Dies the Swan

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.

Tennyson, "Tithonous"


Reading fiction – good fiction - often brings up subjects that have topical reference to one’s day to day life. I was in the middle of reading Christopher Isherwood’s novel A Single Man when the riots began in Minneapolis four days ago. I came across the following passage, which has considerable relevance to the present situation.  

A Single Man centers on a day in the life – a Friday - of George Falconer in December 1962. George resembles Isherwood in too many ways for it to be unintentional: he is an Englishman in his late 50s who has lived in California since the war. He teaches English at a small state university. And he is gay, though, unlike Isherwood, he does what he can to conceal it from his neighbours and colleagues.  

George wakes and eventually makes his way down the freeway to the college. He arrives at a classroom where his students are to be quizzed on the subject of Aldous Huxley’s novel After Many a Summer. After a general discussion, George gets to the question, “What is the novel about?” 

And  now  comes  a  question  George  has  been  expecting.  It  is  asked,  of  course,  by  Myron Hirsch,  that  indefatigable  heckler  of  the  goyim.  "Sir,  here  on  page  seventy-nine,  Mr. Propter  says  the  stupidest  text  in  the  Bible  is  'they  hated  me  without  a  cause.'  Does  he mean  by  that  the  Nazis  were  right  to  hate  the  Jews?  Is  Huxley  anti-Semitic?"  

George  draws  a  long  breath.  "No,"  he  answers  mildly. And  then,  after  a  pause  of  expectant  silence—the  class  is  rather  thrilled  by  Myron's bluntness—he  repeats,  loudly  and  severely,  "No—Mr.  Huxley  is  not  anti-Semitic.  The Nazis  were  not  right  to  hate  the  Jews.  But  their  hating  the  Jews  was  not  without  a  cause. No  one  ever  hates  without  a  cause....  

"Look—let's  leave  the  Jews  out  of  this,  shall  we?  Whatever  attitude  you  take,  it's impossible  to  discuss  Jews  objectively  nowadays.  It  probably  won't  be  possible  for  the next  twenty  years.  So  let's  think  about  this  in  terms  of  some  other  minority,  any  one  you like,  but  a  small  one—one  that  isn't  organized  and  doesn't  have  any  committees  to  defend it..  .  ."  

George  looks  at  Wally  Bryant  with  a  deep  shining  look  that  says,  I  am  with  you,  little minority-sister.  Wally  is  plump  and  sallow-faced,  and  the  care  he  takes  to  comb  his  wavy hair  and  keep  his  nails  filed  and  polished  and  his  eyebrows  discreetly  plucked  only  makes him  that  much  less  appetizing.  Obviously  he  has  understood  George's  look.  He  is embarrassed.  Never  mind!  George  is  going  to  teach  him  a  lesson  now  that  he'll  never forget.  Is  going  to  turn  Wally's  eyes  into  his  timid  soul.  Is  going  to  give  him  courage  to throw  away  his  nail  file  and  face  the  truth  of  his  life....
 
"Now,  for  example,  people  with  freckles  aren't  thought  of  as  a  minority  by  the  nonfreckled.  They  aren't  a  minority  in  the  sense  we're  talking  about.  And  why  aren't  they? Because  a  minority  is  only  thought  of  as  a  minority  when  it  constitutes  some  kind  of  a threat  to  the  majority,  real  or  imaginary.  And  no  threat  is  ever  quite  imaginary.  Anyone here  disagree  with  that?  If  you  do,  just  ask  yourself,  What  would  this  particular  minority do  if  it  suddenly  became  the  majority  overnight?  You  see  what  I  mean?  Well,  if  you don't—think  it  over! 
 
"All  right.  Now  along  come  the  liberals—including  everybody  in  this  room,  I  trust—and they  say,  'Minorities  are  just  people,  like  us.'  Sure,  minorities  are  people—people,  not angels.  Sure,  they're  like  us—but  not  exactly  like  us;  that's  the  all-too-familiar  state  of liberal  hysteria  in  which  you  begin  to  kid  yourself  you  honestly  cannot  see  any  difference between  a  Negro  and  a  Swede.  .  .  ."  (Why,  oh  why  daren't  George  say  "between  Estelle Oxford  and  Buddy  Sorensen"?  Maybe,  if  he  did  dare,  there  would  be  a  great  atomic  blast of  laughter,  and  everybody  would  embrace,  and  the  kingdom  of  heaven  would  begin, right  here  in  classroom.  But  then  again,  maybe  it  wouldn't.) 
 
"So,  let's  face  it,  minorities  are  people  who  probably  look  and  act  and  think  differently from  us  and  have  faults  we  don't  have.  We  may  dislike  the  way  they  look  and  act,  and  we may hate  their  faults.  And  it's  better  if  we  admit  to  disliking  and  hating  them  than  if  we try  to  smear  our  feelings  over  with  pseudo-liberal  sentimentality.  If  we're  frank  about  our feelings,  we  have  a  safety  valve;  and  if  we  have  a  safety  valve,  we're  actually  less  likely to  start  persecuting.  I  know  that  theory  is  unfashionable  nowadays.  We  all  keep  trying  to believe  that  if  we  ignore  something  long  enough  it'll  just  vanish.... 
 
"Where  was  I?  Oh  yes.  Well,  now,  suppose  this  minority  does  get  persecuted,  never mind  why—political,  economic,  psychological  reasons.  There  always  is  a  reason,  no matter  how  wrong  it  is—that's  my  point.  And,  of  course,  persecution  itself  is  always wrong;  I'm  sure  we  all  agree  there.  But  the  worst  of  it  is,  we  now  run  into  another  liberal heresy.  Because  the  persecuting  majority  is  vile,  says  the  liberal,  therefore  the  persecuted minority  must  be  stainlessly  pure.  Can't  you  see  what  nonsense  that  is?  What's  to  prevent the  bad  from  being  persecuted  by  the  worse?  Did  all  the  Christian  victims  in  the  arena have  to  be  saints? 
 
"And  I'll  tell  you  something  else.  A  minority  has  its  own  kind  of  aggression.  It  absolutely dares  the  majority  to  attack  it.  It  hates  the  majority—not  without  a  cause,  I  grant  you.  It even  hates  the  other  minorities,  because  all  minorities  are  in  competition:  each  one proclaims  that  its  sufferings  are  the  worst  and  its  wrongs  are  the  blackest.  And  the  more they  all  hate,  and  the  more  they're  all  persecuted,  the  nastier  they  become!  Do  you  think  it makes  people  nasty  to  be  loved?  You  know  it  doesn't!  Then  why  should  it  make  them nice  to  be  loathed?  While  you're  being  persecuted,  you  hate  what's  happening  to  You, you  hate  the  people  who  are  making  it  happen;  you're  in  a  world  of  hate.  Why,  you wouldn't  recognize  love  if  you  met  it!  You'd  suspect  love!  You'd  think  there  was something  behind  it—some  motive—some  trick…"

Death and the Artist

Growing up in the 1960s, I went to the movies on weekends. My father, who had been a serious and successful poker player in his youth, still managed to satisfy his gambling itch by playing bingo every Sunday after church. He would drop my brother and I off at a movie theater and go to the NCO Club on Fort Jackson, South Carolina and play bingo all afternoon. 

One Sunday afternoon I saw a movie called The Art of Love.(1) I don’t know why, but the movie, which wasn’t very good, has stuck with me all these years later so that I remember one of its stars, Dick Van Dyke, and its plot, that involved an artist (a painter) in a scheme with his friend, James Garner, in which he faked his own death. The publicity from his death somehow convinces people that he was a great artist and the value of his paintings increases significantly. 

Unfortunately, the artist’s friend gets greedy and demands that he produce more paintings, even though he’s supposed to be dead. Eventually, the scheme is exposed and the artist announces to the world that he’s been alive all the while, etc.

The movie’s plot device is the curious notion that a dead artist’s work is more valuable than a living artist’s, especially if the artist dies tragically, still in his prime. If the artist commits suicide, so much the better. I was reminded of all this when I saw a clip recently from a Dr. Who episode that was aired in 2010. In the episode, Dr. Who brings Vincent van Gogh back to life and transports him to the present. He takes him, rather cruelly I thought, to an art gallery where his paintings are proudly hung beside those of the great masters, like Monet, Renoir and Degas. The brief clip then shows Vincent getting very emotional seeing his paintings being admired by everyone. But his reaction wasn’t the one I expected. Instead of becoming upset that all the effusive admiration being shown to his work has come too late, that he only sold one painting when he was alive and that he was treated for depression and he eventually committed suicide, he goes around the gallery tearfully thanking everyone, shedding tears of joy. Not exactly how the real Van Gogh would’ve reacted. Wouldn’t he have been justified in being extremely resentful – not just about the popularity of his work and how everyone seems to be familiar with his sad life story, but about the ridiculous value being placed on his paintings, how every so many months a new record is broken at an auction somewhere of one of his paintings going for tens of millions of dollars? 

By now everyone should be familiar with the story of Yasuo Goto, a Japanese insurance magnate who, In 1987, bought Van Gogh's painting “Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers" (1888) for $39 million. It was then the highest sum paid for a work of art. On his death in 2007, Goto left instructions in his will that the canvas would be cremated along with his body. I suppose we should be thankful that whomever saved it from the flames probably did so not because of its beauty but because of its obvious resale value?

Worse than this are the occasional art thefts that take place in which thieves break into art galleries and strategically steal certain particularly valuable paintings that thereafter vanish from public view for a number of years or for generations until they turn up again in sometimes unlikely places. Where do the paintings that are stolen go? It’s hard not to imagine them hanging in a secret location, probably in a hidden room in a wealthy person’s palatial home. Perhaps they hang on a wall opposite this rich person’s private toilet where he or she sits alone and basks not only in the beauty of the artist’s work but in their own extravagant and obscene wealth. 

But what I also couldn’t quite understand from the Dr. Who clip was how moved the show’s fans were by Van Gogh’s utterly unconvincing emotional response in the modern art gallery at the display of his canvases – canvases that were preserved by Van Gogh’s loving brother Theo after Vincent committed suicide. My reaction to the scene was “where were they when he needed them?” Where were all those erstwhile art lovers when Vincent needed them in 1890 when he died, alone and forgotten at the age of 37? When Barbara Walters told Robert Redford after The Way We Were was released that he could have any woman he wanted, he said "Where were they when I needed them?"

Recently, I also chanced upon a passage from Woody Allen’s memoir, Apropos of Nothing that addresses this problem – the problem of the survival of the artist and, separately, of the artist’s work:

The illusion you’re doing something to help yourself helps you. You somehow feel a little better, a little less despondent. You pin your hopes on a Godot who never comes, but the thought he might show up with answers helps you get through the enveloping nightmare. Like religion, where the illusion gets one through. And being in the arts, I envy those people who derive solace from the belief that your doing something to help yourself helps others. The work created will live on and be much discussed and somehow, like the Catholic with his afterlife, so the artist’s “legacy” will make him immortal. The catch here is that all the people discussing the legacy and how great the artist’s work is are alive and are ordering pastrami, and the artist is somewhere in an urn or underground in Queens. All the people standing over Shakespeare’s grave and singing his praises means a big goose egg to the Bard, and a day will come—a far-off day, but be sure it definitely is coming—when all Shakespeare’s plays, for all their brilliant plots and hoity-toity iambic pentameter, and every dot of Seurat’s will be gone along with each atom in the universe. In fact, the universe will be gone and there will be no place to have your hat blocked. After all, we are an accident of physics. And an awkward accident at that. Not the product of intelligent design but, if anything, the work of a crass bungler.

(1) The Art of Love, released in 1965, starring Dick Van Dyke, James Garner, Elke Sommer and Angie Dickinson. The script was written by Carl Reiner, from a story by Richard Alan Simmons and William Sackheim. Interestingly, Norman Jewison later commented that the movie flopped because audiences weren’t convinced that an artist's death guarantees a huge increase in the sales value of his paintings.

Enchanted Hunters*

It is once again my birthday – my thirteenth on this blog, my sixty-second on this earth. This day is also significant to the Social Security Administration, since I chose the option to retire at 62, instead of waiting until January 2025, my “full retirement” age. Since the amount of money I am allotted is based on my projected life-expectancy, and that it will – presumably – not change whether I retire today or when I’m 66 years and 8 months old, what the hell am I waiting for? Especially since decisive power in the U.S. government is in the hands of Republicans who clearly would like nothing better than to dismantle every social welfare program, including social security, on their long hard road to an America in which only the strong, young and white survive. My retirement benefits might no longer be available in January 2025.

What better way to mark this occasion than by recording a few of my random thoughts on a great English-language novel I finished just last night? The novel happens to be Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. In order to fully enjoy the novel, however, you will have to avoid the many truckloads of horseshit that it has inspired in lieu of “criticism.” It is a love story that is both harrowing and heartbreaking.

The novel is narrated by a man assuming the name Humbert Humbert and it proves, as if it needed to be proved, that a person madly in love is perhaps the most unreliable of narrators. Not even halfway through the novel most of its action has already taken place. Then Humbert and his step-daughter Dolores, known to him rapturously as Lolita, embark on a mad cross-country journey all the way around America, from Ramsdale, a small New England town, southward to the Gulf of Mexico, then all the way across mountains and deserts to California beaches. And after a pause in which Humbert hires a tennis coach for Lolita and considers slipping into Mexico, they travel up the coast, turn east and drive all the way back to a town close to Ramsdale called Beardsley where Humbert enrolls her in an exclusive girls school. All along the way, Nabokov gives the reader a vivid portrait of what V. S. Pritchett called “the highway and motel civilization of the United States.”

As bad as Humbert is, if you cannot bring yourself to forgive him you are committing a crime worse than he did. Near the end of the book he presents to us what he assesses is the magnitude of his crime, which was to deprive Dolores, by then 17 and pregnant with Richard Schiller’s baby, of her childhood. In the last chapter of the book, after he has given Clare Quilty the only send-off he deserved, and got himself in a car chase, driving slowly down the wrong side of the road and been captured, he offers the reader one more impression:

One day, soon after her disappearance, an attack of abominable nausea forced me to pull up on the ghost of an old mountain road that now accompanied, now traversed a brand new highway, with its population of asters bathing in the detached warmth of a pale-blue afternoon in late summer. After coughing myself inside out, I rested a while on a boulder, and then, thinking the sweet air might do me good, walked a little way toward a low stone parapet on the precipice side of the highway. Small grasshoppers spurted out of the withered roadside weeds. A very light cloud was opening its arms and moving toward a slightly more substantial one belonging to another, more sluggish, heavenlogged system. As I approached the friendly abyss, I grew aware of a melodious unity of sounds rising like vapor from a small mining town that lay at my feet, in a fold of the valley. One could make out the geometry of the streets between blocks of red and gray roofs, and green puffs of trees, and a serpentine stream, and the rich, ore-like glitter of the city dump, and beyond the town, roads crisscrossing the crazy quilt of dark and pale fields, and behind it all, great timbered mountains. But even brighter than those quietly rejoicing colors – for there are colors and shades that seem to enjoy themselves in good company – both brighter and dreamier to the ear than they were to the eye, was that vapory vibration of accumulated sounds that never ceased for a moment, as it rose to the lip of granite where I stood wiping my foul mouth. And soon I realized that all these sounds were of one nature, that no other sounds but these came from the streets of the transparent town, with the women at home and the men away. Reader! What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic – one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.

But there is a coincidence in the novel that delighted me. Humbert last sees Lolita living in a tenement in Coalmont with her husband, a decent young yokel named Richard (“Dick”) Schiller:

… there she was (my Lolita!), hopelessly worn at seventeen, with that baby, dreaming already in her of becoming a big shot and retiring around 2020 A.D.

Just as I am retiring today. But the coincidence is, alas, too neat to stand up to scrutiny. In the last paragraph of the novel Humbert expresses his wish that Lolita enjoys a long life and that her child is a boy. As a prologue to Humbert’s story, a psycho-pathologist by the name of John Ray, Jr. matter-of-factly informs the reader that Humbert “died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start”, and that “Mrs. ‘Richard F. Schiller’ died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest.”

So, it turned out, Humbert’s Lolita died only one week before her 18th birthday.


* The Enchanted Hunters was the name of the hotel where Nabokov staged Humbert and Lolita's first tryst.

Unpleasantville

As I started to read Richard Yates’s novel Revolutionary Road last week, I found that, against my will, I couldn’t get the pictures from the 2008 Sam Mendes film out of my head. I expressed my disappointment about the film in 2009. So much of it was very fine, especially the pictures themselves, photographed by the incomparable Roger Deakins. Frank and April Wheeler were played by Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. I thought little of DiCaprio’s performance as Frank. Besides being his usual cute but unprepossessing self, his inadequacy as a male lead was embarrassingly obvious. Why, for example, does he reveal to us his hairless chest more than once? (When, true to the period, he should’ve been wearing an undershirt.) Kate Winslet, however, is transfixing, making the absolute most of the character of April. But Winslet, I now think, made the character seem more interesting and deserving of a better life than she is in the novel.

I saw the film again recently and it seemed worse than I remembered it – almost as bad as the Laurel Players production of The Petrified Forest. The script, by Justin Hathe, lacks the rhythm and proportion of the novel. For instance, he makes the Wheeler’s house on Revolutionary Road far too large, the lawn turned into a magnificent green football field, Frank’s old station car is a giant whitewall-tire Chevrolet. The Campbell’s house, from which they could barely see the Wheelers’ over the treetops, is practically just over the hedge, their backyards abutting on each other. Everything is a great deal glossier, more expansive and ritzier than in the novel. Which makes it even harder to understand all the “hopeless emptiness”. (No two words ring more hollow than these when Leo DiCaprio enunciates them.) And, worst of all, there’s Leo himself. Frank turns 30 in the novel but Leo never looks a day over 16. What I wrote eleven years ago, when I reviewed the film, “He has struggled so valiantly, hasn't he, to convince us these past ten years that he can play a man. He is getting there” holds up. Now pushing 50, DiCaprio is still getting there. 

Some of the peripheral characters are beautifully observed, like Shep Campbell (David Harbour), Jack Ordway (Dylan Baker), Helen Givings (Kathy Bates) and especially John Givings (Michael Shannon), who is confined to a mental ward but is introduced to the Wheelers by his well-meaning mother. His utter lack of tactfulness, blurting out whatever happens to pop into his head, turns him into a kind of dramatic catalyst in the lives of Frank and April. 

But as I eased into the novel and the transparency of Yates’s prose, that provides such a vivid image of Frank and April’s lives, Leo and Kate’s faces were replaced with rather more detailed and more delineated features. “The year was 1955 and the place was a part of western Connecticut where three swollen villages had lately been merged by a wide and clamorous highway called Route Twelve.” The people in the novel all seem to be living some American nightmare, pursuing some fantasy vision of the life they should be living, the life they ought to have, and in some fantasy house and fantasy neighborhood – always slightly more upscale than the one they settled for. And the fictional housing development down Revolutionary Road seemed to be the one that had been perfectly realized, hadn’t it, in that otherwise patronizing 1998 film Pleasantville, whose only fatal flaw, “the falsity overarching the film,” according to Stanley Kauffmann, was “the assumption that the 1950s were actually as they were represented in 1950s TV.” Revolutionary Road very quickly dispels any such assumption. It explores, in fact, just about everything that 1950s TV left out.(1)

Christopher Hitchens pronounced the novel “dated,” because of its setting in, and its scathing portrait of, the suburbs. What dates it far more damagingly is Frank’s interference in what would now be called April’s “reproductive rights.” He actually does it twice, the first time before the action of the story begins. April has her first child, Jennifer, a few years earlier than planned, which entraps her. She makes the mistake of telling Frank that a friend has informed her of a surefire homemade abortion method (abortion wasn’t legal in New York until 1970). Frank angrily forbids her to go through with it. In the film, Frank is initially neutral, to April’s intention to go through with the termination of a third pregnancy, but admits he is relieved when April’s pregnancy passes its 12th week – the point of no return. Yates is also guilty of writing in a sexist third person that compartmentalizes women’s bodies and casually comments on the physical imperfections of his female characters but never the males’. April is criticised by both Frank and Shep for being “too heavy across the beam.”

Then there’s the drinking. You will find the word wine on three occasions in the novel, beer twelve times, martini seven, whiskey eleven and sherry, believe it or not, twelve times. The conspicuous consumption of sherry is, of course, a measure of the pretentiousness of Yates’s characters. Trying perhaps too hard to be true to the period, there was so much smoking in the film that they put a disclaimer in the end credits that the filmmakers were in no way approving of the use of tobacco products. 

But when the novel wound down to its climax and its aftermath (the death of April Wheeler), I caught myself lingering in the last pages, deliberately delaying the novel’s closing. Yates had managed to bring a world to life that, while not exactly inviting, and too close for comfort to the truth, was the more real for being lived in.


(1) Surely the emblematic moment in Pleasantville is when the 50s family’s father, George Parker (splendidly played by William H. Macy) comes home and announces, like always, “I’m home!” and just stands there when no one responds, even going into the darkened kitchen and repeating the announcement. The perplexed look on his face is priceless.