Telling it straight

JOHN GREGORY DUNNE, a modern man of letters, managed careers as a novelist, reporter, essayist and screenwriter. If there’s poetry in his trunk or the odd translation from Middle German, it’s not mentioned. Dunne, who died in December of 2003, was born in Hartford, Conn., in 1932 into the Irish American upper-middle class, the son of a surgeon. He was raised in the Catholic Church (though later lapsed) and educated at Portsmouth Priory and Princeton (class of 1954). Before he began his freelance life, he was a writer for Time. He was married, famously, to Joan Didion. Her response to his death is the subject of her present book, “The Year of Magical Thinking.” An older brother is the writer Dominick Dunne.

The 28 pieces collected here give a comprehensive picture of Dunne’s interest in American institutions and enterprises: Hollywood, the media, the courts, athletes -- and class, always class, here in our so-called classless nation. These themes animate his fiction as well. What makes so much of “Regards” a joy to read is what writers call voice. I think I could look at a blind paragraph of Dunne’s on almost any subject and tell that he wrote it; the sentences crackle and often finish with a little pop. Knowingness and worldly skepticism are his trademarks.

In “Gone Hollywood,” published in Esquire 30 years ago, writing about “dreary cineastes who spend every waking hour in a darkened theatre,” he says, “They bewail the fact that Hollywood is a business run by businessmen for a profit (an apercu akin to discovering that the Pacific is an ocean).”

In “Dealing,” an Esquire piece from 1983, Dunne takes us through the dance of story meetings about a proposed script of John le Carre’s novel “The Little Drummer Girl,” reveling in the chicanery and evoking a culture through the particulars of one (thwarted) deal. Hollywood writing of this sort is often similar to Washington journalism: The writers are always trying to protect their access, and it defangs whatever they might have to say. Not Dunne. He keeps his elbows jabbing.

In “Pauline,” his takedown of the film critic Pauline Kael, which appeared in the L.A. Times Book Review in 1973, Dunne identifies Kael’s nuttier assertions and her “implacable ignorance of the mechanics of filmmaking.” Kael, in her account of the making of “Citizen Kane,” had written about Kane eating his lunch in the newsroom, “which was obviously caught by the camera crew, and which to be a ‘good sport’ [Orson Welles] had to use.” Dunne’s reaction is: “I thought I was hallucinating the first time I read that sentence.... Where was the camera? Were Welles’s meals usually lit? Was it his habit to dine in the middle of a setup? ... Is Pauline Kael trying to tell us that ‘Citizen Kane’ was cinema verite?” And this from a working screenwriter. Telling the tale was more important to Dunne than cultivating the goodwill of a powerful subject. That quality -- a need, really -- is what keeps his accounts of old battles fresh.

“An American Education” concerns the writer Dan James, a Midwestern patrician who had an off and on again career in Hollywood. James had been a Communist and wound up blacklisted. In the mid-’60s, the Dunnes rented a house on Franklin Avenue from James and his wife, Lilith. They all got to be friends. In 1983, using the pen name Danny Santiago, James published “Famous All Over Town,” a novel of life in East Lost Angeles, narrated by a Latino teenager.

The book enchanted all who read it, including me. Danny Santiago, of course, was not available for interviews. Dunne was one of the few who knew the truth. The following year, he published “An American Education,” the story of Dan James and Danny Santiago, in the New York Review of Books. It’s a story of Hollywood and the blacklist, of American money and of what it takes to write authentic fiction. James and his wife had spent some 15 years doing volunteer work in East Los Angeles. His book has its own truth. Dropping the baggage of his privileged background set Dan James free and gave him his voice. Dunne had played a small part in the publication and in a typical Dunnean sentence says, “Given my rooting interest, I found ‘Famous All Over Town’ a lunatic success, a Chicano Bildungsroman by a septuagenarian ex-Stalinist aristocrat from Kansas City.” Some years ago (long after the publication of Dunne’s essay), I worked on a script of the novel, later abandoned. It would have made a movie -- but the real story, as Dunne well knew, was about the novel’s author.

“To Live and Die in L.A.,” first published in New West magazine in 1991, is a rambling essay about the courts and the law and justice in Southern California. The death of Eulia Mae Love, in January 1979, is recalled. Love got behind in her utility bills. She wasn’t polite about it. Two L.A. cops showed up. She had a knife. They had guns. Love wound up dead. Dunne was weighed down by the death. “I bought an eleven-inch boning knife and practiced throwing it in my back yard, holding it both by the blade, as the LAPD claimed Eulia Love had, and by the handle, as three witnesses claimed she had.” Proving to himself at least that Love hadn’t been much of a threat, he knew that if she hadn’t been obese, if she hadn’t snarled and if she hadn’t been black, her grotesque death would have been avoided. This leads Dunne to a consideration of other deaths and the attendant courtrooms and morgues: “A courthouse is by definition a place where people lie; not to lie is to invite confinement in what one superior court judge calls ‘a structured setting.’ ... It is a totally hermetic world, a world in which the most rancid view of human behavior prevails, and I find it mesmerizing.” Dunne assumed lies in most human dealings. They flourish in courtrooms, and I think that’s why he was so taken with the devious ways of the law.

In reviewing “Nothing Lost,” Dunne’s final novel, I called him a connoisseur of venality. Now, after “Regards,” I would add “moral corruption” to that description. Identifying those qualities in American life gave him energy and were central to his voice. He was a master of the extended essay-review, and the New York Review of Books gave him the readership and space he required.

A collection of a life’s work, which is an honor as well as a commercial venture, can be hard on a writer. Some of the subjects will seem remote. Repeated tropes, repeated anecdotes and the occasional favored phrase are unavoidable. A few errors will have crept into the texts. Here, Marina del Rey is misspelled, as is the international detective firm now known as Kroll Inc. At least one of the essays, “Memories of a Left Fielder,” might have been omitted without damage to the author’s reputation.

The book concludes with a Paris Review interview, conducted in 1996 by George Plimpton. Dunne is asked about shifting between nonfiction and fiction. “There’s a technical difference,” he says. “I find that the sentences are more ornate and elaborate in nonfiction, because you don’t have dialogue to get you on your way. Nonfiction has its ruffles and flourishes.”

“Regards” is how cables were signed in the days before faxes and e-mails. A few thousand words filed from a distant place often ended with that word and the correspondent’s name. And that’s how a consideration of this book ought to end -- with a goodbye from a first-rate American writer. Regards, from John Gregory Dunne. *