| |
 |
|
Finding The Furies will always seem a part of Stone Reader, and in some ways the
novel parallels The Stones of Summer. I think of it as a bookend, on the other side of the case, with much of the generation that ran from Mossman to Hobhouse somewhere in-between.
A week or so after 9/11/01, I traveled to New York to attend the IFP’s No Borders Conference. I had never been to a film festival or movie industry event before, didn’t know what happened, and relied on two associates, Jessica
Shamash and Robert Goodman, for tips on what to do. I was there because Robert had suggested we submit the project I was working on, something about books. |
|
| |
I stayed at the Tribeca Grand, where the conference was held. Those weeks the streets lay empty of vehicles south of Canal Street. No traffic. One night I walked eight blocks in Tribeca without seeing another person,
like a scene from The Third Man. Dust coated everything, doorways loomed vacant, unlit, dark. The glow of the giant lights where the wreckage workers worked all night silhouetted the view south.
In the hotel, I told various entertainment executives about Stone Reader. Mostly I just brought a box of books along -- some of the books that led me along the course of the movie -- and talked about them and then
handed the poor baffled listener a 5-minute promo tape, hoping they would watch it afterwards.
But I found that people were more than happy to talk about books, and so I made some friends. Jan Rofekamp, who later became the movie’s international distributor, told me about a similar experience, lending out an old
paperback of a favorite novel, Aztec, and never finding it again (Tellingly, a month later it reappeared in print.) Alyce Myatt, who worked for PBS at the time, talked to me about John A. Williams, a forgotten writer she
admired and I had not yet read. An executive for a large movie company that makes random big-budget pictures, shocked me by not only having taken courses from someone in the movie, but also having read nearly every book,
even obscure ones, I pulled out of the box.
One of my last meetings was with Nick Fraser, a writer, and commissioning
editor at the BBC. In this meeting, which Jessica attended as well (being a
Londoner, I thought she could add clout), I was saved from not having
to describe the project at all. Nick told me about writers he didn’t like,
ones he did, and some other obscure books, such as Embers, which was also
published soon afterwards.
A day or two later, after running into one another on the way out the door,
Nick mentioned to me, as an aside, that if I really wanted to do some
digging into obscurity, he’d be interested to know what happened to the
early drafts of his ex-wife’s last book, “not like her others, quite a good
one, you may find it excellent. She really hit the mark with it. A
surprise.” I didn’t think much about it at the time.
I didn’t see Nick again until several months later when Stone Reader was
finished and playing at Slamdance. We showed him a clip in a condo, and
shortly thereafter he let us know he’d like to license it for the BBC, funds
from which went a long way to making the theatrically released version you
saw in theaters or the DVD.
But in the year before the movie came out, I and others spent a lot of time
trying to figure out how to get Dow Mossman’s book back into print, and
while doing that I became more and more interested in other Lost Books,
particularly because so many people kept mentioning their favorites to me,
and that’s how we started this nonprofit, intending to, if nothing else (and with a few contributions), get
Dow’s book back into print.
As the Lost Books stacked up, I went back through my notes of all the books
people had mentioned to me and I found Nick’s remarks about his ex-wife’s
book, and not thinking much about it at the time, or even then, made a
cursory effort to find out who his ex-wife was.
|
|
| |
Her name was Janet Hobhouse and she had written several books, which
explained Nick’s comments. I went online and bought the cheapest one I could
find, for $1.00, a reader’s copy of her last book, the one Nick had suggested.
In the summer of 2002, before we ever knew what would happen to Stone Reader
or the Lost Books Club, I started reading it.
I read the first 10 pages on my patio. It was nothing like I expected. It
almost starts epically, all the while dovetailing into intimacy. And from
that point on, I read a few pages of the book, sometimes more, nearly every
day, outside, while taking a break or two from work. Days I traveled or when
it rained, and I didn’t read it, felt different, more my own. And I would
often wait a few days before re-entering it. I don’t think I had ever read a
book with such a private space to it, or with a narrator so close inside
your skull. |
|
 |
|
| |
I had been living with Mossman’s book for some time, between editing the movie and re-reading it, and trying to find someone to print it, and when I finished Hobhouse’s I felt it was the parallel universe to The Stones of
Summer. A coming-of-age novel by a woman growing up in NY. Interior to Dow’s exterior. Urban vs. small town. Strong, creative minds played out against the times, in different ways, with a different focus. The books are worlds apart, but both cover a generation, a time I lived through, and will never remember as vivdly.
When I finished The Furies, something I dragged out to nearly autumn, I couldn’t believe there’d be no more.
Still, Nick’s words of something hidden or unclaimed or unresolved in her papers kept coming back to me. Perhaps there could be more.
Almost two years later I was driving up to New York one day to film something in the evening and decided, at the last minute, to see if I could stop in at the Rutgers Library on the way up, the special collections where
Hobhouse’s papers were kept. They graciously assented, and I spent so long just sitting there reading, that I nearly forgot to film and with closing time only a few minutes away, rushed to shoot a few items.
You might want to stop here until you read the book.
|
|
| |
 |
|
Among the files is a thick stack of notes Janet wrote to her mother from the boarding school she went off to at the age of 5. If you read the book, you’ll understand why I mention these. Later, there is a series of notebooks
written “wall-to-wall” by her mother, at once one of the most undiluted and harrowing self-descriptions of mental illness you could read. There are other things in the boxes as well, journals, daybooks, and early drafts.
Letters to her aunt, and a matrix chart prepared by the librarian matching who in the book is who in real life.
In poring through the drafts, looking for what Nick was interested in, I was stumped. The drafts all seem to end with his (the husband’s) appearance into the novel. From that point on, there is nothing, half of the book missing,
either gone or perhaps locked away in a box “Not to be opened until 2020” with other papers.
|
|
| |
As Stone Reader played around the country I would be asked again and again what other books I’d like to see come back and I would invariably mention two: The Furies (and if I had a copy -- which I often did, buying them
online or in used stores when they were a buck or two -- I would hand one to someone in the audience to help get the ball rolling) and John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am. They are both in print now and if I may say
so, better than ever.
|
|
|
