The Window Over the Way

Running over to the window, the first thing he saw opposite was the glow of a cigarette, then a rolled-up shirt-sleeve, a forearm resting on the window-sill, a man’s head, and lastly the woman by his side who had let her hair down over her shoulders. The moonlight filtered into their room, and behind them Adil Bey could just make out a white rectangle which must be their bed. “They must be able to see me too,” he mused. “They can’t help it.” 

One of the characteristics of fiction writers that unfailingly attracts attention is the volume of work they produce. Graham Greene habitually produced five hundred words a day. Jack London wrote one thousand a day, and for Anthony Trollope it was two thousand. But, ultimately, what does the sheer amount of words any given writer produces matter? Considering that they managed to produce creditable prose is the only thing that matters. 

Then there was Georges Simenon. He wrote more than two hundred books under his own name and almost as many under pseudonyms. In his most prolific period, he could write a novel in eight days, six for composition and two for revision. His revising method was a matter of cutting out everything that was superfluous to the story, including any passages that were overtly literary – i.e., that call attention to themselves merely as writing. He wanted to be known as a “craftsman” and not as an artist. He avoided literary circles and distrusted intellectuals. His style, assuming he had one, is spare and utilitarian and serves exclusively to tell whatever story he has to tell.

Simenon had a great number of admirers among serious writers and critics. His contemporary, and one with whom Simenon had a long correspondence, was Andre Gide, who wrote: 

This is what attracts and holds me in him. He writes for ‘the vast public,’ to be sure, but delicate and refined readers find something for them too as soon as they begin to take him seriously. He makes one reflect; and this is close to being the height of art. 

Simenon was 27 when his most famous character, Inspector Maigret, made his first appearance in print in 1930. These police procedurals were what made him world famous as well as one of the wealthiest fiction writers of his time. Yet Simenon wanted to be taken seriously, so he began in 1933 to write “non-Maigret” novels, or what were also know as romans dur – literally “hard novels.” They weren’t always crime stories, but placed his characters in highly dramatic predicaments. 

The Window Over the Way was Simenon’s second roman dur. Like his first, Tropic Moon, it was inspired by his travels – in this case a visit he made to Odessa in the Spring of 1933. Simenon saw the deprivations of daily life in provincial Soviet Russia at a time when Stalin was tightening his grip on power. Simenon had even interviewed Trotsky, who was in exile in Istanbul, so he was acquainted with the political aspect of Soviet life.(1) 

The novel, titled Les Gens d’en face in French, was published in September 1933, at a time when the French reading public had an insatiable appetite for exotic settings – especially those that were parts of the French colonial empire: Indochina, North and West Africa. That appetite was also being fed by contemporary French cinema. Films like Jacques Feyder’s Le Grand Jeu and Julien Duvivier’s Pepe le Moko, both of which are set in North Africa. 

Adil Bey, the protagonist of The Window Over the Way, is a Turkish consul just arrived in the Black Sea port of Batum, a replacement for a previous consul who died under unexplained circumstances. Bey encounters nothing but dysfunction at his consulate, with no amenities and no housekeeper. Even the gramophone he saw when he first arrived is now missing. The next day a Russian woman appears at the consulate. She is Sonia, and she lives over the way with her brother and his wife. They live in a single room behind a window that can be seen from the consulate. Her brother is a high ranking member of the local secret police.(2) 

Because he is so isolated with her, and there is no one else with whom he can communicate, Bey becomes obsessed with Sonia. She nonchalantly becomes his lover, and he is fascinated by her strange indifference, her lack of emotion. He follows her through the ugly town, until he becomes ill. He thinks that someone must be poisoning him, that he will suffer the same fate as the last Turkish consul, who must’ve been poisoned, too. One morning, just as Sonia has arrived for work, Bey grabs her purse and finds a vial of white powder inside. He forces a confession out of her that she has, indeed, been poisoning him. In an extraordinary scene, they express their love for each other. Bey decides that they must escape Russia together. There is a transcendent moment, once their emotions have subsided, when Sonia asks Bey about life in Turkey. He contradicts the lies she has been told all her life about life in a capitalist country. 

“Is it true the streets are so brightly lit you can read in them at night?” 

“Yes All through the night....And all along the Bosphorus there are places where you can sit listening to Turkish music while you drink Raki and eat all sorts of marvellous things. And you watch the caiques slowly sailing by...“ 

The story’s climax arrives abruptly, and it reminded me of that in John Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Trying to save himself, Bey extends his hand to Sonia, not knowing that there are forces that will not allow it. There is a strange moment when her brother, who is inspecting the ship's passenger list prior to its sailing, and he comes to Bey’s name. 

Koline did his job slowly and thoroughly. Adil Bey, who was at the end of the line couldn’t take his eyes off a bit of black ribbon about an inch wide which went round the lapel of his coat, threaded through the buttonhole. 

“Van Rompen...” 

“Here!” Each had his passport returned to him. 

“Nielsen...” 

“Here!” 

“Adil Zeki Bey.” There was no answer for a moment and Koline looked up into the consul's haggard face. Still the latter couldn’t answer. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t move. All he could do was to stare fixedly at that bit of black ribbon. 

“Captain Cauwelaert..“ 

“Here!” 

It was over. Adil Bey had been given his passport. His fingers had almost touched Koline’s, yet nothing had happened! Next came the inspection. Koline and the officers went out while the crew remained in the saloon. Some of them sat down. One finished off a half-emptied bottle of beer. 

“Well! That’s over, at any rate,” sighed John looking hard at Adil Bey. The latter smiled painfully. With an effort he managed to say: 

"Yes. Did you see the Black ribbon?” 

"And his eyes too. In his place I’d have killed you....” And by the way he spoke it seemed as though John had guessed everything—the window over the way, Koline leaning out in the dark smoking his cigarette, the grey paper that Adil Bey had pasted on his own windows, the Russian looking up and down the street watching for his sister... 

While the novel’s portrayal of the deprivations of life in a provincial city in Stalinist Russia could be mistaken for anti-communist (the book was reprinted in 1943 in a French collaborationist journal), it isn’t propagandist in the least. Simenon obviously cares what happens to the people in the story, especially to Sonia. Some critics complained that Adil Bey isn’t brought sufficiently to life. I think it’s due to the fact that he is a Turk, and that Simenon had been performing a delicate political dance by not making his hero a Frenchman instead. I think Simenon is just as capable of bringing life to a quite foreign character than he is making the motives of a murderer convincing in so many of his Maigret novels. 

What stays with me long after I’ve finished reading the book is the strange interplay between Bey and the “people (les gens) over the way,” and the moments in near darkness, after the power in the city is shut off, when they watch one another enduring hot, sleepless nights. 

(1) The Trotsky interview can be found here 

(2) The OGPU (Joint State Political Directorate) was the precursor of the NKVD, the secret state police. It was dissolved in 1934.

You Dirty Old Bastard

For most of the last hundred years, Robert Frost has been recognized as a great poet, but almost immediately after the publication of his first collections, A Boy’s Will, North of Boston, and Mountain Interval, some critics found themselves defending Frost against the charges of popularity and triviality. Because so much of what Frost wrote is so – deceptively – accessible even to people who rarely or never found themselves reading poetry, and because critics were unaccustomed to pointing out what was – seemingly – obvious, they arrived at a generalized view that Frost was too easy and therefore not worth examining at any length. 

But, as Randall Jarrell insisted: 

Frost is one of the subtlest and saddest of poets; and no other living poet has written so well about the actions of ordinary men. But anyone should know this after reading "Home Burial," "Two Witches," "A Servant to Servants," "Neither Out Far Nor In Deep," "Design," "Acquainted with the Night,” “Provide, Provide," "Desert Places," "Directive," "The Gift Outright," "An Old Man's Winter Night"; or guess at it after reading 

But now he brushed the shavings from his knee 

And stood the axe there on its horse's hoof, 

Erect, but not without its waves, as when 

The snake stood up for evil in the Garden ... 

I want to show another face of the multi-faceted Frost with which very few people, apparently, are acquainted. He showed it to an audience at a poetry conference in Washington, DC in October 1962, only a year and eight months after his appearance at JFK’s inauguration and, it turned out, only a few months before he died in January 1963. 

It’s one thing to think of Frost as an autumnal poet – a poet of decay and death. He certainly touched the subject enough times that it must not have hurt his fingers. His not minding the pain it caused was probably closer to the truth. At the poetry conference in Washington, the first lady, Jackie Kennedy, was conspicuously absent. It happened to be the middle of the Cuban missile crisis, and the imminence of nuclear war must’ve been on people’s minds. It certainly was on Frost’s, as his performance revealed to two witnesses of the event, W. D. Snodgrass and R. P. Blackmur. 

According to Snodgrass, who related the event in an essay for The Paris Review in 1994, Frost behaved somewhat uncharacteristically that night. He opened with a reading of Robinson Jeffers’s poem, “Shine, Perishing Republic", which is a kind of celebration of America’s decay. Jeffers was the antithesis of Frost’s humanism, but Frost was evidently in an apocalyptic mood that night. 

He went on to read, appropriately, his poem “October.” 

O hushed October morning mild, 

Thy leaves have ripened to the fall; 

Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild, 

Should waste them all. 

The crows above the forest call; 

Tomorrow they may form and go. 

O hushed October morning mild, 

Begin the hours of this day slow. 

Make the day seem to us less brief. 

Hearts not averse to being beguiled, 

Beguile us in the way you know. 

Release one leaf at break of day; 

At noon release another leaf; 

One from our trees, one far away. 

Retard the sun with gentle mist; 

Enchant the land with amethyst. 

Slow, slow! 

For the grapes’ sake, if they were all, 

Whose leaves already are burnt with frost, 

Whose clustered fruit must else be lost— 

For the grapes’ sake along the wall. 

The somber note was advanced by Frost’s next choice, his poem “November.” 

We saw leaves go to glory, 

Then almost migratory 

Go part way down the lane, 

And then to end the story 

Get beaten down and pasted 

In one wild day of rain. 

We heard "'Tis Over" roaring. 

A year of leaves was wasted..... 

By denying and ignoring 

The waste of nations warring. 

According to Snodgrass, Frost was being deliberately topical at a moment in American history when it seemed as if the lights were about to be extinguished. And Frost was strangely pleased at it. Frost had always been mistaken for a Liberal, and certainly his appearance at JFK’s inauguration reinforced the misperception. But Frost was really an old, pre-New Deal Conservative (he was born in 1875), and only intimated his sympathies now and then in stray comments. Frost’s audience was Liberal, and he certainly must have been aware of it. But in October 1962, with the world teetering on the brink, Frost felt emboldened to show his hand – even if his audience were incapable of taking it in. They gave him three standing ovations. 

[Frost] went on to say that “every liberal I know of has a tendency when his enemy works up against him … to try to remember if he isn’t more in the wrong than the enemy … a liberal is a person who can’t take his own side in a fight.” As the evening went on, he came to be pumping himself up and down at the lectern like a rooster about to crow. Breaking into what seemed a laugh, he referred to that fearful crisis exultantly, “You didn’t want to just fade out, did you? Why not go out in a blaze of glory?” 

Nobody in the room caught the derisive tone of Frost’s remarks except R. P. Blackmur, sitting beside Snodgrass and, as the crowd cheered, was muttering, “You dirty old bastard! You rotten … ” 

“Of all the people in that packed hall,” Snodgrass concluded, “only Blackmur had recognized that Frost was not only triumphing over those in his audience he thought over-scrupulous in conflict, but laughing at the probability of that audience’s imminent death. Now he would not have to die alone; he had had his full career; they would not.” (1)

Ironically, a year later when President Kennedy delivered his eulogy of Frost at Amherst College, he mentioned the artist’s critical role: 

Strength takes many forms, and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant. The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us. 

Less than a month later, on November 22, JFK’s career was cut short in Dallas. Frost, perhaps, would’ve felt vindicated.

(1) Dabbling in Corruption

The Gift Left Out

We all know the story of John F. Kennedy asking his fellow New Englander and favorite poet, Robert Frost, to come to Washington, D.C. and take part in his inauguration ceremony on January 20, 1961, and how Frost had composed a poem especially for the occasion and had brought a typewritten copy with him that day, but when Frost stepped up to the microphone and took out the poem, he couldn’t read the page because the sun was shining so brightly. If you look at the 60-year-old film of the inauguration ceremony, Frost is introduced as a distinguished poet who will read an original composition. Frost starts to read the original part, but falters repeatedly. The dignitaries behind him, including JFK and Jackie, notice he’s having trouble reading it. Finally Frost says that what he was trying to read was to be an introduction to an older poem he knew by heart called “The Gift Outright.” So he simply recited it. 

Here is what Frost was trying to read that day when I was 2 years and 8 months old. 

 

For John F. Kennedy's Inauguration 

Gift outright of "The Gift Outright" 

 (With some preliminary history in rhyme) 

by Robert Frost 

Summoning artists to participate 

In the august occasions of the state 

Seems something artists ought to celebrate. 

Today is for my cause a day of days. 

And his be poetry's old-fashioned praise 

Who was the first to think of such a thing. 

This verse that in acknowledgment I bring 

Goes back to the beginning of the end 

Of what had been for centuries the trend; 

A turning point in modern history. 

Colonial had been the thing to be 

As long as the great issue was to see 

What country'd be the one to dominate 

By character, by tongue, by native trait,

The new world Christopher Columbus found.

The French, the Spanish, and the Dutch were downed

And counted out. Heroic deeds were done.

Elizabeth the First and England won.

Now came on a new order of the ages

That in the Latin of our founding sages

(Is it not written on the dollar bill

We carry in our purse and pocket still?)

God nodded His approval of as good.

So much those heroes knew and understood--

I mean the great four, Washington,

John Adams, Jefferson, and Madison--

So much they knew as consecrated seers

They must have seen ahead what now appears

They would bring empires down about our ears

And by the example of our Declaration

Make everybody want to be a nation.

And this is no aristocratic joke

At the expense of negligible folk.

We see how seriously the races swarm

In their attempts at sovereignty and form.

They are our wards we think to some extent

For the time being and with their consent,

To teach them how Democracy is meant.

"New order of the ages" did we say?

If it looks none too orderly today,

'Tis a confusion it was ours to start

So in it have to take courageous part.

No one of honest feeling would approve

A ruler who pretended not to love

A turbulence he had the better of.

Everyone knows the glory of the twain

Who gave America the aeroplane

To ride the whirlwind and the hurricane.

Some poor fool has been saying in his heart

Glory is out of date in life and art.

Our venture in revolution and outlawry

Has justified itself in freedom's story

Right down to now in glory upon glory.

Come fresh from an election like the last,

The greatest vote a people ever cast,

So close yet sure to be abided by,

It is no miracle our mood is high.

Courage is in the air in bracing whiffs

Better than all the stalemate an's and ifs.

There was the book of profile tales declaring

For the emboldened politicians daring

To break with followers when in the wrong,

A healthy independence of the throng,

A democratic form of right divine

To rule first answerable to high design.

There is a call to life a little sterner,

And braver for the earner, learner, yearner.

Less criticism of the field and court

And more preoccupation with the sport.

It makes the prophet in us all presage

The glory of a next Augustan age

Of a power leading from its strength and pride,

Of young ambition eager to be tried, 

Firm in our free beliefs without dismay, 

In any game the nations want to play. 

A golden age of poetry and power 

Of which this noonday's the beginning hour.

The Road Home

Lately I have been returning to music that has deep meaning for me. Over the weekend I had the pleasure to watch the 2019 television production of A Christmas Carol, with Guy Pearce as Ebenezer Scrooge. Although it takes considerable liberties with the Dickens text, I found that it understood the climactic transformation of Scrooge, that it was the fate of Tiny Tim that stirred Scrooge to his very soul and that had caused him to change his heart.

I carried the hopefulness (and the pain) of the story into my evening here where I live on an isolated island in the Philippines. The weather is wet and gloomy, which is typical for January. The sound of rain falling into the night put me in an escapist mood, and inspired a desire to seek out music that has always provided me with a restorative solace.

Then yesterday I encountered a choral piece that was new to me, composed in 2001 by the American composer Stephen Paulus, called “The Road Home.” Upon hearing the words being sung, I felt its direct bearing on my life, like a plaintive threnody. 

The Road Home

Tell me, where is the road

I can call my own,

That I left, that I lost,

So long ago?

All these years I have wandered,

Oh, when will I know 

There's a way, there's a road 

That will lead me home?

After wind, after rain,

When the dark is done.

As I wake from a dream 

In the gold of day,

Through the air there's a calling

From far away,

There's a voice I can hear 

That will lead me home.

Rise up, follow me,

Come away, is the call,

With the love in your heart

As the only song;

There is no such beauty

As where you belong:

Rise up, follow me,

I will lead you home.

Here is a video of a beautiful performance of the song. Paulus wrote the music first and then asked Michael Dennis Browne to supply the words: 

In the Spring of 2001 I received a commission from the Dale Warland Singers to write a short "folk" type choral arrangement. I had discovered a tune in a folk song book called "The Lone Wild Bird." I fell in love with it, made a short recording and asked my good friend and colleague, Michael Dennis Browne to write new words for this tune. The tune is taken from The Southern Harmony Songbook" of 1835. It is pentatonic and that is part of its attraction. Pentatonic scales have been extant for centuries and are prevalent in almost all musical cultures throughout the world. They are universal. Michael crafted three verses and gave it the title "The Road Home." He writes so eloquently about "returning" and "coming home" after being lost or wandering. Again, this is another universal theme and it has resonated well with choirs around the world as this simple little a cappella choral piece has become another "best seller" in our Paulus Publications catalogue and now threatens to catch up with "Pilgrims' Hymn." It is just more evidence that often the most powerful and beautiful message is often a simple one. May 2013

About the composition of the words, Michael Dennis Browne noted:

I did what I needed to do: spent a lot of time with the melody and tried to see what it might be trying to say. I was between visits to England, where my beloved sister Angela had become ill, and I was certainly thinking, on one level, of “the old country” which I left in 1965 to come to the United States. I could also hear in the first three notes the beginning of “Loch Lomond,” a song I had sung and loved since I was a child. What I was looking for was a significant simplicity, something memorable and resonant and patterned, but not as complex as poems can often be, need to be; I wanted something immediate. Little by little, the words came. I thought of the speaker as a persona rather than myself, though of course there needed to be a “personal vibration” to it (to use Robert Lowell’s term). I was also trying to suggest the consolation that can come to someone of faith, in times of great stress, as a result of prayer and an abiding belief in divine mercy. In a short essay called “Words for Music,” I have written of lyrics for music as “boats on sand” when they appear on the page. In writing words for “The Road Home,” I was writing something to be heard as many voices carrying the stirring melody and not as something self-reliant, to stand on its own the way a poem must do. In doing so, I was aware of steering close to the sentimental and, as I said in my essay, I would never present the words as a poem in a poetry reading, though I have spoken them on occasion as an example of the kind of writing I have done for music. September 2010

So here I am. Momentous things have taken place this past year that changed my outlook on the future. Instead of always having to hack my way through an interminable dark forest, I reached a clearing from which I saw a valley extending as far as I could see. There it lies, my new life, away from here – a place in which I felt stranded like a castaway. All I have to do now is keep walking toward it. Home awaits me.

That's Entertainment

I am a cinephile in the disadvantaged position of being an American. Movies weren’t invented in America, but, since the end of World War I, when American film production, untouched by the war’s destruction, emerged as the dominant force in the world, by the 1920s Hollywood had an astonishing reach. American movie stars were recognized practically all over the world.

By the time I was growing up in the American South in the ‘60s, the major Hollywood studios were in decline, thanks to a revitalised world cinema (about which I knew nothing at the time) and to the challenges of television. Needing to promise, if not always provide, audiences with things that television could not, like a wide-screen and more adult content, American movies had changed without having actually grown up. They were the only show in town whenever I went to the movies, and I ate as many Westerns, war movies, and thrillers as I could stomach. The first time I had a chance to see an actual foreign film, Roger Vadim’s Barbarella, I was turned away because it was rated M for mature audiences (I was 10).

I believed that movies were an exclusively American feat because I had been deprived of any substantive exposure to films made anywhere other than Hollywood. I knew that there was a greater world beyond America only because it had been used as a backdrop by Hollywood. My schooling had taught me the history of the world, and television had brought home America’s “military adventurism” in Vietnam. But I never knew that movies were being made, and had always been made, by French people for French audiences or Italian people for Italian audiences, Japanese people for Japanese audiences. Or, indeed, that some of these movies were being exported to other countries in versions that were “dubbed” into different languages or with translations in “subtitles.”

In April 1951, a film magazine called Cahiers du Cinema first appeared. Co-founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca, it employed writers whose names have since become synonymous with the Nouvelle Vague, a movement as important to cinema history as Italian Neo-Realism: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, and Rohmer. Significantly, they had all grown up during the German Occupation (1940-44). When France was liberated, American movies could be seen again. It sounds simplistic, but it’s easy to guess how these young men, without knowing exactly how their country had been betrayed, had grown resentful of their parents’ generation. Their admiration for America was just as understandable, and their discovery of American movies was an important part of their recovery from the war. But their embrace of America was coincident with their rejection of France. Suddenly, to these young movie fans, the classic French cinema, and especially certain filmmakers, was subject to entirely new and impossible standards of virtue.

To these Frenchmen, American movies are as foreign as their movies are to me. Having imbibed Hollywood movies with my mother’s milk, I find them neither so exotic nor exceptional. I was unaware, in fact, that a movie could presume to be anything other than a diversion, like pop music, until I encountered what is now idiotically called an art film when I was 13. I have related the encounter elsewhere, but after seeing it, I realized for the first time that a movie could be as full and enriching an experience as reading a William Faulkner novel or listening to the Bill Evans Trio. I also learned that Hollywood had been actively involved in preventing me from seeing films made in foreign countries at least since the end of World War II.

Today when I have a chance to look at one of the 4K restorations of a 60 or 70 year old Hollywood movie, I can see the beauty of its design, and all the care and skill that went into its fabrication, but it invariably reminds me of what G. K. Chesterton said when he first saw Times Square: “What a magnificent sight for someone who can’t read.” American films have always been visually impressive, and they have also been surpassingly dumb.

I don’t know that I will ever escape from the conviction that Hollywood productions are products, just like every K-Pop group – an assemblage of materials drawn from a great pool of talent and artificially combined. Nothing organic, nothing spontaneous, nothing original. Hollywood directors were industrial employees, no different from their army of cutters and costumers and set dressers and hairdressers who work behind the camera. They were dependable clock-punching workers in the dream factories. Calling them artists is perhaps a little romantic but nonetheless misleading. And it’s only because of a handful of rebellious Frenchmen, reverse (and counter-intuitive) provincials, that we got in this mess in the first place.