Prater Violet Read Online Free PDF

imagination, that I could invent dialogue, that I could develop a character. I had believed that I could describe almost anything, just as a competent artist can draw you an old man’s face, or a table, or a tree.
    Well, it seemed that I was wrong.
    The period is early twentieth century, some time before the 1914 war. It is a warm spring evening in the Vienna Prater. The dancehalls are lighted up. The coffee houses are full. The bands blare. Fireworks are bursting above the trees. The swings are swinging. The roundabouts are revolving. There are freak shows, gypsies telling fortunes, boys playing the concertina. Crowds of people are eating, drinking beer, wandering along the paths beside the river. The drunks sing noisily. The lovers, arm in arm, stroll whispering in the shadow of the elms and the silver poplars.
    There is a girl named Toni, who sells violets. Everybody knows her, and she has a word for everybody. She laughs and jokes as she offers the flowers. An officer tries to kiss her; she slips away from him goodhumoredly. An old lady has lost her dog; she is sympathetic. An indignant, tyrannical gentleman is looking for his daughter; Toni knows where she is, and with whom, but she won’t tell.
    Then, as she wanders down the alleys carrying her basket, light-hearted and fancy-free, she comes face to face with a handsome boy in the dress of a student. He tells her, truthfully, that his name is Rudolf. But he is not what he seems. He is really the Crown Prince of Borodania.
    All this I was to describe. “Do not concern yourself with the shots,” Bergmann had told me. “Just write dialogue. Create atmosphere. Give the camera something to listen to and look at.”
    I couldn’t. I couldn’t. My impotence nearly reduced me to tears. It was all so simple, surely? There is Toni’s father, for instance. He is fat and jolly, and he has a stall where he sells Wiener Wuerstchen. He talks to his customers. He talks to Toni. Toni talks to the customers. They reply. It is all very gay, amusing, delightful. But what the hell do they actually say?
    I didn’t know. I couldn’t write it. That was the brutal truth—I couldn’t draw a table. I tried to take refuge in my pride. After all, this was movie work, hack work. It was something essentially false, cheap, vulgar. It was beneath me. I ought never to have become involved in it, under the influence of Bergmann’s dangerous charm, and for the sake of the almost incredible twenty pounds a week which Imperial Bulldog was prepared, quite as a matter of course, to pay me. I was betraying my art. No wonder it was so difficult.
    Nonsense. I didn’t really believe that, either. It isn’t vulgar to be able to make people talk. An old man selling sausages isn’t vulgar, except in the original meaning of the word, “belonging to the common people.” Shakespeare would have known how he spoke. Tolstoy would have known. I didn’t know because, for all my parlor socialism, I was a snob. I didn’t know how anybody spoke, except public-school boys and neurotic bohemians.
    I fell back, in my despair, upon memories of other movies. I tried to be smart, facetious. I made involved, wordy jokes. I wrote a page of dialogue which led nowhere and only succeeded in establishing the fact that an anonymous minor character was having an affair with somebody else’s wife. As for Rudolf, the incognito Prince, he talked like the lowest common denominator of all the worst musical comedies I had ever seen. I hardly dared to show my wretched attempts to Bergmann at all.
    He read them through with furrowed brows and a short profound grunt; but he didn’t seem either dismayed or surprised. “Let me tell you something, Master,” he began, as he dropped my manuscript casually into the wastepaper basket, “the film is a symphony. Each movement is written in a certain key. There is a note which has to be chosen and struck