Marcos and Monty Clift

Remember Monty Clift? His most memorable role was that of the brooding Robert E. Lee Prewitt in From Here to Eternity. Saw this first in the Fifties, in black-and-white, after it had already won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Frank Sinatra, thus reviving the singer’s career.

Montgomery Clift was also nominated for his co-starring role with Burt Lancaster, whose torrid clinch in the surf with Deborah Kerr was much talked about as the movie’s romantic highlight. Then there was Ernest Borgnine as the heavy, the sergeant who harassed Sinatra-as-Dimaggio no end, until Clift-as-Prewitt exacted retribution in a dark alley.

Monty Clift was tailor-made for the Prewitt role, with searing, wounded eyes, a sensitive introvert and all. A wiz with the bugle, Prewitt refuses to display his boxer’s skills until it becomes necessary. Monty’s most memorable scene in this adaptation of James Jones’ bestselling debut novel was playing Taps to honor his departed friend Sinatra. Wounded in the knife duel with Borgnine, Monty Clift stumbles into the arms of his beloved, Donna Reed, only to declare that a thirty-year man in the Army can’t stay AWOL when the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor.

For all the melodramatic smaltz, I’ll take it over the luxuriously colored Pearl Harbor anytime. Indeed, ’dem were the days when movies were movies.

Monty Clift went on to define the character of the quirky loner, the quiet, rugged individualist. He came ahead of Marlon Brando, and is still credited with forging ahead of everyone else in the so-called Method acting that also spawned James Dean. Monty figured in a car crash, too, but lived to tell the tale, if only for so long. He passed away at 45, reputedly a victim of drugs, booze, and a lonely life as a covert gay.

Ask the soulful sage Cesar Ruiz Aquino of Dumaguete about Monty Clift and he’ll swoon like a vintage guru, and remind you that Clift also appeared with Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits, and in Suddenly Last Summer with Elizabeth Taylor, who reportedly either mothered and/or had an affair with him, perhaps both, this despite the actor’s sexual preference. And how we still remember one of Monty Clift’s last appearances onscreen, as an aged, mumbling sensitif in Judgment at Nuremberg.

Well, someone obviously remembers Clift as lovingly as we do. Surprisingly, too, he happens to be a young Filipino-American writer.

Noel Alumit has come up with a first novel titled Letters to Montgomery Clift (MacAdam/Cage Publishing, 2002). It’s been gaining plaudits, judging by review excerpts we’ve seen in the Internet. Alumit thus joins Bino Realuyo (The Umbrella Country), Tess Uriza Holthe (When the Elephants Dance) and Brian Ascalon Roley (American Son) as Fil-Am novelists who’ve succeeded immensely with a first book.

We wish him well in the continuing book promotion, including his current readings in the West Coast. Our hardbound copy was sent us by Irene Suico Soriano months ago, and we’d long wanted to read and review it, but only now found the time, which we still have to do with the equally engaging American Son.

In the cover flap, here is what it says of the author: "Noel Alumit was born in the Philippines and earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in drama from the University of Southern California. He studied playwriting at the David Henry Hwang Institute at East West Players. His one-man show, The Rice Room: Scenes from a Bar, was voted one of the best solo shows of the year by the San Francisco Bay Guardian and played to sold-out houses in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities. He recently premiered his latest solo show, Master of the (Miss) Universe.

Letters to Monty Clift is an absorbing read. One may cavil over a certain unevenness of writing that a fine editor could have rectified, albeit to some degree this may have been fully intentioned, given the first-person point-of-view of a boy who matures through well over a couple of decades.

One may not as easily allow the benefit of the doubt, however, concerning the apparent failure to consult an informed Pinoy over certain details of research having to do with the home country.

Like a few other American writers who’ve made the Philippines a setting for their work, Alumit mistakes our carabao for the caribou. Fig trees don’t grow back in the islands, and the declaration of Philippine independence from Spain is commemorated on June 12, not July 14.

A pivotal character named Mrs. Billaruel should have been named Villaruel instead. In fact, practically all of the Filipino surnames used in the novel betray naivete (Tombayo, Gumboa, Andifacio, Phelia Buro!), as these seem too exotically indigenous if non-existent. Realistically, some ought to have doffed a hat to Castilian, Chinese or Tagalog provenance.

These are minor quibbles, which of course a Western reader wouldn’t notice. The grand upside is that Alumit has come up with a stirring, fresh-faced narrative that isn’t so much another coming-of-age tale, but a wonderfully quirky portrait of a Filipino boy who finds himself a forced immigrant in the USA, yet remains consumed by the ghosts still hovering over his pained memory of a wrenching departure.

Bong Bong Luwad of Baguio City is eight years old when his mother hastily packs his bags and sends him to a sister in the States. His father, a newspaperman, had been picked up by Martial Law goons, his mother also suffering a beating at their hands. When they threaten the kid, she entrusts him to an American lady friend who sees to his portage. But Aunt Yuna in California is a cruel guardian who abuses Bong and eventually forsakes him. The kid lands in the care of serial foster parents, until he lucks in on a wealthy Filipino couple with an only daughter who becomes his best friend.

Throughout this early shuttling as an ersatz orphan or foundling, Bong Luwad, who’s renamed Bob, can’t kill the images of cruelty he’s seen, including that of his mother seeing him off. One thing Aunt Yuna teaches him is how to plead effectively to particular saints, by putting it all down in writing. Late-night tv installs Montgomery Clift as Bong’s imagined saint; thus begins his letters to the man he worships – his icon, confidante, and eventual object of love and desire.

Alumit displays a fine sense of structure. Episodic chapters are preceded by his letters to Monty Clift. So subtly introduced are phases in Bong/Bob’s angst-filled passage through puberty, adolescence and teenhood, during which he practically stumbles on well-conceived methods of identity-processng and empathizing with his lost parents. These include rummaging at libraries and bookstores with the intention of blotching – or marking with a blot – page 168 of any book he lays his hands on. The number is in reference to the month and year of his birth.

He enjoys an idyllic relationship with Amada, his foster sister; together they find occasional employment as Hollywood extras, while also undergoing momentous rituals of teenhood.

He also takes up self-mutilation as a defense mechanism, until like Monty Clift he lands in a hospital after a motorcycle accident. He undergoes therapy and Prozac medication.

Alumit’s prose is simple, the story told from the eyes of a child who grows up as a troubled man.

"Being an extra, though, meant having to wait around while the next shot was being set up. I read during that time, placing a blotch on page 168 of Montgomery Clift, a biography by Patricia Bosworth.

"I breezed through Monty by Robert La Guardia. It was different from Patricia Bosworth’s book, Montgomery Clift. La Guardia’s book was more personal. Bosworth’s book was more factual. Both agree on one thing. Montgomery Clift was attracted to men. I found relief in knowing that."

On finely selected occasion, exposition and character insights are judiciously laced with imagistic if quiescent effectivity that approaches poetry.

"Montgomery Clift held me. He told me to take off my shirt and I did. He told me to take off my pants and I did. He told me to taste his nipple and I did. We rubbed together like two sticks trying to start a fire."

While he slowly comes to terms with his sexuality, it is his forced departure from the home country, and his constant yearning to go back and find his mother, that occupies Bong/Bob, especially toward the bittersweet closure of his story.

"I’d thought of Mrs. Billaruz, especially when the man who started it all was dead. The dictator was dead. Ferdinand Marcos died in that year of 1989. I read it in the paper. Funny. He couldn’t take all of his power and wealth with him. He spent his presidential term attaining wealth, stealing from the Philippines, billions of dollars gone. He placed people in prison who disagreed with him. He took parents away. He died and couldn’t take his fortune with him. Now he was the master of dirt and dust."

Alumit delivers a scathing condemnation of the Marcos years, something that hasn’t quite appeared nearly to full in Filipiniana fiction. In effect he mines a highly literary trove of an era that remains largely untapped by local writers.

Despite the minor factual errors, Noel Alumit must be commended for reviving the passion of undeniable memories. Like Bong Bong Luwad’s climactic effort to confront his past, this gifted young author’s homecoming is bittersweetly ours.