Novel Circulations: Old Acquaintance, Rich and Famous, La flor de mi secreto MELISSA HARDIE “The desire for a less-bad bad life involves finding resting places.” —Lauren Berlant Across three women’s films, the status of the literary novel in the midst of changing media environments is melodramatically plotted through the figure of “old acquain- tance.” Vincent Sherman’s 1943 Old Acquaintance pits the meager output of cele- brated writer Katherine “Kit” Marlowe (Bette Davis) against the stream of popular, lowbrow novels written by her friend Millie Drake (Miriam Hopkins). This contest of literary style and production is closely adapted in George Cukor’s 1981 film, his last, Rich and Famous. Both films are in turn adaptations of the 1940 John van Druten stage play Old Acquaintance, and their own close relation or acquaintance may be observed in their similar plots and clear quotations. Across the forty years that separate them, light modernization (for instance, of the characters’ names) merely testifies to their similarity. In Pedro Almodo ´var’s 1995 La flor de mi secreto, friction between literary styles and markets is subdued through melodrama’s focus on affective rather than taste-making practices. Almodo ´var’s late modern or post- modern revision of the story explicitly offers friendship as a point of rapproche- ment between the “pink” and the “black” (romance and noir, or melancholy fic- tion). Feminine rivalry is quarantined, no longer appearing as a viable metaphor of the fate of book-objects in a zero-sum marketplace. This article, however, focuses on Rich and Famous, which explores the question of affinity between women, lowbrow and highbrow, and the fate of the novel circa 1980. Rich and Famous embraces what Leo Bersani calls “an important category of thought: that of alikeness” (64). The particular and volatile experience of “alike- ness” that founds friendship and the possibility that literary value is volatile—that high- and lowbrow are alike—are imagined in its nuanced representation of what Ronald Britton termed “publication anxiety” (whose symptoms are both writer’s block and excessive publication) and by its use of cinematic space to stage the possibility of amicable if incongruous contemporaneity. In Sherman’s Old Acquaintance, a contest between dissimilar literary styles and modes of production is narrated through two classic conflicts of romantic affilia- tion: Kit’s affection for her friend Millie’s husband, Preston Drake (John Loder), and Kit’s oedipalized relationship with Millie’s daughter, Deirdre (Dolores Moran). Kit’s affections are split generationally between her friend’s husband and her friend’s daughter, although the premise of the film is that all affectionate relations are ulti- mately founded in the experience of enduring acquaintance—that is, in the duration rather than the quality of acquaintance. When Preston asks her what foundation their Novel: A Forum on Fiction 50:1 DOI 10.1215/00295132-3854331 Ó 2017 by Novel, Inc. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/50/1/112/449995/112Hardie.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY user on 05 May 2018