Chekhov’s Mistess

April 08, 2009

The Count of Monte Cristo

 

by Mark Sarvas

Back in the 1990s, I was a struggling screenwriter between gigs trying to decide what I should write next. I was eating dinner with another writer friend at a place called Something Fishy, a now (sadly) defunct sushi place, slightly tatty but right on Pacific Coast Highway with resplendent ocean views. After an  hour spent mostly complaining about what rotten storytellers worked in Hollywood, it was my friend who suggested Dumas in general and The Count of Monte Cristo in particular for my next project. “Brilliant!” I cried. The Count was a longtime personal favorite, a real touchstone. I knew it intimately. I decided I would write a modern-day retelling of the story of the wrongfully imprisoned Edmond Dantès and his subsequent revenge.

I immediately re-read The Count, albeit the abridged version. Dumas’s original, published serially in eighteen parts in the Journal des Débats runs over 1,000 pages with dozens of rococo subplots, and since I knew cuts would have to be made, I let someone else to the heaviest lifting. 

In the end, Retribution, as the final script was called, was set amid New York City politics and police, with a climactic chase aboard the Roosevelt Island tram, and very nearly sold to Universal. (We got a late night call from the development executive, who asked, “Who else has this?”  That’s always a good question.  Another of the endless “almosts” that are the screenwriter’s lot in life.)

After that, I put The Count of Monte Cristo away but he’s always loomed large in my personal mythology. Yes, it’s true that Dumas isn’t much for psychological realism.  But one of the most elegant, least commented upon aspects of The Count of Monte Cristo is how Dantès essentially lets his foes undo themselves – he merely lays temptation in their way, and their natures, deformed by greed, by lust, by ambition, lead them headlong into ruin. Years later, when I taught writing to a group of at-risk boys, I substituted one of the required readings with a section from The Count.  To my surprise, when I returned the following week, I learned the boys had sought out the book from their library, and as we discussed it, it became clear this dimension was not lost on them.

Ultimately, The Count of Monte Cristo became a framing device for my own novel, Harry, Revised, albeit accidentally. I was writing the first chapter, in which my protagonist, late for his wife’s funeral, is dithering in a coffee shop flirting with a waitress. I wanted him to get stuck eating something revolting, and thought about the most disgusting sandwich I could imagine: A Monte Cristo.  It was only after I forced the sandwich on poor Harry that I sat back and realized the potential for the device to carry my whole novel.

Because here’s the thing about Dumas – he is a storyteller almost without equal.  Whether you read the 400 page abridged version or the 1100 page unabridged version, the pages will fly past almost of their own accord. Plot is something that has become unfashionable in literary fiction – at its expense, I believe, hence its disappearing audience – and I wanted to see if it was possible to graft a modern literary sensibility onto a good, old-fashioned roaring plot engine. When a writer I admire enormously said of Harry, “I didn’t think they wrote books like that anymore,” I took it, intended or not, as a compliment.

And now, a confession – to me, the book’s heart, it’s most gripping and memorable section, is Dantès’ years and years of imprisonment, his friendship with and education by the great Abbé Faria, and his breathtaking escape, plunging over the prison wall into the water.  It’s a bravura set piece, unforgettable and although I love the rest of the book, it all feels just a wee bit anti-climactic after that. To this day, when I think of the Count, that’s still the first thing I think of. I don’t think Dumas ever bettered himself.

• posted by Mark Sarvas
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