Last Days

George Orwell (or Eric Blair) died 70 years ago today. It is quite impossible for me to let the day pass without marking it, even when I am quite unprepared. Four days after his death, Albert Camus wrote to Maria Casarès: 

Une mauvaise nouvelle : George Orwell est mort. [...] Écrivain anglais de grand talent, ayant à peu près la même expérience que moi (bien que plus âgé de dix ans) et exactement les mêmes idées. Il y avait des années qu’il luttait contre la tuberculose. Il faisait partie du très petit nombre d’hommes avec qui je partageais quelque chose.

Orwell was 46. Ten years after Orwell’s death, Camus died in a spectacular car crash, lately attributed to the KGB, at the same age.

The most moving account of Orwell’s last days was written by his biographer, D. J. Taylor for The Guardian in 2000, on the 50th anniversary of his death. 


Last Days of George Orwell

In January, 1950, small procession of visitors could be seen each afternoon making their way singly and severally through the cheerless north Bloomsbury squares towards University College hospital. Many of them were literary — the immensely tall figure of Stephen Spender with his mop of curly hair, Anthony Powell and Malcolm Muggeridge, both of whom lived in nearby Regent’s Park. Others came from the BBC or from left-wing newspapers. Occasionally, a small boy was brought in and allowed to remain for a moment or so before a patient so terrified of communicating the disease from which he suffered, that he would never allow his adopted son to touch him. The most regular visitor was a spectacularly pretty, brown-haired girl with a newly acquired wedding ring gleaming on her finger.

By January, 1950, Orwell had been at UCH for nearly four months, and in hospital since the start of the previous year. Two decades of chronic lung trouble had finally produced a diagnosis of tuberculosis. At a sanatorium in Gloucestershire, six months before, he had nearly died, but recovered enough to be transferred to London and the care of the distinguished chest specialist Andrew Morland. Morland, recommended to Orwell by his publisher Fred Warburg, didn’t anticipate a cure: but he thought that, with sufficient care and treatment, he might reach the status of ‘good chronic’, able to potter about and undertake a few hours’ sedentary work a day. Orwell, desperate to pick up his pen once more, was told that he had a ‘relatively’ good chance of staying alive.

Morland had taken Orwell on as a private patient: little more than a year since its inception, Bevan’s NHS had barely begun to exist. Fortunately money, the absence of which had troubled Orwell for most of his adult life, was no longer a problem. Nineteen Eighty-Four, published the previous June, had been a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic. 25,000 copies had already been sold in England. US royalties, fuelled by selection as a Book of the Month Club choice, were rolling in. Orwell was famous and well off. In the last month of his life, the value of his estate was put at around £12,000 (the average weekly wage was well below £10). He was also, despite the rigours of his hospital routine, unexpectedly happy.

Orwell had known Sonia Brownell, who had worked on Cyril Connolly’s monthly magazine Horizon, for several years. Sixteen years younger than Orwell, with a string of previous lovers that included the artists Lucian Freud and William Coldstream, Sonia looked an unlikely candidate for the role of second Mrs Orwell, a vacancy the widower had seemed anxious to fill during the late 1940s. Her reasons for accepting a desperately sick man, with whom she was fairly obviously not in love, will always be obscure. Subsequent accusations of gold-digging are unfounded. There was no guarantee when she married him that he was about to turn into the titanic figure of literary legend. Anthony Powell always maintained that Sonia married him simply because her mentor, Cyril Connolly, told her to.

The marriage took place by special licence in Orwell’s room on October 13, 1949. David Astor, proprietor of the Observer and a long-term supporter, gave away the bride in the presence of the hospital chaplain, the Reverend WH Braine, Sonia’s friend Janetta Kee, Powell, Muggeridge and one of Orwell’s doctors. The guests then went off for a celebratory dinner at the Ritz. The bridegroom remained in bed. Several of his friends noted how much the marriage raised his spirits. According to Powell, it ‘immensely cheered him... In some respects he was in better form than I had ever known’. Despite his cadaverous state — he had lost so much weight that the doctors had trouble finding enough spare flesh to insert hypodermic needles — Orwell looked unexpectedly perky in it. Sitting up in bed, Powell remembered, he had an ‘unaccustomedly epicurean air’.

The plan had been that, as soon as Orwell showed faint signs of improvement, he could be sent to a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps to take advantage of the rarefied mountain air. But he remained horribly unwell, losing even more weight and suffering from high temperatures. The new American wonder drug streptomycin had been tried on him the year before, and Fred Warburg had petitioned his US publishers to help in speeding up a delivery of auromycin, but these were early days for TB cures. Among other side-effects, the streptomycin had made Orwell’s fingernails fall out — and the prognosis grew worse.

Orwell, though, was convinced he would live. Full of ideas for books — a study of Conrad’s political fiction and a novella set in the far east, provisionally titled A Smoking-Room Story — he believed that a writer who has a book left in him to write will not die. Despite his poor state, Morland thought that the promise of the Swiss trip would have a beneficial effect and sanctioned it for January. A fishing rod, brought by a friend for his convalescence, lay at the end of the bed.

By this stage, few of his visitors expected him to live. Some of the saddest visits were the few allowed to his adopted son, Richard. Orwell was so anxious about passing on the disease to the four-year-old that he pushed the boy away if he came too close. Sonia came every day, looked after his business affairs, and occasionally annoyed people by her assumption of the role of officious nurse. One day, Sonia told Orwell that she had to go to a cocktail party and wouldn’t be back that evening. Orwell protested faintly, but she bustled off. Others noticed a progressive deterioration. Arriving with Powell on Christmas Day, Muggeridge found him ‘very deathly and wretched, alone, with Christmas decorations all around’. His face looked practically dead, Muggeridge recorded, oddly like a picture he had once seen of Nietzsche on his death-bed. He detected a kind of rage in his friend’s expression, as though the approach of death made him furious. They talked about Orwell’s exploits in the Home Guard, his time in Spain in the civil war, the prospect of Switzerland, ‘and all the while the stench of death was in the air, like autumn in a garden’.

The new year came. A departure date had been set for January 25. Orwell’s companions on the trip, by privately chartered plane, would be Sonia and Lucian Freud. Visiting again on the 12th, Muggeridge thought him ‘more deathly than ever, very miserable,’ complaining that the doctors would not even allow him aspirin. A week later, though, Julian Symons found him eagerly anticipating the Swiss trip, and keen to talk about long-delayed literary schemes.

There was a chance that the doctors might let him start writing again, he explained, and he was anxious to get on with the novella and the Conrad book. ‘I shall go to Switzerland next Wednesday,’ Symons recalled him saying, laughing as he did so, ‘if I don’t catch cold’. Another friend, the anarchist poet Paul Potts, called on him the next afternoon, Friday January 20, bringing a small packet of tea as a present. Looking through the glass square cut into the door, he saw that Orwell was asleep. Judging it best not to disturb him, he left the tea propped up against the lintel and stole away.

Sonia spent the evening at a nightclub with Lucian Freud. In the small hours of Saturday January 21, she was tracked down by telephone to be told that Orwell had died of a massive lung haemorrhage. The news spread throughout the weekend. ‘G. Orwell is dead and Mrs Orwell, presumably, a rich widow,’ Evelyn Waugh noted in a letter to Nancy Mitford. Muggeridge, told of his friend’s death early on the Saturday morning, compared it to the passing of another recent literary casualty, Hugh Kingsmill.
Orwell’s death was the sadder, however, ‘because he passionately wanted to go on living, and there was no sense of peace or relinquishment in him’. Muggeridge, then working on the Daily Telegraph, wrote a couple of memorial paragraphs for the Peterborough column. ‘Thought of him, as of Graham [Greene], that popular writers always express in an intense form some romantic longing...’

The dead man turned out to have made a will three days before his death, in the presence of Sonia and his first wife’s sister, Gwen O’Shaughnessy. Materially, it transferred his literary estate to Sonia. A substantial life insurance policy would provide for his adopted son, Richard, then being looked after by his aunt, Orwell’s sister Avril. Orwell directed that he should be buried according to the rites of the Church of England and his body interred (not cremated) in the nearest convenient cemetery. The task of arranging all this fell to Powell and Muggeridge. A Warren Street undertaker was quickly brought on board.

Then the two tried to engage the services of the Rev Rose, Vicar of Christ Church, Albany Street NWI. Astor influence secured a plot in the graveyard of All Saints church at Sutton Courteney in Oxfordshire. Muggeridge noted in his diary the fact of Orwell dying on Lenin’s birthday and being buried by the Astors, ‘which seems to me to cover the full range of his life’.

The funeral was set for Thursday January 26. The evening before, Powell and his wife, Lady Violet, called in at the Muggeridges after supper, bringing Sonia with them, ‘obviously in a poor way’. On their last meeting, the day after Orwell’s death, Sonia had been overcome with grief. Muggeridge decided that he would ‘always love her for her true tears...’ He left a detailed account of the next day’s events: Fred Warburg greeting the mourners at the church door, the chilly atmosphere, the congregation ‘largely Jewish and almost entirely unbelievers’ who had difficulty following the Anglican liturgy. Powell chose the hymns — ‘All people that on earth do dwell’, ‘Guide me, o thou great Redeemer’ and ‘Ten thousand times ten thousand’ (‘Why, I can’t remember,’ Powell later wrote, ‘perhaps Orwell himself had talked of the hymn, or because he was, in his way, a sort of saint, even if not one in sparkling raiment bright’).

Both Powell and Muggeridge found the occasion hugely distressing. Muggeridge, in particular, was deeply moved by the lesson, chosen by Powell from the Book of Ecclesiastes: ‘Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return to the God who gave it.’

He went back to his house near Regent’s Park to read through the sheaf of obituaries filed by, among others, Symons, V. S. Pritchett and Arthur Koestler, seeing in them already ‘how the legend of a human being is created’.

Mermaid

My step-daughter turns 18 today. A very big deal here in the Philippines. They call it her "debut." I'm not sure if I've mentioned her before on this blog. If not, let this be her official debut.

THE FISHERMAN WRITES A LETTER TO THE MERMAID

This water is so clear
my boat appears to float on air
and casts its shadow on sand
green as a mermaid’s hand

the water is so still
I could carve words upon it with a quill
back-to-front sentences in bloodred ink
and watch them sink

while she, sky-gazing there below
could read, uncoiling slow
like trails of apple-peel
downward beneath my keel:

dear distant friend
even a ray of light must bend
to glide from me to you
so how may words pierce through?

yet think it not too hard
our lives are laid apart
this gulf is hardly greater than
that between man and man

(less, truly, for his tear
sinks, and will touch her there
sharp as a barb among the submarine waves
tears are the element in which she lives)

dear distant friend
if you should chance to find 
the heart I lost one green mid-ocean day
please put it by

please keep it for me shelled in pearl
some seaborne while
and do not doubt, your friend
will come to claim it in the end

Joan Aiken

Here's That Rainy Day

Maybe I should have saved those leftover dreams?
Funny, but here’s that rainy day.
Here’s that rainy day they told me about
And I laughed at the thought that it might turn out this way.
Where is that worn out wish that I threw aside
After it brought my love so near?
Funny, how love becomes a cold rainy day.
Funny, that rainy day is here.


Of all the days of the year that it had to choose from, a typhoon passed directly over my island on Christmas Eve – at 9 PM, no less. For two hours I listened to the approach and departure of one express train after another. At 11 PM it tapered off, with an occasional train swinging back to remind me of the storm’s power. I managed to drift off to a nervous night’s sleep after midnight, blowing out my candle and only using the battery-powered fibre-optic Christmas House that I bought in a fit of nostalgia 11 years ago as a much-needed nightlight.

A snowstorm would’ve been preferable. A snowstorm would’ve been welcome on Christmas Eve. Indeed, if it had been a powerful blizzard that dumped three feet of snow, with drifts burying cars, that paralyzed transport, cancelling flights and closing the airport, it would’ve been welcome on Christmas Eve. If the mayor told everyone to stay home, to not venture out, who needs to go anywhere on Christmas Day? And even if there were a power failure, as always happened whenever it snowed or sleeted in the South when I was a boy, it would call forth the image of a family huddled for warmth, perhaps before a blazing fireplace, sharing the priceless gift of being together.

Here, when the power fails, my electric fan stops working and, even at night, I begin to sweat. The only difference, now that I am acclimated, is that I no longer mind sweating as much as I once did. And early last Wednesday on Christmas morning, everyone ventured out to survey the devastation. Whole groves of banana trees had been felled; trees that had hung on to their branches were denuded of leaves. You could almost see a horizon. Houses you didn’t know were there appeared, missing their jungle cover. The sun was unobstructed and incredibly bright. The shade of the palm trees was no longer there. But if I showed you a picture, before and after the typhoon, you wouldn’t be able to see much difference. Natural disasters, that come in many guises in the Philippines, expose the fragile infrastructure to devastating damage. It seems at such times that the country is only held together with scotch tape and string.

I feel like I’ve blundered into the last stanza of Larkin’s “Here”:

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

Since my arrival in these climes of tropical weather, I have seen my personal record of successive days living without electricity broken three times. (My original record was three or four days, established, if memory serves me right, in 1971, when an ice storm knocked out the power in Columbia, South Carolina.) Here on my island in 2008, a typhoon called Frank knocked out all the power for nine days. Then, in 2011, an earthquake left me without power for 14 days. And then, as a sort of culmination, typhoon Haiyan, called Yolanda here, took it away for thirty-seven days. It would be wise, I suppose, to learn to live without electricity, since its absence brings about so much – what else can I call it but suffering? But that would require the unlearning of a lifetime of habits with which I am unable part.

If I wanted to describe to you what it’s like to have power restored, for a bare lightbulb on the ceiling to suddenly come to life and shine through the darkness (oh, what darkness!), I might allude to the experience of a prisoner of war, tunneling his way toward freedom, and after interminable days of labor and subterfuge, always on the point of being caught and finding all of his labors go to waste, he climbs out of the hole to find that he is outside the wire, that he made it. Now the run to freedom begins in earnest.

So here it is - the last day of the year. If I bothered about auspices, this moment is most auspicious. Alas, the circumstances couldn’t be less auspicious. One of the most common superstitions among these people who live in the dark (and who seem to like it there) is when the palm of your left hand itches, it means money is coming. But you mustn’t scratch it, or the money won’t come. Just like living here – having an itch you can’t scratch. As much of a skeptic as I strive to be, I find myself annoyed by such folk ways. Yet whenever my left palm itches, I sometimes stop myself from scratching it. It reminds me of Primo Levi, who once found himself in a situation - in Auschwitz – in which he came close to renouncing atheism:

This happened in the October of 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death. Naked and compressed among my naked companions with my index card in hand, I was waiting to file past the "commission" that with one glance would decide whether I should immediately go into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instant I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed: you do not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a non-believer is capable. I rejected the temptation: I knew that otherwise were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it. (The Drowned and the Saved)

I wouldn’t want my skepticism to be tested on the point of death. I don’t think I could be so resolute.

As for my resolutions, I hope to be wiser one year from today. If I can be richer, let my riches come in many forms. Out goes the bad old year. In comes the new.

Anna Karina

Anna Karina, who died Saturday, was the most recognizable face of the French New Wave, thanks to the roles given her by Jean-Luc Godard. (He wanted her to do a nude scene in Breathless, but she refused. "But I just saw you in a bathtub in a commercial," he argued. She wasn't nude, she countered, but covered in soap suds.) The lilt of those films, their youthful - if overweening - insouciance, their anarchic air of flaunting convention, is inimitable and by now a fixture of film history. Godard may not have been a master of his craft, but he was determined to demonstrate to everyone his contempt for official cinema. Karina's mad dash through the Louvre in Band of Outsiders with Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur is as iconic - if not nearly as moving or meaningful, because the film wasn't nearly as good - as Jeanne Moreau's run, wearing men's clothes, across a footbridge in Truffaut's Jules and Jim (it helped that both films were shot by Raoul Coutard, unarguably an artist).

Like Hanna Schygulla, who held a similar position in relation to Fassbinder, Karina broke free of Godard's control and enjoyed a career of her own - more lucratively, if far less critically acclaimed. (It wasn't a contest, but the argument over Godard's relative importance was laid to rest long ago. Truffaut won.) Funny how auteurists even now try to downplay her performance in Visconti's beautiful adaptation of Camus's The Stranger, simply because their dogma won't allow them to recognize the film's excellence. (It's so unlike every other Visconti film - which is probably why I love it.) Her performance, as Meursault's unfortunate girlfriend, was touching.

But she is being extolled, yesterday and today, for Pierrot le fou, Masculin Feminin and Alphaville, films as redolent of their time as Sonny Rollins's first recordings. It seems to me intensely sad that lately the only time people want to argue about the meaning of the word "cinema" is when a venerable filmmaker dares to question the validity of trashy superhero movies. (What made it far worse was when he explained what he meant to the halfwits who worship at the Marvel - or Disney's Star Wars - altar.) As long as people who take the subject seriously want to explore what real cinema is, they will find out soon enough how integral a part Anna Karina played in cinema's greatest decade, which was actually only about seven years, 1959-1966. I am sorry that the flesh and blood woman has passed, but her image, her lovely face and form, are as immortal as Garbo's, Monica Vitti's, and Setsuko Hara's. Vivre Karina. (Vivre cinema.)

Another Christmas

Watching the Robert Zemeckis movie The Polar Express for maybe the fourth time this past week, I was reminded of what James Agee wrote more than seventy years ago about the original Miracle on 34th Street:

Santa Claus (well played by Edmund Gwenn) comes to Herald Square and wraps up the millennium in one neat package. Clever, and pleased with itself, and liked by practically everybody; but since I have always despised the maxim "Honesty is the best policy," I enjoy even less a statement of the profits accruing through faith, loving kindness, etc. I expect next a "witty, tender little fantasy" presenting the Son of God (Sonny Tufts) as God's Customers' Man." (1)

Miracle is such a perennial holiday favorite that it has been remade at least twice, and yet it is little more than a cute love letter to our sanctimoniously secular, peculiarly American brand of consumerism, in which the meaning of Christmas has been hijacked by a cartoon figure made up of an unholy hodgepodge Saint Nicholas, his doppelgänger Santa Claus, a popular illustration by Thomas Nast, Currier & Ives, and the story "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" by Clement Clarke Moore. The distinction, I think, is crucial: while believers in Jesus are expected to take the story of his birth as gospel truth all their lives, belief in Santa is only expected from children. When they grow up, their faith is extinguished by their embrace of a factual, rational universe in which it is absurd to accept the existence of a jolly old man (even if he is a saint) who distributes gifts to all subscribing children around the world - in one night!

The Polar Express is easily the most expensive ($165m) and elaborate of a long line of holiday movies that are committed to convincing children (and the child who lies dormant within all of us grownups) that Santa Claus exists. There are some - non-Christian foreigners, mostly - who are so confused by our juxtaposition of Jesus and Santa that they have come to the conclusion that the former is the latter as a young man. Who knows but that this confusion will become prevalent in succeeding generations that never adopt a religion, let alone reject one? Not only is the deployment of The Polar Express' motion capture technique taken to somewhat scary - even creepy - extremes, but its incorporation of every cliché about Santa and his elves on the North Pole (which is a piece of frozen ocean that is constantly on the move) is a sign of its determination to transcend critical judgement.

A recent Guardian article addressed the curious tolerance of film viewers for otherwise execrable films that have anything to do with Christmas.(1) The new movie, Last Christmas, written by Emma Thompson, has proved to be as awful as Love Actually - that Christmas-viewing favorite among the British. Factors that would otherwise sink a newly-released film - bad writing, predictable plots, poor execution (acting, directing, editing, etc.) - somehow has no effect on a holiday-themed film. One proof of the strange immunity of holiday films to criticism is the fact that no one watches them at any other time of the year. They are an integral part of the process with which we try to induce what is mysteriously known as the "Christmas Spirit." We play old songs like "White Christmas" and "Jingle Bells" and festoon our homes inside and out with garish decorations and lights - all of it designed to put us in the mood for the season. If the Christmas Spirit means anything to me, it's about memories of Christmases past. In a powerful way, continuing to keep Christmas well is a commemoration but also a kind of séance in which the ones I have lost are represented in spirit. I continue to take part in the old rites because they cannot.

I already declared, years ago, my favorite Christmas movie, made by Frank Capra. But it isn't It's a Wonderful Life, which Capra made after the war and is a film that I would love to remake. My favorite Christmas movie is Meet John Doe, but it isn't about Christmas. The film ends on Christmas Eve in the snow with distant bells ringing, but it wasn't supposed to. A desperate man has come to city hall to fulfill a promise - to jump from its roof at midnight if people didn't start loving one another.

In a speech earlier in the film, the title character (whose real name is John Willoughby, played with aching conviction by Gary Cooper), tries to convince anyone who is listening (on the radio) that it's time to live up to the Christmas ideal:

I know a lot of you are saying to yourselves, "He's askin' for a miracle to happen. He's expectin' people to change all of a sudden. Well, you're wrong. It's no miracle. It's no miracle because I see it happen once every year. And and so do you -- at Christmas time. There's somethin' swell about the spirit of Christmas, to see what it does to people, all kinds of people.

Now, why can't that spirit, that same, warm Christmas spirit last the whole year around? Gosh, if it ever did, if each and every John Doe would make that spirit last 365 days out of the year, we'd develop such a strength, we'd create such a tidal wave of good will that no human force could stand against it. Yes sir, my friends, the meek can only inherit the earth when the John Doe's start lovin' their neighbors. You better start right now. Don't wait till the game is called on account of darkness. Wake up, John Doe. You're the hope of the world.

John Doe's mistake was probably trying to stretch brotherly love too far (and too thinly). Of course, the Christmas Spirit simply can't last. It was never meant to, even when Christmas was a pagan celebration to tell the gods of winter that, no matter how cold and dark and dead the world around us may seem (with the winter solstice a week from today), we are here with our lights and life and abundance to defy it.

In these terms and in the old spirit of Christmas, I wish all of my readers (all five of you) a lustrous and joyous Christmas.


(1) The Nation, August 30, 1947.
(2) "Turkey anyone? Why standards slip at Christmas when it comes to film," by Steve Rose, 2 Dec 2019.

Something To Remember Him By

The Oriental Theater on Randolph St.

And when I wouldn't take her downtown to the Oriental Theatre she didn't deny herself the company of other boys.


It was last Saturday. I was sitting in the sala (living room) of my small, dark apartment late that morning on my Philippine island. But it wasn't 85 degrees, with my front door open so I had enough light to read by. I had been transported to Chicago in February by Louie, the narrator of Saul Bellow's story, "Something to Remember Me By."

One day in early February, 1933, Louie, 17 and in high school, lives through a day so exceptional, so incredible that it reveals to him the workings of a hidden force in his life, the very principles of existence. This unforgettable day, which Louie relates in old age to his grandchild, "began like any other winter school day in Chicago - grimly ordinary." Just how ordinarily grim, Bellow makes extraordinarily clear:

Chicago in winter, armored in gray ice, the sky low, the going heavy ... The temperatures a few degrees above zero, botanical frost shapes on the windowpane, the snow swept up in heaps, the ice gritty and the streets, block after block, bound together by the iron of the sky ... The street ice was dark gray. Snow was piled against the trees. Their trunks had a mineral black look. Waiting out the winter in their alligator armor they gathered coal soot ... The days short, the streetlights weak, the soiled snowbanks toward evening became a source of light. 

But, like a threnody, there is Louie's dying mother, so near to death that each day holds the threat of him returning home in the evening to a father who will embrace him or strike him with his fists in his "Biblical rage." Louie has an after-school job delivering flowers. On this particular day his delivery takes him to the city's North Side, an hour's ride by streetcar. He's delivering lilies to a family in mourning. He is shown through to the kitchen, past a room empty but for the coffin. He looks at the corpse, a girl older than his girlfriend, now "all buoyancy gone, a weight that counted totally on support, not so much lying as sunk in this gray rectangle."

His delivery done, by now almost dark, Louie visits the office of Philip, his dentist brother-in-law, with whom he can travel home. Philip isn't there. So Louie looks for him next door in a doctor's office. On entering an examining room, he encounters a young woman, lying naked on the table, copper wires attached to her wrists. Without showing the slightest embarrassment, letting him see everything, the woman dresses slowly. In his reminiscence written a lifetime later, Louie writes: 

As the woman raised both her arms so that I could undo the buckles, her breasts swayed, and when I bent over her the odor of her upper body made me think of the frilled brown papers in a box after the chocolates had been eaten--a sweet aftersmell and acrid cardboard mixed. . . The cells of my body were like bees, drunker and drunker on sexual honey (I expect that this will change the figure of Grandfather Louie, the old man remembered as this or that but never as a hive of erotic bees).

Complaining of muscle spasms in her back, the woman asks Louie if he can help her down the stairs to the street. Forgetting Philip, the hour, and his distance from home, Louie proceeds with her to the street, where she then asks him to take her home. "At the moment, a glamorous, sexual girl had me in tow. I couldn't guess where I was being led, nor how far, nor what she would surprise me with, nor the consequences."

But it's a setup, a prank that leaves Louie with no clothes and not even the seven cents for the streetcar fare. He finds clothes, but they're nothing but a woman's dress, a quilted bed jacket and a knitted tam. He puts them on and goes back to the street. Still looking for Philip, Louie locates a druggist who might know where he is. Mistaking Louie for a girl, the druggist suggests a neighborhood speakeasy where Philip sometimes went. 

Finding the place is easy enough. Inside, "A sort of bar was set up, a few hanging fixtures, some tables from an ice cream parlor, wire-backed chairs." The barman, a Greek, listens to Louie's misadventure. He sympathizes and offers to give him fifty cents if he will carry a drunk customer home. Louie gets him there and even cooks his two little girls a supper of fried pork chops. He feels his defilement is complete as the pork fat spatters onto his arms. "All that my upbringing held in horror geysered up, my throat filling with it, my guts griping." He looks in on the drunk, finds some pants and, putting them on, simply tucks the dress down them. He grabs a handful of pennies off the drunk's nightstand and leaves. 

Louie makes it home and is relieved when his father hits him on the head, instead of embracing him, a sure sign that his mother hasn't died. On the streetcar home he had thought of all the things his people did when someone died. "After a death, mirrors were immediately covered. I can't say what this pious superstition means. Will the soul of your dead be reflected in a looking glass, or is this custom a check to the vanity of the living?"

The meaning of Louie's long day in February is something he seeks in his books, something metaphysical. Yet he doesn't notice the signs he encounters along the way: the lilies, the dead girl in her coffin, the naked woman and her frustrated promise of gratified desire, only to be stripped naked himself and forced to scramble across the city wearing a dress.

When Louie escorts the woman to her "home," she asks him "What are you going to be, have you picked your profession?" But Louie is thinking

I had no use for professions. Utterly none. There were accountants and engineers in the soup lines. In the world slump, professions were useless. You were free, therefore, to make something extraordinary of yourself. I might have said, if I hadn't been excited to the point of sickness, that I didn't ride around the city on the cars to make a buck or to be useful to the family, but to take a reading of this boring, depressed, ugly, endless, rotting city. I couldn't have thought it then, but I now understand that my purpose was to interpret this place. Its power was tremendous. But so was mine, potentially. I refused absolutely to believe for a moment that people here were doing what they thought they were doing. Beneath the apparent life of these streets was their real life, beneath each face the real face, beneath each voice and its words the true tone and the real message. 

The woman notices the loose pages of a book in Louie's pocket. "You would have thought that the book or book-fragment in my pocket was a talisman from a fairy tale to open castle gates or carry me to mountaintops." He spends all his money on books. When his clothes are stolen, it's the book-fragment that he regrets losing the most.

Bellow's stories are almost all about loss, and about the salvages his protagonists achieve at the end - sometimes at the cost - of their lives. And they are always reaching for some design, a reason for, some solution to, the astonishing adventures that Bellow relates. Refusing to believe that the calamities that afflict them can have no ultimate point, they sometimes apply the most far-fetched reasoning, from a deservedly obscure book they once read, to make sense of it all. 

Giving proportion to what is out of all proportion. Like Chicago itself: "The city was laid out on a colossal grid, eight blocks to the mile, every fourth street a car line." The cars are streetcars. An hour's ride from home to the North Side. Louie would read on the long passage because, he claims, "Reading shut out the sights. In fact there were no sights - more of the same and then more of the same. Shop fronts, garages, warehouses, narrow brick bungalows." Louie trying to interpose the knowledge he finds in books on the immovable spectacle, the undeniable spectacle of city streets in all their ugliness and multitudinous meaning is the story's final irony. Bellow uses metaphors that add to the solidity of the world, making the world more substantial than it already is. Devoting the power of language to conveying the richness of sensual experience is Bellow's ultimate truth.

And then there were none

Before I let go of November, I have one more duty to perform - saying goodbye to one more of my heroes. The critic John Simon died last Sunday, the 24th, at the age of 94. His obituary was published hard upon in the New York Times. It had been waiting in their obituary files for a long time, when it became clear that Simon wasn't going away expediently. It is a balanced obituary, if not exactly fair, that touches all the bases: Simon's origins, between the wars, in what was then Yugoslavia and is now Serbia, his fluency in languages, his education in English public (i.e., private) school, moving to the U.S. in 1941, finishing his itinerant education with a PhD from Harvard in Comparative Literature. When he reviewed the Peter O'Toole remake of James Hilton's Goodbye, Mr. Chips, he wrote with uncharacteristic emotion: 

I must confess that Goodbye, Mr. Chips moved me to tears. But I must also confess that I attended the Leys School in Cambridge, the subject of Hilton's novel, and that I was one of those new boys who at the start of every Michaelmas term tramped up Trumpington Road to have tea with the kindly old retired master who was the model for Chips. So I may not be an unbiased judge.

He was mentored by Jacques Barzun, Dwight Macdonald, and Robert Brustein. On the dust jacket of Simon's 1971 collection Movies Into Film is this blurb from Macdonald: "John Simon is still our best film critic. He's literate, readable and scrupulously toughminded in his judgements."

Quite by accident, Simon was my introduction to contemporary film criticism. (James Agee was the first real film critic I encountered, but he died exactly three years before I was born.) Compared to his colleagues whom I was reading with equal avidity (both of whom - Vernon Young and Stanley Kauffmann - he singled out for praise), he was more exacting, less compromising, and his writing, though grammatically perfect (he frequently savaged other critics for their grammatical and syntactical gaffes), was inelegant and preoccupied with sometimes arcane puns. His fluency in several languages often saw him performing the invaluable - though thankless - task of correcting the dreadful subtitles of the many foreign-language films available on American screens.

I sometimes disagreed with him, but I found him, more often than any other critic I was reading in the '70s and '80s, to be right in his judgements. Whether or not I was right only posterity can prove. With John Simon's passing, what some called the Heroic Age of American film criticism has come to a close.