Breaking out of convention
ANDREW STEINMETZ uses The Great Escape to explore his family history and invent his own genre
F ifty years ago, John Sturges’s The Great Escape was the movie of the moment. Based (with a few liberties taken) on the attempt by a group of mostly British PoWs to break out of the German prison camp Stalag Luft III in 1944, the film drew critical raves and racked up huge box-office numbers. Viewers left theatres with the indelible image of Steve McQueen — well, OK, his stuntman stand-in — jumping a barbed-wire fence on his iconic Triumph motorcycle. Told that a new book is revisiting the movie on its golden anniversary, then, you’d be forgiven for assuming it would be a star-studded set of reminiscences. What you won’t be expecting is an examination of the life of a bit-part actor whose role in the film is so small his name doesn’t even appear in the credits. But that’s what Andrew Steinmetz has written, and you’ll be glad he did.
The obscure actor in question is Michael Paryla; Steinmetz, a former Montrealer and the author of the novel Eva’s Threepenny Theatre, is Paryla’s cousin. Feeling an emotional connection with Paryla that he can never fully articulate even to himself, Steinmetz doggedly follows his cousin’s unlikely trail: his escape with his family from Nazi Germany for the crime of having partly Jewish roots; adolescence living with his mother in unimaginably distant Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.; a spell studying at McGill before returning to Europe to pursue a theatre career, where consciously or not he was almost literally following in the footsteps of his father. Stalled in secondary roles, he thought his part in The Great Escape might provide a fast track to stardom, but that was not to be: Four years later, after a period of professional scuffling, he died in suspicious circumstances in Hamburg, having been found unconscious in a hotel bedroom after an apparent overdose of sleeping pills.
Seeing connections between Paryla’s life and art at every turn, Steinmetz pursues his ill-fated cousin’s faint and rapidly vanishing trail. The result is a kind of detective story, but one where the sleuthing being done is as psychological as literal, and ultimately as much about the detective as it is about his quarry. In granting a background figure the level of forensic attention generally reserved for the famous, Steinmetz turns history inside out. Employing methods encompassing primary sources, travelogue, diary, filmography and philosophical speculation, he makes no attempt to conceal the seams. In fact, he calls attention to them, deliberately inviting us to question the comfortable assumptions we make about how life finds its way into art and vice versa.
What This Great Escape doesn’t do is make the critic’s job easy. In grasping for some kind of helpful comparison, the best I could come up with was some of James Ellroy’s crime reportage/fiction fusions — American Tabloid, My Dark Places — and Chris Ware’s graphiclit studies of domestic drudgery carried out against the backdrop of history. But even those pointers don’t really get to the essence of what Steinmetz has done. This Great Escape is very much its own thing, and on the terms it invents for itself, it succeeds completely.
A conversation with Andrew Steinmetz
Q: The intensity of your search for the truth about Michael Paryla indicates a strong feeling of kinship with him on your part — beyond the literal kinship, that is. Yet on the surface at least, your life has been very different from his. How do you account for the birth and growth of the obsession? If obsession is what it is.
A: I grew up knowing Michael had a role in a famous movie, and that he died from an overdose shortly after filming. Unconsciously, I concluded his death, whether by suicide or accidental, was “caused” by him taking the role in the movie. Anyway, they were connected. Using the movie as a kind of prism, the book is an attempt to find out which forces — historical, psychological — were at play and affected him personally. I concluded that the circumstances of his life must have eaten away at his identity, leaving him vulnerable. Where I feel a kinship with him is on this level of identity frailty. It’s something about myself I can’t really explain.
Q: Do you recommend that prospective readers of This Great Escape first watch The Great Escape, if they haven’t yet seen it?
A: No. The book is self-contained. If you have to see the movie to enjoy the book, then I would consider it a failure. I really enjoyed Geoff Dyer’s Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, about Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, without having seen the movie.
Q: One of the central facts about Michael Paryla is his sheer obscurity. Is his lack of conventionally measured success something that perversely attracted you in our celebrity-worshipping age?
A: Absolutely. Michael has that “being not Steve McQueen” factor working for him. If you juxtapose Michael’s personal story with the movie and the history behind the 1944 escape, the result is a narrative or montage which is to me far more interesting than McQueen or (Richard) Atten borough’s relationship with the movie. My role as a writer was to make that comparison stand up, by attempting something a little innovative and fresh. As my muse, I had those prisoners of Stalag Luft III. Their ingenuity and courage was outrageous. So you escape a prison camp, you escape obscurity, you escape genre and convention. It’s a prisoner’s duty to attempt escape. Most of us are prisoners of something.
Q: I think of This Great Escape as a kind of novel, though I can’t really justify that in literal terms. What do you call it? And would it be fair to say that your work in general reflects an impatience with the constrictions of genre labelling?
A: You can call it what you like. I’m happy with calling it a novel. But I call it a book. The books I enjoy most fall between the cracks of fiction and non-fiction, and have some kind of unique structure that nonetheless does not distract from the content. And let’s be honest: Lots of fiction is thinly disguised autobiography or artificially contrived non-fiction. And lots of non-fiction, particularly memoir, is merely the story that we tell ourselves about ourselves, a fiction. As a reader, genre means little to me. As a writer, it’s a nuisance that comes after the fact.
Q: This book follows naturally in many ways from Eva’s Threepenny Theatre. Are you through mining your family history for literary purposes, or is there more to be done?
A: Who knows? It’s true I have been mining the family history — but more accurately, I think I have been trying to unveil the process by which writers go about mining their family history. I have tried to take a pretty conservative genre and treat it with a little irreverence, shake it up.
“My expectations are very high, to be the greatest writer that ever lived on God’s earth. In other words, I’m talking about Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky. I want to do that rock ’n’ roll thing that’s on a level with The Brothers Karamazov. I’m starting to build up a body of work. I’m on the right track.”