Three years ago I announced that I’d be writing a book on Terrence Malick. It never happened, for two reasons.
The first is hard to explain, but consider this analogy: Starting a book, for me, is like approaching a great house with many doors. I begin by walking confidently up to what is obviously the main entrance … but almost always it turns out to be locked and barred. I can’t get in that way. So I walk around to the side and try a door there, which is also usually locked. I keep walking around, looking for entrances. Sometimes a door opens, but only onto another door that is shut fast against me. Still, as I make my circuit I am learning a few things about the shape of the house, the internal structure I cannot quite see but am beginning to be able to sketch in my mind. Eventually I find a way in, and things move quickly from there.
That’s how I write books. I struggled for a long time with my idea about Christian humanism during the Second World War, but when I realized that I needed to describe my five major figures in a braided narrative, everything came together and I wrote the book without pause and with joy.
But with the House of the Malick Book I never found the unlocked door. Even the windows were barred and shuttered. I remained on the outside of the project; I was not even able to look in.
The second reason for my giving up on the book is more complicated. I knew I didn’t want to write it as an academic book: for one thing, I wanted it to be a more artful book than the conventions of academic publishing allow, and for another thing, I am not a professor of film studies, and would probably not be able to get the book past the peer-review gatekeepers.
(Digression: When OUP-UK sent my proposal for a biography of Dorothy L. Sayers to peer reviewers, one reviewer said that Jacobs “doesn’t know enough about Sayers” to write a book on her. Now, whoever this person is, he or she has absolutely no idea what I know or don’t know about Sayers; no information underlay the statement. It was laboratory-pure academic turf-policing — determined to keep me off the grass, even though I have spent my entire career working on British and American Christian writers of the mid-20th century. So if that’s the kind of response you get when you propose a book right in the heart your own academic field, imagine what would happen if you tried to trespass in another discipline.)
But it became clear to me, through conversations with my brilliant agent and with some smart and shrewd editors, that my project was not workable as a trade book either. Maybe it would have been twenty years ago; but not today. The conditions have changed.
So, with progress blocked both from within and without, I gradually let go of the idea that I would write about Malick.
But: recently I found my way in. I found the door: that is, I found the governing concept that makes the whole project — and the years of research I did on it! — cohere, for me anyway. But that discovery didn’t change the publishing situation. So: what to do?
The answer is: Start a website. It’s called Cosmos Malick. This is going to be my major project for quite some time, and I am pumped (if you’re British, chuffed). I now see that this project needs to be a website: I am plotting an immense and complex Cosmos, not telling a single linear story.
So: Please come along for the ride! It’s gonna be a long one but I really do think that it will be fascinating. I have gathered a lot of information and ideas about Malick’s movies over the past five or six years, and I am very much looking forward to giving my thoughts structure and form. Posts will be rare at first, because I have a semester to finish out and wow will it be busy; but soon enough they’ll become relatively regular.
This doesn't alter anything I've said in the past about my writing plans, including my post-retirement writing plans. It's just that instead of having a book project going on I'll have a website project going on.
Your financial support will enable me to do justice to a great artist and my thoughts about him. I really want to focus on this without having to think about writing elsewhere for money. (Of course I do write a few other places for a little money; but those are one-offs, not a long-term project to which I want to devote my full energies.)
Finally: a blessed Easter season to you all!