Gilbert Adair, 1944-2011

The first and only time David Foster Wallace visited Premiere's New York office, he made a pretty careful inspection of the books I had lying around in my hovel of a semi-detached cubicle, and honed in one one, and made a pretty immediate and enthusiastic connection with it. The book was Gilbert Adair's 1995 Flickers, an unusual kind of meta-history of the first hundred years of cinema, its method being for Adair to choose one still from one film of every one of those hundred years and compose a mini-essay ostensibly about that film but also of course about everything else. I think Dave was immediately impressed by both the eccentricity and the implicit rigor of this nearly Oulipean approach, and I believe that as he read through one piece and then another he was not only impressed by the writing but discovering a kindred spirit in Adair. Adair did not wear his erudition lightly in the Charles-Taylor-approved style; he wrote as himself, that is, as a near-obsessive reader, viewer, researcher. Yeah, Gilbert Adair was a "bookworm;" you got a problem with that? 

Flickers abounds with prickly judgments and pronouncements that border on the perverse (to his credit Adair lays all his card on the table at the outset; after listing certain omissions "about which [...] I am prepared to offer no apology" he adds "it is [...] a wholly personal, unapologetically partisan choice"), the most notorious of which, to my mind, is his avowal that he "cannot quite regret" the disappearance of Vidor's 1926 Bardelys The Magnificent. And now I wonder, and I Google,and I do not find: what did Adair make, I wonder, of the fact that since the publication of Flickers, Bardelys The Magnificent resurfaced and was restored? Amazing, these things that happen; of all the lost films to build a theory of the glory of lost films around, he chooses one that comes back. In any event, as peculiar and even sometimes stubborn as Adair's perspectives could seem, he was ever a delight to read; there's a friendliness to his use of erudition. A surrealist as well as a deconstructionist, Adair's polyglot sensibility yielded an an expansive jouissance that's visible on every page of Flickers. At any rate, as Dave was leaving my office, he unabashedly asked me, "Can I have that book?" And I said, "No."

I should explain that Dave had this impression of magazine editors that one used to get from watching the likes of The Best of Everything and Youngblood Hawke. I don't believe that he actually wanted to filch my copy of Flickers; I think he thought that, as a magazine editor, I naturally had ten more review copies of the book in a closet down the hall. I expalined that the book had taken ME forever to find and that in the short time that I'd had it, I'd made it something of an extension of myself. The next time we worked together, Dave, having had a devil of a time himself in finding a copy, made it a condition that I track down another copy and send it to him, which I was able to do. Took some effort, as I recall,maybe a special order from Shakespeare and Company or something. Dave received it VERY enthusiastically. 

The bio on the back of Flickers is worth citing in full: "Gilbert Adair has written three novels, The Holy Innocents, Love and Death on Long Island and The Death of the Author. He is also the author of The Rape of the Clock, a full-length verse parody of Pope, and two sequels to classics of children's literature, Alice Through the Needle's Eye and Peter Pan and the Only Children.  His non-fiction includes Hollywood's Vietnam, Myths and Memories and The Postmodernist Always Rings Twice, and he has translated Michel Ciment's John Boorman, François Truffaut's Letters and Georges Perec's 'e'-less A Void. His is a regular columnist for The Sunday Times." Those 99 words offer, I think, a very nice thumbnail sketch of Adair's range, and this was well before Holy Innocents was made into a film by Bertolucci (The Dreamers) with Adair writing the script, or Adair's epic translation of Ciment's epic Kubrick study. Of his translations, I am particularly grateful, of course, for that of Truffaut's letters, which are ever yielding new insights and...stuff (I was particularly chuffed recently, reading a letter from Truffaut congratulating a colleague and instructing her to make him first on her dance card, and realizing that said daughter is all grown up now and a friend and neighbor of myself and my wife), and for the Perec, which by necessity is very nearly an entirely different book from the French original, which my linguistic skills of lack thereof make it a challenge to experience in anything but a patchy sort of way. And there's a lot there on that list I haven't read, and that I look forward to; nevertheless the fact that there won't be more is very sad, as is the fact that 66 is a sad age at which to die. 

Peter Bradshaw's appreciation of the man and his work at the Guardian film blog is a good jumping-off point for those desirous of further Adair awareness.

Comments

[Oliver_C]

One of Adair's best lines from 'Flickers' -- regarding Oliver Stone, but applicable to all-too-many other directors -- "[It's] as if, since the heart is in the right place, it doesn't matter where the camera is."

[jbryant]

Haven't read any Adair, but loved the film version of LOVE AND DEATH ON LONG ISLAND.

[Bilge]

Loved FLICKERS, but I'd also like to put in a good word for his translation of Ciment's Boorman book, which is hard to find but amazing. Also, I quite liked THE HOLY INNOCENTS (the first version, not the post-DREAMERS revise, which I haven't read) years ago, when I first read it. (I didn't even realize who Adair was at the time; I just liked the description on the back of the book.)

[Jonathan Rosenbaum]

During the latter part of my five years in Paris and the beginning of my stint in London, roughly between 1972 and 1976, Gilbert was one of my closest friends; in Paris I used to see him at least a couple of times each week, not even counting the Cinematheque screenings that we both attended. I even read, in manuscript, "The Rape of the Cock" (not "Clock," as Faber and Faber's blushing back-cover copywriter or copyeditor had it). As far as I know, this was the first of his major pastiches, and one that I don't believe he ever published. And in fact, during most of those years, Gilbert hadn't published anything at all. A veritable dandy--he lived in a Left Bank hotel on the Seine during most of this period, where he systematically discarded all of his books after reading them EXCEPT FOR those by Cocteau--and certainly a very brilliant one....Years later, it was largely thanks to him that I became friends with Raul Ruiz, a soul brother of Gilbert's in many crucial respects. What a sad irony that both of them should die prematurely, only about a year apart.

[davidf]

One of my favorite film books, Flickers; sorry to hear about his passing.

[David Ehrenstein]

Gilbert was a friend and colleague once upon a time. I met him though my dear friend Meredith Brody, to whom "Love and Death on Long Island" is dedicated. It's a lovely book and the movie is truly super with John Hurt at his very, very best (I treasure the scene where having found himself in a multi-plex theater playing "Hot Pants College: II" instead of "A Room with a View" rises from his seat indignantly and yells "This isn't E.M. Forster!" )

When he turned 50 Gilbert made the Big Announcement that he wasn't gay anymore. Considering the legions of Tadzios he'd left in his wake one sensed he no longer had what it took to book a room at the Hotel des Bains. Consequently his screenplay adaptation of his novel "The Holy Innocents" for Bernardo Bertolucci, "The Dreamers," de-gayed the action, resulting in the fact that Louis Garrel doesn't get it on with Michael Pitt.

A cinematic crime of the first order!

As to Gilbert's degaying word got back some time lafter the Big Announcement that (as is always the case) it "didn't take."

Ah well. Just watching "Barry Lyndon" on the tube: "They Are All Equal Now."

Or soon will be.

Adieu Gilbert.

[Paul Duane]

And all of the above, without touching on his witty postmodern dissections of Agatha Christie novels - A Mysterious Affair of Style, And Then There Was No One, etc. A remarkable man.

[David Ehrenstein]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2011/dec/09/gilbert-adair-man-letters-cinema?newsfeed=true

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/dec/09/gilbert-adair?newsfeed=true

[Jette]

So pleased to see that my public library, which can often be disappointing, has a copy of "Flickers" that I've just put on hold to borrow. Thanks for the recommendation, I'm sure it will be lovely Christmastime reading.

[david hare]

For those wishing to hear Adair in full flower he does a fabulous commentary track on the Criterion of Les Enfants Terribles.
No one better to talk about it and Cocteau, and I deeply regret Berto made such a hash of Adair's Cocteauian concepts for The Dreamers. Even Re-Gaying probably wouldnt have helped Berto's absolutely sloppy mise en scene. Most egregious moment - showing the clip of Mouchette rolling down the river bank in the wrong fucking aspect ratio!!
Eva Green's line readings in the movie also might have been better rendered in a Lina Lamont voice.

[David Ehrenstein]

Well at least Chrtophe Honore knows how to show Louis off for the boys in the backroom

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGiDyPpCwYE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkNP0LbHgKE&feature=rec-r2-2r-4-HM

[Joel Bocko]

Found used on Amazon, and purchased. Slightly steep but sounds like it will be worth the investment. Too bad the recommendation arrived in this context, but appreciated nonetheless.

[Tom Charity]

Flickers is a marvellous book, I reviewed it for Time Out London so enthusiastically that someone promptly swiped my copy. To this day I feel the hole in my bookshelf. I note in passing that the author of another of my favourite books about film died just six months ago, Theodore Roszak. And the book: Flicker. I can almost see the two of them playing chess on that stairway to heaven...