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
There is no system for his prolificness, just habit. Every morning since his days as a St Andrews doctoral student in the 1970s he starts off amidst the white noise of a cafe or diner. In Scotland it was a small tea shop with a waitress named Fiona. When he started his teaching career at Dartmouth College it was Lou’s. In Middlebury, Steve’s is his place and it is here, among the robin-egg walls and vermont pastoral paintings that he reads the poetry of good friends (Charles Wright, Charles Simic, Louise Gluck) or icons (Robert Frost, TS Eliot, William Wordsworth) and then responds with his own writing. In the afternoons he heads a few doors down to Carol’s Hungry Mind Cafe, scouts out the table in the back corner, piles up on lattes and taps away for hours on the most pressing writing of the day. This neat cleave of his days leaves just enough flexibility for the two courses he teaches each semester, his thrice weekly basketball games, his wife and his three sons.
Parini’s austere work ethic allowed him to get an early start on his career as a professor and writer. After teaching at Dartmouth from 1975 to 1982 he left due to an unsuccessful attempt at tenure. Since then he has been a steady presence in the classroom at Middlebury, where he says he will “keep teaching ‘till I drop.”
Teaching provides a structure to his days that allows for him to continue to crank out multiple books a year. Of Parini’s biographies, Robert Frost’s is the clear front runner and was a dear twenty year long project for Parini. He has found most success, though, with his novels which have sold in the tens of thousands and have attracted Hollywood’s attention. He and critics agree that his best novels are his three most recent ones: The Last Station, Benjamin’s Crossing and The Apprentice Lover.
The idea for The Last Station, his first big literary success, was conceived in a small section of a bookstore in Naples, Italy in the mid- 1980s. Parini had picked up a copy of the memoirs of Valentin Bulgakow, Tolstoy’s last personal secretary. With some probing, Parini discovered that other members of Tolstoy’s inner crew kept diaries during his last year. With extensive research, he fictionalized their voices into a pastiche of six, often contradicting, accounts of Tolstoy’s death. The culminating scene of Tolstoy’s demise in a train station happens to be the same scene Parini was able to witness during his week on the set of the movie in rural Germany last spring.
The book has since been translated into 31 languages and was just released in Tolstoy’s native Russia. The novel is currently out of print in America, though, since it is between printings; the Fall will bring the release of a refurbished version with Mirren gracing the cover. Parini is appreciative of the second life his writing is being granted as a result of the film: “It’s a book I’ve written so long ago it’s almost like I’ve forgotten I’ve written it.”
When the book came out over a decade ago, it was brilliantly received by critics as being a fresh take on Historical Fiction. Miranda Seymour raved in The New York Times that the book “is one of those rare works of fiction that manage to demonstrate both scrupulous historical research and true originality of voice and perception.” Anthony Olcott agreed in The Washington Post that this novel was “a clever variation on the genre, which, while it may still leave some historians edgy, is utterly satisfying as fiction.”
The book had another fateful fan in Anthony Quinn. He was so enthralled by the story that he reached out to the small town poetry professor and insisted that Parini meet him in New York. Quinn just had to have The Last Station translated into a script and he just had to play Tolstoy in it. Honored by this first hint of Hollywood, Parini jumped at a new writing venture.
Over that first “marvelous” lunch and dinner at the aptly chosen Russian Tea Room, Quinn and Parini set off to write the script together. When Quinn passed away in 2001, Hoffman stepped up and decided to scrap the script created by Quinn and Parini since years of work had moved the film away from the story told in the book.
So will poetry and professorship be traded in for tuxedos and red carpets? Not anytime soon. Although Parini will attend the premiers, his copious writing is reliant on leading a self-described “boring” life. It is mind-bending to imagine someone pulling off as many hats as Parini has, but he does it through a life of “dull routine interspersed with periods of extreme panic and exhilaration.”
His close circle is also amazed at how casually he balances all of his writing. Middlebury neighbor and author Julia Alvarez emphatically calls him “a true genius” who is “prodigiously smart and talented.” Reid echoes this sentiment; “on his left hand he’s always working and on his right hand he appears to have all the time in the world, with no worry. He goes away to his writing room and a few months later the whole manuscript emerges and a book comes out.”
As he sits before me lounging on his right, combing his fork through his breakfast plate and melodically talking, his humbleness is astounding. Coming from dropping his youngest son at basketball practice and headed to an early afternoon yoga class with his wife, it is clear why John Mellanson of his afternoon joint, Carol’s, compliments him by calling him “Just Jay.” When Parini started up his afternoon routine at the artsy, loft-like space over three years ago, Mellanson saw that Parini is just a “casual” guy who happens to be “very important.” Parini has even tested his hand a bit as a restauranteur in suggesting that Mellanson start serving toasted sandwiches, which have been a success, and soy-based mango smoothies, which have not.
In the winter, Frost Lane in Ripton, Vermont is left un-groomed. When the snow consumed my rental car, all that was left to do was to hike the quarter mile up to Robert Frost’s Summer home, The Homer Noble Farm, in my raggedy converse. I shuffled up the path for a few minutes, my snow-pants’ cacophony dominating my ears. And then I fell. The silence was overwhelmingly fragile. Naked trees hovered above me and the bare icy road stung from below. And it came then that in those metaphorical woods Frost was forced to choose just one road to follow. Parini has made no such choice and that, also, has made all the difference.
In December of 2008, 28 teens made the same trek I did to break into Frost’s home for a little rager. 10,000 dollars in damages later, the teens were court-ordered to engage in a two-session course with Parini. The focus, of course, would be on Frost’s poetry. As a samaritan and a scholar he approached the course by letting Frost do most of the convincing through the language of two of his poems, “Out, Out” and “The Road Not Taken.” He told me that after his first read aloud of the poem “Out, Out,” “the temperature in the room dropped around five emotional degrees” as students began to understand the “argument that poetry is about life and death.” Not surprisingly, Hollywood wants this Parini story, too. ♦