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.Perhaps the main challenge that Yates’s work poses for any ego-driven auteur is how to bring something other than technical facility to the making of a movie that, as Frankenheimer put it, “is all there on the page.” Yates took pains to describe facial expressions, sound effects, and camera angles, all of which work to convey in cinematic terms the maximum possible meaning and mood of a given scene.For example, when the jealous Helen scolds her daughter Peyton before Christmas dinner, the stage-directions indicate that Milton’s “light, tinny, inexpert” xylophone music (which he plays for the feeble-minded Maudie in order to appear a doting father) be heard throughout the scene.The “music” suggests not only the dissonance between the actual and feigned causes of Helen’s rage, but also the gruesome awkwardness of the whole family gathering, the childishness of Milton’s not-so-furtive infatuation with Peyton—and so on, level on level.Likewise, Yates managed to find subtle solutions for the novel’s alternating points of view, as when the drunken Milton attends the UVA football game in hope of finding Peyton; for the establishing shots, Yates specified “intentional newsreel clichés” (a roisterous crowd, players trotting out on the field, and so on), to provide contrast with the same scene as Milton sees it: “narrow concrete steps leading straight down, in dizzying perspective … a cheering man’s wide-open mouth full of chewed hot dog.” Such images suggest a drunkard’s viewpoint and more—a sense of foreboding, the grotesquerie of a world bereft of hope or moral center.Yates was faithful to the novel’s episodic, nonlinear structure, which he tightened as much as possible with cuts, dissolves, and motifs linking discrete episodes into a symphonic whole.Perhaps the most structurally crucial sequence in the screenplay is the one leading up to its first climactic plot point, when Milton and the prepubescent Peyton climb the bell tower together.Here as elsewhere Yates evoked character and theme with precise visual economy: After Milton persuades Peyton to apologize for tormenting her sister, the screenplay indicates an immediate cut to father and daughter singing a silly song in the car, like two gleeful children involved in a successful conspiracy; then, as they climb the bell tower, they pause near the top to exchange a look that lingers, ominously, until the clappers fall with a denunciatory clamor to the tune of “Jesus Calls Us”—which we will hear again when Milton passionately kisses Peyton at her wedding, and still again when Peyton climbs the stairs (a visual parallel) to commit suicide.Thus Yates suggested the main thematic conflict between illicit love and convention (religious or social) without heavy-handed explication one way or the other, and used the best of Styron’s material in doing so.Birds recur in the novel as symbols of flight and freedom, and so too at key points in Yates’s version: Pigeons fill the screen when the bell tower clock begins to whir, and later, finally, a flock is disturbed by the fatal impact of Peyton’s fall.Add the sheer perfection of Yates’s prose, and the result is a finished work of art that (contrary to his later disclaimer) may well have amounted to a great movie adapted from a great novel.“God, it’s good,” Frankenheimer said forty years later of Yates’s screenplay.“I’d still like to make that movie.”* * *Sheila and Yates exchanged characteristic letters, at once fond and bickering, throughout his stay in California.“At a distance in time and space of four months and 3000 miles,” she wrote, “perhaps we can lay it on the line to each other in a way that will either break the tie … or suggest a way to preserve it.” For Sheila it was a question of giving up “old, reliable tranquility” for the possibility of a greater happiness, though she realized that disaster and disillusionment were far more probable.She pointed out that he’d be better off with a “literary-type girl,” and made it clear that, if they did reunite, things would be different: “I will never—and I mean never—stay home again.Housewifery was my Remington Rand.” Also she was “appalled” at the memory of having to clean up after Yates, but knew all too well what to expect: “Judging from your little flat, and your visit out here, [you] are less likely to keep the trash down than you were in the old days.” Yates responded with a harsh letter to the effect that Sheila was “less wife than anybody [he could] think of,” but later apologized and continued to press for a reconciliation on his return.* By July Sheila seemed almost won over: She asked whether he’d like to settle in Danbury or the city—possibly go back to Europe, even—and as late as mid-August she signed off with, “I love you (and miss you).” Then something happened to remind her, permanently this time, that all such prospects were hopeless.California had been a draining experience for Yates, and two weeks at Bread Loaf seemed a perfect way to relax and savor his triumph before returning to New York and his novel.Indeed, the first week of the conference went remarkably well, though it was far from relaxing.Yates found himself the most celebrated writer on the faculty, a figure of considerable romantic appeal: tall and handsome, still tan from his stint in Hollywood, the embodiment of literary glamour—looks, talent, money.Copies of Eleven Kinds of Loneliness were snapped up by the conferencees (particularly female), many of whom also regarded Yates as the most scintillating lecturer.He discussed, variously, his experience adapting Lie Down in Darkness, the matter of tragic design, the influence of Conrad on Fitzgerald (the peripheral narrator, the “dying fall”), and certain postwar American novels he’d take on a “tight boat”—The Naked and the Dead, From Here to Eternity, Catcher in the Rye.After his lectures Yates would return trembling to Treman Cottage, the applause ringing in his ears, and try to calm himself with massive amounts of alcohol.“I should, damn it, have known how much you were giving,” a rueful John Ciardi wrote him afterward; “you were being so damned great, I guess I forgot everything but my directorial gloat over the way you were rocking the Great Hall.”Yates’s breakdown at the 1962 Bread Loaf conference became part of the permanent lore of the place, but details are sketchy at best—a lot of stale, contradictory impressions heard second and third hand from the principal witnesses, most of whom are dead [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]