A Little Reading

On March 1st, with the first quarantine of this terrible year looming, I got back in the habit of reading every day. I managed to read thirty works since then, some short, some lengthy. I read slowly - by design. I wrote about many of them on this blog throughout the year. Here is my reading list. 

March

Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West

Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

Coming Up for Air by George Orwell

The Years by Virginia Woolf

April

Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter

Billy Budd by Herman Melville

Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh

“The Dead” by James Joyce

May

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Love Among the Chickens by P. G. Wodehouse

A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood

June

The Wheels of Chance by H. G. Wells

A Death in the Family by James Agee

July

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

August

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

September

11/22/63 by Stephen King

October

Bullet Park by John Cheever

The Human Stain by Philip Roth

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann

Joy in the Morning by P. G. Wodehouse

November

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold by John Le Carré

“For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” by J. D. Salinger

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

December

The Trial by Franz Kafka

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

Liberality

[A Christmas Carol, which isn't quite done with me, is such a short, concentrated work that it contains many "significant" passages. The following scene occurs early in the book in Ebenezer Scrooge's office on Christmas Eve morning. It gives the reader a clear attestation to Scrooge's attitude towards the poor and what he thinks should be done with them. He bristles at the use of the word "liberality" by one of the men seeking a charitable donation from him, and claims to have no knowledge of the condition of the poor. Yet, as he will discover, his life is tied directly to the lives of everyone else in the world.] 

They were portly gentlemen, pleasant to behold, and now stood, with their hats off, in Scrooge’s office. They had books and papers in their hands, and bowed to him.

“Scrooge and Marley’s, I believe,” said one of the gentlemen, referring to his list. “Have I the pleasure of addressing Mr. Scrooge, or Mr. Marley?”

“Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years,” Scrooge replied. “He died seven years ago, this very night.”

“We have no doubt his liberality is well represented by his surviving partner,” said the gentleman, presenting his credentials.

It certainly was; for they had been two kindred spirits. At the ominous word “liberality,” Scrooge frowned, and shook his head, and handed the credentials back.

“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the gentleman, taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”

“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.

“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”

“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”

“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.

“Both very busy, sir.”

“Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.”

“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”

“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.

“You wish to be anonymous?”

“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned—they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.”

“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”

“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides—excuse me—I don’t know that.”

“But you might know it,” observed the gentleman.

“It’s not my business,” Scrooge returned. “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!”

Seeing clearly that it would be useless to pursue their point, the gentlemen withdrew. Scrooge resumed his labours with an improved opinion of himself, and in a more facetious temper than was usual with him.

Scrooge

Twixtmas time is here
Weariness and drear
Rest for all
That adults call
The limbo of the year.
Eggnog in my hair
Wrappings everywhere
O that we
Will never see
Another fruitcake here.

 

Fully enjoying A Christmas Carol involves you in a pact with Charles Dickens: do you accept the possibility that a unsurpassably selfish and heartless miser can, in the space of one night, be transformed into a sweet, lovable philanthropist? Are there two Scrooges? Or does Scrooge suffer from a split personality?

Watching any of the several film versions of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol that are available forces the viewer to enter into the same pact, but with the filmmaker. The story is so familiar and we have seen so many adaptations of it that we can no longer deal with Dickens himself, but with all the actors who have been blessed or cursed to be cast in the role – some good and some bad. In the former category I would place Michael Hordern, who played Scrooge in a BBC adaptation in 1977, and Michael Caine who was the only flesh and blood actor in A Muppet Christmas Carol in 1992. But there have been several that fall into the latter category, from the first Hollywood Scrooge, Reginald Owen, who seemed too tired to work up much of the required nastiness or sweetness in the role. Or Alistair Sim, who is probably the most popular Scrooge, but who, while doing nicely with the cheerful Scrooge, was quite unconvincing as the scowling one.

In his review of Michael Caine’s performance as Scrooge, Stanley Kauffmann wrote in an aside, “(The best, by the way, was the forgotten Sir Seymour Hicks in 1935.)” I watched it on Christmas Eve, and Hicks’s is certainly one of the best performances in the role.

Within days of its publication in 1843, A Christmas Carol was subjected to several stage adaptations for which, because of lax copyright enforcement in England at the time, Dickens was paid nothing. These stage adaptation lasted well into the 20^th Century, and Seymour Hicks (b. 1871) first played Scrooge in one of the most popular productions in 1901. It was so popular that he appeared as Scrooge in the very first film of A Christmas Carol, titled Scrooge, in 1913. So it is only fitting that the first sound film adaptation in 1935 should feature Hicks again in the title role.

But the film itself is an extremely mixed bag. Directed by Henry Edwards, it suffers from one serious shortcoming: it makes no imaginative or technical effort to show us the three spirits who visit Scrooge during his dark night of the soul. But the atmosphere of Victorian London, especially its signs of extreme poverty, is effectively evoked. They get the London fog right,(1) and the details of the street scenes are interesting in themselves. But Jacob Marley is restricted to a not very scarifying voice (the conceit that only Scrooge can see him is used), the Ghost of Christmas past is nothing but a light shining behind Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is a little more than the huge pointing shadow of a finger.

That leaves us with Seymour Hicks, who occupies nearly every scene (except the truly horrible ones in which scavengers divide the spoils of a dead man’s – Scrooge’s – bed linen and nightshirt). Hicks is convincingly grasping and heartless (Dickens devoted two paragraphs to Scrooge’s inhuman coldness and hardness) in the first scenes, moved and terrified by the scenes revealed to him by the spirits and wonderfully, giddily joyful upon his transformation. But the success of Hicks in showing the extreme contrast in the reformed Scrooge from his former self raises a serious problem with the role itself.

Because the easiest way to accept the peculiar mystery of A Christmas Carol is to assume that Ebenezer Scrooge is either a dual personality or two people – Scrooge and his doppelganger, his double.

The pact to which Dickens requires us to agree is the faith that Scrooge can be changed, that he can be reformed from a heartless sociopath into a compassionate, loving human being.

In Stave Three, the Ghost of Christmas Present transports Scrooge to the house of Bob Cratchit and Scrooge sees how Bob’s poor family enjoys their Christmas feast, the goose and plum pudding. And Bob calls out,

“A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!”

Which all the family re-echoed.

“God bless us every one!” said Tiny Tim, the last of all.

He sat very close to his father’s side upon his little stool. Bob held his withered little hand in his, as if he loved the child, and wished to keep him by his side, and dreaded that he might be taken from him.

“Spirit,” said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before, “tell me if Tiny Tim will live.”

“I see a vacant seat,” replied the Ghost, “in the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die.”

“No, no,” said Scrooge. “Oh, no, kind Spirit! say he will be spared.”

“If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none other of my race,” returned the Ghost, “will find him here. What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.

“Man,” said the Ghost, “if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!”

Dickens strenuously avoided direct political commentary. In 1843, the French Revolution was still fresh in people’s minds. Dickens wrote about the event in A Tale of Two Cities, published in 1859. There were rumors that such a revolution could happen in England, especially given the horrific conditions that the Industrial Revolution had inflicted on the poor.

But the most that Dickens would say about the condition of English society was summed up by George Orwell: "His whole 'message' is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent.” Dickens couldn’t see the point of a change in living conditions if there wasn’t also a great change of people’s hearts. That is what he dramatizes in A Christmas Carol – the change of heart that must come to even the worst people among us. Its believability is always subject to question, and nothing reveals the importance of such questioning than every time A Christmas Carol is enacted in the pages of a book, on stage or on a film or television screen.

This year, after my 62^nd Christmas, I’m inclined to disbelieve in Scrooge’s metamorphosis. I won’t deny the beauty of it as a Christmas fable, and the beauty of its great arc in a compassionate work of art. But I can’t say I believe any more that the Scrooge we meet in the first stave of A Christmas Carol, played on film by Seymour Hicks or Alistair Sim or Michael Hordern, can be reconciled in any way with the Scrooge we meet on Christmas morning. It’s a lovely and moving fairy tale, and all the more beautiful for being so impossible.

(1)  “The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature  lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.”

Who Killed Santa Claus?

You wouldn’t know it from the title, but Who Killed Santa Claus? is a lovely little Christmas fable whose artifice is less than perfect, but artful all the same.

Firstly, just as the French traditions of what they call Noël are only vaguely paralleled by our grossly impure American traditions of Christmas, the title of the Christian-Jaque film L’Assasinat du Père Noël isn’t quite what English-speaking filmgoers got when they watched Who Killed Santa Claus? Père Noël (an old artisan played by the great Harry Baur) goes house to house on Christmas Eve to have a drink and lecture children about how well or badly they behaved during the year. Children even stay awake to be in his presence, instead of pretending to be asleep. But the village in the film is a poor one, whose families can barely afford the smallest toy for their children.

Secondly, quite apart from its qualities as a film, Who Killed Santa Claus? is reputedly one of those “encoded” films made during the German Occupation of France (1940-1944) whose subtext has something to do, presumably, with who betrayed France in June 1940. Marcel Carné’s Les Visiteurs du Soir is another, but that film is marvelous without having to bother about any clandestine messages.

Shot in a snowbound village in the French Alps, L’Assasinat du Père Noël places us among people effectively cut off from a world beyond the mountain peaks where, in the abundant exterior shots, even the use of filters that can turn day into night (a technique the French call “la nuit Americain,”), it’s sometimes hard to tell them apart.

The cast includes a few faces familiar to an avid fan of French cinema, like Robert Le Vigan, who played the suicidal painter in Quai des brumes, Fernand Ledoux, who played the cuckolded husband in Renoir’s La Bête humaine, and Bernard Blier appears late in the film as a gendarme.

But the film belongs to Harry Baur, who had become one of the finest and most beloved actors in French cinema by the time he appeared here as the globe maker, Gaspard Cornusse, and he invests the role with an imposing weight. Cornusse is a world traveler who tells everyone who cares to listen stories of all the places, especially China, he has visited. His tales inspire Roland de La Faille, the local Baron, to leave the village and travel to the four corners of the earth searching for something he can neither find nor define. On his return to the village, Roland blames old Cornusse for encouraging him to become a wanderer, and of ruining himself in his wanderings. Cornusse’s daughter, Catherine, seems to live in some kind of trance, like la belle au bois dormant. When she learns that Roland has returned to the village, she awakes and announces that she has always loved him since she first saw him ride down the village Street on a white horse.

But a sinister figure intrudes on the placid town on Christmas Eve when the church’s old priest places a priceless relic of Saint Nicholas, a diamond, on a star above the Nativity scene. The gem is stolen during the Christmas service when Léon Villard, the village schoolmaster (and intellectual ass) stages an explosive demonstration outside the church (on behalf of atheism!). Witnesses say they saw old Cornusse near the Nativity scene, in his full Santa disguise. But when Santa is found dead in the snow, and is unmasked as a (dead) stranger, the clues point at Cornusse himself.

Charles Spaak, whose credits include the classics Le Grand Jeu, La Kermesse Heroique, and La Grande Illusion, adapted the film’s script from the Pierre Very novel. Much of the film’s length is taken up with the dropping of clues to solve the double mystery, but they are – thankfully – inconsequential because so much is going on in the film. But it all ends sweetly with Santa giving a secret gift to a sick child as no one other than Dickens could have brought off successfully.

Christian-Jaque – who later married Martine Carol, Lola Montes herself – proved, with his earlier film Les Disparus de Saint-Agil, to be one of those filmmakers who know how to direct children, and he does beautifully again here. Armand Thirard’s photography, which included working in what must have been difficult conditions high in the Alps where snow is piled three feet deep on rooftops and paths through the snow are constantly having to be cleared, provides beautiful shadow effects on the snow. Watching Cornusse in his Santa costume struggle from house to house – and drink to drink – is entertaining in itself.

L’Assasinat du Père Noël is an altogether surprising, but strange film. It was restored by Pathe in 2015 and its rediscovery is another droll chapter of the process of film restoration that will perhaps never end. It originally premiered in Paris on October 16, 1941. It was the first film produced by the German-owned Continental Films. Shortly thereafter, Harry Baur was accused by the collaborationist newspaper Je suis partout of being a Jew. According to Roberto Chiesi in his tribute to Baur, “[he] fended for himself and went to Germany to shoot a film, but in May of 1942 he was arrested and tortured for four months by the Gestapo. The experience reduced him to a shadow of his former self, and he died on April 8, 1943.”(1)

Whatever coded messages are hidden in L’Assasinat du Père Noël will have to wait for scholars to decode. For now, it is well worth the wait to see at Christmas.

 

(1) The tribute is located here.

The Butcher: Addendum

Before I published “The Butcher” on this blog in September, in which I related what I thought was a dimly remembered episode of Oprah, I did some digging. I searched for the specific Oprah episode, which I believed was aired about fifteen years ago. I searched for the specific person who related her story on the episode. All I remembered about her was what happened to her. In my September post I described what happened to the best of my recollection.

The episode that I watched featured a woman who had been involved in a contested divorce that she had won. Her ex-husband was a gynecologist (I’m not sure if that was how they met). He was also her gynecologist, and despite having beaten him in their divorce case, she continued to seek his gynecological services.

On her last visit to his office, he performed a minor procedure on her that required a local anesthesia. When he was finished, he gave her a prescription for painkillers, warning her that she might experience a little discomfort once the anesthesia wore off.

Later, when the woman started to experience bleeding and severe pain, she went to an ER where a doctor examined her and was astonished to discover that her ex had caused such extensive damage – with a scalpel – to her uterus that much of it was irreparable. By the time she appeared on the Oprah show, she was suffering continuous pain that required her taking prescription painkillers, and that it would likely be with her for many more years. And she could never again bear a child.

So much for memory. Over the years the story that I remembered had became somewhat garbled. A few days ago I happened on the actual story. The first thing that struck me was that it hadn’t happened about fifteen years ago, but more than twice as many years. Here is how the AP reported the story:

Debbie Crandall-Millar's husband, a gynecologist, sewed her vagina shut.

Ex-Husband, Associate Ordered to Pay $6 Million for Abusive Sex Surgery

OCT. 24, 1987 | 12 AM

FROM THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SAN LUIS OBISPO — A gynecologist accused of deliberately sewing shut his wife’s vagina to punish her for having an affair and his associate have been ordered to pay the woman $6 million.

The former Debbie Crandall-Millar, 35, on Thursday was awarded $1 million for pain and suffering and $5 million in punitive damages by an 11-woman, one-man jury after four days of deliberations. She has since remarried and lives in Fresno.

Dr. Glenn C. Millar, 65, of San Luis Obispo declined comment on the verdict. Millar and Dr. Robert W. Tetatreau, who assisted in the 1984 operation, both testified during the civil trial that any mistakes they made were not intentional.

Crandall-Millar testified that her then-husband told her after the surgery, “I’ve fixed it so you’ll never screw around on me again.” Her attorney, David Sabih of Monterey, said his client has undergone reconstructive surgery. “She can have sex, but it hurts her a lot,” he said.

Having Marital Problems

Crandall-Millar told the jury that she and her former husband were having marital problems when she entered the Sierra Vista Medical Center for a hysterectomy and that he suspected her of seeing another man. In fact, Sabih said, Crandall-Millar was having an affair at the time and that may have limited the jury award.

The jury found Millar 60% responsible and Tetatreau 40% responsible for the incident. The medical center was also ruled negligent but not responsible for the injury. Millar was ordered to pay the punitive damages and 60% of the injury award.

Millar is still practicing medicine, but a state review board suspended Tetatreau’s medical license pending a review and he is now practicing in Colorado, Sabih said. He said no criminal charges were pressed.

I am not aware that the former Mrs. Millar actually appeared on the Oprah Show. It may have been some other talk show, like Sally Jesse Raphael. It might even have been Donahue. However I first heard about the story, it stuck in my memory.

As for my comparing the story to what Donald Trump is doing to the country, now that the election is over and he lost, it’s even more effective as a metaphor. The brazen vindictiveness and unexampled cruelty of Trump’s acts of sabotage, intended to leave the country in as precarious a place as possible upon Joe Biden’s swearing-in on January 20, with probably more than 300,000 dead of Covid-19 (most of whom he is personally responsible for), is the closest thing to that doctor telling his estranged wife, “I’ve fixed it so you’ll never screw around on me again.” Millar lost the court case but continued to practice medicine. Trump will doubtless continue to make and squander his fortunes, but never again in a position of trust at the expense of a country he never deserved.

To Each His Own

Let’s face it – gangsters are everywhere. Gangsterism may have flourished in Prohibition-era America (1920-1933) and Hollywood capitalized on it with numerous movies on the subject. But there are effective gangster movies made everywhere by now: in Britain, France, Japan, China, Mexico, Australia, etc.

The origins of American crime syndicates can be traced to Italy, specifically to Sicily, and since the Italian film industry is one of the oldest and most vital in the world, it’s no wonder that some of the most authentic gangster films should originate in Rome. 

Francis Ford Coppola, attempting to rehabilitate the reputation of the third part of The Godfather, has released a refurbished version of the film titled The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone. With nothing left to do for the past two decades but tweak his lopsided legacy, with a Redux of Apocalypse Now in 2001 that only muddied the paddy water, and, last year, the resuscitation of The Cotton Club, supposedly a tribute to a legendary Harlem jazz club that was sunk by a love story between two white performers, it was inevitable that he should turn to his most famous films. 

I have to admit that I never saw The Godfather Part III, despite repeated opportunities. I simply had no desire to sit through the terminal installment of a vastly overrated trilogy. I think Marlon Brando’s performance as the titular Don was horrible, and Al Pacino was wasted in the role of Michael Corleone. As for all the rest – I have expressed my hope that Italian-Americans will some day attempt to rehabilitate the image of them on American movie and TV screens as gangsters.

The Godfather was based on a novel by the Italian-American writer named Mario Puzo. One of the most offensive inferences that critics have drawn from his work and from the films it inspired is that it is somehow a metaphor of American life. Puzo may have domesticated the mob, by drawing us into their family squabbles, but he did it at the expense of his own people. In the films, I never mistook the hyenas who go about slaughtering one another in the name of some preposterous code of honor for human beings. (1)

The Godfather(s) featured some scenes shot on location in Sicily that would otherwise have seemed gratuitous if they weren’t so resplendent. Gordon Willis, Coppola’s cinematographer, made the most of the chosen locations around Messina, in the northeast of the island. Leonard Sciascia was born in Racalmuto in the southwest. He used Sicily as the setting for his novel A Ciascuni il Suo, translated as To Each His Own. (2) In his introduction to the New York Review edition of the novel, W. S. Di Piero wrote:

Society held hostage to a suffocating ethos of secrecy, silence, and misdirection; criminality as an expression of maniacal self-containment; evil as an all-powerful but apparently authorless entity (the mafia, Fascism, the Red Brigades); the monstrous perversions of loyalty, love, and honor sponsored by the mentality that is  mafia—these are the real subjects of Sciascia’s best novels.

Five years after the book’s publication in Italy, Elio Petri and Ugo Pirro wrote a film script “loosely based” (liberamente ispirata) on the novel, and Petri directed the superb film. The political undercurrents that Sciascia expected every Italian to know well are expressed in the film in terms of the inter-personal relations of the lead characters: pharmacist Arturo Manno (Luigi Pistilli) who has been receiving letters telling him his death is imminent, Dr. Roscio (Franco Tranchina) who is murdered with him while shooting pigeons, lawyer Rosello (Gabriele Ferzetti), Professor Paolo Laurana (Gian Maria Volonté), who conducts his own investigation of the murders, and Luisa Roscio (Irene Pappas), wife of the murdered doctor and cousin of Rosello, with whom Paolo is in love. 

The film opens with a spectacular aerial shot approaching the northern Sicilian city of Cefalù which is the center of the film’s action. Luigi Kuveiller’s camerawork is fluid and sharp. Nothing is diffused or deliberately atmospheric – he shows us a place inhabited by characters who belong there. Gian Maria Volonté plays Professor Laurana, a role quite different from those that made him an international star. He is a neurotic intellectual, the type who plays with fire without knowing that fire is hot. He is utterly ignorant of the facts of life in his town which everyone else takes for granted. He figures out why the pharmacist and the doctor were murdered and even who is responsible, but he goes about his sleuthing sloppily, and forgets the cardinal rule when it comes to life in his neck of Sicily: trust no one. Gabriele Ferzetti as Rosello is once again the debonair monster, only this time we don’t find out until it’s too late. And Irene Pappas, her Greekness reminding us that the Greeks colonized Sicily, demonstrates how completely love can blind a man. She is not just in league with Rosello, but they’ve been in love since they were children but, since they’re cousins, the Church wouldn’t allow them to marry. The last scene is a masterpiece of brutal irony, underpinned by one character’s appraisal of the whole dismal affair: “Hanno fatto un vero capolavoro.” They pulled off a real masterpiece.

The alternate title We Still Kill the Old Way comes from a line delivered in the film. After a car is blown up with a clumsily planted bomb, a communist friend of Professor Laurana (played by the marvelous Leopoldo Trieste) says to him, “It’s like Chicago around here!” And Laurana replies, “But in my town, my honorable friend, they still kill the traditional way.” The “old way” being the traditional murder with impunity that became a trademark of the Mafia that is as much a statement in itself to everyone still paying attention. Petri’s film was saddled with this stupid title for its American release doubtless to attract fans of the kind of violence glorified by The Godfather. Fortunately, they do not kill the same way in Petri’s film. Murder is represented like it’s supposed to be: as an obscenity on civilized society. But only because the people in Petri’s film are sufficiently realized as human – sufficiently for us to care about what becomes of them. So there are no displays of spattering blood. Just the strange, horrible way real people react to being murdered. 

(1)Paramount has announced interest in a Godfather Part IV, “if the story is right.”

(2)The title is literally equivalent to To Each His Own, but a British title, Each To His Deserts, comes closer to Sciascia’s meaning.