More Baths Less Talking by Nick Hornby Read Free Book Online

these two clever men said would jerk me out of my vacation and back to my computer all those miles away. Murch’s reference to “Negative Twenty Questions,” for example, a game invented by the quantum physicist John Wheeler to explain how the world looks at a quantum level and much too complicated to tell you about here… something about the way Murch used the game to illustrate the process of film editing dimly reminded me of how writing a book feels, if you end up plotting on the hoof.
    But mostly I read the book simply as someone who has seen a lot of films, and as Murch edited Apocalypse Now and The Godfather and The Conversation and The English Patient (and reedited Welles’s Touch of Evil using the fifty-eight-page memo that Welles wrote tothe studio after he’d seen the studio’s cut of the film), then I was in experienced hands: this book is a dream, not just for cineasts, but for anyone interested in the tiny but crucial creative decisions that go into the making of anything at all. At one point, Murch talks about recording the sound of a door closing in The Godfather —a film, you suddenly remember, whose entire meaning rests on the sound of a door closing, when Michael excludes Diane Keaton from the world he promised he’d never join. If Murch had gotten that wrong, and the door had closed with a weedy, phony click, then it’s entirely possible that we wouldn’t still be reading about his career today. And there’s tons of stuff like that, discussions that seem like the nerdy fetishization of trivia, until the import of that trivia becomes clear. Harry Caul in The Conversation was going to be called Harry Caller (after Steppenwolf ’s Harry Haller), until he decided that “Caller” was an insufficiently oblique name for a professional bugger. So “Caller” became “Call,” which became “Caul” after a secretary’s misprint, which in turn gave Coppola the idea of dressing Gene Hackman in his distinctive semitransparent raincoat. And Murch is reminded of this by a story of Ondaatje’s about W. H. Auden, who saw that a misprint in a proof produced a line better than his original: “The poets know the name of the seas” became “The ports know the name of the seas”… Oh, boy. If you’re who I think you are, you would love The Conversations . Strangely, though, every friend I’ve pressed it upon so far has already read it, which suggests (a) that it’s clearly one of those books whose reputation has grown and grown since it was first published, in 2002, and (b) my friends think I’m some kind of dimbo who only reads football reports and the lyrics of Black Sabbath songs.
    And, in any case, it turns out that editing is kind of a metaphor for living. Our marriages, our careers, our domestic arrangements… so much of how we live consists of making meaning out of a bewildering jumble of images, of attempting to move as seamlessly as we can from one stage of life to the next.
    There comes a time in the life of every young writer of fiction when he or she thinks, I’m not going to bother with plot and character and meaningless little slivers of human existence—I’ve done all that. I’m going to write about life itself . And the results are always indigestible, sluggish, and pretentious. If you’re lucky, you get this stage over with before you’re published—you have given yourself permission to rant on without the checks of narrative; if you’re unlucky, it’s your publisher who has given you enough rope with which to hang yourself, usually because your previous book was a brilliant success, and it can be the end of you.
    Tinkers is Paul Harding’s first novel, and it’s pretty much about life itself, and it won him the Pulitzer Prize; he got away with it because he has a poet’s eye and ear, and, because he’s a ruthless self-editor, and