for a few days, given that its publication would remain uncertain until Arledge's family decided whether or not to permit the revelation of so many secrets regarding the author's life and times. To my surprise-perhaps it was the lady's aforementioned insistence, coupled with the gentleman's very obvious attempts to momentarily stave off her questions-he suggested they meet again, and they made arrangements to see one another the following morning at Holden Branshaw's home, where he would read the book aloud to the lady, because he did not wish to part with the original copy of the manuscript, not even for a few days. And I have no idea why-perhaps he was just being polite, or perhaps he was simply terrified by the thought of having to be alone with the lady-but without missing a beat Branshaw then turned to me and insisted I join them at his house the next day if I found the topic compelling or even mildly interesting. Out of simple courtesy, I replied that I wouldn't dream of missing the reading and thanked him for the kind invitation. Following this, Holden Branshaw and the petite lady, her face aglow with satisfaction, said their goodbyes, left my house, and went off in the directions of their respective homes.
I woke up the following day-later than normal and somewhat addled by my last glass of port the night before, having completely forgotten about Mr. Branshaw-to the sound of a chambermaid violently banging at my door, with the very pressing announcement that a Miss Bunnage had been waiting for me in the sitting room for some ten minutes. For a moment or two I idly wondered who on earth she was talking about, and then hastened to wash and dress without lingering any more over the identity of this person who-I might as well say it-had had the nerve to show up at my house unannounced at nine-thirty in the morning. In less-than-ideal spirits I finally made my way downstairs and, before I even set foot in the sitting room, the lady from the previous evening jumped up to greet me, bubbling over with eager anticipation.
"Please excuse the unexpected visit," she said. "But I was on my way to Mr. Branshaw's house and as I passed by I thought I might offer you a ride there. My carriage is waiting outside, and we're already running late."
I couldn't remember the exact hour we had agreed to meet at Mr. Branshaw's house, and for that reason, I suggested-rather unsuccessfully, in point of fact-that it would behoove us to have something to eat before we shut ourselves away in a house to listen to the reading of a novel, the length of which was still a mystery to us. But Miss Bunnage was adamant about leaving and wouldn't hear of it. As she took me by the arm she repeated that the carriage was waiting, and I had no other choice but to follow her outside. Once we were off, she finally seemed to calm down a bit; that was when I noticed that she had with her a folder filled with a sheaf of papers.
"Do you think Mr. Branshaw would give me something to eat if I asked him?" I wondered aloud.
Miss Bunnage smiled and replied: "Don't worry, I'll make sure to ask him." After a pause, she added: "I must tell you, this meeting is extremely important to me. If things work out as I hope, I might be able to prevent a great injustice."
"I thought you were simply interested in Victor Arledge."
"Yes, that's right."
"Oh."
I fell silent, amused and annoyed at the same time.
Mr. Branshaw welcomed us into his home with a far more amiable disposition than he had exhibited the previous evening at my party, the consequences of which were beginning to feel intolerable, for the moment at least. After ushering us into a spacious library lined with white bookcases, he busied himself preparing me some breakfast at the almost objectionable insistence of Miss Bunnage, whose behavior, on more than one occasion, actually caused me to blush. It was during this brief interlude, however, that I was able to inspect his collection of books, and I learned that Mr. Branshaw read strictly philosophy and poetry, and very little in the way of novels. Atop the fireplace, in the spot where one would normally find an unseemly hunting scene or the copy of a Constable painting, there was a massive wooden panel that bore the following inscription:
'Tis to yourself I speak; you cannot know Him whom I call in speaking such a one, For you beneath the earth lie buried low, Which he alone as living walks upon: You may at times have heard him speak to you, And often wished perchance that you were he; And I must ever wish that it were true, For then you could hold fellowship with me: But now you hear us talk as strangers, met Above the room wherein you lie abed; A word perhaps loud spoken you may get, Or hear our feet when heavily they tread; But he who speaks, or him who's spoken to, Must both remain as strangers still to you.
Miss Bunnage, having settled into what looked like the best chair in the room, had opened her folder, removed a few immaculate sheets of white paper, and, pen in hand, waited with obvious impatience as Branshaw reappeared with a tray and I drank my coffee and ate my toast with raspberry jam. Once I was finished, Branshaw whisked the tray away and left the library, only to reappear moments later bearing the coveted manuscript, bound in navy blue cloth. He shook out the book and placed it on the lap of Miss Bunnage, who simply stared at the cover, and then he passed it over to me. Voyage Along the Horizon, it said; somehow it felt inappropriate to peek beyond the front cover. Branshaw, however, took it out of my hands just then, sat down, opened it to page 1, and said, "Voyage Along the Horizon: Book One. `'Tis to yourself I speak ...'" And he read through the entire verse.
"Who wrote that poem?" I asked, glancing up at the panel above the fireplace.
Branshaw was about to answer, but Miss Bunnage spoke up first: "Jones Very," she replied, and then added: "Please continue, and from this point on, please, I must ask you to remain silent."
Mr. Branshaw read the verse by Very again, with gusto this time, and following a brief pause, he began to read the book aloud.
* * *
It was just after the safe return of the voyage captained by William Speirs Bruce, the veteran medical doctor of the Dundee Whaling Expedition, and also right around the time that Jean Charcot was sending out missives from aboard the FranÁais that were the talk of Parisian society, that Kerrigan came up with the idea of organizing an expedition to be made up of men and women of letters-precisely those people who, after devouring the information that came in every day from the Palmer Peninsula, would gossip together in the city's cafÈs about the audacity of those pioneers and confess their own fervent desires to embark, even if only as dishwashers, on one of those Nordic or British steamships, in search of adventures filled with danger and tedious inconvenience, but also with many thrilling and serendipitous experiences, the retelling of which would no doubt dazzle their friends and readers.
Kerrigan, a charming man who possessed the subconscious of an adolescent rather than that of a man his own age, dreamed up a plan that was outrageous and intriguing from the beginning, and the jovial, carefree spirit of this entire endeavor was no doubt what prompted Victor Arledge-as he ate his breakfast on his terrace and racked his brains for a plausible yet sufficiently convoluted excuse that would free him from attending the premiere of the theatrical adaptation of his latest novel without disappointing the audience too much-to suddenly abandon the prudence and serenity with which he made most of his decisions and surrender to Kerrigan's persuasive arguments. The idea was so very novel and Kerrigan's enthusiasm so very innocent and genuine that at first Arledge could only smile and shake his head. But as his loquacious friend began to fill his imagination with images of extraordinary, exotic adventures and sights, and most especially after Kerrigan very deliberately removed from his billfold a slip of paper with a list of the people who had already agreed to participate in this expedition and very ceremoniously flaunted it before his friend's eyes, Arledge could no longer resist, and his already-weakened defenses came crashing down as he rushed to sign the embarkation card on which his name, address, and nationality were already printed, without the slightest of qualms.
A few days later, when the news became public information, the future passengers of the Tallahassee found themselves assailed by journalists from every corner of Europe. The preparations for the voyage, as well as its purpose and nature, were the object of such detailed analysis that the newspapers actually told the expeditioners a number of things they had not known (or, perhaps, had not wanted to know) until then, most specifically the intentions of their captain. The headlines on the front pages described it something like this: "Most Ambitious Literary Enterprise Known to Man. A large group of illustrious writers and artists from England and France to embark on a voyage to Antarctica, hoping to produce a literary work and a great musical spectacle based on their experiences at the South Pole." . . .
To judge the Spanish novelist and essayist Javier Marías solely on the basis of “Voyage Along the Horizon” would be akin to imagining Flaubert only from “Salammbo” or Nabokov from “Transparent Things.” Though these works aren’t insignificant in their own right, to read them without recourse to their authors’ larger bodies of work is to comprehend a complex organism only from its vestigial limbs.
Published in 1972, when Marías was 21, “Voyage Along the Horizon” is his second novel, and has just made its first appearance in English. In a Marías library that now numbers over two dozen books, “Voyage” cannot be appreciated for what it is without first understanding what it is not: a mature book by one of the most original writers at work today. Marías’s most recent novel, “Your Face Tomorrow, Volume Two: Dance and Dream,” also appears in English for the first time this summer, and it is as accomplished and sui generis as all his mature work.
Often mentioned as a Nobel candidate, Marías is famous (everywhere but here) for the 1992 international best seller “A Heart So White,” a kind of whodunit that hides its metaphysical depths, and for “Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me” (1994), a thriller that turns out to be more of an existential puzzle. These fuzzy thumbnails cannot adequately convey how unusual both books are, since Marías’s considerable worth as a writer resides in the uniqueness of his prose. This risks seeming an insult — on par with complimenting a gentleman’s character by calling our attention to the fineness of his tie. But as Proust once said of true literary style, “like the color sense in some painters, it’s a quality of vision, the revelation of the particular universe that each of us sees and that no one else sees.”
That’s the trouble with “Voyage Along the Horizon.” Whereas in Marías’s later creations, a reader is traveling in wholly uncharted territory, the universe of “Voyage” is all technique, and borrowed from a half-dozen other writers at that. Marías — forgive him, he was 19 when he began it — meant it as a literary parody, a postcard to the writers he was reading at the time. Like Italo Calvino’s 1979 “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler” (a novel about reading a novel called “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler”), “Voyage Along the Horizon” revolves around the reading aloud of a novel called “Voyage Along the Horizon,” in which “a large group of illustrious writers and artists from England and France ... embark on a voyage to Antarctica, hoping to produce a literary work and a great musical spectacle based on their experiences at the South Pole.” In form, the novel is Conradian: as in “Heart of Darkness,” an unnamed narrator listens to the story of a voyage centered on a mysterious man. In style, it is Jamesian: long, looping sentences hopscotch from one qualifying clause to the next. In content, the novel is Melvillean, a sea story, albeit staged as if by Agatha Christie. The plot turns on a trifecta most foul — kidnapping, dueling and murder — but the novel is really a seafaring shaggy-dog story where the telling is the tale.
At best, this is amusing; at worst, fatiguing. If you want to care about characters, this is not your book. If you enjoy literary play for its own sake, you might have fun, although Kristina Cordero’s uneven translation sometimes truncates Marías’s long, winding sentences.
If “Voyage Along the Horizon” could have been written by almost anyone (at times, it seems to have been written by everyone), “Your Face Tomorrow,” Marías’s novel in progress, could have been written by no one else. (The first volume, “Fever and Spear,” appeared last year, and Marías is said to be at work on the concluding volume.) Like all his recent novels, “Your Face Tomorrow” is narrated in the first person. A Spaniard, Jacques Deza, is recounting a period in his life when he lived and worked in England as an interpreter for an unnamed shadow agency of the British secret service. Deza began the job during a separation from his wife: a “deepening rift” had formed between them, something Deza did not understand as it was happening. “It is only later on,” he tells us, “that you realize you have lost the trust you had in someone or that others have lost the trust they had in you.”
Deza may have lost trust in his personal life, but it is precisely what he has been hired to gauge in his professional life. During their interrogations of potential terrorists and possible malefactors, his employers depend on him to discern their degree of threat. From the smallest detail (the color, say, of a Venezuelan’s shoes), Deza can deduce whether the man is more likely an elite assassin or a common ass. All too aware of how easily you can reveal yourself without wishing to, or how quickly you can betray your intentions without a word, Deza prefers to remain tight-lipped: “One should never tell anyone anything,” he says in the novel’s first words, an injunction the reader is grateful he violates every chance he gets.
If Proust is right that prose is vision, not whiz-bang effects, consider this example, from “Fever and Spear”: “We do not trust ourselves as witnesses, indeed, we do not trust ourselves at all, we submit everything to a process of translation, we translate our own crystal-clear actions and those translations are not always faithful, thus our actions begin to grow unclear, and ultimately we surrender and give ourselves over to a process of perpetual interpretation, applied even to those things we know to be absolute fact, so that everything drifts, unstable, imprecise, and nothing is ever fixed or definite and everything oscillates before us until the end of time, perhaps it’s because we cannot really stand certainty.”
However verbally fine, the beauty of this passage lies in the precision of the thought: that ultimate understanding of anything is both worth pursuing and beyond attainment. Marías’s is a style of thinking more than writing. In “Your Face Tomorrow” it is faithfully rendered by Margaret Jull Costa, his principal English translator, who achieves a rare feat: presence and near invisibility.
Much of “Fever and Spear” was set in Oxford, late at night and into the following morning, as Deza and the old Oxford don who drew him into the spy game discussed history and human frailty while sipping sherry. But any sense of certainty about where Marías was heading is upended in “Dance and Dream.” Who could have guessed it would involve discotheque toilets, swordplay and Botox?
As Deza reaches the end of the strange, violent centerpiece of “Your Face Tomorrow,” the incongruity of his surroundings intensifies and the hollowness within him deepens. The slow, indefinite revelation of his universe is the most affecting narrative feat in Marías’s work to date. It has a musical lightness that recalls Charles Ives’s “Unanswered Question,” a composition that rises but does not resolve. The reader is left to wonder — and wait to discover — what Marías is thinking, which is to say, where this might be leading. “All it takes,” he tells us cryptically, “is to have behind you some dead beloved person or some beloved person who ceased to be beloved ... or for us to become that for someone else.”
Wyatt Mason is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine.
The end of the world was coming. And he was eight. That's when James Cameron found a pamphlet with instructions for building a civilian fallout shelter on the coffee table in his family's living room in Chippawa, Ontario, a quaint village on the Canadian shore of Niagara Falls. It was 1962, the year of the Cuban missile crisis, and Philip and Shirley Cameron felt they had reason to be concerned about the bomb — the Camerons lived just a mile and a half from the falls, a major power source for communities on both sides of the international border. But for their oldest son, discovering the brochure was a life-changing epiphany. Prior to that moment, the boy's only real care in the world had been getting home on his bike before the streetlights flickered on, the family rule. "I realized that the safe and nurturing world I thought I lived in was an illusion, and that the world as we know it could end at any moment," Cameron says. From that time on, he was fascinated by the idea of nuclear war, his fears fueled by the apocalyptic scenarios depicted in the science-fiction books he devoured at night, reading under his blanket with a flashlight. He may have been the only kid at his school to find the duck-and-cover bomb drills neither funny nor stupid. "Was this crazy or just a heightened awareness of truth?" Cameron wonders. "As the world turned out so far, it was a bit paranoid. But there's still plenty of time to destroy ourselves."
The pensive eight-year-old boy would grow up to tell vivid stories about worlds ending, from a machine-led war in 2029 to an unsinkable ship's descent into the deep in 1912. Each James Cameron movie is a warning against his darkest childhood fears and a kind of how-to guide for living through catastrophe with humanity and spirit intact. His own story begins with a long line of troublemakers.
Philip and Shirley
Cameron's great-great-great-grandfather, a schoolteacher, migrated from Balquhidder, Scotland, to Canada in 1825. "He was a bit of a free thinker. He didn't like the king," explains Philip, a plainspoken electrical engineer, understating things a bit. The Cameron clan is one of Scotland's oldest, a family of notoriously fierce swordsmen who were leaders in the Jacobite uprisings, the bitter Anglo-Scottish religious wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some were executed for treason, others exiled. Philip Cameron's branch ended up on a farm near Orangeville, Ontario, about fifty miles northwest of Toronto, where he attended a one-room school before following work north as a nickel miner to earn the money to enter the University of Toronto in 1948. "Pops is very male, strong. He was always bigger than everybody even though he wasn't bigger than everybody," says the Camerons' youngest son, John David. "He was the guy you didn't want to mess with. If it took you two turns of the wrench, it took Dad a half."
In high school Philip met Shirley Lowe, a slim, blonde-haired, blue-eyed dynamo who drove stock cars in the Orangeville powder-puff derby and won a countywide award for her war bond painting of a city in flames. "Do you want this to happen?" it asked ominously in red paint. While a mother with three kids under age eight, Shirley would join the Canadian Women's Army Corps, happily trooping off on weekends in fatigues and combat boots to assemble a rifle while blindfolded and march through fields in the pouring rain. She kept up her painting, in oils and watercolors, and one night a week she attended an adult education course in a subject of interest, such as geology or astronomy. "I did those things for me and nobody else," says Shirley, who professes bewilderment that she might be the inspiration for the gutsy maternal heroines in movies like The Terminator and Aliens. "I don't know why Jim thinks I'm so self-reliant," Shirley adds with a shrug, her blue eyes sparkling. Philip looks up from the dining table in their Calabasas, California, home, clearly amused by his wife of fifty-seven years. "Well, you are," he says wryly. Shirley is creative, impulsive, and fiery, Philip stoic, analytical, and precise. "It's tough to be diplomatic with stupid people," he confesses. Their wildly different dispositions would combine uniquely in their son, who became equal parts calculating gearhead and romantic artist.
When their first child was born, the Camerons were living in an apartment in Kapuskasing, a cold, remote company town in northern Ontario where Philip worked as an engineer at the local paper plant. Shirley had trained as a nurse in Toronto but was now a somewhat restless homemaker. On August 16, 1954, James Cameron arrived in the world one month late and screaming, an image Hollywood studio executives will have no trouble picturing. Because he was their first child, the Camerons didn't know there was anything unusual about Jim. When he strode into a doctor's office at eighteen months old, extended his hand, and said, "How do you do, doctor?" they learned their son was a little precocious.
Chippawa
When Cameron was five, Philip's job took the family to Niagara Falls, and from there they moved to a comfortable split-level in Chippawa, where they would live until 1971. The family kept growing — next came Mike, Valerie, Terri, and John David. The Cameron kids freely roamed the shores of Chippawa Creek, which is actually, by non-Canadian standards, a rushing river. There were fishing trips and daredevil hikes above the deep gorges. Cameron once slipped off an algae-covered board down a hundred-foot cliff, catching a tree limb and scrambling back up, a misadventure he never shared with his parents. "What happens on the hike stays on the hike," he says. He became a tinkerer, building and experimenting, often with his brother Mike. They made go-karts, rafts, tree houses. A favorite toy was the Erector Set, which Cameron had earned by selling greeting cards. (Shirley paid off the neighbors to buy them — mothers can keep secrets, too.) He used the Erector Set to construct Rube Goldberg contraptions for dispensing candy and Coke bottles. Once he built a mini bathysphere with a mayonnaise jar and a paint bucket, put a mouse in the jar, put the jar in the bucket, and lowered the bucket off a bridge to the bottom of Chippawa Creek. When he pulled it back up, the mouse was still alive, but probably not without having had a good shock. Another proud engineering milestone was the Summer Vacation Trebuchet, a siege engine Cameron constructed out of an old hay wagon at his grandparents' farm near Orangeville and used to launch twenty-pound rocks at spare-lumber targets he had dragged into the cow pasture.
The Cameron boys' handiness with tools was not always constructive. When some neighborhood kids stole their toys, Jim and Mike visited the lead suspects' tree house and sawed through the limbs. When the juvenile criminals climbed up to their woody retreat, it toppled to the ground. "That one they got in trouble for," says Shirley, nodding. "You don't do things where people can get hurt." Philip was the stern disciplinarian in the family, usually able to get his point across in few words. "My dad used to warn me, 'If you mess up I'll take you to the woodshed,'" remembers John David. "I was pretty confident I knew the house, and I didn't think we even had a woodshed. The threat was worse than any actual act."
Early on, Cameron demonstrated a knack for assembling large groups in service of his own goals. When her oldest son was about ten, Shirley noticed his younger siblings and several neighborhood children streaming into her side yard carrying scraps of wood and metal. "I said, 'What are you gonna do with all this junk?'" Shirley recalls. "Jim said, 'We're gonna build something.'" When Shirley checked on the project a couple of hours later, the kids had constructed an airplane. "Guess who was sitting in it being pulled?" Cameron was very good at telling people what to do. He took it upon himself to keep his younger siblings in line when the family went out to dinner. The oldest boy would fold his hands on the table and start twiddling his thumbs, a cue to the little ones to follow and not to grab the salt and pepper shakers.
Shirley encouraged her son's artistic side. At his request, some Saturdays they traveled eighty miles to the RoyalOntarioMuseum, where Cameron pulled out his sketchbook to draw helmets and mummies. "Everything I saw and liked and reacted to I immediately had to draw," he says. "Drawing was my way of owning it." He created his own comic-book versions of movies and TV shows he liked, from pirates inspired by the 1961 Ray Harryhausen fantasy MysteriousIsland to spaceships he saw on the first season of Star Trek in 1966. He easily won all the local design contests — to paint a mural on the SeagramTower at Niagara Falls or the bank windows at Halloween. At age fourteen, he painted a Nativity scene for the bank for one hundred dollars, enough to buy Christmas presents for his parents and siblings.
The Cameron kids are an intense bunch, biochemically turbo-charged. Close in age and temperament, Jim and Mike were sometimes coconspirators, sometimes rivals, often both at once. Mike would grow up to be an engineer like his father, building the sophisticated filmmaking and diving technologies used on The Abyss, Titanic, and his older brother's documentaries. Both bright and convinced of their own opinions, the two oldest Cameron boys are a technically potent and often explosive duo. They could turn a theoretical conversation on space travel into a rowdy brawl. "When they'd mix, there would be fireworks, good and bad," says their youngest brother, John David, who likens the Cameron family dynamic to "Japan before warfare; everybody's got their own systems."
Dinner was served at 6:00 p.m. at the Cameron house every night and timed with military precision. "I make good carbon," Shirley says of her culinary efforts. "I burn things." Her sons talk glowingly of her chili and pot roast but say that it was best when Shirley didn't bring her adventuresome spirit into the kitchen. At a certain point, dinner with the Camerons would become a contact sport. "The more of the family that gets together, the more chaotic and loud and bright and crescendoed it gets, from who gets the goddamned dish," John David says. "There will always be a moment when somebody says something that shouldn't have been said. It's priceless. But it's participatory. If you sit idly by, you'll get chewed on."
Continues...
Excerpted from The Futurist by Rebecca Keegan Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
As a boy in Chippawa, Ontario, James Cameron once sent some mice over the edge of Niagara Falls in a small submersible made from old mayonnaise jars, an Erector Set and a paint bucket. Another time, he made a hot-air balloon out of a dry-cleaning bag and some candles, floating it down the street until someone reported it as a U.F.O. and called the Fire Department. Together with the young Steven Spielberg’s experiments in civic alarum-raising — locking himself in the bathroom until the Phoenix Fire Department was summoned — Cameron’s excursions suggest two interlocking propositions: (1) If you want to know who is going to grow up to be a box-office titan, check out the records of your local Fire Department. And (2) nobody should be surprised if Balloon Boy turns into the proud auteur behind “Terminator Resurrection: This Time With Feeling.”
As Cameron’s latest art-house offering appears in a few select cinemas, Rebecca Keegan’s biography, “The Futurist,” arrives to shine a spotlight on this most shy and retiring of filmmaking violets. I’m only half-joking. The Cameron who emerges here is a pensive soul, racked by the thought of nuclear apocalypse after he reads a pamphlet on fallout shelters at age 8 — “a life-changing epiphany,” according to Keegan, leading to a lifetime of “daydreaming about Armageddon.” I’m sorry, but this is James Cameron we’re talking about? Mr. I Eat Pressure for Breakfast? The guy who detonated a small thermonuclear device just to backlight Arnold Schwarzenegger while he puckered up for a kiss with Jamie Lee Curtis? To this day, people watching that scene are unsure whether to shield their eyes, crouch under their seats or head for the basement.
To be fair, Cameron’s films have long attempted to balance airy calls for world peace with a fierce desire to see Harrier jump jets pass horizontally through tall buildings, but it’s disquieting to see that mixture served up so credulously here. Keegan visited Cameron on the set of “Avatar” for Time magazine in 2008 and decided to turn her article into a book, which is less a biography proper than a set visit by someone who got carried away with access to the great and mighty Oz: “Cameron’s brain is formidable, fascinating and equally developed on both sides.” That’s nice to know. Fans will already be familiar with the unusual molecular makeup of the Jim Cameron childhood: three parts science geek to one part rebel, he aced physics and was pounded at school. After the family moved to California, he got a job driving the hot-lunch truck for the Brea Olinda Unified School District and began scribbling plot ideas about blue people and bioluminescent planets while boning up on matte processes at the University of Southern California library. Then, in 1977, he saw “Star Wars” and emerged seething: somebody had made his movie. “That’s when I got busy,” he said.
Getting a job at Roger Corman’s studio, he sculptured spaceships for low-fi “Star Wars” rip-offs and landed his first directing gig on “Piranha II: The Spawning”; after he was fired, he found himself in a hotel room with a fever and dreamed of a steel skeleton clawing its way through a blistering inferno, thus making “The Terminator” the most innovative alternative to filing for unemployment benefits yet devised. That genesis is the stuff of myth; far more revealing is the three-month period Cameron spent in 1983 writing the scripts for “The Terminator,” “Rambo” and “Aliens,” figuring out how many pages per hour he had to write, then cranking them out to an accompaniment of “Mars, the Bringer of War” from “The Planets.” Hasta la vista, Holst!
Genuine revolutions come in two installments, with first the boy wonders — the Dantons, the Trotskys, the Spielbergs — to be followed, a few years later, by a much steelier strategist: a Napoleon, a Lenin, the man who would be king of the world. There are those who lament Cameron’s transformation from the scrappy filmmaker who made “The Terminator” for $6.4 million into the man who made “Titanic” for more than $200 million, but in truth he is one of the few directors who understand how to spend money, just as he is one of the few who know how to shoot action — a much smaller band than you’d think. Sigourney Weaver, an opponent of the N.R.A., was worried by all the chunky military hardware in “Aliens,” but remember what happens: the Marines descend to the mining colony on LV-426, bristling with guns and grenades, only to get their rear ends handed to them on a plate. Cameron had no need to direct “Rambo”: he’d already made his Vietnam movie.
Or think of the T-1000 in “Terminator 2,” mercury to Schwarzenegger’s might, and realize how powerfully it prefigured the enemy America would face on 9/11. Cameron has an instinctive understanding of asymmetry, in other words; it gives his combat scenes real heft and sinew. Would that the process by which a newly “mellow” Cameron coaxed virtual performances from his “Avatar” actors were anything that splendid: “To help them feel an explosion,” Keegan writes, “he boomed a noise over amplifiers, threw foam particles at them and whacked them with a padded jousting pole.” It’s enough to make you pine for the oxygenated screaming matches that characterized the shoots of “The Abyss” and “Titanic.” Cameron may have dragged filmmaking kicking and screaming into the 21st century, but he has helped deal an irrevocable blow to the art of film biography.
Tom Shone is the author of “Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer.”
Invisible forces that control our behavior have inspired our best storytellers, from Euripides to Steven Spielberg.. Whether we’re yanked around by jealous gods, Oedipal urges or poltergeists, the idea that we feel powerless to direct our own actions has a visceral appeal, one exploited by Shankar Vedantam in “The Hidden Brain,” his exploration of the unconscious mind.
Most previous popular treatments of subliminal forces haven’t been data driven. Vedantam, who until recently wrote the Department of Human Behavior column for The Washington Post, hopes to fill that gap. His entertaining romp through covert influences on human behavior began as a series of columns, and true to its genesis, it reads as vivid reportage overlaid with a sampling of science. Ranging widely from the role of social conformity in violence to snapshots of racial and gender prejudice, Vedantam draws expansive arcs between findings from social psychology and the nation’s sensibilities and voting patterns. “Unconscious bias reaches into every corner of your life,” he writes, thanks to a “hidden brain” generally inaccessible through introspection. As with crop circles, all we see are the traces left by covert attitudes, never the perp at the scene of the crime.
Colorful characters form the backbone of the narrative; we meet a bickering, long-married academic couple, a rapist with great teeth, a woman working the night shift at a tire factory, a woman suffering from a rare form of dementia and a cult member. What binds this motley crew together? All are victims of some form of irrationality — those imperceptible forces that often prompt our actions in the real world, the ones that are at odds with our ideals.
Most of us assume that honesty and generosity are personality traits polished over a lifetime of social interaction. But Vedantam shows how imperceptible social signals determine, for example, how deeply you’ll dig into your pocket. In offices with an honor system for coffee, people are more likely to pay on days when a photograph of human eyes is discreetly posted above the coffee machine, according to one British study. They’re more prone to cheat if a still life of daisies is pasted there instead — even if they say they’re unaware of either picture. Another experiment demonstrates that you’re likely to give a handsome tip to a waiter who repeats your food order verbatim. In fact, you’ll tip an average of 140 percent more than you would if he just paraphrases it. It’s all about social mimicry, apparently, our hidden ability to sync our behavior with the group’s.
While social cues grease the wheels of interaction in subtle ways, they can also create hazards. In a gripping chapter on disasters, Vedantam describes the snap decisions made by employees of one brokerage firm in the south tower of the WorldTradeCenter in the crucial minutes after the first plane hit on Sept. 11. The group on the 89th floor reached the consensus that they were not in danger — and perished. The group on the 88th floor ran for the stairs and survived. While everyone felt they were making autonomous decisions, the decisions were really made by the group. “Group decisions provide us with a signal,” Vedantam writes. “The details about individuals — who did what, who felt what, who thought what — is noise.” He cites another analysis, of response to the 1993 WorldTradeCenter bombing, in which two different groups escaped at different rates. What mattered wasn’t what floor the groups were on but how large they were. “Groups seek to develop a shared narrative as an explanation for what is happening,” Vedantam writes. “The larger the group, the longer it took to arrive at a consensus.” His conclusion? “People can undermine themselves — and reduce the overall survival rate — by trying to help one another.”
The crisis vignettes are skillfully spun out, Grisham style. Vedantam presents a fresh, bracing case for the dangers of group-think. But he sometimes extends his lessons too far. While Vedantam is right that large groups tend to produce fewer good Samaritans, studies of social networks show they can also mobilize quite effectively. After Hurricane Katrina, an impromptu “Cajun navy” rescued thousands of stranded residents. And a number of sociologists have documented how hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated from Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11 by another spontaneous armada.
In a chapter on the psychology of suicide bombers, Vedantam draws parallels among obsessed sports fans, a Jonestown crackpot, violent extremists and striving executives. “The hidden brain’s drive for approval and meaning, and the ability of small groups to confer such approval and meaning, is what is common to the world of” all four, he writes. Social “tunnels,” which block out input from the outside world, direct some people toward public service and heroism, others toward violence.
True, we all want to belong. But the evidence Vedantam offers for his claims is often too scant or streamlined, with contradictory or ambiguous results and dissenting interpretations left out. Meanwhile, the biggest bias of all — confirmation bias, which makes us notice only what supports our own opinions and tune out everything else — hardly gets a mention. All this secret stuff can be very disconcerting. But we need more than we get here to know if it is true.
Susan Pinker is the author of “The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women and the Real Gender Gap.”
Here you'll meet the best of famous authors like Truman Capote, Hemingway, Susan Sontag, Nelly Harper Lee, Colmin Toibin, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tolstoy, Maupassant, O. Henry, Clarice Lispector, Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce, Kerouac, and many, many other writers. Also you will watch videos with musics of The Beatles, Paul McCartney, Sepultura, Amalia Rodrigues, Taiguara, Iron Maiden, etc. and other videos.
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The main idea of this Blog is spread the habit of reading. Literature is part of our lives. When enter in the Literature world, we read better and we improve our though and imagination. I want, with this, divide a little of my dreams. Is to give opportunity to people read and know about works produced by ancient and contemporary writers, and mainly, myself to be insert in this wonderful world of the Letters.
