On July 4th 2008 at an annual gathering at a Michigan lakeside one young man drew substantial attention from family and friends alike. The fresh 19-year-old Marine had just completed boot camp at Parris Island. He was enjoying a few days of leave before undergoing desert training at Twentynine Palms, followed by deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan.
Over burgers and franks, the centathlete probed about Parris Island (naturally envisioning scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film, Full Metal Jacket). The comments were brief, due to the respondent’s laconic personality, and concentrated on one aspect: the rigorousness of the physical training.
While playing cornhole toss on the lawn, the grunt removed his shirt and revealed his new black ink: the initials “USMC” tattooed boldly and gothically between his scapulae. This art was not discussed that weekend, nor was the military’s changed policy toward its members’ tattoos, which are plentiful. But the ink bespoke the newfound pride and identity of a man not six months in the Corps yet willfully marked by it for life.
This is the pride of Prewitt, Warden and the soldiers of the 1951 novel, From Here to Eternity. The author James Jones had been a 20-year-old, frightened participant in Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Guadalcanal. He went on to co-found the Handy Writer’s Colony in his home state of Illinois (where men were evidently encouraged to wear diapers). He lived in Paris, among other places, and spent his last years in the Hamptons on Long Island. At the time of this writing you can buy his home for less than $9 million. Who’s in?
From Here to Eternity is mighty and lush, like much of its setting, Hawaii. The centathlete has had the great fortune three times to visit, not as a G.I. like Jones but as a pleasure-seeking haole and a conventioneer. Several months after his first trip, to Kauai in 1992, the island was devastated by Hurricane Iniki, the “third most damaging hurricane in U.S.” history, according to Dr. George P.C. On his second trip he tramped in Maui’s Haleakala crater, which amazingly resembles Mars, and watched weather being born.
During his last visit, to the Big Island, the youngest of the islands, he and two buddies took a day trip to the magnificent Waipi’o Valley (it looks Jurassic though it is 145 million years too young), which can be uplifting and also menacing. The black sand beach and brilliant white cataracts dazzle. The surf invites but proves overpowering. Driving very slowly into the valley brings wild horses begging for food at the window.
The trio passed a few shanties established in the tangle. One scraggly proprietor looked out from his porch and said, “Hey, that’s my car.” The meaning was clear; he was going to repossess it, even if it was a rental. The rolling tour accelerated only modestly as per the tropically treacherous muddy road. Tension announced itself inside and hung around, abating only when the porch turned out to be vacant on the return, and ultimately dissipating as the events were rehashed that night at a luau by the Mauna Kea Resort…
Prewitt, Jones’s honorable soldier hero, experiences ecstasy and terror a thousand fold beyond the sensations of a vagrant tourist. While in solitary confinement after appalling torture, Prewitt falls into a trance and sees a “jism cord” connecting his two selves and revealing the profound relatedness of the past and present, the personal and the social. The hallucination is provocative and apt output in a book coursing with hormones. “Jism,” according to the O.E.D., was first used in 1842 to describe horse semen and energy.
A contemporary artist, Matthew Barney, builds on similar imagery to evoke and complicate notions of identity, connectivity and virility. In his “Cremaster 2” movie, Gary Gilmore is “parked in a shiny Mustang that is seamlessly connected to another Mustang by a tunnel linking the two cars. Seen sitting inside the tunnel, Gilmore (played by Matthew Barney) pulls and pushes at the Vaselined interior that appears in all of the “Cremaster” films,” as summarized in Art: 21.
When asked about his choice of material, Barney said, “I’ve always thought of the way that Vaseline worked as a transitional element in moments of friction between two objects.” Barney’s vision is decidedly more developed than Prewitt’s, but the hypersexual context of his Cremaster cycle and its gelatinous sculpture lets us appreciate the private’s epiphany all the more.
The primacy of hormones and sexuality throughout From Here to Eternity affirms the novel’s thematic fecundity, a quality most notable when contrasted to the 1953 movie adaptation, directed by Fred Zinneman. At the time the aggressive censorship of the HUAC era, combined with Hollywood commercialism, prevented cinema that was “faithful" to its source. The filmmakers omitted so much of Jones’s “racy” plot lines that their trash heap could have created discrete, dynamic dramas with the respective subject matter of Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Bernard Malamud, Upton Sinclair and Henri Charrière.
Jones didn’t appreciate Hollywood’s redactions of his novels (The Thin Red Line was first adapted in 1964). His novelist daughter Kaylie stated, “He thought that they were not true to the books. With From Here to Eternity, they had to change many things at the time because of the censorship.” She added in the same interview that years later he saw the film again and changed his mind.
After Prewitt is imprisoned he is gravely knifed in the side (you don’t have to read the gospels to catch that symbolism) and finally shot. He dies in a sand trap on the golf course of the Waialae Country Club, today the “premier country club in Oahu” and home to The Sony Open on the PGA Tour. The scene is realistic, as “numerous military defenses had been installed along Oahu's coastline including the golf course,” and the setting of privilege and recreation underscores the pointlessness of the private’s demise.
A caddie for 10 years and a bogey-golfer-on-a-good-day for many more, the centathlete has walked nearly 2,000 rounds in his days and seen some things, even stepped in a hive of yellow jackets while wearing shorts, but he has not witnessed death (though his father was struck by lightning while exiting his cart onto a fairway and miraculously escaped unharmed). No, the centathlete’s most memorable golfing experience, more than 25 years ago, involved the near-dispatch of a bird.
Canada geese are attracted to golf courses with water, crapping multitudinously, to the unmitigated consternation of players and groundskeepers. At Crab Meadow Golf Course on the Long Island Sound, the centathlete was engaged in a high school match. His opponent was teeing off, when a goose waddled directly in front of him at the worst moment. The drive struck the bird in the neck and the goose collapsed, wings outstretched on the grass.
Instantly every goose for at least a half-mile—there were hundreds—stood still and silent. Flock consciousness had transmitted the alert; the victim had not made a sound when it went down. The four humans shared a few uneasy seconds, wondering if there would be Hitchcockian revenge by beak. Fortunately the goose arose and walked away tentatively, its head wobbling significantly on its wounded neck, and the rest of the birds resumed their activities.
Humans lack such a collective nervous system and quasi-telepathic alarm mechanism, but armed forces throughout history have sought to instill their approximation. One U.S. Marine Corps Captain discussed the necessity of speedy groupthink during Basic Training:
“Over time, a recruit learns to obey orders without hesitation, and it is this Pavlovian response that allows us to be successful in battle. Decisions are made quickly, and orders are carried out without question.”
Prewitt was not incapable of such obedience; he was a fine soldier. It was his balking at a corrupt, cannibalistic system that made him unfit. The novel tracks the rotten values to Captain Dynamite Holmes and further up the chain of command, condemning an entire institution that in Jones’s eyes had removed honor and sound moral justification from its foundation. Indeed, Holmes is ultimately promoted. The film does not partake in Jones’s grand indictment. Instead it portrays Holmes as a delinquent rogue, pins all the blame on him, and then punishes him at the hands of a righteous military tribunal.
The centathlete’s immediate reaction when watching the movie was utter bafflement at the miscalculated choice of black-and-white. Any native of or visitor to the Rainbow State of Hawaii will undoubtedly be struck by its vibrant colors, which are inseparable from the islands. At least one reviewer agreed:
“…the film is hurt by the use of black-and-white photography. Use of colour, together with more shots of the Hawaii countryside, would have provided effective contrast between heaven outside setting and hell inside movie's troubled protagonists.”
In support of the aesthetic of Zinneman and company, their movie, according to imdb.com, inspired an aloha-shirt trend. The centathlete, ever the mellow weekend warrior, endorses the superb craftsmanship of Tori Richard, as the company’s apparel is appropriate “anywhere in the world where the resort lifestyle can be embraced.”
Zinneman and company, after taking a machete to Jones’s lush tangled narrative, further distanced themselves from the text through casting. In true Hollywood tradition, Montgomery Clift and Oscar winners Frank Sinatra and Donna Reed were more than 10 years older than the literary personages they portrayed. They were also too pretty and polished (and the men’s lollipop physiques make them appear as starving actors rather than hard soldiers). That said, Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr, with admirable muscles and curves, playing characters true to their actual ages, actually convey the heat of the book.
Kerr’s voracious stare is exquisite. The Scottish actress, who was married during filming to an RAF squadron leader, discussed her preparation for the role: “For Karen Holmes…I studied voice for three months to get rid of my English accent. I changed my hair to blonde. I knew I could be sexy if I had to.” Mission accomplished. One could argue that the theme of this Pearl Harbor classic could be Hubba! Hubba! Hubba! instead of Tora! Tora! Tora!
With her blonde hair and good social standing, Kerr's Karen opposed Reed’s Alma, a raven-haired hostess/hooker with a heart of gold and the unlikely refined posture of a debutante. The inseparable light-dark hair-pair recurs throughout Pop History; its foremost incarnation is Betty and Veronica. During Crab Meadow days there was on MTV the blonde/brunette duo of Susan Ann Sulley and Joanne Catherall, the fetching but atrocious backing singers of The Human League, in “Don’t You Want Me Baby” and “(Keep Feeling) Fascination.”
Prewitt is a far cry from Sulley and Catherall—he is an expert musician. In addition, his gift with the bugle is natural, not consistently honed. The movie, through Clift, showcases his melodramatic rendition of Taps, and shows him “jamming” with only his mouthpiece on “The Re-Enlistment Blues” with real-life guitar hero Merle Travis. A Kentuckian born into poverty like Prewitt, Travis achieved musical success which was compromised by bad behavior similar to that of Jones’s dog soldiers, according to CMT.com:
“Travis also became known as a wildman, especially when he drank. He was arrested more than once for public intoxication and drunk driving—on his motorcycle—and in 1956 there was a highly publicized report of police surrounding his home after he assaulted his wife.”
James Jones wrote the original lyrics of “The Re-Enlistment Blues” and featured them throughout his book. Travis’s completed version is available on amazon.com and iTunes. The centathlete has listened to it many times on account of envy: he wrote a novel (unpublished) and inserted lyrics for a blues song in the hope that the next Taj Mahal or Stevie Ray Vaughan will someday write the tune and play it. Little Taj or Stevie, if you’re out there, check out “There’s No Reason (For These Blues).”
The centathlete finds Travis’s guitar playing enjoyable and the singing uninspired and disruptive. Travis as a vocalist repeatedly breaks a rule a Long Island music teacher once imparted: “when you play the blues, never come in early; late is OK, but don’t come in early.”
Moreover, although it likely wasn’t his decision, Travis altered the lyrics, making them more palatable for a general audience. He even omitted the verse for “Friday,” in a song that runs through each day of the week, a grievous error.
Speaking of the calendar… was it Groundhog Day? No, it was July 4th 2009 back at the Michigan lake and the centathlete again encountered the Marine, now 20, at the annual barbeque. The young man, more confident in his bearing, more tattooed (both arms), and still laconic, played cornhole toss more ably and determinedly. He spun the beanbag in the air for a softer landing because he wanted to win and was determined to do so.
He was recently returned from Afghanistan. “Was it fun?” the centathlete asked affably, not knowing how to broach the subject. “No,” answered the young man politely and firmly. It was established elsewhere that four men in his unit were killed; one of them took a fatal bullet while standing right next to the Marine. He had been stationed in the hot zone of Now Zad and was changed unquestionably by combat. Since then he has gone for more desert and mountain training, to become a leader during his next overseas tour. He is not yet inclined to sing the blues.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Friday, July 31, 2009
A short piece inspired by the work of James Thurber during the running of the centathlon
The Reinstatement of the Heat
I can’t definitively state whether B. announced himself as an attorney before or after he uttered the Three Disparagements. I suspect it was before, but this is based on my interactions over the years with members of the bar, typically wining and dining in Manhattan (in fact B. was seated next to me at a group dinner at a Spanish restaurant where the emptied sangria pitchers crowded the chorizos and flambéed mushrooms to the rim of the table) during which introductions emphasized occupations. I am not a lawyer but B. was and I presume still is—and let me clarify that my socializing in Gotham was certainly not glamorous, though the men such as myself were often calculatedly unshaven and the women wore vintage jewelry delightfully crafted by themselves. In any case, it seems to me at this writing that when the Three Disparagements were issued, it had been established that B. represented the needy in criminal cases. He worked at an organization similar to Legal Aid, an organization of employees formidably underpaid and engaged for long, satisfying years in an honorable Calling rather than a traditionally lucrative Career.
I can’t definitively state whether B. announced himself as an attorney before or after he uttered the Three Disparagements. I suspect it was before, but this is based on my interactions over the years with members of the bar, typically wining and dining in Manhattan (in fact B. was seated next to me at a group dinner at a Spanish restaurant where the emptied sangria pitchers crowded the chorizos and flambéed mushrooms to the rim of the table) during which introductions emphasized occupations. I am not a lawyer but B. was and I presume still is—and let me clarify that my socializing in Gotham was certainly not glamorous, though the men such as myself were often calculatedly unshaven and the women wore vintage jewelry delightfully crafted by themselves. In any case, it seems to me at this writing that when the Three Disparagements were issued, it had been established that B. represented the needy in criminal cases. He worked at an organization similar to Legal Aid, an organization of employees formidably underpaid and engaged for long, satisfying years in an honorable Calling rather than a traditionally lucrative Career.
B. presented as a good-natured soul. He may have told me about an aspiring gangster who fled the police in his mother’s houseboat at five knots under the Throgs Neck Bridge. Maybe he had mentioned another client, a thoughtful burglar, who brought croissants and baguettes twelve consecutive days for the office—aromatic fare that was both délicieux but, it turned out, unsurprisingly, volé. I can’t imagine how such tales would have come to my attention apart from B., as the other attorneys I befriended in his field offered grimmer and more sordid portraits in accordance with their trial work and personalities. B.’s stories likely preheated my disposition and facilitated the warmth I felt toward him, and continued to feel toward him even as he told me—it was a personal address, not an announcement to those across the horde of pitchers—that he had graduated from the law school of the University of Michigan, passionately supported the Wolverines, and held three collegiate squads in the utmost contempt and wished them failure and ignominy for all time: Ohio State Football, Notre Dame Football and Duke Basketball. B. elaborated in the same breath that these teams, as well as their adherents, respectively embodied Ignorance, Parochialism and Arrogance (I may have gotten the order wrong, but I don’t think so).
The sangria, while improving my heart health, no doubt contributed to the ease with which I sloughed off the Three Disparagements. I wasn’t insulted; I respect and admire bile when it is projected without premeditation up from the craw, especially when it spews from an otherwise happy camper like B. I smiled and responded that I am a Duke alumnus; my brother graduated from Notre Dame, where in 1988 I stood next to him as a member of the faithful throng in attendance at the glorious Catholics v. Convicts game; and my wife is a native of Columbus, and she and her extended family love their Buckeyes to a degree a greater than which cannot be conceived.
Naturally, my wife and I watch all Ohio State football games and contribute modestly to the spike of cell phone activity around and even during such events. When we visit from the East Coast during the holidays, we partake in the colloquies concerning things athletic, scarlet and gray. Married to the Midwestern mob, so to speak, I have been given my own Tresselian sweater vest and Woody Hayes bobblehead. This collection falls far short of the wardrobes and shrines of the natives, and my interest in the Buckeyes, despite my best efforts, pales next to theirs because it is not congenital.
Shortly after the most recent, successful installment of The Game, earning Coach Jim Tressel an even higher rung in Paradise one day, I had the occasion to stay in Columbus for several weeks on business. I was told beforehand that I would be in Columbus and in fact the mailing address was “Columbus” but my shelter lay a 30-minute drive west of the creaky Thurber House and the Franklin Park Conservatory, notable in my mind as the home of a robust collection of fanciful, vibrant glassware by a world-famous artisan whose name escapes me to this day, as well as the site of my wedding reception. It was both the distance from downtown and the decidedly suburban character of my temporary dwelling that perpetually led me to believe I was not “in” Columbus, which I ineptly and repeatedly articulated to my in-laws and other locals despite their apparent lack of interest in this observation. I myself grew up in the suburbs of Long Island, NY, and so found the outskirts of Columbus familiar in their flatness, in their multiplication of neighborhoods, many of them still under development as quickly evidenced by the lack of trees, and in their abundance of quality shopping. With the regard to the latter, this Long Islander was dumbfounded and made to feel inferior by the magnificence and cleanliness of Ohio’s malls, one of which offers, hold on to your hat, a Macy’s at either end. I was so struck by this twinning—clearly the manifestation of parallel universes—that I bought the same socks and boxers at each, using identical language (“Hi, I’ll take these.”) for each middle-aged saleswoman. When I reported, chuckling, about this to my hosts I was met with silence.
These hosts were friends of my in-laws and lived in a nearby community that spaced out stunted evergreens, suggesting the development was neither mature nor new. Their house featured a finished basement that served as my apartment and office excellently, as I was able to promptly access the Internet, watch ESPN in HD, and compare Archie Griffin’s signatures on a football and a napkin from a Cameron Mitchell restaurant (I forget which, but it wasn’t a steakhouse—it was one of Mitchell’s bastard start-ups.) They were industrious newlyweds who most nights, after work and dinner, undertook an impressive and unending series of projects such as the laying of hardwood floors, insertion of new closet shelves, and running of wire in a crawlspace the exact location of which I never did ascertain.
They were close with their neighbors on both sides. To the left lived an older couple and adult son, recently transplanted from Brooklyn, who called themselves The Garage People because they spent many hours actively entertaining guests and lolling in their garage on recliners. The parents were retired, the son did not work, and you could have a beer and watch ESPN in HD in their garage whenever you liked—they kept their two cars parked at the curb. Good people. To the right was a fair-haired couple with three sons who all favored the #33 jersey of James Laurinaitis. You could qualify the extent of this preference by arguing that the youngest son was barely one and therefore couldn’t possibly know if he adulated the relentless, fundamentally sound linebacker as did his three-year-old and five-year-old brothers, but who would hear your plea? There is no doubt I’ll never forget Venti, Grande and Tall, as I affectionately referred to them, at first publicly very much but then less so, on account of their cuteness and their integrality in the suspension and reinstatement of the heat.
After The Game, winter had begun to announce itself in Columbus through winds whose nature I did not recognize as I come from Long Island, where strong gusts bring rain or the redolence of seawater, making one think of the beach at summertime, whenever it may come. From my Ohio basement lair, listening to the shrieking blasts shaking the house, I didn’t know what to expect other than an outbreak of megatornadoes or the end of the world. When the winds didn’t blow, the temperature dropped, outside and inside. I’m not one to catch a chill—I tend toward the other extreme, and more than once a stranger at a dinner party has incredulously observed “You’re sweating!”—but I did become unusually aware of the season as a result of The Agreement. I wasn’t present, nor should I have expected to be, when my industrious hosts and their fair-haired neighbors decided they would turn off the heating systems of their homes. It was a contest: the parties had pledged to outlast each other and the first to succumb to the need for toasty comfort would have to pay. If my industrious hosts turned on the heat, they would have to buy a month’s supply of cereal for the fair-haired family; if the family lost, they would plant a vegetable garden for the couple. This all seemed friendly but excessive to me, as a Long Islander, but then I had never shopped at two Macy’s in one mall before.
The parties, through The Agreement and The Contest, were in a way acknowledging the contracting economy and the importance of relying less on fossil fuels. At least these greater issues were mentioned when I casually inquired about the progress—I was for a week very preoccupied with phone calls and onsite meetings with a client situated in a pristine yet sinister professional complex off I-270. One thing I was sure of from the outset was the prominent practice of the Reaganesque philosophy of “Trust but verify.” I had forgotten the deceased president’s adoption of the old Russian adage during the endgame of the Cold War—I was reminded when Venti, the oldest towhead, shouted “We’re doing a Reagan!” as he raced around my hosts’ house. On both knees Venti would slide over newly laid hardwood to the heating vents, usually by the wall, and feel the grates. This was his way of assessing if my hosts had capitulated. He reenacted this ritual nightly, after dinner and before his bath and bedtime I guess, followed by Grande, who similarly yelped and slipped, though he pronounced “Reagan” like “Crayon.” Down in my apartment I would hear the doorbell and then bound upstairs, as I enjoyed this inspection. My industrious hosts did too, I knew, because when I reached the top of the stairs, they had usually arrived from a hasty descent from the crawlspace. They, by the way, did not to my knowledge reciprocate any form of a Reagan; I guess they were inclined to trust and too busy to verify.
Despite my near-febrile constitution, my respect for higher ecological and economic concerns, and my status as a tenant paying no rent (thanks to Ohioan senses of community and hospitality), I became rather perturbed by the cold in the house. My breath hung between me, my laptop monitor, and the HD TV screen, and in the mornings it resembled a taunting phantasm. From a linen closet by the efficient washer/dryer, I removed a lined scarlet windbreaker, which I wore over several T-shirts and my sweater vest, and a Block O wool blanket in which I curled up, swaddled. I swear there was frost on the remaining slices of Donato’s pizza I left in the box overnight—breakfast was crunchy. My work became compromised by limited mobility and overarching grouchiness. Looking back, I realize I could simply have moved my laptop and my person to Panera’s or any other regulated site but my faculties were limited. I shivered and bore it. I was not alone in my suffering: my hosts wore matching scarlet ski suits and thick gray socks as they padded up to the crawlspace or Limbo. They laughed about The Contest, even when the inspector imps were not around, but I sensed they were near the breaking point nonetheless. One night after humming along with the dryer, which I ran several times a day although it was empty, I heard the couple wondering if they should do a Reagan. The husband had seen something like smoke wafting out of the chimney next door. I think I detected a quarrelsome tone.
The hour of reckoning came after two or twenty-two weeks. The timing was not fortuitous. I had chiseled off a Donato’s dinner and snuggled in vain through SportsCenter, and then I went to Kohl’s. “Going to Kohl’s,” my hosts had informed me during the cheery initial days of the Contest, was a bathroom euphemism synonymous with “Seeing a Man about a Horse” or “Powdering One’s Nose.” Why Kohl’s Department Store served as the fictional destination and not the doubly mighty Macy’s, I can’t say. Giant Eagle, the supermarket, would have fit the bill. Nevertheless, as a subterranean accustomed to solitude, I was ensconced at Kohl’s with the door open, when I found Grande watching me, red-cheeked and wide-eyed, and Tall at his side. Upstairs I heard the whooshing I’d learn to associate with the slide of Venti, the little Hans Blix.
“Shoo,” I said to Grande, and I made the universal shooing hand gesture, but the kid just stood still and giggled. His brother mumbled something in toddlerspeak. He may have been inquiring if I was going to be at Kohl’s for a while. In fact I had intended to, in part because I’d decided that the basement bathroom was my best refuge during an outbreak of megatornadoes, and the shrieking gales were at it again. When I made it upstairs, Tall in my arms and Grande scrambling behind, I found that the tousled fair-haired parents had joined the inspection. The father, grossly encumbered in layers of down, held in a bulbous mitten a piece of paper, the formal record of The Agreement, signed and co-signed. He and his wife, who was wearing at least five scarves, seemed ready to make an announcement when Venti exclaimed “Reagan! Reagan! Reagan!” His hands were bare and attached to a grate. Energized, Grande rushed over, at the last second remembering to slide, and touched the grate beside his brother, echoing, “Crayon! Crayon! Crayon!” My hosts were busted; they had turned on the heat just thirty minutes earlier, having run out of hot chocolate or instant oatmeal and disinclined to make a trip to Giant Eagle. It was all OK, the fair-haired father rejoined—he had also flicked the switch and reinstated their heat before walking over, or so he said, I think. They had had enough. He dramatically shrugged off his mittens and ripped up the Agreement. The adults enjoyed a hearty laugh (but did not hug, I noted); the young inspectors were immediately peeved that they did not seem to have won the Contest or anything at all, even though warm currents were at long last rising from the floor. I believe Venti wept from this bitterness as he followed his parents out the door, and Grande wept in reflexive sympathy for his brother. I don’t recall Tall’s disposition as he was tugged home in the wind.
I was summoned East the following day when my presentations were abruptly rescheduled, and so I never did fully enjoy the return of a normal climate at my hosts’. I regret to say I have not seen them since, though I’m sure I can rely on their continued good humor. I do hope to one day entertain them at my home with equally engaging hospitality. During the recent months that a mustachioed acquaintance has become embroiled in not a few professional disputes (involving the reluctance to pay his previously contracted fee, I’ve been stentoriously informed), I have fleetingly recalled the quick and amicable resolution of The Contest, the shredding of The Agreement, and the reinstatement of the heat. Such closure has eluded my acquaintance—he is relying on a bulldog attorney to pursue justice. That reminds me now that my sweet-natured hostess in Columbus once said that she didn’t care for lawyers much because they held forth like experts on everything. I didn’t disagree with her then and, as I said, I’ve always respected unpremeditated bile from a happy camper. I guess that marks me as a New Yorker, but I don’t live in the city anymore. I live in New Jersey.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Neologism
Champenschmutz, n.
(shämp-in-shmüts)
The clingy soil on a raw mushroom.
2009 The centathlete set down his Manhattan and waddled to the kitchen, where his wife instructed him to dampen a paper towel and wipe off the champenschmutz before slicing and adding the mushrooms to the salad.
(shämp-in-shmüts)
The clingy soil on a raw mushroom.
2009 The centathlete set down his Manhattan and waddled to the kitchen, where his wife instructed him to dampen a paper towel and wipe off the champenschmutz before slicing and adding the mushrooms to the salad.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
# 100 The Magnificent Ambersons – Booth Tarkington
“When I got an automobile of my own and began to drive it, I brought to the enterprise a magnificent ignorance of the workings of a gas engine, and a profound disinterest in its oily secrets.”
So intoned—with comically Freudian overtones—the narrator of “Recollections of the Gas Buggy” in The Saturday Review. The author was James Thurber, the Midwestern wit who sprang out of the earnest soil of Columbus, OH and then ventured as a young adult to New York (as did the centathlete’s wife, albeit 80 years later).
The centathlete partakes in the “magnificent ignorance” of things automotive. For example, he never learned to drive a standard. This lacuna in his development was remarked upon (typically with one eyebrow or one side of the mouth raised) over the years by friends who seemed to savor this chink in his otherwise impregnable, blinding armor.
One of these very chums once had to pick up his parents at LaGuardia Airport, so the centathlete rode along in his manually shifted Saab. After idling in the pick-up zone, the driver was forced to exit in order to locate said parents at the baggage claim, leaving the centathlete alone, sitting shotgun. In moments a traffic cop was looming at the driver’s window, stridently directing the centathlete to move the car.
He couldn’t do it, he explained, because he couldn’t drive a stick—he was just a passenger. The cop balked and repeated her instruction with a sneer. She thought he was full of it. The centathlete repeated his defense and then blankly watched the harpy write a ticket and slap it under the windshield wiper. In moments after her departure, the chum and parents arrived, and received their municipal paperwork.
The fine was nominal to them but the humor was not. Can’t drive a stick! Hearty laughter ensued at the expense of the centathlete, whose dominant emotion at the time was chagrin. Two decades would pass before this lapse in his unquestionable virility resurfaced and provoked a different response.
Newly married, the urban-dwelling, car-less centathlete had moved to the suburbs and was required to learn to drive his bride’s Honda Civic, a standard. He did so awkwardly and profanely. Stalling dozens of times, grinding gears and enduring horns, and navigating futilely among the jughandles and reverse jughandles of central New Jersey—all prompted such a vituperative state of mind that the centathlete very nearly questioned whether he had chosen the right mate.
At this fraught philosophical moment he resembled Billy Brown, the hero of the 1998 movie, Buffalo 66, played by the inimitable writer/director/lothario Vincent Gallo, when he kidnaps Layla and gets in her car, to find that he can’t drive it:
According to the Original Catholic Encyclopedia, Cyprian, in middle age, abandoned the Roman ruling class and its vice, decay, and “hollowness of political success” for a “chaste, prayerful” life. He lived during war and plague and was ultimately beheaded by order of the Emperor Valerian, who himself met a humiliating end at the hands of his Persian conqueror, Sapor.
During wartime not everyone lives or dies by the sword; some daydream, doodle and type far from the frontlines. For two middle-aged Midwesterners, Ohio’s Thurber and Indiana’s Booth Tarkington, the automobile figured centrally in their public reveries that nudged, delighted and preoccupied the American home front during respective world wars.
On September 25, 1943 the Soviet army retook the Russian city of Smolensk and German forces retreated behind the Dneiper River. On that day Thurber’s “Gas Buggy” piece appeared. Rather than consider the Eastern Front, Thurber reflected (again with a Freudian vocabulary) on the advent of cars circa 1903, when they puzzled the folks of Columbus: “What is that thing, Mamma? Mamma, what is that thing, huh, Mamma?” Since those days the automotive industry had become a behemoth and inserted itself as a “miracle-worker” into World War II, as Time Magazine observed in February 1942.
More than a generation before, in 1918, after bloody offensives and counteroffensives, World War I ended in November. Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons was published that year. Preceding Thurber, Tarkington chose to reminisce about the good old days in the country when the car was a curiosity or, to some like George Minafer, the bitter protagonist of The Magnificent Ambersons, a monstrosity.
Each Midwestern author’s retrospective is in a sense a “car dream.” Oddly, at least to this Northeasterner, racial insensitivity rears up in each. Ambersons includes several cursory references to “darkies” and “Gas Buggy” features a patronizing treatment of the “colored washerwoman.” Today we want to hear their perspectives as well, but only the driver/author sees out of the rear view mirror.
“Automobiles are a useless nuisance… They had no business to be invented,” snorted George Minafer at his family estate in the Midland town that represented Indianapolis. That invention arguably was realized on July 4, 1894, on Pumpkinvine Pike in Kokomo, IN, when Elwood Haynes and the Apperson brothers tested their gas buggy.
In the immediately following years, likeminded inventors and manufacturers proliferated in Indiana, where “automobiles were produced in more than 40 cities,” according to the Northern Indiana Center for History. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway, built in 1909, brought publicity and excitement to the industry. However, in a generation, Ford Motor Company, General Motors and other manufacturers from Michigan superseded the likes of Indiana’s Studebaker, Stutz, Cole, and Haynes-Apperson.
Even a simple history of the early cars, not to mention the superb photos, is inescapably quaint to today’s driver, as can be sensed here:
Nephew of a California governor, Tarkington was privileged but not rich growing up in Indiana. He was a popular bon vivant at Purdue and at Princeton, where he was a founder of the Triangle Club, “the oldest collegiate musical-comedy troupe in the nation.” He no doubt drew on this background in creating Minafer, who shared a fine pedigree but none of his maker’s good humor.
Tarkington made his own fortune as an author, globetrotted in style, and “eventually built an estate, Seawood, in Kennebunkport, Maine, where he and his second wife, Susannah Robinson, lived from May through December each year..."
One wishes Classic Books Library had used this photo of Seawood, with its glorious white façade and elegantly aged walkway, for its reissue of Ambersons. It speaks to a defiant magnificence that is completely lacking in the dreary cover of the book.
In Kennebunkport, Tarkington was neighbors with George Herbert Walker, President George W. Bush’s great-grandfather, and Francis Noble, the editor for many newspapers owned and published by William Randolph Hearst. (Hearst, incidentally, was a cousin of Elmer and Edgar Apperson; his mother was Phoebe Apperson.)
Hearst of course inspired another Midwesterner, Orson Welles of Kenosha, Wisconsin, to create Citizen Kane, “the greatest movie of all-time” according to the American Film Institute. Released in 1941, Citizen Kane was Welles’s first movie; he followed it up in 1942 with The Magnificent Ambersons.
We can’t see this movie today, due to a toxic struggle between Welles and RKO Studio. So we have to be content with snippets and commentary at www.ambersons.com--
what a tribute it is!
One Welles fan, Jeffrey M. Anderson, in his piece on Ambersons, helps us understand why the director was drawn to the story, and how cinema can complement literature:
The “debacle” of Ambersons nearly killed Welles’s career: “He was never entrusted with a major Hollywood production again. Welles himself said, ‘They [RKO] destroyed Ambersons and it destroyed me.’”
Welles.net reports that the movie “really spelled the end of Welles’s golden period and the beginning of his slow decline.” We might say that Welles resembled in part the tragic hero of his own movie, George Minafer, the bearer of his family’s decline. Life imitated cinema imitated literature.
And then cinema imitated cinema. In 2000 A&E produced a remake of The Magnificent Ambersons, purporting to be more faithful to Welles’s script. The result was a snoozer and a flop. The centathlete is disinclined to agree with the perpetually smug Peter Bogdanovich, but the former Welles confidante was correct when he said, “It would be charitable to say that the Ambersons remake was “poor.”
The TV movie, filmed in Dublin, Ireland (not Dublin, Ohio) featured the creepy but spunky Jonathan Rhys Meyers as George Minafer and the waxen but spunky Madeleine Stowe as his mother. The fact that the official web site has been taken down is apt.
Dead links aside, we can credit the efforts of studios and accomplished directors and actors to do Tarkington’s tale justice. George Minafer would not have participated in such collective endeavors; they were beneath him.
Driving home now (in an automatic), we acknowledge that the automobile is the symbolic and actual instrument of George Minafer’s downfall. After years of scoffing at the nascent car industry and industrial progress, Minafer is struck by a car and gravely injured at the novel’s close.
Similarly, the questioner of symbols such as the magnificent Goddess Automobile, Roland Barthes, was struck by a laundry van (perhaps transporting seamless robes). But while George Minafer was left in a hospital bed by Tarkington with chances for recovery, redemption and love, Barthes was not so fortunate. He died a month later.
So intoned—with comically Freudian overtones—the narrator of “Recollections of the Gas Buggy” in The Saturday Review. The author was James Thurber, the Midwestern wit who sprang out of the earnest soil of Columbus, OH and then ventured as a young adult to New York (as did the centathlete’s wife, albeit 80 years later).
The centathlete partakes in the “magnificent ignorance” of things automotive. For example, he never learned to drive a standard. This lacuna in his development was remarked upon (typically with one eyebrow or one side of the mouth raised) over the years by friends who seemed to savor this chink in his otherwise impregnable, blinding armor.
One of these very chums once had to pick up his parents at LaGuardia Airport, so the centathlete rode along in his manually shifted Saab. After idling in the pick-up zone, the driver was forced to exit in order to locate said parents at the baggage claim, leaving the centathlete alone, sitting shotgun. In moments a traffic cop was looming at the driver’s window, stridently directing the centathlete to move the car.
He couldn’t do it, he explained, because he couldn’t drive a stick—he was just a passenger. The cop balked and repeated her instruction with a sneer. She thought he was full of it. The centathlete repeated his defense and then blankly watched the harpy write a ticket and slap it under the windshield wiper. In moments after her departure, the chum and parents arrived, and received their municipal paperwork.
The fine was nominal to them but the humor was not. Can’t drive a stick! Hearty laughter ensued at the expense of the centathlete, whose dominant emotion at the time was chagrin. Two decades would pass before this lapse in his unquestionable virility resurfaced and provoked a different response.
Newly married, the urban-dwelling, car-less centathlete had moved to the suburbs and was required to learn to drive his bride’s Honda Civic, a standard. He did so awkwardly and profanely. Stalling dozens of times, grinding gears and enduring horns, and navigating futilely among the jughandles and reverse jughandles of central New Jersey—all prompted such a vituperative state of mind that the centathlete very nearly questioned whether he had chosen the right mate.
At this fraught philosophical moment he resembled Billy Brown, the hero of the 1998 movie, Buffalo 66, played by the inimitable writer/director/lothario Vincent Gallo, when he kidnaps Layla and gets in her car, to find that he can’t drive it:
“Is this a shifter car? I cannot drive a shifter car, alright, so we got a little situation here. I can’t drive these kinda cars! What the f--- is goin’ on! You think that's funny? Would you like to know, smartass? Would you like to know why I can’t drive this kinda car? I’ll tell you why, I’m used to luxury cars. Have you ever heard of a luxury car? You know what luxury means? Ever heard of Cadillac, Cadillac Eldorado? That's what I drive. I drive cars that shift themselves.”Cars can make you shift from the ridiculous to the sublime, as evidenced by Roland Barthes’ discourse in 1957 on the Citroën DS. The French semiotician and contrarian likened the DS to a goddess and modern automobiles to the gothic cathedral because they represent the “supreme creation” of their era. Barthes’ perspective is both serious and mischievous as he swings like a manic trapeze artist between the religious, sensual, linguistic, historical, novelistic and cinematic. He comments on the DS’s exterior:
“It is well known that smoothness is always an attribute of perfection because its opposite reveals a technical and typically human operation of assembling: Christ's robe was seamless, just as the airships of science-fiction are made of unbroken metal.”The seamless garment, referenced in John 19:23, was expounded on by Saint Cyprian, the third century Christian bishop of Carthage. In opposing schismatics he considered the robe a “sacrament of unity” and a “bond of a concord inseparably cohering.”
According to the Original Catholic Encyclopedia, Cyprian, in middle age, abandoned the Roman ruling class and its vice, decay, and “hollowness of political success” for a “chaste, prayerful” life. He lived during war and plague and was ultimately beheaded by order of the Emperor Valerian, who himself met a humiliating end at the hands of his Persian conqueror, Sapor.
During wartime not everyone lives or dies by the sword; some daydream, doodle and type far from the frontlines. For two middle-aged Midwesterners, Ohio’s Thurber and Indiana’s Booth Tarkington, the automobile figured centrally in their public reveries that nudged, delighted and preoccupied the American home front during respective world wars.
On September 25, 1943 the Soviet army retook the Russian city of Smolensk and German forces retreated behind the Dneiper River. On that day Thurber’s “Gas Buggy” piece appeared. Rather than consider the Eastern Front, Thurber reflected (again with a Freudian vocabulary) on the advent of cars circa 1903, when they puzzled the folks of Columbus: “What is that thing, Mamma? Mamma, what is that thing, huh, Mamma?” Since those days the automotive industry had become a behemoth and inserted itself as a “miracle-worker” into World War II, as Time Magazine observed in February 1942.
More than a generation before, in 1918, after bloody offensives and counteroffensives, World War I ended in November. Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons was published that year. Preceding Thurber, Tarkington chose to reminisce about the good old days in the country when the car was a curiosity or, to some like George Minafer, the bitter protagonist of The Magnificent Ambersons, a monstrosity.
Each Midwestern author’s retrospective is in a sense a “car dream.” Oddly, at least to this Northeasterner, racial insensitivity rears up in each. Ambersons includes several cursory references to “darkies” and “Gas Buggy” features a patronizing treatment of the “colored washerwoman.” Today we want to hear their perspectives as well, but only the driver/author sees out of the rear view mirror.
“Automobiles are a useless nuisance… They had no business to be invented,” snorted George Minafer at his family estate in the Midland town that represented Indianapolis. That invention arguably was realized on July 4, 1894, on Pumpkinvine Pike in Kokomo, IN, when Elwood Haynes and the Apperson brothers tested their gas buggy.
In the immediately following years, likeminded inventors and manufacturers proliferated in Indiana, where “automobiles were produced in more than 40 cities,” according to the Northern Indiana Center for History. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway, built in 1909, brought publicity and excitement to the industry. However, in a generation, Ford Motor Company, General Motors and other manufacturers from Michigan superseded the likes of Indiana’s Studebaker, Stutz, Cole, and Haynes-Apperson.
Even a simple history of the early cars, not to mention the superb photos, is inescapably quaint to today’s driver, as can be sensed here:
“By 1898 the Haynes-Apperson Automobile Company was producing one car every two-three weeks… Soon they were turning out three different models (for 2, 4 & 6 passengers) at a rate of 2-3 cars per week! This production rate also meant the factory was open seven days a week, 24 hours a day, two shifts per day... Haynes-Apperson production numbers increased steadily: five in 1898, 30 in 1899, 192 in 1900 and 240 in 1901. Later that year, the Appersons and Haynes dissolved their business partnership and began two individual companies.”Cruise-in.com picks up the story of Edgar and Elmer Apperson and their new venture, The Apperson Brothers Motor Car Company:
“The company employed its peak year in 1919, employing about 600 people and producing 3,000 units at the two plants. In the early 1920's, business began to decrease. The Appersons, like many others, were not competitive with the larger manufacturers. Production ceased in 1925, thus ending the pioneering saga…”This story and others like it, and in fact the birth and childhood of the transformative automotive industry, played out right before Booth Tarkington, who was born in 1869 and grew up in Indianapolis. He would have been familiar with the Appersons, as he was actively engaged in Indiana culture and politics—from 1902-1903 he served as a State Assemblyman and he later wrote “In the Arena” about the experience (making him unlike the anti-political Saint Cyprian). Did Tarkington think of “Apperson” when he named his family “Amberson?”
Nephew of a California governor, Tarkington was privileged but not rich growing up in Indiana. He was a popular bon vivant at Purdue and at Princeton, where he was a founder of the Triangle Club, “the oldest collegiate musical-comedy troupe in the nation.” He no doubt drew on this background in creating Minafer, who shared a fine pedigree but none of his maker’s good humor.
Tarkington made his own fortune as an author, globetrotted in style, and “eventually built an estate, Seawood, in Kennebunkport, Maine, where he and his second wife, Susannah Robinson, lived from May through December each year..."
One wishes Classic Books Library had used this photo of Seawood, with its glorious white façade and elegantly aged walkway, for its reissue of Ambersons. It speaks to a defiant magnificence that is completely lacking in the dreary cover of the book.
In Kennebunkport, Tarkington was neighbors with George Herbert Walker, President George W. Bush’s great-grandfather, and Francis Noble, the editor for many newspapers owned and published by William Randolph Hearst. (Hearst, incidentally, was a cousin of Elmer and Edgar Apperson; his mother was Phoebe Apperson.)
Hearst of course inspired another Midwesterner, Orson Welles of Kenosha, Wisconsin, to create Citizen Kane, “the greatest movie of all-time” according to the American Film Institute. Released in 1941, Citizen Kane was Welles’s first movie; he followed it up in 1942 with The Magnificent Ambersons.
We can’t see this movie today, due to a toxic struggle between Welles and RKO Studio. So we have to be content with snippets and commentary at www.ambersons.com--
what a tribute it is!
One Welles fan, Jeffrey M. Anderson, in his piece on Ambersons, helps us understand why the director was drawn to the story, and how cinema can complement literature:
“One of Welles’ favorite themes is aging—looking back on the past with nostalgia, and noting how things change as one gets older. He opens The Magnificent Ambersons with a sequence showing the fashions and the wisdoms of the times. Everything moves slower, he tells us in his famous baritone narration. These sequences are all framed with a sort of discolored edge, like the brown edge of a faded photograph. (In one scene, Welles even manages to use an “iris-fade,” in which the image fades to black around a circle that grows smaller and smaller, an effect that D.W. Griffith used in the silent days.) From that nostalgic starting point, everything slowly collapses. This is due to the invention of automobiles, with which Eugene is making his fortune.”The centathlete was not familiar with the term “iris-fade” but his mind’s eye seems to be increasingly prone to the human form of the process. Memories (riding a brown Columbia bicycle over a sewer cover, spilling, and getting a fat lip) collapse into a black hole…so we run the centathlon to keep at least books alive.
The “debacle” of Ambersons nearly killed Welles’s career: “He was never entrusted with a major Hollywood production again. Welles himself said, ‘They [RKO] destroyed Ambersons and it destroyed me.’”
Welles.net reports that the movie “really spelled the end of Welles’s golden period and the beginning of his slow decline.” We might say that Welles resembled in part the tragic hero of his own movie, George Minafer, the bearer of his family’s decline. Life imitated cinema imitated literature.
And then cinema imitated cinema. In 2000 A&E produced a remake of The Magnificent Ambersons, purporting to be more faithful to Welles’s script. The result was a snoozer and a flop. The centathlete is disinclined to agree with the perpetually smug Peter Bogdanovich, but the former Welles confidante was correct when he said, “It would be charitable to say that the Ambersons remake was “poor.”
The TV movie, filmed in Dublin, Ireland (not Dublin, Ohio) featured the creepy but spunky Jonathan Rhys Meyers as George Minafer and the waxen but spunky Madeleine Stowe as his mother. The fact that the official web site has been taken down is apt.
Dead links aside, we can credit the efforts of studios and accomplished directors and actors to do Tarkington’s tale justice. George Minafer would not have participated in such collective endeavors; they were beneath him.
Driving home now (in an automatic), we acknowledge that the automobile is the symbolic and actual instrument of George Minafer’s downfall. After years of scoffing at the nascent car industry and industrial progress, Minafer is struck by a car and gravely injured at the novel’s close.
Similarly, the questioner of symbols such as the magnificent Goddess Automobile, Roland Barthes, was struck by a laundry van (perhaps transporting seamless robes). But while George Minafer was left in a hospital bed by Tarkington with chances for recovery, redemption and love, Barthes was not so fortunate. He died a month later.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
# 88 The Call of the Wild – Jack London
The centathlete is a Cat Person.
It figures! you snort—you gregarious, loyal, honest team player who loves to travel, you Dog Person. Wait—it seems that subtlety, gracefulness and independence do in fact appeal to you—you Cat Person. Don’t they? No? So you yourself are then decidedly a ___ Person.
Cat v. Dog–the dichotomy elicits spot quizzes and spotty self-analysis (the centathlete actually tested out as a Dog Person). Regardless of our personal biases, we all possess characteristics contrary to our diagnosed pet-hood.
The author Jack London was a Dog Person, some of us will yip, in light of his political team-playing (he was an active Socialist) and his utilitarian, outdoorsy, globetrotting curriculum vitae. Moreover, he gave the world two literary exemplars of canine worship: The Call of the Wild, published in 1903, and White Fang, published in 1906.
Buck, the protagonist of The Call of the Wild, is half-Saint Bernard and half-Scotch shepherd, or collie. When we meet him at the age of four, he lives a princely, secure life on an estate in California’s Santa Clara Valley, which the narrator describes four separate times as “sun-kissed.” This epithet, recalling the “wine-dark” sea of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey in English translation, announces myth-making in the narrative.
In iterating “sun-kissed” London anticipated by five years the aptness of the term for California. In 1908 the advertising agency for the Southern California Fruit Exchange trademarked “Sunkist” for its oranges and lemons.
Citrus seeds were first planted in California during the 1840’s with the beginning of the Gold Rush, as thousands of early fortune-hunters suffered from scurvy. London could have used some of those oranges. He developed scurvy while gold-prospecting in the Klondike two generations later, in 1897, and returned debilitated to San Francisco the next year.
Whereas London volunteered for the North, his dog hero Buck is forcibly taken there, recalling the 1886 novel, Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson, a Scotsman who for a time lived in San Francisco. In addition to influencing London, Stevenson left a similarly deep cultural imprint on the city by the bay, according to Janice Albert and Don Herron:
Two pre-Christian heroes come to mind as role models in subsequent chapters. Buck is “preeminently cunning,” making him like the man of twists and turns, Odysseus. Sure enough Buck defeats his rival, Spitz, due to his imagination.
In his superior strength and courage Buck resembles Heracles. His “exploits,” such as the pulling of the impossibly burdened sled, recall the warrior’s 12 labors. (The majority of those labors required the canine task of “fetching” and the last entailed wrestling with the hellhound Cerberus.)
Buck’s feats inspire his kind master, John Thornton, to lead a new quest. Through a rough arcadia they search for a “fabled lost mine” and a “Lost Cabin,” combining frontier lore with the imagery of Perceval hunting the grail and visiting the illusory Grail Castle.
Buck spends his late years running with a wolf pack into myth as a Ghost Dog, witnessed only by the fictional Yeehat Indian tribe, representatives of pre-Western culture. Ultimately then Buck exemplifies heroism for all times: the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Biblical Era, Middle Ages and Modernity.
The narration’s self-conscious myth-making and its journalistic treatment of rugged life in the Klondike both support another great process, as the title of the novel suggests. Buck’s transformation from pampered prince to wild warrior, his devolution into a “dominant primordial beast” is the compelling theme on display.
Buck’s voyage “into the womb of Time” to become the alpha wolf-dog, evokes for moviegoers a similar trip for mankind. In 1980’s Altered States, Eddie Jessup, a medical researcher played by William Hurt, blurts out with pseudoscientific hubris: “I think that that true self, that original self, that first self, is a real, mensurate, quantifiable thing—tangible and incarnate. And I’m gonna find [it].”
Let’s award an E for Effort to Hurt, if he was ad-libbing, for “mensurate,” a word the centathlete has never seen nor heard before or since. The O.E.D. labels it a rare transitive verb meaning “to measure.” Jessup’s complete thought suggests he meant “mensurable,” as a highfalutin, academic synonym for “measurable.”
If the script actually called for “mensurate” then qualified kudos may go to Paddy Chayefsky, but he disavowed screenwriting credit after fighting with the director, Ken Russell. A celebrated dramatist for television and cinema and a three-time Oscar winner, Chayefsky wrote the 1953 teleplay Marty, which featured the following line of dialogue that could belong to a parody of The Call of the Wild: “You know, us dogs aren't really so much of the dogs that we think we are.”
More than two decades later, Chayefsky wrote his only novel, Altered States. Although he despised the film adaptation, the real scientist who inspired the story liked it fine. “I think they did a good job,” John C. Lilly, the model for Eddie Jessup, told Omni in 1983, “The hallucination scenes are much better than anything ever produced before.”
In 1954 Lilly, a medical researcher, invented the isolation tank to explore consciousness and sensory deprivation. Ten years later, while floating with three dolphins, he took LSD for the first time. Looking to explore and confirm his prior vision, while unmedicated, that there were “alternate realities,” Lilly incorporated LSD and Ketamine into his research for years to come.
He saw amazing and terrifying things (such as the Earth Coincidence Control Office) that intrigued him much more than the devolution into ape man. That process, the focus of Altered States, was based on an episode that Lilly offhandedly dismissed:
Jessup, during his extended incarnation as Primal Man, is attacked by stray dogs, In warding them off with a pipe, striking out, he is a fearful victim, not a club-wielding “lawgiver” such as the man in the red sweater that breaks Buck. Primal Man then follows the dogs to the zoo.
This last act is re-imagined as a stylized dream by Jessup’s wife Emily, played by Blair Brown. On a dark Boston street, silhouetted by streetlamps, Primal Man races with two wild dogs at his side—they now work together, as they would have thousands of years ago, chasing down prey or searching for the grazing grounds of big game.
The scene also resonates on another level, suggesting Emily’s “own liberated masculine aspect à la WMN WHO RUN W/T WOLVES [sic],” according to a writer for deliriousfilm.com, an engrossing site devoted to “movies, dreams, myths and psychoanalysis.” Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt, is the original woman who runs with the wolves; worship of her dates back to mankind’s hunter/gatherer days.
If we think of London’s hero Buck running with the wolves, he becomes a male stand-in for Artemis. His omnisexuality as a hero was suggested early in the plot: in myth women (Europa, Sita, Persephone, et al.), not men, are kidnapped.
The wolf-dog himself, in The Call of the Wild, experiences charged visions of the coexistence of species. By the fire Buck remembers a primitive companion, a “hairy man” who squats, makes strange sounds, and exhibits “perpetual fear.” Later the wolf-dog and hairy man run through the woods.
The fictional treatments of this partnership are grounded in historical fact. The Call of the Wild adds the geographical foundation, at least for North Americans. Some time 10,000-14,000 years ago or even earlier, “the first dogs crossed the Bering land bridge with a wave of humans occupying North America,” according to one website devoted to huskies.
Many of the novel’s sled dogs, like Spitz, are huskies. Buck himself is not one and, at 140 pounds, he outweighs his coworkers almost threefold. The introduction of such a stranger into a group of sled dogs would not be that unusual, we can gather from comments made by Doug Swingley, the 1999 Iditarod winner, to Joe Runyan:
An Alaskan husky with glacial blue eyes, Cody belonged to a friend who lived nearby in apartments in Brooklyn and Manhattan’s Gramercy neighborhood. You did not “walk” Cody; he strode or trotted ahead, pulling the leash vigorously and steadily like a sled dog. Marveling at his unflagging physicality, you would forget that when Cody was a puppy he fell six stories from a balcony, shattering his hind legs and suffering internal trauma. Surgery was ruled out, yet the bones and organs mended completely, never appearing to trouble him again.
When Cody met humans he was universally admired for his handsome lupine build and markings. Huskies are uncommon in Gotham; Cody was an exotic hunk.
When he met other dogs he was typically proud and indifferent at first. He stood still and permitted sniffing, which he reciprocated briefly, if at all. His apathy was most profound to the centathlete one night by Williamsburg’s industrial waterfront. Walking with Cody, we passed a lot full of buses. Two pit bulls lurched out, roaring and gurgling, suspended in rage by their chains. Less than ten feet away on the other side of the barbed wire fence, Cody continued on without looking at them, without flinching, as if they didn’t exist.
Cody could be rambunctious, though he seemed serious when playing with other city dogs, who could be unfocused and silly, and were usually slower and more beholden to short bursts of energy. Chasing a ball or scampering around the dog run, Cody often looked like a varsity all-star small forward playing pick-up with the JV.
Though he lived in a cramped, hot apartment, Cody did travel often to the woods and to wide-open spaces in New England, Pennsylvania and Upstate New York. The best trip he ever took was out west, to Colorado, the Dakotas and Montana. He walked through a herd of buffalo. He was followed for several days by a lone coyote, though they never met up. The framed photographs from that excursion of Cody in high meadow grass radiate fundamental joy.
Cody went to northern California several times as well, also in wooded areas. He committed a violent crime out there—he ravaged a small dog that may or may not have provoked him.
In his late years Cody remained active and calm, beloved by his neighbors in Gramercy and naturally by his master, whom he in turn loved and in certain aspects resembled.
One day his master telephoned, his voice quavering. Cody had fallen very sick. Before a trip to the vet could occur, he’d fallen unconscious and received mouth-to-mouth. He revived then passed out again. Despite further desperate attempts at resuscitation, Cody, the glacier-eyed husky, passed away.
While dogs enhance our existence with their vibrant activity—evoking recognition of a primitive, shared vitality—they also introduce and continually reacquaint many of us with Death. On account of dogs’ shorter life expectancies (and the reduction in size of human families), the successive expirations of our numerous pets can define how we cope with the mortality of cherished ones and ourselves.
More than a week had passed before Cody’s master could make that phone call and others bearing the sad news. He was overwhelmed with grief. More than four years later he hasn’t gotten another dog—in visiting pounds and breeders he hasn’t felt a connection strong enough to “replace” Cody.
John Lilly approached The End vocally and philosophically, due to his temperament and near-death experiences, as was manifest when he visited Craig Enright, who’d been in an awful car crash. Lilly held his friend’s hand and said:
Buck lives on too, of course. The alpha dog runs with huskies, then wolves, into the beginning of primordial life.
A study of dogs’ DNA affirmed the timelessness and the value of the interaction between man, dog and wolf described in The Call of the Wild:
It figures! you snort—you gregarious, loyal, honest team player who loves to travel, you Dog Person. Wait—it seems that subtlety, gracefulness and independence do in fact appeal to you—you Cat Person. Don’t they? No? So you yourself are then decidedly a ___ Person.
Cat v. Dog–the dichotomy elicits spot quizzes and spotty self-analysis (the centathlete actually tested out as a Dog Person). Regardless of our personal biases, we all possess characteristics contrary to our diagnosed pet-hood.
The author Jack London was a Dog Person, some of us will yip, in light of his political team-playing (he was an active Socialist) and his utilitarian, outdoorsy, globetrotting curriculum vitae. Moreover, he gave the world two literary exemplars of canine worship: The Call of the Wild, published in 1903, and White Fang, published in 1906.
Buck, the protagonist of The Call of the Wild, is half-Saint Bernard and half-Scotch shepherd, or collie. When we meet him at the age of four, he lives a princely, secure life on an estate in California’s Santa Clara Valley, which the narrator describes four separate times as “sun-kissed.” This epithet, recalling the “wine-dark” sea of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey in English translation, announces myth-making in the narrative.
In iterating “sun-kissed” London anticipated by five years the aptness of the term for California. In 1908 the advertising agency for the Southern California Fruit Exchange trademarked “Sunkist” for its oranges and lemons.
Citrus seeds were first planted in California during the 1840’s with the beginning of the Gold Rush, as thousands of early fortune-hunters suffered from scurvy. London could have used some of those oranges. He developed scurvy while gold-prospecting in the Klondike two generations later, in 1897, and returned debilitated to San Francisco the next year.
Whereas London volunteered for the North, his dog hero Buck is forcibly taken there, recalling the 1886 novel, Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson, a Scotsman who for a time lived in San Francisco. In addition to influencing London, Stevenson left a similarly deep cultural imprint on the city by the bay, according to Janice Albert and Don Herron:
“…only Jack London, a native son, exceeds Stevenson in the number of public tributes: state parks in two counties, a brace of plaques in San Francisco, and a library devoted exclusively to his work in St. Helena.”The Call of the Wild reads easily as an adventure tale like Kidnapped, but the narrative briskly moves into the aforementioned mythologizing. When Buck is brutally clubbed— broken in order to serve man—the sustained episode of suffering becomes a Passion.
Two pre-Christian heroes come to mind as role models in subsequent chapters. Buck is “preeminently cunning,” making him like the man of twists and turns, Odysseus. Sure enough Buck defeats his rival, Spitz, due to his imagination.
In his superior strength and courage Buck resembles Heracles. His “exploits,” such as the pulling of the impossibly burdened sled, recall the warrior’s 12 labors. (The majority of those labors required the canine task of “fetching” and the last entailed wrestling with the hellhound Cerberus.)
Buck’s feats inspire his kind master, John Thornton, to lead a new quest. Through a rough arcadia they search for a “fabled lost mine” and a “Lost Cabin,” combining frontier lore with the imagery of Perceval hunting the grail and visiting the illusory Grail Castle.
Buck spends his late years running with a wolf pack into myth as a Ghost Dog, witnessed only by the fictional Yeehat Indian tribe, representatives of pre-Western culture. Ultimately then Buck exemplifies heroism for all times: the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Biblical Era, Middle Ages and Modernity.
The narration’s self-conscious myth-making and its journalistic treatment of rugged life in the Klondike both support another great process, as the title of the novel suggests. Buck’s transformation from pampered prince to wild warrior, his devolution into a “dominant primordial beast” is the compelling theme on display.
Buck’s voyage “into the womb of Time” to become the alpha wolf-dog, evokes for moviegoers a similar trip for mankind. In 1980’s Altered States, Eddie Jessup, a medical researcher played by William Hurt, blurts out with pseudoscientific hubris: “I think that that true self, that original self, that first self, is a real, mensurate, quantifiable thing—tangible and incarnate. And I’m gonna find [it].”
Let’s award an E for Effort to Hurt, if he was ad-libbing, for “mensurate,” a word the centathlete has never seen nor heard before or since. The O.E.D. labels it a rare transitive verb meaning “to measure.” Jessup’s complete thought suggests he meant “mensurable,” as a highfalutin, academic synonym for “measurable.”
If the script actually called for “mensurate” then qualified kudos may go to Paddy Chayefsky, but he disavowed screenwriting credit after fighting with the director, Ken Russell. A celebrated dramatist for television and cinema and a three-time Oscar winner, Chayefsky wrote the 1953 teleplay Marty, which featured the following line of dialogue that could belong to a parody of The Call of the Wild: “You know, us dogs aren't really so much of the dogs that we think we are.”
More than two decades later, Chayefsky wrote his only novel, Altered States. Although he despised the film adaptation, the real scientist who inspired the story liked it fine. “I think they did a good job,” John C. Lilly, the model for Eddie Jessup, told Omni in 1983, “The hallucination scenes are much better than anything ever produced before.”
In 1954 Lilly, a medical researcher, invented the isolation tank to explore consciousness and sensory deprivation. Ten years later, while floating with three dolphins, he took LSD for the first time. Looking to explore and confirm his prior vision, while unmedicated, that there were “alternate realities,” Lilly incorporated LSD and Ketamine into his research for years to come.
He saw amazing and terrifying things (such as the Earth Coincidence Control Office) that intrigued him much more than the devolution into ape man. That process, the focus of Altered States, was based on an episode that Lilly offhandedly dismissed:
“As for the scientist's regression into an apelike being, the late Dr. Craig Enright, who started me on K while taking a trip with me here by the isolation tank, suddenly ‘became’ a chimp, jumping up and down and hollering for twenty-five minutes. Watching him, I was frightened. I asked him later, ‘Where the hell were you?’ He said, ‘I became a prehominid, and I was in a tree. A leopard was trying to get me. So I was trying to scare him away.’ I said, ‘If you do that again, I'll kick you in the ass.’ He laughed.”Through Chayefsky's dramatization of this curious incident of the ape man in the night-time, Eddie Jessup becomes the “other, more primitive self” through “genetic regression.”
Jessup, during his extended incarnation as Primal Man, is attacked by stray dogs, In warding them off with a pipe, striking out, he is a fearful victim, not a club-wielding “lawgiver” such as the man in the red sweater that breaks Buck. Primal Man then follows the dogs to the zoo.
This last act is re-imagined as a stylized dream by Jessup’s wife Emily, played by Blair Brown. On a dark Boston street, silhouetted by streetlamps, Primal Man races with two wild dogs at his side—they now work together, as they would have thousands of years ago, chasing down prey or searching for the grazing grounds of big game.
The scene also resonates on another level, suggesting Emily’s “own liberated masculine aspect à la WMN WHO RUN W/T WOLVES [sic],” according to a writer for deliriousfilm.com, an engrossing site devoted to “movies, dreams, myths and psychoanalysis.” Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt, is the original woman who runs with the wolves; worship of her dates back to mankind’s hunter/gatherer days.
If we think of London’s hero Buck running with the wolves, he becomes a male stand-in for Artemis. His omnisexuality as a hero was suggested early in the plot: in myth women (Europa, Sita, Persephone, et al.), not men, are kidnapped.
The wolf-dog himself, in The Call of the Wild, experiences charged visions of the coexistence of species. By the fire Buck remembers a primitive companion, a “hairy man” who squats, makes strange sounds, and exhibits “perpetual fear.” Later the wolf-dog and hairy man run through the woods.
The fictional treatments of this partnership are grounded in historical fact. The Call of the Wild adds the geographical foundation, at least for North Americans. Some time 10,000-14,000 years ago or even earlier, “the first dogs crossed the Bering land bridge with a wave of humans occupying North America,” according to one website devoted to huskies.
Many of the novel’s sled dogs, like Spitz, are huskies. Buck himself is not one and, at 140 pounds, he outweighs his coworkers almost threefold. The introduction of such a stranger into a group of sled dogs would not be that unusual, we can gather from comments made by Doug Swingley, the 1999 Iditarod winner, to Joe Runyan:
“The Alaskan husky is a continuous experiment in breeding and really nothing more than a successful mixed breed mutt. The diverse gene pool is an advantage because it allows mushers to very quickly develop dogs for specific traits.”The centathlete is reminded of an old friend, Cody, a superior specimen who was happiest when working or exercising outdoors; friendly when meeting people and then mainly aloof; taciturn but not sulky; and calm, with a very long fuse that lead to a dangerous temper. Perhaps you know someone like that.
An Alaskan husky with glacial blue eyes, Cody belonged to a friend who lived nearby in apartments in Brooklyn and Manhattan’s Gramercy neighborhood. You did not “walk” Cody; he strode or trotted ahead, pulling the leash vigorously and steadily like a sled dog. Marveling at his unflagging physicality, you would forget that when Cody was a puppy he fell six stories from a balcony, shattering his hind legs and suffering internal trauma. Surgery was ruled out, yet the bones and organs mended completely, never appearing to trouble him again.
When Cody met humans he was universally admired for his handsome lupine build and markings. Huskies are uncommon in Gotham; Cody was an exotic hunk.
When he met other dogs he was typically proud and indifferent at first. He stood still and permitted sniffing, which he reciprocated briefly, if at all. His apathy was most profound to the centathlete one night by Williamsburg’s industrial waterfront. Walking with Cody, we passed a lot full of buses. Two pit bulls lurched out, roaring and gurgling, suspended in rage by their chains. Less than ten feet away on the other side of the barbed wire fence, Cody continued on without looking at them, without flinching, as if they didn’t exist.
Cody could be rambunctious, though he seemed serious when playing with other city dogs, who could be unfocused and silly, and were usually slower and more beholden to short bursts of energy. Chasing a ball or scampering around the dog run, Cody often looked like a varsity all-star small forward playing pick-up with the JV.
Though he lived in a cramped, hot apartment, Cody did travel often to the woods and to wide-open spaces in New England, Pennsylvania and Upstate New York. The best trip he ever took was out west, to Colorado, the Dakotas and Montana. He walked through a herd of buffalo. He was followed for several days by a lone coyote, though they never met up. The framed photographs from that excursion of Cody in high meadow grass radiate fundamental joy.
Cody went to northern California several times as well, also in wooded areas. He committed a violent crime out there—he ravaged a small dog that may or may not have provoked him.
In his late years Cody remained active and calm, beloved by his neighbors in Gramercy and naturally by his master, whom he in turn loved and in certain aspects resembled.
One day his master telephoned, his voice quavering. Cody had fallen very sick. Before a trip to the vet could occur, he’d fallen unconscious and received mouth-to-mouth. He revived then passed out again. Despite further desperate attempts at resuscitation, Cody, the glacier-eyed husky, passed away.
While dogs enhance our existence with their vibrant activity—evoking recognition of a primitive, shared vitality—they also introduce and continually reacquaint many of us with Death. On account of dogs’ shorter life expectancies (and the reduction in size of human families), the successive expirations of our numerous pets can define how we cope with the mortality of cherished ones and ourselves.
More than a week had passed before Cody’s master could make that phone call and others bearing the sad news. He was overwhelmed with grief. More than four years later he hasn’t gotten another dog—in visiting pounds and breeders he hasn’t felt a connection strong enough to “replace” Cody.
John Lilly approached The End vocally and philosophically, due to his temperament and near-death experiences, as was manifest when he visited Craig Enright, who’d been in an awful car crash. Lilly held his friend’s hand and said:
“It's not so bad to die, Craig. I've been to the brink myself a few times, and I've seen over the edge. The Beings have told me on several occasions that I wasEnright died the next day. Lilly died years later in 2001; his legacy of pioneering, unorthodox research into consciousness and into communicating with dolphins, lives on.
free to go with them, but I decided to stay here and continue my work in this vehicle that everyone calls John Lilly; they showed me that I am one of them.
‘You are one of us.’ I know that you know this because we've been there together. Whatever you do, Craig, I love you.”
Buck lives on too, of course. The alpha dog runs with huskies, then wolves, into the beginning of primordial life.
A study of dogs’ DNA affirmed the timelessness and the value of the interaction between man, dog and wolf described in The Call of the Wild:
“Most of the late Pleistocene, humans and wolves coexisted over a wide geographic area, providing ample opportunity for independent domesticationThe conclusion offers quite a kicker, as the authors consider other flora and fauna:
events and continued genetic exchange between wolves and dogs.”
“Backcrossing events could have provided part of the raw material for artificial selection and for the extraordinary degree of phenotypic diversity in the domestic dog. Domestic species of plants and animals whose wild progenitors are extinct cannot be enriched through periodic interbreeding, and change under artificial selection may be more limited. Consequently, the preservation of wild progenitors may be a critical issue in the continued evolution of domestic plants and animals.”Intermingling with the wild, therefore, is critical and enriching for man’s best friend. But man can’t breed with his own hairy progenitors, so he has to be content with their avatars in ancient and modern myths, and in sci-fi movies—and in Geico commercials.
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
# 72 A House for Mr. Biswas – V.S. Naipaul
While lunching with Ed Norton, Ralph Kramden noted an advertisement that struck a chord. After work he arrives home, eager to tell his wife about a vacation cottage for sale, but the audience is against him. Norton has already spilled the beans to Alice and his own wife, Trixie.
The women don’t believe they can afford the cottage. Defensive yet defiant, Kramden cracks open the paper and declaims, “Come to Paradise Acres, the ideal place to spend your summer vacation… $989 buys you a dream house in this enchanted wonderland.”
Kramden argues that he needs a haven from the sonic assault of his daily bus route and from the noise and crowd of his miserable New York apartment. In his mind it’s a chance to partake in the Good Life. TV viewers know otherwise; the stage is set for another failure for the hero, “a dreamer whose visions of upward mobility are constantly thwarted,” according to The Museum of Broadcast Communications.
The comedic bubble-bursting detailed in “Cottage for Sale” is typical of The Honeymooners. The episode, the 43rd installment of the Kramden and Norton saga, aired on January 23, 1954. In the early ‘50’s The Honeymooners appeared in sketches on other variety programs; the show’s sole full season lasted from 1955 to 1956. Afterward the characters returned sporadically in skits and specials as late as 1976 on account of their enduring popularity, thanks in part to reruns in syndication.
Why is Ralph Kramden so funny and so resonant? A Gallery of Archetypes cites him as an avatar of the Clown, “who does his best work as an Everyman.” The web site amplifies:
In conceiving The Honeymooners, Gleason based the Kramdens’ dreary dwelling on the Brooklyn apartment he grew up in, even using the same address, 328 Chauncey Street. The borough has embraced its fictional son: the sign welcoming visitors via the Brooklyn Bridge quotes a Kramden trademark line: “How sweet it is!”
Three years after “Cottage for Sale” first ran, a writer at Oxford University began contemplating in fiction his father’s hardscrabble upbringing 2200 miles south of New York City in rural Trinidad and then its capital city, Port-of-Spain. V.S. Naipaul’s novel, A House for Mr. Biswas, finished in 1960 and published in 1961, describes another scheming Clown/Everyman lured by real estate.
As the cottage does for Ralph Kramden, the house for Mohun Biswas represents an opportunity for a little dignity. When Biswas very tenuously attains kingship of his tenement castle after numerous struggles, he takes pleasure in its relative tranquility (“to hear no noises except those of his family”), echoing Kramden’s desire to be free of clamor next-door, and in its relative autonomy from extended family (“to bar entry to whoever he wished”), mirroring Kramden’s irritation at the frequent presence of a domineering mother-in-law and neighbors such as Alice’s card-playing friends.
Biswas buys his home due to a slick, false piece of salesmanship in the same manner Kramden is victimized by the bait-and-switch of a con-artist salesman. Each hero is overmatched in the marketplace and too proud to admit it. Biswas pays $4,000, an exorbitant sum for his means. Accordingly his wife, Shama, disapproves of this purchase and all his prior rash expenditures—she carefully manages the family finances as Alice manages the Kramdens’ kitty.
The Biswas house quickly proves to be structurally deficient as does the cottage the Kramdens and Nortons buy together for $989 ($7,200 in 2006 dollars). When the New Yorkers first arrive at their new getaway, Ralph and Ed are ridiculously dressed in matching coats, displaying their naiveté toward “vacationing.” The Biswases demonstrate similar inexperience when traveling to the beach for the first time as a family; the underlying cause of poverty adds a melancholy strain.
Whereas the Biswases are stuck in their home and forced to make piecemeal upgrades, the Americans fortuitously shed their albatross and sell the cottage for $1,000. They then learn that the new buyer will flip it for $4,000 (this identical amount emphasizes the high cost of the Biswas house a decade earlier in Trinidad) to the state, which is building a highway through the property. This buyer has “advance information,” a commodity Kramden never has—he’s only a peon in the System and barred from the rapid accumulation of wealth. Biswas is also excluded from such information, whether licit or illicit, such as arson intended to reap insurance money, a tactic called “insuranburn.”
Biswas doesn’t commit arson but he does inappropriately set clearing fires to fields, nearly burning down a house. In his cottage Kramden is similarly inept; he dumps kerosene in the wood burning stove and almost blows up the joint. Neither hero is a modern-day Prometheus, a master of fire, a defining trait of Man.
Each hero’s essential incapacity is evident in his comically distorted physicality. Biswas’s calf muscles lack tone to such an extent that they are often compared to swinging “hammocks.” His poor fitness stems from malnutrition dating to early childhood—by harping on this detail Naipaul indicts a world-order in which billions cannot eat properly. Kramden is obese and the frequent butt of fat jokes, even in “Cottage for Sale.” In reality Gleason the wealthy actor was a celebrated gourmand; in the context of The Honeymooners and the running barbs about Kramden’s appearance, we see an early depiction of beer-chugging gluttony as a characteristically American form of poor nutrition.
These unfit men don’t take insults lying down. In fact, they hurl more than they catch. The trading of invectives supplies the bulk of the humor in both A House for Mr. Biswas and The Honeymooners, and it points again toward the archetype: “The shadow aspect of the Clown or Fool manifests as cruel personal mockery or betrayal.”
In 2005 a writer for The American Spectator, James Bowman, looked back at Kramden and elaborated on the character’s depth:
The French existentialist Albert Camus considered the doomed Greek in 1955 while the full season of The Honeymooners ran. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus sees the icon as “happy” despite the absurdity of his labor because “His fate belongs to him.”
Ah, Fate, the abstraction so compelling to the ancients. According to the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, a contemporary of Buddha, “A man’s character is his guardian divinity,” widely interpreted as “Character is fate,” meaning that our actions and intentions determine our life-paths. This notion significantly influenced Western thought: the German Romanticist Novalis quoted this fragment, and the English novelist Thomas Hardy in turn quoted Novalis.
The extents to which Kramden’s and Biswas’s character strengths and flaws determine their own fates could be debated forever. They are often at the mercy of mystical, natural and social forces beyond their control. For example, “A Cottage for Sale” opens with Alice Kramden and her friends playing bridge, a card game interweaving skill and chance. They commiserate that another woman’s husband “got a promotion.” They’ve gotten a bad deal in life, the scene suggests, and Kramden, the off-camera hero, is fighting against the luck of the draw.
Fate announces itself early in A House for Mr. Biswas. In the prologue we learn that the hero dies (and therefore the ruined Biswas resembles Lear, Othello and Oedipus more than does Kramden). In his last weeks he marvels at his “stupendous” achievement of home ownership, suggesting the state of happiness Camus described.
Indian civilization saw fate as broader than one’s ultimate state in this life. Karma, the “law of cause and effect,” asserts that a soul’s destiny progresses or regresses during its reincarnations. Actions during past lives affect our present lives; our actions today will affect our subsequent lives.
In a novel by an ethnic Indian about ethnic Indians, replete with Hindu terminology, beliefs and rituals, Naipaul notably preferred to write the English “fate” to the Sanskrit/Hindu/Buddhist “karma.” One might see this as a small token of the author’s pro-Western stance for which he has been both lauded and reviled.
Thanks to their colonial presence in India, formalized in 1757, the British have digested karma more often and fully than have Americans. Three popular songs, all by British artists, entertain us with idiosyncratic interpretations of this concept.
John Lennon, the three other Beatles and fellow musician Donovan studied transcendental meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India in 1968. Lennon’s 1970 song, “Instant Karma,” sloughs off reincarnation and places cause-and-effect in the here-and-now.
“It’s up to you,” Lennon sings, investing every human with the power to love and live with meaning today. “You’re a superstar,” he adds, envisioning a radiant firmament in which “we all shine on.”
Naipaul presents a more complicated view. His ironical outsider, Mohun Biswas, is at birth cursed by a Hindu pundit to lead an unfortunate life—a message opposite to Lennon’s. Despite this damnation, Biswas doggedly struggles to shine, albeit dimly, against the bleak backdrop of Third World economics and cultural disconnect.
“Karma is important,” chirped Thom Yorke, the tousled sparrow for Radiohead, a band from Oxford, about the 1997 song “Karma Police.” “The idea that something like karma exists makes me happy. It makes me smile.”
A post-modern composer par excellence, Yorke frequently displays cheeky irony when discussing the often sinister imagery of his songs. He added, “’Karma Police’ is dedicated to everyone who works for a big firm. It’s a song against bosses.” The lyrics lament corporate suppression of individuality, as so astutely illustrated in the comic strip, Dilbert. The invocation of karma emphasizes the unavoidable presence of thought control.
Kramden and Biswas toil below Yorke’s subjects and Dilbert on the food chain. They are excluded from the management of and capitalization on ideas and people. Biswas for a spell directs plantation workers but he does so disinterestedly and without real authority. Like Kramden he follows his erratic dreams and urges, making him admirable but unsuited for institutional conformity. He is always a prime candidate to be fired.
In 1983 another Brit understood karma on his own terms. Concerning Culture Club’s worldwide hit, “Karma Chameleon,” Boy George said,
The injection of romance into cosmic cause-and-effect brings to mind the impotence, mainly socioeconomic, of Ralph Kramden and Mohun Biswas—neither has meaningful disposable income. Kramden is perpetually childless (and sexually impotent?), but he is also happily married to Alice, “proving that love does not need glamour to survive.” He is paid back in sustained conjugal passion the way Boy George wants his addressee to be compensated.
Biswas, on the other hand, is certainly not sexually impotent. He has had four children by the time he is 33. The narrative’s repetition of this fact, along with references to a multiplicity of poorly governed, underfed children in the extended family, suggests a quiet but insistent authorial recommendation for birth control. Unlike Kramden, Biswas does not experience romantic love in front of us. One even wonders how and when his children are conceived; the Biswas’s relations are always fraught and the two do not express much more than a grudging simpatico.
The most negative expressions between the Kramdens and Biswases relate to domestic violence. “To the moon, Alice,” Kramden often yelled, and it became a signature phrase. In “Cottage for Sale” he twice threatens his wife: “One of these days, pow, right in the kisser!” and “I’d like to belt you right now.” These empty threats—Alice never once feared Ralph—represented the height of comedy to the contemporary audience of The Honeymooners since they underscored Ralph’s futile attempt to exert power. There’s little comedy and much discomfort in viewing those threats today.
Mohun Biswas in fact hits his wife, to his discredit, but the context of the narrative also asserts his powerlessness as a traditional patriarch. Biswas’s violence is lesser in degree and frequency than that of the members of his extended family: other husbands beat their wives regularly, even brutally, and the women beat their children mercilessly. These beatings are not just condoned, they are bragged about. Again, there seems to be an insistent authorial protest toward a despicable, unproductive group behavior.
The preeminent feminist novelist, Virginia Woolf, calmly excoriated the commonality of this practice, as she cited a canonical history book: “Wife-beating, I read, ‘was a recognized right of man, and was practiced without shame by high as well as low.’”
This comes from Woolf’s 1929 essay, A Room of One’s Own, which famously introduced the theme of modest spatial independence as a prerequisite for intellectual and artistic development. Mohun Biswas, a frustrated writer himself, intuitively grasps this concept while he yearns for not just a room but an entire house in which he can dream and over which he can lord. As a poor patriarch but a patriarch nonetheless, he partially attains an artist’s shabby dignity to which his wife and daughters are not entitled.
Biswas and Kramden could not frame their quests for real estate in such a context. Naipaul himself, at a seminar, somewhat affirmed the constricted perspective of his hero, as seen in this exchange:
Q: What do you think are the larger themes of Biswas?
NAI: I think that the theme was outlined very simply - the theme about a man getting a house.
We can also read this as the author’s disingenuous simplification of the novel, in contrast to Boy George’s stretch toward greater meanings in his compositions.
The centathlete read A House for Mr. Biswas and meditated (though not transcendentally) on its meanings while often seated right next to ethnic brethren of Mohun Biswas. A rail commuter on New Jersey Transit’s Northeast Corridor Line between New York City and Trenton will note the substantial and rising number of Indian-Americans boarding and detraining at Metropark, Metuchen, and Edison. (Viewing the three stops’ linkage on a map, on a northeast-to-southwest diagonal, recalls the three stars of Orion’s Belt, Mintaka, Alnilam and Alnitak. This asterism probably inspired the layout of the Egyptian pyramids at Giza.)
The lives of these fellow commuters, men and women carrying iPods, laptops and cell phones back and forth from suburban comfort, on the surface do not resemble that of Mohun Biswas. However, his tragic life, inspiring and disturbing, offers much food for thought as a train skims over the New Jersey wetlands, beside egrets and decrepit factories, under the northern sky. How sweet and sour it is.
The women don’t believe they can afford the cottage. Defensive yet defiant, Kramden cracks open the paper and declaims, “Come to Paradise Acres, the ideal place to spend your summer vacation… $989 buys you a dream house in this enchanted wonderland.”
Kramden argues that he needs a haven from the sonic assault of his daily bus route and from the noise and crowd of his miserable New York apartment. In his mind it’s a chance to partake in the Good Life. TV viewers know otherwise; the stage is set for another failure for the hero, “a dreamer whose visions of upward mobility are constantly thwarted,” according to The Museum of Broadcast Communications.
The comedic bubble-bursting detailed in “Cottage for Sale” is typical of The Honeymooners. The episode, the 43rd installment of the Kramden and Norton saga, aired on January 23, 1954. In the early ‘50’s The Honeymooners appeared in sketches on other variety programs; the show’s sole full season lasted from 1955 to 1956. Afterward the characters returned sporadically in skits and specials as late as 1976 on account of their enduring popularity, thanks in part to reruns in syndication.
Why is Ralph Kramden so funny and so resonant? A Gallery of Archetypes cites him as an avatar of the Clown, “who does his best work as an Everyman.” The web site amplifies:
“The Clown reflects the emotions of the crowd, making an audience laugh by satirizing something they can relate to collectively or by acting out social absurdities. In general, the messages communicated through a Clown's humor are deeply serious and often critical of the hypocrisy in an individual or in some area of society.”Jackie Gleason described his creation more matter-of-factly: “The poor soul hasn’t got a hell of a lot of ability. But he keeps trying… He's just an ordinary guy who is trying to make it and can’t do it.”
In conceiving The Honeymooners, Gleason based the Kramdens’ dreary dwelling on the Brooklyn apartment he grew up in, even using the same address, 328 Chauncey Street. The borough has embraced its fictional son: the sign welcoming visitors via the Brooklyn Bridge quotes a Kramden trademark line: “How sweet it is!”
Three years after “Cottage for Sale” first ran, a writer at Oxford University began contemplating in fiction his father’s hardscrabble upbringing 2200 miles south of New York City in rural Trinidad and then its capital city, Port-of-Spain. V.S. Naipaul’s novel, A House for Mr. Biswas, finished in 1960 and published in 1961, describes another scheming Clown/Everyman lured by real estate.
As the cottage does for Ralph Kramden, the house for Mohun Biswas represents an opportunity for a little dignity. When Biswas very tenuously attains kingship of his tenement castle after numerous struggles, he takes pleasure in its relative tranquility (“to hear no noises except those of his family”), echoing Kramden’s desire to be free of clamor next-door, and in its relative autonomy from extended family (“to bar entry to whoever he wished”), mirroring Kramden’s irritation at the frequent presence of a domineering mother-in-law and neighbors such as Alice’s card-playing friends.
Biswas buys his home due to a slick, false piece of salesmanship in the same manner Kramden is victimized by the bait-and-switch of a con-artist salesman. Each hero is overmatched in the marketplace and too proud to admit it. Biswas pays $4,000, an exorbitant sum for his means. Accordingly his wife, Shama, disapproves of this purchase and all his prior rash expenditures—she carefully manages the family finances as Alice manages the Kramdens’ kitty.
The Biswas house quickly proves to be structurally deficient as does the cottage the Kramdens and Nortons buy together for $989 ($7,200 in 2006 dollars). When the New Yorkers first arrive at their new getaway, Ralph and Ed are ridiculously dressed in matching coats, displaying their naiveté toward “vacationing.” The Biswases demonstrate similar inexperience when traveling to the beach for the first time as a family; the underlying cause of poverty adds a melancholy strain.
Whereas the Biswases are stuck in their home and forced to make piecemeal upgrades, the Americans fortuitously shed their albatross and sell the cottage for $1,000. They then learn that the new buyer will flip it for $4,000 (this identical amount emphasizes the high cost of the Biswas house a decade earlier in Trinidad) to the state, which is building a highway through the property. This buyer has “advance information,” a commodity Kramden never has—he’s only a peon in the System and barred from the rapid accumulation of wealth. Biswas is also excluded from such information, whether licit or illicit, such as arson intended to reap insurance money, a tactic called “insuranburn.”
Biswas doesn’t commit arson but he does inappropriately set clearing fires to fields, nearly burning down a house. In his cottage Kramden is similarly inept; he dumps kerosene in the wood burning stove and almost blows up the joint. Neither hero is a modern-day Prometheus, a master of fire, a defining trait of Man.
Each hero’s essential incapacity is evident in his comically distorted physicality. Biswas’s calf muscles lack tone to such an extent that they are often compared to swinging “hammocks.” His poor fitness stems from malnutrition dating to early childhood—by harping on this detail Naipaul indicts a world-order in which billions cannot eat properly. Kramden is obese and the frequent butt of fat jokes, even in “Cottage for Sale.” In reality Gleason the wealthy actor was a celebrated gourmand; in the context of The Honeymooners and the running barbs about Kramden’s appearance, we see an early depiction of beer-chugging gluttony as a characteristically American form of poor nutrition.
These unfit men don’t take insults lying down. In fact, they hurl more than they catch. The trading of invectives supplies the bulk of the humor in both A House for Mr. Biswas and The Honeymooners, and it points again toward the archetype: “The shadow aspect of the Clown or Fool manifests as cruel personal mockery or betrayal.”
In 2005 a writer for The American Spectator, James Bowman, looked back at Kramden and elaborated on the character’s depth:
“[He] looks more and more like a tragic figure. At least he was like King Lear or Othello or Oedipus in not knowing something about himself that the audience did know. In his case, what he didn't know was that his self-presentation was transparent to them, and that everyone could see through his bluster to the weak, vain, greedy, petty self that he thought to keep hidden.”The episodic nature of the sitcom, Bowman adroitly notes, evokes a crucial difference between Kramden and the classically tragic character brought to “irretrievable ruin.” Kramden isn’t ruined—he returns every week, renewed for more humiliation and frustration. Bowman compares him to the ever beleaguered Wile E. Coyote; we can up the ante and compare Kramden to Sisyphus, whose eternal sessions of futile rock-pushing exemplify “thwarted upward mobility” to be sure.
The French existentialist Albert Camus considered the doomed Greek in 1955 while the full season of The Honeymooners ran. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus sees the icon as “happy” despite the absurdity of his labor because “His fate belongs to him.”
Ah, Fate, the abstraction so compelling to the ancients. According to the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, a contemporary of Buddha, “A man’s character is his guardian divinity,” widely interpreted as “Character is fate,” meaning that our actions and intentions determine our life-paths. This notion significantly influenced Western thought: the German Romanticist Novalis quoted this fragment, and the English novelist Thomas Hardy in turn quoted Novalis.
The extents to which Kramden’s and Biswas’s character strengths and flaws determine their own fates could be debated forever. They are often at the mercy of mystical, natural and social forces beyond their control. For example, “A Cottage for Sale” opens with Alice Kramden and her friends playing bridge, a card game interweaving skill and chance. They commiserate that another woman’s husband “got a promotion.” They’ve gotten a bad deal in life, the scene suggests, and Kramden, the off-camera hero, is fighting against the luck of the draw.
Fate announces itself early in A House for Mr. Biswas. In the prologue we learn that the hero dies (and therefore the ruined Biswas resembles Lear, Othello and Oedipus more than does Kramden). In his last weeks he marvels at his “stupendous” achievement of home ownership, suggesting the state of happiness Camus described.
Indian civilization saw fate as broader than one’s ultimate state in this life. Karma, the “law of cause and effect,” asserts that a soul’s destiny progresses or regresses during its reincarnations. Actions during past lives affect our present lives; our actions today will affect our subsequent lives.
In a novel by an ethnic Indian about ethnic Indians, replete with Hindu terminology, beliefs and rituals, Naipaul notably preferred to write the English “fate” to the Sanskrit/Hindu/Buddhist “karma.” One might see this as a small token of the author’s pro-Western stance for which he has been both lauded and reviled.
Thanks to their colonial presence in India, formalized in 1757, the British have digested karma more often and fully than have Americans. Three popular songs, all by British artists, entertain us with idiosyncratic interpretations of this concept.
John Lennon, the three other Beatles and fellow musician Donovan studied transcendental meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India in 1968. Lennon’s 1970 song, “Instant Karma,” sloughs off reincarnation and places cause-and-effect in the here-and-now.
“It’s up to you,” Lennon sings, investing every human with the power to love and live with meaning today. “You’re a superstar,” he adds, envisioning a radiant firmament in which “we all shine on.”
Naipaul presents a more complicated view. His ironical outsider, Mohun Biswas, is at birth cursed by a Hindu pundit to lead an unfortunate life—a message opposite to Lennon’s. Despite this damnation, Biswas doggedly struggles to shine, albeit dimly, against the bleak backdrop of Third World economics and cultural disconnect.
“Karma is important,” chirped Thom Yorke, the tousled sparrow for Radiohead, a band from Oxford, about the 1997 song “Karma Police.” “The idea that something like karma exists makes me happy. It makes me smile.”
A post-modern composer par excellence, Yorke frequently displays cheeky irony when discussing the often sinister imagery of his songs. He added, “’Karma Police’ is dedicated to everyone who works for a big firm. It’s a song against bosses.” The lyrics lament corporate suppression of individuality, as so astutely illustrated in the comic strip, Dilbert. The invocation of karma emphasizes the unavoidable presence of thought control.
Kramden and Biswas toil below Yorke’s subjects and Dilbert on the food chain. They are excluded from the management of and capitalization on ideas and people. Biswas for a spell directs plantation workers but he does so disinterestedly and without real authority. Like Kramden he follows his erratic dreams and urges, making him admirable but unsuited for institutional conformity. He is always a prime candidate to be fired.
In 1983 another Brit understood karma on his own terms. Concerning Culture Club’s worldwide hit, “Karma Chameleon,” Boy George said,
“The song is about the terrible fear of alienation that people have, the fear of standing up for one thing. It’s about trying to suck up to everybody. Basically, if you aren’t true, if you don’t act like you feel, then you get Karma-justice, that’s nature's way of paying you back.”Noble sentiment there, smacking of aggrandizement. The lyrics read more like the revenge of a scorned lover; they fit into the soap opera of Boy George’s break-up at the time with drummer Jon Moss, and it was widely noted that “George admitted that many of the songs he wrote and recorded with Culture Club were actually directed toward Moss.” For Boy George, the addressee of his song combats rather than accepts romantic destiny and his true self—he should embrace that he is a “lover” not a “rival.”
The injection of romance into cosmic cause-and-effect brings to mind the impotence, mainly socioeconomic, of Ralph Kramden and Mohun Biswas—neither has meaningful disposable income. Kramden is perpetually childless (and sexually impotent?), but he is also happily married to Alice, “proving that love does not need glamour to survive.” He is paid back in sustained conjugal passion the way Boy George wants his addressee to be compensated.
Biswas, on the other hand, is certainly not sexually impotent. He has had four children by the time he is 33. The narrative’s repetition of this fact, along with references to a multiplicity of poorly governed, underfed children in the extended family, suggests a quiet but insistent authorial recommendation for birth control. Unlike Kramden, Biswas does not experience romantic love in front of us. One even wonders how and when his children are conceived; the Biswas’s relations are always fraught and the two do not express much more than a grudging simpatico.
The most negative expressions between the Kramdens and Biswases relate to domestic violence. “To the moon, Alice,” Kramden often yelled, and it became a signature phrase. In “Cottage for Sale” he twice threatens his wife: “One of these days, pow, right in the kisser!” and “I’d like to belt you right now.” These empty threats—Alice never once feared Ralph—represented the height of comedy to the contemporary audience of The Honeymooners since they underscored Ralph’s futile attempt to exert power. There’s little comedy and much discomfort in viewing those threats today.
Mohun Biswas in fact hits his wife, to his discredit, but the context of the narrative also asserts his powerlessness as a traditional patriarch. Biswas’s violence is lesser in degree and frequency than that of the members of his extended family: other husbands beat their wives regularly, even brutally, and the women beat their children mercilessly. These beatings are not just condoned, they are bragged about. Again, there seems to be an insistent authorial protest toward a despicable, unproductive group behavior.
The preeminent feminist novelist, Virginia Woolf, calmly excoriated the commonality of this practice, as she cited a canonical history book: “Wife-beating, I read, ‘was a recognized right of man, and was practiced without shame by high as well as low.’”
This comes from Woolf’s 1929 essay, A Room of One’s Own, which famously introduced the theme of modest spatial independence as a prerequisite for intellectual and artistic development. Mohun Biswas, a frustrated writer himself, intuitively grasps this concept while he yearns for not just a room but an entire house in which he can dream and over which he can lord. As a poor patriarch but a patriarch nonetheless, he partially attains an artist’s shabby dignity to which his wife and daughters are not entitled.
Biswas and Kramden could not frame their quests for real estate in such a context. Naipaul himself, at a seminar, somewhat affirmed the constricted perspective of his hero, as seen in this exchange:
Q: What do you think are the larger themes of Biswas?
NAI: I think that the theme was outlined very simply - the theme about a man getting a house.
We can also read this as the author’s disingenuous simplification of the novel, in contrast to Boy George’s stretch toward greater meanings in his compositions.
The centathlete read A House for Mr. Biswas and meditated (though not transcendentally) on its meanings while often seated right next to ethnic brethren of Mohun Biswas. A rail commuter on New Jersey Transit’s Northeast Corridor Line between New York City and Trenton will note the substantial and rising number of Indian-Americans boarding and detraining at Metropark, Metuchen, and Edison. (Viewing the three stops’ linkage on a map, on a northeast-to-southwest diagonal, recalls the three stars of Orion’s Belt, Mintaka, Alnilam and Alnitak. This asterism probably inspired the layout of the Egyptian pyramids at Giza.)
The lives of these fellow commuters, men and women carrying iPods, laptops and cell phones back and forth from suburban comfort, on the surface do not resemble that of Mohun Biswas. However, his tragic life, inspiring and disturbing, offers much food for thought as a train skims over the New Jersey wetlands, beside egrets and decrepit factories, under the northern sky. How sweet and sour it is.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
# 56 The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
From 1926 to 1929 Dashiell Hammett occupied an apartment at 891 Post Street in San Francisco’s gritty Tenderloin district. A young husband and father of two, “Dash” lived apart from his family because he suffered from tuberculosis. He wrote The Maltese Falcon in the flat which greatly resembles that of Sam Spade, his detective hero.
Other local buildings figure in the novel, some with their names changed. Gutman, the arch-villain, stays at the Alexandria Hotel, where he drugs Spade. The model for the fictional lodging was the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, five blocks from Hammett’s apartment.
To this day a popular hotel and stately landmark, the Drake holds personal significance for the centathlete. In 1999, while attending a convention in downtown San Francisco, he ventured out after dinner with an entourage of salesmen in suits, some of them friends, some new acquaintances. It was a breezy but not overly chilly Monday evening. Someone suggested Harry Denton’s Starlight Room as a destination.
This nightclub, on the 21st floor of the Drake, is advertised to party seekers by an illuminated rotating gold star atop the hotel. The beacon lured the entourage west, as if they were magi, across Union Square.
The wise guys exited the hotel elevator and spilled into a throng of glitterati—a pleasant surprise on a worknight. A red booth was secured. Conversations unfolded rapidly with neighbors, local suburbanites in for a swank night on the town. Slurping a Manhattan, the centathlete scanned the crowd and the main seating area.
“Hey—there are The Go-Go’s.”
Belinda Carlisle and Jane Wiedlin, those glam-punk goddesses of the ‘80’s, were holding court around a lengthy table. They looked good, more mature since their MTV salad days, but decidedly good. Their three bandmates were absent but not missed on account of a gaggle of women, dressed in skimpy, retro-mod outfits suggestive of the ‘60’s, and a few contemporarily mod rakes. Their giggly colloquy was pierced by Wiedlin’s nasal fife of a voice.
This observation passed largely unremarked in the booth—the entourage was preoccupied with mingling—but one of the neighbors reported having seen The Go-Go’s in concert days before somewhere (California geography means nothing to a Manhattan-slurping business traveler) to the south of the city. The women accompanying Carlisle and Wiedlin, entertaining them with lurid commentaries and accounts of racy exploits as far as the centathlete could tell (maybe he was only projecting), were actual go-go dancers who flanked the band when they performed.
At the far end of the lounge the DJ was churning up the dance floor. The entourage, which the centathlete now privately termed “geeks in wingtips” in light of the stylish company, attained the space and boogied, power-ties flapping flaccidly.
The collective energy was revved up by the opening notes of the mega-smash, “Livin’ la Vida Loca” by Ricky Martin. That infectious track instantly compelled The Go-Go’s to the floor. Carlisle was radiant, bouncing next to the centathlete and blind to his presence. She was buoyantly engaged with her gal pals, a couple of whom avidly demonstrated their go-go skills on the ledges of the windows displaying panoramic views of the San Francisco night skyline.
As the DJ spurred on the floor with successive numbers, a fellow wingtipped geek engaged one of the go-go dancers in mutual bumping and grinding against the glass. The spectacle was positive and the mood all around was high. Eventually the celebrities’ presence was called out: the DJ played the early ‘80’s hit, “Our Lips Are Sealed.” For a few delightful moments the centathlete danced to The Go-Go’s with The Go-Go’s, but Carlisle and Wiedlin abruptly returned to their table—apparently their own beat didn’t make them get off their seat anymore.
The flow eventually subsided and the entourage sat down as well. Desultory conversation ensued. Then, the centathlete noted Carlisle and Wiedlin leading their group out a side door.
“Where are The Go-Go’s going? Let’s follow them.”
The salesmen and a few neighbors proceeded out into a service stairwell not meant for public traffic. Up a few flights they stepped, and out on the roof itself. The perimeter was ringed by a walkway sunken between stout, chin-high outer walls and a central peak. Down this trough the Go-Go group was smoking and drinking. The geeks satisfied themselves with the impressive vistas and the thrill of the illicit excursion, except for the one salesman who resumed his burgeoning relationship with the window-grinder.
But she had other fish to fry. Upon quitting his company she and her fellow go-go dancers, to the geeks’ astonishment, crawled one at a time up the central slope. They reached the roof’s apex and stood directly under the gold star, yelping triumphantly. After they came down the entourage again followed their lead. The centathlete mounted and ascended the ladder, which rose above the visual comfort of the outer walls. Vertigo was combated with clenched hands and a steady downward gaze at the rungs. The terminus was a short gangplank around the star’s supporting pole.
The entourage stood on the summit, their tentativeness giving way to exhilaration. The star twirled above their heads. It was gusty and chillier. There was an urban mysticism in the moment and it seemed that an affirming ritual was required, but the surrounding skyscrapers offered no guidance or commentary.
When the geeks descended to the trough and then to the Starlight Room, The Go-Go’s were finishing their drinks at their table. Wiedlin was still chirping. Most of the patrons were gone. Eventually the salesmen traipsed off to their hotel and requested their wake-up calls. The next morning on the convention floor it was established that most of them had not recognized, nor did they care, that they had been in the presence of The Go-Go’s. They had brochures to distribute and quotas to meet.
The centathlete has since returned to that unforgettable gangplank, which can only be accessed surreptitiously, without the knowledge of the Starlight Room staff. Creep and climb at your own peril.
The night with The Go-Go’s— a Low Brush with Fame to be sure—could, in retrospect, serve as stock for a Dashiell Hammett story if embellished appropriately. The centathlete would be a hard-boiled private eye like Sam Spade. His entourage would include seedy characters selling gambling accessories and contraband. Their interaction with the celebrities’ group would be more intimate, involving both overt and ambiguous sexuality, eliciting jealousy. Fog would enshroud the rooftop.
One of the go-go dancers would shriek and fall off, the event not directly seen by the narrator and (most of) his entourage. The celebrities would vanish with their harem. The centathlete, on returning to the lounge, would be met by the management and the cops, who would informally accuse of him of witnessing or perpetrating a murder. The urgent mission, under the suspicion of the SFPD, to find the real killer would ensue…
Many readers applaud such ingredients, now familiar to consumers of literary and film noir, and of much other detective dramas, and they eat up the straightforward, monotone presentation. In 1929 Hammett’s laconic, “objective” narrative style in The Maltese Falcon was admired and compared to Hemingway’s. The opening paragraph includes:
The noir atmosphere of The Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade’s “existential” mystique attracted countless fans (Gertrude Stein, for example, who considered Hammett and Charlie Chaplin the two people she wanted to meet in America, according to an interview with the playwright Lillian Hellman, Hammett’s companion) and imitators. However, Hammett himself disengaged from the genre he helped create and he futilely dreamed of producing artistic novels.
The centathlete enjoys noir to a point but he won’t reread its progenitor. He prefers John Huston’s 1941 movie The Maltese Falcon—the third adaptation of Hammett’s book—and he will watch it again.
Ranked 23rd on the American Film Institute’s Best 100 movies of the 20th century, this adaptation celebrates a triumvirate of thespian magnetism: Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. You can’t beat the stiff swagger and snarled calculations of Bogart (who looked nothing like Hammett’s “blond satan”), the eyelids and insinuating purr of Lorre, and the jowls and learned bluster of Greenstreet. In their roles the masters draw in and repel each other, the minor characters, and us.
By contrast, the novel’s narration kept the centathlete mainly and mildly interested in the puzzle. We know Spade will bring the criminals to justice relatively quickly (the book is short), we just don’t know how. Today the derivative, expedited formula of virtually every TV detective drama (the crime scene, the red herrings, the main suspect, the twist, the confession, justice) is a triter shade of stale. Each new installment makes one mix another Manhattan.
Thus weighing in on the two Falcons, the centathlete considers the general question—the book or the movie?
While common experience prefers the book, minds of varying potency have sought to enlighten us toward a more tolerant perspective. Charles Taylor, a contributing writer to Salon.com, railed against bookish snobs who “believe that only words are capable of conveying nuance, distinction, sensibility, thought.” In the desperately polemic and contrarian style typical of many e-zines, he sought to debunk:
Ondaatje:
As a writer are you influenced more by writing than by art?
Berger:
I think I’m most influenced—only when writing fiction—by cinema.
Ondaatje:
Why cinema?
Berger:
First of all, cinematographic editing seems to me to be close to a form of written narrative. Also, that one can have long vistas and close-ups one after the other. And lastly, because of the relationship of the cinema to its public. It’s in the dark. There are people together and yet each is listening and looking alone. People can’t look at paintings like that; they can’t read books like that and somehow, that image is an image of collaboration, the collaboration of the spectator who is no longer a spectator but part of the telling of the story. That image, which comes from the cinema is, to me, more encouraging.
As a connoisseur, philosopher and historian of virtually all the visual arts from Cro-Magnon cave art (“a metaphysical arena of continually intermittent appearances and disappearances”) to modern photography, Berger is especially qualified to issue meditations such as:
The centathlete does prefer books to movies; far, far more of the former have enriched as they entertained. That said, after grappling with Berger, the notion of comparing literature to cinema as comparing apples to oranges becomes inapt. If a book is an apple, a movie is a group of oranges dancing on a screen against the dark.
The customary primacy of books matters, perhaps more than the different experiences of reading and watching. In most cases the movie is an adaptation of the book (not vice versa), and originality counts a lot; we must grant that a story’s source material enjoys heavy favoritism, in the manner of parents to a child, in our psyche.
Skimming the web yields several forum threads about movies that, for some, bettered their inspirations. Certain titles recur:
The Godfather (the centathlete agrees)
The Lord of the Rings (the centathlete disagrees)
The Wizard of Oz
The Shining
To Kill a Mockingbird
Jaws
Harry Potter
Forest Gump
Fight Club
Gone With the Wind
Further investigation has begun—your opinions and additions are crucial. If you don’t post soon, a man in a trench coat will be making the rounds and asking questions. And if he has to slap you, you’ll like it.
Other local buildings figure in the novel, some with their names changed. Gutman, the arch-villain, stays at the Alexandria Hotel, where he drugs Spade. The model for the fictional lodging was the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, five blocks from Hammett’s apartment.
To this day a popular hotel and stately landmark, the Drake holds personal significance for the centathlete. In 1999, while attending a convention in downtown San Francisco, he ventured out after dinner with an entourage of salesmen in suits, some of them friends, some new acquaintances. It was a breezy but not overly chilly Monday evening. Someone suggested Harry Denton’s Starlight Room as a destination.
This nightclub, on the 21st floor of the Drake, is advertised to party seekers by an illuminated rotating gold star atop the hotel. The beacon lured the entourage west, as if they were magi, across Union Square.
The wise guys exited the hotel elevator and spilled into a throng of glitterati—a pleasant surprise on a worknight. A red booth was secured. Conversations unfolded rapidly with neighbors, local suburbanites in for a swank night on the town. Slurping a Manhattan, the centathlete scanned the crowd and the main seating area.
“Hey—there are The Go-Go’s.”
Belinda Carlisle and Jane Wiedlin, those glam-punk goddesses of the ‘80’s, were holding court around a lengthy table. They looked good, more mature since their MTV salad days, but decidedly good. Their three bandmates were absent but not missed on account of a gaggle of women, dressed in skimpy, retro-mod outfits suggestive of the ‘60’s, and a few contemporarily mod rakes. Their giggly colloquy was pierced by Wiedlin’s nasal fife of a voice.
This observation passed largely unremarked in the booth—the entourage was preoccupied with mingling—but one of the neighbors reported having seen The Go-Go’s in concert days before somewhere (California geography means nothing to a Manhattan-slurping business traveler) to the south of the city. The women accompanying Carlisle and Wiedlin, entertaining them with lurid commentaries and accounts of racy exploits as far as the centathlete could tell (maybe he was only projecting), were actual go-go dancers who flanked the band when they performed.
At the far end of the lounge the DJ was churning up the dance floor. The entourage, which the centathlete now privately termed “geeks in wingtips” in light of the stylish company, attained the space and boogied, power-ties flapping flaccidly.
The collective energy was revved up by the opening notes of the mega-smash, “Livin’ la Vida Loca” by Ricky Martin. That infectious track instantly compelled The Go-Go’s to the floor. Carlisle was radiant, bouncing next to the centathlete and blind to his presence. She was buoyantly engaged with her gal pals, a couple of whom avidly demonstrated their go-go skills on the ledges of the windows displaying panoramic views of the San Francisco night skyline.
As the DJ spurred on the floor with successive numbers, a fellow wingtipped geek engaged one of the go-go dancers in mutual bumping and grinding against the glass. The spectacle was positive and the mood all around was high. Eventually the celebrities’ presence was called out: the DJ played the early ‘80’s hit, “Our Lips Are Sealed.” For a few delightful moments the centathlete danced to The Go-Go’s with The Go-Go’s, but Carlisle and Wiedlin abruptly returned to their table—apparently their own beat didn’t make them get off their seat anymore.
The flow eventually subsided and the entourage sat down as well. Desultory conversation ensued. Then, the centathlete noted Carlisle and Wiedlin leading their group out a side door.
“Where are The Go-Go’s going? Let’s follow them.”
The salesmen and a few neighbors proceeded out into a service stairwell not meant for public traffic. Up a few flights they stepped, and out on the roof itself. The perimeter was ringed by a walkway sunken between stout, chin-high outer walls and a central peak. Down this trough the Go-Go group was smoking and drinking. The geeks satisfied themselves with the impressive vistas and the thrill of the illicit excursion, except for the one salesman who resumed his burgeoning relationship with the window-grinder.
But she had other fish to fry. Upon quitting his company she and her fellow go-go dancers, to the geeks’ astonishment, crawled one at a time up the central slope. They reached the roof’s apex and stood directly under the gold star, yelping triumphantly. After they came down the entourage again followed their lead. The centathlete mounted and ascended the ladder, which rose above the visual comfort of the outer walls. Vertigo was combated with clenched hands and a steady downward gaze at the rungs. The terminus was a short gangplank around the star’s supporting pole.
The entourage stood on the summit, their tentativeness giving way to exhilaration. The star twirled above their heads. It was gusty and chillier. There was an urban mysticism in the moment and it seemed that an affirming ritual was required, but the surrounding skyscrapers offered no guidance or commentary.
When the geeks descended to the trough and then to the Starlight Room, The Go-Go’s were finishing their drinks at their table. Wiedlin was still chirping. Most of the patrons were gone. Eventually the salesmen traipsed off to their hotel and requested their wake-up calls. The next morning on the convention floor it was established that most of them had not recognized, nor did they care, that they had been in the presence of The Go-Go’s. They had brochures to distribute and quotas to meet.
The centathlete has since returned to that unforgettable gangplank, which can only be accessed surreptitiously, without the knowledge of the Starlight Room staff. Creep and climb at your own peril.
The night with The Go-Go’s— a Low Brush with Fame to be sure—could, in retrospect, serve as stock for a Dashiell Hammett story if embellished appropriately. The centathlete would be a hard-boiled private eye like Sam Spade. His entourage would include seedy characters selling gambling accessories and contraband. Their interaction with the celebrities’ group would be more intimate, involving both overt and ambiguous sexuality, eliciting jealousy. Fog would enshroud the rooftop.
One of the go-go dancers would shriek and fall off, the event not directly seen by the narrator and (most of) his entourage. The celebrities would vanish with their harem. The centathlete, on returning to the lounge, would be met by the management and the cops, who would informally accuse of him of witnessing or perpetrating a murder. The urgent mission, under the suspicion of the SFPD, to find the real killer would ensue…
Many readers applaud such ingredients, now familiar to consumers of literary and film noir, and of much other detective dramas, and they eat up the straightforward, monotone presentation. In 1929 Hammett’s laconic, “objective” narrative style in The Maltese Falcon was admired and compared to Hemingway’s. The opening paragraph includes:
“Sam Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v… The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows…”The centathlete found the repetition and passive grammar, here and throughout, downright clunky. Hammett used “was” whenever possible; colorful verbs did not appeal much. “He's an unindicative writer—not a lot of adverbs,” one critic further noted.
The noir atmosphere of The Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade’s “existential” mystique attracted countless fans (Gertrude Stein, for example, who considered Hammett and Charlie Chaplin the two people she wanted to meet in America, according to an interview with the playwright Lillian Hellman, Hammett’s companion) and imitators. However, Hammett himself disengaged from the genre he helped create and he futilely dreamed of producing artistic novels.
The centathlete enjoys noir to a point but he won’t reread its progenitor. He prefers John Huston’s 1941 movie The Maltese Falcon—the third adaptation of Hammett’s book—and he will watch it again.
Ranked 23rd on the American Film Institute’s Best 100 movies of the 20th century, this adaptation celebrates a triumvirate of thespian magnetism: Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. You can’t beat the stiff swagger and snarled calculations of Bogart (who looked nothing like Hammett’s “blond satan”), the eyelids and insinuating purr of Lorre, and the jowls and learned bluster of Greenstreet. In their roles the masters draw in and repel each other, the minor characters, and us.
By contrast, the novel’s narration kept the centathlete mainly and mildly interested in the puzzle. We know Spade will bring the criminals to justice relatively quickly (the book is short), we just don’t know how. Today the derivative, expedited formula of virtually every TV detective drama (the crime scene, the red herrings, the main suspect, the twist, the confession, justice) is a triter shade of stale. Each new installment makes one mix another Manhattan.
Thus weighing in on the two Falcons, the centathlete considers the general question—the book or the movie?
While common experience prefers the book, minds of varying potency have sought to enlighten us toward a more tolerant perspective. Charles Taylor, a contributing writer to Salon.com, railed against bookish snobs who “believe that only words are capable of conveying nuance, distinction, sensibility, thought.” In the desperately polemic and contrarian style typical of many e-zines, he sought to debunk:
“…the old canard that reading is active while watching is passive. Doesn't it depend on what you're reading or watching? It's just as easy for a reader to tune out reading pulpy trash (or, if they're really unlucky, a ‘literary’ snoozer like Michael Ondaatje) as it is to tune out at a movie or in front of TV.”The allegedly soporific Ondaatje, author of The English Patient and other novels, plays and poems, refrained from casual slander when he discussed for the Times of London literature and cinema with his friend, the art critic, novelist and intercultural essayist, John Berger:
Ondaatje:
As a writer are you influenced more by writing than by art?
Berger:
I think I’m most influenced—only when writing fiction—by cinema.
Ondaatje:
Why cinema?
Berger:
First of all, cinematographic editing seems to me to be close to a form of written narrative. Also, that one can have long vistas and close-ups one after the other. And lastly, because of the relationship of the cinema to its public. It’s in the dark. There are people together and yet each is listening and looking alone. People can’t look at paintings like that; they can’t read books like that and somehow, that image is an image of collaboration, the collaboration of the spectator who is no longer a spectator but part of the telling of the story. That image, which comes from the cinema is, to me, more encouraging.
As a connoisseur, philosopher and historian of virtually all the visual arts from Cro-Magnon cave art (“a metaphysical arena of continually intermittent appearances and disappearances”) to modern photography, Berger is especially qualified to issue meditations such as:
“Compare...the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.”In many of his writings Berger emphasizes a socialistic need to uphold connections with the Past, the Environment and the Community. His high-minded appreciation of cinema, as performance art in which the moviegoer is also a collaborator, provokes more than does Taylor’s high-handed dichotomy of “reading vs. watching.”
The centathlete does prefer books to movies; far, far more of the former have enriched as they entertained. That said, after grappling with Berger, the notion of comparing literature to cinema as comparing apples to oranges becomes inapt. If a book is an apple, a movie is a group of oranges dancing on a screen against the dark.
The customary primacy of books matters, perhaps more than the different experiences of reading and watching. In most cases the movie is an adaptation of the book (not vice versa), and originality counts a lot; we must grant that a story’s source material enjoys heavy favoritism, in the manner of parents to a child, in our psyche.
Skimming the web yields several forum threads about movies that, for some, bettered their inspirations. Certain titles recur:
The Godfather (the centathlete agrees)
The Lord of the Rings (the centathlete disagrees)
The Wizard of Oz
The Shining
To Kill a Mockingbird
Jaws
Harry Potter
Forest Gump
Fight Club
Gone With the Wind
Further investigation has begun—your opinions and additions are crucial. If you don’t post soon, a man in a trench coat will be making the rounds and asking questions. And if he has to slap you, you’ll like it.
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