Monthly Archives: September 2012

September 11, 2012 · 5:36 pm

The difference between demand and suggestion–what “paying the piper” actually means….

Hi, folks!  This is another non-literary day, which I have singled out as a writer’s day for making better contact with potential readers than I evidently have heretofore.  When I first set up my website, I based it somewhat on my former site, which wasn’t through WordPress.com, and which had an obligatory “Buy now” PayPal button on it for the long works of fiction and poetry which I had or planned to have on it.  That meant that if people wanted to read something from that site, they had to pay in advance.

On WordPress.com, however, I have a “Donate” PayPal button.  While this at first seemed like a disadvantage for financial reasons, and while I did encourage people to pay for what they read, I think the time has come for a bit of clarification.  In short, despite everything I said about wanting people to feel fine about reading the long works for free if they felt they couldn’t pay, probably only about 30 or so folks have done so since the week I put the works on my site, and that’s a generous estimate.  So here’s a guideline:

In the category section of the PayPal post, I have a category called “Time to pay the piper.”  I must confess, I was thinking of this in a sort of traditional cultural way, following the ages-long historical method of the piper who first plays a tune or tunes and at intervals passes around the hat to collect contributions.  It didn’t at first occur to me that this would seem like a preemptive strike for money:  that’s not what pipers do.  It’s after they play for the audience and please them, one hopes, that the hat is passed around.  My suggestion of a $5 bottom limit is to eliminate the problem resulting from a donation which is too small (less than $2) to count on PayPal’s system.

So, you see, I’m not a money-grubber, just a person who would like to receive some real-life recognition for work which I hope will amuse and inspire you; but the first step of this is absolutely being read, and if all you feel like contributing is a comment about what you’ve read, know that comments too are very welcome, and will let me know what you like about the fiction or find wanting in it.

Another point a person brough up who viewed my site from my computer was that the cover art page of each book and the size of the pages of the fiction are too large; I don’t know how it looks on your site, but on my site, it’s simply a function of the zoom level needing to be adjusted (when I added the .jpeg cover art to the text and .pdfed it, it automatically increased the size).  Just find your zoom level on your computer and adjust it to 100% or 75%, or whatever size is best for your own eyes.  The zoom level usually appears on a computer text in .pdf at the top of the Adobe Reader page, and it’s easy to adjust.

That’s all I really wanted to say today.  I recently finished (in August) putting the poetry I’ve written to date on this site, and a little later my fourth novel in what I hope to finish as a loosely connected series of 8 novels (but they aren’t connected as to plot and aren’t serials, so you can read them in any order you want.  The connection, slight as it is, comes in because I have chosen to try to link them loosely to the 8 family signs of the I Ching, which you will see in the upper right-hand corner of the cover page.  These signs are connected to a mother, a father, three daughters and three sons, and each novel is related in a marginal way to some of the symbolism associated with the signs, that’s really the size of it).

I hope that whether you can or want to pay or not, you will find something which you like in the novel(s) you read or the poetry, and that you will feel free to write in and discuss it with me.  Even negative criticism can be instructive to both parties because it shows human involvement, and may generate a dialogue, though of course one hopes most people will like one’s work.  In any case, I’ve made my argument for you, and I really should sign off on this post.  Until I hear from you, then, happy reading, whether you cover the posts or the longer works–I’m always happy to discuss writing and literature, my own or someone else’s.

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September 10, 2012 · 9:09 pm

John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and fictionalizing history

There are two books which I both enjoyed thoroughly the first time I read through them, but I recently (this summer) read through both of them again, and my conclusions are a little different.  Whereas I had previously not thought of them as being much alike, suddenly I realized that they have a number of points in common, for all that the authors wrote from very different standpoints and apparently with different purposes.  The first (in publication date) is John Barth’s uproarious satirical send-up of the historical poet Ebenezer Cooke’s poem “The Sotweed Factor:  Or, a Voyage to Maryland” called The Sotweed Factor (tobacco grower/merchant), first published in 1960.  The poem which the fictional Cooke writes is also known in Barth’s satire as “The Marylandiad.”  Pynchon’s 1997 satire is set in the Americas also, but on the section between Maryland and Pennsylvania which came to be known as the “Mason-Dixon line,” and is entitled (you guessed it) Mason and Dixon.  Pynchon creates a character occasionally mentioned named “Timothy Tox,” who supposedly wrote in the past a poem known as “The Pennsylvaniad,” and has various scenes in which another weed entirely (pot) is consumed by the characters.  In some ways, Pynchon is taking on Barth’s fiction as much as he is imposing changes on his own, because he changes the way in which the fictional world itself is handled.

In Barth’s satire, Ebenezer and his twin sister are polymaths, and their separation and gradual rejoining are a part of the overarching plot structure, though much of the novel is a sort of picaresque trip around the Colonies in the end of the 17th and the first part of the 18th centuries.  Pynchon’s satire is set about a generation later, just before the Revolutionary War, though it starts before that with a fictionalized history of how Mason and Dixon meet up and go about forming a working relationship.  Their story is told (and partially imagined) by the “Reverend Cherrycoke,” a fictional character who supposedly was with them on their expedition to America, and is relating (and sometimes bowdlerizing) the tale for a family group.  In contrast to Barth’s satire, in which the characters are extremely well-educated, Pynchon’s satire takes place in an late Enlightment atmosphere in which some people know some things, but about which it is in fact the reader who must be the polymath in order to follow all the different Pynchonesque threads of narrative.  Mason and Dixon is more of a satire for specialists than Barth’s book and than Gravity’s Rainbow, in that both Barth and the earlier Pynchon tell more universal “jokes” or spend more time explaining their frame of reference; slyly, of course, but the explanations are still there.  In Pynchon’s book on the two astronomers/surveyors, however, one gets the feeling that some of the best punchlines are reserved for mathematicians, scientists, historians, surveyors, and engineers of all kinds; Barth’s book is more purely satirical and literary in nature.  Pynchon’s later book is also told with rather less of the boyish glee that those followers of Pynchon since Gravity’s Rainbow might be expecting, while the boyish glee itself is to be found in the character of Jeremiah Dixon as painted by Pynchon.

In both novels, Barth’s and Pynchon’s, one of the major subjects is what has come to be known as “culture shock,” in which the visitors from England are astounded by the difference of culture in America, or what sometimes seems like a total lack of culture, even to the tolerant Dixon.  There is also more of outright material escaped from a fantasy novel in Pynchon’s work, which might at first seem to be at variance with his strong tendency to follow a daybook from Mason’s and Dixon’s expedition.  There is, for example, a Learned English Dog who speaks, and a mechanical Duck, an exaggerated version of the interest of the time in automatons and machines.  In Barth’s novel, though many, many incidents are far-fetched, they don’t invite comparison to a fantasy novel.

Both novelists feature additional poetry in their books, Barth keeping to the subject of Cooke’s grievances with America, where he has come to claim an inheritance of a “sotweed” plantation, though the poetry fragments he gives are widely at variance except in structure with the real poem Cooke wrote.  The poems Pynchon contributes to his book are manifested as plenty of anachronistic comic songs, but few with the satirical, orgiastic, and scatological wit of those in Gravity’s Rainbow.  Both writers make up fictional meetings between their fictionalized characters and other real historical figures, but Pynchon spends more time actually constructing dialogues that, though odd and unlikely, seem emblematic of what we know of the historical characters.  An example of this is an encounter between Mason and Dr. Johnson and Boswell which takes place in a tavern.  Barth takes another tack; for instance, he creates long sections of a lascivious journal supposedly kept by Captain John Smith about his own sexual exploits.  There is more rowdinesss of this sort in Barth’s book (and one must guess that he inspired Pynchon early), whereas Pynchon seems to rely in an allusive and elliptical way to what (he must have known) readers expect from reading his earlier books.  A hint of this is in the cue-like mention of something being colored “magenta and green,” a color combination which occurred with frequency in Gravity’s Rainbow, almost as if readers were some of the Pavlovian dogs from the earlier novel, taught to salivate with anticipation at the repetition of “magenta and green” and to expect something major to happen.

Both books end “not with a bang but a whimper,” though this is not to say that the endings are not significant.  They are very different, however.  Barth’s book ends with its satirical edge unhampered, however much the characters have declined in fortunes, whereas Pynchon’s book ends on an elegiac note for the end of Jeremiah Dixon, who died sometime before Charles Mason, and the later final illness of Mason, bringing to a halt the worldly close friendship of the two men.  So vivid has been the picture of otherworldly visitations and unearthly happenings, however, that there seems to be almost a certain hope suggested.  Certainly, though the two books cater to some extent to slightly different audiences, the characters live beyond the novels for us, the readers.  I hope you will have the time and patience to read one or both of them, as they well repay the trouble.

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September 8, 2012 · 9:00 pm

Thomas Hardy’s underrated short stories and their connection to his Wessex country picture

Though not as well-known as Thomas Hardy’s novels and poetry, his short stories are just as good, and while simple, they add a lot to his picture of the fictional Wessex country he usually portrays.  Today, I would like to write about three of the stories, “The Three Strangers,” “The Distracted Preacher, ” and “The Fiddler of the Reels.”

As even any fledgling student of literature, fiction, myth, and literary symbolism knows, events, objects, and symbolic ideas occur very often in groups of three in fables and parables and legends.  It is the same in the short story “The Three Strangers,” except that the series of three is less symbolic than in the average fable or parable.  The series occurs against the background of the Wessex country and the homestead of Higher Crowstairs.  When one first encounters the notion in the story of a birth and a christening as the reason for a celebration in a shepherd’s hut where three strangers attend, one wonders if perhaps Hardy is preparing to re-do the New Testament story of the birth of Christ and the visit of the three wise men; but here, the “wise” men who arrive, if they are to be considered truly “wise” in any way, are simply all part of the same secret that the rest of the people at the shepherd’s celebration are not in on.  And one of the three wise men becomes a dupe, not only of the other two, but as we are told at the end of the tale, of the countryside at large.  The story is set back in time, and is not a symbolic tale at all as the birth and christening of the shepherd’s child seems at first to suggest, yet it has the very resonance of a country legend because of what happens to the three strangers and the people there with whom they become involved.

In the second story, “The Distracted Preacher,” a Wesleyan clergyman in the midst of a town full of parishioners who divide their loyalties rather equally between the Anglican church and the Methodist chapel would seem to have enough to do trying to gain the total allegiance of his flock.  Mr. Stockdale, however, has an additional challenge to his equanimity in the form of his landlady, a young and attractive widow named Lizzy Newberry.  When the preacher develops a bad cold, Lizzy takes him to a secret place in the singing-gallery of the church, where smuggled barrels of alcohol are to be found, in order to get him some alchohol for a punch remedy.  She encourages him to trust his cold with this, and Stockdale, quickly falling in love with her, does so, though he is deprived of the sight of her for a day or two after this because, according to the servant Martha Sarah, she is mysteriously “busy.”  Though he knows he’s only temporary in his current position, he vows to come back and ask her to marry him when his two year probation is over.  He continues to be puzzled, however, by her sudden appearances and attentions to him and her equally unpredictable absences, and adopts the stratagem of continuing to take cold-producing walks in the weather.  As it soon appears, and as has been fairly obvious to the reader since the combination of the landlady’s strangely-kept hours and the subject of smuggling coincided in the text, Lizzy herself is deeply involved in the smuggling operations.  After a series of adventures and misadventures with the excise men (the Government tax collectors), all of which encounters are at least very human and partially comic, Lizzy and Stockdale unhappily place themselves at the ultimatum stage of their relationship.  The story is given two endings by Hardy, one of which he insists is based on fact, the other of which he seems to suggest is a sop for his readers.  The story is particularly light in touch and thoroughly delightful either way, as I leave the reader to find out.

“The Fiddler of the Reels” is the shortest of the three stories in my edition, a fairly simple character sketch at first of a “woman’s man,” a dandy who also happens to be a veterinarian and a fiddler, Wat Ollamoor, known as “Mop” because of his long locks.  He is said never to have been a church musician as others in the area have been, or perhaps never to have been inside a church at all; as we are told, “all were devil’s tunes in his repertory.”  A young woman of all young women of the area who is the most enchanted even apparently against her will by his music, enchanted into dancing even unto her own exhaustion and beyond, is one Car’line Aspent; but Hardy doesn’t take the easy way out of the story by grouping it alongside myriad other tales in British and Continental folk literature about demonic musicians:  instead, he says that it would take a “neurologist” to explain Car’line’s fixation on the music.  This too thus seems to be another tale from which one can take one’s own meaning.  Car’line has another suitor, a well-meaning young man named Ned Hipcroft.  In the remainder of the story, Hardy spends some time sketching out Car’line’s obsession, her breaking things off with Ned (who promptly goes to London and busies himself with work in the time of the Great Exhibition of 1851, maintaining a bachelor residence), and their eventual reacquaintance when Car’line writes to him and asks for forgiveness, and for his reconsideration of her past rejection.  When she shows up with a three or four year old child in tow, Ned at first tries to talk himself out of taking them in, but finally Ned and Car’line marry.  No exhibition lasts forever, however, and the good resolves Car’line has made are endangered when they return to their native Wessex township, and she sees Mop again, or hears his playing.  As with any demon fiddler tale, however much neurologists may have been mentioned as an ameliorative in the beginning of the story, the fiddler in the end makes off with something very precious indeed.  Once again, I’m not going to be specific, for as with any good literature, grasping the true spell of the work requires that you read it yourself; you can know the plot, but until you’ve read the work, you don’t actually take part in the magic.  But I won’t create a “spoiler” anyway.

In all three of these tales, older tales abide in the background.  In Hardy’s fictional Wessex, which was supposed to indicate some of the counties of England, there are thus tales told of trickery of Government men, both of the punitive and of the excise-collecting sort, and tales of the country people banding together to deal with what comes at them from more official quarters.  As the last tale of the three has proved, there are still tales that take place concerning the social witchery of dancing and listening to music in the midst of a crowd of performing friends and neighbors.  The country bonds are seen as tight between people, yet there are more or less clearly defined limits, as some of the characters find out.  All in all, Hardy has crafted a skilled picture of the “Wessex” countryside and characters, and unusually for him, without much pessimism and darkness at all.  I encourage you to read these stories because too often, due to works like Jude the Obscure and Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Hardy’s essential humor and humanity about his rustic characters is forgotten in the consideration of his sometimes painful heavy-handedness with tragic circumstances and his often reductive view of women, who are treated a little more evenly with the men in some of his country tales than they are in the novels.  Have a good read!

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September 6, 2012 · 1:27 am

Why can’t we take the “Fifty Shades of Grey” trilogy seriously (for a change) and see how it works (or doesn’t)?

Yes, I confess, I’m one of those people who don’t hear about a publishing sensation until most of the public excitement and in this case notoriety is over; I don’t get to read most books until the library carries them, since my book budget is growing smaller and smaller these days.  So, though I did hear about Fifty Shades of Grey and its sequels, I heard about it in a murmurous brook-like current, far away from the great hue and cry of the reading mainstream.  Once I knew just what the debate was all about, I thought to myself, “Well, it sounds like absolute garbage and malarkey, but you should never condemn anything you haven’t read, at least not without giving it a cursory glance.”  I’m glad I did read the first book.  Not because I found it good, however, but because I gave it a fair shot.  I had to persuade myself to continue reading after that, having already assured everyone whose opinion I respect in the literary field that I probably wasn’t going to continue with the second and third volumes.  Having done so anyway, I now can say that there’s no need to take it down with the sort of overwrought negative hype which is diametrically opposed to the positive hype of the advertisers; all you have to do is attempt to take the book seriously, and that in itself dispels it as any sort of major contender for lengthy spans of attention.

First, let’s take the characters and ethos/psychology.  The greatest amount of the time spent in all three novels (Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, Fifty Shades Freed) is spent in steamy sex scenes between the two main characters, Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey.  This is true despite the fact that the female character enters the novel as a sort of maladept Keystone Kop, full of slapstick awkwardness and social incapacity.  Though there’s a certain way in which she is a true-to-life girlish, giggling, virginal walking orgasm in the making, the amount of intentional or unintentional humor directed at her in the first 25-35 pages or so makes it hard to take her as a serious contender for the passion of a darkly threatening, sophisticated, rich, mysterious male lead, though this is not a fault of these books alone but one which they share with the modern romance genre in general.  It does make it harder to believe, perhaps, that Christian Grey is a dominant male, or Dom, in a BDSM sort of preferred role, inasmuch as even someone who likes to encounter submissives, or Subs, must surely find such a dishrag as Anastasia Steele no challenge to his imagination.  The text, of course, makes the point again and again of telling us that she is subverting his power and challenging him in ways in which he has never been challenged by anyone else, and they are constantly celebrating a series of “firsts” with each other.  For he too is trying to change her, and it’s here that the characterization isn’t really strong enough to sustain the claims of the plot:  they are both trying and hoping to change the other to some extent, certainly in the first book, and to a certain extent in the other two as well.  And as we have been often told by professionals such as psychologists, marriage counselors, and statisticians, not to mention novelists, relationships don’t survive well in which people go in expecting to be able to change the other person from whom they were when they met each other.  Furthermore, we are asked to believe that Grey’s development of self-awareness comes from the interaction not only with his therapist, but also with Anastasia; but the facts of therapy and relationships, as we have often heard, are that we must not only want to make changes ourselves, but must take it upon ourselves to make these changes, no matter how we are accompanied.  Yet over and over again, Grey shows himself to be recalcitrant and difficult, in fact as if he really does have a split personality, a diagnosis word which E. L. James throws off casually without fulfilling the adequate terms of the diagnosis.  As to the BDSM going on in the novel, I’m not going to pretend either that I am competent to judge it or that I am shocked by it:  though I doubt that it would convince aficionados of that sort of relationship, there is enough petty meanness in most of us that we can at least imagine being a dominant, bossy, demanding individual, and enough pusillanmity that we can at least imagine what it is to bow to someone else’s will constantly.  I also doubt that it is a fantasy romance meant to appeal to BDSM experts, but rather think it is meant to titillate the more adventurous of ordinary readers.  A few posts here and there have spoken to this fact, and I bow (figuratively speaking) to superior experience and knowledge.  The other characters fill the roles of friends, friends who have mirroring romances, jealous and envious enemies, and supernumeraries.  Perhaps the most interesting negative character is the aptly named Jack Hyde, though he is a standard suspense-novel villain strayed into the romance genre.  There’s never really any doubt that he will get his, though the “his” is not the one he was striving for; first of all, he’s totally outmanned and outgunned by Grey’s “troops” and Anastasia’s late-but-at-last-arriving good sense, and he turns out to have an interesting connection with the past.  This suspense element is what actually helps drive the rather tired third novel, and is the main thing that keeps what interest it has going, since any reader who’s still speculating about what Anastasia and Christian will get up to on any occasion when they are alone in a room for more than one minute–or, in fact, when they are in public and are not the immediate focus of attention–has a seriously lagging imagination.  Also interesting is the late introduction of Hyde’s female accomplice, a not totally convincing but still more intriguing than not plot development.  What’s somewhat distressing in the series is that in opposition to an abusive male figure in Christian’s past and the character Jack Hyde in Anastasia’s and Christian’s present, there is no counterbalance of good except Anastasia herself.  As she says at one point, she wants to be Christian’s “Alpha and Omega.”  This is to say, in quite literal Biblical terms, that she wants to be God.  Though I don’t mean to suggest that the book necessarily needs a god or gods (though she has an “inner goddess” and a “subconscious” both mentioned overtly and constantly throughout the book), it seems somewhat impious even from an agnostic’s point of view to suggest that one human being can play this role for another.  She is, in fact, wanting to be dominant in an overweening way herself if this is to be taken seriously.

Next, I would like to comment on the language in the novels, which has amused and bemused more commentators on the book than one.  Put in simple terms, the books are very badly written, and need a good editing job from several different perspectives.  The simplest criticism one can make has been made by a number of people before now:  that is, that James does not distinguish between the slang terminology of America, where the action of the novels largely takes place, and the slang of England, which is often used instead.  “Packages” are therefore “parcels” and “strollers” or “baby buggies” are “prams,” among the least confusing things.  Far more serious, however, is the bad grammar and style.  This also kept me laughing irreverently from page to page here and there.  The constant repetition of words and phrases to convey emotions and actions which were repetitive but which good writing would have portrayed with varied language was part of the problem.  For example, when aroused, the female character very often thinks to herself “Oh my” in italics.  When she’s being approached sexually in a way unfamiliar to her, she acts almost as if shocked and indicates the area of touch concerned as “down there.”  She’s constantly either “biting her lip” or “flushing crimson.”  And the male character after a certain point in the action in which he has spanked her is said to have a “twitchy hand”; he also “pouts” at her in a corresponding attention-grabbing way to her lip-biting.  Thus, the characters don’t really develop, despite indications in the outright story to the contrary:  they simply follow a series of repetitious prompts, a code of sorts to let the reader know what’s coming (so to speak).  The bad grammar is much more obtrusive, however, and of that the dangling and misplaced modifiers in phrases and clauses are the most offensive.  To take one example from the second book, when the two characters are on the man’s catamaran and he is enjoying strapping her into a life vest, we read a sentence something like this (bear with me as I try to reconstruct it, the book has already been returned to the library):  “Being secured, he grinned and patted her arm” or whatever.  The problem there is that “being secured” modifies (reflects meaning on) “he,” not on her or her vest, not mentioned in the sentence in question.  And it does no good grammatically speaking to say “you know what she means, though,” because good grammar and good writing depends not on these kinds of contraband understandings, but upon obvious accuracy.  What this sentence in fact says is perhaps accurate to what some people think of the books as a whole, that the character Christian Grey would be better off to himself and everyone else were he restrained in a tight straitjacket (never mind the even more amusing question of how, once restrained, he managed to pat anything, however much he might be grinning maniacally.)  An even more ridiculous example which I’ve racked my brains to recollect exactly but which escapes me at the moment occurs when the misplaced modifier tells us that Christian’s erection is doing something that an erection unequipped with additional limbs simply could not do.  Inanimate objects as well sometimes take on the characteristics which almost certainly are meant to apply to the characters themselves.

Now as to the modern romantic novel tradition that the book is written in, I think that using the higher number of openly sexual scenes, the book does a reasonable job of making overtly physical the mostly emotional sadomasochistic tendencies of the average romance novel.  Teasing the reader is of course the game not only in romances but in suspense and mystery novels, and there are wee portions of the latter two in this romance as well, concerning the mystery of Christian’s past, the suspense of what will happen when Jack Hyde has the upper hand of the main characters, et cetera.  But it’s not just a matter of teasing the reader with the typical reversals and re-reversals of fortune that occur in almost any novel, popular or not:  the usual romance novel in fact plays off a sort of emotional sadomasochism which often subsists in the relationships between women and men.  Sometimes, it’s the sufferings of the boy-next-door who finally gets angry at the girl for momentarily preferring an apparently more vigorous lover, sometimes it’s the girl-next-door who, like Anastasia Steele, is deeply in love with a richer, more sophisticated man who doesn’t treat her in an easily understandable way.  Whichever variation on the forms it is, there is a certain amount of cruelty in the characters’ relationships, a degree of deliberate melodrama and perversity, which governs the way the plot unfolds.  All I’m suggesting is that this trilogy of novels makes these things into overt sexual acts, however well or badly they are portrayed, however realistically or not.

Lastly, you may wonder about my qualifications for making judgements concerning a novel series of this kind, considering that I have heretofore prided myself on writing about already acclaimed and worthy works of literature about which there has on that matter been little contest.  Let’s just say that I read a fair amount of mindless modern romantic drivel in my adolescence, and these three novels, though catering to that same impulse only for an at least slightly older demographic, isn’t the worst I’ve read, which tells you yes, these things can get pretty bad before they exhaust the patience of addicted readers.  This has in fact been an odd sort of holiday for me from the serious literature I generally cover; now, however, I look forward to rejoining the works of critical merit and worth which render so much more in the way of valuable reading experiences.  Here’s to all you readers of quality works who’ve occasionally stepped off the straight and narrow and felt embarrassed, but not known where to look about your guilty secret–since E. L. James stepped on the scene, the opportunity to read something literarily neglectful, occasionally boring, and sometimes just plain bad has increased exponentially:  I leave the knowledge, I feel safely, in your competent hands.

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September 5, 2012 · 4:51 pm

“Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.”–Louis Dembitz Brandeis

When I was about twenty-one or twenty-two, I happened to see a production on television of the playwright Christopher Fry’s 1949 play “The Lady’s Not for Burning.”  The experience stayed with me for quite some time, and is still one of my fondest theatrical experiences.  Yet not much is heard about the play these days, and for many people Fry seems old-fashioned and full of sentiment.  I remember mentioning the play with fond affection to a theater instructor, who informed me that I had bad taste:  a taste for Fry in the theater, he said, was as bad as having a taste for the horribly purple prose of Thomas Wolfe in fiction.  Since at the time I rather liked You Can’t Go Home Again and Look Homeward, Angel as well, I shut up, convinced that I wasn’t sufficiently sophisticated, or cognizant of what I should know, or just plain intelligent enough to see the differences he was talking about.  Yet all these years later, in spite of having lost my interest in and taste for Thomas Wolfe’s fiction, I still retain a fond affection for the plays of Christopher Fry that I’ve read and seen (I’ve only the experience of two, “The Lady’s Not for Burning” and “A Phoenix Too Frequent,” though at one point Fry was quite popular in the theater and there are a number of other plays by him as well).  Today, I wanted to write a little about the first play I mention above, “The Lady’s Not for Burning,” in the hope, I suppose, of encouraging other readers and enthusiasts of verse plays to read him, and maybe even of spurring some interest in putting his plays on again, who knows?  One thought has a million paths in the outside world, after all.

The play is set in a “small market-town” called Cool Clary around 1400, at a time when witches were still being burnt and a war in Flanders was still recent.  The action centers around a dual problem which presents itself in the home of Hebble Tyson, an officious and by-the-book Mayor of the town; this problem is that at one and the same time a young woman comes to his house for shelter, being designated a witch by the townspeople, and in an at first unrelated case, a man, Thomas Mendip, comes in requesting to be hanged.  Thus, the “right of free assembly” in a time and place where such rights were not matter of course is being exercise willy nilly by an unruly mob, and not to gain other legitimate rights, but in fact to deprive a young woman, Jennet Jourdemayne, of her life and property.

In this case, it’s the language of Thomas Mendip which attempts, if not to “free men from the bondage of irrational fears,” to mislead the accusers and focus on him, because, according to him, he sees no point in continuing life.  His speeches are full of the excesses of existential bombast of our own day except in verse:  for example, when one of the other characters says she hears a cuckoo singing in the spring air of April, he responds:  “By God, a cuckoo!  Grief and God,/A canting cuckoo, that laughs with no smile!/A world unable to die sits on and on/In spring sunlight, hatching egg after egg,/Hoping against hope that out of one of them/Will come the reason for it all; and always/Out pops the arid chuckle and centuries/Of cuckoo-spit.”  Thomas Mendip steps into a situation already full of tension, because the young heir of Tyson, his nephew, Humphrey Devize, is awaiting the arrival of his bride-to-be, Alizon Eliot; Humphrey’s brother, Nicholas Devize, is locked in a sort of sibling rivalry with his brother Humphrey, and naturally wants whatever his brother wants, or whomever.  At first the brothers are competing over Alizon, but when Jennet comes into the picture, they both start to compete over her, even though she is doomed to be burned the next day.  It is her language which, due to her scientific upbringing and background, tries to “free men from the bondage of irrational fears.”

Each character has comic lines more than sufficient fully to paint their characters.  To take a case in point, Tyson is always saying things like “Dear sir, I haven’t yet been notified of your existence”;”Out of the question./It’s a most immodest suggestion, which I know/Of no precedent for.  Cannot be entertained.”;”I will not be the toy of irresponsible events”; and the like.  He’s clearly an official’s official.  The Justice Edward Tappercoom is another such case, though he is less interested in the matter of Jennet’s soul and her possible hexings of others than he is eager to confiscate and enjoy her property by the law of the time after she’s dead.  The mother of the two competing brothers, Margaret Devize (the Mayor’s sister) is more sketchily filled in, though she too has her moments:  when asked by Thomas to concern herself with the mob outside, which may soon be stoning or in some way harming a woman accused of witchcraft, Margaret replies, “At the moment, as you know,/I’m trying hard to be patient with my sons./You really mustn’t expect me to be Christian/In two directions at once.”  This quite effectively states her interests and obsessions for the length of the play, though she has many other lines–she is just the good mother and housekeeper who concerns herself purely with the domestic arrangements, and keeps herself to herself when it comes to public controversy.  Even a drunk, old Skipps, the man whom the “witch” has been accused of turning into a dog, turns up at the end to confound the judgement, and does so “poetically.”  He has been located by the parish clerk Richard, who has earlier run away with the bride-to-be, Alizon, and they have turned back to reveal the truth of Skipp’s existence, so that justice will be served.  Skipps, not knowing what he may be accused of, responds in a masterly joining of Biblical poetry and doggerel:  “Who give me that name?…Baptized I blaming was, and I says to youse, baptized I am…wiv holy weeping and washing of teeth.  And immersion upon us miserable offenders.  Miserable offenders all–no offence meant….Peace on earth and good tall women.  And give us our trespassers as trespassers will be prosecuted for us…” et cetera.

The majority of the truly poetic lines, however, are given to Thomas Mendip and Jennet Jourdemayne, as they are the two main characters, she trying to persuade the audience in the Mayor’s house that she is not a witch, while Mendip tries to persuade them to hang him as the murderer of two men he says he killed, old Skipps and another man, which facts they all dispute without certain knowledge because they can’t believe any man would willingly come to have himself hanged.  As he says of his military service, however, “I’ve been unidentifiably/Floundering in Flanders for the past seven years,/Prising open ribs to let men go/On the indefinite leave which needs no pass./And now all roads are uncommonly flat, and all hair/Stands on end.”  Thus, he knows what it is to kill, and perhaps (if an actor were trying to find additional character motivation for why the character so persistently tries to focus deadly attention on himself) he is feeling, like Hamlet, “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world,” or something of that kind.

When Jennet, conversely, tries to use reason and logic with Tyson, she says, “Asking to be punished?  Why, no, I have come/Here to have the protection of your laughter./They accuse me of such a brainstorm of absurdities/That all my fear dissolves in the humour of it./If I could perform what they say I can perform/I should have got safely away from here/As fast as you bat your eyelid.”  Tyson, unfortunately, takes this remark as a partial confession.  She goes on, “They tell one tale, that once, when the moon/Was gibbous and in a high dazed state/Of nimbus love, I shook a jonquil’s dew/On to a pearl and let a cricket chirp/Three times, thinking of pale Peter:/And there Titania was, vexed by a cloud/Of pollen, using the sting of a bee to clean/Her nails and singing, as drearily as a gnat,/’Why try to keep clean?'”  The two, Jennet and Thomas, go on with their fantasy of talk, vying with each other but with different motives, until Thomas says he has “bedlam” under his hat, and “the battlefield/Uncle Adam died on.  He was shot/To bits with the core of an apple/Which some fool of a serpent in the artillery/Had shoved into God’s cannon.”  To this exchange of two souls who seem immediately to understand each other, Tyson responds in his totally uncomprehending way, “That’s enough/Terrible frivolity, terrible blasphemy,/Awful unorthodoxy.  I can’t understand/Anything that is being said.  Fetch a constable./The woman’s tongue clearly knows the flavour/ Of spiritu maligno.  The man must be/Drummed out of town.”  After a few minutes of this, Thomas loses his patience with Tyson and says, “You bubble-mouthing, fog-blathering,/Chin-chuntering, chap-flapping, liturgical,/Turgidical, base old man!  What about my murders?/And what goes round in your head,/What funny little murders and fornications/Chatting up and down in three-four time/Afraid to come out?  What bliss to sin by proxy/And do penance by way of someone else!”

The matter doesn’t become any clearer for the officials, and as to the ostensible wedding party, they are in a regular chaos and disorder because guests to celebrate are expected that night.  Finally, the officials decide to let the two erstwhile “convicts” spend their last night in company, she as her last night on earth, he as one who needs to be cheered up and sent on his way.

The unraveling of the somewhat complicated plot involves a party going on in the background offstage, an initially frustrated elopement of the clerk Richard and the girl Alizon Eliot, and the further fighting of the two brothers.  In the midst of this disorder, however, Thomas and Jennet are also falling in love with each other.  In a sense, this is an existential romantic comedy told backwards to dilute the potential sentimentality of the romance itself.  For example, as Jennet suggests about Thomas’s claims to have killed old Skipps and another man, “There was a soldier,/Discharged and centreless, with a towering pride/In his sensibility, and an endearing/Disposition to be a hero, who wanted/To make an example of himself to all/Erring mankind, and falling in with a witch-hunt/His good heart took the opportunity/Of providing a diversion.  O Thomas,/It was very theatrical of you to choose the gallows.”  When I say “an existential comedy told backwards,” I mean that the action of the play begins not at the beginning, nor really in the middle (as in medias res would dictate for an epic or novel), but nearly at the postulated end of the woman being accused and in the process of undergoing imprisonment and trial.  Instead, however, Frye whips the rug out from under the feet of his oppressing (or as with some like Margaret the mother, just indifferent) characters, and resurrects old Skipps.

That this is an existential play and not a simple romantic comedy, however, becomes quite clear in the end, in the alternatives to go or stay which are presented to Jennet and Thomas, and in the conditions under which they will have to leave or stay.  That is, to stay is deadly, but to go has its risks and forfeits as well.  And all the risks and forfeits of life itself have been gone through in the magnificent poetic excursions of language, especially from these two characters.  The choices they make, including the loss of the fear of loving, show that they carry existential baggage despite their apparently greater dedication to reason than the superstitious characters around them, because they only overcome the fear slowly, at least in dramatic terms on stage.

What does this have to do with freedom of speech, you ask?  Well, for one thing, the officials in the play are all constrained by fear of exceeding certain careful limits, not only from freedom of speech, but even from freedom of thought.  Their minds run in carefully cut grooves, and never get out of the ruts.  Even when Tappercoom offers to let Thomas and Jennet go at the end, it’s not because he sees their points of view; it’s only so that he can get Jennet’s property now that she is less demonstrably witch-like.  Only Richard the clerk frees himself from his parish role enough to run away with the woman he loves from the loveless marriage which threatens her.  The brothers and Margaret their mother do not change from having the initial concerns they had at the beginning of the play.  They are a little freer in their speech, but they too do not have any real freedom of mind to go along with it, the brothers sunk in lechery and competition, the mother in her household concerns.  It is only Jennet and Thomas who represent the forces of freedom, she in having the courage to go along with him into the night without knowing where they will go, he in getting over his “irrational fears” of closeness and love.  But this comes out sounding far more schmaltzy and sentimental than it does in the play, particularly if you see a powerful performance of it as I did.  Perhaps it would help readers to know that Richard Burton, John Gielgud, and Claire Bloom among others worthy of note were in one of the first productions of the play–maybe it’s possible to visualize it just a bit more accurately when you can see fine dramatic actors in your mind’s eye.

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September 1, 2012 · 10:56 pm

Two beautiful poems about outer (and inner) space–by John Masefield and Conrad Aiken

In discussing the first poem I’ve selected today, John Masefield’s “I Could Not Sleep for Thinking of the Sky,” I want to illustrate some of what I think draws us into the subject of outer space, which is often a metaphor in poetry for our inner space, our reachings toward infinity in an interior direction.  What I am suggesting in fact is that in Masefield’s poem, the “sky,” “The unending sky, with all its million suns” is in fact an example of T. S. Eliot’s “objective correlative.”  For, as Masefield continues, we see a place where the poet watches “the fire-haired comet run[],” and “a point of gloss/Burn to a glow, and glare, and keep amassing.”  He tries to imagine what it would be like if he could “sail that nothing,” if he could “proceed” and see a sun’s “last light upon his last moon’s granites/Die to a dark that would be night indeed.”  That his poem is a masterful exposition about death itself becomes more obvious in his last lines, when he says he might experience “Night where [his] soul might sail a million years/In nothing, not even Death, not even tears.”  Thus, though the poem is concerned with the birth and death of solar systems, which take up ever so much more time than humans to die, he can imagine himself living a kind of immortality almost like that of a god in heaven, but in a literal heaven of planets, stars, suns, moons and the like.  In form, the poem is a sonnet, first eight lines, then six, and the set pattern of the form enforces a sort of masterful containment of emotion, a condensation of intensity and meaning which sets up parallels between the wide and limitless-seeming sleepless night, the dark sky above with isolated bright spots, and the final and eventual and otherwise unimaginable experience of Death with a capital D, the final death of an individual seeming so small beside the deaths of galaxies and universes.  Yet it is this supposedly limited human intelligence, this small and insignificant human being, who is having this vast experience of the heavens.  In small space and time, two very indicative words here, Masefield has painted both an exterior and an interior notion of vastness and illimitable places.

Conrad Aiken’s poem, “Morning Song of Senlin,” is both longer and more filled with comic ironies.  Yet, it too is about shooting through space.  Aiken’s poetic voice, however, does not see the experience of going through space at top speed as something he could or would or might do were it possible, but in fact seems to treat the inner space of his private existence as a foil and in counterpoint to the experience of travelling on planet Earth through the universe.  Yet the two experiences in this poem are intimately connected.  The poem begins, “It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning/When the light drips through the shutters like the dew,/I arise, I face the sunrise,/And do the things my fathers learned to do.”  It might be remarked that the name “Senlin” was said by Aiken to mean “little old man,” and so it is that we can imagine so easily the daily ablutions and activities of a precise, neat, circumspect senior citizen, whose unbounded if somewhat humorously ironical remarks about travelling through space as he completes his daily brushing and combing activities could easily take our own breaths away as we imagine them.  He seems so very smug and self-satisfied.  The first stanza ends, “And I myself on a swiftly tilting planet/Stand before a glass and tie my tie.”  The chorus occurs periodically throughout the poem and reinforces the sense of a very small and insular even if natural world on the Earth around Senlin:  “Vine leaves tap my window,/Dew-drops sing to the garden stones,/The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree/Repeating three clear tones.”  In the second stanza, we get again the repetition of the little old man looking in the mirror, tying his tie, combing his hair, but in this case the heavenly accompaniment to this activity is: “The green earth tilts through a sphere of air/And bathes in a flame of space.”

In the next stanza, final things are thought of, but again rather comically, as if in the attitude of a member of a boys’ club who has a special understanding with the club president:  “It is morning…Should I not pause in the light to remember god?/Upright and firm I stand on a star unstable,/He is immense and lonely as a cloud./I will dedicate this moment before my mirror/To him alone, for him I will comb my hair,/Accept these humble offerings, cloud of silence!/I will think of you as I descend the stair.”

The poem mentions, of course, that “The walls are about me still as in the evening,/I am the same, and the same name still I keep.”  Yet, this seems an odd sort of reassurance to juxtapose with the next of the travelling-at-high-speed-through-an-unknown-firmament passages, which reads, “In a whistling void I stand before my mirror,/Unconcerned, and tie my tie.”  The next morning comes and is related in similar form, in this fashion:  “It is morning.  I stand by the mirror/And surprise my soul once more;/The blue air rushes above my ceiling,/There are suns beneath my floor…”  We continue with the alternation back and forth through the rest of the poem of Senlin getting ready in the morning with such images from his mind as “I ascend from darkness/And depart on the winds of space for I know not where….”  The last we actually hear of Senlin’s voice, we hear “There are shadows across the windows…And a god among the stars;and I will go/Thinking of him as I might think of daybreak/And humming a tune I know…”  We get one final repetition of the natural earth-bound images in the chorus with slight variation, and thus the poem ends.

But what has Senlin actually said, when it’s taken all together?  There seem to be four main lines of monologue going on in this mind we are listening to:  one is that he’s abstracted with getting ready for his day, and his daily routine.  The second is that after all, there are daily images outside his window as well which can be seen as being nearly as reassuring as the routine itself.  The third and most terrifying set of images are associated with the fact that yes, he is on a “swiftly tilting planet,” and these images open the door to startling and frightening possibilities of collision, not so much of planets with each other, but of the quotidian with the unearthly and heavenly.  Yet, for Senlin’s convenience, in the fourth set of images he has imagined himself a god who, though “immense and lonely as a cloud” may still be appeased by someone going through his daily cycle, minding his own business, and giving a polite if highly conventional tip of the hat to the notion of god itself.  This is a strangely and hilariously apt picture of a man keeping his balance in ways which most of us practice from time to time, as we note that scary things do happen (but of course, not to us!).  And this is what makes this poem of universal interest to all of us, even those of us who are not getting on in years and able only to make the best of things in this way.

These two poems seems opposed in another way in the sense that Masefield’s poem takes place at night, and incorporates a sense of the sheer vastness of a life experience when it is filled with a notion of the unearthly and wide expanses of eternity.  And Aiken’s poem takes place in the morning, in a calm and domesticated setting, where the “wild” element is introduced by the thoughtful though somewhat dismissive acceptance of outer space and the earth’s place in it by the composed and superior-to-the-experience attitude of Senlin.  The first poem has somber and tragic tonalities; the second has counterpoint and comic irony.  Yet, both are about our place in the universe and how we face it.  For this reason, I’ve always loved these two poems, and found comfort, complexity, and amusement during the many times I’ve read them through.

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September 1, 2012 · 1:56 am

“Every novel should have a beginning, a muddle, and an end.”–Peter De Vries

If you wonder what odd tack I’m on today and why I’m so concerned with novelistic structure in the governing witticism which supplies the title of my post, it’s because I just today finished proofreading my fourth novel, putting it on the eCO (electronic Copyright Office), writing a novel blurb for it to add to the other ones I’ve already put among my pages on this site (where you’ll find it in order), and finally, putting the novel itself on this blogsite.

The title of the novel, Tales of Lightning and of Thunder, may sound like a collection of short stories; instead, it’s an episodic novel centering around the figure of Jason (the main character from classical mythology in the tales of Jason and the Argonauts, Jason and the Golden Fleece, Jason and Medea).  Naturally, it was impossible to cover all of the different angles of the stories told by different classical authors, largely because there are so many writers who write about Jason and so many slightly different versions of the myths.  So, I picked and chose what I wanted to write about after reading around in all my five or six classical guides and dictionaries and retellings of mythology.

Should you be familiar yourself with any of these tales, you may wonder where I got the notions I’ve written about Jason (as a child) and his family.  These notions were in general pure invention up to the point when his uncle begins trying to influence his decisions, and even then I’ve changed the nature of his uncle’s character from that of the myths:  he’s no longer an underhanded villain as much as he is a foolish and misguided man.  And what happens to his sister Magda is a slight reference to the far greated mishap suffered by Helle, the young sister of Phrixus, the two of whom rode on the back of the great ram before it became only the source of the Golden Fleece.  Of course, I’ve created Jason as a sort of American “prince,” a son of young upper middle class parents at the beginning of the novel, and I go on from there, taking down both the Bildungsroman tradition  to a certain extent (see my “blurbs for novels” for an explanation) and the notion of a hero as larger than life, or tragic, or any of the other standard formulas for writing hero characters.  Again, my story has elements of comedy and satire, but not perhaps as much as my other novels.

I hope when you get the chance to read something longer from my site, you’ll have a look at Tales of Lightning and of Thunder, and will perhaps set aside trying to keep up with the elements of myth in their proper places in order simply to read the story as a story; after all, if you can’t enjoy the revised structure which changes it from a myth into a novel with “a beginning, a muddle, and an end,” then I haven’t succeeded in making the story live again in a new incarnation.  But I hope you will decide that I have, and will “get as much mileage” out of reading it as I did out of writing it.  Until tomorrow!

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