Tag Archives: literary topics

September 8, 2012 · 9:00 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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September 5, 2012 · 4:51 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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September 1, 2012 · 10:56 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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September 1, 2012 · 1:56 am

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

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

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

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

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

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August 30, 2012 · 3:05 pm

If you’re going to skin a buffalo or steer, make sure your karma’s good….

Years ago, someone told me a story, a sort of folk tale which is circulated in parts of the West and Southwest, about a naive buffalo hunter who got stuck out in a snow storm on the range.  Though apparently the story is circulated among different groups of people as a tall tale based on fact, it has actually been written down and made into a literary work.  I wish I knew by whom, because several people have been credited with it.  Anyway, in this story the buffalo hunter, stuck out on the range when the storm hits, decides to wrap himself up in what turns out to have been a “green” (uncured) buffalo hide, with the result that he is smothered to death as the hide “shrinks.”  Obviously, he should’ve known the difference between a cured and an uncured hide.

When I first encountered the title of Annie Proulx’s short story “The Half-Skinned Steer” from her collection of stories Close Range, I assumed that it was some version of this story that I was going to read.  But her story, while to some degree lacking the sort of slapstick human element of the other story, is untimately more chilling.  The similarity between the two is not only in the skinning of a buffalo or steer, but in the unity in what’s being done to animals and how they are avenged on humans.  There’s a supernatural element in Proulx’s story, which yet can be explained away by those determined to do so as the natural demise in grief of a plain, boring, and everyday elderly rich man who rides an exercise bike and decides to drive himself across several states in a Cadillac to his brother’s funeral.

Mero, the main character, is contacted by his nephew Tick’s wife with the news that his brother Rollo has died.  This information provokes his decision to travel and causes him to reminisce about the past, and to wonder if his brother ever managed to steal his father’s girlfriend away, a “horsy” woman who evidently appealed to all of them in slightly different ways.  For one thing, she was a natural storyteller: as we are told, “It was her voice that drew you in, that low, twangy voice, wouldn’t matter if she was saying the alphabet, what you heard was the rustle of hay.  She could make you smell the smoke from an unlit fire.”  The message that the storyteller conveys is one about how natural things are avenged on humankind, the interloper; it’s a question of Tennyson’s “nature red in tooth and claw.”  When humanity participates in this earthly menage, it risks being treated itself in the same terms as its victims, even if by apparent “supernatural” influence.

The extent to which Mero’s lack of adjustment to a natural ranch environment is fairly complete is shown by the fact that he is living in city surroundings far away from his original home, exercising on a stationary bike when Tick’s wife calls him to tell him that his brother Rollo has died.  The main fact she tells him about the death is that Rollo has been running his ranch as a sort of Australian theme park, with emus (among other “Down Under” animals) on site; one of the emus has slashed him with its nails “from belly to breakfast,” an event which is thoroughly in line with what will happen later in the story.  It’s obvious from this death that even someone who is more accustomed to ranch life than Mero must still treat his surroundings with constant attention and respect, and one gets the feeling quite early on, from his determination to drive his Cadillac to his brother’s funeral in the midst of winter snowstorm conditions, that Mero has forgotten this very important adjustment.

He is given several warnings by his surroundings that he is not capable to take on this “mission”:  he is stopped while speeding by a policeman, and at first can’t remember what he’s driving for when the policeman asks.  Then, he has a collision and must purchase another car, which though also a Cadillac turns out to be a malfunctioning one.  But he thinks to himself about purchasing yet a third car on his presumed way home, “I can do whatever I want.”  Yet, even when talking to his nephew’s wife on the phone, he himself introduces the element of superstition in thinking:  he’d “never had an accident in his life knock on wood.”  And this superstitious element in the story becomes the correct way to confront the apparently supernatural picture of his downfall, in which the reader is pulled between seeing the story both as a pragmatic account of a man’s lack of forethought and caution, and also as a symbolic reminder of how his early beginnings get their belated revenge on him.

One might say, of course, that he is not concentrating while he drives.  But he is taken up with remembering his early life with his father, his father’s girlfriend the storyteller, and his brother.  The story which she told that is set up as a foil and in counterpoint to the story of his trip is that of “Tin Head,” a rancher who supposedly had “a metal plate in his head from falling down some cement steps.”  Tin Head is one of those archetypal figures from tales to whom odd things happen as a matter of course.  We are encouraged to believe that he made a series of bad decisions due to the plate “eating into his brain.”  This brought bad luck on his ranch therefore, really highly unusual bad luck sometimes, such as the chicks turning blue.  And all the while that Mero is thinking of the story of Tin Head and how he once half-skinned a steer and then left it while he went to supper only to come back and find it gone, he is also thinking of his father’s girlfriend as the only flesh and blood woman he’s ever known.  From the time he was 11 or 12, when according to his memory, he showed an anthropologist some cave paintings and learned that some of them were vulvas, he has thought of all other women as having “the stony structure of female genitalia.”

These three threads of storyline entertwine:  he thinks of himself as a “cattleman gone wrong” who doesn’t like rare steak and who considers he’s been preserving his health with exercising, “nut cutlets, and green leafy vegetables”; he thinks of Tin Head, whose luck turned permanently against him after he came out to the pasture in search of where someone might’ve dragged the half-skinned steer only to find it glaring at him from a far field, its “red eyes” full of hate; and he remembers the storyteller who could tell the story so well, and thinks about her appearance.  The symbolism and imagery of the story work as foreshadowing.  For example, during his trip he wakes up early in a motel room with his “eyes aflame” from lack of sleep.  Everything practical that one knows about safe driving and arrival at a destination goes against his logic, yet in the end, when he is stuck up in a snow drift and has to break a window to get back into his car after a trip out to see if he could perhaps walk (to a nearby ranch whose owner, he finally remembers, would be dead by then), it is the “red eyes” of his taillights winking that signal again just how much trouble he is in.  He all the while is assuring himself that he “might” find his way, or a truck “might” come by, but when he thinks of the “mythical Grand Hotel in the sagebrush,” we know either that he is acknowledging himself to be in desperate straits or that he really is delusional.

At the very end of the tale, the two threads of actual story, the story of Mero’s drive and the story of Tin Head’s bad luck, come together in a final tribute to the girlfriend’s act of storytelling itself:  for Mero notices some cattle in a nearby field, and one of them, whose “red eye” he thinks he sees, is stalking him, keeping up pace for pace.  The last line of the story brings the whole picture stunningly and neatly together, proposing in the “rhetoric of fiction” (Wayne Booth) that stories, however exaggerated, are what our lives come down to, that we are always joining another story which has come down to us “from before” (note the symbolic presence in the story of an anthropologist), and that a person is a fool who thinks that he or she can escape acting a role in some story which began even before he or she was born.

The collection of stories in Close Range is subtitled Wyoming Stories, and is the collection from which “Brokeback Mountain” originally came.  There are many other stories in it which deserve equal attention, but this is my post for today.  Naturally, my skill at retelling the story is not nearly as accomplished as Annie Proulx’s in the original telling, and I hope you will buy the book or check it out from a library, or get it online if it’s available there, and read it for yourself.  I think you’ll agree with me that it is a welcome and accomplished addition to what might be called New Americana.

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August 29, 2012 · 3:43 pm

Life strategies suggested by a poem by Seamus Heaney

Just how often, when you are smarting from some sort of a blow to your pride, equilibrium, feelings, intelligence, or perhaps more life-endangering, your physical person, has some other well-meaning and ultimately interfering soul muttered “Oh, well, we should all learn to turn the other cheek…”?  And usually their remark trails off into an infinity of foolish remarks, because most people do not suffer either fools or bullies or well-meant interference gladly, and you (listening to this from them), however much you are a follower of Scripture or perhaps only an admirer of some of the wisdom there, find other bits of doctrine hard to swallow.

Your hour has come!  Rather, it came back in 1996, when Seamus Heaney told the other side of the “turn the other cheek” story in his poem “Weighing In.”  This poem came to my attention first because it’s one of my brother’s favorites, and I felt compelled to read it and compare it with the man I know and see just what made the poem (and him!) tick.  Before I go any further with this, I should say that my brother is a very erudite and accomplished university teacher, who puts up with a great deal and never complains, or at least he seasons his complaints with the salt of jest, which never grows old.  He never complains about his students to me, of course, because his students don’t ask him computer questions and don’t ask him to design websites the way his sister has until recently.  But according to the poem, I’m not just supposed to say mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa and let it go at that.  I’ll try to give, in my prosaic and ultimately less interesting flow of words, some sense of what Seamus Heaney has to say on this subject in his poem “Weighing In,” which comes from his collection “The Spirit Level” (in Ireland, a spirit level is what we refer to as a “carpenter’s level” in the U. S.  You know, that straight hunk of wood or metal which has a little window full of liquid in the middle of it–when the liquid bubble is exactly in the middle of the window, then the surface you have it placed on is level!).

Heaney begins the poem “Weighing In” by describing another piece of builder’s machinery, a “56 lb. weight.”  He characterizes it as a “solid iron/Unit of negation.”  His main point in the first few stanzas of the poem is that it’s nearly too heavy to lift at all until placed upon a weighbridge (which holds another balancing weight on it).  Then, “everything tremble[s], flow[s] with give and take.”

Having established his governing metaphor thus in the first four stanzas of his poem, he goes on to consider what this imagery means in human terms:

“And this is all the good tidings amount to:/This principle of bearing, bearing up/And bearing out, just having to/Balance the intolerable in others/Against our own, having to abide/Whatever we settled for and settled into/Against our better judgement.  Passive/suffering makes the world go round./Peace on earth, men of good will, all that/Holds good only as long as the balance holds/The scales ride steady and the angels’ strain/Prolongs itself at an unearthly pitch.”

But having enunciated this poetic and sparse and tightly and neatly rhetorical principle in its human terms, Heaney goes on in the next section of the poem to elucidate what the two sides of the balance are in Scriptural terms, the part of the balance we’re familiar with hearing in terms of Christ’s “turning the other cheek” and the less familiar (if in realistic fact more common) command to “refuse the other cheek.”  For Heaney sees the knuckling down to others’ whims and egos as humoring “The obedient one you hurt yourself into,” a question therefore of masochism (though this makes a somewhat more simplistic idea of his intricate and involved picture of the emotional and psychological elements involved).  He suggests that what Christ did in fact when the soldiers were mocking him was to exercise “the power/Of power not exercised, of hope inferred/By the powerless forever.”  Then, he begs the party addressed in the poem, “just this once,” to say who hurt him or her, “give scandal, cast the stone.”

Finally in this mastery of poetical imagery and argument, he brings the poem down even more to the personal level and a specific time (“one night when follow-through was called for”) and apologizes for having withheld retaliation for a remark from his friend which required a swift and presumably angry rejoinder, and says that he thus “lost an edge.”  The last two lines of the poem tell us that this was a “deep mistaken chivalry,” and that “At this stage only foul play cleans the slate.”

This poem is a vital and thorough recognition not only of the struggles we go through in making and holding on to our accomplishments and strengths, but also of the difficulties we encounter in making and holding on to friends.  In relatively small space, the poem links our friends to our innermost habits of response and self:  do we forgive too readily, do we take offense too easily?  Is there a middle ground?  Can “chivalry” be “mistaken,” can we be too gentle with a friend?  And just when does a friend need to hear from us that he or she has gone too far, and not from the point of view of our own concerns only?  The entire question of a fair balance is, after all, what hangs in the balance.

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August 24, 2012 · 9:17 pm

“When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the touch of the one in the play of the many.”–Rabindranath Tagore

In the quote I have added to my post for today, Tagore brings up the issue of the many and the one, and asks that he be always able to see each person as an individual, not just one person lost in a crowd, a sea of possibly opposed faces.  He also suggests that knowing even one person well is an entryway into knowledge of others in general.  This is a very complex statement of quite laudable values, and one which bears upon the book of short fiction by another Indian author, Jhumpa Lahiri, the winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Her book Interpreter of Maladies, the title of which was taken from one of her stories by that title,  not only won the Pulitzer Prize, but was also a Pen/Hemingway Award winner and was selected by the New Yorker as a “Debut of the Year.”  The most intriguing thing about the relationship between the author and her book is in fact the degree to which she herself is an “interpreter of maladies,” the maladies of alienation and separation visited upon people either moving from one continent to another or from one state of being to another.  In each of her nine stories, whether they are stories of families travelling between India and the U. S. for love or work or recreation or whether they are portraits of unique and unusual loves and characters, she traverses the boundaries, both those which keep her characters separate and those which, being overcome, unite them more firmly to each other.  And as she does so, her characters and their dilemmas, however firmly they may be rooted in cultures which don’t understand each other intuitively, become the objects of a further development of intuition.  Just as Tagore says, understanding one person’s motives and concerns, even if they are very different from yours, and though the understanding may be hard won and have developed from a totally alien perspective, shakes one’s faith in the notion of alienation and causes readers to extend their minds to the faiths and concerns of others.  Suddenly, one can imagine the person as being like oneself after all; one can at least understand.

From the first story, “A Temporary Matter,” in which a young couple deals with the conditions of having been deprived of their child, the subject of alienation is strong.  In order to overcome the separation which has been occasioned by their mutual grief, they begin to confide in each other about things they’ve never before told.  Their reconciliation is made bittersweet by the recognition that they have perhaps never really known the other person fully.

“When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,” the second story, shows an Indian family joining forces in their support of a man from Dacca, a Pakistani (before Bangladesh became separate) who has some different traditions from themselves.  The story is told from the point of view of the young daughter of the house, for whom Mr. Pirzada brings treats every evening, missing as he does his own seven daughters.  He nervously watches the news on their television in a town near Boston, since he is unable to be with his own family in Dacca.  The manner in which the American society around them isolates the newcomer with his own hard luck is portrayed by a scene in which the young daughter is prevented by a teacher from following up on her interest in the geography and history of the region Mr. Pirzada is from.  The family must wait with Mr. Pirzada to find out if his family survived the conflict or not.  The ending is reported obliquely, not only by the news broadcasts the family continues to watch on their television set, but also by the letters Mr. Pirzada writes them after he leaves Boston to return to Dacca.  Clearly, it is up to neighbors to act locally in order to overcome cultural blindnesses.

In “Interpreter of Maladies,” Mr. Das and his wife, who were raised in the States and who are visiting India and various tourist sites there for the first time, rely on their guide, Mr. Kapasi, to show them around and inform them of local traditions.  Mrs. Das, however, upon finding out that Mr. Kapasi works for a doctor as a language interpreter, assumes incorrectly that he is a sort of psychologist who can help her with her problems.  Mr. Kapasi, meanwhile, has been misunderstanding Mrs. Das to mean that she wants to be special friends.  Gradually, though Mrs. Das has a rude awakening in discovering her error, Mr. Kapasi’s cover of polite and correct behavior aids him in preserving his equilibrium and delivering the family from a crisis which has arisen due to their own inability to adjust to their environment.  It is Mr. Kapasi in this case who has the epiphany, or perhaps the moment of wisdom, when he realizes just how the Dases see him:  for they are people who are estranged from the land of their origins, and are rather ordinary “ugly American” tourists.  Thus, he has correctly deduced their malady.

“A Real Durwan” is a tragic sort of story to which even someone unfamiliar with the idea of what a “durwan” is (a sort of underprivileged charperson) can relate.  It takes place in an Indian setting, where Boori Ma, the staircase sweeper and door guard of an apartment building, each day chants up and down the stairwells as she sweeps the tale of where she used to live (a much better place) and the life she used to live (how grand), and though the other residents of the building where she sleeps in an old quilt under the mailboxes don’t entirely believe her, until the landlord moves, they all treat her with a guarded respect.  The sad outcome is derived, ironically, from a promise the landlord makes to get her better sleeping arrangements, perhaps because it leads Boori Ma to “count her chickens before they’e hatched.”  Her friend the landlord forgets, with unfortunate consequences for Boori Ma, because the building has recently had a facelift and the other residents have become prideful, just as they blame Boori Ma for having been all her years there.  Was she telling the truth all that time, or only fabricating?  The ending doesn’t resolve this issue; it only portrays how the Wheel of Fortune can betray any one of us at any moment who is without friends.

In “Sexy,” a seasonal story if ever there was one, a young woman, Miranda, who is having a love affair with a married Indian man, learns the difference between seasonal and perpetual.  The story features a background plot of another love affair with a married person:  Miranda’s friend Laxmi also has a cousin who now knows that she’s being cheated on by her husband, a frequent traveller on airplanes between Delhi and Montreal.  Instead of coming home to the cousin in the Boston area, that husband has picked up with a younger woman he met on a flight.  The story in the background acts as a foil for Miranda’s relationship; besotted as she is with Dev, her own married man, the words of a young boy she’s babysitting for, who tells her she’s sexy just as Dev did previously, awaken her to what is actually happening.  She plans what to tell Dev, but the change of seasons, a sort of fate, articulates her points for her, in a fine and neatly handled end to the story.

The next piece of fiction, “Mrs. Sen’s,” tells the story of a friendship between a young boy, Eliot, and the Indian woman, Mrs. Sen, who babysits for him.  As Eliot watches Mrs. Sen chop vegetables and deal with her various fears and insecurities about living in a new community outside of Boston (where her husband teaches mathematics), he begins to understand something about her points of reference.  For one, she previously had a chauffeur, and now Mr. Sen is insisting that she learn to drive.  She is worried by the fact that she feels alone and isolated in the building where she lives, too far away for other people to hear her if she screams.  When she encounters further difficulty with the driving, it is in fact Eliot who hears her crying in the bathroom as Mr. Sen apologizes to Eliot’s mother for having involved him in an accident.  Eliot hears her, and has thus understood something about her fear and her difficulties.  And with this, he has gone through a learning experience of his own.

“This Blessed House” is a deceptively simple story about the nature of tolerance and belief.  When Twinkle and Sanjeev begin to find Christian ornaments hidden in every nook and cranny of their new home, Twinkle celebrates them, though she is a Hindu, by putting them all up on the mantel.  The objects by and large have no real artistic value, they are obviously the result of a sincere and devout observance, however one without much taste.  But as everything continues to go well for the young couple, Twinkle insists on retaining the objects, which costs Sanjeev something severe in the way of his ability to tolerate them.  It’s not, in fact that Twinkle is changing her religion:  she seems simply to regard the objects as good luck charms, and despite Sanjeev’s embarrassment when they have friends over, the couple’s lucky popularity is clearly a result of Twinkle’s open and receptive personality.  It becomes clear by the end of the story that despite disdaining Twinkle’s good luck charms themselves, Sanjeev cannot resist the charm of Twinkle herself.  He has a dark moment of the soul, as it’s called, when he realizes just what this will entail.

When we first begin the story “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar,” we have to wonder ourselves just what is wrong with Bibi.  From the description of the many different kinds of medical treatment and advice she has received, not all of them equally reputable, we have to ask if perhaps she is an unacknowledged hysteric, or perhaps if she suffers an unknown form of epilepsy.  Her fits are looked upon with sympathy by her friends and neighbors, which she has in spite of being closely quarantined by her family.  It’s only when Bibi’s own preferred solution and a chance event that it turns out no one can trace coincide that she finds herself an ordinary member of society.  This story seems to suggest that ordinary human interaction and good-heartedness can guide people to accept what seems at first like a totally anomalous situation, something which comes about without the sanction of restrictions and family rule.  Bibi is after all human, not a demon as her cousin’s wife, with whom she lives on and off, sees it; people may be demonized by someone around them, it is clear, but there are equally those prepared to accept what they don’t understand.

Finally, in “The Third and Final Continent” the book ends with a sort of summary story about the way in which a person originally difficult to understand in their ideas and motives can come to symbolize something precious for someone from an entirely different society.  A young Indian man leaves his home in 1964 to go to Boston and study, and to work in the MIT library system.  While there, he is at first situated in a YMCA, but soon moves to another room in a private house for the summer before his wife can come over from India to join him.  He meets a real eccentric in the owner of the house, Mrs. Croft.  At first, it takes some real practice of patience and conscious good will on his part to meet her halfway.  Soon, however, he meets her daughter and learns things about her that cause him to feel a genuine empathy for her.  Later, when he moves into another house with his wife, he still thinks of Mrs. Croft as an essential part of his establishing himself in America, and goes to see her.  The results of his interest in her affect the rest of his life, and become a watchword for his family as well.  As the story concludes in the character’s voice at the end, “….[T]here are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept.  As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”  Luckily for us, we have Jhumpa Lahiri’s work of imagination to fall back on, so that if such things are beyond us for the time being, we can always find a translator, in fact an “interpreter” of our “maladies.”

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August 20, 2012 · 7:19 pm

“What beck’ning ghost, along the moonlight shade/Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?”–Alexander Pope

There is a corollary to the proposition that there’s more rejoicing over the return of a prodigal son than there is over the continuing excellence of a constant one; that corollary is that it’s worse when a potentially good man goes bad than it is when a bad man continues what he’s doing.  In Kingsley Amis’s book The Green Man, we get a double reflection of this second notion, when we not only meet up with a modern day man of relaxed moral fiber, but also with the ghost of a minister turned evil revenant who confronts him.

In an English tradition descended from the ancient fear of nature and natural forces–for our worship of nature is an entirely different tradition, though equally ancient, which even so recognizes the power of the earth–the “green man” is a sort of roving spirit, sometimes neither good nor ill, sometimes outright malevolent, and sometimes given to testing mankind, as in the medieval tale “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” which many of you will already have read and I hope enjoyed in a literature class.  In Amis’s book, the man of easy morals is an innkeeper named Maurice Allington, who is situated with his wife, father, and daughter in an old inn in Hertsfordshire, England.  Though the elemental force is so strong that there’s almost no bargaining with it, Maurice learns from the evil spectre of the minister’s ghost and a mysterious young man, and makes some sacrifices on his way to learning what evil and good may actually be about.

The book relies on a combination of fear and hilarity, the deep-seated source of a certain intensified response from the reader in both directions.  The book is not unlike other chilling literary/stage/movie experiences I can think of:  for example, the 70’s stage show “Dracula,” with its equally hysteria-inducing combination of the two otherwise opposed tendencies.  We alternately thrill with horror and gasp, then laugh out loud.  A movie experience utilizing this same formula was “An American Werewolf in London,” which used the by now reliable combination of slapstick, horror, satire, and cultural and occult lore that Amis’s book uses.  But Amis’s book preceded these dramatic offerings in time; it was first published in 1969, though also published in the U.S. by an American publisher in 1986.

So, just what are Maurice Allington’s problems?  Firstly, he is dissatisfied with his marriage to his wife, Joyce, and wants to bed the lovely Diana, wife of his best friend, the doctor Jack Maybury.  His father, who is not in the best of health, lives with his family and Maurice is unsettled by him, too.  He also has a massive drinking problem, as his concerned family members and friends constantly remind him.  And he has to decide if it’s his drinking which is causing the most unusual of his problems:  that is, he sees spirits.  He sees spirits and experiences psychic phenomena far beyond the limit of the simple antique ghost tale which is retailed by him to his customers at the inn to pique their interest.  Of course the book deliberately, artfully, and effectively leaves it unclear for the most part as to whether these are genuine manifestations, a result of the door between worlds suddenly being opened, or whether Maurice is actually becoming mentally unhinged and debilitated by the liquor and his own lack of balance alone.  The only being who seems to confirm the sightings he himself experiences is the cat, Victor, who in the time-honored tradition of cats with psychic abilities arches his back, hisses and spits, or runs out of the room and hides when the ghosts come to visit.

Maurice sees not only the sinful and spirit-summoning minister from the past, but also what turns out to have been the minister’s (Underhill’s) wife; an incarnation of a young man who acts something like a modern version of Christ but something more like a modern version of Satan; an apparent manifestation of a twittering bird which makes him wonder if he has delirium tremens; and a large clump of walking devastation of foliage which reads like one of J. R. R. Tolkien’s ents on steroids:  this last is the so-called “green man.”

The dapper young man without a name helps orient Maurice to the experiences he’s undergoing, though the orientation isn’t one conducive to dwelling safely and well in this world.  Others try to help him recoup his losses, such as his doctor friend Jack Maybury, whose wife Maurice is trying to bed on the sly.  His own wife, Joyce, and his son Nick and Nick’s girlfriend are all equally concerned, and are trying in their various ways to help Maurice come to terms with what they mostly regard as a fiction of his overwrought imagination.  His young daughter Amy is in danger of becoming a pawn in the game he is playing with his otherworldly experiences and foes.  Finally, he has trouble keeping track of the time, time having no meaning when he’s conversing with the elegant young man, because his watch and clocks no longer aid him in determining how time is passing when they are speaking to one another.  Worst of all, perhaps, is his difficulty in coordinating daily reality with the supernatural things which are happening to him (in his head?).

For Henry James readers who have encountered some of the criticism written about James’s story “The Turn of the Screw,” this double-barrelled treatment of suspicious happenings, when a character is proclaimed by different critics to be 1) suffering under a real visitation from the other world or 2) suffering from an overactive imagination, a drinking problem, a psychological disorder, et cetera, will be familiar.  James is in fact mentioned in The Green Man.  And though I’m not going to reveal the ending of the book (with its unexpected romantic alliance), I can safely tell you without ruining the reading experience that even up to the very end the suspenseful questions of exactly what happened remain.  After all, part of the time we may be in the mind of a crazy drunk (or is he in legitimate danger of losing his soul?  Or has he squeaked “out from under” losing his soul?).  This is a book well worth the occasional difficulty with theological terminology and concepts; in fact, it is a book that I think Henry James himself would’ve been proud, in our time, to have written.

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August 19, 2012 · 8:53 pm

“The school of hard knocks is an accelerated curriculum.”–Menander

In Gertrude Stein:  A Biography of Her Work, the scholar/critic Donald Sutherland says, “Gertrude Stein uses the simplest possible words, the common words used by everybody, and a version of the most popular phrasing, to express the most complicated thing….[S]he uses repetition and dislocation to make the word bear all the meaning it has….one has to give her work word by word the deliberate attention one gives to something written in italics.”  This is certainly true of one of her early works, a collection of three stories called Three Lives, which is much more readable than her later more experimental works.  Still, even with this early work, the “repetitions and dislocations” of language would confuse an inexperienced, simple reader who was reading mainly for the story and who was also launching a fledgling attempt to get a sense of the English written language.  This would be true even were the reader going only for the story of the characters’ emotions and nothing else.

Thus it is that though I have routinely read very challenging poetry and prose both, I have no enthusiasm for the works of Gertrude Stein in general, except to view them as experiments, perhaps necessary stages the written English language had to go through (or perhaps “confront” is the correct word) in order to be renovated.  Something similar could be said of the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet in terms at least of what they have contributed in English translation:  they are amazingly like each other, and seem all to go about language developments in the same way.  Yet they were at the time they were written part of a focus to objectify the narrative voice or experiment with it in a way which was begun but not finished by people like Ernest Hemingway.  Still, Hemingway is readable, whereas often Gertrude Stein is simply difficult, mainly meant for people who like romans à clef, word puzzles, and guessing games.  One way around this difficulty with Stein, if you are determined to read things she has written other than Three Lives, is to look over a copy of editor Renate Stendhal’s biography in captions, short quotes, and pictures entitled Gertrude Stein:  In Words and Pictures, a thick photographic history of Stein’s life which enables the reader to see better the things and people Stein was referring to in her novels and poetry, and to get a better sense of the time in which she lived.  I looked at that, but I also read Three Lives, mainly because it was the one thing of hers I felt I could read well from start to finish.  Here’s what I found and what I feel I can honestly offer about the collection of stories:

The stories are three sobering portraits of three different women’s lives in America in the early 1900’s.  The first woman, who is the main character of “The Good Anna,” Anna Federner, is “of solid lower middle-class german stock” (the lower-case “g” in german is as Stein uses it throughout the book).  The entire story is concerned with incidents relating to Anna’s employers’ lives (she is a sort of housekeeper and a general factotum), her dogs’ lives, and her conflicts with the scheming and lack of generosity she sometimes encounters.  For, she is good to others; it is not just a title, it is her title, this is the source of what she is, some short-sighted errors aside.  She comes to a dismal but quite ordinary end and the story ends simultaneously.

“Melanctha,” the second story, while different from the first story in that it speaks of a young African American woman and her intrigues and relationships with men and with women, ends similarly.  Though more enigmatic in nature and more amoral, just as the prose about her is more enigmatic in its starkly expressed picture, without narrative sympathy or reserve, Melanctha too comes to a bad end, but without having noticeably distinguished herself by unmotivated kindness to others, as the first character, the “good” Anna did.  There is also a certain amount of dated treatment of black people’s issues in the book, for all that it is Gertrude Stein writing, and for all that she was in sympathy herself with the African American struggle for rights in her own time.

In the third story, “The Gentle Lena,” the shortest of the three stories, Lena is described as “patient, gentle, sweet and german.”  She too starts out life as a servant, brought over to the U. S. to serve.  Though her life is called “peaceful” by the narrative voice, her fellow nursemaids tease her, apparently because she is not intelligent or quick-witted and will believe anything they tell her.  Her basic incomprehension of what is going on around her is shown quite clearly in Stein’s recording style:  it isn’t a language barrier problem, because it persists even when she is with other German people.  For example, we are told that Lena did not enjoy her life in Germany, but that she herself is unaware of this.  Stein quite simply tells us why, with no preamble or laborious psychologizing to indicate special insight (and this is true though Stein herself was a gifted student of the American psychologist William James before she went to live in France).  Lena’s life only slightly improves materially when she gets married and has her husband’s three children, and it improves not at all emotionally, for after going into what used to be termed “a decline,” she too dies, with no moral to the story, in true Steinian fashion.

What can be said about these three lives?  First of all, that they are simply that:  three lives, varied in some specifics, but each of them ending where we all end.  Yet, they do so without the least fanfare or blare of symbolism, imagery, or obvious rhetoric.  And that they are no better, or happier, or more rewarded with heroic status is the point I believe we are meant to take away.  Since they are all three women, this can possibly be interpreted to be a feminist moral if one is so inclined, yet Stein doesn’t assign any moral at all.  The final point is perhaps that there are so many unremarkable lives, which so many of us live, and that we are lucky even to be as well-remembered as these characters are, either by the other “characters” in our lives or by writers like Stein.

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August 17, 2012 · 2:26 pm

“An evil mind is a constant solace.”–Unknown

Have you ever watched an anti-hero, whom you know to be an anti-hero if not an outright villain, get away with murder in a novel, and find yourself hoping that he will continue to do so for the pure (or not so pure) comic pleasure it gives you to see him go from incident to incident, triumphant but flawed?  And of course, because he is so flawed you can laugh at him freely, and not invest real sympathy in his travails the way you would for a noble hero or heroine.  In this case, the reader himself or herself becomes a receptacle of a certain sort of selfishness in allowing such sympathy to exist:  that is, while you don’t give the character any true respect or empathy, you can still enjoy the course of his actions and, if and when he meets his inevitable nemesis, have nothing to mourn for except perhaps in having to stop following an enjoyable read.  It is in this sense alone that the reader imitates sympathetically the character Michael Beard’s “evil mind,” a “constant solace” to Beard and one unknown to the other characters, whose misunderstandings of his actions are all fairly humorous.

Michael Beard is the anti-hero of Ian McEwan’s 2010 book Solar, and a literal murder is exactly what it looks like he will get away with, though his tribulations mount up in a very funny way as if he is being punished by fate.  Beard, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist past his prime, is making a living through public speaking engagements, through a remote sort of participation in some corporations as an advisor, and lackadaisically through working along with a government project on global warming.  On the home front, Beard has freed himself time after time from his entanglements with women, until he one day wakes up to the fact that his latest wife has in fact turned the tables on him in this regard.  With murder in his heart Beard approaches the situation, only to be relieved of responsibility through a bizarre accident, for which the wrong man is later blamed and arrested.

It would appear through most of the novel that Beard has what is known as “the devil’s own luck”; all he has to do is resent someone or something, and bad things happen, but not to him.  And to counterpoint his involvement with the “dark side,” Beard has the satirical version of “the mark of the beast” on him, a melanoma on his hand that, were he sincerely concerned with solar problems and global warming and its after-effects, would have been dealt with safely.  Yet, he is also a figure of fun, just as the devil(s) in medieval morality plays often were:  for example, when Beard participates in a polar expedition to view a glacier, he makes a hilarious mistake.  Badly needing to pee while he is out on the iceberg on a snowmobile, Beard makes his typical error of being badly adjusted to his circumstances on earth by peeing in a sub-zero temperature, with comically disastrous results.  For as the saying goes among men, “it’s cold enough to freeze your pecker off.”

A more serious challenge to the comic devil known as Beard is the fact that he takes little care of his health in general and is obviously living on borrowed time, not only because of the events due to his bad actions, which are snowballing behind him, but due also to a mounting stress and heart condition resulting from the fact that he is monumentally selfish, even to himself.

The one love of Beard’s life is his little daughter, Catriona, who stands alone as a challenge to all that Beard is and has done wrongly.  Will Beard free himself from a life-long habit of cynicism and casual indifference to the rights of others, or will he get his just deserts just when he is close to redemption?  To some extent, the reader must figure this out.  One thing is certain:  Solar is a wonderful satirical masterpiece, and Beard is the traditional “satyr” at its center.

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