Making Books

To be sure, the rest of the literary community was slow with the welcome wagon. Henry James, after taking his niece to a program of Lumière and Edison, was stricken with remorse: "I hope that some of the rather horrid figures and sounds that passed before us at the theatre didn't haunt your dreams. There were too many ugly ones. The next time I shall take you to something prettier." Joseph Conrad, commissioned by Famous Players-Lasky (later Paramount) to adapt one of his short stories in 1920, wailed the news to a friend: "I am ashamed to tell you this, but one must live!" Imagine his shame when the studio rejected his scenario.

We can safely say that, until Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne arrived in the late 1960s, famous writers had a statutory duty to thumb their nose at Hollywood, even as they fed at its trough. "A hideous town," said Fitzgerald, "full of the human spirit at a new level of debasement." And still the literary lions came rolling in: William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, Thornton Wilder, Aldous Huxley, James Agee. And a not-so-funny thing happened. The books began to change the movies. (André Bazin argued that the Italian neorealist school was really "the cinema of American literature.") And the movies began to change the books.

There was an element of mercy to this. Authors no longer had to lard their chapters with physical description in the manner of a Balzac or a Trollope; the fund of common visual reference bequeathed to us by movies (and later television) meant that we were all, writers and readers, on the same page. Except that the page itself was changing: Text was losing ground to image.

This is something fiction lovers have never quite gotten over. I have a friend who makes a point of never seeing a film adaptation until she's read the novel in question. It comes down to principle with her, and I have to admit I've passed on "The Wings of the Dove" and "Angels and Insects" and even "Memoirs of a Geisha" for much the same reason. I want to experience a good book -- or a bad one -- straight up, without a mediator.

Ultimately, this qualifies as an act of self-defense, because a movie adaptation, if it's at all decent, will forever alter the way we see a literary work. The gourd-headed, prepubescent girl who gazes out from W.W. Denslow's original drawings in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz bears no relation to Judy Garland, but which Dorothy will follow the yellow brick road down through the ages? The Norman Bates of Robert Bloch's imagination was pudgy and bespectacled with thinning sandy hair -- until he was colonized by Anthony Perkins. And Sam Spade, if we're to trust the testimony of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon , has yellow-grey irises and a hooked nose and looks "rather pleasantly like a blond satan." Wrong! He's dark and dour with a scarred lip and an air of tragedy. Not to put too fine a point on it, he's Humphrey Bogart, just as Casper Gutman is Sidney Greenstreet and that deadly colleen Brigid O'Shaughnessy is Mary Astor. Nothing can persuade us otherwise.

Bibliophiles fall back on the assurance that books alone can draw us into the human soul. Or, as theorist George Bluestone puts it, a film "can show us characters thinking, feeling, and speaking, but it cannot show us their thoughts and feelings." By this logic, movies can never do proper justice to the greatest literary works because the power of these texts flows from the sensibilities of their creators and characters. No director will ever get a handle on Moby-Dick ; no celluloid transcription of Anna Karenina can move us as profoundly as Tolstoy's words; no actor, even one as great as Vanessa Redgrave, can make Mrs. Dalloway live on screen as she lives on the page.

But exceptions quickly crowd to the fore. Dickens, not surprisingly, shines beautifully on the screen; so do Fielding and Hugo and Dumas père and fils; so, for that matter, do Chandler and Tolkien and Highsmith. Even the most cinematically unpromising writers can be enhanced by translation. The turning point of Joyce's great story "The Dead" comes when Gretta Conroy pauses to listen to a tenor singing "The Lass of Aughrim." In John Huston's excellent adaptation, we hear that exquisite air, we see Anjelica Huston standing on the stair, and Gretta's epiphany becomes ours.

No movie studio, of course, is clamoring to bring Ulysses or Finnegans Wake to the screen. But an impressive number of books (bestsellers, mostly) are now being optioned for movies, from Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian to such unlikely vehicles as Malcolm Gladwell's Blink . "There's more Hollywood interest in books than there's been in a long time," says Variety reporter Steven Zeitchik. But he quickly cautions that "for every 10 options that get bought, maybe one or two get made, and that's very generous. . . . There are too many books out there, too many options. The cost of making movies has gotten so high."

Economics aside, movies and literature still have a very good reason to carry on their complicated romance; one might even call it a duty. As the television medium continues to chase down a factitious version of "reality," books and films can insist, against all evidence to the contrary, on the primacy of imagination.

Think of those awed Parisians who watched the Lumière brothers' train coming at them 111 years ago. Legend tells us they panicked, thinking the train was real; in fact, according to film historian David Thomson, they understood perfectly well they were watching an illusion. And I'm guessing that, as the shock faded, they began to wonder about this train, to ask the kinds of questions that create narratives. Where is it coming from? Who's on board? Who's waiting on the platform? ·

Louis Bayard, a novelist and reviewer, is the author of the upcoming "The Pale Blue Eye."