W Oody a Llen and the Literary Canon

17 W oody A llen and the Literary Canon William Hutchings I ’ m a serious person, a disciplined worker, interested in writing, interested in literature, interested in theater and fi lm. (Woody Allen, qtd. in Lax 2001 : 155) Comedy, like water, always fi nds its own level – as Shakespeare knew best. For the groundlings, there were physical buff oonery, “vulgar” double entendres, com- pounded insults and beratements, as well as the antics of rustics and clowns; for those with more refi ned tastes and better educations, there were often now- recondite literary allusions and witty, subtle, and cerebral wordplay. Both kinds of entertainment (and more) were provided, often in abundance and in the same play. This is the promise that was exemplifi ed in the title As You Like It : each viewer could be assured that, for the price of a ticket, he or she would fi nd whatever type of comedy was most likely to make him or her laugh. It is, however, a claim that can be made on behalf of remarkably few modern comedies, whether on stage or screen – and a standard to which few playwrights and screenwriters even aspire. Neil Simon provides a reliably “good night out” for those who are Broadway- bound in search of unchallenging fare; Noel Coward reliably amuses those with a taste for witty exchanges among the “Mahtini, dahling?” subset of the haute bourgeoisie. Even the great comedians of the silent era knew and reliably played to the particular tastes of a popular audience: hence the sentimentalities of Chap- lin ’ s Little Tramp, the sad-sack stoicism of Buster Keaton, the physical imperil- ments of Harold Lloyd, the knockabout shtick of Hal Roach ’ s Keystone Kops. The audiences for Porky ’ s (and its sequels and its legion of imitators) or Dumb and Dumber or Animal House know – and fi nd – exactly and reliably the entertain- ments that they seek. Woody Allen ’ s fi lms, however, are quite a diff erent matter. Certainly, his early comedies have no shortage of slapstick humor and sexual A Companion to Woody Allen, First Edition. Edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 360 William Hutchings innuendos; yet often, especially in his subsequent fi lms, there can be found also a rich allusiveness and a wide-ranging erudition that are unrivaled among fi lmmak- ers of his time. His non-comic fi lms confi rm and deepen this unique intellectual intertextuality, often evoking literary works of the existentialist and absurdist traditions. Nevertheless, an exact assessment of Woody Allen ’ s relationship to the literary canon is more problematic than it might initially appear – not least because of inconsistencies within his own self-presentation in interviews and his own writings. At times, he frankly discusses literary authors with remarkable sophistica- tion and aplomb, articulating a post-Sartre, post-Kaf ka, post-Beckett worldview and aesthetic, as in many of the interviews cited herein. Particularly in the later years of his career, however, he has preferred to present himself as a street-smart “regular guy” from a Brooklyn blue-collar family – one who was thrown out of college during his fi rst year, fi nds reading a chore rather than a pleasure (and does it mainly “to keep up with my dates”), ardently follows his favorite basketball team on television, plays jazz, and drinks beer (see, for example, Shickel 2003 : 153). When asked in 2011 about his “top fi ve books . that have made most impact on him as a fi lm-maker and comic writer,” he included only one widely known literary work – J.D. Salinger ’ s The Catcher in the Rye which “always had special meaning for me because I read it when I was young – 18 or so” (Gerber 2011 ). The others were Really the Blues by Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe (1946), a memoir by a jazz clarinetist of that era; The World of S.J. Perelman (2000), an anthology of writings by “the funniest human being in my lifetime, in any medium,” to which Allen himself contributed the introduction; Epitaph of a Small Winner by Machado de Assis (1880), about which Allen remarked that “Because it ’ s a thin book, I read it[; i]f it had been a thick book, I would have discarded it”; and Elia Kazan: A Biography by Richard Schickel (2005) (Gerber 2011 ). Yet, just three weeks later, following the release of Allen ’ s Midnight in Paris , his most overtly literary and allusive fi lm since Love and Death (1975), the New York Times saw fi t to publish an article “decoding” the fi lm ’ s “historical truths,” its many references to “the enormously talented cast of expatriates and bohemi- ans that peopled Jazz Age Paris” including “[Ernest] Hemingway . [Gertrude] Stein[,] . Picasso ’ s mistress[,] . Salvador Dali, T.S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Jose- phine Baker, Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, and others,” all of whom fi gure in its plot (Berger 2011 : C7). One month later, noting that Berger ’ s “crib sheet to the ‘Mid- night in Paris’ pantheon . still ranks highest among the most e-mailed items in the movie section,” A.O. Scott wrote a lengthy analysis of such cinematic intertextuality as a (supposedly) recent trend. Allen ’ s fi lm, he claimed, “wears its cul- tural baggage lightly and treats the great writers who fl it across the screen less as touchstones than as imaginary friends for its hero” – adding that “his enthusi- asm for high art has always fi ltered snobbery through an essentially democratic temperament, and there is nothing obscure or recondite in the name dropping” in his latest fi lm (Scott 2011 : AR 12). Woody Allen and the Literary Canon 361 Often, Allen ’ s less-than-literary self-characterization refl ects the stand-up come- dian ’ s honed sense of playing to the specifi c audience/readership of the venue in which his comments will appear; it is also the conjurer ’ s age-old trick of “misdirec- tion,” his fi nal topic in Schickel ’ s interview (Schickel 2003 : 169, 173). Certainly, his satirical animus against pompous pseudo-intellectuals has long been apparent (most famously in Annie Hall , when Allen ’ s character brings in the real Marshall McLuhan to correct a pretentious moviegoer standing in line trying to impress his date by discussing the scholar ’ s theories); furthermore, Allen ’ s own public persona as a comic has long been relentlessly self-deprecating, a by-now-intuitive tendency that is perhaps exacerbated in literary matters by his status as an autodidact – a trait shared by working class English authors Joe Orton, Alan Sillitoe, and David Storey, among others. As the census prepared by Andrew Gothard (Chapter 18 in this volume) clearly reveals, the extensiveness of Allen ’ s allusions throughout his fi lms, fi ction, and interviews from over fi ve decades far surpasses what has been widely assumed. A confi dent, knowing allusiveness, whether more or less subtly apparent, can be found in both the content and the structure of many of his works and in numerous interviews over fi ve decades; yet alongside this, there persists a counter-tendency – equally strong – towards denying that he is an intellectual in any sense of the term. Such self-deprecation often carries over into his comments assessing his fi lms as well – eventually provoking an interviewer ’ s profane outburst that seems no less appropriate to Allen ’ s disparagement of his literary knowledge: [ S CHICKEL :] I think you ’ re full of shit about this. [A LLEN :] Well, I . I . as long as long as people know how I feel about them (Shickel 2003 : 163). These rival tendencies within Allen ’ s self-representation have long been not only an essential trait of his comic persona but also a recurrent characteristic of his creative genius and an underassessed facet of his personality. From the outset, Allen ’ s affi nity for allusions to and quotations from the literary canon was manifest, made all the funnier in their often incongruous contexts. Amid the standard comic alarums, slamming doors, and madcap chase scenes of What ’ s New Pussycat? (Clive Donner, 1965), Allen ’ s fi rst feature fi lm as both script- writer and actor, a character pauses in mid-farce to declaim a line from Hamlet . Even more surprisingly, there is an off hand if arcane allusion to German philoso- pher and playwright Friedrich Schiller. Similarly, near the end of Sleeper (1973), an excerpt of dialogue from Tennessee Williams ’ s A Streetcar Named Desire gets interpolated, with Allen reprising famous lines of Blanche Dubois (including, inevitably, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”) and Diane Keaton responding with those of Stanley Kowalski, mumbled in the style for which Marlon Brando was by then renowned. Asked to identify assorted photo- graphs from the twentieth century by his twenty-second-century captors, Allen ’ s 362 William Hutchings character describes F. Scott Fitzgerald as “a romantic writer loved by English majors [and] nymphomaniacs”; he also deems Rod McKuen a serious infl uence on American poetry – a line that would have drawn laughter even then. Sleeper (1973, cowritten with Marshall Brickman) is the fi rst Allen fi lm to have its premise based on a single identifi able work of literature: H.G. Wells ’ s The Sleeper Awakens , which is also known by its original title, When the Sleeper Wakes . Like Allen ’ s character Miles Monroe, Wells ’ s protagonist Graham awakens from a 200-year slumber to discover a civilization whose technologies, values, customs, and mores have been utterly transformed from those of the world he knew – though not for the better.

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