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Literary Review
ENDPAPER
One-book writers
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
NETRA SHYAM
THEY wrote one great book and were never heard from again. Or, nothing they ever wrote later counted. Harper Lee comes to mind straightway. Why did she never write anything after To Kill A Mockingbird? Was she afraid it would never be as good as her first book? Or did she decide, like Salinger, not to write for a public? G.V. Desani and his All About H. Hatter is another classic example of the one-book writer. Many literary critics feel Joseph Heller and J.D. Salinger may as well be one-book-writers. And they would be very wrong: Catch 22 and The Catcher in the Rye are not their masterpieces. Something Happened and Franny and Zooey, are. Other one-book writers: Ralph Ellison and Invisible Man, Robert Crichton and The Secret of Santa Vittoria, Henry Roth and Call It Sleep, Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes, Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet and Malcolm Lowry's Under The Volcano. As an aspiring writer, you are brought up on the notion that you have to write several books — offer a substantial body of work — or you are no writer at all. To write just one book and stop with that seems a failure of a kind. But reflecting on these one-book writers, I realise this needn't always be true. Why not put everything you know — about life, about the writing craft, about character — into that one book? Perhaps that is how you write a really good book, perhaps even a great one.
The most fascinating case of the reclusive one-book writer is now an exciting, suspenseful, uncompromising literary documentary called "Stone Reader". This one-of-a-kind documentary is, a film critic notes, a movie about a passionate reader in search of other passionate readers; a love poem to reading. A man named Mark Moskovitz stumbles on an old paperback copy of a book called The Stones of Summer by someone named Dow Mossman. The blurb on the book by a New York Times writer says the book is "an undiscovered masterpiece, a seminal work of literature." Moskovitz, a passionate reader who has been devouring books since he was a child becomes intrigued — he has never before heard of the book or the writer. Reading the book, he becomes excited. It is, as the review says, an unknown masterpiece. He becomes hungry for more books by Mossman but is astonished to learn that Mossman has not written anything else. He becomes even more puzzled when he discovers that The Stones of Summer is out of print. Bookstores don't stock it, neither have they heard of it. Now, doubly curious about Mossman, Moskovitz gets on the Net, searching for information on the author and discovers that there is none. No one, not even his former publishers, know what happened to him.
That is when Mark Moskovitz, who directs political commercials for a living, hits upon the idea to turn his quest for Mossman into a film. A film that would document his search, step by step. On E-Bay he finds three hardcover copies of the book for sale and buys them all. He contacts several people who might have a clue to Mossman's whereabouts: the literary critic whose blurb provoked Moskovitz to read the book in the first place, the artist who designed the cover jacket of Stones, Mossman's contemporaries at a writers' workshop, his literary mentor whom the book is dedicated to and so on. I am not going to reveal here whether Moskovitz finds Mossman or how his literary quest ends — that would spoil the suspense that the film is so careful to build. What I can reveal is the process, the journey, before he arrives at the end of this most wonderful and unusual quest. In trying to hunt down a one-book writer, "Stone Reader" becomes a film that also illuminates the reading life. A love poem to reading, as one film critic calls it. Moskovitz talks endlessly of his deep love for books and writers. Other readers — friends of the filmmaker — and several famous literary figures such as Leslie Fiedler, Robert Gottlieb and Frank O'Connor talk about the writing life.
The film is also a lovely meditation on the relationship between author and reader. Moskovitz, it turns out, is more than the ideal reader — he is in another dimension. But he proves that a book becomes everything the author meant it to be when it meets its ideal reader. Copies of Stones had lain about in used bookstores and people's homes for several decades, and yet, it was not until Moskovitz read it and became possessed by it, did it begin to actually exist again. Though most writers write for themselves, the film reveals that it is the reader who completes the book. There has not been, so far, such an uncompromisingly literary documentary. It fulfils a fantasy that many book lovers have had: to see a movie where the camera sensuously caresses books. The camera dwells lovingly on bookshelves, there are close ups of book covers and their spines, the title page and the endpapers. And readers are seen fondling their favourite books. Because of Moskovitz's film, Barnes and Noble have now brought The Stones of Summer back into print. Interesting twist, isn't it? That a movie should resurrect a book? Halfway through his quest, Moskovitz becomes sidetracked by his new fascination for one-book-writers. And decides it is his mission to bring back into print all these little known one-book writers. He makes a list, tracks down the books these authors wrote (several of them are on his shelf) and takes them to one of New York's leading agents. Once in his office, Moskovitz pours out from the bag on to the agent's desk, his 10 great one-book writers of the century. He is there to plead for their life; that they be rescued from obscurity. It's a delightful, gratifying sight.
Moskovitz continues to make his "century's great one-book writers list" and has founded a Lost Book Club. If you can think of more one-book writers, please e-mail them in and we'll see if we can get them on the Moskovitz List, so that they would find a new life on bookshelves, in bookstores and at The Lost Book Club.
pradeepsebastian@hotmail.com
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