Category Archives: Articles/reviews

February 17, 2013 · 5:01 pm

A Poem and a Meditation on Being an Individual, and On What “Read[s] Human and Exact.”

In searching for poems to write about this morning (and I was definitely in the mood to write about good poetry, having recently finished a longish bout with prose in having published a fifth novel), I was reading through my own favorite poems in a treasured Norton anthology and came across a poem by Robert Graves which has always struck me as particularly talented.  Luckily, since it has been in at least one published version since 1938 and has already been published in full on the Internet at least once, I can share the whole poem with you here without transgressing copyright laws.  Here is the poem:

The Devil’s Advice to Story-Tellers

“Lest men suspect your tale to be untrue,/Keep probability–some say–in view,/But my advice to story-tellers is:/Weigh out no gross of probabilities,/Nor yet make diligent transcriptions of/Known instances of virtue, crime or love./To forge a picture that will pass for true,/Do conscientiously what liars do–/Born liars, not the lesser sort that raid/The mouths of others for their stock-in-trade:/Assemble, first, all casual bits and scraps/That may shake down into a world perhaps;/People this world, by chance created so,/With random persons whom you do not know–/The teashop sort, or travellers in a train/Seen once, guessed idly at, not seen again;/Let the erratic course they steer surprise/Their own and your own and your readers’ eyes;/Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair)/Motive and end and moral in the air;/Nice contradiction between fact and fact/Will make the whole read human and exact.”

This is excellent compositional advice for prose, and I think of it every time I remember my maternal grandmother, who used the expression “telling a story” to mean “lying.”  She would look at me gravely during a particular moment of my stellar mendacity and say, “Now honey, are you sure you aren’t telling a story?”  It would always make me grin ruefully and would thus give the game away, but the dialectal expression itself was so apt and funny that I couldn’t help myself.  There were even one or two occasions when I was telling the truth and she almost didn’t believe me because of my typical reaction when she made her query.

So, now, what does this poem have to do with “being an individual”?  Just this:  I have recently discovered, thanks to a friendly and frequent commenter writing in, that there are at least three other Victoria Bennetts with writing aspirations, some in poetry and some in prose, and my feeling is that the mild adventure I’ve gone through in coping with this does indeed “read human and exact” even better than if I’d come up with a glorious lie about it.  I am probably the oldest of the Victoria Bennetts currently writing (I was 55 on my last birthday), arguably at least one of the best or at least most conventionally educated, and have had experience writing both poetry and prose.  Most of what I’ve written or at least what has been published is available on this site, though there is more to come if I live long enough.  Having said that, it’s now time for my big adventure:

Today, in trying to revise my “About the Author” page to contain my middle name (my full name is Victoria Leigh Bennett), I inadvertently eliminated the whole page instead of just the PDF of information, and so lost all of the kind and wonderful comments that were also stored on the page, along with the notices of awards people have from time to time nominated me for and at least one movie which a fellow blogger, JM at thelivingnotebook, was kind enough to send me for this weekend.  The movie is one I had copied down the link for, and I plan to watch it this weekend, the only time the movie is available, so at least that wasn’t totally lost, but I would have liked to have retained the other material as well.  But people do write in to the “About the Author” column from time to time, so I hope and trust that I will hear from people again there before all is said and done.

No, the real adventure was contained in finding out just how many other Victoria Bennetts there are around.  It is a particularly euphonious and stately name–don’t worry, I’m not complimenting myself–after all, I didn’t name myself–very Latinate, and though I respond to various nicknames, I have learned also to answer to my full name, which for some reason as one ages gets used more and more.  Now, I was used to the idea that there were Victoria Bennetts in home decorating, Victoria Bennetts who ran office companies, and various assorted other and sundry Victoria Bennetts who either bore the name from birth or had married into it as regards the last name.  But what I was really shocked to find was that there were several other WRITING Victoria Bennetts around.  On the advice of my commenter who informed me of one of these in particular, I found that just on one website there was a Victoria Alexander Bennett, a Victoria Louise Bennett, and yet another Victoria Bennett who, like me, had chosen not to use a middle name.

This was sobering indeed.  That there were so many of us (and doubtless more to come!) was very discouraging.  But then I thought:  if it doesn’t discourage me that there are so many people writing in general every year, and that I am in competition with all of them, then why should it bother me that there are several other Victoria Bennetts, who moreover don’t even all write the same sorts of things, to judge by my research?  And I also thought that after all, writers are very determined and tenacious when it comes to tracking down authors whom they want to read.  As long as no writers are copying the ideas of other writers explicitly and misusing them, there’s plenty of room for us all, surely.

And as to Robert Graves and his delightful, whimsical, mischievous, and diabolical little poem?  I’ve got news for him and his devil–though they may know how to write fiction so as to “make the whole read human and exact,” when it comes to reality and finding one’s own individual space, it’s like the man said:  you can’t make this stuff up!

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February 14, 2013 · 11:04 pm

Accepting the Versatile Blogger Award and passing it along to others….

Hello, readers!  Today I have decided to accept the Versatile Blogger Award, not only because it is, as it always is, an honor to be nominated, but also because today I am not engaged in another time-consuming project which would prevent me from accepting.  Also, I am quite adamant that I want to pass the award along to some other folks, some of whom I have nominated for other awards before, others of whom have not been previously nominated.  As you are probably aware, the correct procedure is to thank the person who nominated you, tell at least 5 things about yourself, nominate at least five others to receive the award, and let them know that they have been nominated, so that they can pass the award along should they also choose to accept.  So, here goes:

I would like to thank JM at thelivingnotebook for nominating me, and for saying such kind and wonderfully encouraging things about my work.  He is a male graduate student at a large public university in the States, who chooses to be anonymous in a suitably mysterious way, knowing full well that one day he will burst full blown like Athena from the mind of Zeus upon the public in an acclaimed work of fiction or non-fiction and will then have to reveal his true identity (or this is my take on it, anyway!).  He teaches undergraduates writing and composition, and is in his 30’s, born on Cape Cod but something of a rover, to judge by some of his posts written from other locations.  He considers his blog to be “a framework for exploration and discovery,” and writes many valuable, informative, and tutelary posts on various aspects of writing, as well as composing music and putting links to that on his blog as well.

Now, as to telling the five things about myself, and hoping not to repeat myself from the other award I accepted, here are the five facts.  While they may not be original enough to illuminate the writing process much, perhaps they will at least indicate my potential membership in the club of writers, with all of its pitfalls and foibles:

I have written books and poems from the time I was in first grade, often using the prose or poetry involved to trade friendly slurs with friends who also wrote (hence my interest in satire) or to praise and acclaim them (hence the happy, comic moments in my comedy and satire which highlight positive personal characteristics).

My first poem was published in a teacher’s magazine when I was in the sixth grade.

Also when I was in the sixth grade, I wrote a hysterically inaccurate historical play based on Ivanhoe (I give this work to a character in one of my novels).  In my play, the Normans lived in England and the Saxons invaded them (the exact opposite of what actually happened).  This is probably one of the reasons I have never written historical novels!

One of my scariest literary memories is one of having Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” read to me in bed at night by a friend at whose house I was staying for a sleepover.  And I love cats, but man! was that one scary!  But the main character got just what he deserved for harming the cat in the first place.

I have three more novels to complete before my projected series of eight novels will be complete (these novels, however, can be read separately, and have no plot connections to each other).

Now it’s time to nominate at least five other people to share my award:

First, I would like to nominate Emma McCoy, the author of a frightening and vital suspense novel “Saving Angels” and of a work-in-progress entitled “Unethical” which I am all agog to read when she finishes with it. Emma has been completing full character sketches for her characters in her WIP, and has published one or two or them on her site just to whet our appetites.  She has had some personal challenges to overcome this year, in particular an experience with grief and a brand new job, but blogs often to keep her readers informed as to what’s happening with her and her site.  She is also seeking other avenues of publication for “Saving Angels” and took place in 2012’s NaNoWriMo.  Her facebook address and her e-mail address are also published on her site.

Next, I would like to nominate Caroline at Beauty Is A Sleeping Cat (I couldn’t agree more!).  Caroline is an enthusiastic reader of fiction and non-fiction, who hails originally from Paris, and whose original languages are German and French.  She is the daughter of a multinational family and has all the strength of this variety behind her in her multi-lingual blogsite, on which she canvases and discusses literatures of many countries, usually doing her reading in some language other than English, all the while making her analyses and her knowledge of translations available to English speakers as well.  Caroline has multiple M.A.s, in cultural anthropology and French literature and linguistics.  In her latest post, she has branched out into Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry, doing a service to the literary communities around her.

Thirdly, I would like to nominate djkeyserv140, the prolific and talented writer from Australia who, while rigorously engaged in seeking full-time employment of an extra-literary variety, is also keeping a number of us happily engaged with his science fiction, historical, fantastic, and etc. worlds fictively.  While working on a major WIP, David has also written a very exciting story about two Japanese swordsmen named Mune and Mura, and is currently writing a story about a mining colony on Venus, a very tantalizing tale which promises some odd and curious developments to come.  Other short stories are also listed on his site.  To a vigorous sense of what readers might find gripping in action, David joins a really strong capacity for narration and descriptive word-pictures.  Together, the two make for some excellent reading.

My fourth nomination goes to Katherine Gregor, a writer originally situated in London who has recently decided to make a sudden and dashing move to another city, from which she plans to continue her intriguing and poetically gifted prose writings involving traditions from various parts of the United Kingdom and Europe.  Katherine has many opinions to share, all of them happily quite entertaining and challenging to various elements of the bland status quo; we can all do with a large dose of what she has to say, just to keep us from becoming too solemn or out-of-balance.  “Scribe Doll” is how she bills herself, and that is what she is!

Lastly, I would like to nominate Richard Gilbert, of the blogsite NARRATIVE.  Richard has said on his own that he considers he has formed a “bivouac between the two literary camps of New York and academia,” and all things considered, I find this very just.  Richard writes about and keeps tabs on memoirs and non-fiction narratives and essays in general, but still finds time for the occasional remark which relates these categories to fiction as well.  The father of a family, who has a wife and two grown children, Richard has practiced subsistence level farming for ten years, and has lived to tell about it in various publications.  Meanwhile, he is writing his own memoir and teaching writing at Otterbein University, after having taught at a number of other major midwestern universities.  Richard’s blog is one sure way of keeping one’s finger on the pulse of narrrative, whatever one’s chosen and preferred form.

Thanks again to all of you who have ever nominated me for an award, whether I followed through or not–they were all appreciated, whether or not I felt I could take them up at the time.  I hope that those whom I have nominated will feel like accepting as well, for I have certainly enjoyed reading them, just as I have enjoyed reading JM’s inspiring posts on thelivingnotebook.

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February 11, 2013 · 8:53 pm

“The Sorrows of Young Werther,” the Sentimental Novel, and the Argument from Popular Art to Reality

In this post, in order to illustrate my points more fully and in a more authoritative manner than I can assume as a person only passingly cognizant with this particular form of novel–that is, I’ve read a number of sentimental novels for study, but I lack that sympathy with them which would help make my remarks enthusiastically informed–I intend to quote heavily from other authorities.  So, in reference to the sentimental novel, of which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther is a prime and famous example, this is what Wikipedia has to say:

“The sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility is an eighteenth century literary genre which celebrates the emotional and intellectual concepts of sentiment, sentimentalism, and sensibility….Sentimental novels relied on emotional response, both from their readers and characters.  They feature scenes of distress and tenderness, and the plot is arranged to advance emotions rather than actions.  The result is a valorization of ‘fine feeling,’ displaying the characters as a model for refined, sensitive emotional effect.  The ability to display feelings was thought to show character and experience, and to shape social life and relations….[The sentimental novel] was a reaction to the [colder] rationalism of the [immediately preceding] Augustan Age.”  Wikipedia further notes something that is rather obvious in reference to this genre:  “Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility is most often seen as a ‘witty satire of the sentimental novel,’ [which] juxtapos[es] values of the Age of Enlightenment (sense, reason) with those of the later eighteenth century (sensibility, feeling)….”

The genre focuses on the values of “humanism” and often features the “weaker members of society” such as “orphans and condemned criminals” and encourages the readers to identify and sympathize with them.  For example, in The Sorrows of Young Werther, the young heroine Lotte’s brothers and sisters are taken care of by her because they have lost their mother; also, Werther, the hero, sympathizes with a young man who, like him, falls in love to no avail with a young woman as Werther is in love with Lotte, and when the young man commits a crime, Werther makes an impassioned plea for his release; finally, there is a wandering lunatic in the book, and Werther begins to compare his own state to that of the lunatic, whom he meets when the lunatic is searching for flowers for a mysterious lady whom he loves.  All of these other characters have much prose attention devoted to them by Goethe in the book, though ostensibly the attention occurs in Werther’s letters to his friend William and sometimes to Lotte.  And though the novel is thus in the main an epistolary novel, there are omniscient sections written by an unnamed “editor” which relate things to do with Werther (as he too becomes one of the unfortunates upon whom sentimentalism is to be lavished).

Hermann J. Weigand, in commenting on the way The Sorrows of Young Werther was perceived in the 1770’s when it was written (it first appeared in 1774, though Goethe continued to revise as late as 1787), has this to say:  “We are not likely to follow the example of the young people of the 1770’s and succeeding decades, who read [the book] as a sob story, and made a fad of wearing his blue frock coat and yellow waistcoat, and in many cases found in the hero’s fate an invitation to suicide.  Today we read [the book] as a highly illuminating, vivid, and colorful document reflecting the Zeitgeist of the ‘age of sentiment,’ and as a closely knit work of literary artistry.  As the fictional case history, moreover, of a highly endowed and appealing individual who allows himself to drift into disaster under the spell of a passion the danger of which he fails to sense until his will to live has been sapped and his sanity undermined, the story has a powerful appeal for the psychologically oriented reader who follows the stages of the hero’s mental disintegration with rapt fascination.”  As Weigand further remarks, in Werther’s letters a picture of his personality and qualities emerges.  He is “cultivated, well-to-do, generous, talented, sensitive, observant but more inclined to reverie, under no pressure to conform to the discipline of gainful employment, self-indulgent in his cult of pure feeling, an idealist finding pleasure in the company of simple folk and children, religious without adherence to dogma, a devotee of nature as opposed to the artificial conventions of society, preferring the cult of genius to the cultivation of taste governed by rules, an antirationalist in short, exhibiting all the winning traits of that late-eighteenth-century man who has come under the spell of Rousseau’s gospel of nature.”  And yet, with all of this going for him, he commits suicide when he must finally come to terms with the fact that the woman he loves, Lotte, cannot properly return his love in good conscience.  Lotte has been married to a young man named Albert for some time who is moreover a young man Werther likes and is friends with.  The prose in fact “imitates” Werther’s cessation of existence, at least in the translation by Catherine Hutter which I used, in the sense that though the writing is florid and overdone throughout much of the novel, overly emotional and passionate and frankly rather silly in parts (to my sense at least), when Werther is finally dead, the last sentences are stern and solemn and funereal:  “At twelve noon, Werther died.  The presence of the judge and the arrangements he made silenced the crowd.  That night, at about eleven, he had the body buried in the spot Werther had chosen.  The old man and his sons walked behind the bier;  Albert found himself incapable of doing so.  They feared for Lotte’s life.  Workmen carried the body.  There was no priest in attendance.”

Now, this translation and the appended foreword by Weigand were published in 1962, when psychology was becoming increasingly important; hence, Weigand comments that what we are likely to take from the book is the interesting psychological picture of a certain type of person, Werther himself.  There’s something in this, of course, but think of it this way:  the book was interesting in 1774, and what people took from it was what they brought to it:  a desire to find models to imitate, which funnily enough was a personality trend inherited from the Augustans, who were full of models for imitation; it’s just that with the “age of sentiment,” the very models had changed in nature, but the tendency to look for them was still there.  So, certain sentimental characteristics continued to appear in fiction even as late as Dickens, a point commented on with certain caveats by Wikipedia.  In 1962, people (notably Weigand in his commentary) were still finding in the book what they brought to it, though then what they brought to it then was a desire to watch a character’s psychological development as he “mentally disintegrated”; that is, they wanted to read a case history.  So, what do we find in the book now, if anything?  What is there for us, in 2013, in this book?

Perhaps we can take a certain comfort from the thought that just as The Sorrows of Young Werther inspired some odd forms of imitation as in those who dressed as the character was said to dress, or very negative actions as in those who were inspired, like Werther, to commit suicide for some motive or other, there are always people who imitate unhealthy tendencies they may find in art.  Art, in short, is not to blame.  In addition to being generally encouraging, this might appease those adherents of violent or at least action-packed videos who don’t like to hear that their favorite art form is the source of real-life violence, though of course calling it art might be over-generous.  But what of the opposite point of view?  That is, we, homo sapiens sapiens, self-knowledgeable and aware of being self-knowledgeable, self-reflecting humankind, have perhaps come full circle back to a certain naive (though not innocent) interpretive stance, one in which some of us see art as having an intimate connection with the way we conduct ourselves, one in which art legislates and dictates our world strategies.  There are among this number those others of us who do not enjoy the violence, either depicted in artistic terms or encountered in real life, who attempt to eliminate the whole tawdry mess by lumping it all together as something undesirable to be gotten rid of.  So there are still two tendencies of humankind thus, one which excuses art by pointing to the unlikelihood that art could cause someone to “do that,” and the other which insists that art should be “healthier, more wholesome, more idealistic.”  But wasn’t young Werther idealistic?  Wasn’t Werther cultivated, and loving to children, and kind to the unfortunate and to older people, and polite to those which society considered his betters?  To return to the notion from the early 1960’s commentator Weigand that the novel is intended as a psychological portrait for our times, the picture of the tumultuous decline of a young man who has everything going for him, isn’t this just exactly the sort of background story often referred to by those who say of a young criminal or suicide “He was so quiet, and nice.  No one would have thought he would do something like this”?  Is it only a chance acquaintance with a young woman like the beautiful Lotte which inspires such self-destruction by an unsuccessful suitor?  And what of the aggravations young Werther suffered in his attempt to work as a secretary to an ambassador after he left Lotte’s side?  Or what of his signal and powerful humiliation at the hands of a Count who had befriended him, brought on by the interference of others who did not like him?

All of these considerations are perhaps pertinent to a contemporary reading of The Sorrows of Young Werther, the moreso as we are everyday provided with examples of young and not-so-young people killing themselves and/or other people, ostensibly because of one primary thing in their lives, but often brought on, in the history we are after the fact given of them, by a whole series of events.  It is, though overly sentimental in its manner of expression quite often, not only a romance but also a casebook for our times.  We have to remember one key item of resemblance between Werther and the ordinary contemporary suicide/homicide:  in at least one spot in the novel, Werther reveals that he had had thoughts not only of destroying himself, but also of destroying Lotte and/or Alfred.  And this speaks to the hopelessness and general destructive tendency Goethe was so aware of in his otherwise exceptionally gifted hero, as well as to characteristics we might expect to find in a modern Werther, a young man born to distinguish himself somehow, who rather than settle down into being an average young man like his friend Albert or a sage counselor as his correspondent William is said to be, determines to distinguish himself through annihilation, and thus make an indelible, if tragic, mark on the world.  This is the true sign of the romantic hero as he just a few years later came to be delineated in fiction and poetry, and sadly, often imitated in fact by some of those who were of the ones determined to model themselves on their fictional heros:  he was determined to be distinguished, by whatever means necessary.  And perhaps that is what we all need to remember, if there is a moral at all to be drawn from this particular fiction:  sometimes, in some contexts at least, it’s okay just to be average and forget about being overly distinguished!

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February 3, 2013 · 10:50 pm

The Art of the Novelistic Vignette–Muriel Spark’s “Reality and Dreams”

As we are all aware, chacun à son gout, or de gustibus non est disputandum; in other words, there’s no accounting for tastes.  We all like different things, and no doubt that’s as it should be,  to allow all the many different things in our world to thrive and flourish.  As Robert Louis Stevenson also put it, in his A Child’s Garden of Verse, which first expressed the matter to me when I was quite young, “The world is so full of a number of things/That I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”  So, why am I not entirely happy with Muriel Spark’s shortish novel Reality and Dreams, especially since it is so relatively short that any readerly boredom and pain incurred in reading it could certainly not be long-lived?  I can’t answer that question without referring to the movies, and since that’s what the book centers around, a span of time in the life of a British movie director obsessed with his work and his own legend, perhaps that’s entirely as it should be as well.

There’s a movie I’ve heard of but have (thankfully) never seen:  I’ve heard that Andy Warhol once filmed an eight-hour movie of someone sleeping.  And that’s what the movie was, simply the encapsulated experience of watching someone sleep.  I cannot imagine how unutterably boring it must have been to watch, but I have to confess that I thought of that movie when suffering my way slowly through the longueurs of Spark’s novel.  For, it operates similarly in the sense that it is composed of a series of vignettes, painted on the stage scenery of our minds, by a largely omniscient narrator, with a great deal of telling and not much showing.  Before I proceed, let me say that I have no objection to omniscient narrators and have at times found the opposite tactics, those of stream-of-consciousness or limited points of view, equally boring in other cases.  Nor do I have enshrined in my temple of taste E. M. Forster’s long ago preference for showing over telling, which so many writers took as gospel until now it is once again starting to be questioned or even to fall in disfavor.  I simply am describing some qualities of the book in enumerating these characteristics.

There is a great deal of reported dialogue in the book, in fact much of the book centers on what people say to each other about themselves and others and there are only brief spans when we learn from the narrative what they felt.  In any case, when we do learn something felt, there is no analysis of it in the omniscient voice, which is surely a neglected opportunity, since it can be one of the genuine pleasures inherent in reading about characters in this mode, to hear a voice-over analysis of  their feelings as a continuation of being told what their feelings are.

The story centers around an accident to the director of films, the main character Tom Richards, and his recuperation, his “redundancy” period (for non-Britishers, “redundancy” is becoming officially unemployed), and the resumption of his film career.  His fall from a high crane while filming is the cause of his accident, and towards the end of the novel, we see his disaffected daughter Marigold and a minor disgruntled starlet and a previous husband of a woman the director has slept with plotting to sabotage a second crane again to injure or to kill him, but interestingly enough (and that the writer chose largely to write around these opportunities is more interesting than what she actually did; one wonders at her choice), the starlet is actually the one who falls and is instantly killed, and Tom Richards at the end of the novel is going on his merry way, continuing his typical life as before his accident.

What the novel centers around instead are the conversation and conflicts inherent in the pairings and re-pairings of the characters Tom, his family and friends, and co-workers, who in their personal lives act a lot like a set of spoiled children, and they are of course the spoiled darlings of the screen, so there’s nothing inherently wrong with that choice.  It’s just that there’s so much of it that it itself becomes “redundant.”  Tom and his wife Claire are serially unfaithful to each other but happy together with this arrangement, but Tom himself cannot even be faithful to a mistress whom he is otherwise obsessed with.  “But he was Tom Richards; he could not help his moods,” we are told.  Even his children are part and parcel of the series of ironies visited upon the characters of the book.  One of the best moments of the book occurs when his daughter Marigold resurfaces after a mysterious long absence; it turns out that she has been living in tent cities and camper communities with those who, like her father, have lost their jobs, but who unlike her father are not rich and therefore have her sympathy.  The headline we are asked to imagine reads:  “Millionaire Film Magnate’s daughter lives rough to show solidarity with the out-of-works.”  She certainly has little or no sympathy with her father.

Probably what I miss the most from the potentialities of this book is more exploration of the spirituality inherent in two statements made tantalizingly at the very front and at the very back of the book.  The first line of this book about a director who thinks he is something like a minor god reads:  “He often wondered if we were all characters in one of God’s dreams.”  In the last paragraph of the book, Claire, Tom’s wife, is pouring drinks for herself, Tom, and their daughter Cora from Tom’s other marriage.  The last sentence reads, “Both Tom and Cora felt her strength and courage sustaining them, here in the tract of no-man’s land between dreams and reality, reality and dreams.”  There is no question but what Muriel Spark has mastered the art of the novelistic vignette, which often reads so like dialogue and stage directions from a play.  But why, oh why, I ask myself, didn’t she make more of the potentialities inherent in her novel as she began and ended it?  And for that, I have no ready answer, except “There’s no accounting for tastes.”  That’s evidently just not what she wanted to write about!

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January 25, 2013 · 6:53 pm

A rattling good tale in the old-fashioned manner and the modern moment–Joseph Conrad’s “The Warrior’s Soul”

There are fashions in modes of fiction, and sometimes even in the same author’s work, more than one fashion (or era style) can be observed.  Many stories outlive their own time, and continue to have an influence on new generations of readers.  This is especially true of some of the works of Joseph Conrad, whose novella The Heart of Darkness continues to be read, interpreted, and re-used for its modern-day applications and significances (as one might note by recalling that the movie “Apocalypse Now” was based loosely upon it).  Even his novels Lord Jim and The Secret Agent, though more dated than The Heart of Darkness, are still quite popular in classrooms and library circulation systems alike.  Yet, there is something more to this selection of fashions than just a come-again go-again style or styles to be considered; there is also the role played by the various elements of the story in relation to each other which helps establish and make popular the style.

Recently, I rescued from a free book bin a book of four short stories by Joseph Conrad called Tales of Hearsay, and each of the four stories is constructed as the telling of a tale, with three of them using the fictional device of a frame story in which the external narrator relates a story from the past.  In this sense, the story is not unlike The Heart of Darkness, which also uses a frame story.  Yet, the story I’m concerned with today is of an older time both in its setting and in most of its tone, and is a quite simple story for most of its length, with none of the complexity of Conrad’s famous novella.  It is the first story in this book, “The Warrior’s Soul,” and it has all the earmarks of a very old story style indeed, with a passionate young lover, a mysterious beautiful woman, a slightly older gallant soldier, a war, an intrigue, a significant promise, a deathly request–where shall I begin, and where else could it end than in a story of this kind?

The basic story is this:  Just before the time in history when Napoleon marched on Russia, a young Russian soldier attached to a diplomatic corps is in France, in Paris.  He is first inspired by and then falls madly in love with a beautiful society hostess whose drawing room he frequents, and who in a kindly, slightly more mature woman’s fashion, tolerates his adoration and is kind to him.  While there one evening, the young man is witness to some sort of political intrigue between her and a slightly older male French officer, and the upshot of this situation is that the two save him and his diplomatic corps from internment indefinitely in France during the coming war by warning him in time for him to flee.  He is able to pass the warning along to his superiors, and all escape safely back to Russia, after he has vowed to the officer that if ever he can help him even unto his life, he will.  Time elapses, and we are now at the scene of France’s defeat in Russia and Napoleon’s death-filled and starving retreat from Waterloo.  As an old Russian campaigner (the external narrator of the story) sits by the fire one evening in the freezing winter weather, the young soldier comes into the firelight leading a sore-encrusted, raggedy, starving French officer dressed in full regalia except for his nearly frozen feet, which are wrapped in sheepskins.  As it turns out, this officer is the once gallantly attired and regal-mannered older officer of the mysterious woman’s drawing room, who had been so kind to the young Russian soldier when he was staying in Paris, and who had allowed him to escape.  After making himself known to the young soldier, the French officer begs him to shoot him and put him out of his misery, and after a while of debating with himself, the young soldier does so, to be sternly rebuked by his fellow soldiers for shooting a prisoner, all of whom had before reproached him for being too soft and loverlike in his mannerisms, all except the old campaigner, who tells the tale to the end.  For, though the young soldier is able to retire later without overt disgrace, he must retreat to his country province “where a vague story of some dark deed clung to him for years.”

The simplicity with which the mutual sacrifice of the gallant French officer and the high-minded Russian soldier is enacted is part of the old-fashioned quality of the tale.  We are told at the end as a form of summation, “Yes.  He had [shot him].  And what was it?  One warrior’s soul paying its debt a hundred-fold to another warrior’s soul by releasing it from a fate worse than death–the loss of all faith and courage.”  Even the rather trite and well-worn phrase “a fate worse than death” (though it may perhaps have received one of its first usages in Conrad’s tale) slips past the critical reader’s censor rather more easily if one is content to forego modern complexities of thought.  Yet, even in Conrad’s simple tale, at the end we read of the young soldier “He was stooping over the dead in a tenderly contemplative attitude.  And his young, ingenuous face with lowered eyelids, expressed no grief, no sternness, no horror–but was set in the repose of a profound, as if endless and endlessly silent meditation.”  That is true Conradian prose of the complex variety, but it occurs only at the very end of the story, so we may read past it in our first reading, and notice mainly the ease of expression in the portrait of the scene.

The picture of the woman involved too is part of the nimbus cast round the act of glory in battle which is the unspoken referent of both the warriors’ activities, in fact is of the essence of the glory itself.  As the old Russian campaigner relates, “She was of course not a woman in her first youth.  A widow may be….She had a salon, something very distinguished; a social centre in which she queened it with great splendour….Upon my word I don’t know whether her hair was dark or fair, her eyes brown or blue; what was her stature, her features, or her complexion.  His love soared above mere physical impressions.  He never described her to me in set terms; but he was ready to swear that in her presence everybody’s thoughts and feelings were bound to circle round her.  She was that sort of woman….She was the very joy and shudder of felicity and she brought only sadness and torment to the hearts of men.”  It is in fact against  the background of the salon that we are supposed to imagine, superimposed, the image of war to come, and then later, in the scene in the Russian snowy waste, the image of the woman and the salon superimposed over the scene by the fireside, as in the hallucinatory double image sometimes used in film-making.  For, it is the woman and the salon that both men are glancingly referring to in their moment of mutual “heroism” (or what Conrad has used to represent the replacement of a more standard act of heroism as it is usually portrayed, meaning ferocity in battle).  Their heroism lies in the determination of one not to be less than the man he has been because of being in a situation of extreme suffering that might cause him to perform less than heroic acts, and in the determination of the other to act up to the top of his bent and be worthy of the life (and the death-shot) that the other has entrusted to him.  They are brothers and equals in this sense, though one is years older and the other relatively untried.

It is only the hallmark of Conrad which in fact saves this tale from being a typical sentimental (and therefore pernicious) tale of heroism in warfare, for sentimentality about war is as loathsome to the genuine soldier as it is to the conscientious objector; and that is why I would like to return to that final section of the tale, which portrays the old campaigner and the young soldier over the French officer’s corpse.  For, they do not accede to his request immediately.  At first, the young soldier cannot bring himself to kill the French officer, who is then seized up with an “agony of cramp” as his limbs begin to defrost by the fire.  The young soldier says, “It is he, the man himself….Brilliant, accomplished, envied by men, loved by that woman–this horror–this miserable thing that cannot die.  Look at his eyes.  It’s terrible.”  The old man realizes what the young man means, because “We could do nothing for him.  This avenging winter of fate held both the fugitives and the pursuers in its iron grip.  Compassion was but a vain word before that unrelenting destiny.”  The French officer continues to beg, then calls the boy in anger a “milksop” to try to drive him to do the deed.  There is another pause.  At this point, the old man turns his back and then hears the young man’s gunshot.  He says, “I give you my word [I guessed it because] the report of Tomassov’s [the soldier’s] pistol was the most insignificant thing imaginable.  It was a mere feeble pop.  Of the orderlies holding our horses I don’t think one turned his head round.”  The gunshot is thus made into a small thing, which has an inverse great effect upon the future of the young soldier Tomassov.  Another key Conradian tactic comes into play, though, and that is one I did not mention when I previously quoted the passage about one warrior’s soul “paying its debt a hundred-fold to another’s warrior’s soul by releasing it from a fate worse than death–the loss of all faith and courage.”  And that is that immediately following this sentence, Conrad continues, “You may look on it in that way.  I don’t know.  And perhaps poor Tomassov did not know himself.”  And then he goes on to paint the picture of the young soldier, his hat off in a gesture of respect, bent over the corpse.  There’s all the makings of a great melodramatic death scene, yet by giving the reader a choice, by saying “You may look on it in that way.  I don’t know,” Conrad has robbed the matter of its melodrama and produced not only a rattling good tale in the old-fashioned manner, but a triumph of modern tone at the very last minute.  It is at this moment that one suddenly remember the other Joseph Conrad, the author of The Heart of Darkness, and all the complexity which he was able to bestow on the topics of colonization and decadence in Africa.  For this story too is from the same pen, and in small measure at least bears the hallmark of that great work of Conradian modernism.  And is saved thereby.

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January 23, 2013 · 6:45 pm

Several approaches to writing a love scene–emotionally intense narrative, dialogue, sexually intense narrative, and a different possibility….

One of the most difficult kinds of scenes to write well in a novel or short story is the love scene.  Perhaps this is because of the great similarities most people experience in their own love lives which writers draw the models of scene and incident from.  The reader may in this instance say, “Yes, this is verisimilitudinal, but so what?  It doesn’t tell me anything I don’t already know about love.”  In other cases, the reverse may be true:  the reader may say, to the author’s best efforts, “Yes, but I don’t know anyone this has ever happened to, and I don’t believe in it, and that’s that!”  We all judge some kinds of endeavors on our pulses to a certain extent, and this is especially true of the literary love scene.  We expect to be titillated, involved, enlightened, and validated, all at once, and while scenes which can do all of these things at once happen along only too infrequently, two or three out of the four qualities we look for are often what we settle for, or even one, if it’s strongly enough expressed.  The truly gifted writer tries for emotionally intense and/or sexually intense narrative, inspired dialogue, and sometimes finds a way to throw us a curve ball or two when it comes to our expectations about being validated in particular, especially as demanding readers; I’ll explain what I mean.

First as to emotionally intense narrative:  as James Thurber said, “Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.”  There is a double entendre here in the sense that not only does Thurber refer to the drama of interpersonal relationships being expressed in fiction, or face it, sometimes even the melodrama, but also being Thurber (whose work once was accompanied by a cartoon with his wife morphing into his house, ready to swallow him up) with an emphasis on the word “through,” as in “finito!” or “over and done with.”  The implication is one of much sturm und drang for the reader to make his or her way through, and the enjoyment thereof depends to some extent on how much the ordinary reader enjoys seeing things worked out to their logical conclusion through many an ordeal.  Will the lovers end up together or apart? is the question, but as in many another case, the journey is the essence of the experience, the conclusion just not as important.   The reader may even breathe a sigh of relief after a sustained experience with this sort of narrative, or feel like giving himself or herself a pat on the back for sticking with it.  A really good writer of course ameliorates these feelings with the quality of his or her writing, but there’s no denying that the more intensity the experience has, the more demands it makes of the reader’s skills and tolerance.  Often with a fiction of this kind, bloggers following a readalong will write in with quibbles with the way the fiction ended up, lovers together or lovers apart, with less emphasis on the way they got there (which is really what often writers in this mode want to emphasize) than on how it ended up plot-wise.  The feeling seems to be “I put up with all that hooey, the least the writer could do is throw me a bone of a happy/melancholy ending!”

Another path a writer may take when writing a love scene is to focus heavily on the dialogue and let the winds blow where they may, assuming that the reader responsive to punctuation and conversational tags will get the gist of the tennis-match-like verbal drama just fine.  As Elizabeth Ashley said, “In a great romance, each person basically plays a part that the other really likes.”  The reader watches two characters doubly, not only as each is to and of himself or herself but as they are in combination, to each other when they are playing the roles of lovers.  In this case, it’s not the fictional participants who have to like the parts they are playing in relation to each other, it’s the reader, whether the reader hopes for weal or woe for them.  The reader must assent that yes, that character can actually be imagined stepping forth from his or her own interior cave of subjectivity to make that remark to the love interest in the given situation, and that the love interest would respond as cited.  Again here, it’s a question of verisimilitude, but possibly people in fiction say weirder things than they do in real life or than they are content to hold themselves accountable for, because on the basis of no statistics whatsoever but only on that of a certain experience of fiction, I’ve noticed that characters’ dialogue is often used to “up the ante”dramatically whether or not the characters actually ever do anything astounding or not.

There is again the sexually intense narrative, and it is this sort of narrative which hints that it lurks hidden behind the other two forms above, and for which we often read though we are most often disappointed of its appearance.  How many times have you been reading about two characters engaging in displacement activity described in an overwrought narrative, or jawing away at each other passionately about some topic which both have really invested with deeper significance than seems called for, however sincere they might feel they are being, however sincere for the moment you might even feel they are being–how many times have you wished they would just grab each other and exchange passionate embraces, and get it over with?  As Proverbs 7:17-18 says, “I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon.  Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning.”  This sort of narrative, though rewarding, raises the ante in the sense that once the characters and the readers have been sated (and unless you like reading pornography, you will get sated fairly quickly with two or more characters who are always successful at their “grappling” the others to themselves), some misfortune has to befall them, to part them permanently or temporarily so that the writer can feel that he or she is carrying on the business of actually writing literature and not writing trash.

In most love scenes, there is probably a combination of the three kinds of writing listed above, or at least two of the three.  It strikes me, though, upon reading a thought sequence by a character in Ford Madox Ford’s Some Do Not… (the first volume in his tetralogy Parade’s End) that there is from this combination an emerging fourth kind of love scene, a love scene which encompasses not only the submerged or hidden sexual scene and the two others, the dominant emotionally intense narrative and passionate dialogue, but a kind of love scene which engulfs the whole being of the novel (perhaps now I am speaking thematically, however).  With indirection, we are given the character Valentine Wannop’s thoughts about her married (and physically Platonic) love Christopher Tietjens:  “….[I]n these later days, much greater convulsions had overwhelmed her.  It sufficed for Tietjens to approach her to make her feel as if her whole body was drawn towards him as, being near a terrible height, you are drawn towards it.  Great waves of blood rushed across her being as if physical forces as yet undiscovered or invented attracted the very fluid itself.  The moon so draws the tides….The day of her long interview with Tietjens, amongst the amassed beauties of Macmaster furnishings, she marked in the calendar of her mind as her great love scene.  That had been two years ago; he had been going into the army.  Now he was going out again.  From that she knew what a love scene was.  It passed without any mention of the word ‘love’; it passed in impulses; warmths; rigors of the skin.  Yet with every word they had said to each other they had confessed their love; in that way, when you listen to the nightingale you hear the expressed craving of your lover beating upon your heart.”  This reflection upon an earlier scene is yet another kind of love scene, an emergent fourth, for the original scene she is reflecting upon contains a sort of emotionally intense narrative so ratcheted up as to incorporate sex as a feeling in the air, so strong it is, and the dialogue is its manner of conveyance (I know you think I’m cheating by not selecting a scene which includes actual sex, but Ford doesn’t write much of that in my experience of him–The Good Soldier and now this tetralogy–but prefers to give reflections of reflections and reflections upon reflections of what has happened behind closed doors).  This would be an example of Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility” except that in this scene itself, Valentine is not tranquil, but is disturbed by her recollections, made to feel other feelings than those that would be most comfortable.  And this is a kind of love scene experienced by one person alone when recollecting the emotion of a scene in which both emotional and sexual intensity are present behind a totally socially unexceptional ordinary dialogue, an unexciting “English” sort of social dialogue, using the word “English” now as the writers of England have often in modernist literature used it, to mean socially unadventurous, though for true real-life adventurous conversation on an intellectual level, the English are often hard to beat.

I have peeked ahead in the tetralogy (this is a spoiler alert, so be warned, those of you who plan to read it); in my exasperation with the fact that Valentine and Christopher are still Platonic lovers by the end of the first volume, I find to my surprise that they are still together at the end of the book, though that’s all I know.  His wife Sylvia had cheated on him from the beginning even in the first volume, so with an ordinary reader’s sense of justice, I was hoping that he would ditch the bad bride and take up with the constant girlfriend.  Still reading in the interim, I’m not sure if there are other love scenes of a more traditional nature, but this sort of odd love scene, what I have called the “emergent fourth” in which a person alone recollects so intensely a past love scene that he or she encapsulates the whole thematic content of the novel–which is also about war–in its opposite (for love and war form a sort of opposition), this is the source of the fascination I feel with the four novels now, and which will, I feel, keep me reading until the end.  And for four connected novels, that’s filling a tall order.  I remind myself of something said in The Little Prince:  “The essence of things is in the unseen world,” or words to that effect.  Certainly, the unseen world has a real force and existence in Ford’s tetralogy.

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January 21, 2013 · 6:04 pm

Other-hatred and Self-hatred in John Gardner’s “Grendel”–Knowing Your Enemy

In some English class or other, from middle school days through college days, most of us have read some version of “Beowulf,” the Old English heroic tale pitting man against monster, in which Beowulf wins and goes on later to fight a crafty dragon, who then dies only when Beowulf’s friend and thane Wiglaf fights by his side; but Beowulf dies from his wounds, and receives a hero’s burial.  In this version of the tale (and for so very long, there was no other version), the men know and care little about the monster Grendel’s characteristics or inner qualities, all that concerns them is how to combat and kill him so that he will cease to haunt their meadhall and eat their thanes.  As far as his motives go, he is of the race of Cain and therefore commits murder.  As the text of Beowulf reads, “Unhappy creature, he lived for a time in the home of the monsters’ race, after God had condemned them as kin of Cain.”  Full stop.  If we are led to think of Grendel’s motives at all, we perhaps suppose that after being attracted by the noise of the meadhall (Heorot) being built, he feels envy because the men sleeping at night inside “felt no sorrow, no misery of men.”  But his motives are unimportant, for he is clearly the evil-doing interloper, and as such does not merit our sympathy or understanding.

Taking his cue from slight hints in the text, however, John Gardner fully fleshes out a picture of Grendel not as a monster of a different race from humans, but as one having some relationship to them:  he understands their language, and can speak it though unclearly (later in Gardner’s rendition, Grendel taunts the coward Unferth and is haltingly understood by him).  He himself is aware of his relationship to men, and attempts more than once to approach or be understood, though it is to no avail.  He is hated and scorned, and because he feels a kinship to man, he internalizes these feelings and hates and scorns himself, and everything else as well.  Gardner has clearly taken hints from Robert Browning’s monster Caliban in “Caliban Upon Setebos” (a borrowing of yet another monster in later days, this time from Shakespeare’s Caliban in “The Tempest”).  Like Caliban, Grendel reasons upon his own life, the things he observes of men, the relationships between the two, and God, the universe, and the nature of things.  In these “studies” of mankind, God, and nature, Grendel is led by the dragon (Gardner introduces the cunning dragon who will be Beowulf’s downfall as a “tutor” of Grendel, one who can read his mind) and by the Shaper (the scop or poet whom he hears singing and intoning poems for men in the meadhall at night).  Of the scop’s song, he says that “he had made it seem all true, and very fine,” even though he thinks it is lies.  He asks himself, “What was he?  The man had changed the world, had torn up the past by its thick, gnarled roots and had transmuted it, and [the people] who knew the truth [] remembered it his way, and so did I….I was so filled with sorrow and tenderness I could hardly have found it in my heart to snatch a pig!”  He thinks not only of the heroic tales but of the tale of Creation which the scop sings as “the projected possible.”  He thinks, “It was a cold-blooded lie that a god had lovingly made the world and set out the sun and moon as lights to land-dwellers, that brothers had fought, that one of the races was saved, the other cursed.  Yet he, the old Shaper, might make it true, by the sweetness of his harp, his cunning trickery.  It came to me with a fierce jolt that I wanted it.  As they did too, though vicious animals, cunning, cracked with theories.  I wanted it, yes!  Even if I must be the outcast, cursed by the rules of his hideous fable.”

Grendel, this Grendel, is both intelligent and has moral perceptions.  He perceives the boasts in the meadhall (of which many a teacher has made learned analysis as to their poetic merit) as the ravings of drunken men bent upon impressing each other.  He notes that men often kill men, slay other animals, and destroy landscape as a sort of warfare, without meaning to eat.  He notes the waste of the men journeying back and forth across the land with tribute of goods and animals to other kings who have dominion over them.  And as the dragon tells him of human rationality, which is supposedly the division between humans and Grendel as well as between humans and animals, “They only think they think.  No total vision, total system, merely schemes with a vague family resemblance, no more identity than bridges and, say, spider-webs.  But they rush across chasms on spider-webs, and sometimes they make it, and that, they think, settles that!”   This Grendel constantly spies on the humans, keeps in touch with what affects them (as if he is an outcast one of them), and feels anguish when the Shaper (the scop) is dying.  He refers to it as “meaningless anguish,” but its meaning is obvious.  Even more, this Grendel becomes capable near the end of the book not only of reflections upon past, present and future, which he first learned from the dragon, but also of poetry.  When the scop dies, it is as if it’s the end of an era for him, until suddenly the Geats (Beowulf and his warriors) appear.

Grendel’s reaction to their presence is strange.  He feels a sort of gleeful excitement because something new is in his world, but it is clear that he does not fully recognize his enemy.  He tells himself that he could avoid the meadhall until they leave again and so be perfectly safe, yet he knows he will not do so.  He notes that Hrothgar, the king of the meadhall, and his thanes are not best pleased to have strangers coming in to finish off their monster for them, so he concludes, with an odd sort of loyalty to old enemies, that he must finish off the newcomers for the honor of Hrothgar and his retainers.  He has an additional motive, however, and that is that he is afraid of tedium possibly resulting from his life as it is.  As he thinks to himself, “All order, I’ve come to understand, is theoretical, unreal–a harmless, sensible, smiling mask men slide between the two great, dark realities, the self and the world–two snake-pits….Violence is truth….”  He thinks when he hears the stranger (Beowulf) speak, however, and answer a challenge in the meadhall against his bravery, that Beowulf is “crazy.”  He’s had this thought long before in the book about men when he watched them killing each other, yet he seems fascinated by Beowulf and fatally drawn to him.  “I grew more and more afraid of him and at the same time–who can explain it?–more and more eager for the hour of our meeting.”

When his fall finally comes, he is able to persuade himself that it came about through an “accident,” that he was caught off guard by Beowulf, who then took advantage of him and tore his arm off.  In the end of the novel, Grendel is surrounded by animals, “enemies of old,” who are watching him die.  “I give them what I hope will appear a sheepish smile….They watch with mindless, indifferent eyes, as calm and midnight black as the chasm below me.”  Then he asks the key question, really, of the whole book:  “Is it joy I feel?”  This is the motive of self-hatred having come full circle in Grendel’s life.  At the last, he says to the mute witnesses of his death:  “Poor Grendel’s had an accident….So may you all.”  Thus, the self-hatred leads into other-hatred just as often as the expression of other-hatred (feasting on his enemies) used to lead him into further self-hatred as he got further and further away from any possibility of fellowship.  Yet, part of the driving force of his self-hatred also comes from the fact that there was never really a chance of rapprochement between him and the humans, because from the very first they were, in his words, “stupid” and “crazy” and suspicious of him.  Finally then, the book is a book about fate, just as the original text carried notions of fate, though in “Grendel” we are concerned not with the nobility and fate of men but with the nobility and fate of the “monster” who wants to be one with and of them, yet cannot make them understand.  Published in 1971, in a time when the heroic outcast figure was once again becoming popular in literature, this book takes the formulas a step further, containing many moments when Grendel is petty and non-heroic, and yet the book transmutes even these moments into startlingly emotive episodes which excite recognition and fellow feeling in us for the anti-hero of the tale.  In its ability to force us to recognize our own thoughts and impressions, feelings and speculations, this book teaches us to know what are proverbially called our own worst enemies:  ourselves, both in the singular application and in the plural application, in which all men and women are to some degree enemies of the others, not the least because they are enemies to their own best instincts.  I think now, having read and commented at length upon so dismally moving and darkly motivated a book, I will go and read a light-hearted poem or improving essay, just to lift my spirits again, lest I too begin to feel like a Caliban or Grendel and foist my destructive instincts upon others!

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January 13, 2013 · 5:54 pm

Mark Twain and the importance of deceit in civilization– “Is He Living or Is He Dead?”

Having recently taken into my home yet another waif of a volume found on my local library’s “free” shelf, I began to peruse it this morning and found that Mark Twain, as many of you already know by having read his works, is not only a yarn-spinner but a liar extraordinare.  And he’s proud of the fact!  At least, his writing persona is proud of the fact in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way.  And all you have to do is think back on almost any Twain fiction, essay, or diatribe to see that lying is not only one of his favorite topics, but one of his favorite pastimes, from “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” to the smallest and least significant essay.  If he’s not advocating a falsehood, he’s practicing one in the full knowledge that the reader is most likely in on the joke, though different readers may have different reactions, some readers being complacent and some of them uncomfortable.

The volume I found myself closeted with this morning was entitled The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays, and was a reprinted volume put together from several other reprinted volumes at some point in time by P. F. Collier and Son Co. in a Harper Brothers edition, a publishing history that reeks of some of Twain’s own invented lines of fictional descent and which would have delighted the great man himself.  In an aside in an essay entitled “My First Lie, and How I Got Out of It,” Twain remarks, “….[A]ll people are liars from the cradle onward, without exception, and…they begin to lie as soon as they wake up in the morning and keep it up, without rest or refreshment, until they go to sleep at night.  If [my parents] arrived at that truth it probably grieved them–did, if they had been heedlessly and ignorantly educated by their books and teachers; for why should a person grieve over a thing which by the eternal law of his make he cannot help?  He didn’t invent the law; it is merely his business to obey it and keep still; join the universal conspiracy and keep so still that he shall deceive his fellow-conspirators into imagining that he doesn’t know that the law exists.”  Of course, in this essay Twain writes a lot about “the lie of silent assertion,” in which people pretend that nothing is wrong when something actually is.  But this quote still distributes itself equably over many situations when people lie out loud about something, as well as practicing the silent lie of assent.

The story in question which I’m commenting on today is one called “Is He Alive or Is He Dead?” from the same volume, and its comedy relies on the fact that often people don’t know 1) who a famous artist is 2) whether he or she is alive or dead and 3) what the value of his or her paintings actually is.  Nor do they want anyone to know that they don’t know, another stock comic device as well as often being an actual fact about people.  In this story, four starving artists (the actual famous artist François Millet makes a cameo appearance) are trying desperately to think of a way to make a living, when nearly no one will buy any of their pictures.  The narrator is one of them, and he lists Millet and two other artists (whom he names Claude Frère and Carl Boulanger) who are in this predicament.  Putting their heads together, they decide to achieve fame via the well-known assertion that dying often makes an author or artist famous whereas he or she could not achieve this status in life by any means.  Taking this as the inspiration for their deception, they “make” Millet the artist who will “die” (actually in their plan he retreats to live in private, hiding while pocketing his share of the proceeds), and so they all paint lots of pictures and studies and sketches as “students” of “the famous Millet” (as they talk him up to people they meet), and he paints many pictures as well.  The other three give out that he is dying or near to dying when they try to sell his paintings and their own studies, and of course the ploy works, and they all become not only respected but much richer than they would otherwise have been.

This case of fradulent art practice is one with which many people can sympathize as long as it’s a case of comedy written by Twain, in which the in extremis condition of starving while trying to make a living off something as high-minded as one’s art provides the average reader with the impetus towards sympathy.  But an art dealer, for example, even one gifted with a genuine interest in tangled histories of art provenance, might be smiling or grimacing even a little more wryly than the average reader in following the artistic quartet’s adventures.  For, there’s a formula to be used in bringing off this kind of artistic triumph, and it goes something like this:  a) a serious situation or need that most or all readers can sympathize with; b) an ingenious idea, so ingenious that the reader feels the temptation of the characters’ own desire to see it employed; c) a discussion of whether or not it’s honest and safe, a strategem which allows the author to engage the reader even more thoroughly by exploring what most people ask themselves about any course of action, whether they have the moral stomach for it and whether it’s any use to try it.  This is a key element in the formula, because it enables the writer to get the convinced reader even more fully on the characters’ side.  Next follows d) at least one example of the stratagem successfully employed, and then the plot is taken as having been acted upon, so there’s no reason not to go on practicing the deceit in question (in terms of the moral equation which says “to lie once is to lie always,” not true if you believe in reformation of character, but nevertheless true in the sense of the story’s fictional structure).  In this case, this last step is a continuation of the fiction that the famous artist (Millet, having become famous in fiction as well as being famous in non-literary fact) is dead.

The entire story is enclosed within an exterior story in which one of the four artists, now a rich man (whom the external narrator “disguises” by naming him “Smith”) tells him the inset story of the four artists because they have seen another rich man (who it turns out is Millet, living under an alias) go out the door of the hotel, and “Smith” wants to tell the narrator the tale.  Why he should want to reveal Millet’s secret to a comparative stranger is the one weak point in the story, but it’s more or less successfully glossed over by the knowledge most people have of quick familiarities between people who travel and end up telling their own life stories to people they meet on the way, comfortable in the knowledge that most likely they won’t see them again.

But there’re two more layers of deceit practiced in this story, and one is that of “Smith,” who see “Millet” and tells the external narrator the story:  it’s the layer in which someone tells an incredible story, and then as proof takes a match out of their pocket and says challengingly, “You don’t believe me?  Here’s the match I had in my pocket when it happened!”  Of course, Smith doesn’t say this to the narrator, but he might as well have–for what’s to prove that the man named Smith isn’t a congenital liar who just happens to see the man he calls “Millet” and dreams up a tale about him, or a creatively inspired liar (a writer!) like Twain?  And then, there’s Twain himself, that arch-fabulist of all fabulists, behind the scenes, no doubt chuckling over every word, even from wherever he is now (and we all know where we go when we keep company with The Father of Lies, as the devil is popularly called)–yet who can help but believe that when confronted with such a solid satirical moralist (as Twain often is) that some god didn’t pass him along to heaven anyway?

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January 9, 2013 · 9:42 pm

The unity and interplay of comedy and horror in the tales of Saki (H. H. Munro)

Many years ago, when I was just a teenager and had a part-time job which allowed me a generous disposable income to spend on books and records, I bought an omnibus edition of The Complete Works of Saki.  Though I didn’t understand fully what “mafficking” was, I was enchanted by the lilt and insouciance of one particular verse, which ran thus:  “Mother, may I go and maffick,/Tear around and hinder traffic?”  Later I came to know that Mafeking was a town in South Africa where the Boer War was fought, and that “mafficking” was wild and boisterous celebration upon achieving a victory (for example, in warfare).  But playful strewing about of place-names from the Victorian and Edwardian eras and warfare in jest weren’t the whole of the charm of Saki’s stories, verses, and plays.  He has a particular gift for uniting comedy and horror with the emphasis in one story being on one of the two elements, and on just the opposite in another story.  Two stories which play with this uncanny combination, a combination which I have remarked upon before as being particularly effective in conveying both parts of the equation, but especially the chill that runs down one’s spine at a good horror story, are “Gabriel-Ernest” and “The Open Window.”  The first has a tinge of comedy and is otherwise a short horror story; the second seems to be a horror story at first, but keeps the surprise about the jest until the very last sentence of the story, and builds up excellently to that point.  The first story, “Gabriel-Ernest,” works by contrast by starting out with the outré note in the first sentence.

In Gabriel-Ernest, an artist named Cunningham informs his friend Van Cheele in the first sentence that “There is a wild beast in your woods.”  When Van Cheele responds to this by insisting that the “wild beasts” are limited to a fox and a few weasels, Cunningham takes back his remark, but it gives the reader pause.  The next day, when he goes to visit his own property on a ramble, Van Cheele finds a young boy, totally naked, stretched out full length by a pool, sunning himself.  We are told his eyes are light-brown, “so light that there was almost a tigerish gleam in them” and that they watch Van Cheele “with a certain lazy watchfulness.”  When Van Cheele challenges him as to his presence there, the boy says that he lives on “flesh,” and from there on, Van Cheele is on the losing side of the dialogue.  He keeps trying to make ordinary sense of what the boy says and does, but the boy succeeds in intimidating him physically, and the next day, after Van Cheele has been considering that a lot of small animals and a child or two have gone missing lately, the boy turns up naked again, in Van Cheele’s morning-room this time.  When Van Cheele becomes angry and challenges him again, the boy responds with wild equanimity, “You told me I was not to stay in the woods.”

Van Cheele’s aunt comes in and is promptly deceived by the two of them, the boy because he sits indolently under the copy of the “Morning Post” which Van Cheele hurriedly drapes over him, Van Cheele because he can’t seem to recognize just what’s wrong, though he knows that something is very, very wrong.  He decides that he will have to contact Cunningham and take his opinion about the situation, so he unadvisedly leaves the boy in his aunt’s care and his aunt when he leaves is “arranging that Gabriel-Ernest [their name for the “adopted” boy] should help her to entertain the infant members of her Sunday-school class at tea that afternoon.”  Cunningham tells Van Cheele that the boy had vanished right in front of him and to a further query says, “on the open hillside where the boy had been standing a second ago, stood a huge wolf, blackish in color, with gleaming fangs and cruel, yellow eyes.”

We are next told that Van Cheele “did not stop for anything as futile as thought.”  He thinks of sending a telegram to his uncomprehending aunt, but realizes that “‘Gabriel-Ernest is a werewolf’ was a hopelessly inadequate effort at conveying the situation, and his aunt would think it was a code message to which he had omitted to give her the key.”  The story’s ending smiles and leers at us just as wolfishly as Gabriel-Ernest himself, an ending in which when the “boy” and the infant with him disappear, the aunt concludes that Gabriel-Ernest has jumped into the water to save the infant and that both have drowned, and sets up a brass plaque in the parish church.  The last line, smirking at us and our readerly discomfort, reads:  “Van Cheele gave way to his aunt in most things, but he flatly refused to subscribe to the Gabriel-Ernest memorial.”

In “The Open Window,” the quantity of horror to comedy is reversed, though the dead pan delivery of comedy at the last line occurs again.  A guest, Framton Nuttel, who is taking a cure for his nerves by paying a set of “formal visits on a set of total strangers,” finds himself sitting in Mrs. Sappleton’s living room talking to her fifteen year old niece.  The niece tells him what seems like a perfectly lucid story of how his aunt has had a “great tragedy” in her own life three years previously.  As she explains it, “Out through that [large French window], three years ago to a day, her husband and her two young brothers went off for their day’s shooting.  They never came back….Poor aunt always thinks that they will come back some day, they and the little brown spaniel that was lost with them, and walk in at that window just as they used to do[,]…her youngest brother[]singing, ‘Bertie, why do you bound?’….Do you know, sometimes on still, quiet evenings like this, I almost get a creepy feeling that they will all walk in through that window–“.  Well, the niece has clearly set the scene.  In comes the aunt and keeps looking out the window with anticipation, which chills the marrow of the young visitor, because he’s nervous and he believes what the niece has told him of her aunt’s mental obsession.  He tells them about his own illness in an effort to stem his rising nerves as the aunt keeps watching the window.  Finally, she leaps up and says “Here they are at last!….Just in time for tea, and don’t they look as if they were muddy up to the eyes!”  But when Mr. Nuttel faces the niece sympathetically, she too is looking out the window with a horrified look on her face.  When he looks out, he does indeed see three figures carrying hunting guns and a little spaniel, and hears a hoarse voice singing “Bertie, why do you bound?”.  “Framton grabbed wildly at his [walking-]stick and hat; the hall-door, the gravel-drive, and the front gate were dimly noted stages in his headlong retreat.  A cyclist coming along the road had to run into the hedge to avoid imminent collision.”  The people converging on the room (all of whom are actually alive) discuss the mystery of his rapid departure, and the aunt says, “A most extraordinary man….could only talk about his illnesses, and dashed off without a word of good-bye or apology when you arrived.  One would think he had seen a ghost.”

The niece, however, is equal to this occasion too, and so is “Saki.”  In the penultimate paragraph of the story, the niece says, “I expect it was the spaniel….he told me he had a horror of dogs.  He was once hunted into a cemetery somewhere on the banks of the Ganges by a pack of pariah dogs, and had to spend the night in a newly dug grave with the creatures snarling and grinning and foaming just above him.  Enough to make anyone lose their nerve.”  As the final line of the story runs, in Saki’s wonderfully condensed tongue-in-cheek explanation:  “Romance at short notice was her speciality.”

Many of Saki’s stories use the combination of the horrific chill and the comic chuckle, but the two above are certainly among the most well-known of them all.  As the Introduction’s writer Noël Coward says of Saki, “Many writers who raise youthful minds to a high pitch of enthusiasm are liable, when re-read in the cold remorseless light of middle age, to lose much of their original magic.  The wit seems laboured and the language old-fashioned.  Saki does not belong to this category.  His stories and novels appear as delightful and…sophisticated…as they did when he first published them.  They are dated only by the fact that they evoke an atmosphere and describe a society which vanished in the baleful summer of 1914.  The Edwardian era…must have been, socially at least, very charming.  It is this evanescent charm that Saki so effortlessly evoked.”  Why not have a glance through some of Saki’s stories and pay a visit to that world of “evanescent charm” for yourself?  All you have to lose is your solemnity.

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December 29, 2012 · 5:20 pm

Marguerite Duras’s “The Lover”–A Book Without Boundaries, Yet Bounded

Marguerite Duras’s August 1984 book The Lover, published in the heyday of deconstructive thought, bears the signs of that thought in the sense that while it operates without boundaries, it yet is bounded by the very system that calls it forth.  It is a paradox, in fact.

The book has no boundaries of time and space, first of all.  The story, which purports to be mainly about the love affair between a girl in her mid-teens and her lover in his late twenties in French colonial Indochina, is broken up into short segments of a page or two to less than a page, and the time and place sequences are confusing in their order, since the story does not proceed from the beginning to the end, or start at the end and go back to the beginning forward, or even proceed in a sequence with various flashbacks, in short in any of the more standard ways in which a story often is told.  Rather, it is mostly all flashback, so to speak, but the flashbacks come in what seems like any old order.  As the main character, the young Lolita-like Caucasian teenage girl with the Chinese lover says near the beginning, “The story of my life doesn’t exist.  Does not exist.  There’s never any center to it.  No path, no line.  There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one.”  This is not only a character speaking of herself and giving some insight into what she is like, however, but an off-the-cuff analysis of how the story itself operates and is written.

Other boundaries which are broken are taboos.  She is Caucasian, he is Chinese, which is a taboo in the French Indochina of the time because even though he is rich and she is poor, she is of higher status than he is.  Her lover is also nearly twice as old as she is.  In several places, she says outright that her elder brother is a fratricidal “hunter” who is responsible for the death of her younger brother (who is two years her senior), though it’s unclear in what exact sense this is true.  Her mother doesn’t love her children all equally, which is often thought of as taboo as well.  The lover uses her as a prostitute, yet even this set of boundaries is not observed, because he loves her and tells her so, and even after many years, at the end of the book when he calls her in Paris, he says he still loves her.

The decadence of the whole book is heralded in the main atmospheric conditions, which also have no boundaries, but saturate the entire “feel” of the book.  The climate of Indochina of the colonial period, with its heat, humidity, conditions of fever and wood-rot and somnolence, is made to stand as the “objective correlative” (to use T. S. Eliot’s term) for the desire which the young girl says she has to die.  Yet at least twice when she communicates this desire to cease to exist, she follows it up with the remark that she wants to write.  It is as if in the writing itself she will somehow cease to exist.

The text as well has no boundaries of narrative perspectives which remain unbroken.  The child tells her own story through much of the book, yet there are also passages such as this one:  “Fifteen and a half.  The news spreads fast in Sadec.  The clothes she wears are enough to show.  The mother has no idea, and none about how to bring up a daughter.  Poor child.  Don’t tell me that hat’s innocent, or the lipstick, it all means something, it’s to attract attention, money.  The brothers are layabouts.  They say it’s a Chinese, the son of the millionaire, the villa in Mekong with the blue tiles.  And even he, instead of thinking himself honored, doesn’t want her for his son.  A family of white layabouts.”  The narrative about the girl and her lover sometimes uses first person from her perspective, but sometimes uses third person, as if the mature writer is intruding into the story and objectifying the experience.  As well, there are two confusing segments near the halfway point in the text where a short history or sketch about an American expatriate living in Paris named Marie-Claude Carpenter and then about two collaborators in the war named Betty and Ramon Fernandez occur.  The history of these three characters is brief and intrudes in the midst of the story of the girl and her lover, and is not otherwise explained.

Perhaps the whole tale may be finally explicated by this one remark in the text, which is said of the mature writer when she is later in Paris:  “[In her lover’s voice] she heard again the voice of China.”  The entire book is thus the tale not solely of a decadent Caucasian family in China, but of their desperate love affair with the country itself in the colonial period.  As the girl says in what seems like only a casual comparison at the time, there is a similarity between having an affair with a person of lower status and colonizing a country–the book is an emotional “history” of that colonization of a rich country and that girl’s affair with a rich man who is still seen by their family and society as inferior to her because he is part of the indigenous population.  Thus, finally, this one boundary is affirmed when the lover, years later, calls her up in Paris:  “Years after the war, after marriages, children, divorces, books, he came to Paris with his wife.  He phoned her.  It’s me.  She recognized him at once from the voice.  He said, I just wanted to hear your voice.  She said, It’s me, hello.  He was nervous, afraid, as before.  His voice suddenly trembled.  And with the trembling, suddenly, she heard again the voice of China.  He knew she’d begun writing books, he’d heard about it through her mother whom he’d met again in Saigon.  And about her younger brother, and he’d been grieved for her.  Then he didn’t know what to say.  And then he told her.  Told her that it was as before, that he still loved her, he could never stop loving her, that he’d love her until death.”

Yes, this one boundary, between the two people, which is not only a barrier but also a line of unity, a union, is reaffirmed, yet in the overturn of the colonial administration, it is also stood on its head.  Only the male character in the end remains the same, and the girl too, perhaps, as she has written herself.

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