Invasion of the Body Snatchers

By LANCE MORROW

The novelist John le Carre says that he will never write again about George Smiley. Le Carre cannot think of Smiley anymore without seeing Alec Guinness. The actor stole the author's creation, hijacked it into flesh. One remembers that some primitive peoples feared being photographed because they thought the camera would make off with their souls. Mention George Smiley to anyone who knows Le Carre's spy novels and his memory will instantly throw onto its screen the image of Alec Guinness. Smiley will not be fat and smudgy looking, as the novelist imagined him. He will be simply, immutably, Guinness, impersonating Smiley. Incarnation of this kind is an interesting negotiation between words and pictures. It is a form of translation.

A one-way form of translation: the filmed flesh, the visible image, seems to have the advantage. Great movie characters do not often beat on the gates of prose, begging to be turned back into words. (Movies get "novelized" sometimes, of course, but novelization is merely a spin-off, like a doll or a T shirt.) Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind sold a million copies in its first seven months. After the movie appeared, Rhett Butler was irreversibly Clark Gable. Scarlett O'Hara was Vivien Leigh. Mitchell's prose withered to the irrelevance of an architect's blueprint after the house is built. Dashiell Hammett created Sam Spade. Humphrey Bogart became Sam Spade. The idea of a character becomes imprisoned in the body of the incarnator, and even the creator cannot liberate the prisoner. The character has acquired features and hair and costume. But something valuable, the subjective suggestiveness that hangs around the edges of words and comes alive only in the reader's imagination, may have died of specificity. Abruptly, the embodied character takes on the limitations of individual flesh.

Sometimes the incarnations compete. In the early film versions, Ian Fleming's James Bond became Sean Connery. Then Bond turned into Roger Moore. Convinced that Bond was Connery, some moviegoers dismissed Moore as an impostor. Charlton Heston, conversely, performed a miracle of dramatic consolidation in the 1950s and '60s. He became Moses, Ben-Hur, Michelangelo, Andrew Jackson and John the Baptist: everyone this side of God. Heston possessed such brooding gravitas that he could plausibly pass for an abstraction, the decalogue with a strong chin.

The translation from one medium to another becomes stranger when one of the mediums is reality itself. If one thinks of George Patton, the image that appears on the mental screen is that of George C. Scott. The officer, real in history, a vivid and powerful coherence, a life proceeding through time toward a death, becomes someone else. The writer Cleveland Amory has reported taking his father, who knew Patton well, to see the movie. When the general's aide, Charles Codman, was introduced on the screen, Amory's father protested, "It isn't Coddie." Amory whispered that it was not meant to be Coddie, it was just an actor playing Coddie. But Amory's father insisted, "If they could get Georgie, they could certainly have got Coddie."

These artistic enactments are forms of mythmaking. They rearrange experience to endow it with drama and significance. The novelist John Gardner once wrote a version of Beowulf from the monster Grendel's point of view. In Gardner's telling, a blind harper appears at King Hrothgar's hall and sings, transforming Hrothgar's bloody, sordid career into "ringing phrases, magnificent, golden, and all of them, incredibly, lies. The man had changed the world, had torn up the past by its thick, gnarled roots and had transmuted it, and they who knew the truth, remembered it his way--and so did I."

The mind needs its illusions. One thinks of the story of a mother walking with her child. A stranger exclaims, "What a lovely girl!" The mother replies, "That's nothing, you should see her picture!" Sometimes the actors who play villains in television soap operas have women come up and slap them in restaurants. The dreams become more intense than the moments of conscious vision.

Some artistic incarnations can be dangerous to the incarnator. Eugene O'Neill's father James was a talented actor who played the Count of Monte Cristo so many times, and so lucratively, that he ruined himself for anything else. He became the part. The illusion that was his success (the count) became his failure. (And so, in the artistic hall of mirrors, his playwright son reincarnated him in A Long Day's Journey into Night in order to destroy him once again.)

In a refinement of the idea, some characters have destroyed themselves precisely by incarnating themselves. Toward the end of his life, Charles Dickens, pressed for money, set off on grueling reading tours in which he became "Dickens," a lecture-hall version of himself. The labor exhausted him and hastened his death. Ernest Hemingway was a splendid man--generous, intelligent, full of curiosity and energy and talent--until sometime in middle age, when he became "Ernest Hemingway," a besotted parody of himself.

Writers who turn themselves into celebrities run such risks. Balzac is said to have formed a theory about the dangers of being photographed, which may have something to do with the hazards of celebrity in general. Everybody is composed of a series of ghostly images superimposed in layers to infinity, the theory said. Since man is not able to create something out of nothing, each photograph must lay hold of, detach and use up one of the layers of the body on which it was focused. The self is peeled away like an onion.

Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy set in motion a fascinating drama of incarnations--a tragedy of myth transmittal attempted as dynastic policy. Each of his sons, by turns, was to enact the dream. When Joseph Kennedy Jr. was killed, then Jack Kennedy became the incarnation. Then Bobby Kennedy. Ultimately, Ted Kennedy took up the burden, by then almost too heavy and bitter to bear.

Sometimes the process of incarnation veers off in metaphysically unexpected directions, translating selves into roadside institutions. Consider this recent exchange:

Child: What was the first movie you ever saw, Daddy?

Father: I don't remember the title, but it starred Roy Rogers.

Child: Why would you want to see a movie about a restaurant? --By Lance Morrow