By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
[Newsstand] A writer's passing moment: Kamp on John Hughes
In the March Vanity Fair, David Kamp gets family and colleagues to talk about John Hughes’ last years, out of the public eye. Online, there are pieces of his pseudonymously published short fiction, as well as outtakes from Kamp’s interviews and a small gallery of Hughesiana. (The picture of a pile of some of his many notebooks, in the magazine, but not online brings a smile to a journal-keeping writer’s face.) The entire piece is worth reading, but the last two paragraphs have a distant tang of Peter Handke: what does a writer think? What does a writer do? What are a writer’s final…
“The notebook that Hughes was carrying with him when he died, a red Smythson Panama, contained no new entry for August 6, though August 5 was filled with a detailed description of the hotel—as if setting the scene in a screenplay—and warm notes about his visit with his grandson. The family also recovered the camera that Hughes had been carrying on his last walk. It contained a few photographs he’d taken that very morning: neatly composed streetscapes. “It’s some small comfort to us that we know from the spot where the ambulance arrived, and from where his last picture was taken, that it was a small distance—that it was sudden,” James says.
“More comforting still, James says, is that, “when he passed away, he was doing something he loved. He was out note-taking and observing”—even if the notes were mental and photographic rather than pen-to-paper. The point is: John Hughes never stopped writing until his heart stopped beating.”
