William Goldman

It's no longer clear to me anymore when or how I first encountered William Goldman's work.  I think, I think that it was my parents' copy of The Princess Bride, a paperback with an absurdly misleading cover.  Though it's also possible--maybe probable--that I'd seen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid before that.

Though, fuck me, this is ironic: I'm quite sure that whenever I read Princess Bride, I was able to appreciate the shaggy dog meta-story framing it, including his story about having family problems while working on the screenplay for The Stepford Wives.   Had I actually seen Stepford Wives before I read Princess Bride?  Hell, had I already watched Marathon Man on television by that point?

Here are two things that are clear.  One, a peculiar point of pride that I read the novel The Princess Bride years before the beloved film version was made.  Another, that (whatever the first book of Goldman's I picked up was), my parents had several others--Boys And Girls Together and The Color of Light I'm sure of, because I think they are now on my bookshelf at home; there may have been others--and that when I was done with those, the public library was providing me with anything I could lay my hands on.  Magic.  Marathon Man (the novel), if it wasn't one of the ones the 'rents had  copy of.  Heat, which was terrible enough that I knew it was bad even with a teenager's lousy taste, but featured an unforgettable gimmick involving credit cards turned into deadly weapons.

That, and the movies, of course.  So.  Many.  Movies.  Great movies.  Pretty good movies.  Terrible movies.  Movies that would have been terrible but for Goldman's penchant for snappy dialogue--children, before there was Joss Whedon, there was William "The fall will probably kill ya'!" Goldman.  William "This might be the garden spot of the whole country" Goldman.  William "My name is Inigo Montoya.  You killed my father.  Prepare to die" Goldman.

William "Is it safe?" Goldman.

So.  Many.  Movies.

But when I think about William Goldman, you know, it always seems to come back to the novel, The Princess Bride.  I mean, the movie's great.  Everybody talks about the movie.  The movie is just fine.  The book, though, is a different animal, and I don't mean that in the way a book is always different from a movie; Goldman's brilliance as a novelist and screenwriter, his sheer finesse at the art of writing was that he absolutely understood that what worked in the novel wouldn't work at all for the screen, and so he didn't even bother adapting the novel when he wrote the screenplay for the film, even while he was writing a screenplay that hewed closely to the "good parts" plot-within-a-plot of the novel and incorporated lines of dialogue word for word, creating an utterly faithful faithless version.

The novel, though.  Not just because I was one of the lucky ones who met it first.  But because it seems to me that maybe it was the first time I really read a book about books.

The novel, you see, has two layers.  Or maybe two-and-a-half.  Or three, depending on how you're looking at what isn't there.

One layer, an obvious layer, is the one you know if you've seen the movie: boy meets girl, girl loses boy, girl has to marry prince, boy turns out to be a pirate, adventure, romance, giant rodents, infinite cliffs, the (second) strongest man in the world, the (second) best swordsman in the world, a Sicilian who is inordinately proud of his propensity for logic puzzles, a villain with too many fingers, mostly dead, mawwrwidge.

But the framing device for this layer is a clever and complicated trick brilliantly pulled off.  "The Princess Bride," Goldman claims in a lengthy introduction, is a real novel, not something he wrote but the masterpiece of S. Morgenstern, the brilliant and obscure novelist.  Goldman tells us that when he was young, he just hated, hated, hated literature as a child, but then he was laid up sick and his father--a barely literate immigrant--sat down at his bedside and slowly, laboriously read this fabulous work to Goldman, and when little William finally went back to school, he was transformed, he was a devourer of books and on his way to a writing career--

And yet not all was well.  Goldman tells us that now he is a grown man and writer with a family, but his wife (this is fiction, although Goldman was married) is a cold and distant psychologist, his son (also a fictional creation; if I remember correctly, he did have daughters, however) a strange and alien creature growing stranger and less relatable every year.  And Goldman is in California working on the script for Stepford Wives and wondering how his professional life can be absurdly successful while his personal life is in decay, and he remembers his son has a birthday approaching and he remembers his own father connecting to him through this great and wonderful S. Morgenstern novel.  So, with some effort, he goes about procuring a copy for his son's birthday--which Goldman misses, because Hollywood and professional obligations, but he has it delivered.

He calls home to ask how the book was received, and is put off by how unimpressed his son seems, and by how his wife seems to think the book was an imposition upon the poor child.  He finally comes home to discover the book has hardly been touched at all--this wonderful, beautiful, brilliant tale of epic adventure and true love, the most meaningful thing he ever experienced as a young boy his son's age.  In a fit of pique, he takes the book to his study, he opens it to the first page--

He discovers it's awful.

This is all invention, keep in mind.  This metanovel, this framing device, this story around the story.  No S. Morgenstern, no real "Princess Bride," not even a real depiction of his family at home (thank goodness for his sake).

Anyway, he tells us he forced himself to read the whole thing, discovering his father read him the good parts.  There is a story of high adventure and true love buried in there.  Emphasis on buried.  But it's also a lot of rambling political satire and sociological study and commentary on fashions and customs.

It is, in other words, your Nineteenth Century novel.  It's Moby Dick, a high epic of seamanship and obsessive-compulsive monomania drowned in a lot of nonsense about how whales are actually fish and the minutiae of gutting them for profit.  It's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a passionate, tragic, harrowing tale of selfless love and selfish jealousy hemmed in on all sides by amateur scholarly essays re: medieval Parisian architecture and urban planning.  It's The Turn of the Screw, a harrowing account of taboo relationships and the supernatural haunted by... whatever the fuck Henry James is talking about the rest of the time, Jesus wept.

Goldman decides he's going to force his publisher to put out the "good parts" version his dad read to him, edit the hell out of the novel and get it back into print as a badass abridged version; but he won't hide what he's up to, he'll pepper the remaining text with commentary about what he's leaving out....

And about life.  And justice.  And love.  And what it means to try to be a good person in a pretty fucked up world where you don't get what you want and maybe not what you deserve.  A world where nobody lives happily ever after, they just live for a while and then they die and somebody else lives later going through much the same thing.  Where you and I and nearly everybody we know isn't going to be the best swordsman, or the best strongman, or the most beautiful person in the world, or the Dread Pirate Roberts, but will just have to come to terms with being somewhere around average.  A world where we're all kind of losers, but that isn't actually important.

It's actually kind of a grim novel.  But also an uplifting one.

I'm going on and on, and on and on, and on; I know.  But this book--I haven't read it in years, I guess I have to go back and re-read it again now--this book was one of those quiet bombs that go off in your head.  I mean, I guess I was something of a fucked-up kid for a book that was basically about the unfairness and disappointment of life to resonate with me so strongly, but there you are.  Goldman's anecdote, buried in the middle of The Princess Bride, about losing at tennis is something that comes back round in my brain all the time.  And as much as I've come to adore a lot of those digressive 19^th Century novels with their meanderings into distant fields and meadows thousands of miles from any plot the reader may have been trying to follow, it's very possible that enjoyment was made possible by Goldman affectionately skewering them.

On top of which, I think Princess Bride was very possibly the first time I was ever really thinking about a story as a story, as something being told by somebody, and who was telling it, and what was it really about.  This is one of the key things the novel is really about.  William Goldman is in the book as a character claiming he isn't the author, but the editor, giving us this fictional and unreliable account of how he fell in love with this fictional and unreliable epic, which he's gone and made even less reliable by deliberately refusing to leave it intact, presenting it as a love story and adventure when it could just as fairly have been read as a lengthy meditation of Florinese fashion peppered with digressions about cliff-climbing, exotic poisons, sword-fighting, insane torture devices, and half-assed necromancy.  I don't always think about what I'm reading as deeply as I should, mind, but when I do I probably owe it more to Professor Wm. Goldman than to anyone I took high school English from (sorry, everybody I took high school English from; it wasn't you, it was me).

If I write--I hardly write anymore, I struggle with it and it depresses me--but if I write, I write in some measure because of William Goldman.  I don't know if I ever quite realized that until sitting here and writing this.  There are lots of writers who have had an impact on me--I still want to be Stephen King when I grow up, the late Harlan Ellison showed me how words can be like bullets and razor blades--but Goldman had this quiet and persistent effect on who I am when I write and, really, who I am as a person.  Because Goldman was really the one who taught me life is a bunch of disappointment but that isn't the point, and if you think it is, you weren't really paying attention.

What a strange thing to find secret joy in.

We've lost him, you know, you knew when you started reading this or guessed by now.  He was 87, which is a good run and no one can really be surprised because everything comes to an end.  I take it he's entirely dead, not mostly dead; although I never met him, I feel comfortable saying he would have enjoyed that morbid and tasteless reference.

If I'd met him, I don't know if I would have thanked him enough, I don't know that I could have.