Dies the Swan

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

Tennyson, "Tithonous"


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death and the Artist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enchanted Hunters*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Unpleasantville

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Milk and Honey

The word “dystopian” is commonly used to describe a narrative work – a novel, play or film – that is set in some terrible, nightmarish but fictitious place. The word is used as the antithesis of utopian – an ideal place. Some critics have called Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon dystopian.(1) But Koestler wrote a work of fiction about people and places that are recognizable. He wrote about former revolutionaries, the old guard of Bolzheviks, who were still around at a time, after the death of Lenin and the expulsion of Trotsky, when Stalin was consolidating his absolute control on Russia. Stalin saw that, before he could have total control of where Russia was going, he first had to control the narrative of the revolution. Just as surely as Zeus devoured Athena so that she would sprout from his forehead, thereby making her a part of his own body and a product of his own power, Stalin had to rewrite history and erase the facts that came in conflict with his own, official, version of events. This called for what became known as the Great Purge. The old generation of revolutionaries who had witnessed and helped to shape the revolution had to be liquidated. But first they had to be denounced and as many of them as possible had to be persuaded to confess their own guilt, to apostatize their former views and then be led away to the executioner. 

Arthur Koestler, in the dedication that precedes the text of Darkness at Noon, wrote: The characters in this book are fictitious. The historical circumstances which determined their actions are real. The life of the man N. S. Rubashov is a synthesis of the lives of a number of men who were victims of the so-called Moscow Trials. Several of them were personally known to the author. This book is dedicated to their memory.”

Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov is one such victim of Stalin’s (identified as No. 1’s) purges. At the beginning of the novel he is arrested and imprisoned. The exact reasons for his arrest are unknown to him. And though he eventually learns the “reasons” he has been denounced, he also comes to the realization that they ultimately do not matter. He is to be destroyed because he knows the truth about the revolution, the direction of which has somehow gone desperately wrong. On one of his daily walks in the prison yard he is accompanied by a dim-witted farmer. He says to Rubashov, “A day like to-day, when one smells the melting of the snow in the air, takes hold of me. We will neither of us last much longer, your honour. They have crushed us because we are reactionaries, and because the old days when we were happy must not come back ...” 

“Were you really so happy in those days?” asked Rubashov; but the peasant only murmured something unintelligible, while his Adam’s apple slid up and down his throat several times.
Rubashov watched him from the side; after a time he said: “Do you remember the part in the Bible where the tribes in the desert begin to cry: Let us make a captain, and let us return into Egypt”? 

The peasant nodded eagerly and uncomprehendingly ... Then they were conducted back into the building.

Rubashov had referred, cryptically, to the moment in Numbers (14:4) in which the Jews, who had been brought out of captivity in Egypt by Moses, were beginning to doubt that they would ever see the Promised Land of which Moses had told them, a land of “milk and honey.” So they considered returning to Egypt, knowing full well what they were returning to. 

Rubashov is determined, at first, to die in silence, but his confinement and the certainty that he will be killed like all the others weakens his resolve. After days of isolation in his cell, he decides to sign a confession to crimes of which he is not guilty simply to save his neck, wanting only to be left alone, even in confinement. Pacing his cell, waiting for his interrogation, he ponders everything that has placed him in his position, while remaining convinced of the legitimacy of the revolution:

The discussions at the congresses during the Civil War had been on a level never before in history attained by a political body; they resembled reports in scientific periodicals—with the difference that on the outcome of the discussion depended the life and well-being of millions, and the future of the Revolution. Now the old guard was used up; the logic of history ordained that the more stable the régime became, the more rigid it had to become, in order to prevent the enormous dynamic forces which the Revolution had released from turning inwards and blowing the Revolution itself into the air. The time of philosophizing congresses was over; philosophical incendiarism had given place to a period of wholesome sterility. Revolutionary theory had frozen to a dogmatic cult, with a simplified, easily graspable catechism, and with No. 1 as the high priest celebrating the Mass. His speeches and articles had, even in their style, the character of an infallible catechism; they were divided into question and answer, with a marvellous consistency in the gross simplification of the actual problems and facts.

The whole thing was a pretty grotesque comedy, Rubashov thought; at bottom all this jugglery with “revolutionary philosophy” was merely a means to consolidate the dictatorship, which, though so depressing a phenomenon, yet seemed to represent a historical necessity. So much the worse for him who took the comedy seriously, who only saw what happened on the stage, and not the machinery behind it.

Finally, an old comrade, Ivanov, interrogates him in his cell:

Rubashov rubbed his pince-nez on his sleeve, and looked at him short-sightedly. “What a mess,” he said, “what a mess we have made of our golden age.” Ivanov smiled. “Maybe,” he said happily. “Look at the Gracchi and Saint Just and the Commune of Paris. Up to now, all revolutions have been made by moralizing dilettantes. They were always in good faith and perished because of their dilettantism. We for the first time are consequent. ...” “Yes,” said Rubashov. “So consequent; that in the interests of a just distribution of land we deliberately let die of starvation about five million farmers and their families in one year. So consequent were we in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we sent about ten million people to do forced labour in the Arctic regions and the jungles of the East, under conditions similar to those of antique galley slaves. So consequent that, to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death, whether it is a matter of submarines, manure, or the party line to be followed in Indo-China. Our engineers work with the constant knowledge that an error in calculation may take them to prison or the scaffold; the higher officials in our administration ruin and destroy their subordinates, because they know that they will be held responsible for the slightest slip and be destroyed themselves; our poets settle discussions on questions of style by denunciations to the Secret Police, because the expressionists consider the naturalistic style counter-revolutionary, and vice versa. Acting consequentially in the interests of the coming generations, we have laid such terrible privations on the present one that its average length of life is shortened by a quarter. In order to defend the existence of the country, we have to take exceptional measures and make transition-stage laws, which are in every point contrary to the aims of the Revolution. The people’s standard of life is lower than it was before the Revolution; the labour conditions are harder, the discipline is more inhuman, the piece-work drudgery worse than in colonial countries with native coolies; we have lowered the age limit for capital punishment down to twelve years; our sexual laws are more narrow-minded than those of England, our leader-worship more Byzantine than that of the reactionary dictatorships. Our Press and our schools cultivate Chauvinism, militarism, dogmatism, conformism and ignorance. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been. We have built up the most gigantic police apparatus, with informers made a national Institution, and with the most refined scientific system of physical and mental torture. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can see. For the energies of this generation are exhausted; they were spent in the Revolution; for this generation is bled white and there is nothing left of it but a moaning, numbed, apathetic lump of sacrificial flesh. ... Those are the consequences of our consequentialness. You called it vivisection morality. To me it sometimes seems as though the experimenters had torn the skin off the victim and left it standing with bared tissues, muscles and nerves. ...” “Well, and what of it?” said Ivanov happily. “Don’t you find it wonderful? Has anything more wonderful ever happened in history? We are tearing the old skin off mankind and giving it a new one. That is not an occupation for people with weak nerves; but there was once a time when it filled you with enthusiasm. What has so changed you that you are now as pernickety as an old maid?” Rubashov answered: “To continue with the same metaphor: I see the flayed body of this generation: but I see no trace of the new skin. We all thought one could treat history like one experiments in physics. The difference is that in physics one can repeat the experiment a thousand times, but in history only once. Danton and Saint-Just can be sent to the scaffold only once."

And Rubashov returns in his thinking to the metaphor of God’s chosen people in the desert:

What happened to these masses, to this people? For forty years it had been driven through the desert, with threats and promises, with imaginary terrors and imaginary rewards. But where was the Promised Land? 

Did there really exist any such goal for this wandering mankind? That was a question to which he would have liked an answer before it was too late. Moses had not been allowed to enter the land of promise either. But he had been allowed to see it, from the top of the mountain, spread at his feet. Thus, it was easy to die, with the visible certainty of one’s goal before one’s eyes. He, Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov, had not been taken to the top of a mountain; and wherever his eye looked, he saw nothing but desert and the darkness of night.


(1) The German title of the novel is Sonnenfinsternis, “Solar Eclipse”. It was hurriedly translated into English by Daphne Hardy, Koestler’s girlfriend, just before the Germans invaded France in May 1940.

Flesh and the Devil

I have always loved silent films, but I don't think I know why. I have some theories, but maybe it's nothing but the magic artificiality of the medium. People talk in silent movies. Some people think Charlie Chaplin never spoke, but he speaks in all of his films. We just can't hear his voice. Early on in my life as a cinephile I was lucky enough to see and fall in love with several great silent films, like Douglas Fairbanks’s The Thief of Baghdad and Rudolph Valentino’s The Son of the Sheik. Such films communicated in a language that is mostly forgotten today: a completely non-verbal language that you had to apprehend with your eyes alone. Although they used intertitles if there was something important being said by an actor and the films were accompanied by music scores sometimes written especially for them, the overpowering impression that a silent film left one with was that they were representations of an imaginary world. That was probably what attracted me to the silent films I saw in my teens – they were products of the imagination.

Among the silent films I saw in my teens were a few starring Greta Garbo, including A Woman of Affairs and Flesh and the Devil. I found them mesmerizing, so much so that my memories of them have remained vivid even after 45 years. I had a chance to watch Flesh and the Devil, made in 1926, again on Monday when it was screened by Turner Classic Movies, and, almost from the very start, my pleasant memory of it was shattered. What I found so intricately alluring then had now become intricately fake. William H. Daniels, who was Garbo’s favorite cinematographer, shot the film. The visuals are flawless, down to the costumes and the settings (although I found a few of the glass shots a tad obvious). As wonderful as the art direction, costume design and cinematography are, the overall effect is of an emphasis on the accuracy of physical details that completely overwhelm the falsity of the characters and their behavior toward one another.

Based on a novel by Hermann Sudermann, the film tries to stake out the same territory well-known to fans of Erich von Stroheim: turn-of-the-century Teutonic Europe, with its handsome military officers in riding boots and beautiful young ladies all married to wealthy old men who meet at balls and fall passionately in love. There are duels in Flesh and the Devil, the first dispatching the old husband. I was reminded of John Gilbert’s appeal as the hero, Leo von Harden (all the leading characters have a “von” in their names), but I was shocked to find Greta Garbo suddenly so uninteresting as Felicitas von Rhaden, the crux of the movie’s love triangle. The central relationship of the story is, unexpectedly, the love of Leo for his boyhood friend Ulrich von Eltz (the names alone are hilarious). After the usual turgid twists in the dime novel romance, the film closes with poor Garbo falling through the ice of an insufficiently frozen lake while Leo and Ulrich throw down their duelling pistols and embrace. A few air bubbles rising to the surface are all that’s left of Felicitas.

Garbo’s performance as Felicitas was beautiful in the incipient love scenes. She is certainly the aggressor, not the least for being more experienced than Leo. But then the film labors to attach the unfaithful wife tag to her, which became so tiresome for Garbo herself that she quit the business in 1940. She doesn’t handle her later scenes well precisely because they weren’t conceived as anything more than romantic clichés. At least half of Garbo’s allure in her films was manufactured beforehand by publicity. Now that the publicity is long forgotten, only the film itself is left for us to judge her by. I’d like to confess that, all these years later, Flesh and the Devil has perhaps something more going for it than Garbo. But it really isn’t very much.

Kevin Brownlow and David Gill did a splendid job, though, dusting off this old relic. Carl Davis’s music is once again memorable. But seeing it again taught me how a memory, especially from one’s youth, should be left right where it is, lodged in the past, untouched by corrosive experience.

Billy Dud

Having finally found the right moment, this past week, a month away from my 62nd birthday, to read Herman Melville’s Billy Budd (1) was not out of prejudice to either the opera composed by Benjamin Britten with a libretto co-authored by E. M. Forster, or the film directed by Peter Ustinov (who also starred as Starry Captain Vere) with a screenplay written by Ustinov, Robert Rossen and DeWitt Bodeen. (The script was based on a play adaptation by Louis O. Coxe and Robert H. Chapman.) Both the opera and the film are on a level of seriousness – of intent, anyway – to warrant one’s attention and both productions earned respectable notices. The film got it’s star, Terence Stamp, appearing in his first film role, a Golden Globe for his performance as the title character. 

The tale was left “finished” in manuscript when Melville died in 1891. But even in its “definitive” form, which was finally published in 1962, it’s hardly a finished Melville novel. It’s more of an excellent rough sketch for a great novel Melville might have, probably would have, written. Stanley Kauffmann, in his review of the Ustinov film, called it “the greatest scenario for a novel that I know.”(2)

Having just finished reading it – the version first published in England in 1924 – it does make one wish for more, rather as Fitzgerald’s tantalizingly unfinished The Last Tycoon does. That “more,” however, is not what either the opera or the film give to Melville’s tale. I won’t bother getting into the problems that various editors have had with the text, nor will I go near to the critical overkill to which it’s been subjected in the almost hundred years since it’s first appearance. Melville’s writing is sufficiently straightforward and transparent to allow for a wide range of interpretations. Clearly, Melville was drawn to the story because of its lyrical qualities, its engagement with hard and detailed facts that yet admit of a skyful of metaphors. Like the Pequod, the Indomitable, the ship on which the story is set, must first be allowed to sail of its own volition before it is turned into a symbol. 

Billy Budd is a study of the antagonism and irreconcilability of good and evil. Billy, a “handsome sailor,” presented by Melville as a specimen of singular beauty among the pressed crew of a Royal Navy ship, comes into conflict with the ship’s master-at-arms, James Claggart for no other reason, Melville implies, than that his existence is a stark reminder to Claggart of everything he lacks and that he is preternaturally disposed to despise – his innocent good-naturedness reflected by his strikingly appealing appearance. Practically the instant he recognizes these qualities in Billy, Claggart begins to devise a way to destroy him. After failing to entrap him in a conspiracy among other pressed sailors to mutiny (at a moment in English history in which mutiny is an especially menacing word), Claggart boldly accuses Billy of sedition to the captain of the ship, Captain Vere, himself. Fond of Billy, as is everyone else on his ship, the captain suspects the accusation to be a lie, but must hear Billy defend himself and calls him to his cabin. There, faced with Claggart’s calumny, a tragic flaw of Billy’s – a stammer that grows worse when he is overcome with strong emotions – renders him incapable of defending himself through speech.(3) Standing opposite his accuser, struggling with his stammer to answer Claggart’s lie, Billy suddenly lashes out with his fist, catching Claggart square on his forehead, killing him. “The body fell over lengthwise, like a heavy plank tilted from erectness. A gasp or two, and he lay motionless.”

This is the point at which Captain Vere comes to the fateful – and ordinarily unwarranted – decision to conduct a “drumhead court” that will seal Billy’s fate before the Indomitable returns to the fleet. At the back of Vere’s mind, and the background of Melville’s tale, is the specter of mutiny, and it is in order to avoid it that Vere decides to establish Billy’s guilt for the death of Claggart and to expeditiously hang him. Doubtless, given the same facts, another tribunal could have arrived at such a verdict and executed Billy. But the effect of Vere’s decision, and its summary enaction, does circumvent whatever disturbance Claggart’s death and Billy’s captivity may have aroused in the ship’s crew. The circumstances of Billy’s hanging are related by Melville in one if the greatest scenes in literature. With a noose around his neck, Billy shouts “God bless Captain Vere!” and the crew murmur the same words back, just as Billy is hoisted to the top of the mast and the morning sun shines on him. Billy’s body is summarily wrapped in his canvas hammock, cannon shot is placed inside to weigh it down, and it is slipped over the side of the ship, with some men making somber note how the seabirds flew for some time over the spot where the body went down. The Indomitable rejoined the fleet without further incident, and in an engagement with a French ship, Captain Vere is mortally wounded, dying with the words “Billy Budd” on his lips. 

In 1948 British composer Benjamin Britten suggested to E. M. Forster that he turn Billy Budd into a libretto for an opera he would compose. The four act version of Britten’s opera was performed in 1951. But Forster had made significant changes to the story that muddled the import of Melville’s tale. Forster was attracted to the project because he was convinced by clues in Melville’s texts that he was a “suppressed” homosexual. This interpretation has become more widespread than is justified. As James Fenton wrote, "[Melville] was a daring writer, yes, but he would not have thought of himself as daring in that particular direction."(4) 

E. M. Forster, however, interpreted Claggart’s and Captain Vere’s behavior towards Billy Budd in terms of their suppressed homosexual passions. However this interpretation severely narrows the full import of Melville’s tale, it’s what Britten used as the framework for his opera. He would make a similar mistake twenty years later with Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, taking a cue from Luchino Visconti’s horrible film, and turning it into a tale of frustrated homoerotic passion, instead of a great artist’s final attempt to attain what for him had only been fleetingly attainable: an ideal of beauty represented in his imagination by a beautiful boy he meets at a Venice resort. 

The opera of Billy Budd has at least the beauty of Britten’s music to distract one from Forster’s unfortunate libretto. With Peter Ustinov’s film there is no such distraction. It is, simply put, a maritime disaster. Though set aboard a ship, which would challenge even an experienced director to find solutions to the monotony of possible views of the action, Ustinov wastes the formidable talents of his cinematographer Robert Krasker with quite pedestrian set-ups. But his casting of the three principle roles would’ve impeded him anyway. Casting Terence Stamp as Billy was like the casting of Diane Kruger as Helen of Troy. He is a fine enough actor, but how could he possibly succeed in embodying Melville’s angelic “handsome sailor?” Claggart is played by a quite misplaced Robert Ryan, too old and too American. His menace toward Billy is clear enough, but reminded me too much of his many film noir heavies. But the most miscast role is Ustinov himself as Captain Vere. The most crucial scene in the book is the confrontation between Billy and Claggart in Captain Vere’s cabin. Ustinov’s poor direction has Billy knock Claggart down with two joined fists, which would’ve been slow, clumsy and probably ineffective in killing Claggart. Ustinov shows him falling down and hitting his head against a jutting wooden block, which is presumably what kills him. But not before Claggart opens his eyes and grins at Billy, knowing that he, to, is finished. In the tale, as I have described, Billy, who is taller than Claggart, kills him with one punch to his temple. 

In the scene of Billy’s hanging, Ustinov couldn’t show us the actual hanging, but instead shows Billy’s shoes dropping neatly together to the deck below where he is hoisted to his death. This suggests something that Melville doesn’t show: that hanging Billy caused him to convulse enough to throw off his shoes. It isn’t even subtle in the film. And the only thing in the film that stops the crew from mutiny upon Billy’s execution is the appearance of an enemy ship, which impels the men to their battle stations. It is a muddled conclusion to a mishandled adaptation of Melville’s tale which, while seemingly spare, possesses implications that are cosmic in scope.

(1) I didn’t read Moby Dick until I was 43. And I’m glad that I waited.
(2) A World on Film: Criticism and Comment (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). 
(3) “In this particular Billy was a striking instance that the arch interferer, the envious marplot of Eden, still has more or less to do with every human consignment to this planet of earth. In every case, one way or another he is sure to slip in his little card, as much as to remind us — I too have a hand here.”
(4) "The Sadist and the Stutterer," The Guardian, 2 December 2005.