Stumbling through the Centathlon

# 98 The Postman Always Rings Twice – James M. Cain

2011-11-05T16:27:00.015-04:00

Caught with a snazzy tie.

Not cute enough for Frank.

Tufnel played a Collings.

Marv takes a seat.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. The road to Ensenada, on the other hand, “is plenty wide and fast.”

The source of the former declaration is a beatified Frenchman, according to the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms: “This proverbial statement probably derives from a similar statement by St. Bernard of Clairvaux about 1150… ‘Hell is full of good intentions or wishes.’”

The latter observation derives from the venerable Lyle Lovett, whom the centathlete exalts and has seen in concert five times over two decades. In the title track of his 1996 album, “The Road to Ensenada,” we hear the Mexican town portrayed as a destination for American wantonness:

But down here among the unclean/

Your good just comes undone

During a taped session, Lovett related that the song was inspired by one of many motorcycle trips with his close friend, the eminent guitar builder Bill Collings, whose devotees include Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, Joni Mitchell and the unequaled Nigel Tufnel. A comment to the video states: “this is Lyle’s first Collings dreadnought (East Indian rosewood / German spruce) from 1979 built out of Bill’s two-bedroom apartment on Bingle Rd in Houston.”

The same model guitar appears in this performance, a duet with John Hiatt of the exquisite heartbreaker, “Nobody Knows Me.” In this older track, which the singer has evidently labeled “a cheating song about Mexican food,” Lovett describes the ease of infidelity once you leave the country:

But it was a dream made to order/
South of the border/
And nobody knows me like my baby/
And she cried man how could you do it /
And I swore that there weren't nothing to it

Frank Chambers, protagonist of James M. Cain’s 1934 novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, knew what Lovett was singing about. He tells us, “Ensenada is all Mex, and you feel like you left the U.S.A. a million miles away.” The remoteness brings perceived freedom from consequence, and Chamber cheats on his wife Cora when he visits the town with a brand new acquaintance. Through the swiftness and ease of his carnal error, Chambers affirms Chris Rock’s claim that “a man is as faithful as his options.”

Back in the U.S.A., when Cora finds out, she confronts Frank and cries. Rather than swear there was nothing to it, like Lovett’s sad cowboy, Frank offers man’s only other excuse: “She didn’t mean anything to me.”

Frank’s appraisal of Ensenada adds to the distinct waft of racism that appeared earlier in the narrative. When a restaurant patron mistakes Cora for a Mexican, she says, “I’m just as white as you are.”

Frank overhears this retort and subsequently speculates about Cora’s availability despite her marriage to the older Nick Papadakis. He says, “It was being married to the Greek that made her feel she wasn’t white.” Frank jabs with the epithet “the Greek” to denigrate and depersonalize the man he’s about to cuckold.

In fact, Cora wanted the patron to know that she’s superlatively white and American, as evidenced by the fact that she comes from Iowa. This form of proof brings to mind Superman, who first appeared in 1938, and his extreme American-ness, as Michael Rizzotti noted:

“…Superman lands in a corn field in the Midwest. His adopted parents are white, Anglo-Saxon and in all likelihood protestant (WASP). The question is, why the Midwest? He could very well have landed in a native, Jewish, African, Arabic, Mexican, Italian, or Chinese neighborhood in any of the US’ [sic] thriving big cities. The reason is that during the period in which Superman was popular, to be American meant to be white Anglo-American.”

Frank and Cora’s Depression-era bigotry adds ugly honesty to the narrative. Cora’s remark is a small sign of her limited perspective and sensitivity about identity—and of her desperation and savagery that will surface later.

Previously, by marrying Nick Papadakis, Cora had escaped aimless, sordid poverty as an L.A. floozy, to end up as an Old World fairy tale heroine (lowly girl rescued from drudgery by prince). But the marriage proves unsatisfying because Cora, a modern woman with her own drive, wants more than a comfortable life at a wide spot in the road—she wants to achieve the American dream. Her Greek prince is too old and settled, and his princedom isn’t big enough.

Ironically, Cora, by choosing to cheat on and then cold-bloodedly murder her husband, not only fails to attain the 20th century American Dream, she becomes a latter-day Classical tragic heroine, following in the footsteps of Clytemnestra, who plotted with her lover Aegistius to kill her husband Agamemnon. Her last year is ultimately very Greek.

Hollywood, in the 1946 movie adaptation starring John Garfield and Lana Turner, whitewashed over race and ethnicity. “Nick Papadakis” became “Nick Smith” (in the book, Cora’s maiden name is Smith) and Nick’s roots were transplanted to northern Canada. Turner, with her bottle-blonde coiffure (Cora is dark-haired in the novel) does not have to explain to anyone that she isn’t Mexican.

Mexico as the land of temptation is marginalized as well. In the opening scene, Garfield as Chambers tells us he ended up in Twin Oaks while hitching from San Francisco to San Diego. In the book, he was coming from “Tia Juana” on a three-week bender.

(Tijuana is more Sin City than Las Vegas. Years ago, the centathlete visited one night with friends. The very first scene past the Border Crossing was a bust of some kind: ten or more locals were lined up against a wall. On nearly every corner, pharmacy signs promoted cheap medications and quick surgeries. Two blocks off the main drag it was dark and foreboding. And then there were the tequila bars.)

The movie focuses on the sex appeal of the doomed couple; with Garfield as the tough homunculus and Turner as the temptress of the diner. Turner looks overly made-up but fabulous in her white wardrobe. Director Tay Garnett explained:

“There was a problem getting a story with that much sex past the sensors. We figured that dressing Lana in white somehow made everything she did less sensuous. It was also attractive as hell… They didn't have ‘hot pants’ back then, but you couldn't tell it by looking at her.”

Garnett and company appear to have also thought about the choice of ties. The chubby Nick Smith wears a conspicuously short tie, which adds to his portrayal as a sexless clown. When Cora catches Frank cheating on her, the proof is the snazzy striped tie he left with the other woman.

While they were glamorous celebrities at the time of filming The Postman Always Rings Twice, Garfield and Turner were in reality not unacquainted with the tribulations of Frank and Cora. Garfield for a time ran with a gang in New York City. Turner was embroiled her whole life in eventful marriages and affairs. In 1958 she participated in a murder trial when her 14-year old daughter Cheryl was charged with fatally stabbing Turner’s lover, Johnny Stompanato, a gangster’s bodyguard. Cheryl was acquitted on account of self defense.

To write The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain drew on one of the most sensational trials of the 1920’s, the Snyder/Gray case. Ruth Snyder and Henry Judd Gray, gripped in a torrid affair, killed Ruth’s husband, Albert Snyder, an editor of Motor Boating magazine, which even today “covers the passions, adventures and lifestyles of active, affluent boat owners while delivering authoritative reviews and how-to information.”

The lovers blamed each other for the murder, which took place on Long Island, one of the bastions of civilization and, of course, the cradle of the centathlete. David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace summarized some of the trial’s tawdry aspects:

"Although both later claimed the other was the dominant partner, Judd’s nickname of ‘Momma’ or ‘Mommie’ for Ruth would seem to indicate that she was the real leader in their relationship. Ruth wasn't a beauty, but she exuded animal magnetism. During her trial, she received 164 marriage proposals."

It was a circus trial, Troy Taylor writes:

“Celebrities attended in droves, including mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart; director D.W. Griffith; author Will Durant; evangelists Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson.”

Famous journalists such as Damon Runyan and Walter Lippmann attended as well. James M. Cain told The Paris Review that one comment stuck with him: “Walter said it seemed very odd to be inhaling the perfume...of a woman he knew was going to be electrocuted.”

Unsurprisingly, a charged olfactory sense appears in The Postman Always Rings Twice. “I could smell her,” Frank tells us when he first encounters Cora. Pheromones are in the air and lust is up his nostrils.

The scent of a woman impressed another noir hero, Marv of the 2005 film Sin City. The killer is smitten with Goldie and says, “She smells like angels ought to smell, the perfect woman…” The tender, prayerful adoration contrasts with the black deeds of an “unstably violent” giant.

Frank Chambers is no comic-book assassin with a heart of gold like Marv. His revelation about smell shows him to be primal and animal-like. What sort of animal?

“You look more like a hell cat,” Frank says to Cora, kicking off the Cat Motif in the story. There’s the dead pussycat at the base of the stepladder. Then, Frank hooks up with Madge Allen, who raises a lion, a tiger, jaguars and pumas, and the two take the road to Ensenada. They discuss tracking pumas in Nicaragua, though it’s never cleared up if they managed to leave their motel room to undertake this expedition.

As a token of their romance, Madge leaves a baby puma for Frank—but gives it to Cora, who hysterically chews out her cheating husband: “And the cat came back! …Ain’t that funny, how unlucky cats are for you?” The image evokes the black cat in The Matrix, a sign of déjà vu that demonstrates a glitch in the system.

Intriguingly, the swaddled feline becomes a surrogate baby for Frank and Cora, albeit for a night only. Frank exhibits no warmth toward a bundle we could presume to be adorable, as this video shows. Parenthood, like marriage, can’t fulfill him.

The National Center for Biomedical Information reports that the puma “occupies the most extensive range of any New World terrestrial mammal.” Astrologists tell us even more:

“…those who share the puma as their totem should be mindful of their tendency to lash out too quickly, or act out in haste. Call upon the patience and observation of the puma before taking action in order to avoid quick and unsavory consequences.”

If only Frank and Cora had known. Of course, hasty lashing out and unsavory consequences make for good noir. Cain himself did not use that label; he thought his narrative was distinctive because it showcased “…the lingo in the mouth of a hobo with good grammar, like they have in California.” He further told The Paris Review: “Let's talk about this so-called style. I don't know what they're talking about—‘tough,’ ‘hard-boiled.’ I tried to write as people talk.”

To us ultramoderns, noir speech doesn’t seem exactly natural—it sounds affectedly measured and menacing, or “razor-sharp and acerbic.” It’s an outdated posture that takes some work to assume. To wit, Mickey Rourke prepared unusually to become Marv, according to Sin City director Robert Rodriguez:

“Mickey had this one piece of music he would play on the set to get into the character of Marv… It was Johnny Cash’s version of The Nine Inch Nails song, Hurt. If you listen to that song that’s how he did Marv."

(In 1992 Johnny Cash was inducted into the Rock and Roll of Fame. His presenter was Lyle Lovett.)

For his last stop on the road to Hell or somewhere else, but certainly not Ensenada, Marv gets the electric chair, just as Frank Chambers does in The Postman Always Rings Twice. And just as Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray did in 1928 in Sing Sing. A tabloid reporter snuck in a camera and shot Ruth right when the juice was turned on and, as Marv would say, they “got to it.” If you like noir, you’ll want to see the picture. It’s a doozy.

# 93 The Magus – John Fowles

2011-03-05T14:21:00.003-05:00

Anthony Quinn as Conchis

Picasso: saurian and simian?

Hannibal Lecter, classical musician

Dio: Devil's Horns

First off, the centathlete needed to confim the correct pronunciation of the title of The Magus, the 1965 novel by John Fowles, because he has never heard the word spoken. It’s “may-gus,” according to the OED and Anthony Quinn, who played the mysterious Conchis in the 1968 movie adaptation.

Most of us are familiar with the plural on account of the three wise men of the Gospel of Matthew. A British friend once uttered, puzzlingly, the word “magi” as “Maggie” (a name that brings to mind songs by The Beatles and Rod Stewart). Years later this was brought to attention of her father, who was also perplexed and, as an ex-pat, unsure of how most Englishmen today call their Biblical adorers. We Americans prefer the A long and the J soft, so we say “may-jeye.” Anyway, with the singular text now placed on the shelf, we have to keep repeating may-gus, may-gus, may-gus.

Playing the desktop etymologist, the centathlete found that both “magus” and “magic” share ancestors in ancient Greek and old Persian. A magus was a member of the priestly caste of Zoroastrianism known for its development of “Eastern” and “non-Christian” wisdom, notably through the practice of astrology, the interpretation of dreams, and the ability “to foretell events of world importance,” according to William Davies and Dale Allison.

The seemingly related word “magister” may not be related at all: the OED sources the classical Latin title that we moderns have transformed into “master.” For several reasons, The Magus evoked an earlier novel by Hermann Hesse alternatively titled Magister Ludi and The Glass Bead Game. Hesse told the Nobel Prize Committee he spent 11 years writing the book; Fowles spent more than a decade writing The Magus—its draft title was The Godgame.

Both works present profound, enigmatic “games” that are existential, psychological and pan-cultural. The authors’ parallel motifs and themes were not lost on readers of the ‘60s, according to Bill Kruse, who wrote, “…those youngsters who had once carried battered copies of Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha and Demian in the back pocket of their jeans now replaced them with a copy of The Magus."

The final image of Siddartha is of the “wise, thousand-fold smile of Gotama, the Buddha.” Like Hesse, Fowles considers a certain kind of smile the representation of enlightenment. Throughout The Magus, the young protagonist Urfe is described as “grinning,” on occasions when he thinks he knows what is truly transpiring and why—to find out later that he does not. It’s the grin of immaturity and shallow presumption. In contrast, Conchis smiles cryptically and deeply. Paul Laurenz, in analyzing Urfe’s quest for self-discovery, writes, “Conchis’s new world demands the Heraclitean complement, the knowing smile of a buddha who is aware that he does not know.”

(Now, a quibble. Hesse and Fowles, these giants of fiction and philosophy, both uphold “the smile,” yet in their writing they are unable or unwilling to make the reader laugh. Just saying.)

While Hesse toiled over his masterpiece, the Dutch social philosopher Johan Huizinga published Homo Ludens (in English The Playful Human) and argued for the fundamental cultural importance of play. In discussing Huizinga, Daniel Rigney wrote:

“There is something enchanting and captivating about playing games—something that draws us into their imaginary worlds and seals us off from the world outside… Games are at once both imaginary and vividly real to those who fall under their spell.”

This observation describes the process and the appeal of The Magus, in which Urfe is effectively isolated in a marvelous “domaine” on a remote Greek island, and forced to navigate the reality and illusion of Conchis’s godgame. In an interview, Fowles himself acknowledged the role of play in the mind of the writer: “I think literature is half imagination and half game. One’s feeling alter, sometimes very greatly, from one creation to the next.”

(Some will remember that an earlier detour in the centathlon took us through the recent ascendance of the rules of games as entertainment in themselves.)

As the arbiter and leader of the imaginative godgame, Conchis embodies the magus, or the magician, the powerfully resonant card (the very first trump) in the tarot deck, as Urfe reminds us. There are 78 cards in the traditional tarot deck and 78 chapters in The Magus, but “little correlation between the individual cards and chapters,” according to Barry Olshen as cited by Jens Pollheide, who pointed out that John Fowles “encourages” certain identifications, such as tarot iconography, in the reader and then “frustrates” them.

Carl Jung thought that tarot cards represented timeless archetypes that could help an individual on the road to transformation. Gerald Schueler noted, “In Jung’s analytical psychology, these archetypes comprise the major dynamical components of the unconscious which affect the human psyche in many different ways.”

Fowles relied on Jung for provocative fodder rather than for therapeutic dogma. He told Dianne Vipond, “Jung is infinitely more valuable [than Freud] for an artist. One of the Eranos yearbooks was important for The Magus.” So we readers have Urfe as The Fool, the archetypal youth on the journey to self-realization and the authentic life, and Conchis as The Magus, the wise trickster, and little other reason to consult in the tarot deck.

The centathlete, it must be revealed, endeavored to read tarot cards years ago. The Rider-Waite deck was acquired. Illustrated guides were studied. The exercise proved to be an entertaining novelty and one thing became immediately clear: many women want to have their cards read. The readings, this fortuneteller found, were “successful” when suggestive and interactive, rather than authoritative and one-sided. You should read the client at the same time you read the cards.

The most memorable reading illustrates this perception. At a party, the centathlete occupied a corner by the radiator of his Manhattan apartment and read for a few people. One young woman, whom he had never met before, sat down and requested advice concerning the theme of Love. As the cards were turned and interpreted, the centathlete found himself, by observing the woman’s reactions, suddenly referring to her object of desire as female rather than the male, intoning “she will be…” rather than “he will be…” Days later a mutual friend, who was at the party, expressed great surprise that this orientation could have been discovered in that setting—and she confirmed that it was in fact true. Despite this discovery, the centathlete shortly thereafter lost interest in tarot and discontinued the hobby in much the same way he briefly took up and dropped the games of chess and croquet.

Croquet: leisurely, brilliant July afternoons in the front quad of New College at Oxford University. During a study abroad summer program, the centathlete (who typically sported a cap for stale comic effect) and a few fellow students often shirked research and writing for a few games of croquet on the lawn. There was even a final tournament, which the centathlete did not win.

Only by stumbling through the centathlon, admiring Tom Wilson’s heartfelt blog post, do we learn that during the late ‘40s John Fowles attended New College. Other alumni include top 100 novelist, Virginia Woolf and the actor Hugh Grant. While there, we Americans were never told who may have once slept and scribbled in our rooms (most of them spacious, fusty singles)…

After Oxford, Fowles taught on the Greek island of Spetsai. His descriptions of the light, landscape and aura, so different from England, will impress anyone who has had the fortune to visit that mythmaking cradle of the world, as the centathlete has. The blues and whites of Santorini, the butterflies and buttresses of Rhodes, the neglected ruins on the roadside—they are unlike anything back home and they do engender a new mindset for the tourist.

The lord of a columned mansion on Spetsai where he conducts “metatheater,” Conchis personifies an intense classical sensibility at odds with the uptight, English Urfe, who writes, “[Conchis] had a bizarre family resemblance to Picasso; saurian as well as simian, decades of living in the sun, the quintessential Mediterranean man...” Before coming across this vivid comparison, the centathlete had a page earlier actually envisioned Anthony Hopkins as the painter in the south of France in the 1996 film Surviving Picasso. Watching the movie’s trailer today we see a manipulative, randy genius creating art and games in the sunshine—just like Conchis.

Now, Picasso isn’t Hopkins’s only role that comes to mind while reading The Magus. Hannibal Lecter (whom Hopkins played in The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal), Thomas Harris’s cannibal and serial killer, gives us a man who is an initiator of games and a connoisseur of art, a debauchee of utter erudition, who has plumbed the depths of horror and shines the lamplight of perverse insight.

Lecter is a magian caricature in the footsteps of Conchis and his one-time mentor, Count de Deukans (not to be confused with Count Dooku of the Star Wars saga). The Belgian count, according to Conchis, was “immensely rich” as well as “most abnormal, politest, most distant [and] most socially irresponsible.” He was not then unlike Conchis himself, and we can say he ably preceded Lecter.

Let’s get specific. Conchis played a Pleyel harpsichord and it was the key to his meeting Count de Deukans, who owned “five or six harpsichords, museum pieces” and played them himself. In Harris’s 1999 novel Hannibal, “Lecter plays the harpsichord and the theremin,” Gary Moore notes, while the 2001 movie adaptation shows him playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations on a clavier. Through this arcane musicianship, the characters seduce us as astute keepers of tradition and beauty.

Len Platt elaborates on the dangerous seduction, asserting that the character of Hannibal Lecter represents an elevated concern for the very state of Western society and culture. He writes:

“…[Lecter] epitomizes the taste, tradition, and distinction that have been all but dispatched by the leveling dynamic of mass society and mass culture. In this context, the key elements in Dr. Lecter’s make-up, his extraordinary intelligence and great refinement (see, for instance his taste for exotic food…for classic cars, the best perfumes and so on), these become culturally placed in unequivocal ways and deployed against Harris’s version of the awfulness of modern life.”

There comes a strong and clear warning when we consider the diabolical figures of de Deukans, Conchis and Lecter, the latter two personally acquainted with the horror and atrocity of World War II (Lecter’s traumatic childhood is detailed in the 2007 film Hannibal Rising). Sam Ford observes:

“…no matter how superior we become through education, through culture, and through refinement, the basest aspects of human nature—to dominate others, to be violent—will still prevail."

As he was years earlier indoctrinated into the excellence of human achievement by de Deukans, Conchis introduces Urfe to the finer things. He adds the harsher things as well, making Urfe despise his contemporary, bourgeois English life. This tearing down of common values is called out by the three quotations in French in The Magus from the old depraved shadow, the Marquis de Sade.

Fowles was not the only writer thinking of the marquis during the early ‘60s. The German Peter Weiss wrote the play Marat/Sade, which was first performed in 1964 in West Berlin, a year before The Magus was published. (Peter Brooks’s celebrated movie adaptation of Marat/Sade followed in 1967.) For the next decade it was de rigeur to film de Sade; the wave of soft-core was capped by the transgressive, scarring 1975 film, Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, by Pier Paolo Pasolini, who hated fascists perhaps even more than did John Fowles.

Fowles, Weiss and Pasolini all weave de Sade’s rejection of virtue and behavioral boundaries into greater explorations of war, politics, history, and heightened individuality. What is freedom? How should one behave with power, or without it?

Fowles seems to have made use of the marquis in the manner he appropriated Jung for provocative imagery (and, for that matter, in the same way Picasso used the horned Minotaur in many paintings). In his interview with Dianne Vipond, he said, “I don't for instance have much time for texts like de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. I'd rather say I am implicitly erotic!” A key to the sexiness of The Magus is Fowles’s tactic of serial suggestion and frustration, as noted in the earlier reference to Jens Pollheide.

At the end of Urfe’s stay in Spetsai, he is led to a trial that involves his own humiliation, despite the fact that he is placed as the judge rather than the defendant. The charged conflation of domination and subjection, as well as the binding and gagging, evoked the presentation of Trent Reznor in the Nine Inch Nails 1994 video of “Closer,” named the second sexiest song of all-time in one poll. The band’s mud-coated live performance at Woodstock in 1994 channels the lyrics into ecstatic mayhem.

Reznor, as the composer/performer, explored isolation, addiction and violent desperation. Mark Romanek, as the director, created one of the most popular videos ever (17^th on MTV’s greatest videos), mainly by borrowing very heavily from the artwork of Francis Bacon and the photographs of Joel-Peter Witkin. The photographer, called in Salon.com “the reigning king of deviant imagery” and known for provocative nudes and crucifix masks, among other representations, actually considers himself a “Western Christian” artist, as he told Cindy Marler. Fowles, in contrast, tells us in his book’s foreword that he denies God and aims to portray “a series of human illusions about something that does not exist…”

In The Magus, at the trial of Urfe, there is a human illusion that brings to mind a second hard-rocking musician. The narrator describes, “…a huge left hand…with the forefinger and the little finger pointing up and the two middle fingers holding down the thumb.”

Consumers of heavy metal music wield this symbol en masse and call it “the Devil’s horns.” It was popularized by the late Ronnie James Dio, who learned it from his Italian grandmother. The gesture wards off “the evil eye” and, Dio added in an interview, “puts an exclamation point and a period to what you’re doing.”

Like Fowles, Dio knew a distinctive, timeless Mediterranean motif when he saw one, and he had the insight to employ it in memorable, contemporary fashion. This was a man—whom the centathlete saw in concert on August 15, 1984—who wrote or co-wrote songs entitled “Tarot Woman,” “Stargazer,” “Heaven and Hell,” “Voodoo,” and “The Bible Black.” Evidently, he too was a magus, one of many magi.

# 54 Light in August – William Faulkner

2011-01-16T08:49:00.000-05:00

At a convention years ago the centathlete met a bunch of folks from Mississippi, specifically Crystal Springs, once known as “Tomatopolis of the world.” Looking to connect via his Southern schooling, the centathlete informed one hot tomato he went to college in North Carolina. “Oh, that’s not the South,” she promptly said.

Today one wonders if her radius of Southern quintessence extended as far as the college town of Oxford, nearly 200 miles to the north. Known lately for both its southern lifestyle and “cosmopolitan flair,” Oxford was home to William Faulkner most of his life and it served as the model for Jefferson, MS, the setting for his 1932 novel, Light in August.

Most people outside of Crystal Springs consider Faulkner a representative, if not an apotheosis, of a “Southern writer,” as evidenced partly by his influence on contemporary artists such as the guitarist Doug Wamble, a native Tennessean. Here is an excerpt from an interview with Adam Levy:

Q. What dead artist…would you like to have collaborated with?

A. …For other arts (besides music), it'd be William Faulkner. I'd love to have found a way to work with him, because he's in my favorite subset of humanity — the Southern Intellectual.

Chamber Music America awarded Wamble a grant to explore, in his words, “the dichotomy of being an intellectual who is rooted in the down home elements of the South.”

In embracing and wrestling with the “dichotomy” between folksiness and erudition, Wamble created a “sound portrait of the fictional world of William Faulkner.” Its track “Christmas’ Burden,” a superb bit of banjo blues seen in this live performance here, gives voice to Joe Christmas of Light in August. By playing on the notion of “the white man’s burden,” Wamble considers Joe’s mixed heritage and its impact on his body and soul. On the run, Christmas sings:

And I know that it’s true

something’s gonna happen to me

And I know God loves me too

What does happen is horrifying. His fate stems from Faulkner’s own scarring memory of the public justice enacted on a man named Nelse Patton, according to a website devoted to Faulkner Triva. In Faulkner’s County, the historian Don Doyle examines such atrocities, the concept of a collective “burden,” and the relationship between the legacy of Oxford’s Lafayette County and the lore of Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha:

"[Faulkner] saw the southern past as a burden on his people, carrying with it sins so profound that the past constituted a curse that hung over the land, inherited by one generation after another."

As the past cursed Faulkner’s county, change plagued it. Let’s start with the very population of that “postage stamp.” Faulkner himself provided the following demographics:

Yoknapatawpha Population (ca. 1936): Whites, 6,298, Negroes, 9,313

This yields a proportion of 40% to 59%. The eminent historian and novelist Shelby Foote disputed the depiction as follows: “…[Faulkner] makes it about half black and half white. That’s absurd. No county in the hills here would be half black.” We presume Foote means that the black population is much too large and therefore the statistic is apocryphal when compared to Lafayette. Do we infer that Faulkner was placing his county in the old-line cotton-growing area, and accentuating the perceived threat of unrest to the whites of Yoknapatawpha?

As the population in Lafayette has almost tripled from the 1930’s, the demographics have more than flip-flopped from the Faulknerian portrayal. According to the 2009 census, in Lafayette County there were:

White persons 31,925, Black persons 10,817, 72.6% white, 24.6% black

We undertake such rudimentary analysis because race matters crucially in Light in August on a societal and individual level. Joe Christmas is tortured, perhaps cursed, by his mixed ancestry. With slavery a century and half behind Americans, we continue to inquire about, if not obsess over, this issue. “Ethnic background is important to many,” writes Blackflix.com. “Since so many of you have asked—here is what we know,” above its Multiracial Celebrities gallery.

Indeed, the identity of “Joe Christmas” evokes the character’s name source and evergreen argument over the race of Jesus Christ. Try a Google search to see the latest permutations of what Jesus might have looked like.

With a Christian namesake, a Madonna in the character of Lena Grove (played in this video by Mallisa Rainey), a reverend and two preachers, Light in August presents an abundance of religious fervor, inquiry and doubt. The troubled figures invite us on our own epistemological examination of identity and belief. In delving into Joe Christmas’s early childhood, the narrator tells us, “Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes…”

Richard Guilfoyle called this passage a koan, and wrote:

"As such, Light in August is an anamnetic text, the remembrance of things past and the recollection of the a priori and phenomenal known in the tradition of The Confessions of St. Augustine, Dante’s Vita Nuova, and Plato. Augustinian, Dantean, and Platonic contemplation of memory is a divine reuniting; it is the educing of the godlike, godly, and for some, even god. The quest is intensely personal, particular, pointed, wavelike, and revelatory of the universal."

Whoa, that's heavy lifting, Richard—but we’re not getting quizzed on it! Good ol’ Mark Twain broke down this process with more succinctness and cynicism:

“In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners…”

Hey, it was Twain, not the centathlete, who brought up Politics, the topic other than religion that has no place in polite discussion. With our Faulkner in hand, we see that in the 2008 presidential election, voters in Lafayette County were 56% for McCain and 43% for Obama, in line with the state of Mississippi.

An analysis of other Mississippi counties’ results argued for a correlation between the vote for Obama and the historical demographics of cotton-growing areas. Comparing and overlaying maps from three centuries, the blogger concluded, “The electoral map indicates very clearly that there there is a strong national consciousness in the Black Belt that was expressed in the election of the first Black president.”

McCain won the other Southern states except Florida, Virginia and North Carolina, suggesting that the Crystal Springs tomato was on to something about who is Southern and who isn’t. Incidentally, the centathlete met her at a convention in Hawaii, the birthplace of President Obama, though that is disputed by the Birther Movement, which questions the president’s legitimacy without the production of the “vault copy of the long firm birth certificate.”

The “Mama Birther,” an interesting title, is Orly Taitz, who writes to President Obama on her website as follows: “…your white half is as corrupt as your black half. The issue is not in race, but in the massive Social Security and elections fraud, that you are perpetrating.” This invective refers in part to the branches of the Obama family tree.

On the Daily Show, Jon Stewart mocked Taitz, whom he called “the lost Gabor sister,” as well as a Delaware woman who shouted that the president “…is not an American citizen. He is a citizen of Kenya.” Stewart’s segment was titled “The Born Identity,” punning on the Matt Damon cycle that the centathlete watches over and over again on cable, and again calling attention to the compelling issue of identity.

Another website more seriously rebutted the birthers’ allegation that President Obama’s certificate of live birth was a forgery. Snopes.com calls itself “the definitive Internet reference source for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation.” The Snopes.com founders and primary fact-checkers, David and Barbara Mikkelson, were interviewed by David Pogue, a technology blogger for The New York Times.

David Pogue: Where does the name Snopes come from?

David Mikkelson: Snopes come from a family of characters who recur in the works of William Faulkner. He typically had different families that represented different strata of Southern society. And the Snopes were on the bottom rung of the social ladder. But none of that has anything to do with the site. It just — I knew the name Snopes from having read William Faulkner. It was my nom de net. And then when we started the site, it turned out to be sort of fortuitous. Because it is so short and catchy and distinctive.

The Snopes clan does not appear in Light in August, but we like to bump into the novelist’s influence in a very contemporary platform. We kept reading:

David Pogue: Does it ever make you cynical about human nature? All this [misinformation], day in and day out?

David Mikkelson: Well sometimes. You know, it gets a little disheartening to see the same kinds of things going around time after time.

Take heart, David, those same things—legends, family histories, imperfect remembrances, avatars, apotheoses (loving the plural), sermons, war stories—will always keep going around. On Faulkner Time.

# 2 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

2010-06-10T22:30:00.001-04:00

Gaius Maecenas is a name that readers of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby should reckon with for two reasons.

First, Mr. Maecenas (70 BC – 8 BC), a very wealthy, connected Roman politico and “munificent patron of literature,” referenced early in the text as a member of an alliterative triumvirate of lucre ("Midas and Morgan and Maecenas"), is credited as having built the first heated swimming pool. Jay Gatsby died in his own fabulous marble pool, so naturally we look back to the origins of chlorinated currents.

Secondly, he is a name source for a character in Satyricon, written around 61 AD by the Roman author and “party animal” Petronius, one “Gaius Pompeius Trimalchio Maecenatianus.” An anonymous scholar noted: “This name…shows how pretentious [the character] is. Gaius is a popular name in the family of the Caesars, Pompeius is the name of a Roman general, Maecenas was the name of the Emperor Augustus’ ‘spin doctor.’” Petronius’s character, a classical representative of the life of superluxury, is commonly known simply as “Trimalchio,” and he so inspired Fitzgerald that he modeled Jay Gatsby after him and even named an early version of the novel, “Trimalchio.” Gaius Maecenas is therefore the forebear of Gatsby’s forebear.

By invoking Trimalchio, Fitzgerald was walking in the fresh footsteps of T.S. Eliot. The epigraph of Eliot’s The Waste Land, published three years before The Great Gatsby, is a quote uttered by Trimalchio while relating the story of the Sibyl, described by a devotee of the poem as “an old, withered, but immortal woman who is tired with life and wants to die…”

In The Waste Land’s first stanza we are presented with another woman’s ominous vision. “Fear death by water,” sniffles Madame Sosostris, the tarot card reader with a cold. This warning gets our associative synapses firing as we imagine Gatsby’s fresh corpse floating on a “pneumatic mattress” in his swimming pool.

John McGuirk explained that Madame Sosostris’s warning is inapt because the purported seeress misunderstands myths and therefore the possibility of rebirth: “Avoiding such a death of self is to avoid renewal and remain in a living death.”

In the later stanza titled “Death By Water” we read of the recently drowned Phlebas the Phoenician and we again rush for exegesis, in this case furnished by Arwin van Arum: “The majority of interpreters…see Phlebas’ drowning as a death by water that brings no resurrection, although there is a strange sense of peace in the death.”

Not all deaths by water invoke peace, nor do they involve drowning. Some are in fact fearsome and violent. Along with the shooting of Gatsby, we recall the stabbings of Marion Crane while showering in the Bates Motel (in the 1960 movie Psycho), and Jean-Paul Marat while reading in his bathtub (memorialized in Jacques-Louis David’s 1793 painting, La Mort de Marat).

Hitchcock, with his frantic pace and varied perspectives (cut to Face! cut to knife against torso! cut to silhouetted slasher!), dialed up the victim’s fear and vulnerability—to such an extent that one poll named this the “most nail-biting moment of all-time” in cinema.

This death and its ensuing prolonged, clinical clean-up, deprive the criminal Marion Crane of the rebirth or spiritual comfort she may have desired. IMDB.com writes, “She goes to her room and takes a shower, which feels to her like absolution. But it’s too late for that.”

David, in contrast, glorified Marat the victim, whose draped, languid posture and cherubic smile suggest not fear but stoic heroism, even though his death was sudden and at the hands of a stranger, Charlotte Corday. The painter, who had visited Marat just the day before, assigns him a rebirth, according to the Web Gallery of Art:

“…the most striking element is the arm hanging down lifeless. Thus David has unobtrusively taken over the central image of martyrdom in Christianity to his image of Marat. Revolutionary and anti-religious as the painting of this period claimed to be, it is evident here that it very often had recourse to the iconography and pictorial vocabulary of the religious art of the past.”

Marat was slain by a “cool, gracious, studious maiden;” Crane was offed by a man behaving and dressed as his mother; and Gatsby was done in by a publicly cuckolded, needy widower. Murdering a bather is evidently not a macho deed.

The novelist is neither a movie director nor a painter. Fitzgerald gives us a kill without the hysteria and immediacy of Hitchcock, and without the sensual adoration of David. We experience the scene in the past tense through Nick’s eyes, memory and pacing. There is the unraveling of the lies in the wake of the accident, the build-up of Wilson’s unhinging and revenge wish, and Nick’s measured but charged vocabulary (“the holocaust was complete”) after finding George Wilson’s body.

Fitzgerald displays a painterly technique throughout his masterpiece, most obviously through his use of color (white, yellow, green, etc.). In the final image of Gatsby, the slain hero slowly rotates on his mattress as blood traces a circle around him “like the leg of transit.” Nick had circled his train schedule before rushing out to the mansion, foreshadowing this symbolic circling.

Unlike David, who in his painting honored the face and flesh of a close friend, Fitzgerald via Nick Carroway focused on the icon and the dream. Gatsby is noticeably depersonalized through the gospel of his death and burial; the emphasis is on the insufficient mourning. His body is not described.

Gatsby’s corpse spins because the mattress had bumped into leaves, affirming that it is the first day of autumn, and evoking nature-worshipping concordant with pagan observance. Casie Hermanson wrote of the narrative’s emphasis of Time, “This seasonal calendar is more than just a parallel, however. It is a metaphor for the blooming and blasting of love and of hope, like the flowers so often mentioned.” In his death representation, Gatsby becomes a human water-clock marking the end of youthful exuberance and sexuality, and announcing the season to cease sowing and begin reaping.

As the body turns, we gaze at the water and contemplate related classical imagery. The Mythical Creatures Guide cites Walter Burkert: “The idea that rivers are gods and springs divine nymphs is deeply rooted not only in poetry but in belief and ritual; the worship of these deities is limited only by the fact that they are inseparably identified with a specific locality.” The guide adds, “Nymphs are personifications of the creative and fostering activities of nature, most often identified with the life-giving outflow of springs.”

What a nymph gives, a nymph can take away. In Argonautica, the chronicle of Jason and the Argonauts by Appolonius of Rhodes in the 3^rd century BCE, there is the tale of Hylas, the beloved, handsome friend of Heracles. Hylas is thirsty, so he is drawn away from his entourage to a pool where he meets a nymph and his fate, as we read at the Online Medieval & Classical Library:

“A water-nymph was just rising from the fair-flowing spring; and the boy she perceived close at hand with the rosy flush of his beauty and sweet grace. For the full moon beaming from the sky smote him. And Cypris made her heart faint, and in her confusion she could scarcely gather her spirit back to her. But as soon as he dipped the pitcher in the stream, leaning to one side, and the brimming water rang loud as it poured against the sounding bronze, straightway she laid her left arm above upon his neck yearning to kiss his tender mouth; and with her right hand she drew down his elbow, and plunged him into the midst of the eddy.”

Sweet terror in this death by water! John William Waterhouse captured the boy’s defenselessness in his 1896 painting, Hylas and the Nymphs, which Ezra Pound called, “Foreboding in the Pool.” By calming the waters and cloning six more fair nymphs, Waterhouse accentuated the erotic allure of the event.

Like the springs of yore, the modern swimming pool has been at times linked with the energy and force of female libido. This is unforgettably demonstrated in Billy Wilder’s 1950 film Sunset Boulevard.

When Joe Gillis arrives at Norma Desmond’s mansion, her swimming pool, like her house and her self, is a former marvel that is now decrepit. In fact, the pool is filthy and rat-infested. Norma is a withered Sibyl-like figure, unfit to be Joe’s lover because her sexual identity has been neglected and untended for years.

Later, the consummation of their affair is confirmed at the pool, which has been miraculously cleaned and restored. Norma, born again, announces: “…I’ve never looked better in my life... Because I’ve never been as happy in my life.”

She then towels off Joe and clutches him around the neck from behind. The sinister movement reminds us of Argonautica and the drowning-pull of Waterhouse’s Nymph A. Norma is no longer a Sibyl.

Later still, Joe dies and floats in Norma’s pool and, by association, her dangerously revived perception of herself as a celebrity sex goddess. Like Joe, Jay Gatsby is shot by a mad, spurned lover, though not his own.

The 2003 French film, Swimming Pool, took a few more explicit laps with the motif of an Older Woman and Her Pool. Sarah Morton, a successful English writer, opts to spend a summer at her publisher’s desirable country house in France. When Sarah arrives, the pool is covered with tarp and littered with leaves, and her character’s Dowdy and Uptight Index is at record highs.

This index drops during the film, as the director François Ozon stated in an interview, “As Swimming Pool progresses, Sarah evolves in both her attitudes and her clothes. She blossoms, becoming more feminine and luminous.”

The catalyst for Sarah’s metamorphosis from Sybil to nymph is the young, voluptuous and reckless Julie. Her main activity is bathing in and lounging by the water. Watching Julie unsettles Sarah, and one of her coping mechanisms is to painstakingly clean the pool. Ozon elaborated:

“I’m utilizing the swimming pool for its plasticine quality and also for its enclosed and confining aspect. Contrary to the ocean, a pool is something that you can manipulate. The swimming pool is Julie’s space. The pool is like a cinema screen on which you project things and through which a character enters. It takes a long time before Sarah Morton gets into the swimming pool. She can do it only when Julie becomes her inspiration, and only when the pool is finally clean.”

In view of Sarah Morton and Norma Desmond, we see that an actively used, clean swimming pool connotes a vigorous sex life and nymph-like identity. What about the male Gatsby and his pool? It is notably “unused” the entire summer—Gatsby swims in it for the first time the day after the vehicular manslaughter of Myrtle Wilson, the first day of his loss of Daisy. His swim and his float on the mattress replace an amorous encounter with the woman who dwells across the water.

The tedious 1973 movie adaptation of The Great Gatsby, starring Robert Redford, depicts the murder scene in blinding whites, creating an atmosphere of sterility. Gatsby’s marble swimming pool is not dirty and dingy like Desmond’s, but then he is a young man obsessed with a dream girl, not a faded star dwelling behind curtains. Superficially, his pool resembles Norma Desmond’s as a symbol of Roaring Twenties’ decadence and celebrity, and, because of its nonuse, emptiness.

Ah, existential emptiness depicted by a young man floating on a mattress in a plasticine pool—we would be talking now about the 1967 movie The Graduate, right? (“Plasticine” derives from “plastic,” recalling Mr. McGuire’s one-word career advice for Benjamin Braddock.)

Tim Dirks describes Benjamin Braddock as he idles away his summer in both his parent’s pool and in the bedroom with Mrs. Robinson, and he explains how the director Mike Nichols made sure the viewer sees the parallel:

“With a clever transitional device and a montage of images, suggesting the emptiness and joylessness of his life, [Benjamin] walks back and forth transparently between these two pursuits and worlds. He rolls off the raft in the backyard pool, pulls on a white shirt, and enters a doorway to the Braddock home… One of their many sexual contacts is symbolized by his rising up onto a inflatable rubber pool raft (after the dive), inter-cut with his landing on top of Mrs. Robinson in the hotel bed.”

If you make your inflatable bed, you lie in it in more ways than one, like Benjamin and like Gatsby. Benjamin escapes his purgatory of the Pool and Mrs. Robinson, but Gatsby is not so lucky: he succumbs like Joe Gillis and Hylas. Gatsby’s nymph-murderer Daisy is two degrees of separation from the actual shooter, though her action provoked him.

We can only wonder if Mr. Maecenas commissioned a mattress to go with his new creation. We do know that the first swimming pool would have evoked already established conceptions of Life, Death, Rebirth and mainly feminine Sexuality. By the 1920’s, the pool had already attracted connotations of extravagance and celebrity. Its usage, covering and maintenance—and lack thereof—provided powerful imagery for subsequent artists with insights into psychology and astute abilities to press the viewer’s and reader’s button.

In his own death by water, Jay Gatsby participated in and contributed to a long and vibrant tradition of viewing a commonly refreshing recreational activity as something much more complex. The glamorous life is negated, love is lost, and absolution is denied for the hero who was blind to the foreboding in the pool.

See you in the deep end.

# 87 The Old Wives’ Tale – Arnold Bennett

2010-01-24T09:10:00.000-05:00

“You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

This pregnant phrase’s postpartum course straddled the English Channel. Its originator was possibly Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, or French General Aimable-Jean-Jacques Pélissier (according to British military man George Cavendish Taylor), or the French revolutionary Maximilien Francois Robespierre.

The centathlete broke exactly three eggs to make Omelette Arnold Bennett to celebrate the reading of the English author’s 1908 novel, The Old Wives’ Tale, and to honor a man worthy enough to have a dish named after him. Featuring smoked haddock and hollandaise sauce, the meal was a favorite of Bennett’s when he lived in 1930 at London’s Savoy Hotel, where he was an esteemed regular with an insider’s knowledge of the institution, according to John Potter, chairman of the Arnold Bennett Society:

“…[Bennett] frequented the hotel for some twenty years, getting to know as friends some of the key figures in its history, including George Reeves Smith, managing director for many years and Richmond Temple, the publicity chief. It was Temple who, in 1927, took AB on an extensive tour of the Savoy, from top to bottom through all the many service departments.”

Bennett typically enjoyed his Savoy omelette “…after an evening at the theatre,” per Helen Watson, who calls the creation “elaborate but delicious, perhaps like Bennett's rich Victorian prose.” The recipes for Omelette Arnold Bennett are like snowflakes: legion and similar but not identical. The suggested cheese can be Cheddar, Parmesan, Emmental, Comte or Gruyere. The centathlete opted for the latter and followed the BBC’s recipe.

One radiant soul knows that the centathlete’s profound ineptitude in the kitchen is surpassed only by indifference; she had already arrayed ingredients and cookware when he tramped home after work with his wrapped haddock filet, acquired at Freeman’s Fish Market in Maplewood. Wavering before the countertop and range, the centathlete was then blessed to receive encouragement and invaluable direction—and his wife doesn’t even eat fish or omelettes (or omelets)!

As an admirer of essentially all nourishment within the Seafood and Egg categories, the centathlete was predisposed to savor Omelette Arnold Bennett—and he certainly did. The poached and flaked haddock established a mild and meaty foundation. The hollandaise sauce, browned after a few minutes in the broiler, acted like a tasty cheesy blanket not unlike the topping of French Onion Soup (as the radiant soul observed). Parsley and pepper punctuated the dish and saved it from an overarching creamy blandness.

Once this gastronomic stop on the centathlon was digested, we were able to readdress its inspiration. The novel The Old Wives’ Tale, like our introductory phrase, is an English-French work, following the Baines sisters between Staffordshire and Paris, and it was written by an Englishman while living in France.

Like most Yankees the centathlete was ignorant of Arnold Bennett and his hometown of The Potteries (a.k.a. The Five Towns or Stoke-on-Trent) in Staffordshire, England. With a dense industrial landscape sprouting furnaces that resemble bottles or stalagmites, as seen in an eerily gothic BBC video from the 1950’s, The Potteries spawned the companies of Wedgwood, Spode and more than 1500 other concerns beginning in the early 1700’s.

In those years the colonial British suppressed large-scale American pottery, like other manufacturing. Centers developed, though not of the scale of The Potteries. In 1840 one Staffordshire potter, James Bennett (no relation to Arnold?), traveled to East Liverpool, OH and built its first kiln. He was followed by others and the town became known in the late 1800’s as “The Pottery Capital of America” according to its Museum of Ceramics.

The industry has declined there since 1930 but hangs on. Some years ago a local high school student took umbrage when the dean “…suggested [he] take a job at the steel mill or pottery plant.” Lou Holtz went on to become a celebrated college football coach, idiosyncratic motivator, and East Liverpool’s famous son with his own hall of fame.

“I can't believe that God put us on this earth to be ordinary,” quoth Coach Holtz, who has probably delivered several thousand pep talks to youngsters and adults to be all that they can be. Arnold Bennett, as an artist, took a different tack: he breathed genius and transcendence into the commonplace. According to biographybase.com, “Bennett believed in ordinary people…Bennett made simple things and ordinary people interesting.”

The Old Wives’ Tale follows the lives of the Baines sisters, who are remarkable, or unremarkable, as most of us are. Bennett’s “treatment” of characters like Constance and Sophia Baines is developed and slow-moving.

In his tale Bennett introduces great historical events and the onsets of romantic adventures—and then allows them to pass without impacting his narrow-minded heroines. We envision him rolling in tires (The Paris Commune, Sophia’s elopement to Paris, the potential of Cyril), watching them deflate, and contemplating the hiss. A notable tire, so to speak, is the Siege of Paris, which the Prussians conducted from September 1870 to January 1871.

Sophia Baines, as a heroine “utterly absorbed in doing one single thing,” is unaffected by the siege because she is engrossed in managing her pension. Her hedgehog existence dramatizes Bennett’s “perception,” noted in his preface, that “ordinary people went on living ordinary lives during the siege, and that to the vast mass of the population the siege was not the dramatic, spectacular, thrilling, ecstatic affair that is described in history.”

Such a view can be confirmed by many of us fairly easy. For example, the centathlete lived in Manhattan three miles from the World Trade Center on 9/11; on several occasions people from other parts of the country have asked “what was it like?” The reality is that he knew only one person who worked there (the friend got out unharmed but had a harrowing time) and watched the towers burn from afar, then fall on TV. Later that day and in following weeks travel to the site was prohibited, so for the centathlete it was the smell (at the time emphatically suggesting onsite toxicity) and the poignant memorials (the walls of messages from schoolchildren across the country, the moving vigil at Union Square) that comprised his essentially passive experience of the event…

While Paris was under siege, a real-life Frenchman was preoccupied, though not quite in the manner of Sophia Baines. Arthur Rimbaud, savage and pubescent, turned 16 on October 20, 1870, 145 miles to the northeast in Charleville. He witnessed the Prussian destruction of Mézières, and he used the images in his visionary poetry.

As Paris experienced unrest after its defeat, Sophia toiled in her pension and Arthur traveled to Paris. In his biography, Rimbaud, Graham Robb suggests that the teen didn’t mind at all seeing eggs broken to make a different kind of omelette:

“Rimbaud had come to see his heroes… the heroic revolutionary fringe: men who had reached adulthood without losing their sense of humour or their taste for destruction.”

In March 1871 came the Commune, the bloody two-month reign that would inspire future revolutionaries. Sophia Baines was “vexed” but “not very much intimidated by it” and the period is referenced and dismissed tidily in one paragraph in The Old Wives’ Tale. In contrast, Arthur Rimbaud was far from inconvenienced, he was invigorated. He was in Paris “to witness the dawn of a new age,” according to Robb, in a “search for loose structures and temporary commitments that could serve as a nomadic base for the imagination.”

While the Communards burned the guillotine, abolished state payments for religious concerns, prohibited night work by bakers, and then died en masse at the hands of the army, Rimbaud was busy turning himself into a “seer.” Meanwhile, Sophia Baines “watched every sou, and [she] developed a tendency to demand from her tenants all that they could pay.” This narrative aside and others render her and her sister Constance less sympathetic and less heroic, even though we grant the wives their mitigating life circumstances and Bennett his verisimilitude.

The oldest wife the centathlete has ever known is his grandmother, who celebrated her 100th birthday in November. Anne Elizabeth was born in 1909, one year after The Old Wives’ Tale was published, when William Howard Taft was president. Although she has always been known as “Betty,” the staff of her assisted living facility calls her “Anne.” This misidentification irks the centathlete but not his grandmother, who is hale, mobile, and usually in a state of bemused awareness.

Her father was a stonecutter specializing in tombstones and monuments. She and her three brothers (there was a sister who died as an infant), grew up in Ridgewood, then a German neighborhood of New York City. Betty's chore at the age of five was to fetch the milk each morning from the nearby farm—it’s difficult to imagine that when driving in Queens today.

In The Old Wives’ Tale Arnold Bennett gave his sophisticated Edwardian readers a sense of life in a simpler time 40-60 years earlier. Constance and Sophia take horse-carts to other towns and castor-oil cures. They occupy chairs with antimacassars.

Betty’s family was musical and she actively participated. To this day she can play strains from “Till We Meet Again” (popular in 1918) on the piano and, on her ukulele, the smash hit from 1933, “My Little Grass Shack in Kealakekua, Hawaii.” As a teenager she went to Drake Business School and became a legal secretary in Manhattan. She worked at Mutual Insurance of New York and was supervisor of the stenography pool.

Betty was a wage-earner, as were Constance and Sophia Baines. Husbands appeared for all three, but these women were all ultimately breadwinners. That daily responsibility, especially for a mother, can inculcate a strength and rigidity of backbone, which the Baineses certainly display.

In 1938 Betty married William, who subsequently fought in World War II and the Battle of the Bulge, and afterward never discussed it with anyone. He worked for the post office. In the postwar years Betty’s daughter and son were her joys. She returned to work at Wellington Bank on Long Island. She was an assistant manager at several banks, and she and her family relocated to Huntington. Unlike the fictional Baines sisters, who had servants, Betty cooked and handled the housekeeping in addition to her full-time job.

In 1973, Betty retired and her husband died. They had been married for 35 years. Her husband has largely faded out of the collective memory (he is seldom referenced), due to circumstance, the passage of time, and perhaps a relative faintness of charisma or accomplishment (hard to say for one who doesn’t remember him). Arnold Bennett understood this kind of posthumous evanescence, and that it is more likely to happen to men who while living did not make sufficient deposits in the accounts of Family Pride, Town Pride and County Pride.

Betty left New York and bought a home in western Connecticut, an area she had always admired. This was a characteristic act of independence for her, a woman in her sixties. In The Old Wives’ Tale Sophia tries to persuade Constance to leave Bursley for life with her in a hotel. Constance won’t go—so they both stay in The Potteries. As we age, we appreciate the pathos of that decision and the perspectives of both sisters.

In her advanced years Constance Baines is serially disappointed by her only child, Cyril. Self-absorbed, prideful and insensitive (though to a moderate extent), he can’t manage to visit or correspond with his mother as diligently as he should. Betty's son has not managed to visit or call her in years; no direct cause is known for this estrangement. We might pause here to elaborate on an appropriate perdition for this small man (Sophia’s scoundrel husband Gerald is a small man) but the centathlon is long, our subjects are good-humored, and ordinary life is beautiful, as Arnold Bennett shows us.

Betty now lives in Pennsylvania to be near her daughter. She likes to laugh and make others laugh. When you ask her how she’s doing, she chuckles and says, “I haven’t flung my last fling yet!”

That makes us want to fling some eggs in a pan. Where’s that haddock?

Next up: The Great Gatsby.

# 62 From Here to Eternity – James Jones

2009-08-18T20:33:00.000-04:00

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 thousandfold 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.

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.

A short piece inspired by the work of James Thurber during the running of the centathlon

2009-07-31T17:02:00.000-04:00

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.

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.

Neologism

2009-02-22T16:06:00.000-05:00

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.

# 100 The Magnificent Ambersons – Booth Tarkington

2008-11-16T17:22:00.000-05:00

“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:

“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.

# 88 The Call of the Wild – Jack London

2008-03-11T21:31:00.002-04:00

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:

“…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 was
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.”

Enright 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.

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 domestication
events and continued genetic exchange between wolves and dogs.”

The conclusion offers quite a kicker, as the authors consider other flora and fauna:

“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.

# 72 A House for Mr. Biswas – V.S. Naipaul

2007-10-03T14:06:00.000-04:00

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:

“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.

# 56 The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett

2007-07-29T14:34:00.000-04:00

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:

“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.

# 84 The Death of the Heart – Elizabeth Bowen

2007-06-14T20:06:00.000-04:00

“A little learning is a dangerous thing,” Alexander Pope wrote and the centathlete affirmed through his own dubious example.

While touring western Ireland the centathlete stopped at a B & B in The Burren, the timeless, rocky region of County Clare. Taking an introductory stroll down the lane, he met a gray-haired woman tending to her bushes. Greetings were exchanged and the gardener issued a welcome and a wish to enjoy the local flora. The centathlete responded with a recap of his travels through Celtic hamlets, across peat bogs, and up The Reek, where St. Patrick meditated. Then, as he was brimming with a tourist’s freshly acquired pack of historical facts, he impulsively sought to emphasize the formidable history of his own hometown, Huntington, NY, founded in 1653 and named in honor of Oliver Cromwell.

The gardener met this information blankly, reiterated her wish, and returned to her pruning. An indefinite period later the centathlete learned that Cromwell is “the most hated man in Irish history” and therefore that reference on the lane was tantamount to egregiously gross misconduct.

Geez, whaddaya gonna do? To paraphrase W. Somerset Maugham, the centathlete blogs on occasion to disembarrass his soul. You can’t undo a faux pas committed years ago in the presence of a stranger in a foreign land; you only hope to make yourself a little less dangerous…

When three men bought a sizeable parcel of Long Island from Raseokan, Sachem of the Matinecock tribe, they called it “Huntington,” as Huntingdon was the birthplace of Cromwell, the Protestant civil-war hero and the soon-to-be Lord Protector of England. (John Major represented Huntingdon in Parliament for years before and after he was British Prime Minister.) The naming would have asserted the English heritage of the settlers and set them apart from the Dutch constituency to the west, centered in Brooklyn and New Amsterdam.

Peter Stuyvesant, the peg-legged Governor of New Amsterdam, and the Dutch had initially welcomed the English, but international politics were threatening the coexistence on Long Island. Across the Atlantic, Cromwell had begun the First Anglo-Dutch War, which ended in April, 1654. The war’s second installment on various fronts resulted in part in the 1664 English capture of New Amsterdam, immediately renamed New York.

In the years before Huntington incorporated, Cromwell suppressed the Catholic, pro-monarchy Irish rebellion, killing thousands at Drogheda, Wexford and Kilkenny before returning to England to combat the Scottish. While Huntington added to its initial dwellings, Ireland underwent a rapid, calamitous transformation: “Cromwell and the Parliament passed the Act of Settlement of Ireland in 1653 whose goal was the massive transfer of land from Irish hands to English hands.”

One beneficiary of this transfer was Henry Bowen, an atheistic Welshman who had abandoned a Puritan wife to become a colonel in Cromwell’s army in Ireland. More than 300 years later, this military force inspired Elvis Costello, born Declan Patrick MacManus, to write his 1979 song, “Oliver’s Army.” Having grown up in England of Irish descent, Costello explained his youthful, musical understanding of Cromwell:

“He was a devil incarnate to the Christian brothers. We used to sing very Catholic pieces, they’d be frowned on today as not being in the spirit of church unity, things like “Oh Glorious Spirit of St. Patrick’s” and “Faith of Our Fathers,” lots of take on the history of England from the old-religion martyr’s perspective. And we'd sing the Latin mass without knowing what it meant but loving every line.”

After the campaign Henry Bowen, as a charter member of the “pseudo-aristocracy” of Protestant Anglo-Irish landholders called the Ascendancy, was given an estate in County Cork. The novelist Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) directly descended from the colonel; she inherited the estate and its mansion of Bowen’s Court, built in 1776, which she managed until economics dictated its leveling in 1960.

Ireland, its fading “big-house” society, and war do not factor in Bowen’s 1938 novel, The Death of the Heart; the author addressed those subjects in other books. This story takes place in London—where Bowen also lived and frequently engaged with the intellectual Bloomsbury society—and a southeastern village on the English Channel.

A refined sensibility manifests itself initially through the description of a wintry park scene, and throughout the narrative via perceptions of flowers, the sea, the sky, the woods, and the contemplation of the true inception of Spring. The apprehension of Nature and the Seasons suggests changes and cycles which the characters must obey as they interact and age.

Suggestion is an apt term for the literary style on display; intimation (the word itself appears several times in the text) is better for several reasons. Grown out of the Latin intimatus, “intimate” originally was used in the late 1400’s in English to mean “to publicly or formally announce.” According to the O.E.D., more than 100 years passed before a second meaning was cultivated: “To make known or communicate by any means however indirect; hence, to signify, indicate; to imply, to suggest, to hint at.”

If one person “owns” this latter, more familiar definition, it’s William Wordsworth, on account of his 1807 poem, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” Even an infrequent poetry sampler like the centathlete here recognizes the celebration of an infant’s view of Nature with “the glory and freshness of a dream.”

This joyful innocence is soon forgotten. A six-year-old already mimics the artifice of human affairs: “Then will he fit his tongue/To dialogues of business, love, or strife.” The adult’s best recourse is to fleetingly, partially recapture the earliest perspective, even while praising “those obstinate questionings/Of sense and outward things,/Fallings from us, vanishings.” The final lines sum up the romantic’s heightened perception of the world and his passage through it:

“Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

Elizabeth Bowen upholds the heart as the same source for a fulfilling appreciation of life. Her novel displays a nuanced treatment of Wordsworth’s theme of innocence—personified by her heroine, Portia Quayne—corrupted by experience.

Her title reflects the inevitability and totality of this eclipse, updated in the materialistic, manipulative environment of London of the late 1930’s. Decades later, two American musicians, Don Henley and Bruce Hornsby, echoed both Wordsworth’s and Bowen’s outlooks in their 1989 song, “The End of the Innocence.” The lyrics begin:

Remember when the days were long
And rolled beneath a deep blue sky
Didn't have a care in the world
With mommy and daddy standin’ by

The song’s video presents first the view of a child, perhaps Henley (although he seems more of a slick reincarnation of Thornton Wilder’s Stage Manager in Our Town), in engaging, comforting small-town surroundings of 1950’s America. The parental security he references was not so cut-and-dried for Elizabeth Bowen or her heroine Portia: both were raised in unstable households and lost their mothers as teenagers (Portia also lost her father).

Continuing with Henley and his video’s director, David Fincher (who has gone on to direct movies such as Se7en, The Game and Fight Club), we fly over windblown treetops and admire teenage lovers kissing as the “tall grass waves in the wind.” In The Death of the Heart the 16-year-old Portia attempts a similar tryst in bucolic environs but she fails because the older Eddie can’t reciprocate or honor her ardor and innocence.

In another parallel motif, we see Henley lip-syncing in front of a blank movie screen, followed later by a young mother or older sister captivated by a film. Portia first attends a Marx Brothers movie and enjoys the company of Anna and Thomas more than the entertainment; later she attends the cinema with Eddie, Daphne and the Seale entourage, and she is betrayed. Cinema, the dominant medium of man-made illusion, in both works proves to be compellingly necessary yet somehow unsatisfactory in modern life.

In his brief evocation of a girl in Nature and in his chorus (featuring “Offer up your best defense/This is the end of the innocence”), Henley voices a philosophical kinship with Bowen, for whom Portia offers an offense of intense emotional authenticity as her defense. His wistful demeanor in his video suggests he holds thoughts like Wordsworth’s, “too deep for tears,” but his sunglasses toward the close prevent us from really knowing. Henley grafts on a political theme (Bowen and Wordsworth eschew politics) that augments his sense of resignation or, we could imagine, causes him to attain the “slow indignation” with which Bowen’s swans swim in her introductory paragraph. At any rate, “The End of the Innocence” laments an inevitable process.

A Chinese proverb states, “The saddest thing is the death of the heart,” which can be interpreted as “There is no greater sorrow than a heart that never rejoices.” Wordsworth presents the child’s perspective as the cause and medium for rejoicing. Bowen has her adult characters, Anna and Thomas Quayne, Eddie and St. Quentin, bring about this symbolic death; she would have their own lives enriched by Portia’s alternate rejoicing and awkward missteps.

Her missteps and those of her guardians and acquaintances are muted. Although love and sexuality provide the grist to this dramatic mill, there is no frank depiction or acknowledgment of their physical consummation (Bowen was happily married for almost 30 years to Alan Cameron yet their union was apparently always “passionless.”). The relations—such as those between Portia and Eddie, Portia and Matchett, Eddie and Daphne, Anna and St. Quentin, and Anna and Eddie—unfold on a charged platonic plane.

Intimations of fulfilled and challenged intimacy (its meaning of “sexual intercourse” also stems from the same Latin root as “intimations”) charge this plane. Bowen has been compared to Top 100 author Henry James, in whose novels “intimations” appears liberally. Like James, she sees hints of immortality in purely human interaction.

In The Death of the Heart and in James’s The Wings of the Dove we find similar subjects for contemplation. “Sacrificers are not the ones to pity,” Bowen’s narrator writes, “The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.” James’s narrator employs “sacrifice” more than 10 times to describe various attitudes and behaviors. The titles of the three sections of The Death of the Heart—“The World,” “The Flesh,” and “The Devil”—underscore the quasi-religious sense of love and friendship.

A Sufi religious scholar, jurist and philosopher, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, wrote, “The death of the heart is ignorance; so avoid it.” We might, after reading this novel, think that Bowen would argue that the heart’s death is actually effected by knowledge of human affairs—it can’t be avoided but it can be mitigated by a sympathetic consideration of innocence, a reappraisal of a child’s ignorance. Like an adept cleric, Bowen superbly condenses her observations and lessons into maxims such as, “Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.”

For Bowen, time-old behavioral “patterns” also provoke a religious, pre-Christian, outlook. When Portia anticipates Eddie’s arrival in Seale, the narrator provides another maxim: “The wish to lead out one’s lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of one’s self-respect.”

The narrative takes its time building psychological and emotional momentum toward this event. When the reality of Eddie’s unsuitability proves devastating to Portia, she says, “But, Eddie, they thought you were my friend. I was so proud because they all thought that.”

With such a simple, candid delivery, Portia powerfully reveals that her expectations of love have been shattered. She loses her innocence in a different, meaner way than she intended. The pride irreparably damaged is complex here: it relates to the social, egoistic and sexual selves. Portia’s status as an innocent 16-year-old woman adds greatly to the damage done, even though it isn’t physical.

Maybe it was pride that prevented the gardener in The Burren from responding at all to the centathlete’s Cromwell gaffe. An older woman, she would likely have frequently experienced a man’s conversational missteps and, unlike Portia, she likely would have recognized that polite silence can be a valuable defense.

The next day at The Burren the centathlete took a most informative and enjoyable walking tour. The guide, John Connolly, discussed the geography, wildflowers and Celtic folklore and myth. He also addressed the many stone walls pointlessly traversing the barren countryside—they exemplified “futile labor,” ordered built by the British to occupy the starving native Irish during the famine years and keep them from revolting. In Connolly’s polite, matter-of-fact explication, there was the intimation of a pride informed and tempered by History and Nature in your backyard.

More recently the centathlete, at a New York City pub, encountered a group of Irish visitors. Again impulsively, this time lubricated by Guinness, he sought to commune by stating that he is “Irish” in light of one maternal grandfather. “No, you’re of Irish descent,” the young man firmly corrected him. Just one more prompt to get a little more learning.

# 78 Kim – Rudyard Kipling

2007-05-21T16:07:00.000-04:00

The apprentice travels far and seeks out his self-appointed master, bringing enthusiasm and formidable, developing talent. Their encounter validates the young man’s worship and makes the path ahead more attainable.

Let’s delve into two real-life instances of this scenario. First, a 20-year-old aspiring musician and college dropout arrived in New York City from the Midwest. Through radio play, albums and an autobiography, he’d identified with the simple, painfully authentic sound of a singer/songwriter fervently committed to a fairer society. A composer and performer of hundreds of songs over more than two decades, the 48-year-old hero was debilitated by Huntington’s Disease, confined to the Greystone Park psychiatric center in Morris Plains, NJ, where his admirer visited him in 1961.

Bob Dylan played his guitar and sang for Woody Guthrie. He subsequently brought other folk musicians to visit the guru after his transfer to hospitals in Brooklyn. The influence was so profound it was observed that Dylan “dressed, played, and even posed for cameras like Guthrie.”

The second instance took place in 1889 in Elmira, NY. A 23-year-old British journalist voyaged from India for a tour of Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and then the United States, which he entered at San Francisco. He filed reports all along the way, eventually crossing America and making a point to call, unannounced, on a world-famous author who himself had been a newspaperman in his early years. The 53-year-old celebrity was financially troubled despite his immense renown as a writer and raconteur.

Rudyard Kipling presented his credentials, then interrogated Mark Twain tentatively and intermittently; more often he listened and took notes as the white-haired man groused about copyrights and solicitations. Twain, the master of comedy and observation, later said of his guest, “Between us we cover all knowledge. He knows all that can be known, and I know the rest.”

Both Dylan and Kipling produced direct testimony of their awe-inspiring meetings. The singer introduced “Song to Woody” on his 1962 debut album, Bob Dylan. The reporter published his account first as an article and then, 10 years later, as part of his non-fiction collection, From Sea to Sea.

Examining each testimony, we find of course the heartfelt tribute. We also find second-hand imitation and forced diction. In his lyrics, the rhyme-happy Dylan affected speech that he and most Americans did not use. He dropped his g’s and liberally wielded the “a-“ prefix (“It looks like it’s a-dyin’”)—a take-off on Guthrie, who had given voice to the vernacular of his beloved subjects. Although he was the balladeer of the Okie, the miner, the migrant farmer, and the common man, “Guthrie was not some rube, some natural-born poet who just fell off the turnip truck in the big city. [He] was raised in a middle-class home... The hick was his stage role,” Ed Cray noted.

While it was insightful at the time to uphold the somewhat neglected Guthrie and his style, Dylan’s lines and imagery in this particular song are hackneyed and fall well short of his model’s emotional and political immediacy. For example, the first verse of “Song to Woody” concludes, “I'm seein' your world of people and things/Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings.” The vague language and archaic titles of the referenced characters evoke, ironically, not the charged pleas of Guthrie—who wrote on his guitar, “This machine kills fascists”—but the sardonic fairy tales of Mark Twain, whose novels’ titles include a prince, a pauper and a king (Arthur).

Kipling’s tribute to Twain began, “You are a contemptible lot, over yonder,” and thus the apprentice affected the folksy parlance of his guru. (Like Guthrie, Twain gave voice to rural dialects after educating himself sufficiently to converse on the most erudite levels, according to his company.) His reporting, like Dylan’s playing, is engrossing enough, but the mimetic relation to his subject, coupled with his starched Victorian rhetoric, makes the centathlete cringe. Here is Kipling going over-the-top as if he were regaling an audience the way Twain did at public readings:

“Once, indeed, he put his hand on my shoulder. It was an investiture of the Star of India, blue silk, trumpets, and diamond-studded jewel, all complete. If hereafter, in the changes and chances of this mortal life, I fall to cureless ruin, I will tell the superintendent of the workhouse that Mark Twain once put his hand on my shoulder; and he shall give me a room to myself and a double allowance of paupers’ tobacco.”

There’s the “pauper” again—it seems that a fawning apprentice (Kipling/Dylan) has to invoke medieval poverty as if it were a tarot card that must be turned over in such a reading… Whereas Dylan never lyrically protested as directly as Guthrie, Kipling never amused as deeply as Twain. However, the two apprentices each found their own voices and audiences shortly after sitting at the feet of their idols, and they magnificently transcended the humanities on their own terms.

Kipling’s 1901 novel, Kim, reminded the centathlete immediately of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Each book presents a street-smart vagabond on a rich, illuminating voyage toward manhood. Each hero has a senior, loyal sidekick with his own provocative quest.

Kim and Teshoo Lama navigate not the Mississippi River of the U.S. circa 1840 but the arteries and terrains of India circa 1885, especially the Grand Trunk Road which, according to Lonely Planet, “literally bound India together for centuries, providing a vital link for trade and communication across the empire.”

The escapism of Huckleberry Finn agrees with the American frontier history and sensibility—anything can happen out West in recently established, sparsely populated hamlets. In contrast, the escapism of Kim is curtailed by the ubiquity of other humans (even in remote Kashmir the local society engages the travelers), an entrenched cultural history, and a thriving British regime managing Empire through military force and geopolitical espionage known as “the Great Game.”

As Kim traverses India and what is now Pakistan he exhibits remarkable adeptness, owing to his untraditional upbringing, in run-ins with representatives of many cultures, castes (there are approximately 3,000 castes and 25,000 subcastes in India) and professions. Joe Sixpack will remark that detailed knowledge of this region is vital today.

Such an observation is not lost on the American military as it operates in Afghanistan (referenced in Kim, and the terminus of the Grand Trunk Road) and Iraq. Following is a passage from a MOUT (Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain) web site:

“The ability to support operations with intelligence in urban areas requires Battlefield Visualization (the “what”), the ability to depict and analyze urban terrain, objects and events in three dimensions; and Situation Awareness (the “why”), the commander’s understanding of the people, resources, and a wide range of forces (such as: culture, politics, religion, economics, etc.) and their relationships.”

Culture, politics, religion, economics—what was ultimately parenthetical for the author, a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, is in fact the substance of Kim. Moreover, Kim stands as the avatar of, to use contemporary espionage terminology, first-rate HUMINT (human intelligence). By upholding Kim and by mocking or punishing culturally myopic and insensitive characters in the novel, Kipling was telling his English audience that more authentically multicultural operatives were essential in order to maintain colonialism. The lesson would apply to a neo-con or like-minded reader in favor of “winning the war on terrorism” abroad.

In Kipling’s narrative Kim acquires fluency in many Asian languages and customs through immersion from birth to adolescence—a pedigree rarely found among Americans. Geography and resources have limited the U.S. Military’s ability to cultivate a legion of Kim’s, but urgent conditions call for an immediate, rudimentary commitment in that direction, as the lieutenant colonel noted:

“HUMINT operations require time to establish even basic relationships between people and are inherently more time consuming to develop than other forms of intelligence. Two weeks is probably the minimum time the urban force would need to be on the ground before it started to pay dividends but once the results
start, they would increase exponentially.”

Any reader should grant that multicultural literacy is positive; the question is, toward what end? Kim accepts the goal of maintaining order and justice under British rule—a point of view that placed Kipling’s work out of favor with anti-colonial perspectives. For example, George Orwell, a Top 100 author who lived for five years in Burma, labeled Kipling “the prophet of British imperialism in its expansionist phase.”

Orwell’s two essays on Kipling are fun reading for their trenchant, magisterial commentaries and asides, which can read like counterintuitive conundrums (like Noam Chomsky’s confounding observations) the more you consider them:

“There is no ‘Law,’ there is only power. I am not saying that that is a true belief, merely that it is the belief which all modern men do actually hold. Those who pretend otherwise are either intellectual cowards, or power-worshippers under a thin disguise, or have simply not caught up with the age they are living in.”

“All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy.”

“Kipling was a Conservative, a thing that does not exist nowadays. Those who now call themselves Conservatives are either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists.”

(Americans, switch “Conservative” with “Liberal” and listen how the last sentence rings.)

As a hater of fascists and a sympathetic spokesman for the poor in the 1930’s, Orwell was a spiritual brother of Woody Guthrie. With regard to spiritualism and religion, the two men were not, as one might expect of ardent socialists, simply antagonistic.

One admirer of Orwell wrote, “…although [he] wasn't a religious man and didn't go to church (except for the usual occasions like marriage) he ‘loved the land and he loved England and he loved the language of the liturgies of the English Church.’”

Guthrie, as a young man, read up on “eastern religions.” His third wife, Marjorie Mazia, was Jewish; the couple lived with their children in the Jewish neighborhood of Coney Island. According to one interviewer, their son Arlo “grew up with an awareness of the Jewish roots on his mother's side, but in practice the family was not aligned with any one religion.”

Arlo related a poignant story that elucidated his parents’ views. Before he was born, the Guthries’ infant daughter was terminally injured in a fire, and then:

“She was brought to the hospital, still alive, and my mother rushed in and the nurse said, ‘Mrs. Guthrie, you filled in everything but what religion the child is,’” he says. “She said, ‘All.’ The nurse said, ‘We can't put that.’ So she said to put ‘none.’” Twenty minutes later my father came in and, thinking to get around the confusion, the nurse said, ‘You need to fill in the religion.’ He said, ‘Put “all.” She said, ‘We can't do that.’ So he said, ‘Put “none.”’”

Kipling’s Kim exhibits an “all” religiosity. The boy engages five of the world’s six largest faiths— Christianity (Catholicism and Anglicanism), Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism—how many novels can claim that diversity?

The hero’s respect for each religion is underscored by the portrayal of universal rituals. Teshoo Lama constantly prays over his “rosary beads” (Kipling does not use the native term “mala” for them)—a practice that began in India in the 8th Century B.C. At the story’s end he baptizes himself in a river, then asks Kim to follow suit and wash away his own sins, satisfying Buddhist, Hindu and Christian alike. The comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, who spent a lifetime stressing such commonalities, would have been pleased.

Another Campbell called Rudyard Kipling “the first modern science fiction writer.” John W. Campbell, who as an author and editor of Analog magazine helped usher in “the Golden Age of Science Fiction,” was among many in his genre who idolized Kipling on account of his “approach and technique,” according to Fred Lerner:

“He was the first to go beyond simply providing the reader with the essential background information needed to read his story… Kipling had learned this trick in India. His original Anglo-Indian readership knew the customs and institutions and landscapes of British India at first hand. But when he began writing for a wider British and American audience, he had to provide his new readers with enough information for them to understand what was going on… A combination of outright exposition, sparingly used, and contextual clues, generously sprinkled through the narrative, offered the needed background. In Kim and other stories of India he uses King James English to indicate that characters are speaking in Hindustani; this is never explained, but it gets the message across subliminally.”

The centathlete, a devourer of sci-fi as a teen and sporadic binger as a world-weary adult, would add that another aspect of Kim applies to the work of Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein, Gibson, et al.— is it great children’s literature or adult literature?

Before Kim’s interfaith purification ritual, Teshoo Lama and the Muslim, Mahub Ali, conduct a tête-à-tête in amicable terms yet with divergent perspectives on the recent events and on Kim’s future. The narrative parallel with the final scene of the sci-fi trilogy The Matrix—in which The Oracle and The Architect agree to an entente between the Machine and Human worlds—seems to back up Lerner’s assertion.

After The Architect retreats, The Oracle (an African-American woman) is joined by the Chinese martial arts practitioner and the Indian girl whose father previously discussed “karma” with Neo. The movie’s symbolism reflects the writer-directors’ omnivorous appetite:

"The script was a synthesis of ideas that sort of came together at a moment when we were interested in a lot of things: making mythology relevant in a modern context, relating quantum physics to Zen Buddhism, investigating your own life," said Andy [Wachowski].

Kipling did not need to invent religious and philosophical diversity in Kim; it existed already in India. His boy hero adds the necessity of Action to the many dogmas. This practical bent is exhibited early in the story through his personal symbolism: a red bull on a green field (the insignia of a British military unit, we find out).

To participate sensually in this iconography, the centathlete tried his first Red Bull energy drink. On the palate the beverage recalls vitamins sweetened for pre-teens, begging the question: is this a drink for children or adults?

Invented in Thailand in 1962 and reformulated and marketed in Austria in 1987, Red Bull employs a logo of two clashing red bulls on a yellow sun, “the epitome of the kinetic virility and pugnacity the beverage claims to provide,” in the opinion of Brandchannel.com. The promotional copy on the can emphasizes the quaff “improves performance, especially during times of stress or strain” and “increases concentration.”

Already high on literature, the centathlete can’t testify to the vitalizing effects, but members of the U.S. military can. Red Bull is “the preferred combat zone pick-me-up,” according to The Army Times, “which easily moves more than 30,000 cans at contingency exchanges each week.”

The movement toward greater American HUMINT in Asia is thus facilitated…

# 73 The Day of the Locust – Nathanael West

2007-04-22T23:17:00.000-04:00

I’ll wait here
You're crazy
Those vicious streets are filled with strays
You should've never gone to Hollywood

The composer of these lyrics, Daron Malakian, the guitarist and sometime singer of one of the most popular rock bands in the world, System of a Down, was born and raised in Hollywood. An only child, he and his parents “lived in a one-bedroom apartment in one of [its] ‘ghetto neighborhoods,’” according to an interview with PlayLouder. When Malakian was 13 the family moved 15 minutes away to a house in Glendale. He now lives on a nearby hill, where he was visited by The Explosion, the newspaper of his alma mater, Glendale High School.

Malakian had “dark times” growing up and was a “bad student.” He himself was a “stray” for a time on the “vicious streets” he sings about: “I had friends that were gang members, so it made me open my eyes. I've had enough knives and crowbars pulled on me, but I try to avoid stuff like that now.”

They find you
Two-time you
Say you're the best they've ever seen
You should've never trusted Hollywood

System of a Down was “found” and signed by American Recordings President (and possible reincarnation of Rasputin) Rick Rubin, who saw the group at L.A.’s Viper Room. Having produced artists including LL Cool J (his first production credit), Run DMC, Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers, as well as Shakira, Mick Jagger, Tom Petty, Neil Diamond and Johnny Cash, Rubin has been one of the foremost tastemakers in American culture for more than a generation.

The centathlete has discussed the role of a music producer with a friend who is a musician and a producer. It’s amorphous. Some producers “turn knobs,” practicing their expertise with studio consoles, some make strong artistic decisions and leave the engineering to others, some mainly sit and chat with their wives and girlfriends about dinner plans.

Malakian described Rubin, who does not turn knobs, as “like a doctor you really trust.” Here’s what he told Connect about the song containing the lyrics cited above and below:

“I gotta admit when I brought in "Lost in Hollywood" I was like 'Wow - this is the greatest song.' And he's like 'It's alright' and I was like 'alright??!?!'.... I was so pissed that I went home... I had to prove to him and myself. It's just when you got that extra push and when someone second-guesses you like that when you already think you're badass... and you think 'Maybe I'm not so badass.' You go back home and you kick your ass a little over it. And you come up with something better... It's about the song. So that's what Rick brings to the table - that second-guessing. And sometimes I don't understand but it always makes the song better [It's the] simple ideas that make big differences.”

Somber and cautionary, “Lost in Hollywood” concludes Mezmerize, the first of two albums System of a Down released in 2006.

I wrote you
And told you
You were the biggest fish out here
You should've never gone to Hollywood

Although Malakian was proud of the song (and the centathlete likes it fine), at least one reviewer found the lyrics “clichéd” because the song addresses “very familiar subject matter about how tough Hollywood is because a lot of people who come out to realize their dreams get used up and spit out.”

This subject was not a cliché in the late 1930’s, when Nathanael West wrote The Day of the Locust. Born Nathan Weinstein, West was an indifferent student like Malakian—he even used another student’s transcript to transfer from Tufts to Brown University.

After college West lived in Paris in the mid-1920’s among writers and painters. He returned to New York City, where he worked as the night clerk at The Kenmore Hotel and The Sutton Club Hotel, providing free or steeply discounted rooms to his friends such as the writers Dashiell Hammett, James Farrell, Erskine Caldwell (all Top 100 authors), S.J. Perelman and Edmund Wilson.

In 1935, after publishing three commercially unsuccessful novels, he moved to Hollywood and worked as a screenwriter. His hotel experience surfaced in one character from The Day of the Locust, a former hotel bookkeeper named Homer Simpson.

To come across that name in a book that is nearly 70 years old is startling to anyone acquainted with The Simpsons, which became the longest running primetime sitcom in 2005 after surpassing The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet. In two more years it will have outlasted Gunsmoke, the longest running primetime drama.

Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons, named his Homer Simpson after his father, Homer, and chose the last name whimsically—he dreamt up the animated series in 15 minutes at the Hollywood office of James L. Brooks, a screenwriter turned producer (is Brooks a “knob-turner”?—the centathlete presumes the role of a TV producer is as variable as that of a music producer). Several web sites state that The Day of the Locust is one of Groening’s favorite books but a substantiating quote is not immediately available. In any case, Groening, who is from Portland, moved to Los Angeles as did West and West’s Homer Simpson; his lovably gluttonous Homer stays put in Springfield.

In analyzing The Simpsons, Dan Korte referred to Groening’s “subversive comic sensibility.” The Day of the Locust displays similarly black humor (ex. when the naïve Homer, in asserting that he knows what a “fairy” is, misreads Tod Hackett’s lips and says “Momo” instead of “Homo”). Moreover, its overall brevity, truncated chapters, and multiplicity of grotesque characters—all set against an awareness of pop culture and glamour—will remind readers of the TV show. Korte cited another writer, Ed Bishop, who considers The Simpsons revolutionary entertainment:

“But the appeal of The Simpsons goes beyond its humor. There's an angst, a kind of doom, in The Simpsons that's unlike anything else on television. The Simpsons are a family of losers and they know it…Yet, though there's angst and even self-pity in these characters, they are not defeated.”

This appraisal could easily apply to The Day of the Locust, but on Bishop’s last point the book goes blacker: its characters are routed.

They take you
And make you
They look at you in disgusting ways
You should've never trusted Hollywood

Early on, The Day of the Locust recounts the protagonist Tod Hackett’s first meeting with Abe Kusich outside a prostitute’s room in a seedy hotel. West himself lived in similar quarters—The Pa-Va-Sed Hotel (the centathlete thought of “perverse”)—among “stuntmen, extras, and midgets,” according to Richard Simon.

Kusich is a combative dwarf; his prominence recalled for the centathlete David Lynch’s movies, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, in which a dwarf represents a master spirit, and Mulholland Drive, in which the studio chief was played by a little person who wore a prosthetic “normal-size” body.

A dreamy, violent, grotesque exploration of Hollywood, Mulholland Drive reminded one reviewer, Joan Dupont, of a certain novel, prompting the following exchange with Lynch:

“When you tell him that his film has the mood of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, he says ‘Bless your heart,’ in warm tones straight from the heartland. ‘I love that book, I love the ‘30s and Sunset Boulevard.’”

Lynch expounded partly on the appeal of the actual Mulholland Drive: "It’s the wilds, in many places it’s desert, and you could run into a coyote, or who knows what? It’s easy to imagine almost anything happening.”

The desert outside L.A. is the setting for strange doings between Hackett, Earl Shoop, Faye Greener and The Mexican in The Day of the Locust.

Originally from Missoula, Lynch went to school in Philadelphia and Boston, where he roomed with Peter Wolf, the future singer of The J. Geils Band. In 1971 he moved to Los Angeles and currently resides in the Hollywood Hills.

Lynch’s fondness for music appears as stagey, transgender lip-syncing and cabaret in Blue Velvet. The Day of the Locust includes a performance at a club featuring female impersonators.

From his own hilltop close by, Malakian referenced the lechery of Hollywood, which also intrigued West. The novelist’s recipient and exploiter of numerous “disgusting” looks, Faye Greener, the 17-year-old wannabe starlet, could easily be the dedicatee of “Lost in Hollywood.”

When Hackett visits a party at an upscale Hollywood brothel, the madam, Audrey Jenning, readily evokes Heidi Fleiss. Greener opts to work for Jenning to pay for her father’s funeral; the centathlete thought of Lynn Bracken, the fetching prostitute played by Kim Basinger in 1997’s L.A. Confidential. That movie updated the genre of film noir, created in part by West’s friend and boarder, Dashiell Hammett, through books like The Maltese Falcon. Certainly West drew on and contributed to literary noir.

The disgusting ways on parade in The Day of the Locust are not restricted to adults. Adore Loomis, an aspiring child star accompanied by his stage mother, entertains Hackett and Simpson with a rendition of “Mama Doan Wan’ No Peas.” The little boy embellishes the traditional blues song with “extremely suggestive” gestures and “sexual pain.”

The centathlete and another blogger thought of the prepubescent Britney Spears on Star Search, swiveling her shoulders and kicking out her heels, singing “I Don’t Care” like a spurned, defiant woman.

I was standing on the wall
Feeling ten feet tall
All you maggots
Smoking fags on Santa Monica Blvd

This is my front page
This is my new age
All you bitches put your hands in the air
And wave them like you just don't care

Malakian’s lyrics now address the same mob that West portrays: the star-obsessed poseurs and sheep. The musician’s use of “maggots” and “bitches” is sneering (not misogynistic), in keeping with the edgy, confrontational style of his previous compositions. At a System of a Down concert we can imagine the audience obeying the condescending exhortation, waving their hands, and thereby complicating the boundaries of mob behavior.

The writer has more room for sustained treatment of this motif, as in the relatively lengthy (13 pages), final chapter of the riot. This conflagration occurs outside a movie premiere hours before the celebrities have arrived. West was perhaps the first novelist to focus on the mob and the wannabes rather than the stars—there are no established actors or producers in The Day of the Locust, although the book is very much about Hollywood. The only character who has “made it” in the industry is Claude Estee, the “successful screen writer,” but he is shown to be a debauched poseur himself.

West’s unorthodox perspective, ingenuity, reflexiveness and humor reminded the centathlete of the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Late in the novel, when Hackett is processing Homer Simpson’s incoherent outburst, the following passage jumps out:

“He hit on a key that helped when he realized that a lot of it wasn’t jumbled so much as timeless. The words went behind each other instead of after. What he had taken for long strings were really one thick word and not a sentence. In the same way several sentences were simultaneous and not a paragraph. Using this key, he was able to arrange a part of what he had heard so that it made the usual kind of sense.”

This conception of a non-sequential story, told within a sequential story, anticipates the surreal blending of narrative with meta-narrative that Kaufman employed in Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. The “usual kind of sense” that follows an initially absurd situation applies to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. For the centathlete, West’s skill is on par with Kaufman’s; both writers provoke and engross, yet their craftsmanship is less ambitious than their ideas. Their respective works are self-consciously constrained—every chapter or scene has a “hit or miss” quality. That said, the centathlete has enjoyed every Kaufman movie, and he will always wait with relish for the next one.

Although The Day of the Locust was largely ignored when it was published, one reader “was impressed by the pathological crowd.” This was F. Scott Fitzgerald, who for a time lived next-door to West in Hollywood, working at screenwriting like his neighbor and friend. Fitzgerald attended a party at West’s only a week before he died in 1940. West was vacationing in Mexico with his new wife when he learned of the death; the two were killed in a car accident in El Centro, CA as they drove to attend Fitzgerald’s funeral. Ironically, in his novel, West described and complicated a paltry funeral, attended by vacuous, somewhat sinister celebrity-hounds.

Look at all of them beg to stay
Phony people come to pray

West revels in the evangelical quackery of Los Angeles—he lists many upstart sects and quirky sermon topics such as “The Crusade Against the Salt” and “Brain-Breathing, the Secret of the Aztecs.” The mob’s longing for meaning seems desperate and ridiculous—this same longing leads it to pray to idols on Earth, the stars of Hollywood, to which Malakian apparently refers. West employs a very similar turn of phrase to the one above: his characters “come to California to die.”

You should've never trusted Hollywood
You should've never gone to Hollywood

These final words warn against the same dangers that West dramatized. Of course Malakian himself didn’t “go” to Hollywood; he never left. But he knows better, we can assume, and he doesn’t play the empty, untrustworthy game of “Old School Hollywood,” the title of the song that precedes “Lost in Hollywood.”

In his introduction to The Day of the Locust, Alfred Kazin set out to emphasize that times were different when the novel was written, beginning with, “Hollywood in the 1980’s is not the glamour capital and dream factory that once excited millions of Americans as the most magical but improbable place on earth.” If that were in fact true then, it isn’t now. Who can deny Hollywood’s primacy in the current American psyche—and in the global zeitgeist? The praying, longing and relocation/tourism remain robust; the red carpet is more crowded, surrounded, and watched via TV and the Internet every season.

Kazin also observed that West insightfully argued that the mob, rather than adulate, “really wants to kill its idols.” Nowadays we see that wish enacted by stalkers and, by proxy, by encroaching paparazzi, articulated on numerous “death pool” web sites, translated on the pages of the tabloids, and tacitly affirmed in the much-watched coverage of the deceased such as Anna Nicole Smith. In short, the motifs of The Day of the Locust are all too recognizable today, and the sensibility lives on with “outsiders” such as Groening and Kaufman, who moved to L.A. to write films, just like Nathanael West and so many others.

And there are outsiders like David Lynch who wouldn’t add their voices to Malakian’s—they wouldn’t tell Faye Greener or you to stay away. Ever the cryptic dream weaver, Lynch said, “I like Los Angeles. There’s smog, and there’s gangs and trouble, but, at the same time, there’s an optimistic sort of feeling.”

# 71 A High Wind in Jamaica – Richard Hughes

2007-04-06T11:52:00.000-04:00

Yah mon, when children, Jamaica and England are linked together, many of us think of Musical Youth, the adolescent reggae act known for the 1982 hit, “Pass the Dutchie.”

In 1979 Frederick Waite, a Jamaican musician who had moved to Birmingham, England, founded Musical Youth as a vehicle for himself and his talented two sons, who were joined by three fellow students, one of whom replaced the father as lead vocalist.

“Pass the Dutchie” was a cover of “Pass the Kouchie” by the Jamaican trio, The Mighty Diamonds, who tour internationally to this day. The original’s lyrics reflect a pro-ganja perspective evident in many other songs in reggae, hip-hop and rock—“kouchie” or “kutchie” is slang for a smoking pipe or chalice.

Seeking a broader, less druggy appeal in accordance with their ages, Musical Youth changed “kouchie” to “dutchie,” a term for a cooking pot, as well as other lyrics so that their theme concerned hunger and poverty. For example, “How does it feel when you’ve got no herb?” became “How does it feel when you’ve got no food?” The switcheroo succeeded to the tune of more than 4 million records sold worldwide.

Yah mon, some old cats remember when MTV played videos, and, uh, thanks mon…yah, and “Pass the Dutchie,” in very heavy rotation for months and months, was a pleasant pre-Nickelodeon curiosity—due especially to the chubby-cheeked li’l dudes, Kelvin and Michael Grant, who “toasted” (a Jamaican form of rapping in patois) and played guitar and keyboards. Viewing the video again, we find the band lip-syncing in London across the Thames from Parliament, with cuts to a trial in which the boys are wrongly prosecuted for injuring an overly restrictive policeman—a priggish, bearded, toy fascist.

Ultimately justice prevails and Musical Youth is declared innocent, free to dance and sing before the judge and jury as the song closes. The policeman is humiliated and he bows his head—a better fate than that which befalls his doppelganger in a video for yet another 1982 hit by yet another act from Birmingham.

In “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’” by Judas Priest, we see an engineer-functionary, with a Chaplinesque mustache and bowler (Charlie Chaplin played the first toy fascist in the 1940 movie, The Great Dictator), serving as the antagonist. He traverses elevated bridgework in front of an energy ministry, just as the policeman crossed the bridge from Parliament, the seat of power, to confront Musical Youth. This prig frowns at the intense radioactivity—one of the properties of actual heavy metal—of Judas Priest, a heavy metal band par excellence, in full headbanging lip-sync mode. Rob Halford, Judas Priest’s singer, waves his arms and emits a pulse of energy that causes the functionary’s head to explode; authority is not just humiliated, it is destroyed.

Unlike Judas Priest, Musical Youth emphasized playfulness over violence, yet we still acknowledge their video’s imagery of governmental/societal persecution and joyous rebellion supporting the song’s initial declaration, “This generation rules the nation.”

A courtroom scene appears in another artwork linking children, Jamaica and England—the 1929 novel, A High Wind in Jamaica, by Richard Hughes. The child protagonists rule the events of what seems to be a Caribbean pirate fable; their prospects for eventually ruling the nation are, to a cynical reader, better than Musical Youth’s.

When the 10-year-old heroine Emily’s testimony regarding an alleged murder is required, she is coached by a slick attorney and watched anxiously by her parents, who are unsure about her recollection and interpretation of the events. The scene predates by more than two decades Arthur Miller’s dramatization of the Salem witch trials in The Crucible, in which children formally but dubiously corroborate misconduct. Indeed, the competency and credibility of child testimony has continually bedeviled the American judicial system.

Emily, it turns out, is less than truthful on the stand, and the defendants, a pirate captain and his crew, are condemned to death. Had the captain been a musician, he might have voiced the sentiments found in the 1993 reggae/dancehall hit “Informer” by Snow, a young man who rapped nimbly and autobiographically in patois about his trial for murder based on false testimony. Snow was acquitted, and he proclaimed the retribution he wanted to exact against the prosecution witness: “A licky boom-boom down” probably signifies revenge by gunfire.

Notions of a more Christian, turn-the-other-cheek type of justice are expressed in A High Wind in Jamaica by a wrongly accused man. The “negro cook,” one of the novel’s minor black characters, responds publicly to the conviction, stoically addressing the inevitability of death and the comfort of his innocence. Why did the Times, the paper of record in England, according to Hughes’s narrator, report that this man alone of the pirates was noble when faced with the gallows, was most comfortable and articulate when subserviently coming to terms with abusive power?

Snow’s beef is not with power—it’s personal. In his video the antagonist is a slick, mustachioed informer who drinks champagne in a steam room with a group of attractive ladies. He presumably informed on Snow for money to attain or continue a pimp’s lifestyle.

“Informer” passed over the theme of racial injustice; A High Wind in Jamaica prefers the subjects of morality and child psychology. The seeds of evil are on display in all of us early on, the book argues. Environment and circumstance, such as captivity on a pirate ship, enable the worst to occur. Moreover, children inherently possess and rapidly develop the means to shame a victim—most notably the traumatized Margaret—and conceal the truth.

Francine Prose’s introduction to the novel alludes to frequent comparisons with William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, which also explores the outbreak of corruption and violence among youngsters in an exotic island setting. In fact, the last paragraph of A High Wind in Jamaica reminded the centathlete of a different Top 100 book.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita concludes with the image of the tragic heroine, as imagined by Humbert Humbert, permanently exiled from childhood:

“What I heard then was the melody of children at play and nothing but that, and I knew that the hopeless thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that chorus.”

A High Wind in Jamaica ends similarly with a zoom-out from Emily at play as she is, in contrast to Lolita, able to blend in again with her schoolmates back in England—not even the narrator can tell her apart from the others. Emily can overlook, perhaps even forget, her transgressions and tribulations, and society will accept her. In this respect, the novel anticipates by more than 30 years Hannah Arendt’s controversial concept of “the banality of evil.”

For Hughes, innocence is a false construct. Violence—in the animal kingdom (the family cat is shredded by other wild cats), the climate (the hurricane) and the land itself (the earthquake)—is part of Existence in which humans are willing or unwilling participants. Emily and her siblings thoughtlessly kill and torture animals in the very first chapter, but in so doing they’re seen to be only playing games.

One such game involves the elaborate capture of a bird by its feet. The description concludes,

“…decide by ‘Eena, deena, dina, do,’ or some such rigmarole, whether to twist its neck or let it go free—thus the excitement and suspense, both for child and bird, can be prolonged beyond the moment of capture.”

Then comes a chillingly abrupt, provocative segue. The next paragraph begins, “It was only natural that Emily should have great ideas of improving the negroes.” Animal cruelty and racial progress are equally practiced by the adorable little Englishwoman; degrees of mindlessness and earnestness toward both behaviors are devastatingly called into question.

Emily finally rejoins the ruling class. Others would find assimilation more difficult. One reggae artist, Eddy Grant (born in Guyana, not Jamaica, and then relocated to England), sang about the troubles endemic to the predominantly non-white neighborhoods outside London in his 1983 hit, “Electric Avenue,” an actual area of Brixton.

In reviewing the video, we see images of Grant jogging on a Caribbean beach, dreadlocks bouncing, juxtaposed with close-ups of a faceless outlaw revving a motorcycle. The lyrics begin with “Down in the street there is violence,” as Grant lip-syncs on a couch in a living room, watching TV. The established context is of injustice/uprising and awareness/indifference.

The biker is joined by an anonymous twin and they roll (as a reduced incarnation of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse) through “Electric Avenue,” a scruffy urban neighborhood, at night—the dangerous time. “Can’t afford a thing on TV,” Grant sings, affirming poverty and exclusion from Society.

He steps onto the carpet and falls in a pool before the TV, and he also staggers and drops on the sand—injustice wounds the dreadlocked man in the city (England) and on the beach (the former colonies). The bikers magically revive and transport him to a classroom with children.

The lead student is an adorable, spectacled girl similar in age to Emily. She leaves the classroom to join the crowd that is now following the bikers, who are fomenting a protest or rebellion, interpreted in the chorus as, “We gonna rock down to Electric Avenue/And then we’ll take it higher.”

The presentation of the girl, who smiles as she descends to the street, lightens the song’s tone of protest and mitigates the ominous appearance of the bikers and murky cinematography. Originally scowling, Grant himself lip-syncs somewhat impishly once the girl has joined the movement. His exhortation for immediate progress is thus “positive” and more commercially appealing.

The contemporary power structure, however, might have been alarmed that the message is depicted as dangerously seductive to its children—how would Musical Youth’s and Judas Priest’s toy fascist have reacted as the girl left the classroom?

Whereas Eddy Grant referred to socioeconomic discrimination as the cause for Electric Avenue’s state as “the dark side of the town,” Richard Hughes dramatically argued that the dark side lives in every heart and throughout nature.

His blandly named novel (the “high wind” does not seem to refer to pungent breezes from the camps referenced by The Mighty Diamonds) offers no apparent cure. The book seems simply to warn against Pollyanna-ish ignorance toward and coddling of children.

The generically named Musical Youth advocate in “Pass the Dutchie” that consciousness, celebrated in dance and song, will alleviate hunger and carry the day. Unfortunately, the future was not as rosy as it once appeared to the boys. Patrick Waite, while awaiting a drug-related trial, died at age 24 of heart illness. Junior Waite suffered a nervous breakdown. Kelvin Grant suffers from psychological problems and lives reclusively.

Michael Grant and Dennis Seaton, however, soldier on as musicians and adult caretakers of their legacy as child stars. “We be the Youth till we die,” Seaton said. In his case, the child is publicly and unusually father to the man. In Emily’s case, the child is metaphorically and unusually mother to the woman, and the rest of us. Yah mon.

# 82 Angle of Repose – Wallace Stegner

2007-02-23T00:10:00.000-05:00

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed,” Wallace Stegner wrote in his “Wilderness Letter,” the reading of which is even more worthwhile than a hike in the woods. Intended as support for governmental land preservation, this 1960 epistle was earnest, passionate and eloquent enough to be recycled as a profession of faith by The Wilderness Society and The Sierra Club—as well as by parks in Africa, Canada and Australia—to this day.

A novelist and historian, Stegner (of whom the centathlete, as an Easterner who lives where citylight washes out the stars, was completely ignorant) addressed the profoundly revitalizing benefits of the Great Outdoors to an American’s spirit and character, and his closeness to nature growing up “on the empty plains of Saskatchewan and Montana and in the mountains of Utah.” He also suggested that modern man needs escape, even if temporary, from the “technological termite-life” that breeds insanity and malignance, conditions that have festered, in his opinion, for decades:

“It seems to me significant that the distinct downturn in our literature from hope to bitterness took place almost at the precise time when the frontier officially came to an end, in 1890, and when the American way of life had begun to turn strongly urban and industrial. The more urban it has become, and the more frantic with technological change, the sicker and more embittered our literature, and I believe our people, have become.”

The “official” closing Stegner noted was popularized by Frederick Jackson Turner in his 1893 paper, The Frontier in American History. Turner cited a brief statement about the frontier in the U.S. Census of 1890; he expounded on the “perennial rebirth” and the “fluidity of American life” as a result of ongoing expansion into the West, and he argued that “with [the frontier’s] going has closed the first period of American history.” This thesis has been canonized and, more recently, disparaged by contemporary scholars—in any case the centathlete recalls that rudimentary recognition of Turner and his argument was required in multiple-choice questions on high school history exams.

Stegner’s concurrence with the thrust of Turner’s argument is evident in his 1971 novel, Angle of Repose, which presents a contemporary retired historian relating the life of his grandparents in various far-flung locations out west in the 1870’s and 1880’s. Significantly, the base story concludes in 1890, suggesting that the grandparents’ “frontier days” are over and going forward they must come to terms with a circumscribed, negotiated life together. Look out for “1890” in future retrospectives.

The novel’s heroine, Susan Burling Ward, is an artist and writer who leaves genteel society and cherished personal ties in New York’s Hudson Valley to live with her itinerant engineer husband. She is a Quaker, as reinforced by her usage of “thee” (a Quaker form of address meant to express belief in the equality of all people), which evokes another community that scratched out a life on a harsh frontier of sorts.

Several years go the centathlete traveled to Costa Rica and visited Monteverde, home to a cloud forest, essentially a rainforest (a jungle that receives more than 80” of annual rainfall) at altitude. This reserve was created largely out of land owned by 12 Quaker families from Alabama who had moved there in 1951 in protest of the U.S. military draft.

The resettled Quakers, many of whom still reside in Monteverde, were acting as custodians of the natural environment long before ecotourism was cool (there were at most 60 visitors per year during the 1950’s; there are now more than 50,000 annually).

During one hike through an incredibly lush jungle, the guide explained that ranchers had cleared the entire area, which was then purchased by conservationists who let it alone to grow back quickly in all its diversity. The key to such rebirth is that it must take place within 10 years; even the fertile Costa Rican soil demands a statute of limitations. During an unguided walk a late-morning downpour prompted the howling of unseen monkeys in the treetops. The moment testified to a human’s status as just one minor player in an ancient, uncontrolled drama.

Wallace Stegner was not a Quaker like the Costa Rican conservationists, his heroine Susan Ward, and his fellow historical novelist James Michener (two years older than Stegner), who comes to mind while reading Angle of Repose in light of the family-typifying-an-era formula, geographical and occupational detail, and mixing of fictional characters with actual people. One panner called the novel “a dandified Michener,” a brusque put-down the centathlete considers a hearty recommendation.

Susan Ward and her Eastern friends mingle with impressively accomplished and named personages such as John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and William Dean Howells. One specimen of the narrative’s name-dropping (we might think of it as a buffalo chip in honor of the prairies traversed by the Wards) is Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the Irish-American sculptor whose work included the monument to General Sherman by the southeastern entrance of New York’s Central Park.

The centathlete lives on the same city block as the Augustus Saint-Gaudens Playground, advertised as displaying “bronze and porcelain decorations that harmonize with the new gates, garden area, and play equipment.” This landmark is an ostensible tribute to the Gilded Age artist, but the decorations are few and unremarkable, and any hint of harmonious commemoration is overwhelmed daily by screaming, scrambling toddlers and urchins—Bah, humbug!

Like the Costa Rican Quakers, Wallace Stegner voiced pacifist and egalitarian policies. He opposed the Vietnam War from the beginning and he wrote about unfair discrimination against African-Americans and other minorities. His public status was due not just to his books—he was the head of Stanford University’s Creative Writing Program, which he founded in 1946.

One student, Ken Kesey, who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest while at Stanford, said, “I always compared Stegner to Vince Lombardi—he put together not only a good team but a good team of supporting coaches.”

Another, Nancy Packer, observed that Stegner was “courteous, attentive and forbearing” with students, and extremely disciplined in his own work, balancing writing and teaching equally for 25 years at Stanford.

Stegner was uncomfortable with aspects of the counterculture that arose in the Bay Area during the late 1960’s; he dramatized his disdain for history-renouncing radicalism in Angle of Repose through the repartee between the curmudgeonly narrator, Lyman Ward, and the bra-less hippie, Shelly Rasmussen. In 1971 he retired to devote himself to writing, as his wife, Mary Page Stegner, reported:

“Wally didn’t like the way students were trashing the campus, and he didn’t like the fact that they didn’t come to class. He decided he didn’t have to teach, and he said there was no point in teaching when people weren’t coming to class.”

Discipline and endurance, characteristics that Stegner valued and practiced, are evident throughout Angle of Repose. The novel is experienced as a series of arduous slogs enriched by meticulous appreciation of the rugged environments and respect for the enormity of the mining and irrigation projects. Dynamic plot developments, epiphanies and coincidental encounters are scarce and downplayed, in keeping with the upholding of the continuous dedication and resourcefulness that actual pioneers demonstrated.

Then there is the dream sequence in the final chapter, a coda that diverges from the sustained, measured tempo and guarded perspectives of the prior narrative by presenting concentrated, charged intimacies. This coda wraps up the interaction between the past and the present, offering hope for a livable future to be earned.

Stegner was described as “honest and straightforward” and engaged in “debunking myths of the West as a romantic country of heroes on horseback.” The man himself said, “The West does not need to explore its myths much further; it has already relied on them too long.”

Had he been present at certain TV-studio meetings in the mid-1960’s, Stegner would likely have scoffed at one producer’s sales pitch for a new show, promoted as “Wagon Train to the stars.” A popular network melodrama from 1957-1965, Wagon Train was precisely the type of hokey, inaccurate fiction that Stegner sought to dispel.

After Star Trek was greenlighted, its producer-writer Gene Roddenberry drew on a government document (recalling Turner’s reliance on the U.S. Census Report) to craft his famous introduction for each installment. We can imagine the degrees of skepticism, caution and acceptance with which Wallace Stegner would have greeted the first line of Captain James T. Kirk’s monologue, “Space, the final frontier.”

# 55 On the Road – Jack Kerouac

2007-02-05T22:58:00.000-05:00

In 1972 a 17-year-old named Jean-Louis Aubert and his childhood friend Olivier “Olive” Caudron left Paris to travel across the U.S. Energized by American and British rock groups (there were no such bands in France), the two hitchhiked with their guitars, dreaming of mingling with hippies and anarchists, and soaking up the magic that would make them great musicians. Perhaps they would even be discovered.

In the streets, to earn money, they strummed and sang songs by The Rolling Stones and Crosby, Stills & Nash, joined often by the locals. For five months they crossed the country without staying in a motel, winding up in San Francisco, where they saw Jefferson Airplane in concert before returning to Paris.

Aubert later said that the journey was an initiation. He had taken the risk and he had had a vision—to write rock songs in French, which no one had done. The poetry of the voyage was his inspiration. And he had read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

Four years later, after playing in Paris garages and at university parties, Aubert, as singer and guitarist, co-founded Téléphone, France’s equivalent of The Beatles. (His buddy Olive later founded the rock group Lili Drop.) Their first album, wildly successful as were their subsequent four before their break-up in 1985, included the song “Sur La Route” or “On the Road.” Here is a crude translation:

On the Road

Rolling all night
And the whole day
Without knowing where I’m going
And why I’m going there

I race after a dream
My heart hung onto
Puncturing my skin
Without ever proving its reality

I’m on the road
I’m in retreat
I’m on the road
And I don’t give a damn
I’m on the road
I’m in retreat
I’m on the road

I don’t know what I’ve left
I don’t know what I’m going to find
But I had to leave, leave to forget
I’m not scared of a flat
I’m not scared of a blowout
I don’t have time to think about it
You know I’m almost there

I’m on the road
I’m in retreat
I’m on the road
And I don’t give a damn
I’m on the road
I’m in retreat
I’m on the road

Roll, roll, roll…

Stylistically, Kerouac was emulating bebop, improvising exuberantly. He listened to Charlie Parker while writing, as Jackson Pollock did in the early 1950’s while executing his drip paintings. (The only bebop musician the centathlete saw live was Dizzy Gillespie. He and his homeys went to the Blue Note for the trumpeter’s first of several sets, as each one was priced separately and exorbitantly. Big mistake: the old-timer let his young cub bandmates do most of the riffing, presumably because he would warm up later in the evening. When Gillespie did occasionally blow, those cheeks were astonishingly distended as though grapefruit-filled.)

In contrast, Aubert was breathing French identity into an existing, relatively stricter template: the four-minute rock song, which requires an economic poetry of short, instantly catchy lines and lots of rhymes. The rock composer doesn’t have the novelist’s or bebop hepcat’s twin luxuries of time and space.

Aubert’s “On the Road” asserts the tenuous but enriched condition of a beatnik vagabond whose voyage, even if it means fleeing something, is the spiritual destination. The overriding metaphor is of the traveler as an automobile’s tire. The melody begins with a steady rock groove flavored with Western-sounding slide guitar, and then, after the verses are concluded, segues into a harder, frenetic jam of joint riffs and repeated exhortations to “Roll!”

Another Frenchman, Raphaёl Haroche, who grew up in the 1980’s and 1990’s outside Paris, was a great admirer of Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. In 2000, known as simply Raphaёl, he launched a career as a singer-songwriter combining a Dylanesque sensibility with carefully considered arrangements.

While preparing for his second album, he wrote the songs impulsively, the majority of them in one day, recalling Kerouac’s spontaneous prose. On New Year’s Eve of 2001, while in Brussels at a train station, he encountered two needy men selling roses, and the next day he wrote his own “On the Road,” interpreted roughly as follows:

On the Road

On the map of the world with a bird’s flight
You think you can hit the big time
That you have the sky in a drop of water
You seek a better future
Life runs out through our hands
Joy, pain—our path…
Ride across life without a train ticket
Ride across life without a train ticket

On the road…

Loneliness, angst
That created the dream of freedom
To swear that you won’t be bored
When you’re in a good space, you see
And this happiness that rides through us
For a crumb of bread
If you’re hungry, take mine

If it isn’t America
It’s very close to it

There were times I wanted to be a bird
So I could spit from high above
See the houses and the countrysides
And turn my back to them
I’ll sell my bags of roses
I’ll take the morning train
On all the walls there was written
Justice not revenge
Justice not revenge

On the road…

The single was a smash in France, due in part to the participation of Jean-Louis Aubert, who was invited to join Raphaёl for a duet on the album and in a few subsequent concerts. The younger man’s song offers metronomic percussion, textured and varied instrumentation, and a restrained, incantatory delivery.

Aubert and Téléphone approached Kerouac’s energy much more closely. His “On the Road” presents a character’s self-appraisal, and embraces listeners through the infectious communal force of rock ‘n’ roll.

Raphaёl, in his lyrics, echoes Kerouac’s empathetic interaction with the marginal and downtrodden (“digging” them, as Kerouac might say), while his meditative melody evokes a more intimate, plaintive listening experience.

The brief evocation of America is compelling and mysterious: is he suggesting that the rose-sellers wished they were living in the Land of Opportunity, where they might earn and buy more? or that the beatnik spirit of co-existence is nearly attained by the narrator’s earnest identification with the vendors?

The final lines of “justice not vengeance” suggest that Raphaёl hopes for elevation for everyone, an elevation that includes the material. Life on the road entails for him a compassionate, egalitarian sentiment that was articulated by Kerouac but overshadowed in the American’s novel by the quest for a spiritual and cultural revolution.

Both Frenchmen partake in Kerouac’s quest to transcend unimaginative self-absorption and conventionally demarcated (ex. by race or nationality) identity. For further indication of the power that quest can hold over a reader, we note a concert that took place in Denver less than two years ago.

Emmanuel Bidan, a longtime Téléphone fan, had bumped into Jean-Louis Aubert, who has enjoyed a productive solo career for 20 years, at a Paris train station. Bidan invited the icon to the Denver International School, where he teaches French and at times uses Aubert’s lyrics as subjects for study. Aubert accepted and in March 2005 he flew to Denver, performed a concert, and discussed his methods and ideas with the students.

It was a return trip: Aubert had passed through Denver three decades before during his initiation while reading On the Road. The city figures prominently in the novel, and was briefly home to Kerouac. As Aubert spoke after the concert of the impact of his early adventure, the personal resonance of the lyrics he wrote as a teenager, and the need to compose in the language in which you dream, he mentioned that he brought with him his old copy of On the Road—it was in his pocket…

Like Aubert, Kerouac was born “Jean-Louis” and, although he didn’t speak French, he spoke a dialect called joual. His parents were from Quebec and members of the French-Canadian Diaspora, which also included “Cajuns” or "Acadians" from Nova Scotia.

The centathlete has road-tripped through the southern coast of Nova Scotia's French-influenced region. In the precisely named village of Middle West Pubnico, at the Red Cap Restaurant, he ate rappie pie—a dish of comfort food that reminded him of defiantly bland Celtic pub cuisine—amid elder male workers on their lunch hour. The pie had no taste to this traveler, and the French dialect was impenetrable.

If you can’t drive to Maritime Canada, Maritime Canada will come to you—via Great Big Sea, an uplifting band that mixes traditional Celtic music and contemporary folk-rock. Arising out of the vibrant Irish-Canadian community in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Great Big Sea has earned fame and adoration through perpetual far-ranging tours of North America. The centathlete has taken in their passionate show in New York City, where the Newfoundland flag was waved in the balcony.

All four band members sing. They play guitars, fiddles, accordions, bouzoukis, Irish flutes, and a bodhràn (the centathlete bought one of these handheld drums in Ireland’s western town of Roundstone—it makes a decorative keepsake for a rhythmically inept tourist).

In 2000 Great Big Sea issued Road Rage, an album of live recordings that everyone should own, and a log of the band’s tour of all ten Canadian provinces. One of their original songs articulates familiar sentiments:

Consequence Free

Wouldn’t it be great, if no one ever got offended
Wouldn’t it be great to say what’s really on your mind
I have always said ‘all the rules are made for bending’
And if I let my hair down, would that be such a crime?

(Chorus)

I wanna be consequence free
I wanna be where nothing needs to matter
I wanna be consequence free
just sing Na Na Na Na Na Ne Na Na Na

I could really use, to lose my Catholic conscience
Cuz I’m getting sick of feeling guilty all the time
I won’t abuse it, Yeah I’ve got the best intentions
For a little bit of anarchy but not the hurting kind

(Chorus)

I couldn’t sleep at all last night
cause I had so much on my mind
I’d like to leave it all behind,
but you know it’s not that easy

(Chorus)

Wouldn’t it be great, if the band just never ended
We could stay out late and we would never hear last call
We wouldn’t need to worry about approval or permission,
we could—slip off the edge and never worry about the fall

(Chorus)

No ambiguity, irony or literary pretension here, as affirmed during an interview with Sean McCann:

Q: Where did the song 'Consequence Free' come from?

SM: That was Jim Cuddy from Blue Rodeo making fun of me for getting up so early to work when we're at home. He said, "Why'd you become musicians if you still have to get up early?" Alan and I joked about the kind of dream of just being able to do whatever you want, living totally consequence free.

The song expresses the desire of On the Road, albeit in a far tamer manner, notably lacking a beatnik’s appetite for self-destruction. There’s no shame in admitting that most folks would find Great Big Sea’s vision more identifiable and accessible—what teenager hasn’t wanted to rebel, to live consequence free even for a little while?

The good-natured Canadians’ lyrics dream of “a little bit of anarchy, but not the hurting kind.” On the Road’s Dean Moriarty, Sal Paradise and their gang (stand-ins for Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac and their comrades) actually lived with a great degree of hurtful anarchy. They took real risks, achieved real epiphanies, and paid real costs.

In contrast to the Rated-G utopia that Great Big Sea imagines, Moriarty et al. commit offenses and crimes. They steal cars and ingest drugs with abandon. Rules are not just bent, they’re shattered with the aim of a new life-affirming aesthetic. And consequences are ignored: Paradise marvels near the end of his story that Moriarty, the quintessential itinerant madman, the modern saint and con artist, is still questing despite the fact that he has been married three times and has two children.

The centathlete was surprised by the age of the characters and the extent of their familial entanglements. These are not single teenagers on Spring Break—they’re guys in their 20’s and 30’s with wives, houses, and jobs. (The women seem to matter only to the extent that they accommodate the protagonists; should we think of the Great Beat Writers as just a strange sect of patriarchal apostles?) Their collective will to live fully and dangerously, which demands a prolonged narcotic derangement of the senses, trumps the responsibility they might bear toward their cohabitants and dependents.

Paradise’s famous line about his heroes, “The only people for me are the mad ones…” is often quoted; Bob Dylan recited it from memory during an interview seen in Martin Scorsese’s documentary, No Direction Home. The centathlete can’t help thinking of Paradise’s aunt, the stand-in for Kerouac’s mother, who wasn’t mad yet supported her charge with money and lodging whenever it was required. The ever-tolerant, understanding, forgiving aunt/mother who always welcomes back the mad, prodigal son…

Biblical references in mind, we note the singer of “Consequence Free” wishes to “lose my Catholic conscience.” This subject troubled Kerouac, who delved into Buddhism and strayed from the lifestyle his Catholic priests would have prescribed. In the final stage of his life he wrote, “I’m actually not a Beat but a strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic” and “I’m not a Buddhist, I’m a Catholic.” The prodigal son had come back to the Church and to his mother, with whom he lived until his death.

The liner notes to "Road Rage" (the name refers not to anger but a Newfoundler term for a party in the street) state: “Canada is a big country. St. John’s is closer to Paris than Victoria.” That relative proximity of Europe didn’t attract Sal Paradise, who at the close of On the Road sits on a New Jersey pier and retrospectively looks west, across the “huge bulge” of North America. Like a saxophonist exhaling the last strains of a coda, he intones, “…I think of Dean Moriarty…I think of Dean Moriarty.”

In a New York apartment the centathlete, when thinking of Jack Kerouac, faces both east toward Paris and west toward Denver, and he thinks of Jean-Louis Aubert…he thinks of Raphaёl Haroche…and he thinks of Great Big Sea…

Coming soon…
Angle of Repose

# 94 Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys

2007-01-18T18:40:00.000-05:00

About ten pages into Wide Sargasso Sea, the 1966 novel by Jean Rhys, the centathlete realized he could literally hear the narrator, because he’d heard the pacing, tone and subject matter before—in the 1992 movie The Lover.

Jeanne Moreau, the French actress and singer, distinctively narrated off-camera as the elder personage of the Young Girl decades after the events on screen, channeling the “morning-after voice” of Marguerite Duras, who wrote the 1984 novel, L’Amant, on which the movie is based, about her childhood in Vietnam.

Some critics took issue with The Lover’s indisputably erotic emphasis through its exhibition of the prolific Hong Kong actor, Tony Leung, and the exquisitely photogenic nymphet, Jane March, an 18 year-old English model with no prior acting experience. Roger Ebert, who liked the movie less than the centathlete did, thought it offered little more than “soft-core sensuality,” and he added:

“I wanted to know more. I believe true eroticism resides in the mind; what happens between bodies is more or less the same, but what it means to the occupants of those bodies is another question.”

At first blush, the complaint seems curious coming from an unblushing former B-movie practitioner like Ebert, who wrote the screenplay for the bawdy 1969 satire, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, directed by skin-flick grandmaster Russ Meyer. His call for “serious” character development is a familiar refrain of dramatic and literature criticism, one the centathlete has never shared.

The centathlete has never “wanted to know more” about a book or film’s dramatis personae. Vividness or strangeness of environment, originality and intricacy of technique, expansiveness of perspective, and dynamism of plot all attract him more than the fullness of the characters. There are plenty—6.6 billion—of people; the centathlete doesn’t hinge his indulgence in a work of art on the envisioning of characters as virtual human reference-points. This seems a matter of taste and personality, though, and the way you interact or want to interact with books and with people may differ.

We could tear down many of the greatest stories ever told, such as those in the Old and New Testaments, or epics such as The Odyssey or Beowulf, or novels such as Animal Farm and Brave New World (both in the Top 100 list), for giving their heroes little inner depth. Furthermore, most of children’s literature and genre (mystery, sci-fi, etc.) fiction lacks “realistic” psychological complexity. Scrolling down beloved entries in the AFI’s greatest 100 movies (Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, Some Like It Hot, etc.) suggests that this particular critical demand is applied rather selectively.

Still, many novelists themselves obey the impulse to know more, to great success. Gregory Maguire took The Wizard of Oz and wrote the 1995 novel, Wicked, a backstory-prequel based on Glinda's nemesis, the Wicked Witch of the West. He said in an interview:

“…I did think that because it is a familiar subject and people have a preconception they might be intrigued to follow and see whether their preconceptions hold any water. That's what I was intrigued in, too. They might feel the same as I do. Oh, the Wicked Witch of the West. Gee, we don't know much about her, do we? She wears black and she's kind of ugly; she doesn't seem to take care of her skin very well; but she's still interested in those ruby slippers. Why? There's a complication there. What is it? She always tells the truth. In the movie, the Wicked Witch might be scary, but she never lies.”

Three decades before Maguire, Jean Rhys complicated a one-dimensional witch. She took the character of Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontё’s 1847 novel, Jane Eyre, and wrote a backstory-prequel that became Wide Sargasso Sea, as she explained:

“When I read Jane Eyre as a child, I thought, why should she think Creole women are lunatics and all that? What a shame to make Rochester's first wife, Bertha, the awful madwoman, and I immediately thought I'd write the story as it might really have been. She seemed such a poor ghost. I thought I'd try to write her a life.”

Like Bertha Mason, Rhys was a Creole, defined for her as a white European from the West Indies, having been born in 1890 in Dominica, where she lived until she was 16. Her novel’s title refers to the seaweed-matted Sargasso Sea and the symbolic distance between the cultures on its opposite sides.

After going to school in England and working as a chorus girl, Rhys lived a bohemian life in Paris, where she wrote journals that were given to the novelist Ford Madox Ford, who encouraged and taught her to write novels. In the mid-1920’s the two had an affair while Rhys’s husband did prison time for embezzlement, making them—perhaps—the only amorously linked novelists of the Top 100 list. Each donned a pseudonym: Rhys was born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams; Ford was born Ford Hermann Hueffer.

Rhys was an alcoholic prone to depression for much of her life, as was Duras (whose surname is also pseudonymal, chosen in honor of a town where the author’s father lived; she was born Marguerite Donnadieu). Their late, respective books, Wide Sargasso Sea (published when Rhys was 76) and L’Amant (published when Duras was 70) display an astonishing number of parallels; each could be described as the semi-autobiographical study of a white girl’s coming of age in a decaying, fraught colonial setting, featuring a brittle, unmaternal mother, a Catholic girls school, cultural clashes, and contentious conjugal negotiations that intertwine passion and wealth.

There’s a similarity of style too. Rhys’s writing has been called “stunningly sensual and mellifluous yet pared-down and immediate.” Her unsentimental minimalism, a firm foundation for the hysteria and tragic conflagrations she depicts, incorporates physical curiosities such as a glacis, a glass-covered veranda, and frangipani, a flower exotic in appearance and name. (The repeated references to tropical flora calls to mind the bougainvillea that grows everywhere in southern Mexico in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, as well as the evocative wisteria that populates William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.)

Duras has been described as a minimalist who, “…talks about the melancholy of love in a style so simple, so pure, so raw too, that you are marked by it for ever.” She was identified with the French literary movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s, Le Nouveau Roman (The New Novel), characterized by:

“…an austere narrative tone which often eschews metaphor and simile in favor of precise physical descriptions, a heightened sense of ambiguity with regards to point of view, radical disjunctions of time and space, and self-reflexive commentary on the processes of literary composition.”

Her screenplay for 1959’s Hiroshima Mon Amour, so evident through the voice-overs, is fascinating and unforgettable. The film moves back and forth between the heroine’s life during World War II in France and 14 years later during a brief stay in Japan. Cinematic montage juxtaposes Nevers and Hiroshima, two small river-bordering cities that were and are nondescript relative to their respective countries’ capitals and other major metropolises.

Last year the centathlete toured western Burgundy with his future fiancée, at one point embarking on a canoe trip from Nevers down the Loire, ending at its confluence with the Allier. A persistent, robust headwind tripled the envisioned effort, doubled the allocated time, and halved the pleasure. On the return ride the van was shared with a group of local schoolchildren (maybe third-graders) who had also been paddling but experienced only fun, in light of their collective good humor. Over and over they yelped “Bus!” while giggling, indicating that they had given it a new meaning only they shared. Bus! Bus!

The centathlete also biked around the area, but not as demonstrably care-free as the character of She in Hiroshima Mon Amour first biked through Nevers, nor anywhere near as rigorously as She did ultimately, riding all the way to Paris (161 miles!) in two days (the terrain is flat, as seen by train, but still…).

Duras wrote and directed many other movies in addition to her novels, developing a multimedia perspective that Jean Rhys, 24 years her elder, never uploaded. If we take this sensibility—the emphasis on sensory perception; the flat, philosophizing commentary—and subtract a novelist’s skill and a confessor’s anguish, we get… the eye and voice of Terence Malick, the American director/screenwriter.

Before the 2005 release of Malick’s The New World, Hwanhee Lee wrote that the director’s first three films:

“…are concerned with bringing cinema back to its humble origins, of presenting unmediated and uninterpreted reality, before its natures have split into different theoretical positions and approaches, such as the dichotomy between realism and expressionism, fiction and documentary, and the division of cinema into various genres and movements. Rather than merely paying homage to silent cinema, it appears to be a certain fundamental or primitive condition of cinema that he seeks, for most silent films are neither primitive, unmediated, nor uninterpreted presentations of reality.”

Interesting, to say the least, that Lee failed to mention Alain Resnais, the director of Hiroshima Mon Amour, as an obvious influence on Malick…

Q'Orianka Kilcher, another exquisitely photogenic nymphet, and 14 when she was cast as Pocahontas in The New World, provided a more accessible, direct assessment of Malick, who hasn’t given an interview in more than 30 years:

“He was a really wonderful director. He allowed all the actors to fully immerse themselves in their characters and to bring the characters to life in their own way. He was a very spirit-of-the-moment kind of director. If he saw the wind blowing in the grass a certain way, he suddenly started filming it…We stayed pretty close to the script except that almost all the dialogue was cut out…”

Like Duras and Rhys, Malick moved to France as an adult. There must have been something in le vin that spawned their mutually “elliptical” and “obscure” style.

Sipping a Pouilly Fumé (produced a leisurely bike-ride beside the Loire north of Nevers), we’re not surprised to recognize that The New World, like Wide Sargasso Sea, portrays a young girl’s coming of age against a combative backdrop of colonialism, or that Pocahontas, like Annette Cosway (Rhys’s name for Brontё’s Bertha Mason), is fatefully taken to England by her older husband by boat…

But not by bike of course. And not by…Bus!