The New York Review of Ideas » Profiles | September 2009
Professor Parini Goes to Hollywood
Can this poet find success on the big screen?
By Jessica Kaplan
As Jay Parini ambles his way into Steve’s Park Diner on an icily bright February morning, “Hollywood” is the last word that comes to mind. When I see a middle-aged man with slow, deliberate movements ease into the diner I doubt that it could be Parini — this guy was too ordinary, too normal to be an established writer hedging his way onto the silver screen with a feature film adaptation of his critically acclaimed 1990 novel, The Last Station.
Steve’s has a diminutive presence on Merchant’s Row at the edge of Middlebury’s snow-pocked campus. Narrow as a trailer with its stormy-hued exterior and hopeful American Flag it could be Anyplace, USA; but it’s not. It’s the infamous locale of Parini’s fastidious morning writing routine. Once inside it is easy to see that there is a safety in Steve’s ruggedness that could be conducive for cozying up with some work. With antique cans of maple syrup lining the counter, smells of pancakes wafting from the open kitchen, white ceramic plates veined from usage and hushes of breakfast conversations, the diner is a warm hug to the senses.
Like the diner itself, Parini oozes small town Vermont. He is tall, but un-intimidating in his maroon sweatshirt, Franciscan haircut and rimless glasses. His shape is not round, but soft and when he smiles his kind eyes squint up under dark brows. We take a seat in a wooden booth close to the front, and he easily delivers his order without looking at the menu (eggs, potatoes, extra crispy bacon, toast, coffee) to a waitress who knows his name; a testament to his well-known ritual of writing in this small space with a dime-store notebook, a pencil and a volume of poetry for inspiration.
However, “he has a very deceptive presence,” as his mentor and author Alastair Reid observes. “Even though he looks as though he’s completely lost in the world, he is extremely acute, extremely attentive and very imaginative.”
Parini is a modern day man of letters. In addition becoming a fixture during three decades at Middlebury College and the prestigious Breadloaf Writers Conference it hosts every summer, he has produced a steady stream of biographies, fiction, criticism, essays, and poetry that would be the envy of any writer. Despite his prodigious output, Parini has managed to hover beneath the mainstream radar. Some time back an uncle even lamented, “with your brains you could have been a lawyer.” And in the words of one friend, Parini just may be the “hardest working writer you’ve never heard of.”
All that may be about to change since his film’s September 4 premier at the Telluride Film Festival premier. It will garner even more publicity as it is released in North American and European cinema by October. Russian writer Leo Tolstoy’s tragic last year is at the epicenter of the feature, but Parini’s story is told through the concentric viewpoints of Tolstoy’s fragmented entourage. The film is already inciting Oscar buzz on websites like The Film Experience and Oscar Frenzy. An A-list line-up includes Academy Award Winner Helen Mirren as Sofya Tolstoy, Academy Award Nominees Christopher Plummer as Leo Tolstoy and Paul Giamatti as Vladimir Chertkov and James McAvoy as Valentin Bulgakov. Michael Hoffman is the writer/director.
This movie venture is just the tip of the iceberg as Hollywood is currently enamored by turn-keying Parini’s novels into films and Parini continues to be up for the challenge. Hoffman is working on an adaptation of The Apprentice Lover; a collaboration is in the works between Parini and a well-known, un-named Irish Director for an adaptation of Benjamin’s Crossing; and Parini is co-authoring a script with Andy Breckman that will be a biopic of Robert Frost’s life. Francis Ford Coppola had Parini adapt his first novel, The Love Run, for the big screen, but Parini dislikes the story and would be just as pleased if it were never made.
“There seems to be so many film projects swirling around my work that I am put in touch with a lot of people in the theatre and film world,” Parini muses. His tone strikes a delicate balance between an acceptance of his accomplishments and a modesty about them. “I think I’ve been, even to myself, surprisingly successful.”
Although Parini sees himself primarily as a poet who happens to dip into other genres, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ascribe him such a simple epithet. Poetry is Parini’s literary home base; it is where he entered the writing world, it is at the core of his scholarly work and it provides the content for most of the courses he teaches at Middlebury. It is also a form of spiritual contemplation for Parini who uses his daily sessions as a vehicle to balance his life and make sense of his experiences. “The goal of poetry is like the goal of meditation and the goal of religion,” Parini explains. “It helps us organize our thoughts, it helps us be in touch with our feelings, it helps us get closer to the earth.”
Parini situates himself as a traditional poet who’s natural free-verse rhythm helps him explore both personal and political realms. As an earnest reader, Parini’s mind is always filled with the voices of other writers and his poetry is heavily dotted with their echoes. He has been seen as an authority on the value of poetry and was recruited by Yale University Press to write Why Poetry Matters (2007). The book has since been reissued in paperback and is now widely being used as a textbook for poetry in introductory poetry courses.
Reconciling the voice of Parini as an ethereal poet with that of a screenwriter rubbing shoulders with Hollywood’s top tier isn’t as problematic as one might think. Since the nascent days of his career in academia and writing, Parini has been blind to genre-boundaries. After publishing his first collection of poems, Singing in Time, in 1972, he has entered each new literary frontier effortlessly. He debuted as a biographer of Theodore Roethke in 1979 and premiered as a novelist with The Love Run in 1980. Although he notes today that both were “pretty lousy,” they set the precedent for his unprecedented career. “I don’t know if there is another American writer who has worked in virtually every genre,” Parini observes. “I don’t think there is anything I haven’t tried my hand at.”
Poet and College of William and Mary English Professor Henry Hart was one of Parini’s earliest students when he first started his teaching career at Dartmouth College in 1975. Hart is equally impressed by Parini’s incessant willingness to explore unchartered territories. “Nothing surprises me about Jay. If you told me he was getting into shape to climb Mount Everest so that he could write a book about the experience, I still wouldn’t be surprised.”
Parini’s youth in working-class Pittston, Pennsylvania set the stage for his uninhibited genre-jumping. Parini’s parents were not the “bookish” type. His mother had dropped out of the local high school in the ninth grade to become a waitress and his father took a short reprieve from school at the age of 12 to help his family by working on local farms. Their educational journeys allowed them to be the ideal parents for an experimental writer; they were supportive of Parini’s literary ventures, but completely void of judgement and agenda. “I was totally free to do whatever I wanted in the realm of writing.”
Since Parini views the aim of all writing to be clarity, truth and understanding the category of writing that leads him to that place is insignificant. “You don’t pick up one of his books and wave it about as if it defines him.” Reid explains. “Everything he’s written has been part of a whole.”
The notion of a distillation toward silence is insisted upon through much of his bibliography. In the namesake poem of his collection The Art of Subtraction, he writes “I’m back this afternoon, in autumn, / sitting where I used to, / trying, once again, to clear my head, / subtract the last things I don’t need, / get down to only / what cannot be shaken loose or said.” Again in his essay on “Poetry and Silence” Parini writes that “The greatest irony of poetry, and language itself, is that the most complete expression involves a total erasure of the medium as the speaker arrives at a condition of understanding so complete that speech becomes superfluous.”