Trespassing Bergman

In the documentary Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember (1997), the great Italian actor describes how, in the 1960s, busloads of foreign tourists would stop outside the house of Federico Fellini in Rome to maybe catch a glimpse of the great filmmaker. Fellini was as much a part of their Roman itinerary as the Colosseum, the Spanish Steps, and the Trevi Fountain. Fellini's life was a part of the show.

But Ingmar Bergman's life was nobody's business. Once he had become world famous, he sought to protect his privacy from goofball fans who trekked all the way to his home on the remote island of Fårö to catch a glimpse of him. In 2013, five years after Bergman's death, a documentary was released called Trespassing Bergman. The title of this curiously mocking documentary comes from the garrisoned house on Fårö (off Götland, if that is any help) to which some of the people in the film - all filmmakers - come to visit, where Bergman lived and worked (on and off) for forty years. To any true cinephile who ever held the work of Ingmar Bergman in high esteem (and I don't believe it's possible to be one and to not do the other), the film lurches from touching reverence to effrontery and back again.

There is a quite bizarre fetishism at work here, almost as if Bergman's corpse was in the room while some of the people invited inside were poking around his inner sanctum (his study, his movie-viewing room), rifling through his books and collection of videos. Daniel Espinosa confesses that he feels like he is "trespassing" in Bergman's home, and Claire Denis becomes strangely spooked and has to leave the house. But a number of them had clearly shown up to bury Bergman rather than praise him. And what a very odd bunch of people they assembled to trespass on Bergman! Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Michael Haneke, John Landis, Lars von Trier, Tomas Alfredson, Daniel Espinosa, Claire Denis, Wes Craven, Ang Lee, Thomas Vinterberg, Isabella Rossellini, Harriet Andersson, Zhang Yimou, Woody Allen, Laura Dern, Francis Ford Coppola, Takeshi Kitano, Holly Hunter, Wes Anderson, Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Pernilla August, Alexander Payne - all of them have something to say about Bergman's films, sometimes illuminating, sometimes not.

Ask your average movie fan today to name a "great" director and you might get answers like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, or Ridley Scott. Further down the scale you might get J. J. Abrams, James Gunn, or Matthew Vaughn. Ask them to name a great foreign director and you would probably get the name of one of the many foreign directors who, early in their careers, defected to Hollywood. Like Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Denis Villeneuve, or Alfonso Cuarón.

Well, none of these "great" directors comes even close to my standard of greatness - a standard established by Ingmar Bergman and a handful of other filmmakers. I simply can't use the word in connection with them without putting it between quotation marks. Some of them have made good films. Michael Haneke, Claire Denis, Ang Lee, Zhang Yimou. And I got the feeling that the makers of Trespassing Bergman at least sensed this as well. At one point, John Landis calls The Seventh Seal, the film that made Bergman almost a household word, a "joke" and Alexander Payne claims that it "doesn't hold up" and its once "profound" qualities are now "laughable." One of the problems that The Seventh Seal presents to the viewer is its solidity and concreteness. It isn't in the least abstract, which was Bergman's point. He wanted to show how, in the Middle Ages, things like death and hell weren't just concepts but extremely real, and he used medieval church paintings that represented death and the devil almost as everyday, familiar objects, as his jumping off point. Just because the film has been parodied so much doesn't diminish its power. People can parody the pared-down writing style of Ernest Hemingway without diminishing the greatness of The Sun Also Rises.

The worst offender by far is Lars von Trier, the Danish imbecile who appears to lack the ability to control the puerilities coming out of his mouth. After showing off an obscene figurine on his desk, he asserts that, because Bergman supposedly claimed to be in a constant state of sexual arousal, even into old age, he must have been masturbating nonstop. Coming from someone who has by now made several quite ineffective hardcore pornographic films, Trier's remarks are merely asinine.

Martin Scorsese speaks about his first encounters with Bergman's early films, especially Summer With Monika, but then points out that, for a Roman Catholic like him, Bergman was on the "condemned list." And Robert de Niro appears briefly to inform us that, because he was too busy to watch the Bergman films with which the filmmakers provided him, he wasn't able to comment on them. Wes Anderson, whose Paris home is shown off to no purpose, makes some remarks about the lack of "comedians" among Bergman's actors. Anderson is becoming somewhat legendary for producing the longest string of totally pointless films on record. He should be in the Guinness book by now.

But before we're halfway through the film, the focus shifts abruptly from Bergman's work to Bergman's women. One of the things that the film points out is how Bergman was attacked by a new generation of Swedish filmmakers and critics and how Bergman responded to them in The Silence and Persona, radical departures from conventional narrative films. Bergman could have easily ignored the new generation and relax in his renown, without making another film to stand alongside Smiles of a Summer Night and The Seventh Seal. The fact that he continued to make films that challenged viewers, like Winter Light and A Passion attests to his stature as an artist.

The 1970s were by far the most turbulent and difficult years for Bergman. He gave up asking difficult questions about God and death and focused instead on marriage and family. He had to flee charges of tax evasion in Sweden and work in Germany. I think his work during this period began to parody itself. When Woody Allen, who has always revered Bergman, made Interiors, which was released almost simultaneously with Bergman's Autumn Sonata, Vernon Young suggested that Bergman was copying or even parodying the style of Allen's film, rather than vice-versa. Isabella Rossellini makes the pertinent point that Bergman's portrayal of a successful woman ( Ingrid Bergman is a concert pianist in Autumn Sonata) who neglects her children and her family obligations is quite sexist, not to mention outdated.

Finally arriving at Fanny and Alexander, which was the most expensive film ever made in Sweden, earning the Swedish Film Institute some criticism for spending its entire budget for the year on one film, some actresses mention their nervousness working with Bergman, but Lars von Trier expresses his - justified, I think - outrage about how "blasphemous" Fanny and Alexander is because it is little more than a travesty of his life's work.


The film returns repeatedly to shots of Fårö, its stark landscape and stony beaches, its occluded horizons. You get a sense of how much it might have inspired Bergman, looking out on that denuded island, blasted by Baltic winds. It doesn't seem lonely so much as it might be populated by ghosts. There is a starkness that is beautiful, even lyrical, that only someone like Bergman would notice. After covering so much ground, the film closes with a touching moment when, in still photographs, a very old Bergman embraces Ang Lee. It offers us a kind of forgiveness for the trespassing we have all committed by watching this exasperatingly uneven documentary.

Tiny Tim Lives

Charles Dickens is generally credited, on the strength of just one of his many books, A Christmas Carol, with nothing less than the invention of Christmas as it is now popularly celebrated. When he composed the tale in the last months of 1843, what he had on his mind was his own survival, since his publisher was threatening to cut his royalties in half because of a slump in the sales of his books, and his wife was pregnant with their fifth child. But he also had in mind the survival of London's poorest residents, which is why A Christmas Carol, while it is perennially associated with the overwhelming access of cheer in Ebeneezer Scrooge in the story's final "stave," is otherwise very somber and sobering.

In his marvelous introduction to the story, G. K. Chesterton informs us of so much about Christmas and how Dickens observed it and transformed it. He is especially insightful in his observation that it was no confusion of pagan and Christian calendars that placed Christmas in winter:

It is the element not merely of contrast, but actually of antagonism. It preserves everything that was best in the merely primitive or pagan view of such ceremonies or such banquets. If we are carousing, at least we are warriors carousing. We hang above us, as it were, the shields and battle-axes with which we must do battle with the giants of the snow and hail. Man chooses when he wishes to be most joyful the very moment when the whole material universe is most sad.

George Orwell said as much when he remarked that we can only know happiness in terms of contrast: we recognize happiness when we find it in life because we know its opposite so well. Scrooge gives us a picture of man at his most unkind and at his most generous. This is why it is so difficult for an actor to be successful in the role. For, while some of the actors who have played Scrooge are most convincing at portraying one half of the role, they too often fall short in portraying the other.

Dickens wasn't so sophisticated about politics that he could explain to us how to make a world in which both Scrooge's insatiable greed and Tiny Tim's tubercular leg would be equally inadmissible. He didn't want to remake the world, despite how horribly ill-made it was when he found it. But he could use his art to place before us the two figures of Ignorance and Want in the form of children hidden in the folds of the second ghost's garments:

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable.They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

"Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!" exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked; and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

''Spirit! are they yours?" Scrooge could say no more.

"They are Man's," said the Spirit, looking down upon them. "And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. "Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end!''

This strange moment is often omitted from the Christmas Carol films. It introduces an element of polemics to the story. Those children continue to be, 175 years later, a powerful rebuke to a world that prides itself in - but can never live up to - its progressive values.

Despite Dickens's injection of serious purpose to his story, it was an immediate success (the first edition, published on December 19, was sold out by Christmas Eve), and it remains a favorite among his books. When he took up public readings, as always to make more money from his writings, he read A Christmas Carol to his delighted audiences. The English actor Seymour Hicks first performed as Scrooge in a stage production of A Christmas Carol in 1901. After playing him thousands of times on stage, he appeared in the role in a film made in 1913. It was only fitting, therefore, that Hicks should be the very first Scrooge in a sound film released in 1934 when he was 63. He was followed by Reginald Owen, Alastair Sim, Albert Finney, Michael Hordern, George C. Scott, Michael Caine, and lately by Jim Carrey and Patrick Stewart. And who can forget Rowan Atkinson's Blackadder Christmas Carol?

I don't remember which Scrooge was the first that I saw when I was a boy, but it was either Alastair Sim or Mr. Magoo (voiced by Jim Backus). Of all the ones I've seen, it's hard to tell which was the best Scrooge. The worst was Bill Murray in the insufferable "updating" of the tale called Scrooged. As I mentioned before, the role presents a singular difficulty to the actor, for, while it was relatively easy for Dickens to pull off the great change of heart that transforms Scrooge from a despicable, avaricious misanthropist into a sweet, lovable old philanthropist, it is exceptionally difficult for an actor to accomplish it in the span of a ninety minute movie. Alastair Sim failed because he was simply too endearing to begin with. He does the reformed Scrooge sweetly, but he fails to convince as the cruel old skinflint. George C. Scott presents us with the opposite problem. He is perfect as the bilious bastard through three quarters of the film, but is uetterly unbelievable as the loving and kind benefactor in the last quarter. Michael Caine acquitted himself beautifully, despite being surrounded by muppets. Jim Carrey is simply unqualified as the first (thoroughly creepy) "performance capture" Scrooge.

The problem with all the different film adaptations of the book is, since none of them is distinguished in cinematic terms (nobody has a reason to remember who directed each of them), the only thing that makes them distinguishable from one another is the actor who plays Scrooge. Only the lead actor can breathe life into the old tale. Which one is my favorite? Moira Armstrong directed a television adaptation in 1977 with Michael Hordern as Scrooge. It had a very small budget. (Why are only American films made wretched by shoestring budgets?) The outdoor scenes are drawings with the actors superimposed on them. And videotape doesn't age well. But, honestly, it is a far more evocative version than Robert Zemeckis's Walt Disneyfied version, with its CGI animation, the same sort that made The Polar Express the most unintentionally scary Christmas movie ever. And, as I already mentioned, Jim Carrey rings every false note.

Michael Hordern was Marley's Ghost to Alastair Sim's Scrooge in 1951. Consigned to supporting roles for most of his career, he was finally given a chance to play leading roles in the 1970s. Though he lacks the necessary menace to make us hate the former Scrooge, he is splendid in the latter stages, even better than Alastair Sim at his wimsiest. And, probably because I only recently unearthed a copy of the programme, which is just shy of one hour in length, Hordern is my favorite Scrooge.

What is it that brings about Scrooge's great metamorphosis? In his review of A Muppet Christmas Carol, Stanley Kauffmann wrote: "Foreknowledge of the sentimentalities in A Christmas Carol is no safeguard: it always makes me cry. Oscar Wilde, no Dickens enthusiast, said: 'One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell [in The Old Curiosity Shop] without laughing.' Well, one must have an even stonier heart to read of the melting of Scrooge without melting a little."

Is it the vision of his own corpse carelessly covered by a sheet or a headstone engraved with his name that so frightens Scrooge that he is moved to be a different man? The 3rd Ghost reveals to Scrooge what the unimposing portion of his world would be like upon the event of his death. In another well beloved Christmas tale, Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey is so afraid that he will be ruined by the accidental loss of a bank deposit that he resolves to take his own life, since his life insurance policy makes him worth more dead than alive. Before he can throw himself off a bridge, however, an angel falls in the river and, when George rescues him, the angel gives him a guided tour of what his small own would be like if he'd never been born. Such is the conceit of the tale that, of course, everything is worse off without George Bailey. Not even Dickens would stack the deck so shamelessly. When he has seen enough, George begs the angel to take him back, and they all lived happily after. But George only wanted to end his life, not nullify his whole lifetime. Capra wanted to show how interconnected our lives are, and how the removal of just one life affects the lives of everyone around it. Ten years ago on this blog, I proposed a remake of It's a Wonderful Life that took the story to an opposite extreme. The hero of the remake is shown how little his world is affected by his absence - except for one almost unnoticeable detail.

Scrooge begs the ghost of the future to give him another chance to make a positive impact on his world. And I believe the point at which I, too, always cry whenever I watch A Christmas Carol, is when Dickens tells us of the death of Tiny Tim. The Ghost of Christmas Present forebodes it:

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

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

Scrooge learns that the greatest rebuke to his greed is the effect it has on the most innocent life that it touches. The suffering of children is the most powerful challenge to all our principles - to our faith in goodness or in a beneficent God. For how can we believe in either when a child suffers or dies? If one child cannot be spared pain and death, of what use is a government, our laws, or progress? It is for Tiny Tim that Scrooge pleads for, and is granted, a second chance. His heart is broken by the fate of the child so that it should be made whole again.

Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.

And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!

New One

I never cease to be disabused of the intelligence of celebrities. They have lives prior to becoming celebrities, and some of them never forget what it was like being unknown. But the moment some of them become celebrities, everything they experience thereafter is something that they themselves just discovered. This is never more true than when they have kids. Women get pregnant and give birth and it's all they talk about - until it dawns on them that every woman who's listening has been there, too. And men become fathers and all they can talk about is their bewilderment and amazement - and their feeling of utter uselessness.

Mike Birbiglia has been around a few years. I saw him in Trainwreck (2015) playing - you guessed it - an insufferable dad. He reminds me of Dana Carvey doing one of his impressions. I mean, he's like a Dana Carvey who can't do impressions. He's now on Broadway doing his one-man show, "New One." Seeing him doing the rounds of the talk shows and listening to him talk about the subject of his show made me wonder why he didn't learn anything from playing an insufferable dad in Trainwreck.

He isn't the first man to become a dad. So he's probably also not the first man to wonder at being a dad. What puzzles me is that, after expressing what amounts to an extreme ambivalence about fatherhood, he encourages men who haven't become fathers to go through with it, too. I get the feeling that it isn't because he wants us to experience all of the glories of the position. He also wants us to feel his pain.

At one point in the show, after having "agreed" to the conception of a child, gone through his wife's 75-month pregnancy (his own estimation), and having begun to understand what it's like to be “evicted from your own life sponsored by you,” he finds himself sidelined when the baby is born, as all men (except for the doctor) are, saying “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I guess I’ll just write an email to everyone I’ve ever met. Which is really the chief responsibility of the dad. The mother births a double bowling ball out of her vagina and then the dad just knocks out an email.” Most men stoically accept the division of labor (pun) involved in child-bearing. What else can they do? Go onstage and whinge about it? There are worlds that are forever closed off to men. But "womb-envy" is something better sublimated than openly expressed. Yes, Victor Frankenstein engendered human life all on his own and look where it got him (not to mention his poor creation).

The birth over, Mike's home life settles into its routine. But he gets into some trouble when he talks onstage about how his wife breastfeeds their child at the kitchen table while he washes the dishes. His wife had to remind him that he never did the dishes. They argue, and when he's alone he thinks (and repeats in his show) “I get why dads leave.” Oh, so that's why they leave? I thought it was some other reason. In most cases, I've found, fathers leave BECAUSE THEY CAN.

My father was always there, a rock. But a quiet, emotionally distant rock. Of course, I've found out since he died that he was that way only with my brother and me. To my sisters he was much more approachable, which makes perfect Freudian sense. I sometimes wish he had been a bit more of a presence in my life. But after listening to Mike Birbiglia's querulous prattle on the subject of being a father, I changed my mind. Thank you, daddy (I never called him "dad"), for being a functioning father in silence.

But I am childless. I live with a woman who once cried because she couldn't give me a child. Years before I met her, after her fifth - and final - pregnancy, which resulted in a C-section because her womb was shared by her daughter and an ovarian cyst the size of a 1-liter Coke bottle, the doctor put her under and performed a radical hysterectomy. The baby's father was the father of her two big brothers (a third boy died in infancy). When the daughter was 3, he seized the opportunity to bugger off - leaving the woman (they weren't married) alone to raise his three children, along with an older daughter from another relationship. When I entered her life 11 years ago and I came to live on my island, I brought her along with three of her children. Two of them have since grown up and moved out. I was their surrogate father, providing for them in a fashion their "real" father could never have managed. As the saying goes, I put a roof over their heads, clothes on their backs, and food on the table.

Now tell me, Mike Birbiglia, what is a father?

Hobbitual

For everything, it seems, there is a category, a classification, or a genre to which it must be assigned before any discussion of it can get off the ground. I recently blundered onto a blog devoted to film wherein the author described what are now known as "art-house films" and their relation to "other film genres". It's probably no accident that the contemporary film consumer should have come up with the idea of placing films that defy categorization - like Renoir's The Rules of the Game, Antonioni's L'Avventura, Ozu's Late Spring, and our very own category-defying Citizen Kane - in a separate section of the Netflix catalog. There was simply nowhere else to put them. I posted a comment on the blog, asking, "Since when is art a 'genre'? Unless you have conceded, at last, that L'Avventura is art and The Searchers is a Western?"

Every writer who attempts a work of fiction works in two directions. They work to set down a record of the world as they see it or as they think it really is. But they also work, whether they know it or not, to record their visions, a world that exists only inside their heads. So however much they might strive to be "objective" and be nothing more than a pair of eyes, sacrificing their egos to the objects of their love, every word they write is a personal choice that inevitably reveals their presence in the created work.

For the past few decades, a seismic shift has occurred in American popular culture. Its first manifestations occurred in the mid-1970s, when two filmmakers, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, rose to such unprecedented prominence that they eventually established their own production companies, enjoying artistic freedom that rarely existed before. And they made a number of films that set box office records. The films they produced are examples of what I would call belated juvenilia - films that abide by an implied pact between the filmmaker and the viewer that adulthood is regrettable and that the point of their lives sometime prior to adulthood is not just preferable but endlessly renewable.

Go back still further in American pop culture to the 1950s, when the dictatorship of youth transformed popular music. A generation of Baby Boomer teens, with disposable incomes of their own, took music away from their parents' generation and haven't relinquished it since. So instead of songs written by and for adults, speaking from an experience of life and of love, exploring and satisfying that experience in creative ways, songs were passed into the hands of children who needed nothing but lyrics that strung together comforting platitudes through endless variations of cliché. A generation of singers, whose oldest survivor today is Tony Bennett, that responded to the challenge of singing and creating standards in ways distinctive enough to make the standards their own, were replaced by singers whose talents were drowned out by the screams of teen-aged girls, singing songs that addressed the problems of teenagers.

And if you look back still further to 1937, to popular fiction, an otherwise insignificant book called The Hobbit was published in England, quickly followed by an edition in America. It was an elaborate fantasy story marketed to children, replete with maps and illustrations of hobbit characters, as well as various elves and dwarves that inhabit an alternate world that existed long before industry and technology, where magic antedates religions, reminiscent of Europe's oldest fairy tales that emerged from extinct mythologies. The author of The Hobbit was J. R. R. Tolkien, a most unlikely teller of fairy tales: an Oxford scholar of philology, of ancient dead languages and the epics and sagas written in them. Spending most of his creative life with these languages and their obscure significance and meanings known only to him and his colleagues, Tolkien tried, evidently, to expand and improve on them, without having to appeal to any scholarly authority, but deriving from scholarship of the highest authority. But it was marketed as a children's book.

So serious was Tolkien, however, that his fairy tales should be taken seriously, when he learned of an American publisher's interest in The Hobbit that expressed their intention to publish color illustrations to supplement Tolkien's own drawings, Tolkien wrote to his British publisher, Allen & Unwin, “It might be advisable, rather than lose the American interest, to let the Americans do what seems good to them - as long as it was possible (I should like to add) to veto anything from or influenced by the Disney studios (for all whose works I have a heartfelt loathing).”

According to his biographers, Tolkien had gone to see Disney's first feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, accompanied by fellow Oxford don C. S. Lewis, and took umbrage at the depiction of the dwarfs. Who else but the creator of a (literary) world filled with elves and dwarves [to use Tolkien's spelling] should sit in judgement of Disney's silly misrepresentation of a classic fairy tale? What probably bothered Tolkien the most was that audiences took to Disney's film precisely because it is unlearned. Otis Ferguson, who called Snow White the best film of 1938, said that he found "something beautiful about all of it, I think, because it does not try to be wise about fairy tales, or fairy talish about its birds, rabbits, people." (1)

In 2009, I wrote in a post called "The Fairest of Them All" the following: "It was perhaps inevitable that folk tales should have been exiled to the nursery. before we renamed them fairy tales and heavily censored them, they were a kind of cultural subconscious. The original tales, like the ones collected by the Brothers Grimm, are filled with strange imagery and associations that only an ethnographer would understand." Or, indeed, a philoligist. But Tolkien rejected my hypothesis: "Folk-lore origins (or guesses about them) are here quite beside the point. It is of little avail to consider totemism." This line is from Tolkien's essay, "On Fairy Stories" in which he addressed the subject with much feeling and authority. What is most clear from my reading of the essay is that Tolkien wanted to rescue fairy tales from the nursery and convince people that they were worthy of being taken seriously. "Is there any essential connexion between children and fairy-stories? Is there any call for comment, if an adult reads them for himself? Reads them as tales, that is, not studies them as curios. Adults are allowed to collect and study anything, even old theatre programmes or paper bags."

Tolkien described how he himself came upon fairy stories:

"I was keenly alive to the beauty of 'Real things,' but it seemed to me quibbling to confuse this with the wonder of 'Other things.' I was eager to study Nature, actually more eager than I was to read most fairystories; but I did not want to be quibbled into Science and cheated out of Faerie by people who seemed to assume that by some kind of original sin I should prefer fairy-tales, but according to some kind of new religion I ought to be induced to like science. Nature is no doubt a life-study, or a study for eternity (for those so gifted); but there is a part of man which is not 'Nature,' and which therefore is not obliged to study it, and is, in fact, wholly unsatisfied by it."

But one important aspect of Tolkien's "escape" into fairy stories was his first-hand experience of war. He served in the British Army in World War I and his experience created in him a profound hatred for the modern world. "A real taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war." In other words, his discovery of ancient languages at university, followed by the traumatic experience of war, gave him a place of refuge from the modern world that could create such things as the maxim gun and mustard gas, whose effects on human beings he witnessed in the trenches.

But the subject of writing stories exclusively for children became an issue for Tolkien when his Lord Of the Rings trilogy was published, books that he insisted were written for an adult audience rather than for children. Literary critics (some of them anyway) took exception with Tolkien's claim. One review of The Rings that has had its own kind of immortality was written by Edmund Wilson. "Oo, Those Awful Orcs" is available for perusal in Wilson's collection, The Bit Between My Teeth, but, curiously, it is available online, quoted in its entirety, on some Tolkien fanzine sites, where Wilson's essay is used as an illustration of the lengths to which a literary critic will go to express his skepticism of their religion.

"Dr. Tolkien has announced that this series – the hypertrophic sequel to The Hobbit – is intended for adults rather than children, and it has had a resounding reception at the hands of a number of critics who are certainly grown-up in years." But Wilson, who had previously expressed his distaste of detective and horror fiction, refused to taken in by Tolkien's fairy stories. "One is puzzled to know why the author should have supposed he was writing for adults. There are, to be sure, some details that are a little unpleasant for a children’s book, but except when he is being pedantic and also boring the adult reader, there is little in The Lord of the Rings over the head of a seven-year-old child. It is essentially a children’s book – a children’s book which has somehow got out of hand, since, instead of directing it at the “juvenile” market, the author has indulged himself in developing the fantasy for its own sake ... An impotence of imagination seems to me to sap the whole story. The wars are never dynamic; the ordeals give no sense of strain; the fair ladies would not stir a heartbeat; the horrors would not hurt a fly."

Instead of simply dismissing Wilson's review as the expression of opinion that it is, and agreeing to disagree, some of these online Tolkien sites interrogate - feebly - Wilson's own motives for not falling in line with their orthodoxy. Especially since Wilson briefly examines the psychology of Tolkien's fiercest supporters - their insatiable taste for what I identified above as Belated Juvenilia:

"Now, how is it that these long-winded volumes of what looks to this reviewer like balderdash have elicited such tributes as those above? The answer is, I believe, that certain people – especially, perhaps, in Britain – have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash. They would not accept adult trash, but, confronted with the pre-teen-age article, they revert to the mental phase which delighted in Elsie Dinsmore and Little Lord Fauntleroy and which seems to have made of Billy Bunter, in England, almost a national figure. You can see it in the tone they fall into when they talk about Tolkien in print: they bubble, they squeal, they coo; they go on about Malory and Spenser – both of whom have a charm and a distinction that Tolkien has never touched."

Perhaps in anticipation of Wilson's incredulity, Tolkien, in his "On Fairy Stories" essay, attacks the criticism directly:

"I do not deny that there is a truth in Andrew Lang's words (sentimental though they may sound): 'He who would enter into the Kingdom of Faerie should have the heart of a little child.' For that possession is necessary to all high adventure, into kingdoms both less and far greater than Faerie. But humility and innocence - these things 'the heart of a child' must mean in such a context - do not necessarily imply an uncritical wonder, nor indeed an uncritical tenderness. Chesterton once remarked that the children in whose company he saw Maeterlinck's Blue Bird were dissatisfied 'because it did not end with a Day of Judgement, and it was not revealed to the hero and the heroine that the Dog had been faithful and the Cat faithless.' 'For children,' he says, 'are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.'”

The issue arises again whenever J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books are examined by anyone other than fans of the books. They wonder that such "young adult" fiction [a stupid term, equal to "old child" perhaps?] that centers on the fantastic adventures of adolescents in an imaginary world should attract adult readers. I won't go there, since I have never read any of Rowling's books, and the films did nothing to change my mind. (I loved, however, all of the great old actors in the films, some of whom we have since lost to various ailments of extreme old age.) I could, but I have not, expressed the wish that Harry Potter had come along in 1970, when I might have been (but wasn't) more amenable to its attractions.

Tolkien wrote about one of the requirements of reading fairy stories, the "suspension of disbelief."

"Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker's art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called 'willing suspension of disbelief.' But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a  successful “sub-creator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed."

But this is precisely where I find myself when I read Tolkien, or listen to popular music (which includes several genres, like rock, pop, rap/hip hop, country, et al), or watch the Indiana Jones or Star Wars movies - on the sidewalk outside, in the Primary World, my credulity reawakened, my disbelief functioning fully.

All of which reminds me of a remark made by G. B. Shaw in reference to the faith we have developed (even while some of us - including the current American president - seem to have abandoned) in Science:

"I have pointed out on a former occasion that there is just as much evidence for a law of the Conservation of Credulity as of the Conservation of Energy. When we refuse to believe in the miracles of religion for no better reason fundamentally than that we are no longer in the humor for them we refill our minds with the miracles of science, most of which the authors of the Bible would have refused to believe. The humans who have lost their simple childish faith in a flat earth and in Joshua's feat of stopping the sun until he had finished his battle with the Amalekites, find no difficulty in swallowing an expanding boomerang universe."

Look out. The Flat-Earthers are back.


(1) Otis Ferguson, "Walt Disney's Grimm Reality," The New Republic, January 26, 1938.

Damn Statistics

Last week I found a video clip of Buddy Rich on the Mike Douglas Show in 1971. Rich briefly showed off his drumming virtuosity, and then he sat down as Douglas brought out another guest. It was the character actor, George Lindsey, better known for playing Goober, the brother of Gomer Pyle, on The Andy Griffith Show. The conversation turned to country music, and Douglas mentioned that Rich had some strong opinions of country music, to which he responded with some enthusiasm: "I think that it's about time this country grew up in its musical taste, rather than making the giant step backwards that country music is doing." I don't think I've ever heard anyone attack the music genre as directly and emotionally as Rich did. He even called Glen Campbell, the "Wayne Newton of country music."

Rich was not only a great jazz musician. He was a great advocate and ambassador of jazz. He had to be because by 1971, when that particular episode of the Mike Douglas Show aired, jazz was already experiencing its great decline in popularity that would eventually see it almost disappear in the '70s. Jazz artists who wanted to be heard, who wanted to make a living commensurate with their talents, had to play some other kind of music to even survive. And who could blame them? Who could blame George Benson, who was one of the greatest jazz guitarists of his generation, for recording the album Breezin', which is marked the beginning of a movement of jazz musicians turning their backs on straight ahead jazz and playing a watered down, commercialized music instead, music that David Sanborn called "instrumental pop."

Jazz is the greatest musical idiom of the 20th century. With classical music in decline, and symphony orchestras surviving only on public fund drives, listeners who wanted to hear how a musical intelligence responded to their times, instead of to the music of composers long dead, found in jazz a worthy alternative. In the 1930s and '40s Swing music was the most popular musical genre. It wasn't exactly jazz, but it was heavily influenced by jazz and waz the closest that jazz ever came to being America's popular music. After the war, as the big bands were broken up, musicians turned to smaller combos in smaller clubs. Be-Bop created the form that jazz would take into the '60s, until some of them went too far, either into experimental free jazz that left most listeners behind in the dust, or fusion jazz that corrupted the form by trying to incorporate different idioms like funk.

The jazz music that survives today is Post-Bop, and sounds like a somewhat ossified form that is a throwback to the '60s. But at least jazz is still alive. Not long ago, I heard, or thought I'd heard, a staggering statistic - that sales of jazz albums worldwide constituted only 3% of total album sales. If that weren't saddening enough, what I came up with in my statistical search* made me at least twice as sad. In the U.S., where jazz was invented, the amount of the album total in 2017 was 1.2%. Of the twenty music genres, jazz was ranked tenth, after "Religious" (2.9%). What a kick in the head. It made me wonder what Buddy Rich would've said. He probably would've said that jazz was his religion.

But then I noticed that "Classical" music was even less popular, ranked 12th at 1.1%, with Blues and Folk music barely registering at 18th and 19th place, each with 0.4% of total sales. So, altogether, what I regard as the most challenging and most authentic music genres constituted a total of 3.1% of album sales in the U.S. Country music, which Buddy Rich couldn't resist ridiculing, is ranked 5th, with 8.1% of total sales. By far, the three most popular genres, constituting 56.9% of total sales, are Rock (22.2%), Rap/Hip Hop (17.5%) and Pop (17.2%).

I'm not going to waste time splitting hairs trying to define the differences between the genres, even if all three of the top sellers are technically all "Pop". The Beatles, for example, were a Pop band, as The Rolling Stones, their closest competitor, made abundantly clear. And while there is some serious Hip Hop music, most of Rap is so aggressively and disgracefully misogynistic that Wynton Marsalis, the unofficial contemporary ambassador for jazz, and for African-American contributions to music, often has to struggle against the image of black music that Rap/Hip Hop presents to the world.

And the argument that the top three genres appeal primarily to the uninformed musical tastes of the young doesn't hold up, since Rock has been around for more than sixty years and the generation of performers from what was the greatest era of Rock music, the 1970s, is already starting to die out. Rock originated as watered-down R & B, but has since moved into several sub-genres of its own. (R & B, which is at least true to its origins, out-sells Country at 8.7% of total album sales.)

Country has never made sense to me, unless it was when Ray Charles borrowed it with songs like "Georgia On My Mind" and "You Don't Know Me." Some have claimed its origins were in the Blues, like every other American musical genre. If there's a trace of the Blues in Country, I can't hear it. It appeals, exclusively it appears, to Red State white folks.

The statistics don't lie, but what if the list were turned upside down? Jazz would then be ranked 11th, but at least the worst music would be on the bottom where it belongs. But there has never been a clear correlative - except in the tiny minds of businessmen - between what sells and what's good.

If one were to limit oneself just to one instrument - the piano - the number and variety of talented Jazz pianists is daunting. Whether it's the technical brilliance of Oscar Peterson and Herbie Hancock or the idiosyncratic genius of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner, there is so very much to hear, and hear again and again in the extraordinary recordings from the 1950s and '60s. Jazz wasn't the heavily orchestrated sound of Gordon Jenkins and Nelson Riddle, although they were a part of it. It was musicians creating every time they went onstage something out of thin air - the same air you were breathing if you were lucky enough to be in the club on the night they performed. The recordings were sometimes single takes, but sometimes there were alternate takes that demonstrate just how freely they could improvise. When John Coltrane launched into his saxophone solo, and it lasted sometimes ten or fifteen minutes, his drummer, Elvin Jones, would sometimes have to bring him back down to earth by tapping the rim of a drum. I was just a boy when Coltrane died, but I still think of his music as the music of my age. To not know it, to not respond to the challenge it presents to the listener, is to be wilfully ignorant. Fewer and fewer people, it seems, have an appetite for exaltation. So what if Jazz is such a lonely and private place by now?


* The statistics can be found here.

The Verdict

As much as I would love for this to be my review of the marvelous Sidney Lumet film, The Verdict (1982), starring Paul Newman in top form as down-on-his-luck public attorney (and sometime ambulance chaser) Frank Galvin, it is not. That laudatory review will have to wait for another day. Instead, what I want to present to you, dear reader, is a possibly fate-sealing verdict from the source of my financial support for the past decade. It may yet be the end of me. And, looking back over the calamitous decade that commenced when I left my sister in Anchorage, Alaska and flew to the Philippines, how could I not see this coming? 

(In the months leading up to his death in 1966, Lenny Bruce would introduce to his comedy act, much to the displeasure of his audience, the humorless details of the legal actions being taken against him. I hope I'm not beginning to sound like poor Lenny.)

The letter from the VA Debt Management Center arrived, via email from a family member (I'm using an address in the States as my "home of record"). Mailed on November 19,(*) the Monday before Thanksgiving, it wasn't delivered until November 26, and I have until December 19 to reply or they will go ahead with what they are threatening to do. The letter states:

The Department of Veterans Affairs recently sent you a letter explaining that your entitlement to Compensation and Pension benefits had changed. As a result, you were paid $XXXX.XX more than you were entitled to receive. Since you are currently receiving VA benefits, we pkan to withhold $(the full amount of my monthly benefits) until the amount you were overpaid is recouped. The withholding is scheduled to begin on February 2019.

So at least my Christmas table won't be bare. But what sort of cheer can come from the prospect of the end of the world come February? But the VA shone a light at the end of the tunnel. In a paragraph that opens with the words What are your options?, it reads:

PLEASE TAKE ACTION: Pay the debt.

or PLEASE TAKE ACTION: Set up a payment plan.
... if the recoupment plan above causes undue financial hardship, you can request an extended monthly recoupment plan with a financial status report.

or PLEASE TAKE ACTION: Request a waiver or dispute the debt
If you cannot repay the debt as proposed on the front of this letter, we will work with you to set up a reasonable repayment plan.

Then the letter closes with the obligatory - and somewhat hypocritical - words, "Thank you for your service to our country." (I can hear my father interjecting "Blow it out your ass!")

So I went to an internet café, printed out the forms (VA form 5655 Financial Status Report), and filled them out. 

While going over my financial statement, detailing my expenses against my income, I had to be brutally honest. The amount of my expenses matched that of my income. I have been criticized in the past (by my dear sister) for not saving what little money I have left after I kept the wolf from my door. My excuse is always the same. When you live without everything but what you need to survive, you watch the commercials on TV that scream at you for not buying some crap you don't need but which they insist is the only thing that will make your happiness complete, and you're an American and born & bred in a culture of instant gratification, and the result is you live in perpetual frustration. So when you discover there's an extra ten bucks in your pocket after the bills are paid, the very last thing you think of doing is putting the money away for a rainy day. Because it's always raining here. Maybe the next flood is coming and we don't know it?

My request for a waiver had to be made in writing. So I enclosed a letter with my financial report, once again telling the story that I've had to tell dozens of times. I last told the story on November 18 (see Thankless).

So, I'm in great danger of not only being stranded in a foreign country, which is how I've been living for eleven years, but of being stranded here without any financial support. And it gets worse. The VA may not believe me. For years I have tried to convince my friends of the seriousness and desperation of my predicament. I gave them some glimpses of what livibg in the Sticks is like - the typhoons, earthquakes, and floods, the incessant power failures, the inescapable heat, the bugs. But I failed. All of my skills as a writer that I brought to bear on the task of convincing them that I desperately want to get out of here have miserably failed. They don't believe me. They regard my being here as purely voluntary, and they don't believe that I really want to leave. I managed to convince only one of them that I needed help in acquiring a replacement passport, and he helped me over the relatively minor hurdle of getting to the embassy in Manila, paying the fee, and returning. That was in 2016. But once I had the passport, he told me that I then had the liberty to stay or leave. But, of course, I did not. I still have to find the wherewithal to pay for the ten years' worth of visas that I never got, as well as a plane ticket home to somewhere in the States I could expect someone to take me in. But I guess he didn't believe that, either. 

Suppose the VA does the same - suppose they don't believe that I'm stranded here. If none of my friends believed me, why should the VA?

The upcoming Christmas has the potential of being the most precious holiday for at least the past decade - and all the more precious for potentially being the last. I will try and reflect some of its emotion in my upcoming posts.


* It was dated November 18, a Sunday, which was almost certainly a clerical error. Government employees (like Catholic prostitutes) never work on Sundays.

Tango del Violador

Out of respect for languages I never learned, or didn't learn thoroughly enough, I usually avoid reading poetry in translation. Of course, I've read the classics in translation, and some of my favorite authors, like Chekhov, Camus, and Kawabata, I know only from translations. But it's prose. As Virginia Woolf explained, "to know a language one must have forgotten it, and that is a stage that one cannot reach without having absorbed words unconsciously as a child. In reading a language that is not one's own, consciousness is awake, and keeps us aware of the surface glitter of the words; but it never suffers them to sink into that region of the mind where old habits and instincts roll them round and shape them a body rather different from their faces."

Despite my ignorance of Spanish, however, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda is one of my heroes. But you, dear reader, must know this if you've looked up this blog on a web search. "Widower's Tango" (Tango del Viudo) is the title of a Neruda poem that he included in his collection, Residence on Earth. I chose to name my blog after the poem for reasons that I described in a post on February 1, 2011. In 2001, I copied a page from the life of Neruda when I waited until my wife left our apartment at around 11 AM and watched her drive out of sight. Then I moved a van I had rented the day before to the bottom of the stairs, filled several empty boxes with all of my clothes, books, videos, cds - everything that I still considered to be mine - and carried them down to the van. When I was done, I taped a note to the screen of our big screen TV (far too heavy to carry down three flights of stairs), locked the front door, slid the key under it, and drove from Denver to Des Moines, Iowa without stopping. I hadn't told her I was leaving. The note said I had gone to San Diego. I left her in such a manner because I couldn't think of any other way to get away clean. 

Neruda found himself in a similarly impossible predicament with a Burmese woman he called Josie Bliss. I won't recount the whole story. It can be found in his Memoirs, first published (in Spanish) in 1974, and in English translation (by Hardie St. Martin) in 1977. Neruda was involved in the editing of the book when he died of cancer in 1972. The editing was completed and the book was published with the revelatory title, Confieso que he vivido: Memorias - "I confess that I lived".

And then everything I knew - or thought I knew - about Neruda was called into question when, the day after Thanksgiving, I read this headline from The Guardian: "Poet, hero, rapist – outrage over Chilean plan to rename airport after Neruda". It was the first time I'd heard anything about Neruda being a rapist. Doing a little digging, I learned that the accusation has been a hot potato since 2010, when Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian socialist provocateur, quoted a passage from Neruda's Memoirs as an example of liberal hypocrisy. In the book, the particular passage quoted by Žižek comes right after Neruda had been revisited by Josie Bliss in Ceylon and he had to pack her off back to Burma to keep her from being arrested and forcibly deported. Here is the entire passage that has caused all the latest controversy:

My solitary bungalow was far from any urban development. When I rented it, I tried to find out where the toilet was; I couldn't see it anywhere. Actually, it was nowhere near the shower, it was at the back of the house. I inspected it with curiosity. It was a wooden box with a hole in the middle, very much like the artifact I had known as a child in the Chilean countryside. But our toilets were set over a deep well or over running water. Here the receptacle was a simple metal pail under the round hole.

The pail was clean every morning, but I had no idea how its contents disappeared. One morning I rose earlier than usual, and I was amazed when I saw what had been happening.

Into the back of the house, walking like a dusky statue, came the most beautiful woman I had yet seen in Ceylon, a Tamil of the pariah caste. She was wearing a red-and-gold sari of the cheapest kind of cloth. She had heavy bangles on her bare ankles. Two tiny red dots glittered on either side of her nose. They must have been ordinary glass, but on her they were rubies.

She walked solemnly toward the latrine, without so much as a side glance at me, not bothering to acknowledge my existence, and vanished with the disgusting receptacle on her head, moving away with the steps of a goddess.

She was so lovely that, regardless of her humble job, I couldn't get her off my mind. Like a shy jungle animal she belonged to another kind of existence, a different world. I called to her, but it was no use. After that, I sometimes put a gift in her path, a piece of silk or some fruit. She would go past without hearing or looking. That ignoble routine had been transformed by her dark beauty into the dutiful ceremony of an indifferent queen.

One morning, I decided to go all the way. I got a strong grip on her wrist and stared into her eyes. There was no language I could talk with her. Unsmiling, she let herself be led away and was soon naked in my bed. Her waist, so very slim, her full hips, the brimming cups of her breasts made her like one of the thousand-year-old sculptures from the south of India. It was the coming together of a man and a statue. She kept her eyes wide open all the while, completely unresponsive. She was right to despise me. The experience was never repeated.


For me, the strangest thing about this story, which took place in 1929, is not Neruda's forthright confession of what he had done to the Tamil woman, or his evident contrition, but how it could've been in print for 36 years, in its original Spanish and in translations into several other languages, read by thousands of people, including critics and biographers, before anyone had a problem with it.

In my online search for articles using the keywords "Pablo Neruda rapist", I found one (one was enough) written by a journalist (1) who clearly made up a story about how she had just bought a bagful of Neruda books, along with the new biography of Neruda by Mark Eisner, Neruda: The Poet’s Calling, had read the incriminating passage from Neruda's Memoirs while riding the subway, and, after interviewing Eisner, who was fair enough to tell her "he was incredibly influential as a human being, and played such a historic role that included so many political events, and he’s so important for understanding social and artistic movements”, took all of her Neruda books off her shelf and threw them into a recycle bin.

But there is a passage in Neruda's Memoirs that comes just before the rape that provides some welcome context for his mistreatment of the Tamil woman:

Solitude in Colombo was not only dull but indolent. I had a few friends on the street where I lived. Girls of various colorings visited my campaign cot, leaving no record but the lightning spasm of the flesh. My body was a lonely bonfire burning night and day on that tropical coast. One friend, Patsy, showed up frequently with some of her friends, dusky and golden, girls of Boer, English, Dravidian blood. They went to bed with me sportingly, asking for nothing in return.

One of them told me all about her visits to the "chummeries." That's what they called the bungalows where young Englishmen, clerks in shops or firms, lived together in groups to save on money and food. Without a trace of cynicism in her voice, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, the girl told me that she had once had sex with fourteen of them.

"And why did you do it?" I asked her.

"They were having a party one night and I was alone with them. They turned on a gramophone, I danced a few steps with each of them, and as we danced, we'd lose our way into one bedroom or another. That way, everyone was happy."

She was not a prostitute. No, she was just another product of colonialism, a candid and generous fruit off its tree. Her story impressed me, and from then on, I had a soft spot for her in my heart.

Neruda was a lifelong communist, but his observations in Burma and Ceylon, both British colonies, were somewhat disingenuous, and his intimacy with the "downtrodden" native people was more than a little patronizing, especially from a young man in a position of authority. To Neruda, and to the reader decades later, it was a different world in a different time. In Burma, Neruda had a native lover. His relations with her were initially purely physical. But the woman's possessiveness and jealousy soon became intolerable. He was trapped with her until he received orders that he was transferred to Ceylon. He saw his opportunity to leave the woman, abandoning almost everything to keep her from suspecting, and went off to board the ship just like he was going to work. Were there sexual and racial aspects to his relations with the women he encountered in the East? Of course there were - since he was from the other side of the world and didn't speak their languages. Yes, it is significant that the beautiful Tamil woman was a pariah caste and that she was already familiar with Neruda's shit. She may have been "untouchable" but she was still eminently desirable. It was perhaps her very low social status that made her even more fascinating to Neruda. If she had somehow testified her own case to us, if we had known anything more of her than Neruda gave us in his confieso, perhaps it would be different. But Mark Eisner suggests that even Josie Bliss may have been a fictitious person. As far as we can tell, was there ever a beautuful Tamil woman whom Neruda ravaged?

I am tentatively (perhaps selectively) in favor of the #MeToo movement, giving credence to voices that were formerly and historically silenced. I hoped that enough people would take it seriously to block the recent Supreme Court justice nomination. But we aren't there yet. If any formerly avid reader of Neruda can use the sketchy anecdote from his youth as enough of a reason to reject his life's work, they probably weren't serious about him in the first place. I think there is a dividing line between a person's life and their work. I won't excuse or forgive what Neruda did - and confessed to having done. I don't consider it my place to do either. Does it change the way I think of Neruda, or lessen my consideration of his work? As I said before, I don't - can't - properly judge the quality of his poetry. But the chilling first words of "Tango del viudo" still thrill through me --

Ah maligna ...

And, for the record, I won't be changing the name of this blog any time soon, and they probably won't be changing the name of Santiago's airport.  


(1) Joshunda Sanders.