Citizen Thomson

James M. Cain. Joseph Conrad. Jane Austen. Gustave Flaubert. David Thomson.

David who?

It’s one of David Thomson’s favorite games: Name your five greatest . . . whatevers. Filmmakers, authors, football players. David Thomson is on my list of five greatest writers. Never mind that he is a film critic and not a novelist, at least not a good one. He doesn’t tell us what to think, he attacks us with what he thinks: “Martin Scorsese is the adult version of a delicate, hypersensitive kid who grew up in a rough neighborhood and ever afterwards felt bound to pretend that he was hit man as well as violinist.”

His masterwork is “The Biographical Dictionary of Film.” He warns readers to buy two copies, so at least one might survive being hurled to the floor. Then he is alternately silky, addictive, evocative. Describing a film, an actor, a mood, Thomson somehow captures the implicit, the quality that most of us may notice but so often fail to consciously calculate. With Matt Damon, he singles out “the feel of a squashed and rebuilt face” and the “promise of an intelligent sourness not seen on screen since the days of Holden and Mitchum.”

In the four editions published since 1975, he has perfected a kind of intellectual midwifery. Not since another Englishman before him, Kenneth Tynan, wrote the Observer and New Yorker essays that became “Profiles” has a critic reached into the illusory world of movies and pulled out such immediate human truths.

His successes look so easy that the measure of his daring only becomes clear when he fails. And there are plenty of examples, starting with the novels “Suspects,” “Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes: A Life and a Story” and “Silver Light,” works so weird, so sordid, so clunkily written, they could only have come from the mind of a kinky private school boy. His latest work, a philosophical tract on the future of movies, is like the novels, another decompression exercise after the great works, troubled storm drains. Then there are his film biographies, mighty, noble, solid, classical, insightful and just trashy enough to be page-turners: one on David O. Selznick, a second of Orson Welles.

It was a coincidence last winter as I pressed for a chance to interview Thomson that he had just come out with a revised fourth edition of the dictionary and that strange philosophical screed, “The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood.” After 30 years of reading his work, I wanted to know: Who is this man? How does he do it? Or, in the case of the novels, why? Yet when I finally meet Thomson and learn his story, the most striking thing about the only living author on my Five Best list is that he didn’t become a serial killer, but an empath instead.

He lives in Pacific Heights in San Francisco in a Victorian townhouse that seems too good for real life, but instead where a movie character playing a writer might live. In the photographs on his book jackets, he seems watchful, a bit dour, like a Holbein portrait of a conspiratorial Tudor courtier. A stout, almost block-shaped man in his 60s answers the door. He is reflexively gracious, with an only slightly English accent.

We proceed through narrow hallways lined with good junk, out to the garden, down a side stair to a basement office and facing chairs in a paper-strewn lair. This must be the filing system that led him to combine Frances Farmer and Sharon Stone in the same entry in the dictionary: photographs accidentally lying side by side one day, the sight of which prompted the line, “Anyone could have seen the sisterhood of blondeness, wide intelligent brows, and a gaze so frank and unshakable that it left one wondering where looker and self-destruction met.”

Settled into his chair, master of his universe, the biographer is ready to give his history, him according to him. After decades in America, his once-British voice sounds Americanized, but it still has the tremulous flourish, emphasis and emotion of an Englishman. When he says Warren Beatty has a “broad” smile, he doesn’t say broad, but broaaaaad. Here is a man who has lived life full throat and largely untroubled by interruptions.

The first surprise comes early on. Prickly truths about others are his stock in trade, but when it comes to himself, Thomson is not above giving a de-thorned version of himself, how impossibly happy his childhood was, how good his publishers, how fine his luck. Getting his story right would require putting down the notepad and going back to him again and again, to past writings, to family, to his agent, to his editors and friends. We begin at the beginning: Thomson was born in Streatham, one of the dreariest suburbs of far-gone south London. It was 1941, the thick of World War II, and the city was routinely pounded by German air raids. Indoor plumbing was still a luxury; rats leapt from shattered outhouses. His father, Kenneth “Tommy” Thomson, once a lightweight boxer and aspiring writer, was at 33 an executive for the American-based radio manufacturing firm Philco. “When my mother went into labor, my father chose that moment to leave her,” he lets drop.

He doesn’t elaborate, but waits to enjoy the effect. It takes digging afterward to find that when the man of the house fled, he left his own mother, Violet, behind. So when Nora Thomson returned home from the delivery ward with baby David, there wasn’t just a newborn to look after, but her elderly mother-in-law and a lodger, “Miss Davis.”

Boys without fathers were not uncommon, he continues. Most men were away in the war. Thomson’s father was across town with another woman, and his furloughs came, Thomson recalls, “about two weekends out of three.” He returned home as if nothing had happened. Their relationship those weekends was built on sport. The title of Thomson’s 1996 memoir, “4-2,” refers to the score of a 1966 England victory over Germany in the World Cup. A detail in it catches his father teaching him a soccer kick called a “rasper” in the kitchen, using the kitchen table legs as goals, while his mother washes the dishes.

As the fathers of other boys returned, and his parents’ arrangement became public, what upset him, he says, wasn’t abandonment during the Blitz, but deceit. “It was the incredible attempt to act as if there was nothing untoward.” He adds, “But you know, these things happen. It makes it sound as if I had a bad childhood. I didn’t. My mother was devoted and I was raised in much happiness.”

The happiest of those happy times were spent tucked up in a chair in local movie palaces that were then the pride of south London. He’s not sure of the film he saw first. “It was either ‘Henry V,’ or the Lassie film of 1945,” he says. “I ought to know the title; it’s the film in which Lassie is pursued by the Gestapo.”

Laurence Olivier or a rough collie, Thomson was hooked. By 10, as his mother worked, he developed a talent for talking strangers into accompanying him into films that required adult supervision. “There were old ladies who adored me, took me out for ice cream,” he says.

By 1951, Thomson was seeing three or four films a week just as the postwar Labour politics of the time swept him into an exclusive private boy’s school, Dulwich College. The new socialist government had told Dulwich that it could take in a quota of the smart and poor or forsake state assistance in rebuilding war damage and constructing shiny new science labs. The sheer magnificence a boy from a poor family would feel the first day he strode a Streatham street wearing a Dulwich uniform is hard for modern Americans to appreciate. I ask Thomson about the tie. “What was the pattern?”

Thomson inhales so deeply that his chest swells. “Blue and black stripes,” he says, his accent sharpening, and a smile forms at his lips as he adds, “diagonal.”

“How did you feel, coming as a scholarship student?” I press. “I mean, was there a distinction? Were there a lot of horrid little rich boys there?”

“Yesss,” he says, wincing at the buzz kill. “The first day of school, the new class, which was probably about 200 boys--maybe half were scholarship boys--was addressed by the master, and he said something to the effect, ‘I look out at your faces and I’m told you are the cream of south London. It’s just that the cream has turned a little sour this year.’ ”

One snotty old man does not a David Thomson make. To get a sense of the child, it helps to meet his alter ego. Thomson buried him in the 1985 novel “Suspects,” deep among the invented histories for a small army of characters from Hollywood classics. It seems that Harry Lime, the Orson Welles character in “The Third Man,” also came from south London, also went to Dulwich, also was a heavy child raised by women. This Harry “deferred to his grandmother, a petite snob with only three fingers on one of her hands, abhorred by his mother and cold to the child, but a model of odd learning, superior diction and polite sarcasm.”

Squirreled away in “4-2” is a glimpse of him at 13. It was 1954. It was one of the weekends that his father chose to return home to drum manhood into his increasingly fat and fancy son. A decade before Thomson was born, his father had been an amateur lightweight boxer, but such a quick one that professional heavyweight champion Max Baer used him as a sparring partner. That day, Thomson and his father had been to a football game in west London. “We were waiting at the bus stop, and dusk was coming on. There were not many other people around; I believe there was no one else at the bus stop. Now, I may have been doing something foolish, or chattering on about something that annoyed him--I don’t know. I have no memory of it. But suddenly he punched me very hard in the stomach.”

He went down on his knees, unable to breathe. When the bus came, Thomson got on it with his father and never questioned the punch.

Years later, in the third edition of the dictionary, Thomson would write of Martin Scorsese and “Raging Bull”: “I don’t think Scorsese knows or cares much about boxing. That means that he is using its ritual for some personal journeying into the heart of savagery. And I am not sure he really knows that savagery either.”

There is always a line in his criticism between the lust of attack and the skepticism of a feint, between the bold and the self-conscious. Thomson likes attackers, and as a writer, he is one. This 1980 sally in the dictionary, “Stanley Kubrick is the most significant and ornate dead end in modern cinema,” so rattled Time magazine film critic Richard Schickel that in a review of the 2002 edition, he was still arguing it.

I suggest to Thomson that he writes as if his life, or at least an expensive round of drinks, depends on it. He didn’t pick up cutthroat technique in a pub, he corrects me, but in a classroom where debate was standard. “It bred that sort of killing attitude,” he says. “I’m going to win. I’m going to win this argument.”

At 19, Thomson was offered a place at Oxford, the best university in the country, arguably the world. Instead, he decided to go to the London School of Film Technique in Brixton, a south London borough fast becoming the front line between Jamaicans and English neo-Nazis. The school was so badly organized, he says, that “when I was there the students were seriously considering suing it for fraud.”

He hooked up with a group of fellow students who divided themselves into a crew--cameraman, director, actors--and Thomson became the writer. The plots of their 16mm films revolved around the emotional turmoil of a man newly released from prison, a study of the life of a stall keeper in the fruit and vegetable market, and a sequence from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” There was a slapstick routine, he thinks. “We were all very pretentious,” he says. They argued everything there was to argue about movies. “We used to have John Wayne walking competitions.”

Early on, Thomson decided that getting Wayne right was somehow akin to getting the cinema right ... nay, to getting life right. Thomson loves quiet men--loved them then, loves them now. Robert Mitchum. Sam Shepard. Clint. His early reaction to Wayne was the first hint of his uncanny mix of intuition and intelligence, the ability to sense a smile, or a punch, coming as acutely as an elephant feels a tsunami welling far out on the ocean floor. He also realized that behind every great moment from a quiet man was a director who understood his power, a Howard Hawks, of whom he wrote, “Like Monet forever painting lilies or Bonnard always re-creating his wife in her bath, Hawks made only one artwork. It is the principle of that movie that men are more expressive rolling a cigarette than saving the world.”

An opening quote to the third edition of the dictionary has a baffled friend asking, “But where’s Keanu Reeves?” From the beginning, Thomson’s criterion to include someone in the dictionary has been, “A person had to interest me.” He makes the point in so deadpan a fashion that it would be easy to miss its importance.

Richard Schickel calls the dictionary “everyone’s favorite cheat sheet.” Thomson’s influence is so pervasive that one wonders what New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane would have sounded like without him. But what sets the original apart isn’t style, it’s his trigger. He is constitutionally unfit to review a movie purely because a studio has released it. No other critic has been so strict with his material.

This is the point where his admirers, such as Mark Feeney, culture writer for the Boston Globe, start talking about an 18th century quality to Thomson’s work. He’s “Shandian,” says Feeney. The late Cuban novelist and avid Thomson fan Guillermo Cabrera Infante preferred a comparison with Dr. Johnson. Thomson himself invokes Diderot.

If that is all a literary way of calling him greedy, then it is most certainly true. From the Lassie film of 1945 until the term “high concept” became code for car crashes, he saw every movie he could, sometimes more than a dozen a week, so many that Schickel has openly questioned how he could have done it. After the death in 1993 of documentary filmmaker Kieran Hickey, a film school friend from London, Thomson found a list of films that he and Hickey had seen in just one week in 1961: “Affair in Havana,” “The Naked Dawn,” “Men in War,” “Saint Tropez Blues,” “Blast of Silence,” “A Taste of Honey,” “Bonjour Tristesse,” “Le Coup du Berger,” “The 400 Blows,” “Dark Victory,” “L’Avventura,” “Bellissima,” “Beyond the Forest,” “Senso.”

The friendship with Hickey reveals not only Thomson’s appetite for movies, but personal courage. Hickey was gay. Pubs in south London still bear names such as “The Pugilist.” For a straight man to have a homosexual best friend, and their tripping in and out of Vincent Minnelli movies together in 1960s Brixton, was not simply to risk ridicule, but being left for dead on the cobblestones.

By 1963, Thomson accepted that he wasn’t going to make films, but write about them. His father fixed him up with a job as a watchman at a decommissioned rubber factory. The idea was that he could write while the plant was stripped for parts and sold. Thomson was bouncing a rubber ball off a warehouse wall when Anne Power, a former secretary with the business, wandered in holding her year-old daughter, Kate. Power was an unusual thing for the day (except to Thomson): a single parent of an only child. Thomson and Power were married by December and quickly had two more children, Mathew (named for the Montgomery Clift character in “Red River”) and Rachel.

In 1970, a succession of jobs as a copy editor evolved into a break at the London publishing house Secker & Warburg, where he impressed publisher Tom Rosenthal enough to turn a text for a slight film book into the first commission for the dictionary. As Thomson began organizing his impressions from 10,000 hours in the dark, he also had children to feed, so he found a part-time job at an American-owned school in Sussex called New England College.

Laura Morris, Thomson’s English agent, was then a young page editor at Secker & Warburg. As the book came together, she realized that it was no ordinary dictionary. It had libel issues. “We would go to the lawyer,” she recalls, “and he’d say, ‘The author is very rude about Mr. John Ford,’ and we’d say, ‘Well, he’s been dead for some time.’ ”

Thomson was no more reverent when he shifted from iconic Westerns to comedies. He found Charlie Chaplin’s “little man” noxious. “Art should insist that people are all the same size.” He bristled at self-deprecation, pegging Jack Lemmon as a “precise, unwearying neurotic,” and after listing the films in which he perfected dismay in an office suit, concludes, “Nothing detracts from the self-lacerating irony and precision of most of these performances except the feeling that, despite repeated attempts, no blood flows.”

Thirty years later, his take on Billy Wilder still affronts the unprepared. “Wilder is a heartless exploiter of public taste who manipulates situation in the name of satire. He prefers dialogue to character, sniping to structure ... Sunset Blvd slyly confronts Swanson and von Stroheim with their past without ever really attempting to understand them.”

But he took his hat off to the Bronx grit of Tony Curtis, swooned openly at the frank sexuality of Angie Dickinson, delighted in the blithe intellect of Warhol and named Cary Grant “the best and most important actor in the history of the cinema.” He had a hard spot for message pictures, stately intellectualism, all-around high-mindedness, carefully tweaking the slavish followers of Andrei Tarkovsky and Miklos Jancso, and lobbing a grenade at Sidney Lumet. “Only someone of dour self-seriousness could have kept 12 Angry Men so high-minded; and only a clever handler of actors could have maintained its sham tension.”

A handful of directors preoccupied him: Jacques Rivette, Max Ophuls, Howard Hawks and Orson Welles. Make him choose, and it would come down to Welles, like him, a greatness or bust type, unwilling or unable to join his trade as a journeyman. In 1971, to Thomson’s eyes, Welles was under attack. Pauline Kael’s New Yorker essay “Raising Kane,” followed by “The Citizen Kane Book,” argued that true authorship of the classic lay with screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz.

The Welles entry in Thomson’s dictionary is the only one that has Thomson slugging his way back from the ropes. “No one who has seen the film as often as it deserves to be seen,” he wrote, “would dream that Welles is not its only begetter. The Citizen Kane Book may persuade us to reassess Mankiewicz, but he never becomes more than a clever, aphoristic, self-loathing pen-pusher . . . . Kane is less about Hearst than a portrait and prediction of Welles himself . . . Welles caught the rueful, visual landscape of exploding failure.”

In 1975, as the dictionary was vetted by lawyers, proofed, printed and released, Thomson braced for outrage. The response?

“Silence,” he says.

The pall foretold his most brutal year. New England College moved him to its home campus in New Hampshire. Back in London, his mother developed a brain tumor. As he tended her deathbed over a long, hot summer, his father kept coming to the house on weekends for Sunday lunch, as if nothing had happened. Back in America, only a year older than his father had been when he abandoned him, Thomson was dealing with the wreckage by having an affair. Power left, taking their three children home to England.

Secker & Warburg publisher Rosenthal assured Thomson that the public wasn’t ready for such a literary dictionary. Film reference books were supposed to be storehouses of trivia. Eight months into the ruinous year, English critic Gavin Lambert finally reviewed the book. His opinion in the now-defunct magazine Films and Filming didn’t send it to the top of the best-seller list, but it saved Thomson, who can still quote the line: “This book is both more and less than history, a work of imagination in its own right, a piece of movie literature that turns fact into romance.”

Rosenthal commissioned a second edition. It was clear from the outset that Thomson had the potential to unseat the universal reference of the day, “Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s Companion,” a volume so dry that Steven Spielberg is described as “an American director.” Yet it’s not clear if anyone involved, Thomson included, ever appreciated the uniqueness of their undertaking.

As it has evolved: second edition in 1980, a third in 1996, a fourth in 2002, a revised fourth last winter, with the drama becoming a kind of thinking man’s Oscars--who makes it, who doesn’t. As the second edition came out, Woody Allen was the critical darling for “Annie Hall,” Brian De Palma a favorite of Pauline Kael. Then came Thomson. De Palma was a case of flashy cruelty, he argued, Allen a self-sentimentalizing, Chaplin-issue “little man,” indifferent to others, “hypersensitive reacting to the imprints the world makes on him.” Sylvester Stallone was possibly “the most self-conscious noble savage since Mussolini. His weird monument Rocky is a fairy tale that fakes everything down to its own naivete.”

He found Scorsese uneven, calculating, cerebral, but in Robert De Niro he saw a deadly version of the quiet man. “He seems as averse to charm as a lurcher dog,” Thomson wrote. “As a screen presence, he’s as threatening and ungraspable as a sweet-faced madman who pours a torrent of talk over you on the subway, trapped in the tunnel between Bellevue and Groucho.” De Niro’s genius, he wrote, was the “refusal to simplify.”

The second edition caught on among filmmakers. But it took the third edition to make the display table in Brentano’s. Sixteen years had passed and a new generation of filmmakers had arrived. Thomson caught and weighed them: the Coen brothers (“Barton Fink”: “sophmore surrealism”), Ridley Scott (“Blade Runner”: “always made hokum look as good as quality”), Jane Campion (“An Angel at My Table,” “The Piano”: “Wordsworthian”), David Cronenberg (“Dead Ringers”: “a masterpiece--one of few such achievements in the 1980s”).

When a potentially great filmmaker entered the book, Thomson’s pleasure was intense. You could practically hear him draw breath as he announced Spike Lee’s arrival as a filmmaker with “Malcolm X.” Only a fool would miss the warning he shot at detractors of Tom Cruise, before announcing him an heir of Cary Grant or Clark Gable, but better. “But when did Gable ever risk playing the jerk to whom Cruise was totally committed in The Color of Money?” he asked. “When was Gable as uninhibitedly tender as Cruise managed in Risky Business? And could Gable have survived the black-hole narcissism of Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man and let us know we were watching a more complex and worthwhile character at the edges of the story while Oscar was being won?”

Even with the third edition, loyalty ran deep in America to his only rival, Kael. However, by then the former editor of the New Yorker, Robert Gottlieb, was not only determined to admire them both, but became Thomson’s U.S. editor at Knopf. He says, “I trust David’s opinions more than I trusted Pauline.”

In the heartland of America, critics were echoing Lambert. The Chicago Tribune placed Thomson with the two greatest American critics: James Agee and Manny Farber. “All three are creators in their own right: poet, artist, historian.” The Minneapolis Star Tribune pointed out that “Roger Ebert is the only film critic in the United States with a Pulitzer Prize to his credit, but David Thomson he’s not.”

Then again, Roger Ebert doesn’t have a secondary oeuvre of novels so scabrous that they would alarm a prison psychiatrist.

Thomson describes his movie-driven novel “Suspects” as “an examination of the split personality of the America of Frank Capra.” The rest of us must have missed the part in “It’s a Wonderful Life” where the Jimmy Stewart character has an affair with his wife’s sister, whose cuckolded husband comes to Bedford Falls and rapes his wife for revenge. Their child is Travis Bickle, the sociopath of “Taxi Driver.”

When Thomson took the sucker punch from his father at South Kensington Station, he didn’t howl or cry. He wasn’t so much angry as struck by his father’s frustration. “How to admit that I wanted glory?” he asked himself.

A classic principle of drama going back to Aristotle states that if you take all the characters of a play and roll them together into one person, you end up with a profile of the author. Behind the 1,300 subjects of the newest edition of the dictionary, there is Thomson, clear as a zebra in a striped room. He’s the boy with glory in his heart, rounding up the fey, the cynical and the sly to slap the smirks off their faces. He has the bombastic and posterity-minded posing for their statues, and then the brave, the poetic, the raw, the experimental, people who moved him who he thinks will move us too.

Like so many film buffs, Thomson comes off as unshockable about Hollywood. But does he know it? When he arrived in California in 1981, he was a lumpy, philandering university lecturer from south London. A second marriage to the “other woman,” Lucy Gray, had taken him to San Francisco. There, as he began rubbing shoulders within the film community, as all the best strangers do, he made a complete and utter ass of himself.

He and Gray socialized with the Coppola family at their Napa estate, then Thomson wrote unctuous nonsense about the genius of “Rumble Fish” in Sight & Sound. When he arrived in New York to serve on the committee for the New York Film Festival, he responded to dissenting critics as if he were addressing a dim sophomore. “I’ll have to explain it to you,” he said to one. Even those who agreed with him about Welles and Kael mocked him as Francis’ poodle.

Back in California, as if to prove his mettle, he decided to take on the undefeated maneuverer of Hollywood: Warren Beatty. Beatty had lured Kael out for a producing job in Hollywood, then dropped her; he had dallied with Welles on a project and demanded final cut; he had seduced Natalie Wood, Leslie Caron, Julie Christie and Diane Keaton. But when Thomson called for a profile in California magazine, he wasn’t doing press for the release of “Reds.” When Thomson came back with a commission for a full-length biography of Beatty, the actor still wouldn’t talk.

Thomson filled out the 1987 biography “Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes: A Life and a Story” by alternating biographical chapters with a lurid novella. This involved a reclusive, supposedly Beatty-an megastar, “Eyes,” who lived in Toxic Flats outside an apocalyptic Los Angeles.

The biographical chapters capture Beatty the way no one ever got him--his seductive mix of diffidence and availability, “shy thing, head down, hair tousled.” But he also found the smarts, the rawness and daring that could pull off “Bonnie and Clyde” and “McCabe & Mrs. Miller.” For those with the patience to plow through them, the fictional chapters were as fake and snide as David Bowie’s dismay in “The Man Who Fell to Earth.”

“Did Beatty ever respond?” I ask Thomson.

“Oh yes!” Thomson says. “He said, ‘I think it tells you more about the author than it does about me.’ It was a very good, very clever answer.”

Mercifully, in 1987, a commission from Knopf for a biography of David O. Selznick drew a veil over the novel writing. Then as Thomson waded through the unexpurgated version of Old Hollywood between 1990 and 1995, he and Gray had two sons, Nicholas and Zachary. Prompted by the birth of the children, Thomson wrote “4-2,” the tender soccer memoir about his father.

The 1996 “Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles” reads more like a homecoming than a biography. In it, Thomson argued that Welles “stole perfection” with “Citizen Kane” at only 25 and never found the mix of nerve and opportunity to repeat the trick. It is a poignant, insightful book, in which a man still awed by Welles’ masterpiece takes us through the emotional collapse of a master. The man who made “Citizen Kane” ended his days obese, performing magic tricks and sucking up pity from Europeans. Thomson’s empathy had strange parallels. He managed an encyclopedia containing the highs and lows of all of cinema, but then turned to writing a novel in which Michael Corleone’s son has his mother raped.

Inside every dictionary is a roll call of new talent. In the latest edition, the cream was sour. The only potential Welles was Paul Thomas Anderson, maker of “Hard Eight,” “Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia” and “Punch-Drunk Love.” Thomson is so hopeful for him, it hurts. “Anderson is not handling himself well,” Thomson fretted. “He is drawing fire upon his vulnerabilities. But is there any other way?”

In the most recent book, last year’s “The Whole Equation,” this apprehension has swallowed him. It’s a depressed work, a morass of leftovers from the Selznick book, the dictionary, the Beatty and Welles books in which he argues that movies are dying. Yet at the heart, in one suddenly luminous chapter, he leaves the door ajar to his gift, maybe even his soul.

In it, describing the way we respond to actors, he lapses into a rhapsody about Nicole Kidman’s portrayal of Virginia Woolf in “The Hours.” It drives him back to Woolf’s 1925 novel “Mrs. Dalloway” and this street scene: “the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.”

This is David Thomson revealing how he processes a great screen performance. “She didn’t do it by imitation,” he says, leaning forward, eyes burning. “She found a new character. Everybody comments on what she did to her nose. It’s actually what she does to her eyes.”

Life; London; this moment of June.

Kidman, he realized, somehow managed to capture the countenance of a novelist living at the edge of the beautiful and unbearable.

As our interview ends, Thomson says that he hopes to do one more dictionary. “I want the last edition to be the biggest and the best,” he says. “I want, if possible, to go back on earlier editions and change my mind and all that kind of thing.”

“Oh my God, no!” I cry.

The thought of a 64-year-old draining the ferocious youth from the book is too much to bear. David Thomson paid a terrible price for these books. He let a marriage fall apart, he missed three children growing up, he forsook fresh air and sunshine for six decades in a screening room. However, this much he should know: He has achieved glory.

Times librarians Penny Love and Scott Wilson assisted with this story.