Sunday I was watching a Discovery program called Rocky Mountain Railroad (10 years in the tropics has made Canada look like paradise) and a man in his early twenties, enthusiastic about his job with Canadian Rail, rolled up his sleeve to show off his employee number, what looked like eight digits, tattooed on his forearm. All I could do was shake my head. Think of all the numbers, social security and bank accounts and PINs, that we all have to memorize. The young man admitted that his job is very important to him, and that he plans to make a lifelong career out of it. But even this doesn't excuse him. No one but an idiot who has never heard of the Nazi concentration camps, in which inmates had their prisoner numbers tattooed on their forearms, would get a tattoo of their employee number, social security number, or a girlfriend's cell number on his forearm. Do a Google search for "who had numbers tattooed on their forearms?" You won't see a photo of that Canadian guy.
So I gave the kid a little credit, but not much, by thinking that maybe he got the tattoo in all innocence, that he did not know about the tattooed forearms of concentration camp inmates. But that doesn't pardon him either: knowing about those inmates' tattoos and getting a tattoo of your own anyway; or living 74 years after the end of the war against fascism that someone in your family, a grandfather perhaps, took part in and not know anything about those tattoos? It's unlikely that the young man has not seen one of the X-Men movies. In the very first installment, set in "Poland 1944," the boy who would grow up to be "Magneto" notices the tattoos on the forearms of the prisoners. Does it ultimately matter where we get our information, as long as we are informed? As I argued in my previous post, I have to believe that it does.
In his relentlessly shattering book, If This is a Man, Primo Levi recounts his "Initiation" into his life as a prisoner in Auschwitz:
"Häftling [prisoner]: I have learnt that I am a Häftling. My number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.
"The operation was slightly painful and extraordinarily rapid: they placed us all in a row, and one by one, according to the alphabetical order of our names, we filed past a skilful official, armed with a sort of pointed tool with a very short needle. It seems that this is the real, true initiation: only by "showing one's number" can one get bread and soup. Several days passed, and not a few cuffs and punches, before we became used to showing our number promptly enough not to disorder the daily operation of food-distribution; weeks and months were needed to learn its sound in the German language. And for many days, while the habits of freedom still led me to look for the time on my wristwatch, my new name ironically appeared instead, its number tattooed in bluish characters under the skin.
"Only much later, and slowly, a few of us learnt something of the funereal science of the numbers of Auschwitz, which epitomize the stages of destruction of European Judaism. To the old hands of the camp, the numbers told everything: the period of entry into the camp, the convoy of which one formed a part, and consequently the nationality. Everyone will treat with respect the numbers from 30,000 to 80,000: there are only a few hundred left and they represent the few survivals from the Polish ghettos. It is as well to watch out in commercial dealings with a 116,000 or a 117,000: they now number only about forty, but they represent the Greeks of Salonica, so take care they do not pull the wool over your eyes. As for the high numbers, they carry an essentially comic air about them, like the words "freshman" or "conscript" in ordinary life. The typical high number is a corpulent, docile and stupid fellow: he can be convinced that leather shoes are distributed at the infirmary to all those with delicate feet, and can be persuaded to run there and leave his bowl of soup "in your custody"; you can sell him a spoon for three rations of bread; you can send him to the most ferocious of the Kapos to ask him (as happened to me!) if it is true that his is the Kartoffe/schalen-kommando, the "Potato Peeling Command," and if one can be enrolled in it."
Monday, May 20, 2019
Friday, May 17, 2019
Numerology
I turned 61 today - or yesterday. I live in the Far East, but my thoughts are somewhere in North America. A friend wished me a happy birthday and then said "come home". I will, I will. But first there's this rough patch to get through, this unnecessary detour. It's unavoidable, can't be helped. But for now, time to reflect on my progress.
Poets always put a patina on it, getting old, I mean. Like découpage. Two poets I have long admired talked about the common perceptions of age, without really feeling them in themselves. Thomas Hardy saw how his spirit, still willing, had to contend with his flesh, which had altered:
I look into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, ‘Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!’
For then I, undistrest
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.
But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.
Hardy felt betrayed, by the changes in others and the changes in his physical appearance. But the incongruity of his still youthful passion against the image in his mirror was too much for him, too absurd to accept. Only one can be true, but which one?
Philip Larkin, who was a great admirer of Hardy, felt deeply the difference between his life and the lives of others; a disconnect between what was expected of his life and what his life had amounted to. Not by regret, but by the refusal of others, people he once knew, to imagine their own lives otherwise.
‘Dockery was junior to you,
Wasn’t he?’ said the Dean. ‘His son’s here now.’
Death-suited, visitant, I nod. ‘And do
You keep in touch with—’ Or remember how
Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight
We used to stand before that desk, to give
‘Our version’ of ‘these incidents last night’?
I try the door of where I used to live:
Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide.
A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored.
Canal and clouds and colleges subside
Slowly from view. But Dockery, good Lord,
Anyone up today must have been born
In ’43, when I was twenty-one.
If he was younger, did he get this son
At nineteen, twenty? Was he that withdrawn
High-collared public-schoolboy, sharing rooms
With Cartwright who was killed? Well, it just shows
How much ... How little ... Yawning, I suppose
I fell asleep, waking at the fumes
And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed,
And ate an awful pie, and walked along
The platform to its end to see the ranged
Joining and parting lines reflect a strong
Unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife,
No house or land still seemed quite natural.
Only a numbness registered the shock
Of finding out how much had gone of life,
How widely from the others. Dockery, now:
Only nineteen, he must have taken stock
Of what he wanted, and been capable
Of ... No, that’s not the difference: rather, how
Convinced he was he should be added to!
Why did he think adding meant increase?
To me it was dilution. Where do these
Innate assumptions come from? Not from what
We think truest, or most want to do:
Those warp tight-shut, like doors. They’re more a style
Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,
Suddenly they harden into all we’ve got
And how we got it; looked back on, they rear
Like sand-clouds, thick and close, embodying
For Dockery a son, for me nothing,
Nothing with all a son’s harsh patronage.
Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.
Ah, but Larkin was afraid of dying - not so much death as the moment when he would die. He anticipated it, just as Shakespeare had in Sonnet 73:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.
And Shakespeare died at 52! "Death is but the shifting wind that fills the living sail." I wrote these words when I was 20. How did I know it at 20? "The idea is to die young as late as possible," wrote the anthropologist Ashley Montagu. And Oscar Wilde's lovely line, "The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young." And poor Oscar was dead at 46!
I feel myself to be exactly the same at 61 as I was at 20 - as I was at 10! One's age is unimportant.
Wednesday, May 15, 2019
Machiko Kyo
Ordinarily I wouldn't be writing any of this if Day's death hadn't completely upstaged that of Kyo, whose immortality is assured by her appearance in a handful of magnificent Japanese films: Rashomon, Ugetsu, Floating Weeds, and The Key (aka Odd Obsession). These films will be treasured for as long as the film medium is around. She will also be remembered for minor roles in Mizoguchi's Red Light District and Teshigahara's Face of Another. I suppose everyone who saw her in these films, men and women, was a little in love with her.
But something else italicizes the death of Machiko Kyo, and it was the same at the death, in 2015, of Setsuko Hara. She takes with her yet another large piece of cultural history - the legacy of the Japanese film, once a booming industry that, in the space of a few years in the late 1990s, seems to have vanished. Since then, only a handful of films, most of them directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, have kept the glory of the Japanese film fresh in people's minds. Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse, Kobayashi, and Imamura are names that are prominent in every cinephile's memory, standing proudly alongside Renoir, Fellini, Bergman, Ray (Satyajit, not Nicholas), Antonioni, and Buñuel.
I will remember Kyo from her first breathtaking appearance in Rashomon, when a sudden breeze blows her veil away from her face as she is riding past Toshiro Mifune sitting under a tree. I will remember her as the ghost Lady Wakasa in the mesmerizing Ugetsu. And I will remember her as the actress, already relegated to "mature" roles in her group of Kabuki actors in Floating Weeds. Of course, there is the difference that these three films are towering works of art to which she contributed her beauty and grace. The word "exquisite" is overused when Westerners write about certain aspects of Japanese culture. Machiko Kyo justifies the renewal of the word.
So it's goodbye to Doris, but au revoir Machiko.
Monday, May 13, 2019
Holography
What no one seems to realize is what every real critic has always known: that there is no connection whatever between popular success and critical acclaim. Just last week I was kicked out of a Facebook Film group because I went and asked a (very) serious question of the forum's founder. I avoid such forums for the simple reason that they are not devoted to cinephilia at all but to fandom. Henri Langlois coined the term "cinephage" for film fans who "devour" every movie that comes along without applying any discriminatory standard that might distinguish the good ones from the bad ones. A fan is someone who is suspicious when a cinephile spends too much of his time (or what they consider too much) responding negatively to a great majority of films. If they truly love films, shouldn't they be expressing more of that love?
This is a headache that afflicts every serious critic. Randall Jarrell, who was the greatest poetry critic of his age, was often attacked for not approving of so much of the poetry that was published in the 1940s and '50s. His response was that a critic's job is to love the light, which obliges him to also hate the dark. And Jarrell was famous as much for the severity of his hate as for the power of his love. But a phenomenon that he didn't address was the ability to distinguish what one likes, for personal reasons that are otherwise unaccountable, and what is demonstrably good. This is the problem from which too many contemporary critics suffer. One can like something one knows is bad. Occasionally I like hot dogs, but I know what they're made of and I wouldn't attempt to argue that they're good food. Yet, time and time again, film critics who should know better are trying to convince me that because they like something it must be good.
But last week, when I was kicked out of a Facebook group, I had entered a discussion about Avengers: Endgame because the group's founder used the curious words "holocaust memories". He was arguing that what these kinds of movies (superhero or comic book movies) needed was a script writer who could add depth to the subject, who could in effect, distract us from its flimsy source material. A comic book's greatest drawback, for a filmmaker, was its emphasis on its illustrations over its ideas. While the illustrations, or "graphics," offer filmmakers valuable indications of how the film should look, the stories are hopelessly primitive. What caught my interest, however, were the words "holocaust memories" (perhaps deliberately, he didn't capitalize the "h"). In the X-Men films, there is a character named Magneto who first discovered his powers when he was a boy sent with his parents to a Nazi concentration camp in Poland. The boy is separated from his parents, who are then herded by guards toward a towering smokestack. The boy objects to being separated from his parents and cries out to them as barbed wire gates are twisted and bent open by some invisible force - the boys mutant power to move and manipulate metal objects from a distance. As I wrote about the scene in a post I made in December 2009 (see Comic Book Movies): "The scene is used merely to introduce the character who later becomes known as "Magneto." This outrageously self-serving attitude, which appropriates one of the most terrible periods of human history merely to introduce a level of seriousness to its subject shows how these films cannot even touch seriousness without falling to pieces."
One of the things that the latest CGI has inadvertently accomplished is exposing the inherent stupidity of the underlying ideas of the superhero movies. Despite CGI's exponential advancements over movie special effects of the past, the ideas behind the superhero movies haven't advanced much further than their comic book origins. They have become the perfect embodiment of Henry de Montherlant's old criticism of Hollywood movies, that exhibit "a perfect technique in the service of cretinism."
So the comment I posted on the Facebook film group page was, "Are you OK with using the Holocaust [capital H] in a superhero movie?" A few moments later I received notifications that my comment had been "liked" and that the group founder had replied to it. Shortly after that, however, the notifications disappeared, along with the link to the forum. I had not only been kicked out of the forum, but I was blocked from acquiring access to it. In trying to provoke discussion on what I think is a serious issue with a superhero movie, the discussion was abruptly ended and I was peremptorily shown the door. What I wasn't given the chance to say was that there are people who say that the Holocaust should never be the subject of a book or a play or a poem, least of all a film. Yet there are great books and plays and poems and even films that have taken on the subject, with compelling results.
The last survivors of the Holocaust are now in their eighties and older. Last week it was reported that half of millennials in a recent poll could not identify Auschwitz in photographs. Clearly the incredibly important job of keeping the Holocaust fresh in people's memories must be left to artists, not to the makers of superhero movies.
Tuesday, May 7, 2019
The Heraldry of Being
Psalm 8
I spent the last Saturday of April, the 27th, helplessly enduring a 12-hour power outtage in my apartment on Biliran Island. I had been warned more than a week in advance, so I was prepared for it. But how does one prepare for twelve hours in the middle of what is known hereabouts as "summer," when temperatures by day are in the nineties, without the relief of even an electric fan? I adapted years ago to living without air conditioning. It's pleasant to enter an air conditioned drugstore in town, or the Western Union office to wait for a money transfer from my brother, or the one fast food joint, and feel the coldness of the air, close to twenty degrees cooler than the air outside. But I learned how to live without it a long time ago.
In preparation for the power cut off early in the morning, I got out of bed an hour early, cooked rice in my electric cooker, filled a thermos with boiling water for coffee, and charged the batteries in my cellphone and my tablet. When the power shut down shortly after 6 AM, I opened all my windows, plugged my ears, and went back to sleep until after 8.
Despite my having hundreds of ebooks, my traveller's library, I always reserve the experience of reading an actual book for special occasions like power failures, which are practically a fact of life in the Philippines. So, since I have a small contingent of books, some hardcover some paperbacks, and since I spent the previous power outtage in the company of John Cheever (see "Oh What a Paradise It Seemed"), I opted for the contemporary of Cheever whom he regarded as the greatest writer of American fiction, Saul Bellow - the Penguin Collected Stories (2001). Having already read the first two stories, "By the St. Lawrence" and "The Silver Dish," I skipped "The Bellarosa Connection" and opened the paperback to "The Old System."
The story begins in the here and now where Dr. Samuel Braun wakes late on a December Saturday and, after his ablutions, goes to his kitchen, in which his remembrances of two older cousins, Isaac and Tina, occupy his otherwise lonely afternoon. They were the only two people he really loved - "For whatever use or meaning this fact might have within the peculiar system of light, movement, contact, and perishing in which he tried to find stability." The story he tells is banal - Tina on her deathbed abandoning an absurd family grudge against Isaac. But he finds himself amazed, as I too was amazed, at how deeply it moved him.
Dr. Braun remembers them, his uncle and mother, from their coming to America, and his older cousins. "A vision of mankind Braun was having as he sat over his coffee Saturday afternoon. . . . Silent, with silent eyes crossing and recrossing the red water tank bound by twisted cables, from which ragged icicles hung down and white vapor rose, Dr. Braun extracted a moment four decades gone . . ."
Dr. Braun has vivid memories of his cousins, and in particular a sexual encounter with Tina when he was a boy sick in bed with a fever. Tina, who was always obese (she once, without knowing it, sat on a kitten and smothered it to death), envelops the boy with her naked overabundance, which he recalls with mystified pleasure. (The story was first published in Playboy.) But shortly after the war, a quarrel arises between Isaac and Tina when Isaac needs three members of the family, with himself as the fourth, to contribute $25,000 each so that he could buy up a disused golf course and develop it as a shopping center. On the day the transaction was arranged to take place Tina and the others renege on their share, and Isaac has to come up with the $100,000 himself. He does it - the land is his, and Isaac gets rich.
But this is not the real cause of Isaac and Tina's estrangement - the reasons are far less explicable than either wants to admit. "The quarrel between Tina and Isaac lasted for years. She accused him of shaking off the family when the main chance came. He had refused to cut them in. He said that they had all deserted him at the zero hour. Eventually, the brothers made it up. Not Tina. She wanted nothing to do with Isaac." One begins to wonder what it is about these cousins that would inspire Dr. Braun to reflect so movingly on his love for them. Still, "Dr. Braun had given up his afternoon to the hopeless pleasure of thinking affectionately about his dead."
"For several years, at the same season, there was a scene between them. The pious thing before the Day of Atonement was to visit the dead an to forgive the living - forgive and ask forgiveness. Accordingly, Isaac went annually to the old home. . . . These annual visits to Tina continued until she became sick." Cancer. Terminal. Still, Tina refuses to see Isaac. This is a terrible breach of propriety, that Tina and Isaac should not be reconciled before she dies. "Cousin Tina had discovered that one need not be bound by the old rules." Finally, she relents, but only on condition that Isaac pays her $20,000.
"In Dr. Braun's opinion, his cousin Tina had seized upon the force of death to create a situation of opera, which at the same time was a situation of parody. As he stated it to himself, there was a feedback of mockery. Death the horrid bridegroom, waiting with a consummation life had never offered Life, accordingly, she devalued, filling up the clear light remaining (which should be reserved for beauty, miracle, nobility) with obese monstrosity, rancor, failure, self-torture."
Isaac goes to see his rabbi to confirm his resolution to do what he knows he must do. Then he gets the money from his bank and puts it in a briefcase. (The briefcase is a nice touch. $20,000 doesn't justify a briefcase.) He goes to the hospital, up to her room, hands the briefcase to his brother, Mutt, and waits. "Because he could not stand still, he moved down the corridor, hands clasped behind his back. . . . He was sixty years old. He knew the route he, too, must go, and soon. But only knew, did not yet feel it. Death still was at a distance."
As if remembering all of this in sequence, telling the story in the here and now inside his head, "And Dr. Braun, feeling with them this work of wit and despair, this last attempt to exchange significance, rose, stood, looking at the shafts of ice, the tatters of vapor in winter blue." Tina allows Isaac to enter. They are too overcome by sorrow and love to restrain themselves. They embrace. The story ends in tears. And Braun wonders about all of it in a paragraph of heartbreaking and astounding puzzlement.
"The Old System" closes with a return to equilibrium, to the here and now: "When Dr. Braun closed his eyes, he saw, red on black, something like molecular processes - the only true heraldry of being. As later, in the close black darkness when the short day ended, he went to the dark kitchen window to have a look at stars. These things cast outward by a great begetting spasm billions of years ago."
So I, sixty years old (sixty-one a week from Thursday), on a different Saturday, the hottest day of the year, deprived of any relief from the heat, reading a story set in "the short end of December", overwhelmed by the weight of that same heraldry of being, abstracted momentarily in exalted language. The question in the psalm quoted above (also quoted in the story) is a rhetorical one. It doesn't require an answer. But Bellow answers it.
Monday, April 29, 2019
The Circus
Because he was such an extreme perfectionist, none of the productions of Charlie Chaplin's films from The Kid (1923) to City Lights (1931) was without some major complication. They were explained in unapologetic detail in Chaplin's book, My Autobiography. But because it was the product of one of the most difficult periods of his personal life, he barely mentions the film he released to the public in January 1928, The Circus. And he waited until 1967 to do anything about restoring the film and re-releasing it. Always proprietary of his legacy, he finally, grudgingly it seems, struck a pristine new print from his own negative and re-released The Circus with a new musical score he composed (with some assistance - Chaplin couldn't read music) and he also wrote a song that he sings as the film opens. "Swing, Little Girl" isn't up to the level of "Smile" - the beautiful song he wrote for Modern Times. Merna Kennedy swings on rings suspended from high above under the circus tent. Chaplin sings the song in a noticeably old voice, much older than the man in the film, who was almost 40.
The Circus is uncomfortably lodged between Chaplin's two monuments, The Gold Rush (1925) and City Lights (1931). It's consistently funnier than either of them, but it comes up short on "pathos" - it gives you more than enough laughs, but no tears. Tears? Ever since The Tramp in 1915, when Chaplin added a new dimension to his usual knockabout comedy, an emotional undercurrent of sadness based on the inescapable fact that he's a tramp and not a suitable love interest for the girls (played by Edna Purviance until 1923) he irresistibly falls for. No other film comedian could make an audience cry. And we cry every time we watch little Jackie Coogan thrown into the back of a truck that is to take him away to an orphanage, and he reaches out with his little hands and cries out to Charlie, who, back inside their attic room, is being throttled by the social worker and a cop. But Charlie hears the boy's cries for help and finds the strength to fight off his attackers and rescue him. We cry when Charlie, who had fallen asleep waiting for Georgia and her friends to come to his cabin like they promised, awakes to the noise coming from the saloon in town. It's midnight, and the girls forgot their promise. Charlie leaves the cabin, walks over to the saloon and peers through the window at the revels inside. And we cry every time Charlie smiles that shattering smile at Virginia Cherrill, the blind girl who "can see now" because she remembers the feel of his hand.
But there are no tears in The Circus, even when Charlie learns that the circus owner's mistreated step-daughter loves Rex, the tightrope walker, instead of him. Yet Charlie defends her against her step-father's abuse and gets himself fired. She runs away and asks Charlie if he can take her with him. He knows that she can't possibly live the homeless life he leads, so he arranges for Rex to marry her, and he convinces the circus owner to take them back into his troupe. Knowing it's time for him to leave, he watches as the wagons depart and he is alone at the film's close. Because of this attenuated romance, The Circus is Chaplin's shortest feature film, at just shy of 72 minutes long. But the comic invention in The Circus is sustained and intricately timed, from the opening sketch with the pickpocket to becoming trapped in the lion's cage to Charlie's uproarious tightrope walk while being attacked by monkeys. The pacing and sheer poise of these scenes is peerless in silent comedy. In one perfect scene, Charlie tries out as a circus clown. The circus owner and the other clowns, in makeup and costume, gather around to watch. But, amazingly, Charlie cannot be funny. The essence of his clown is just that - his essence. Charlie is funny. He cannot seem funny. The clown is his being, his true face, not his mask.
The most beautiful scene is saved for last. The circus strikes its tent and the wagons trundle away, leaving Charlie alone in the deserted space. As Theodore Huff puts it, "The last scene was deliberately photographed in the harsh, early morning light to bring out the careworn lines of his face."(1) He looks down and notices a scrap of paper at his feet. It is a piece of the paper star through which the girl he loved had jumped from her horse. Heaving a sigh, he crushes the paper star into a ball, drops it and kicks it away, walking jauntily as ever into the middle distance. Remember that painful note - painful for him to write, but (with its poor grammar and spelling) so painful to read - that he left for Edna when he departed from her house in The Tramp? We see him walking slowly, sadly away from the camera. Then he squares his shoulders, shakes off his sadness, twirls his cane and kicks up his shoes as he walks farther down the road. Charlie's exit in The Circus is a lovely reprise of that classic moment.
In his book, The Movies Come from America, Gilbert Seldes, one of Chaplin's early champions, wrote: "I can foresee a bitter attack on Chaplin. He represents the dispossessed, the little man who has never had his share of the good things of the world. Sometimes the victim, as I have said, of cruel chance, sometimes the innocent bystander who suffers from the violence of others, often the direct victim of economic injustice. And yet this little man isnever angry; he brings a flower to mollify an angry boss in a factory; he raises his hat to his eternal enemy, the policeman. There are people who find in this method of Chaplin's a kind of economic defeatism. They are not satisfied with the accidental demolition of the policeman's pride, just as they are not satisfied with the comedy of the man who is trapped in the wheels of the big machine so that a blueprint has to be consulted before he can beextricated. They want the little man of the Chaplin pictures to wreck the machine. They are furious over that characteristic ending of the Chaplin films in which the little man escapes from all the complications and torments of civilized life by walking away along the road that leads to no definite end. I think that they are suspicious of Chaplin because by making people laugh even at their misfortunes he makes life tolerable for them. It happens not to be Chaplin's temperament to make life seem intolerable. He has never shown the rich and the powerful as noble figures. Indeed, the most attractive of his rich men was only human and generous when he was drunk and turned heartless when he was sober. The truth is that Chaplin is like many others, an individualist in his criticism of society, apparently unwilling to join one tyranny in order to destroy another."(2)
Seldes published these words in 1937, and their irony must've seemed more than a little bitter when Chaplin, who had antagonized J. Edgar Hoover and aroused suspicion about his political sympathies when he took part in war bond drives during WW2 supporting the "second front," the Soviet Union, which was, after all, our ally in the war against the Nazis, left the U.S. for a vacation in Europe in September 1952, only to have his return visa revoked. He was duly informed that if he tried to re-enter the U.S. he would be arrested. Chaplin wouldn't return to America for twenty years. An honorary Oscar in 1972 was a ridiculous form of apology. He was never a member of any party, but his allegiances, I think, were pretty clear. "I've known humiliation," he once said, "and humiliation is a thing you never forget. Poverty—the degradation and helplessness of it! I can't feel myself any different, at heart, from the unhappy and defeated men, the failures."
(1) Charlie Chaplin (New York: Henry Schuman, 1951).
(2) The Movies Come from America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937).
Wednesday, April 24, 2019
Oh What a Paradise It Seemed
For his final effort, Cheever felt moved to compose a kind of conservationist fable. Set in a fictitious village called Janice (named for a mill-owner's first wife), it centers on Lemuel Sears, a computer hardware executive and widower (twice) and dwells on his struggles to understand the behavior of the people he encounters and to save a pond that is one of the great attractions, for Sears and others, of the village from being obliterated by local politicians in league with the Mob. "This is a story," it begins, "to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night."
Cheever loved ice-skating. According to John Updike, "Ice skating was his exercise, his Wordsworthian hike, his rendezvous with sky and water, his connection with elemental purity and the awesome depths above and below, while he clicked and glided along, in smooth quick strokes (I imagine) like those of his prose."(1) It is due to his passion for ice-skating that Lemuel Sears sets in motion the ecological action of Oh What a Paradise It Seems.
"Swinging down a long stretch of black ice gave Sears a sense of homecoming. At long last, at the end of a cold, long journey, he was returning to a place where his name was known and loved and lamps burned in the rooms and fires in the hearth. It seemed to Sears that all the skaters moved over the ice with the happy conviction that they were on their way home. Home might be an empty room and an empty bed to many of them, including Sears, but swinging over the black ice convinced Sears that he was on his way home. Someone more skeptical might point out that this illuminated how ephemeral is our illusion of homecoming. There was a winter sunset and in this formidable show of light and color he unlaced his skates and returned to his apartment in the city."
Sears returns to Janice to skate again on Beasley's Pond, only to discover that it has become the target of ill-planned re-zoning and waste material is being dumped into it. "When he returned to the city Sears called his law firm and asked them to investigate the tragedy of Beasley's Pond. He also wrote a letter to the newspaper." The letter was published under the heading "Is Nothing Sacred". It was an emotional letter that was later used against his appeal to stop the dumping:
"I have been skating on weekends on Beasley's Pond, in the company of perhaps fifty men and women of all ages and for all I know all walks of life, who seemed to find themselves greatly refreshed for the complexities and problems of the modern world by a few hours spent happily on ice skates . . . Last Sunday, carrying my skates to the pond, I found that it had been rezoned as fill and had become a heap of rubbish, topped by a dead dog. There is little enough of innocence in the world but let us protect the innocence of ice skating."
What hope for such a bigoted romantic in a world becoming exponentially more unnatural with each passing day? Sears's love life takes up the rest of Cheever's story, somewhat surprisingly for a man of his years. He finds himself in bed, and various other places, with Renee, a much younger woman who attends public meetings in basements about god-knows-what (Alcoholics Anonymous? Flat Earth Society?) and never misses an opportunity to tell Lemuel, "You don't know the first thing about women." Yet she allows this man who doesn't know the first thing about her sex significant liberties, and then leaves him hanging (with his pants down) when he grows too demanding. When she jilts Sears, in a scene too funny to be believed, the elevator man in Renee's building takes him to bed.
By the end of Cheever's tale, there have been two mysterious deaths, and the appeals to save the pond are overruled. But a last, desperate act of sabotage carried out by a concerned married woman brings the planned re-zoning and the dumping to an sudden end. Sears is vindicated and Beasley's Pond, a small but precious piece of his world, of his very being, is preserved for future generations of men and women.
Although he was expert at satirizing suburbia, Cheever never expressed hatred for it, or for the great changes that he watched overtake it as the decades tolled. He had seen great changes in himself as well (his overcoming alcoholism and coming out as bi-sexual), and he greeted them with as much humor and generosity as he could allow for himself. He may have felt a sense of displacement, as his memories of a former age returned to haunt him, but regret or nostalgia weren't Cheever's métier. Kenneth Tynan once remarked that Ralph Richardson had the voice of "a man in a perpetual state of astonishment." Cheever had the same yeast in his voice and it is the same voice I hear in Oh What a Paradise It Seems: "The sky was clear that morning and there might still have been stars although he saw none. The thought of stars contributed to the power of his feeling. What moved him was a sense of those worlds around us, our knowledge however imperfect of their nature, our sense of their possessing some grain of our past and of our lives to come. It was that most powerful sense of our being alive on the planet. It was that most powerful sense of how singular, in the vastness of creation, is the richness of our opportunity. The sense of that hour was of an exquisite privilege, the great benefice of living here and renewing ourselves with love. What a paradise it seemed!" Although it was impossible for Cheever to remain on that plane of exaltation for very long, how thrilling it was that he would even reach out for it, time and again, in his writing.
Conservationism has finally gone mainstream now that everyone on the planet is dealing with the effects of Climate Change. For most of my life we have been warned of the consequences of our abuse of the planet's resources and our dependence on fossil fuels, and I find it almost tragic that all but the climate change deniers (an unteachable, unreachable minority) have finally accepted the irrefutable evidence. All but the stupidest politicians know the facts, but corrupt motives prevent them from admitting it. And some of us are beginning to think that it may already be too late to stop us from going over the "tipping point" to a planet transformed by higher temperatures, sea levels, and catastrophic weather events. As British poet James Hamilton-Paterson wrote, years before Climate Change was officially identified:
"Conservation is only ever a rearguard action, fought from a position of loss. It is ultimately unwinnable, and not least because there are no recorded victories over population increase, nor over the grander strategies of genetic behavior such as the laws of demand, political expediency, sheer truancy and a refusal to relinquish a standard of living once it has been attained. There can only be stalemates, holding actions and truces uneasily policed. A few affecting species will be saved, a few million hectares of forest, a few tribes of indians; but the world will never return to how it was when this sentence was written, still less to how it was when reader and writer were born. This has always been true and will continue to be so. The mistake is to extend this sequence backward in time and imagine it leads to a lost paradise. It is a safe bet that as soon as the earliest protohominid could think, it invented a legend to account for its sense of loss."(2)
(1) "The Waspshot Chronicle," The New Republic, December 2, 1991.
(2) Seven-Tenths: The Sea and Its Thresholds (London: Random Century, 1992.
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