Life by the Pen: Portrayals and Perceptions of Writers in American and British Pop Culture

Sophia Dorval

 

The life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known to the world as the legendary American novelist and humorist Mark Twain, was filled to the brim with triumphant highs and devastating, heartbreaking lows.   Poverty-ridden, suicidal moments gave way to others in which he achieved great wealth that was ultimately squandered on foolish gambles.  He suffered familial loss to such a profound degree that he only had one living child left at the time of his death.  In the age of the steamer, he sang for his supper to captive audiences all across the globe.   And in his own prophetic words from his autobiography, "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835.  It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it.  It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet.   The Almighty has said no doubt, 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks, they came in together, they must go out together. “

 

A picaresque existence such as his was rightfully used as fodder by dramatists for the silver screen for merely two decades after his passing, and not since.   (A  trailer for an upcoming film adaptation of the novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn can be viewed on YouTube. 

 

Jane Austen, equally heralded as a British master on humor and manners, lived by contrast a far more quiet life than Clemens.  Adhering to the customs of her time, her status as an author wasn't even widely known during her lifetime.  She spent virtually all of her 41 years in the English countryside with her immediate family before succumbing to illness.  For anyone who has perfected the art of living under a rock and is somehow unfamiliar with Austen, assuming she was her generation's equivalent of Dear Abby is understandable.   Millions of copies her novels have been sold posthumously and there have been countless film and television adaptations of her body of work for the past two decades.     

 

The January 5, 2010 Guardian piece "Write On: Authors On Film" gleefully poked fun at glamorous portrayals of scribes from Tolstoy to Shakespeare by stars such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Anne Hathaway and Christopher Plummer.   Films about writers, as opposed to action heroes, are few and far between on both sides of the pond for obvious reasons.   Writing is a solitary act, and hard work, nothing more.   There are only so many montages involving typewritten or inked versions of prose that viewers can take.  But it does seem ironic that the life of arguably one of the greatest and beloved American writers hasn't been explored in cinema in 70 years, while that of a Regency-era spinster has become a cottage industry within the film industry.   What's wrong with this picture?  Is there anything truly amiss, or is it a positive sign of our far more politically correct times? 

 


 

Sepia tinged photographs of a white-haired, bearded Twain decked out in a Colonel Sanders style suit represent an America that most want to believe is long gone.  In his January 5, 2009 guest column "Time to Update Schools' Reading Lists " for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer John Foley writes that "Explaining that Twain wasn't a racist...is a daunting challenge... Many students just hear the N-word.   This is particularly true of course of African-American students.  I have not taught Huck Finn in a predominantly black classroom, and I think it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do so effectively... I never want to rationalize Huck Finn to an angry African-American mom again as long as I breathe." 

 

In 2011, New South Books printed a version of the novel that removed a word offensive towards Native Americans and replaced the N word.  Unlike Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, an exploration of a literary figure as flawed as Twain is a tough sell to both social media-centric, smartphone-owning Millenials and Baby Boomers brought up during the Civil Rights era.   On both sides of the spectrum, there will be Americans who could care less about his groundbreaking use of American vernacular in literature, who would wince at his minstrel-style portrayal of slaves,  who need to believe that the words and thoughts of Twain belong to an America that is no more.  

 

 

Across the pond, the stereotypes about the British in regards to a love of letters, (literally and figuratively) those posh accents, those quaint bonnets, and the fact that Austen was safely tucked away in a part of the world that didn't have to deal with the harsh realities of race and colonialism heightens the escapist pleasure for filmgoers observing British class relations and romantic rituals.   (Patricia Rozema's 1999 adaptation of Mansfield Park attempts to connect the Regency-era wealth to plantations in the Caribbean.) The complexity of class relations in Austen's world appeared far less violent than life in the Antebellum South, despite what history has shown us about 19th century global events.  And it's a universally acknowledged fact that Austen's heroines were intelligent and headstrong, yet still managed to be blindsided by love.   Perhaps these days, love sells even more than sex for female viewers starved of romance and uninterested in Tinder.  

 


 

We surely live in a period where physical copies of books have been relegated to furniture status and even Tweets can feel laborious to digest.   It is telling that one of the most famous and beloved writers in modern-day pop culture is also female but sadly, fictional.  Sex And The City's protagonist  Carrie Bradshaw redefined the single girl, a symbol of seemingly attainable New York City "fabulosity".  The image of our fair Miss Bradshaw typing away furiously at her laptop was one so pervasive it's safe to call it the shot seen around the world, inspiring legions of future bloggers.   Her closet in her rent-controlled Upper East Side apartment was a treasure trove of designer dresses, her social circle was a who's who of equally empowering and embarrassing New York City cliches, as was her love life.  An urban Cinderella caught between the prosperity of the Clintonian era and the national security-tinged Bush years, the character also embodied a lot of stereotypical traits of writers on film:  She could never quit her Cosmopolitans, her cigarettes, or her toxic turned fantasy relationship with the perennially unavailable Mr. Big.

 

 Like Twain, there were some tricky racial faux pas ("ghetto gold") ,like Austen, her place in Manhattan society was the fuel her weekly columns ran on. Unlike Austen or Twain, viewers found her foibles relatable while envying her wardrobe, which is precisely how Americans like their writers, as opposed to lofty. 

 

But if they must have - ideals, then at least let them be male, promiscuous, supremely self-destructive, and unrepentant alcoholics as evidenced by last year's adaptation of William Burroughs' beat classic On The Road, the series Californication, Factotum, Capote and Infamous.  This year's BBC production A Poet In New York chronicles the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas' final boozy months in The Big Apple that were spent snoozing through rehearsals, pontificating in pubs, chasing skirts, waking up to his mistress, penning love letters to his wife, and getting too acquainted with morphine.   Male f**k-ups and basket cases, if celluloid is to be believed, make the best writers.   They always manage to pick themselves up off the floor covered in their vomit at the exact moment the muse visits them and plug away at creating magic prose.

 

While it would be safe to assume that Americans would prefer their writers possess expensive gadgets and a deep unabiding passion for Armani, while British audiences prefer to lose themselves in lush, verdant scenes narrated by Keats, on both sides of the pond, writers who live by the pen, (or quill ) and die by either drama, cirrhosis, or transcend their myriad dysfunctions through romance, are tales all audiences can get behind.  

 


 

Author Bio:

Sophia Dorval is a contributing writer at Highbrow Magazine.

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