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Misfits Country

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Originally pulblished in Small Press Review:

Review of Misfits Country, a novel by Arthur Winfield Knight
--by Maura Gage Cavell, Professor of English and Director of the Honors Program at Louisiana State University at Eunice

Misfits Country, a novel by Arthur Winfield Knight, is now available through Tres Picos Press, P.O. Box 932, Freedom, CA 95019 ([...]), for $14.95, ISBN: 978-0-974309-1-8.

The story hinges around the making of the movie The Misfits, a screenplay by playwright Arthur Miller, which was written for and stars his wife, Marilyn Monroe. By the time the movie was being filmed, this relationship was failing. The other key figures in the novel include director John Huston, and leading men Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable. The characters in Misfits Country are imagined versions of their real-life counterparts. While this is not history, the reader will feel he or she is actually meeting up with these key figures as they are developed so believably and realistically. This may be fiction, but it is well-researched fiction.

The reader is taken behind-the-scenes to meet these characters during production time. When Marilyn has self doubts about her ability to play Roslyn, John says, "'Don't be silly. Roslyn was written for you'" (14), but he changes his mind about her acting abilities when he realizes he never had her on her knees: "'Yeah, well, we all make mistakes"'(15), so he is both kind and cruel to Marilyn within a short period. Combined, they have insecurities, drinking, drug, and gambling problems, issues with aging, marriage, love, and location--a hot desert. Even the minor characters are painted realistically. The description of Thelma, "She had a face like a used newspaper, but she knew things" (26) is not atypical of the way the characters are depicted--in a lively fashion.

The significant characters have many miseries, and yet there is a true tenderness between them, and it is easy to care about them. Marilyn and Monty care about each other, and they might even be in love on some level, but he is gay and she has been used up by men, and so their love remains unconsummated. It is an odd love affair. Their relationships and lives have been riddled with pain, love, hate, loss, and so the way they connect is tenuous, stormy, and unpredictable. While they may often be lost and flailing about in their own lives, they can be kind to one another, share true affection, even while they are grappling with their own various ways of being lost. Marilyn says early on, "'I can't seem to find...the way back to my room'" (9), showing herself to be literally lost, and then she says, adding to this idea so much more resonance, "'I think I'm lost'" (9). And Monty, a gay man playing a cowboy, has his own issues. With their flaws intact, they manage to make this film a work of art. As John so eloquently reminds everyone after Marilyn and Clark have met and she is happy that he likes her, "'Now that we're all so happily introduced, let's get the goddamn picture underway. We've got a film to make, people'" (11). As the poster for the movie The Misfits claims, "It Shouts and Sings with Life," so does Misfit's Country. Even the setting is lively; as Clark and Kay drive, they travel "east, past the Mustang Ranch. It was probably the most famous whorehouse in America" (127). Knight gets and keeps our attention. The vivid and accurate details of the setting seem perfect for the horse wranglers and cowboys in the film.

This novel is primarily a love story of Monty and Marilyn and is developed in a sequence of chapters entitled with the names or job titles of the characters they are about. The chapters flow like scenes; the characters' various voices and points of view pull us along to create "the big picture" (no movie pun intended). The chapters read like poems, and the novel reads as if it were a collection of poems, culminating in a certain sad beauty calling out to the human spirit.

The author plainly states that "Misfits Country" is a work of fiction. By using the names of extremely famous actors for his characters, however, he allows us to feel that we are voyeurs into the extraordinary lives of these larger than life stars from the fifties. This novelette does not fit into the genre of historical fiction; I really don't know how to classify it, except as expressed in the title of this short review.

Misfits Country goes beyond bad and reaches a whole new level of terrible writing. The story is bland and repetitive. The characters are flat and predictable. The names of famous celebrities do nothing to help the book because NONE of the personalities that made the celebrities larger than life are present. Really, any name can be attached to the characters betwixt the binding, and the reader wouldn't be able to differentiate one from the other. These characters are lifeless and uninspired. I don't think I have ever been more disappointed in a book the way I was with this one. I won't even mention the numerous errors within the text. I was expecting a good story featuring larger than life figures in history and what I got was anything but... Avoid.

REVIEW BY CHARLES ALVERSON:

`Misfits Country' by Arthur Winfield Knight (Tres Picos Press, March, 2008)

It was the boiling summer of 1960. Three famous actors, a celebrated director and a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright arrived in Nevada, USA, to make a film the playwright, Arthur Miller, had written for one of the stars, Marilyn Monroe, his wife at the time.

The film was `The Misfits,' the other stars were Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift and the director was John Huston, creator of many great films including `The Treasure of the Sierra Madre' and `The Maltese Falcon'.

The occasion was a fit setting for a classic motion picture and a personal disaster for most of the principals as portrayed by Arthur Winfield Knight in a work of fiction that reads as if it were a documentary written by someone who'd probed the mind and soul of those involved.

In Knight's imagination--bolstered by the mythology surrounding such luminaries:

Marilyn Monroe is a passive, drug-addled, constantly late nymphomaniac who despises her husband and can be consoled only by Paula Strasberg, the drama coach/masseuse who followed her from New York. `The Misfits' was her last completed film.

Clark Gable is an aging screen immortal whose youthful excesses and efforts to maintain a macho image at age 59 threaten his life and his happiness with his wife, pregnant with his first child. He was to die within two weeks after shooting finished.

Montgomery Clift is an insecure homosexual addict mourning the lost beauty of his face, reconstructed after a car wreck, and scorned by the he-men Gable and Huston. He would die at 45, having destroyed his system with drugs and booze.

John Huston is the hard-drinking, hard-gambling ringmaster of this circus of human wrecks. Despairing of maintaining order, he coddled Monroe and Clift, sometimes directed when drunk and took time out to go camel racing.

Arthur Miller is the odd man out, the Eastern intellectual in a nest of Hollywood neurotics, despised by his soon-to-be ex-wife and constantly rewriting scenes from the film to salvage Monroe's unraveling ability to play the heroine of the film.

This is Arthur Knight's raw material, the puppets he manipulates through gyrations that seem as familiar as they are bizarre. By chance, he was present in Dayton, Nevada, when `The Misfits' was being filmed, but Knight claims that did not influence the writing of this novel. We think we know a lot about Monroe's tragic life as a sex symbol and something about the lives of Gable and Clift. And certainly much of what Knight writes rings true to what we think we know, but the line between fact and fiction in `Misfits Country is imperceptible. This is perhaps the danger of this genre. Will Arthur Knight's imaginings fuse with the `reality' of the lives and events he portrays? Or are the facts and myths so conflated that one cannot tell--or care--which is which?

Knight's version of the making of `The Misfits' is exciting, sexy, torturous and almost as nervous-making as the endless wait to see if Monroe will show up on set. His puppets--Marilyn, Monty, Clark, John, Arthur and a small host of supporting characters--are revealed in chapters averaging less than two pages long. Though we know the film was finished and the fates of the principles, the tension remains high to the very end.

Critics may complain that Knight erases the line between fact and fiction by claiming well-known personalities as booster rockets for his imagination, but he makes them ring tragically true.

Arthur Knight's "Misfits Country," for those of us either old enough to recall or be adequately studied in cinema to harbor curiosity about what may have actually occurred in the minds and lives of the cast members of Hollywood's hot list during the shooting of what has been univocally described as one of the most difficult film productions ever undertaken, reads like a dream we may have never dreamt ... but always considered.
Arthur Miller's script for The Misfits, directed by John Houston in 1961 and strongly supported by then A-list actors Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift marked the last curtain call for two of America's greatest film stars ... they just didn't know it yet. And ... who would've?
Such retrospective analysis provided the fictional fodder for Knight, who delves deeply into the "what if?" He presents the reader with scenarios created from actual, factual research and a sharper mind for speculative scenarios with even more finely honed prose to explore the dynamics of what happened on the set ... or what may have, behind the sets and soundstages in the personal challenges facing these stars whose inner lights were dimming in a rapidly fading horizon of personal illusion simultaneously melding with that of the public silver screen.
Using the tension of Miller's and Monroe's failing marriage sizzling in the Reno, Nevada desert heat, accentuated by an increasingly inebriated Houston who had indeed lost his "direction," Knight explores the breadth and depth of these rich and famous personas America adored, and insightfully presents through his inner-dramatic format what may have really led to the end of the epic drama, the erratic lives of those who embodied it, and an era when a movie-going public departed theaters in awe, never knowing what dirt might lie within the folds of the theater's curtains. They bought the dream - Knight didn't.
The documented reality of the film's labored production is, in and of itself, tabloid material, but Knight exercises his focused writing to cast the characters in different lights - sometimes soft and forgiving, and others harsh and unyielding. Between the novel's bindings and among its pages, readers become privy to thoughts, attitudes, intentions and actions stripped of a Hollywood mystique that can never be proven. Nor, however ... can his suppositions ever be outright denied. And in such ... the drama within a drama emerges.
The film, after much delay, opened to mixed reviews, no doubt born from an expectation of audiences who were awaiting established superstar performances, but had no clue about a drunken and compulsively gambling director; the downright nasty marital discord of America's blonde-bombshell sweetheart stoned out of her beautiful gourd on drugs and alcohol during filming; the ever-widening gap of her marriage to acclaimed playwright Arthur Miller; or Monroe's implied liaisons with "Monty," a closeted bisexual who sported a drug usage profile equal to or greater than Monroe's.
Fact: Miller and Monroe divorced shortly after production on The Misfits was completed.
What "Misfits Country" offers that the film does not is a vast and deep undercurrent of raw dialogue that wasn't scripted for actors, yet in prose form reveals a story equally as compelling, perhaps even more compelling, than that of the film, where actors were merely reciting lines for takes ... but not delivering the stuff emanating from their true hearts, even if their true hearts' desires are the product of Knight's imagination.
"Misfits?" Probably. But in "Misfits Country," human beings - not actors - with much more real emotions, real issues, real dramas, real problems ... without direction ... and without doubt, seek solace, happiness, and comfort wherever it might exist ... for survival.
Reality, in "Misfits Country" seems to possess more inherent truth than what we saw on the screen when too, and quite fairly, we suspended our belief for entertainment.
Arthur Knight, an early scholar of Beat Generation poets and retired university professor, edited and published several acclaimed anthologies from this historic era of American literature. He's also written plays on his versions of the lives of Billy The Kid, James Dean, and Jack Kerouac. Among his other available novels is "Blue Skies Falling," a thinly-disguised take on the life of Sam Peckinpah.
"Misfits Country" presents readers with yet another dreamy journey into the lives of Hollywood's American film icons ... and outlaws.
Like Knight's past literary endeavors, "Misfits Country" is well worth the read - so read it now ... before the inevitable movie ... about the movie, arrives at your local theater.

In his novel "Misfits Country," Arthur Knight imaginatively creates a movie within a movie, using the actors of the 47-year-old film The Misfits as characters in his new movie about their dysfunctional relationships as they are concurrently creating The Misfits. Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, Arthur Miller, and John Huston star in Knight's movie which has an atmosphere and residue of a bygone era, most of their best work (Some Like It Hot, From Here to Eternity, Gone With the Wind, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Death of a Salesman) being done well before The Misfits.

Knight creates an intimate, documentary-style piece, employing cinematic writing that immerses the reader in the day-to-day saga of the fictionalized lives of Marilyn, Monty, Clark, John, and Arthur. At times, he uses a close-up, allowing the reader entree into the intimate details of the characters' personal challenges. We feel their angst; we're told their self-doubts; we taste the martinis, whiskey, and champagne they drink; we smell Huston's nearly constant cigar and feel overwhelmed by the fumes of so many cigarettes smoked by Monty, Arthur, and Clark. We pity the pain, suffering, and frustration of Marilyn and Monty as they attempt to confront their ever-present demons. We sense Arthur's awkwardness, his inability to fit in with the others. Clark, much older than his 59 years and in bad health, knows who he is and recognizes he doesn't have a lot of time left; he looks forward to the birth of his son. John has a picture to complete; he'll get paid and he can pay his gambling debts; after this film, he'll move on to the next one.

Knight racks focus and we tunnel to the arid Nevada landscape, an integral character in his story. The unwavering, searing, bright sun forces us to squint. The roasting heat across the salt flats keeps us wiping our faces and necks in an unsuccessful effort to remove constant perspiration.

At other times, Knight utilizes flashbacks for insight into present behavior. He'll then flash forward, showing the characters pondering their future, wondering where they will be in five or ten years, especially poignant because we know several of them will be dead.

Arthur Knight's "Misfits Country" is an enticing, surprisingly realistic work of fiction.

I've read quite a bit on the subject of the making of THE MISFITS, and I cannot imagine a better book on the subject. Knight captures every aspect of the real persons involved in the making of the film, good, bad and appalling. Knowing that Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift will soon be dead adds to the poignancy of the story. I've never read a better treatment of Marilyn. She is exasperating, appealing, loving, caring and on the skids. Buy this book. It is riveting.

Those who enjoyed Knight's excellent "Johnny D." will again appreciate the rapid-fire style of storytelling as told from the rotating points of view of the central characters.

As mentioned in some of the other reviews, this would make a great movie, though the casting would indeed be difficult due to the sheer iconic nature of two of the principals. Maybe enough time has passed, though, for younger audiences (the largest portion of the movie-going public) would be willing to accept such a reach..

Movie historians should consider this book a "must-read." Casual readers will also quickly be drawn into the engaging narrative "flow" of the book, too. I'm already looking forward to Knight's next book.

As little as I'd want to see an Arthur Miller movie (or read the screenplay), another Arthur has written a book that should become a movie (but where can we find anyone to play MM, Clark or Monty?). Even if you haven't seen the movie, do read this book.