Filmmaker Statement

Writer / Producer / Director Lorenzo DeStefano
 

Only a few of us seek immortality, and fewer still by writing. But Arthur Inman challenged the odds. He calculated that if he kept a diary and spared no thoughts or actions, was entirely honest and open, and did not care about damage or harm to himself or others, he would succeed in gaining attention beyond the grave that he could not attain in life.

Born in Atlanta in 1895, descendent of a prosperous cotton merchant family, Arthur was the only son of distracted and inattentive parents, Henry Arthur and Roberta Crew Inman. 

Their infant son grew into a moody, taciturn and unhappy youth.  Sent away to a military academy in Decatur, Georgia, and then to the Haverford School in Pennsylvania, young Arthur had a nervous breakdown at sixteen, an event that launched him into the long and windingly eccentric and hypochondriacal life that followed.

As days turned into months turned into years turned into decades, Arthur’s diary grew from the childhood journal of a lonely boy into a many-layered and strikingly animated work of a gifted writer and social observer of the mid-20th century. By turns charming, repellent, shocking, cruel, and comical, Inman’s diary is also an uninhibited history of Arthur’s times, of his eccentricities and fantasies, of his bizarre marriage arrangements and sexual adventures. 

The man’s explorations of his own troubled nature made him excessively curious about the secret lives of others. Like some ghostly doctor-priest, he chronicled their outpourings of head and heart as vividly as he did his own. The diary reads like a grand nonfiction novel as it moves inexorably toward disaster.

Inman’s growing fears of nuclear holocaust and the inevitable annihilation of Boston and everything he loved in life turned from an obsession into a mania he could only escape within the pages of his ever-expanding diary.

“FROM A DARKENED ROOM” brings to vivid life the fascinating diary world created by Arthur and his wife of forty years, Evelyn Yates Inman. One of the most eerily devoted yet independent spouses in all of recorded literature, Evelyn was her husband’s collaborator in the remarkable human experiment they conducted inside the walls of apartment # 604 in Boston’s Garrison Hall. 

       

What Arthur and Evelyn Inman created within the walls of Garrison Hall, the still-standing edifice at #8 Garrison Street in Boston’s Back Bay, was a social microcosm filled with human emotion, aggression, self-interest and, ultimately, strong and enduring affections. 

Arthur and Evelyn’s efforts from the 1920s into the 1960s have a particular relevance to our times, when bloggers and podcasters by the tens of millions are seeking their own form of immortality. Generations ago, this oddly modern couple, akin to behavioral scientists like Masters & Johnson, Studs Terkel, and Alfred Kinsey, embarked on their own quest to stop the clock and record the intricacies of daily life. They took out personal ads in the Boston papers (“Wanted-Talkers & Readers, to amuse an invalid author…”) seeking participants in their grand experiment.

After being vetted by Evelyn, applicants would be interviewed by Arthur. If they were intriguing enough these paid visitors, men and women of all ages, races and persuasions, often became lifelong friends.  They would find themselves immortalized in Arthur’s mammoth diary, a document that became the repository of their dreams as much as it was the tabernacle of Arthur Inman’s prodigious talents as a listener and keen social observer.

In what would turn out to be include over 1,000 fellow citizens of Boston, these people from wildly diverse backgrounds and social strata came up to talk with “Mr. Inman” / “Arthur” / “Artie”. The diary contains the minutely-drawn record of the hopes and struggles of those whose lives Arthur helped immortalize, including the revolving door of the eccentric staff at Garrison Hall.

  

The diary also chronicles Arthur & Evelyn’s fiery relationship, revealing in unprecedented ways the intricacies of what can only be called a very modern marriage. The news of Arthur’s man dalliances with female visitors, and Evelyn’s decades-long affair with Dr. Cyrus Rumford Pike, her husband’s favorite osteopath, is as shocking as it is understandable, 
given how the relationship between these two people changed over the years.

Within the 17 million pages of his mammoth 155 volume diary, throughout the hundred hours of audio tape recordings discovered by Lorenzo DeStefano in rusty coffee cans in the basement of Harvard’s Houghton Library, Inman kept a scathingly honest record of his politics, his social attitudes, his various illnesses (real & imagined), and the fluctuating dynamics of his complex marriage. Arthur was not afraid to record his less than attractive traits, including the racism he struggled with his entire life, and his isolationist attitudes about American politics. 

He liked to quote Casanova, one of his favorite diarists, who said “I would rather be convicted based on the truth than acquitted based on lies.” A man simultaneously at war with and hugely fascinated by the modern world, Inman’s diary contains one of the most fascinating collections of human subjects ever assembled. 

 

The years-long construction of the gargantuan Prudential Center just across the street, the ever-changing face of his beloved Boston, along with deep divisions in his married life and complications of his many medical conditions, real and imagined, threatened to tear Arthur’s fragile world apart. 

   
On December 5, 1963, two weeks after the assassination of President Kennedy, Arthur’s lifelong quest for literary immortality became too much for him to bear.  He put a bullet to his heart with a Colt .38 he’d purchased decades earlier 
to protect he and Evelyn from criminals.

After Arthur’s death, Evelyn devoted the remaining twenty-two years of her life to finding a publisher for the life’s work of her troubled but gifted husband.

In the late 1970s, she secured a published deal with Harvard University Press. After eight years of monumental editorial work by the renowned American historian Daniel Aaron, THE INMAN DIARY was published in 1985 to great acclaim, hailed as one of the most unique diaries ever written, and certainly among the longest.

“FROM A DARKENED ROOM” will bring together the massive amount of research materials I have gathered over the years for “THE DIARIST”, a 5-Part Limited series on which I am writer & Producer (www.diaristmovie.com), for “CAMERA OBSCURA”, my play based on “THE INMAN DIARY” directed by Jonathan Miller at Seattle Repertory Theatre and at the Almeida Theatre in London (www.cameraobscuraplay.com), and for “THE INMAN DIARIES” opera based on my play, produced by the Intermezzo Chamber Opera Company in Boston in 2007 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inman_Diaries). 

Materials include Inman Collection materials housed at Harvard’s Houghton Library, including the original handwritten and typed diary notebooks numbering 155 volumes, along with 100 hours of audio recordings made by Inman between 1950 and his death in 1963. These will form the narrative core of the piece and will be incorporated along with other video and photographic assets to help create a compelling portrait of a man obsessed with “connectivity” decades before that word was even conceived. 

 

 

Meet the Filmmaker - Lorenzo DeStefano