LONDON—In his infamous 1976 essay “American Plastic,” on what then counted as the new fiction in America and its connections to the French New Novel, Gore Vidal made a distinction between what he termed R&D writing and R&R writing, basically experimental prose and realism. When he landed on the works of John Barth, who’d been publishing by then for two decades, he was surprised to find that his first two novels—The Floating Opera (1956) and The End of the Road (1958), both written in 1955 when Barth was twenty-four—were “two novels of a kind and that kind is strictly R and R, and fairly superior R and R at that.” (Vidal’s judgments about Barth’s later books were not so affectionate.) I first read The End of the Road twenty-five years ago—along with a few other of his early books like Lost in the Funhouse in which he had moved into R&D mode—and it was one of the initial pile of cheap hardbacks I bought at the Strand after moving to New York (it now sits in a storage facility under the Manhattan Bridge). I was reading a lot of existential American postwar fiction then, and like The End of the Road often these books involved an illegal abortion, as in Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates or Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, or an accidental infanticide, as in John Updike’s Rabbitt, Run. I read Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer around this time, but if I recall correctly all of its traumas are in the past (if I am wrong about this it would be a good excuse to reread it). Then I read about a dozen novels by the Italian Alberto Moravia, who really knew the way to end a novel: with a car wreck that kills everybody but the narrator.
Gratuitous and self-indulgent nostalgic digressions about my own irrelevant reading habits aside, I wasn’t aware until a week ago that Barth’s R&R second novel had in 1970 been made into an R&D film by Aram Avakian, who collaborated on its screenplay with Dennis McGuire and Terry Southern. End of the Road stars Stacy Keach as Jacob Horner, the mental patient and teacher of English grammar who narrates Barth’s novel, and James Earl Jones as Doctor D, his experimental psychiatrist at an unconventional institution outside Baltimore called the Farm. It was the first film shot by Gordon Willis, the cinematographer of the Godfather pictures; Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, Interiors, Manhattan, and so on; and many of the thrillers of Alan J. Pakula, from Klute through The Devil’s Own. Avakian, who had worked on Frances Ford Coppolla’s early pictures, and Southern were friends from their time together with the Paris Review crowd in France after the war. Keach and Jones were Off-Broadway and Shakespearean actors both on the brink of fame: Keach the next year would star in John Huston’s Fat City and in the 1980s would play Mike Hammer on television, winding up as one of the Bourne franchise CIA nemeses; Jones had featured in Dr. Strangelove as well as the Graham Greene adaptation The Comedians and that year would be nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for reprising his Broadway role as a boxer in The Great White Hope, not long before he met his destiny as the galaxy’s most powerful voice actor. The intersection of all these talents yielded a gorgeous and abrasive picture that was rejected in its time.