Immersion

In August of 2022, when The New York Times wrote of the death, at age 89, of the much-admired historian David McCullough, the newspaper referred to an interview Mr. McCullough had given to the newspaper in 1992.   

At the time of the earlier article, Mr. McCullough's biography of Harry Truman--which he had spent ten years writing, and for which he would later receive the Pulitzer Prize--was on the best-seller list.  Nine years later, in 2001, his biography of John Adams would appear--and would also be awarded the Pulitzer Prize. During his career Mr. McCullough also received the National Book Award, twice, for books about the Panama Canal, and Theodore Roosevelt.

"Immersed in Facts," the 1992 article's headline read, "The Better to Imagine Harry Truman's Life."

"People often ask me if I'm working on a book," Mr. McCullough told reporter Esther B. Fein. "That's not how I feel. I feel like I work in a book [italics added]. It's like putting myself under a spell. And this spell, if you will, is so real to me that if I have to leave my work for a few days, I have to work myself back into the spell when I come back. It's almost like hypnosis."

Ms. Fein wrote the following, in the 1992 piece:

When David McCullough was writing "The Great Bridge," his chronicle of how the Brooklyn Bridge was built, he grew a beard, the better to look and feel like one of the book's heroes, the engineer Washington Roebling. While working for the last decade on his current best seller, "Truman," he would begin each day with a brisk early-morning walk, just as Harry S. Truman did.

To learn the rhythms of speech and of life in Truman's hometown, Independence, Mo., Mr. McCullough lived there for a while. In Washington, he raced through the Capitol, retracing the path Truman ran when he was summoned to the White House on April 12, 1945, to be told that Franklin D. Roosevelt had died and that he was now President of the United States. 

"The only way I can attain this feeling for my subject," Mr. McCullough said, "is when I've soaked up so much information on it, know it from every angle and direction, and can call on all those resources to imagine that I am there."

Another Times piece, by Alexandra Alter from this past November, concerned the acclaimed Irish fiction writer Claire Keegan. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/05/books/claire-keegan-foster-books.html

Different writers, of course, have different processes, regarding the unfolding and creation of their work.  I liked, very much, the following comment by Ms. Keegan. about her writing process.

"I don't believe in plot and I've never plotted anything," she told the Times. "I don't think you can be in the paragraph if you've already decided where you need to be."

In the paragraph.  I'm taken by her use of this phrase--as I was taken by Mr. McCullough's view of working not on, but in his books. 

Both examples put me in mind of the realm of method acting--which (at least in part) involves a deep sense of emotional (and physical) immersion in, a belief in, the acting moment.

As regards method acting: I think of two stories about Marlon Brando--certainly one of film history's most remarkable actors (and very possibly its most remarkable actor).  His work was long-identified with the system of method acting.

The first story occurred during the filming of director Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954).  It involved a scene featuring Mr. Brando and the great Eva Marie Saint.  

Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint, "On the Waterfront"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The scene--which has been remarked upon by many film-watchers, over time--took place as Mr. Brando, playing Terry Malloy, and Ms. Saint, as Edie Doyle, walked through a small neighborhood park.

In rehearsal, Ms. Saint accidentally dropped a white glove she had taken out of a pocket of her overcoat. Brando picked up the glove from the ground, and then, as the scene continued, tried it on.  Elia Kazan, it has been written, liked the moment so much that he asked that it be kept in the scene, when filming took place.  I do not know how many other actors would have conceived of this strikingly unusual and quietly beautiful physical gesture--but this was of course Brando, responding organically, instinctively, to that which unfolded before him. There was, one can also note, a poetic contrast inherent in Brando's naturalistic improvisation: Terry Malloy, a longshoreman and ex-boxer, trying on the delicate-looking glove of a woman he was drawn to.

Here is the scene, from YouTube:  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHtJUWO7yeA

The second Brando story--another story I love--concerns a small acting detail, from 1972's The Godfather.  The story was told by Al Pacino, during a 1979 Playboy magazine interview, conducted by journalist Lawrence Grobel.  "I will never forget Brando the first time I did a scene with [Diane] Keaton," Pacino said in the interview.  Brando, while not part of the scene, watched Pacino and Keaton at work. "During the scene at the table," Pacino said, "a leaf fell off the tree onto my shoulder. I took off the leaf and tossed it and later Brando said, "I like what you did with the leaf."

The detail of the falling leaf--how Pacino responded to it, naturally; how Pacino was immersed in, committed to, the artistic moment--was, to the exquisitely-attentive Brando, significant, and telling. 

Lastly, here are additional comments--from the same 1979 interview with Pacino--about Brando, during the filming of The Godfather.

Brando, Pacino said, "was wonderful to me. He made me laugh, the things he’d do. I’d be playing a scene, and he’d show up off camera, straight-faced, with a silly fake bird in his pocket. His support was so powerful, it helped me a great deal. What can you say about someone that gracious? He made it so easy."

(Image, above, from On the Waterfront, © Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., a member of the Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group)