Category Archives: Articles/reviews

February 9, 2014 · 5:11 pm

How Firesign Theater, Stanislavski, and I are (loosely and tangentially) connected….

Let’s start with the facetious, progress to the serious, and then wind down (or up?) with the point of my post for today.  It’s not a long post, in any case, but I hope to raise a few thoughts and speculations about how we bloggers go about blogging and adhering to a schedule of publication even when it’s a gloomy winter and our fingers are a little bit frozen as they peck the keys, and we really haven’t been reading much lately, so we have nothing much to blog about (or at least not if our posts are usually about literature).  What have I been doing instead of blogging and reading good literature, you ask?  Well, I’ve been trying to drag and haul and “unpack” (as Shakespeare somewhere or other would have it) words from my “word hoard” (the ancient Anglo-Saxon for “vocabulary”) to fill the pages of my novel.  I also took time out to watch an opera production over the computer from Met Opera On Demand, “Madama Butterfly,” to be precise.  So it’s not that I’ve been totally unproductive:  I’ve just not fulfilled my (self-appointed) duties as a blogger very well.  But I promised you something facetious, so let’s begin at the beginning.

For those who like comedy routines and have a memory which reaches back a few years, there’s the comedy team called “Firesign Theater,” a group of several talented no-longer-young comedians who by now have cut a number of records, of which I am the proud possessor of about four.  Those who have their spoofy take-down of Shakespeare album (and who still have a turntable to play it on) may well remember, I believe from their jests about weather conditions in “Hamlet” or possibly “Macbeth” on the heath, the immortal lines–delivered in the true ornate Shakespearean manner and accent–“Crack, cheeks; blow, wind,” and other such gems of parodic genius.  There’s also the school adventures of Porgie Tirebiter (a spoof of Archie and Jughead-style teenage fables) from “I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus,” their parody of Sherlock Holmes entitled “The Tale of the Giant Rat of Sumatra,” and the topical albums (they were popular in the late ’60’s and early ’70’s) “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers” and “In the Next World, You’re On Your Own,” to name only the albums I’m personally familiar with.  There are more, which a search on the Internet will turn up.  These four inspired raconteurs of rowdy routines were (and I hope still are) Phil Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman, and Philip Proctor.  And here’s the nub of it:  though they had obviously had to rehearse their routines to get all the remarks and the sound effects filled in in their appropriate spots, they had a way of playing off each other’s jests which struck one as more truly like improvisational theater than planned writing.  It is absolutely delightful what they can do with words, concepts, events, and other people’s creations.  And the freshness is preserved by the sense of their being especially inspired on the instant to make their jokes.  And here (though of course “many a truth is spoken in jest,” as we know) we switch to the serious part of my post.  How does one access one’s inspirational genius?

One of the most interesting and vitally creative and worthwhile books I’ve ever read is the famous Russian director and teacher Konstantin S. Stanislavski’s book An Actor Prepares.  It’s all about how he went about training his students to act by the manner now know as “method acting,” of which he was the main inventor.  Nevertheless, though it is about acting and acting students and the theater and plays and playwrights, it is a work which everyone, painter, actor, literary critic, sculptor, academic, novelist or poet, or anyone in any other creative field should read, for its advice on inspiration.  Though there are many scenes and incidents in the book in which Stanislavski spurs his students to new heights of creativity by his advice and teachings, there is one key scene which I will have always in my memory, and which is the gist of my own thoughts on creation to the present day.  Stanislavski was reproaching a certain student for his slipshod work in the manner in which he portrayed his character.  The student, like many a student everywhere, earnestly (but perhaps a trifle lazily?) responded that he had tried and tried, but he didn’t feel “inspired” that particular day with that particular character.  Stanislavski’s response?  He lectured the student that it was not his primary job to “be inspired,” rather it was his job to develop his “technique.”  He believed that technique was the bread and butter (or the meat and potatoes) of the creative world.  Inspiration, by contrast, was something that came along where and where it would, and was more like the icing on the cake.  It could not be relied upon, because it was a will-‘o-the-wisp, likely to disappear if too heavily relied upon.  The best possible creative solution was always to have one’s technique at the ready and in operation, and while maintaining one’s openness to allow inspiration to come along, always be prepared to do a simple workmanlike job in the event that it deserted one.

And where do I come into this post, as I indicated that I would at the beginning?  Well, it’s only that I’ve tried day after day (like Stanislavski’s erring and excuse-making student) to come up with an inspiration for a post, and finally today while I was looking for something to post upon, my eyes ran across a book by a theater person named Sonia Moore, written on the Stanislavski method.  And a light bulb did indeed go on over my head, so I guess it was really a kind of inspiration, in a way, but before I could just take the improvisational moment and the inspiration and run with it, I felt it only fair to share not only my original reading of the book, but also to connect it up with all the ins and outs of the vexed question of inspiration and improvisation themselves.  And so, here it is:  a post a bit longer than I thought it would be, but one I hope which will repay your attention and give you too something to think (or read) about the next time your inspiration lags.  Toodle-oo! for now–post done!

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February 3, 2014 · 8:12 pm

Disclaiming the disclaimer–Terry Kay and the truth of “To Dance With the White Dog”

In this post, I’m going to start with the ending, then do some standard description of the book.  There was no standard disclaimer in the book about the fiction having to do only with no actual people, alive or dead, and in fact I didn’t run into the “disclaimer of the disclaimer” until the last page–I had been a good and servile reader and not looked ahead to “spoil” the story or satisfy my impatience.  Here’s what I read on the last page:

“Author’s Note:  You will find in many novels a fine print disclaimer about the story, about the coincidence of similarity to real people and real events.  It is a proclamation that fiction is fiction, regardless of its wellspring.  This novel does not carry that disclaimer.  It would be a lie.  I have taken To Dance With the White Dog from truth–as I realized it–of my parents.  There was a grand romance of life between them, and my father’s loneliness following the death of my mother was a terrible experience for him.  And there was a White Dog.  And my father did believe White Dog was more than a stray.  In this novel, I have changed names, numbers of children, and other facts.  I did this for two reasons–dramatic intensity and detachment, both necessary in relating a personal memory to an unknown audience.  I do not mean to offend the truth.  I only wish to celebrate its spirit.”

This book, dealing with at least some actual events and people as it does, is still fictionalized and as such, using the fine imaginative lens of Terry Kay to reach its realization, has a great deal to do skirting the delicate edge between sentimentality and sentiment, the first a definite drawback to experiencing genuine emotions dealing with death and dying, the second, sentiment, being an especial plus where it occurs.  The basic story line concerns an elderly man, Sam Peek, who is still robust though on a walker, and whose children cluster around him with their emotions not always under proper control when his wife “of fifty-seven good years” dies and leaves him alone while still surrounded by well-meaning offspring.  The sentiment is what the author is striving to picture, the sentimentality is what he is trying to eschew, even while picturing the sometimes overwhelming emotionality of the man and his children towards everyday events which call the mother’s death to mind.

This is a tough job, and yet I believe that by and large Kay manages to bring it off, though a cynic might mock the simplicity of the world view(s) of the characters.  Kay leaves his characters alone and doesn’t usually attempt to explain them away, controlling most of what happens from the old man’s viewpoint, whether he is actually “dancing” with the mysterious white dog which appears after his wife’s death or whether he is writing in his journal and enjoying a playful plot to tease his children, particularly his daughters, who worry about him too much and crowd him with their concern while he is trying to maintain control of his own feelings.

The stray dog is the first center of his children’s concern, because their father tells them that it appears to be fed and will let him touch it and comes in his house, but none of them can see it, at least not at first.  Realizing that his daughters think he’s barmy and attempting to amuse himself at their expense, he deliberately gets in front of them and pretends to pet an invisible dog, and to dance with its paws on the front of his walker.  They can never see it, and furthermore their dogs don’t bark when he says his dog is around, so of course they start to wonder if they should make other plans for their father than allowing him to live alone with themselves checking in on him periodically and sometimes coming to cook for him.  Finally, however the blazing white dog is seen at a distance, and Neelie, the old African-American woman who was a special friend of his wife Cora’s, tells them it’s a ghost dog with their father, and they aren’t sure what to believe, not only what they believe but what their father believes.  This is perhaps a weakness of the text, that a stereotypically ghost-fearing older black person would have this perspective and voice it for them, but then I can’t apply the same standards to Terry Kay’s book that I might apply to a work of pure fiction, because for all I know Neelie was modeled upon a real person who happened to have these particular traits.  That is a matter for Kay’s creative conscience.

One thing I can speak to is that the characters more or less speak and act like real people otherwise, not like cardboard cutouts of people in the Deep South, and they do things that are not stereotypical.  For example, one of the sons threatens a father of some ne’er-do-wells whom he thinks may have harmed his father when the old man suddenly disappears for a few days, and there is a later scene when he repents of the threat, not because there was any bad result of it externally, but because he realizes that the father of the miscreants may in fact be as worried about the careers of his own boys as all Sam Peek’s children are about their missing father, who it turns out later has simply taken his white dog and gone off on an adventure of his own, the last big one of his life.

Taking all of these things together, I enjoyed my reading of To Dance With the White Dog, and found that it used simple language and concepts to put forth some very complex ideas about living and dying.  It is a quick but by no means negligible read, and has made fans in many places, perhaps one of the most far-flung geographically speaking The Most Reverend Desmond M. Tutu, the Anglican Archbishop of Capetown, who had this to say about the book, my copy of which was dated 1990:   To Dance With the White Dog is a hauntingly beautiful story about love, family, and relationships.”  This is the essential thing one can say about the book, because it really doesn’t matter whether the dog is real or not, a ghost dog or not:  what matters is what the characters do with the circumstances they are given, caring for each other in circumstances of that eternal enemy of humankind, death.  In this book, the characters show the way of death’s defeat and the triumph of their own supposedly weaker mortality in the contest between the two.  And that’s what “dancing with the white dog” is all about.

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January 31, 2014 · 4:14 pm

A brief and partial survey of the “bon mot” and a nod to the latest contender….

Hi, folks!  I’ve finally returned to blogging, back from my winter hiatus of the turn-of-the year holidays, my own illness (a nuisancy cold), and the illness of a couple of friends (now on the mend) whom I took time out to make something for to lift their spirits.  And my topic?  A brief (all too sketchy) and partial (showing favoritism to the French and the U.S. citizenry) survey of the bon mot (the “witty remark”).  Naturally, I wanted to include one of the latest examples of the form, so let me embark upon my survey without further ado, and I will bring this fraction of the world’s wit and bonhomie up-to-date with a nod to Justin Halpern’s short text Sh*t My Dad Says, which actually you probably heard of long before I did.  It can’t do any harm, however, to situate it within a line of historical descent with its forebears.  So here goes:

First, there’s the comparatively gentle and whimsical Montaigne, who included his cabbages and his cat in some of his musings.  The remarks he has to offer are thoughtful, perceptive little contributions to the world’s store of witticisms and go something like this:

  • “The thing I fear most is fear.”
  • “I want death to find me planting my cabbages.”
  • “He who would teach men to die would teach them to live.”
  • “I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my mind better.”
  • “Nothing is so firmly believed as what is least known.”
  • “When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?”
  • “Man is certainly crazy.  He could not make a mite, yet he makes gods by the dozen.”

Then, there is the more pointed and far more cynical La Rochefoucauld, whose Maximes are famous for their cutting edge and bite:

  • “That we can overcome our passions signifies their weakness rather than our strength.”
  • “There is always something in the misfortune of our best of friends which does not entirely displease us.”
  • “We are never so happy nor so unhappy as we imagine.”
  • “There is no disguise which can for long conceal love where it exists or simulate it where it does not.”
  • “True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen.”
  • “Everyone complains of his memory, and no one complains of his judgement.”
  • “Old people like to give good advice, as solace for no longer being able to give bad examples.”

Finally as a requisite for situating Halpern’s book in a slapdash historical context, there are a few from Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.), and The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table:

  • “Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.”
  • “Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.”
  • “Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.”

The first patently obvious difference which stands out in Justin Halpern’s book and which sets it apart from the more conventional book of bon mots is that in this case part of the humor is in fact derived from a disrespect for the polite conventions of conversation, signified here by the repetitive and constant use of vulgar and quasi-abusive language (by the “Dad” in question, who is copiously quoted).  Though Halpern makes it clear that there is much affection amongst the family members he writes about in the showcase for his father’s wit and wisdom, he never hesitates to quote his father’s disparaging remarks to him and other family members, and even started a Twitter feed for the work, at www.Twitter.com/ShitMyDadSays.  Here are some of the choicer remarks, not for the shy or faint-hearted, and definitely not for the social worker type who eschews frank language in family situations:

  • “Do people your age know how to comb their hair?  It looks like two squirrels crawled on their heads and started fucking.”
  • “That woman was sexy….Out of your league?  Son, let women figure out why they won’t screw you.  Don’t do it for them.”
  • “Jesus Christ, one fucking Snickers bar, and you’re running around like your asshole is on fire.  Okay, outside you go.  Don’t come back in until you’re ready to sleep or shit.”
  • (On off-limits zones in hide-and-go-seek) “What the fuck are you doing in my closet?  Don’t shush me, it’s my fucking closet.”
  • (On getting in trouble at school) “Why would you throw a ball in someone’s face?…Huh.  That’s a pretty good reason.  Well, I can’t do much about your teacher being pissed, but me and you are good.”
  • (On my first school dance) “Are you wearing perfume?….Son, there ain’t any cologne in this house, only your mother’s perfume.  I know that scent, and let me tell you, it’s disturbing to smell your wife on your thirteen-year-old son.”
  • (On fair play) “Cheating’s not easy.  You probably think it is, but it ain’t.  I bet you’d suck more at cheating than whatever it was you were trying to do legitimately.”
  • (On slumber parties) “There’s chips in the cabinet and ice cream in the freezer.  Stay away from knives and fire.  Okay, I’ve done my part, I’m going to bed.”
  • (On understanding one’s place in the food chain) “Your mother made a batch of meatballs last night.  Some are for you, some are for me, but more are for me.  Remember that.  More.  Me.”
  • “The dog is not bored.  It’s not like he’s waiting for me to give him a fucking Rubik’s Cube.  He’s a goddamned dog.”
  • “You sure do like to tailgate people….Right, because it’s real important you show up to the nothing you have to do on time.”
  • (On the right time to have children) “It’s never the right time to have kids, but it’s always the right time for screwing.  God’s not a dumb shit.  He knows how it works.”
  • “The baby will talk when he talks, relax.  It ain’t like he knows the cure for cancer and just ain’t spitting it out.”
  • “Sometimes life leaves a hundred-dollar bill on your dresser, and you don’t realize until later it’s because it fucked you.”

Though longshoremen are often credited with having vulgar language and using vile expressions that bring out the timidity in the rest of us, it’s vital and useful, I think, to report that this opinion is a result of class prejudice and that the language usage above comes from an educated member of the community, in fact a doctor, who uses his panoply of casually dismissive and discrediting language to call members of his family to attention and to let them know that he is making a serious point about something that involves them.  His point, clearly, is that they should listen carefully, and there’s apparently nothing like a good round expletive or frank evaluation to call people to attention quickly.  What comes out as well in Halpern’s book, after one has had a good laugh at all the many things that one wishes one could have said in similar situations, but which one didn’t have the chutzpah to enunciate in quite those terms, is that there is genuine affection and caring, not only of Justin Halpern for his family, but of the family itself as well by the frank and vocal father.  Not bothering with the excuse a lot of people offer before becoming either snide or frank, “I’m saying this because I love you,” Sam Halpern (the lauded dad) simply cuts to the chase and verbalizes what we all wish we could say sometimes, but with the whole emotional resonance of the remark intact.  The result is a hilarious collection of sayings and some other story-like passages of text which continue and update the traditions of the bon mot, making one wonder what indeed could possibly come next.  Truly, if one puts one’s linguistic prejudices regarding formal and stately language aside, assuming that one has them in the first place, there’s a world of wit and laughter in the picture Justin Halpern creates just by exhibiting his father’s contributions to one of the oldest traditions in the world.  Kudos to him and his father both, the older for being who he is first and foremost and not hiding himself from the world behind a screen of propriety, and the younger for knowing how to appreciate a true contributor to our literature without being blinded by false modesty because the speaker is a member of his own family.  May we all learn a little more of frankness as well as adroitness from their example, in whatever vernacular we choose to express them.

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December 18, 2013 · 8:08 pm

Dylan Thomas and “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”–The perpetual present tense

“One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.”

With this magical beginning, the spirit of the Christmases of one particular childhood is brought alive into the special awareness we all share, by reference to the moment of brightness just before sleep, and Dylan Thomas begins his tale of all the events of many Christmases, as if they were all rolled into one, all astounding and equally miraculous.

His second paragraph goes thus:  “All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like and cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street, and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find.  In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.”

This second paragraph not only strengthens the half-hallucinatory quality of memory, but also strengthens the poetic qualities and aspects of the narration, all while centering on one particular Christmas at the beginning as a way of leading into the wider, more general story of how all the Christmases were alike when Dylan Thomas was young, focusing thus also on the aspect of repetition as a characteristic of tradition.  The odd previously unexplained reference to “Mrs. Prothero and the firemen” draw out one’s curiosity as well, and provoke further attention.

To participate in this poetic piece of prose most fully, it is necesssary to read it aloud, and it comes as no surprise that the work was intended for the radio, full of many “tongued” voices as it is through the narrator’s memory.  There is a vague quality to many of the very items that strike us as most picturesque:  for example, the acts of the aunts and uncles in the story are both traditional and highly characteristic of celebrating adults, yet the identities of some of the uncles are unclear, and one aunt is remembered mainly for getting tipsy whenever possible, without really being an alcoholic, “because it was only once a year.”

The short work is almost like a work of music, starting with a brief flourish, alternating details and word pictures as a piece of music would vary themes, building to several minor crescendos and then featuring moments of what one feels must be a modern Christmas, when a voice or two undefined urges the speaker on to tell of specific details already known to the listeners.  As the time of day changes, so does the elegiac tone increase, until finally night comes.  The last sentence reads, “I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.”

I don’t know what your Christmas traditions are if you have them, but in our family we always read something together on Christmas Eve.  Usually it has been the whole of “A Christmas Carol” (which is long) or for a less attentive audience and a younger one “The Night Before Christmas.”  But if you are looking for something to read together this Christmas Eve, you could do much worse than to be Welsh for a season and to read together “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” by Dylan Thomas.  There are no difficult dialectal words to master or explain, and the whole piece is immensely accessible for young and old alike, regardless of nationality or political affections.  To find this piece on the internet, simply go to Google.com and get on the link www.bfs.media.com/MAS/Dylan/Christmas.html .  And have a happy and blessed holiday in bringing to mind a perpetual present-day vision of your own Christmases past, this season!

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December 10, 2013 · 9:26 pm

A fine study of hysteria and ambiguity?–“The Marquise of O–” by Heinrich von Kleist

Today, I’m going to risk an admission which will perhaps annoy, shock, dismay, or plain confuse those readers who’ve known me long enough to know what a good feminist I try to be and how much I want to observe correct sexual politics:  I really like Heinrich von Kleist’s story (from the German Romantic period) entitled “The Marquise of O–,” in which a widow with children, living at home with her parents in a secluded and quiet fashion, somehow finds herself pregnant with another child, and without knowing who the father is or when the conception occurred.

When male writers remark upon this story, it’s usually with the remark that it is a fine study in hysteria and ambiguity and an excellent portrait of the additional Electra-like relationship which the Marquise has with her father, Colonel G–, the Commandant of the citadel of M–, clearly throwing their hats in the ring as Freudian interpreters who excuse the story for its perhaps dated notion that a woman could fall in love with someone who had impregnated her on the sly.  The key word in the whole story, however, which was discoursed upon at length by my excellent Comparative Literature professor in my undergraduate days, the much-beloved Professor Holdheim of Cornell University, was the word “circumstances.”  Everything hinges upon this word, and in fact Professor Holdheim even re-translated some parts of the story for us in which in German the German word for “circumstances” had been left out or altered by our textual translator, Martin Greenberg:  circumstances are that important in the story.

Here are the basic circumstances:  In the northern Italian town of M–, where the widowed Marquise of O– lives with her father and mother (and the marquise is said to be “a lady of unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-bred children”), the Marquise has published in the newspapers that though she is in the dark as to how this has happened, she is “in the family way” (the literal expression is “in other circumstances,” a euphemism), and that she would like for the father of the engendered child to present himself, as “out of family considerations” (family being another important “circumstance” in the story) she considers herself bound to marry him.  She had left her own estate of V– to live with her parents after the death of her husband, until the — War filled the locality with the troops “of nearly all the powers, including those of Russia.”  Her father was ordered to defend the fortress, but before the ladies could be sent to safety, the citadel was attacked and the women were forced to flee.  In the confusion, the Marquise was seized upon by some rowdy Russian troops, who certainly had the intent to rape her, but before they could carry out their intention, she was rescued by a gallant Russian officer who greeted her in French, punished the attackers vigorously, and “who seemed [to the Marquise] a very angel from heaven.”  He led her to the other wing of the castle which had not yet caught fire, “where she fainted dead away.”  A short time later, her waiting women appeared and he told them to call a doctor, said the Marquise would soon recover, and went back to the battle.

While doing his duty as a Russian soldier, the young Russian officer who had rescued the Marquise, Count F–, also helped put out the fire of the attack and other such deeds of generous heroism, and had allowed her father safe passage, acting in accord with all the more charitable duties of a conqueror.  As is remarked upon in the text, when he is praised for his gallantry to the Marquise by his own general, who wants to have the men who had “dishonored the Czar’s name” shot if the Count will identify them, he blushes furiously, gives a “confused reply” that he couldn’t identify them in the dark, and looks “embarrassed,” but someone else identifies them and they are shot.  “[T]he Count made his way through the crowd of hurrying soldiers to the Commandant [the Marquise’s father] and said how very sorry he was, but under the circumstances [italics mine] he could only send his warmest regards to the Marquise….”

The next news the family of the Marquise receives of their hero is that he has been killed in another skirmish elsewhere, and though this monopolizes their attention for a while, soon they have other problems, viz., the strange illness which is afflicting the Marquise.  The illness at first passes, and the Marquise jokes with her mother that if another lady told her of the condition (or “circumstance”) that she would think the lady pregnant.  But the Marquise recovers a few days later and the illness is forgotten.  Not long after, they have another piece of astounding news:  a servant comes in and announces that Count F–, the Russian officer whom they had thought dead, is there and is seeking an audience.  The officer “turned, with an expression of great tenderness on his face, to the daughter; and the very first thing he asked her was, how did she feel?”  It comes out that the Marquise has been ill, but when the Marquise expresses a confidence that nothing else will come of it, he agrees that he thinks so too, and asks her if she will marry him.  They put him off and delay and question why he is so emphatic, but he continues to press his suit vigorously, saying that it’s necessary for “his soul’s peace.”

The family explains courteously that the Marquise had determined never to marry again after the death of her husband, but that since Count F– has been so genteel and has “laid so great an obligation” of gratitude on her that she will take some time to consider his proposal.  Again and again, he urges his suit, again and again they ask him to wait, and to carry out his duties to go to Naples as ordered.  They say that then he may come and be a guest at their dwelling while their daughter and they consider the matter and get to know him.  With rare alacrity, the young man cancels his trip and asks to stay right away.  The family actually begins to fear for his future professionally, sure that he will get into trouble with his superiors.  Finally, they agree to tell him that until his return from Naples, the lady will not “enter into any other engagement.”  He is overjoyed and agrees to go to Naples, while having letters of report sent to them from his own family and superiors proclaiming his character.  When he takes leave he again says that he loves the Marquise and wants very much to marry her.  The family is totally perplexed, but leaves the matter aside until his return.

They receive all good reports of him from his superiors and his family, but in the meantime, the Marquise’s mysterious illness returns.  After consulting with her doctor and the midwife both, it becomes obvious that she is in fact pregnant, and her parents throw her out of the house to return to her own estate of V–.  “The midwife, as she probed the Marquise, gabbled about young blood and the cunning of the world; when she finished, she said she had had to do with similar cases in the past; all the young widows who found themselves in her predicament would absolutely have it that they had been living on a desert island; at the same time she spoke soothingly to the Marquise and promised her that the light-hearted buccaneer who had landed in the night would soon come back to her.  When the Marquise heard this, she fainted dead away.”  As is obvious, the literary convention of having women faint a lot from various kinds of psychological shock is tested to the utmost against reality, in which we are asked to believe that the Marquise actually does go into fainting fits a lot.  Her mother writes a note about “the existing circumstances” when her parents ask her to leave, and so she does, taking her children with her.

“Her reason, which had been strong enough not to crack under the strain of her uncanny situation, now bowed before the great, holy and inscrutable scheme of things.  She saw the impossibility of persuading her family of her innocence,” and in short decides to “lavish all her mother love on the third [child] that God had made her a gift of.”  She restores and makes repairs to disused parts of her estate and begins to make small garments for her potential new arrival.  At this point, she determines to put her notice in the newspaper to ask the father of the child, whoever he might be, to make his appearance and marry her.  In the meantime, Count F– returns from Naples to her parents’ home, and her parents and brother are shocked to find that the Count still wants to marry their daughter, insisting that he himself believes in her innocence.  He makes his way to her estate at V– and obtains an interview with her.  His vehement courtship attempts fail, however, even his attempt to tell her some secret or other which he feels will sway her will.

There seems to be no hope for his cause.  Then, the Marquise’s brother tells him about her advertisement in the newspapers, and the Count says that he knows now what he has to do.  Again in the meantime, her mother visits her and by a ruse determines that the Marquise, however definitely pregnant, also definitely has no notion as to who has put her “in those circumstances.”  The daughter is forgiven, and taken home to her parents’ house, and now comes the strange Freudian scene between the Marquise and her father.  Her mother seems oddly clueless when she sees it, but even pre-Freudians must’ve found something a bit peculiar about this scene:  the Commandant allows his daughter to sit on his lap, which he has never done before.  After peering through the keyhole, “[the mother] opened the door and peered in–and her heart leaped for joy:  her daughter lay motionless in her father’s arms, her head thrown back and her eyes closed, while he sat in the armchair, with tear-choked, glistening eyes, and pressed long, warm and avid kisses on her mouth:  just as if he were her lover!  Her daughter did not speak, her husband did not speak; he hung over her as if she were his first love and held her mouth and kissed it.  The mother’s delight was indescribable; standing unobserved behind the chair, she hesitated to disturb the joy of reconciliation that had come to her home.  At last she moved nearer and, peering around one side of the chair, she saw her husband again take his daughter’s face between his hands and with unspeakable delight bend down and press his lips against her mouth.  On catching sight of her, the Commandant looked away with a frown and was about to say something; but calling out, ‘Oh, what a face!’ she kissed him in her turn so that his frown went away, and with a joke dispelled the intense emotion filling the hushed room.  She invited them both to supper, and they followed her to the table like a pair of newlyweds….”  This is not to suggest, be it said, that the Commandant is the father of his own grandchild, only that there is some strong element of hysteria in the family and in the era as well (as I mentioned, the period was the German Romantic period); this hysteria seems foreign and psychologically suspect to us now, with the fact that both the mother and the daughter have fainting fits, and the father is weirdly affectionate in an overly compelling way with his own daughter.

Near the end of the story, Count F– places himself before the Marquise and her parents and confesses by gesture and implication that he is the man she advertized for.  She runs from the room in confusion, calling him the devil, and sprinkling them all with holy water.  The parents agree on their daughter’s behalf that they will marry the next day.  The daughter goes into a fever, tries to refuse, says that she can’t marry, “especially not him,” but her father insists that she must keep her word.  “He also submitted a marriage contract to the Count in which the latter renounced all his rights as a husband, at the same time that he agreed to do anything and everything that might be required of him.”  The pair are married, but the new Countess refuses to look at, touch, or have anything to do with her husband for a long time.  He lives in a separate dwelling in M–, while the Countess continues to stay with her parents.  “Thanks only to the delicate, honorable, and exemplary way he behaved whenever he encountered the family, he was invited, after the Countess was duly delivered of a son, to the latter’s baptism.”  He puts a gift of 20,000 rubles in the baby’s cradle and a will making the mother his heiress in the event of his death.  “When his feelings told him that everybody, seeing what an imperfect place the world in general was [literally “for the sake of the fragile constitution of the world,” which speaks to the constitutions of the characters as well], had pardoned him, he began to court his wife the Countess anew.”  They are remarried a year later, and the whole family moves to V–, where the young people beget “[a] whole line of young Russians.”  The story concludes with this indirect “moral”:  “[W]hen the Count once asked his wife, in a happy moment, why…when she seemed ready to accept any villain of a fellow that came along, she had fled from him as if from the Devil, she threw her arms around his neck and said:  he wouldn’t have looked like a devil to her then if he had not seemed like an angel to her at his first appearance.”

So now, we have four “balls” of literary interpretation with which to juggle the meaning of this story:  ambiguity, Freudian gestures including both hysterical ones and sexual ones, and the devil/angel study in contrasts.  Still, I wonder if that’s quite enough:  perhaps feminist politics do have a place herein, or at least a feminist questioning of the Marquise’s situation.  She is a woman rooted in family, at a time when family and social status considerations were paramount.  She has lived in a protected family grouping even though she has lost her own mate, and has accepted her father’s role as the arbiter of rules and regulations, and her mother’s role as persuader of the sometimes tyrannical sway he practices.  Her “circumstances,” in fact, are such that when she is “in other circumstances,” otherwise a happy time, she must count her own family not among her advocates but among her animosities.  And who presents himself?  A man whom she was greatly and favorably impressed by in his role of gentle conqueror, at a time when men in society were viewed as conquerors of women’s minds, hearts, and souls anyway, a blurring of lines which she must’ve found confusing.  She could of course have been killed, or gang-raped by the several original attackers from whom he took her, but he protected her from the worst ravages of war.  This is not to excuse him.  But there is in my mind a vague memory of seeing a movie version of this story in which, after he saves her and she is lying fainted-away on the straw or something, he sees her as a beautiful sleeping image of a woman, and then of course the camera cuts away to other scenes.  This transition from warfare to quiet solitude and from multiple images of distress and despair to her with her clothing in a bit of disarray and him standing over her looking admiringly down is the movie-maker’s explanation of the situation the Count finds himself in.  And if the woman accepts her apparent fate as his new wife, can we really scorn her choice, given the pressure of her society and her parents, and the unlikelihood of her ever otherwise finding respectability again in a society which prizes it highly?  If you feel the story is uncomfortable, I think that perhaps von Kleist, being the complex man he was in all of his writings, probably meant for it to be so, despite the glossing of “happy ending” with which the story ends:  after all, some people to be happy fight constantly as he himself did, with Goethe and others, to be accepted.  Others fight only so long, and then accept that their “circumstances” are bigger than themselves.  One can surmise that the Marquise of O– was just such a one, who found her own ways of coping with what must’ve been a shock, a misfortune, and finally a conditioned (or circumstantial) happiness.  What do you think?

 

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November 18, 2013 · 6:38 pm

“‘Tis a gift to be simple, ’tis a gift to be free….”–Shaker hymn

In honor of the fall and of the upcoming American Thanksgiving season, this post is dedicated to all gentle melancholiacs who at the same time feel affinities with the fall weather and the approaching change of season.  Those of you Canadian readers who have already celebrated the earlier (October) Canadian Thanksgiving can still perhaps relate to this post and its subject, due to the fact that parts of Canada at least are still having relatively warm weather for this time of year, which means that they are no colder than a lot of areas in the Northern U. S.

This post centers on one of my favorite poems of all time, which tantalized and captivated me from the first time I heard it, feeling as I did so much in sync with its notions and ideas.  The main thing I want to stress about it, in fact, is that its obvious complexity, which centers around Gerard Manley Hopkins’s innovative style of what has come to be called “sprung rhythm,” hides an absolute clarity of line and simplicity of emotional statement often overlooked when the poem is discussed.  The poem is “Spring and Fall:  to a Young Child,” and as it appears on at least one internet site already in its complete version (www.readbookonline.net), I can freely reproduce it here without copyright violation, though I intend to give also Hopkins’s original stresses on the words, which indicate his notion of sprung rhythm for the poem.  Here goes:

Spring and Fall:  To a Young Child

“Márgarét, are you gríeving/Over Goldengrove unleaving?/Leáves, like the things of man, you/With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?/Áh!  ás the heart grows older/It will come to such sights colder/By and by, nor spare a sigh/Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;/And yet you will weep and know why./Now no matter, child, the name:/Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same./Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed/What heart heard of, ghost guessed:/It ís the blight man was born for,/It is Margaret you mourn for.”

My basic idea about this poem is that everyone, regardless of academic background or love or disinclination to whatever degree for poetry, innately and instinctively can understand this poem, because it is so very simple.  One can make false difficulties by concentrating or focusing on the accent marks, but the melancholy emotion discussed in the poem and its source, and the dramatic lyric voice of the adult looking on at the child and in the poem speaking to her and beyond the situation as well are simple:  we grieve for our mortality, as we see evidence of it in the seasons of change, which are especially spring and fall (with here an emphasis on fall).  Summer and winter, by contrast, are seasons of stability, but we always feel our own changes more in spring and fall, as we see the evolutions around us in nature.

But for the benefit of those who may doubt or still have questions, let’s take it line by line.  Margaret, the young child, is addressed by an indulgent but realistically inclined adult, who asks if she is sad at the change from summer to fall.  Leaves, he tells her, are like the passing moments and possessions and years of man, and because her thoughts are “fresh,” and therefore not accustomed by many years’ accumulation to the rotation of seasons, she can still be made melancholy in a child’s simple, somewhat clueless, and inarticulate way.  He speaks perhaps more to himself than to Margaret when he tells her that over the course of time, her “heart” will “come to such sights colder by and by,” and here perhaps the only ambiguity–and a creative one at that–creeps in:  not only does the word “colder” indicate that her heart will be “colder,” or less moved to grieve over such a simple thing, but also the sights themselves will be “colder,” or more momentous in human terms.  He indicates that her grieving then will be over things she can assign motives to, no longer the ones like falling and dead leaves, which make her sad without her knowing really why.  All sorrows, he hints, are really from the same well of emotion, regardless of their surface causes.  She has not been able to “mouthe” the feelings, nor to analyze them, he further notes for her benefit, but her “heart” has heard its far away death knell, and her “ghost,” or spirit, has guessed what is to come in the distant future.  He tells her finally that “it” (meaning not only mortality, but grieving over it and what cannot be changed, and centering oneself in nature on the presumption that man is the center of the universe in a humanistically prejudiced sort of way) is “the blight man was born for,” and then ends the poem by saying that she mourns in reality for herself, and not simply for the fallen leaves.  One could wonder at this juncture if again he really is not talking to himself more than to the child, whose understanding of these issues he raises is likely to be limited, but we have the poem we have, and it is not a dramatic duologue, but a dramatic lyric with an unknown adult speaker, so we are in the dark as to Margaret’s reaction.

There are also those who find difficulties in Hopkins’s neologisms, his newly coined words, but it is quite simple if we take them just as they seem to mean:  it is the neat compression of feeling and thought which produces them, and they are so obvious as to be even commonsensical, were they not also highly poetic.  “Goldengrove” is a grove of colored leaves, either in spring or fall.  “Wanwood” and “leafmeal” refer to the falling and dying leaves and dead trees, or denuded trees, left bare by whatever means or conditions.  These compressions are especially clever because they convey the word pictures of what the two people are seeing or have recently seen, and call up associations for the reader in an especially innovative way.

The submerged subjects here–and every poem has submerged subjects, be they ever so simple–are projection and empathy.  We are led to believe that Margaret, the child in question, empathizes with nature and feels “low” because she sees the decline of the fall season around her (and “sorrow’s springs” is of course a pun on the season of “spring,” which indicates that as long as Margaret lives, there will be a renewal in the spring, which, however, will be sad in its own way because there is always decline to come).  But with a certain amount of cynicism, the speaking adult says that it is not so much empathy as projection, that is, projection of her own feelings about being human onto the weather and nature, which in poetry circles is known as “the pathetic fallacy.”

Finally, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “gift” of “being simple” and “free” in his self-expression is a gift to us his readers as well, because the shortness of the poem makes for easy memorization and recitation, two activities which used to be a large part of our literary culture, and which still should be.  People used to get together and recite poems as eagerly as they read stories to each other aloud, and told tales, and sang old ballads.  Therefore, this poem is my candidate for such endeavors, which should be started young, as young as one might guess the fictive “Margaret” is:  acquaintance with words poetic which one can recite under one’s breath to oneself sometimes in affection for the lines and enjoy again and again by this method is a gift which children never outgrow.  The funny thing is, in my childhood–which was some time ago–if one saw an adult person mouthing something to himself or herself aloud and no one else was close by, there was an even chance that it was a poem, not just a grocery list or a grumbling about something negative which had happened, or mental illness manifesting itself.  Now, it usually means that the person has a smart phone ear bud in and is conversing with someone else by that means!  Whatever your case, if you have an ear bud in and are talking to your best chum, why not take the opportunity to recite a short poem of your choice to them, even just a limerick:  words are so much a part of what it is to be human, that we should never forget how much of a gift they are from other people, and how wonderful it is to share the best and most glowing, witty, and beautiful of them with another person!

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November 17, 2013 · 4:45 pm

An old friend with a new face–“The Complete Prose Tales of Alexandr Sergeyevitch Pushkin”

Just yesterday, I was musing nostalgically over all the things I “learned” when I was an undergraduate, including the many authors I came to be acquainted with in my Comparative Literature courses, authors whose works covered many different areas of world literature.  True, the acquaintance didn’t run very deep and was instead broad; still, it was an instructive “placement” issue in relation to stories, novels, and tales all around the world and my place-to-be in relation to them.  One of my favorite authors was Pushkin, and the book of his we read from front to back was a Norton publication called The Complete Prose Tales of Alexandr Sergeyevitch Pushkin, translated by Gillon R. Aitken.  I checked and verified that it is indeed still in print, though of course the cover or “face” is different.  The book is available from Amazon.com (just in case any of you are looking to make Pushkin’s acquaintance in translation).  Accordingly, here is an excerpt from the Introduction, and a short précis of one of my favorite (though quizzical) Pushkin tales:

“Pushkin holds the supreme position in Russian literature.  It was his genius, in his prose as well as in his verse, which created, in the fullest sense, a national literature, and which laid the foundations upon which that national literature could subsequently be built.  Until his emergence, writing in Russia, with the exception of a handful of works, had been mainly imitative, pursuing pseudo-classical principles, and reflecting closely the trends of various Western European cultures–French, in particular.  The lyrical simplicity and the absolute precision of Pushkin’s poetry, the natural, straightforward grace of his prose perfectly expressed the Russian mood; and, in that expression, Pushkin gave to Russia for the first time in her history a literature whose inspiration came from herself, and which succeeded in setting the tone for successive generations of Russian writers.  But, of course, his achievements were more than national:  his universality of vision, his ablity [sic] to transmute what he saw and what he understood into language of the utmost purity and point have created for him a permanent place in the literature of the world.”

To sketch a brief biography of Pushkin, he was born in 1799, to a boyar-descended father and a mother whose descent was from an Abyssinian prince, and whose ancestry is reflected in one of Pushkin’s unfinished novels entitled The Moor of Peter the Great.  Pushkin’s father and uncle were both inclined to literary pursuits, but this had a less direct influence on him than the tales of Russian folklore told by his nurse, Anna Rodionovna.  His reading and writing both started early, and were at first in French.  When he was twelve, Pushkin was sent away to school, where he started to compose poetry for perhaps the first time.  By 1814, he was already in print, and by the time he left school in 1817, he was already seen as a new young literary spirit.  He released his first important long poem, Ruslan and Ludmilla, in 1820, which “established his reputation beyond question.”  Pushkin’s life wasn’t without its travails and hardships–he was exiled to a minor officialship in Southern Russia by Tsar Alexander I because of his role as a liberal.  Still, he was able to make good use of this time as a literary force, and blossomed in his literary work.  It was during this time that he first read Byron, who made a strong impression on him.  It was between 1820 and 1826 that he wrote a number of long poems, lyrics, ballads, plays, and a novel.  Two of the things he wrote, a play called Boris Godunov and “the masterpiece for which he is best known,” Eugene Onegin, a novel in verse, have both since been made into powerful and resonant operas of which there are Russian film versions available.  In 1829, Pushkin got engaged to Natalya Goncharova, and this had a gradual influence on the tenor of his work:  before, he had been a passionate liberal spirit; after his marriage in 1831, he became more of a serious conformist, and incidentally also more of a prose writer.  “In 1836, Pushkin received an anonymous letter suggesting that his wife was having a love affair with a Baron d’Anthès.  He was persuaded to withdraw his challenge to [the baron] to a pistol duel.  Fresh insinuations made a duel inevitable, however.  It took place on January 27th, 1837…[and the baron was only a bit injured].”  Pushkin, however, received his death shot, and died at the relatively young age of thirty-seven.  The odd and interesting thing is that the story I am going to comment upon today, “The Shot,” a story of a strange duel, rather non-duel or quasi-duel, was written in the years before Pushkin himself ever had a reason to fight, and was published in 1831.

At the beginning of the story “The Shot,” we become acquainted with the perspective of a young army officer stationed in a small town, whose social opportunities are small and restricted largely to his fellow soldiers and a mysterious former soldier named Silvio, who also lives in the small town.  Much of the story is devoted to establishing Silvio’s eccentricities and quirks, such as his seeming to avoid any serious cause for quarrel with anyone.  The young officer from whose perspective the story is narrated has what would appear to be a typical young fire-eater’s view of things, which is that however small the slight to one’s honor, it must be avenged.  He relates how, after a possibly drunken lieutenant insults Silvio over a game of cards, Silvio, instead of challenging him to a duel as would be his right, “contented himself with a very slight apology and made peace with the lieutenant.”

This lukewarm attention to honor affects the narrator’s respect for Silvio, the older man who up until now has obviously been his hero.  It also for a while lessens his following among the other young men, although this doesn’t last.  But for the narrator, it is a serious matter.  He becomes cold toward Silvio, which fact the older man notes, and after a few attempts to befriend him again, gives up what had been their private talks together.  This continues until one day a message arrives for Silvio, and he calls all the young men together to announce that he must depart, and wants them all to attend him for one final dinner.  After the party is over, he asks the young narrator to remain behind; apparently, he has a tale to tell, and it is a strange and provocative one.

It seems that when Silvio himself was a young soldier, he was brilliant and rakish and all hellfire and was followed and admired eagerly by all others in his unit until suddenly a young man still more brilliant in his prospects and qualities entered the regiment.  The two could have been friends, and indeed the new recruit tried to make friends with Silvio, but Silvio resisted, eaten up with envy of the other’s qualities.  Matters accelerated until Silvio insulted the opponent, who by the traditions of the time challenged him to a duel.  When they fought, the opponent drew the winning lot for first shot, and placed a shot squarely through Silvio’s cap.  Silvio, however, determined to have a thorough revenge, said that he would reserve his shot until another time, and refused to draw on the young aristocrat.  As Silvio tells the young officer in the story’s present tense scenario, he has to go now because the time has come when he can properly get even with his enemy:  as he says, “We will see whether he regards death with the same indifference on the eve of his wedding….”

There is a passage of some time, and the young officer finds himself in another small town again.  It is a tiny and boring village, and has nothing to recommend itself in the way of social activity.  For a while, the soldier’s housekeeper tells him tales, for a while he reads all the books he can lay his hands on, and he is quite frustrated and is afraid of becoming an alcoholic because there is so little else to do other than to drink.  Then, however, he hears that a short distance away from him, there is a rich estate of a Count and Countess, and that they are coming to visit it in the summer.  He determines to make their acquaintance as a humble visitor, and in fact does so.  The conversation passes to how good each is with a pistol because of a couple of shots that the young visitor sees and asks about which have penetrated a landscape of Switzerland hanging on the wall.  As they compare notes on the best marksmen they have known, it turns out that Silvio, the hero of the young officer in the recent past, is known to the Count.  In fact, the Count is the same young aristocrat whom Silvio reserved his duel shot against years before.

Now it is the Count’s turn to tell a tale.  He relates how Silvio, soon after the Count’s marriage, turned up during the honeymoon to take his long-delayed revenge.  Silvio, however, had distaste for the thought of firing on an unarmed man, and so invited the Count to fire first, and when they drew lots, this is how it in fact turned out.  The Count hit a landscape picture on the wall.  Silvio took aim, but just at that point, the Countess rushed in, shrieking and throwing herself on the Count.  He told her they were joking to calm her, but Silvio responded, “‘He is always joking, Countess….[H]e once struck me in the face for a joke, he shot through my cap for a joke, and just now he missed his aim for a joke; now it’s my turn to feel in the mood for a joke….'”  He takes aim again, and the Count in frustration challenges him to fire and to quit making fun “of an unfortunate woman.”  Silvio, however, says that he has had his revenge in seeing their “alarm” and “confusion,” and says further:  “I forced you to shoot at me, and that is enough.  You will remember me.  I commit you to your conscience.”  On his way out, hardly even looking, he puts a second shot through the landscape picture.  The original narrator, the young officer who has just heard the Count’s story, understands that now he has finally heard the last of Silvio, and the tail-end of his story.  The story ends thus:  “I never met its hero again.  It is said that Silvio commanded a detachment of Hetairists at the time of the revolt of Alexander Ypsilanti, and was killed at the battle of Skulyani.”

A few points about this story:  first of all, the “shot” is in fact fired, because not only is Silvio’s revenge complete, but the landscape, a symbol of peace, tranquility, wealth, and privilege, is what he breaks into by deloping and firing at it.  Also, the “shot” is fired because he has attained his revenge at the end.  Another note on the story:  it is a complex and satisfying story to read, but except for Pushkin’s clarity and smoothness of relation could be a bit confusing because of the complicated story-within-a-story structure which occurs first when the young narrator tells of Silvio, relates the first part of the interior story from Silvio’s point of view, goes back to telling of himself and his own presence in a second small village, and then ends by giving the rest of the interior story (this time from the Count’s point of view) and reveals at the very last what happened to Silvio.  Making one final complication, the tale “The Shot,” along with four other tales, is published under the overall title “The Tales of the late Ivan Petrovitch Belkin,” an alter ego for Pushkin, and he even inserts an Editor’s preface to them which contains a short “biography” of Belkin supposedly written by a neighbor.  The lives of the real author, Pushkin, and the alter ego, Belkin, are mainly alike only in one respect:  both of them have heard many tales from a housekeeper.  Thus, Pushkin was giving credit of a sort to one of his own sources.

This tale is one of the shorter stories in the volume, but even so it packs quite a punch literarily speaking; it is my hope that if you have not yet had the chance to make the acquaintance of this particular Russian literary master, that you will be intrigued enough to take the opportunity to read him.  To make a bad pun with a Pushkin title, his works don’t “Boris” and are certainly “Godunov”!

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October 17, 2013 · 9:34 pm

Confronting the re-publishing spectre in order to produce a Halloween shiver (my “old school” dilemma)

Hello, readers!  For the last year now, gradually as time has come on, I’ve had it in mind to re-publish for you a post I wrote last October 9 (2012), a post which lives on famously for me because it has been so popular with you.  Not only has it been the most popular post of the fall season, but it has been the most popular post of all on my site ever since it was published, even during spring lambing season and the summer heat which followed!  So, thinking along the lines of newspapers which occasionally re-publish extremely popular articles with only a new headline or blurb to explain why, I thought I’d share it with you again this Halloween season, preparatory to a few other tales I also plan to feature, which are new to my site, though not to literary history.

Not being a computer whiz, I contacted WordPress.com support pages and forums, only to find, however, that it was not possible simply to re-publish the page with a single comment or perhaps a new title, and easily chill your blood.  No, and it is also frowned upon to quote oneself (that attitude has a rather more understandable bias, since no one likes a windbag).  After I corresponded several times with the folks at the forum, however, I did run across the suggestion–closest to what I wanted to do–to write a “new” post, and provide a link with the former post.  This is what I am going to try to do now, providing again for you (I hope) a post on one of my favorite A. S. Byatt tales of all time, certainly, and demonstrably your favorite post of mine, though to be perfectly honest, the major part of the credit is hers, and not mine.  So here goes:  A. S. Byatt’s tale “The Thing in the Forest,” and my own more modest comments on the same.  I hope you see what I mean about what real fear is!

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October 10, 2013 · 9:28 pm

The way a writer “surfaces” into a seduction–a tale of the end of youth by V. S. Pritchett

In my last post, I wrote on a story by Turgenev called “First Love,” in which an adolescent has his heart broken for the first time when he realizes that his own first serious crush is his father’s dalliance, if not his father’s actual “light-o’-love.”  And I commented that this story was one which was being told (read, rather, since its teller insisted on making it a literary artifact for his audience) to an story’s internal audience of men, likely over port and cigars after dinner.

Another popular topic which surfaces now and again is the “first seduction” tale, and though I would like to be able to report that I had read an equal number of wise and worldly women tell such tales along with the number of tales I’ve read over the years in which men tell each other about youth’s first moments of sexual awakening, it just ain’t so.  Maybe women need to start writing them.  In any case, I’ve just found another example of the genre with an interesting twist, written by V. S. Pritchett, and published in his volume Selected Stories.  It’s perhaps a bit dated, but none of Pritchett’s humor is lost as he traces the young man’s initial unknowingness, then clumsiness with his first opportunity, then final triumph over his partner’s assumption of superior knowingness.

The story is called “The Diver,” and I should tell my own audience right now that the term “diver” is used as a double entendre for the young man’s male organ by the experienced woman who takes it upon herself to educate him sexually.  But this does not happen before the whole setting is established by a series of minor incidents and misfortunes which cause her to take pity on him and take him as her lover.  Here’s how it goes:  first of all, the young virgin male is an Englishman in Paris, where his fresh-cheeked English innocence is made fun of by all the other young men he works with, who all have (or say they have) mistresses, while he not only has none, but brags that he has none.  The adult narrator of this story says he was a “fool” to tell the others this, but the youth at the time doesn’t at first realize how much teasing it will lead to.

Even his superior at the leather warehouse where he works, a M. Claudel, has a woman who stops by to see him, a Mme. Chamson, who likes to tell dirty jokes to all the office boys in a group, but who takes exception to the young man at the center of the tale (an aspiring writer) if he tries to laugh along with the rest of the group.  He doesn’t really “fancy” her, and thinks she looks like some “predatory bird,” with her badly dyed hair and extravagantly arched eyebrows, some Parisian harridan of the streets.  Despite the fact that she is married to an attendant at the Louvre, she seems to have some understanding with Claudel.  But the young man’s luck is due to change.  One day, when a barge is unusually sent with the consignment of skins to the leather warehouse, it is accidentally rammed and sunk by a Dutch boat right in the harbor, and the young writer is asked to accompany Claudel to the harbor to watch and see how many of the skins can be salvaged by a diver, who is the hero of the day to the admiring youth.  In a strange accident, the youth gets knocked into the water, and comes up with a chill which even several glasses of rum at the local bar cannot dispel.

At this point, Mme. Chamson comes along and convinces him to come along with her to her shop, where she first coaxes him, then intimidates him out of some of his clothes to get warm and dry, then finally (as he proves resistant to removing his pants) starts to undress him herself.  This often-used device of literary seductions of having someone be too wet to stay in their own clothes and having to change them in the surroundings which include an attractive or at least available member of the opposite sex, however, does not follow its well-worn pattern in Pritchett’s tale, for Pritchett quotes frank chapter and verse for what elsewhere is left undeclared or neglected or unarticulated.  In his tale, the young man becomes inconvenienced in the extreme by his reaction to the woman trying to undress him.  “She stood back, blank-faced and peremptory in her stare.  It was the blankness of her face, her indifference to me, her ordinary womanliness, the touch of her practical fingers that left me without defence.  She was not the ribald, coquettish, dangerous woman who came wagging her hips to our office, not one of my Paris fantasies of sex and danger.  She was simply a woman.  The realization of this was disastrous to me.  An unbelievable change was throbbing in my body.  It was uncontrollable.  My eyes angrily, helplessly, asked her to go away.  She stood there implacably.  I half-turned, bending to conceal my enormity as I lowered my trousers, but as I lowered them inch by inch so the throbbing manifestation increased.  I got my foot out of one leg but my shoe caught in the other.  On one leg I tried to dance my other trouser leg off.  The towel slipped and I glanced at her in red-faced angry appeal.  My trouble was only too clear.  I was stiff with terror.  I was almost in tears.”

Mme. Chamson becomes angry with him at first, and says she is “not one of your tarts,” and asks “What would your parents say?  If my husband were here!”  Then, when he starts to sneeze with the cold he is per her previous supposition catching, she takes a look at his “inconvenience” and is caustic:  “‘In any case…’ as she nodded at my now concealing towel–‘that is nothing to boast about.'”  She finds him partial clothes then leaves the room and doesn’t come back.  After a bit, she calls to him in a harsh tone of voice to come and get his things, and when he goes into the back room, she is lying on a bed without “a stitch of clothing” on!  “The sight of her transfixed me.  It did not stir me.  I simply stood there gaping.  My heart seemed to have stopped.  I wanted to rush from the room, but I could not.  She was so very near.  My horror must have been on my face but she seemed not to notice that, she simply stared at me.  There was a small movement of her lips and I dreaded that she was going to laugh; but she did not; slowly she closed her lips and said at last between her teeth in a voice low and mocking, ‘Is this the first time you have seen a woman?'”  The narrator has already told us in an earlier paragraph that it is the first time he has seen a naked woman, but at this point the young man obviously becomes a bit irritable with the woman having so much control of the scene, and he denies it and lets his writer’s imagination take over:  he thinks idly of the earlier talk of the morgue in the bar and tells her that he previously saw a dead woman in London.

This properly frightens Mme. Chamson, and she pulls the coverlet up across herself and the writer continues to spin out details from his imaginary view of a dead woman in London, whom he says was (like Mme. Chamson herself) a shopkeeper.  He even invents a “laundry man” killer who was “carrying on” with the woman, and when she says, “‘But how did you see her like this?'” he keeps on going and says that his mother had been very insistent about his paying the bill and that he had been up to the woman’s apartment before because they knew her.  She asks him if the tale is true, and how old he was, and we are told “I hadn’t thought of that but I quickly decided.  ‘Twelve,’ I said.”  He continues the tale by explaining that they called the police and so on and so forth, but all this only causes Mme. Chamson to feel sympathy for him, and pulls him to her, and when the obvious happens, she says, “‘The diver’s come up again.  Forget.  Forget.'”  In their passion, she even says “‘Kill me.  Kill me,'” though now of course she’s thinking of “la morte douce” and not actual death.

As he leaves, she advises him about his suits and his job, and by implication approves of his plan to be a writer.  She also introduces him to her husband, who has been fishing after his busy day but has just come home.  And she asks him, finally, to return the suit she has lent him the next day, raising the suspicion in at least this reader’s mind that she means to continue the liaison.  The narrator recounts “Everything was changed for me after this.  At the office I was a hero.”  Ostensibly, this is because Mme. Chamson has told the others that he saw a murder, but the last paragraph shows that at least one of the people he works with may have a clue as to the more complete state of affairs:  “‘You know what she said just now,’ said Claudel to me, looking very shrewd:  She said “I am afraid of that young Englishman.  Have you seen his hands?”‘”

It is of course not the young Englishman’s hands, or even any other bodily manifestation, which is the real “hero” of the story, but his imagination, which in the vibrant air of Paris has had many a tale start to develop only to die out when he tried to write them in English.  Now, it is clear, however, he has rhetorically triumphed over someone more experienced by telling a tale which, whether true or not, was just the kind of thing she was waiting to hear.  This shows that he judged his audience correctly, a main concern for a writer whether of a speech or a tale or a novel.  And if he only sees it, of course, it may equally be partly the imaginations of the other young men which have guided their “tales” of seduction in front of him, so that he is now freed from the barrier of silence which previously held him back.  Not that he would tell them about Mme. Chamson; one feels he will not.  Nevertheless, he is now a person whom people can talk about rather than just a cipher with no particular meaning, and he can embroider all he likes in his stories, which as we have seen by his on the spur of the moment improvisation are at least convincing.

It is likewise V. S. Pritchett’s sure touch with his own story, the humor of the embarrassing moments in the young man’s life which delights and charms us, as he proves without doubt that a writer can portray another writer in contact with what could be a seamier side of life and yet “dive” to “surface” with something well worth preserving, a fine comic masterpiece.

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October 3, 2013 · 2:24 pm

Cigars, port, and “First Love”–Perspective gained on youth

It has always seemed to be a staple of the traditional old-fashioned story (and some very good stories at that) that an assorted group of people have much to say to each other after dinner (usually a small group of men over their port and cigars, but sometimes in other tales a small group including women).  They sit together and suddenly a topic for stories comes up–and they all acquiesce in taking their turns at telling something that once happened to them, something they saw which seemed remarkable, something they’ve made up for the occasion, or something on a certain topic.  It happens so often that it seems likely people used to do this regularly, not just in fiction, but in real life, in the days before television.  Many writers have used this frame story convention to both good and poignant effect, among them a trio of writers  who were associated with each other during the mid- to late 1800s, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Ivan Turgenev.  Today, my subject is a short, seemingly slight and negligible tale by Turgenev called “First Love,” which is as much a philosophical examination of the phenomenon of adolescent crushes in all their neophyte grandeur as it is an actual tale of a particular young man and his first love.

As Vladimir Petrovich–a middle-aged bachelor–tells it, he was but sixteen when his parents and he lived in the country in a villa containing a manor house with three wings, the other two of which were to be used by other people.  Rather, on the first night when the storytellers gather, Petrovich refuses to tell his story, but offers to write it out and bring it back in two weeks’ time:  this seemingly odd device underlines the whole question of perspective, and how time and distance from the topic leave their mark.  After orienting the reader to his setting, Petrovich tells how a shabby genteel princess, Princess Zasyekin, and her daughter, Zinaida Alexandrovna, come to live in the most run-down of the three house wings, and what the effect upon Valdimir’s youth and young adulthood was.

Zinaida and the young man are both described, the young man as the central character being described in his sometimes wild and heady moments of adolescent exultation, Zinaida in scenes with others, as she affects them by her quirks.  Petrovich describes his first night alone in his room after Zinaida has entertained him along with a group of other, slightly older men in her mother’s house (the reader gradually becomes aware that this is something unusual, a young girl entertaining a group of men alone, with only a casual sort of supervision from the next room by her negligent and debt-ridden mother, but the perspective of the story is angled so that the young man is shown accepting this as more or less normal for a young Princess).  Petrovich describes his sleepless night:  “I seated myself on a chair and sat there for a long time, as though enchanted.  That which I felt was so new and so sweet…I sat there, hardly looking around me and without moving, breathing slowly, and only laughing silently now, as I recalled, now inwardly turning cold at the thought that I was in love, that here it was, that love.  Zinaida’s face floated softly before me in the darkness–floated, but did not float away; her lips still smiled as mysteriously as ever, her eyes gazed somewhat askance at me, interrogatively, thoughtfully and tenderly…as at the moment when I had parted from her.  At last I rose on tiptoe, stepped to my bed and cautiously, without undressing, laid my head on the pillow, as though endeavoring by the sharp movement to frighten off that wherewith I was filled to overflowing….I lay down, but did not even close an eye.  I speedily perceived that certain faint reflections kept constantly falling into my room….I raised myself and looked out of the window.  Its frame was distinctly defined from the mysteriously and confusedly whitened panes.  ”Tis the thunderstorm,’–I thought,–and so, in fact, there was a thunderstorm; but it had passed very far away, so that even the claps of thunder were not audible; only in the sky long, indistinct, branching flashes of lightning, as it were, were uninterruptedly flashing up.  They were not flashing up so much as they were quivering and twitching, like the wing of a dying bird.  I rose, went to the window, and stood there until morning….The lightning-flashes never ceased for a moment; it was what is called a pitch-black night….I felt great fatigue and tranquility…but Zinaida’s image continued to hover triumphantly over my soul.  Only it, that image, seemed calm; like a flying swan from the marshy sedges, it separated itself from the other ignoble figures which surrounded it, and as I fell asleep, I bowed down before it for the last time in farewell and confiding adoration….Oh, gentle emotions, soft sounds, kindness and calming of the deeply-moved soul, melting joy of the first feelings of love,–where are ye, where are ye?”  This is the very stuff of adolescent emotion at first love, which both men and women can surely relate to.  Even the very elements of the heavens contribute to speak to the young man of love, as he stands by his bedroom window, taking in the stormy night.

As the young man is also aware of and relates a few pages later, Zinaida is a thoughtlessly cruel young girl at times.  “…I was not the only one who was in love with her; all the men who were in the habit of visiting her house were crazy over her, and she kept them all in a leash at her feet.  It amused her to arouse in them now hopes, now fears, to twist them about at her caprice–(she called it ‘knocking people against one another’),–and they never thought of resisting, and willingly submitted to her.  In all her vivacious and beautiful being there was a certain peculiarly bewitching mixture of guilefulness and heedlessness, of articifiality and simplicity, of tranquility and playfulness; over everything she did or said, over her every movement, hovered a light, delicate charm, and an original sparkling force made itself felt in everything.  And her face was incessantly changing and sparkling also; it expressed almost simultaneous derision, pensiveness, and passion.  The most varied emotions, light, fleeting as the shadows of the clouds on a sunny, windy day, kept flitting over her eyes and lips.”  The young man, Vladimir, being only sixteen to Zinaida’s twenty-one, takes her at her word when she tells him that he is a child compared to her:  but this very complex picture of her which the mature man reads out to his friends years later proves something that the character when younger did not have the perspicuity to see about the girl:  she too shows immature character traits, and childish whims rule her quite often.

This state of things goes on for some time, but gradually begin to change.  Zinaida hints to her admirers that she is in love.  She doesn’t say with whom, but one and all they are on tenterhooks.  Then, she excuses herself from receiving them for several days, claiming to be ill.  When Vladimir next sees her, she is different, somehow, calmer, older perhaps.  He is simultaneously becoming aware of gradual change in his parents also, in his mother, who mainly nags at him about visiting the Princess’s house too often, and who shows him no real affection, and in his father, who according to him has always been capricious in his affections for the boy, occasionally cosseting him but more often rejecting his overtures.  But the most startling change comes about as the boy slowly notices that his father is going about late at night in a cape in the garden, and then notices one day, finally, that his father is riding horses with Zinaida.  As it turns out, to his great disillusionment and surprise at them both, it is his father with whom Zinaida is in love, and as becomes apparent also in the story, the older Princess her mother benefits from their trysts financially, though there is no absolute indication as to exactly how far the relationship has gone.  One has one’s suspicions, however, just as Vladimir does.

The great searing of Vladimir’s soul happens one day when he happens to see his father strike Zinaida’s arm with a whip, and Zinaida accept this and kiss the mark.  And Vladimir thinks to himself that “The last month had aged me greatly, and my love, with all its agitations and sufferings, seemed to me like something very petty and childish and wretched in comparison with that other unknown something at which I could hardly even guess, and which frightened me like a strange, beautiful but menacing face that one strives, in vain, to get a good look at in the semi-darkness….”  He enters university, and soon after his father dies of a stroke, leaving behind these words for him:  “‘My son…fear the love of women, fear that happiness, that poison…’.”  Of course, it’s his father’s own nature which has created his own hell, and Vladimir dimly perceives this, but four years later, when Zinaida is married to a wealthy young man and dies in childbirth, Vladimir cannot forgive himself for seeming to shun her company and not visiting her before she died.

Vladimir’s final statement on young love and youth is rather a statement of the mature man, and by the flowing literary quality of it, one can assign a inter-fictional reason as to why the mature man Vladimir wanted to ponder and write out his statement to his two dining friends:  this statement has all the roundness and literary character of poetry and life philosophy:  “O youth, youth!  Thou carest for nothing:  thou possessest, as it were, all the treasures of the universe; even sorrow comforts thee, even melancholy becomes thee; thou art self-confident and audacious; thou sayest:  ‘I alone live–behold!’–But the days speed on and vanish without a trace and without reckoning, and everything vanishes in thee, like wax in the sun, like snow….And perchance the whole secret of thy charm consists not in the power to do everything, but in the possibility of thinking that thou wilt do everything–consists precisely in the fact that thou scatterest to the winds thy powers which thou hast not understood how to employ in any other way,–in the fact that each one of us seriously regards himself as a prodigal, seriously assumes he has a right to say:  ‘Oh, what could I not have done, had I not wasted my time!'”  This is surely not only one of the most moving tributes to the vicissitudes of youth and young emotions and endeavors, but also one of the most accurate:  what young person, male or female, has not felt their own powers swelling and becoming great in them, only perhaps some years later to regret not having done all that they could to fulfill their early promise?

At the end of the story, the character relates how some time later he attended the deathbed of an anonymous old woman who had never had anything grand or costly in her life, and he ended with a deep desire to pray for both himself and his father.  And the question here is, why does he want to pray for them, rather than for the women in his life who have been mistreated or wronged, or who have suffered, like Zinaida, or Vladimir’s mother, or the old woman, or even the money-squandering old Princess, Zinaida’s mother?  Knowing Turgenev and his concern for unfortunates and humanity, the answer is probably that the men have been the source of some of the wrong done to the others, and so are “greater sinners” and need prayers more–if, in fact, one can do any such arithmetic with such a poetic ending.  But the story thus ends on a note of psychological depth and reality also, because often when people are too deeply moved by one situation to be able to let their feelings about it loose for relief, some quite unconnected tragedy or misfortune will free their tears and allow them to grieve:  and Turgenev was nothing if not a great master of psychology in his characters.

Though this is a story of a particular love relationship and its disappointments, the most evocative moments in the piece are built around what all young loves have in common, and thus the specific details are made extra convincing because they are supported by what we nearly all have known or experienced at one time or another in our youths.  And as I have I believe shown, Turgenev’s control of perspective, with the older man looking back and insisting on making a literary artifact of his tale instead of just telling it to his friends, then gradually developing the youth’s awareness of what is going on around him in a more adult, more cynical world, creates a masterpiece of world literature.  I hope everyone will have a chance to experience it for themselves, and perhaps to compare it with their own early experiences of love and youthful emotions.

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