STEPHEN AMIDON
  • Home
  • About
    • Biography
    • Works
    • Events
    • Press
  • BOOKS
    • Locust Lane >
      • Locust Lane Press
    • Human Capital
    • The New City
    • Security
    • The Real Justine
    • The Primitive >
      • Il Primitivo
    • Thirst
    • Subdivision
    • Splitting the Atom
    • Non Fiction >
      • Something Like the Gods
      • The Sublime Engine
  • FILM
    • SCREENPLAYS >
      • THE LEISURE SEEKER
    • ADAPTATIONS >
      • SECURITY
      • IL CAPITALE UMANO
      • HUMAN CAPITAL
  • THEATER
    • 6BIANCA
  • Contact
  • Latest

My Debt to Mickey Spillane

10/12/2015

 
Picture
Three photographs loom large among the things that shaped me as a writer. All of them portray novelists. Two are iconic, one random. Encountered at impressionable moments in my youth, each conjured up a vision of a writer’s life that may have proved mostly false, but still contained enough truth to propel me along my long, strange trip to becoming an author. 

The first photo, improbably, was of Mickey Spillane. I came upon it while leafing through a magazine when I was thirteen. It captured the crime novelist standing in his South Carolina beach house. He was a little bullet of a man: cocky, crew cut, bronzed by the sun, wearing sandals and Bermuda shorts. A silver can opener dangled from a chain around his neck. In the background, amid scattered scuba and fishing gear, a beautiful, bikini-clad woman stretched on a sofa, gazing adoringly at the author. There was something dizzyingly seductive about the image, a suggestion that the languorous freedom of childhood could be carried into adulthood, only now with alcohol, spear guns, and hot chicks.

“Who is this guy?” I asked my father.

“He’s a writer,” he answered, less impressed than me.

“What does he write?”

“Novels.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

“And this is his house?”

“One of them.”

I had never really thought much about the people who wrote books. They just sort of existed. That suddenly changed now that it appeared that writers lived in beach houses filled with cool stuff and drank beer whenever they felt like it. This would require further investigation.

I discovered my next influential photo as a high school senior. A lot had changed in the four years since my glimpse of Spillane. I’d come to understand that he was something of a hack, that writing was a lot less fun than spear fishing, and that most novelists did not have beach houses. But the residue of that powerful initial attraction persisted. I’d become a passionate reader; I now wrote stories of my own. When a course on existentialism was offered by a teacher I liked, I signed right up. While the novels, essays and plays we read were profoundly inspiring, the images of their authors were not. Ferociously mustachioed Nietzsche looked as if he had been in a bad mood his entire adult life. Wall-eyed Sartre suggested the sort of neighbor your parents urged you to avoid. And craggily ancient Becket brought to mind a headmaster who couldn’t wait to break out the paddle. Was this the price of writing so vividly, so dangerously? Did it twist your features into something pained, even a little grotesque?

But then, near the end of the semester, we were assigned Camus’ The Stranger. The author photo portrayed the coolest-looking guy I’d ever seen. Handsome and intense, the collar of his coat popped up to his ears, an unfiltered cigarette dangling from lips that were formed into a defiant half-smile. I kept looking back at him as I tore through his masterpiece, amazed that such a searingly painful book could come from someone who evinced Olympian self-possession and McQueen-like style. Maybe the life I was about to undertake would not exact such a terrible toll after all.

I came upon my final photo during my junior year in college, while spending a month in Ireland as part of a course in Irish literature. The highlight was a visit to the Martello tower in Sandycove just outside Dublin, where the great author lived briefly as a young man and where he would later set the first chapter of Ulysses. In the gift shop, I bought a poster of the famous photograph of a young Joyce: hands thrust in pockets, tweed jacket open, cap pulled snug on his brow, head was twisted slightly to the side as if he was sizing up the person looking at him. At the bottom of the poster was the motto pronounced by Stephen Dedalus at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “Silence, exile, and cunning.” Joyce had been around my age then — 20, 21, — when the photo was taken, just beginning to make the difficult decisions that that would allow him to pursue his profession. The poster hung above my bed during my senior year, when I started to make my own decisions to fly above the nets to become a writer.

It would be easy now to dismiss my obsession with these photos as childish folly. Spillane’s work is vanishing like the coastline near a beach house, while most photos show Camus looking more like an affable college professor than James Dean. And I never did get around to reading Finnegan’s Wake. And yet, somewhere in my imagination, these photos live on, their message of freedom, self-reliance and risk still part of my decision to become a writer — a decision I must keep making every day.


First published in Biographile Magazine.

    What's going on

    Archives

    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    November 2022
    September 2022
    July 2022
    April 2022
    February 2022
    December 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    March 2021
    September 2018
    September 2017
    August 2017
    September 2016
    May 2016
    March 2016
    January 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013

    Categories

    All
    6BIANCA
    Adam McKay
    Aida Begic
    Albert Camus
    Alessandro Avataneo
    Alessandro Marini
    Alison Espach
    Antonella Pinelli
    Argo
    Audible
    BBC Radio
    Book Club Guide
    Booklist
    Book Reading
    Brookline Booksmith
    Burning Boy
    But Why: A Podcast For Curious Kids
    Carlo Virzì
    Cary Joji Fukunaga
    Cassandra Campbell
    Celadon Press
    Celeste Amidon
    Charlotte Brontë
    Cheri Passell
    Christina Pfeiffer
    City Life Anteo
    Corriera Della Sera
    CrimeReads
    Crime Reads
    Daily Beast
    Daniele Marmi
    Decider
    Donald Sutherland
    Don Delillo
    Elise Dumpleton
    Essay
    Ferrari
    Festival Delle Storie
    Film Forum
    Florida Keys
    Fontanafredda
    Francesco Bruni
    Francesco Migliaccio
    Francesco Piccolo
    Gian Paolo Serino
    Glauco Della Sciucca
    Hall Of Fame
    Harriett Gilbert
    Helen Mirren
    Herbert Marcuse
    Human Capital
    Il Capitale Umano
    Il Giornale
    I Love Italian Movies
    Il Primitivo
    Irish Film Institute
    James Joyce
    Jane Eyre
    J C Candor
    Jim Come
    Jimmy Prosser
    Joe McGinniss
    John Steinbeck
    Jorge Perugorria
    La Guraimba Film Festival
    La Vera Justine
    Liars In Love
    Locust Lane
    LUCA MASTRANTONIO
    Luca Scarlini
    Maddy Casale
    Marc Meyers
    Margin Call
    Matilde Gioli
    Meridian
    Miami International Film Festival
    Michael Cart
    Michel Reilhac
    Mickey Spillane
    Moira Macdonald
    Mollie Odintz
    Netflix
    Nicola Tescari
    One-Dimensional Man
    Paolo Mereghetti
    Paolo Virzì
    Paolo Virzì
    Paris Trout
    Paul Auster
    Pete Dexter
    Peter Chelsom
    Petra Diestlerová
    Philip Womack
    Raindance Festival
    Red Badge Of Courage
    Revolutionary Road
    Riccardo Angelini
    Richard Yates
    Roberto Manassero
    Ron Charles
    Salon Internazionale Del Libro
    San Sebastian Film Festival
    Scuola Holden
    Seattle Times
    Security
    Serena Sinigalia
    Shelf Awareness
    Shepherd
    Something Like The Gods
    Sport
    Starred Review
    Stephen Amidon
    Stephen Crane
    Suburbs
    Teatro Stabile Torino
    The Atlantic
    The Big Short
    The Guardian
    The Leisure Seeker
    The Moviegoer
    The Nerd Daily
    The Spectator
    The Sublime Engine
    Thomas Amidon
    TOFM
    Toronto International Film Festival
    Travel2Next
    Tribeca Film Festival
    Turin Film Festival
    Ulice Kobylek
    Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi
    Venice Film Festival
    Vermont Public Radio
    Village Voice
    Vintage Books And Wine
    VPR
    Wake Forest Magazine
    Wake Forest University
    Walker Percy
    White Noise

    RSS Feed

  • Home
  • About
    • Biography
    • Works
    • Events
    • Press
  • BOOKS
    • Locust Lane >
      • Locust Lane Press
    • Human Capital
    • The New City
    • Security
    • The Real Justine
    • The Primitive >
      • Il Primitivo
    • Thirst
    • Subdivision
    • Splitting the Atom
    • Non Fiction >
      • Something Like the Gods
      • The Sublime Engine
  • FILM
    • SCREENPLAYS >
      • THE LEISURE SEEKER
    • ADAPTATIONS >
      • SECURITY
      • IL CAPITALE UMANO
      • HUMAN CAPITAL
  • THEATER
    • 6BIANCA
  • Contact
  • Latest