Novelist on the Go
"The door to my lower consciousness is always open," says writer STEPHEN GELLER '62, "and I can travel there. It's an LSD trip without LSD, really.
"This is a great time for the novelist to write because you've got to push beyond all the media - newspapers, television, radio, movies, and their reality to create a super-reality of your own, a super-existence with everything greatly heightened."
Despite the difficulties of succeeding today, as Steve aptly analyzes, he has published two novels, She Let HimContinue, described in an interview by William Jaspersohn '69 as "a penetrating, rapidly-moving novel of a young man's schizophrenia." Of the second, Pit Bull, Geller says, "The theme is violence, which as far as I'm concerned is what this country is all about."
Both were bought for films. A third, A Vain Thing, is at the publishers. He has also written two screenplays and is now in England directing one he wrote with Colin Wilson on the latter's novel, Ritual in the Dark.
It was Geller's belief, and frustration, that films are made by committees. He felt a work no longer belonged to him once a director got hold of it. His experience in England will reconcile this. And he made it happen by forming his own film company, Pequod Productions. The film should cost about $350,000.
"Don't ask me why, but it's actually easier to raise $350,000 than it is to raise $30,000," claims the man who's done it. Bob Katz '62, his Dartmouth roommate, is with him on this venture.
Steve's rules seem simple: "Write about what you know. Write all the time. Don't waste time. Don't waste words." They work because of the talent and discipline that he brings to them.
He applied them early at Dartmouth where he won the Eleanor Frost play- writing competition, the Lockwood Prize for fiction, and the Marcus Heiman Award for dramatic achievement.
Dartmouth creative writing professor Alexander Laing '25, whom Steve credits as a mentor, describes him as "a terrifically controlled and dynamic guy. He has energy that bubbles over and it's directed this way. He was just a powerhouse as a student. 'I got an idea,' he'd say, and dash away, skip a couple of classes and come back with a finished play."
Steve's accomplishments also reflect the economy of his mind. When he wrote his first novel he was working full time at WNHC-TV in New Haven, where he stayed on with his wife and daughter after getting an M.A. at the Yale Drama School. He'd stop on his way home from work while others were celebrating the cocktail hour and write from 5 to 7 p.m. His work at the station's documentaries department involved investigating a murder and water pollution. Both occur in She LetHim Continue.
Pit Bull is dedicated "To Olivia's, for the table." Though he no longer has a second full-time job, he still leaves his house to write in the restaurant on Chapel Street. He needs noise around him to shut out his consciousness.
In all his works, including A VainThing - "a great big jazzy book" of 1157 pages - there is a terribly contemporary, social-psychological awareness. Set around Los Angeles, which he says epitomizes "the eternal present," it involves two families, madness and revolution, and idealistic politics.
"I found the characters leading me - and that's the best sign," he says. "It was a vessel for them."
Steve himself is fiercely committed politically. "But I'm constantly battling with myself," he adds.
"Sometimes I wonder if the real battle is with art, not people. But art is people."
