I: THE EXCAVATION
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In 2017, I published a novel entitled he, a—barely—fictionalized account of the life of the comedian Stan Laurel. I think I’d lived with the book for most of my writing life, as I’d first considered Laurel as a possible subject back in 1999, although it was then little more than a passing thought.
It’s sometimes erroneously assumed that ideas are the currency for writers. Some variation on “Where do you get your ideas from?” is the question most frequently asked of authors by readers, but it is a subject in which many of those practitioners remain studiedly uninterested. (I suspect this is partly superstition: a fear that if over-analyzed, the delicate business of making stuff up might collapse entirely.) Ideas manifest themselves with maddening frequency, rather like the six impossible things believed before breakfast by the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. The real currency for writers, as for readers, is time. Just as there will always be more books to read than hours in which to read them, so too writers will always have more ideas to be written than hours in which to write them.
Thus it was that a decade would elapse before I finally committed myself to writing the Laurel book at some point, and a few more years had to pass until I resigned myself to the fact that the ongoing business of clipping magazine articles and buying expensive treatises on the history of British comedy and the development of Hollywood, and biographies of long-dead comedians, meant this work had already commenced.
But during that time I became fascinated by the processes through which films come into being. I don’t mean the mechanics of filmmaking, although obviously these constitute an important element of such a fascination, but the human entanglements that produce movies—the manner in which disparate individuals may be brought together, sometimes for only one project, before dispersing, often never to be reunited as a unit, leaving behind a piece of work that, in an ideal world, may constitute a lasting cultural artifact or, at the very least, engage an audience for the duration of its running time.
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Horror Express brought together five such individuals: a war hero who fell into acting for want of anything better to do; a widower who wished only to die so he could rejoin his love in the next world; a philanderer and gambler who yearned to be the handsome lead, yet appeared destined to play the villain; an alleged Communist sympathizer who, in a Kafkaesque twist, was never formally accused, and therefore never given an opportunity to confront his accusers, but found himself blacklisted nonetheless; and the Catholic product of a fascist regime who moved to the left in his teens, but remained intent throughout his career on resisting all efforts to force him into making political statements in his films, seeking instead only to entertain .
These five men would work together only on this single occasion. In fact, one of them would never make another picture following Horror Express, despite living for many years after. The film that resulted from their sole collaboration is not great, but it is good, and certainly much better than it has any requirement to be. It is a product of craftsmanship, and a love of the medium. It wants to be all it can possibly be, and perhaps just a little more.
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I once interviewed the American mystery author George Pelecanos, who remarked that none of us is writing for the ages; we just have to write as though we are.
Every creative endeavor should aspire to the condition of art.
