Deeblog

Nothing is more vague than impressions of individual identity. Each man recognizes his neighbor, yet there are few instances in which any one is prepared to give a reason for his recognition.

                                                                                                         --  Auguste Dupin

You may have heard of a new film with the name of a masterpiece; you will surely know the inspiration for what critics have almost uniformly understood as an excuse -- albeit a clever and original one -- to allow yet another serial killer to wreak havoc on the national census.  Perhaps this is what remains of minds like Poe's (many self-proclaimed admirers of Lovecraft, for example, praise his 'gory science fiction plots,' or other such nonsense) to those who cannot appreciate the sonic rapture of his prose -- I know and care not.  A true lover of literature preserves deep in his memory the enchantments of the best works of a given author and finds, in time, that certain authors can be trusted and certainly simply cannot.  Those who love topicality, who are inspired by the latest hue and cry, can and should be returned to the shelf whence they came and left to rot.  Only the authors who consider their own works and own genius eternal, bereft of the shackles of the news hour, are worth are time.  Which brings us to a famous literary experiment.

The crime involves a sumptuous young Parisian who helped her mother run a pension until the age of twenty-two, "when her great beauty attracted the notice of a perfumer."  The latter obviously has a saleswoman in mind, at least for the business side of things, but we do not.  As readers of literary fiction discerning enough to enjoy Poe, we expect that something romantic if not diabolical will absorb poor Marie Rogêt.  Now if a pretty young woman is discovered by one man, she will be discovered by dozens of others, because nothing is more beguiling to a man than a woman on whom other men have their eye.  It can be concluded therefore that Marie Rogêt, at the time of the onset of this 'mystery,' had become a favorite among those Parisian men lucky enough to frequent the 6th arrondissement.  She had gotten herself engaged to one of those men, a certain St. Eustache, who had actually taken up residence in the Rogêts' pension (which commitment came first is left to the reader to surmise), and one fine morning in June she had informed that same St. Eustache that she would be visiting an aunt about two miles away.  Thus our story unravels:

St. Eustache ... was to have gone for his betrothed at dusk, and to have escorted her home.  In the afternoon, however, it came on to rain heavily; and, supposing that she would remain all night at her aunt's, (as she had done under similar circumstances before,) he did not think it necessary to keep his promise.  As night drew on, Madame Rogêt (who was an infirm old lady, seventy years of age,) was heard to express a fear ‘that she should never see Marie again’; but this observation attracted little attention at the time.  On Monday, it was ascertained that the girl had not been to the Rue des Drômes; and when the day elapsed without tidings of her, a tardy search was instituted at several points in the city, and its environs.  It was not, however, until the fourth day from the period of disappearance that anything satisfactory was ascertained respecting her.  On this day (Wednesday, the twenty-fifth of June), a Monsieur Beauvais, who, with a friend, had been making inquiries for Marie near the Barrière du Roule, on the shore of the Seine which is opposite the Rue Pavée St. Andrée, was informed that a corpse had just been towed ashore by some fishermen, who had found it floating in the river.  Upon seeing the body, Beauvais, after some hesitation, identified it as that of the perfumery-girl.  His friend recognized it more promptly.

St. Eustache will leave one of literature's most magnificently described farewell notes ("Upon his person was found a letter, briefly stating his love for Marie, with his design of self-destruction"), which does not, of course, preclude him from possible involvement.  What follows this and similar paragraphs lifted from all the newspapers of the day is a quilt of speculation and hysteria that the renowned Auguste Dupin will spend the second half of the story tearing asunder from the friendly confines of his sitting room.  Without revealing his methods, which are as usual pedantic in a most enlightening manner, one aside remains particularly trenchant:

The town blackguard seeks the precincts of the town, not through love of the rural, which in his heart he despises, but by way of escape from the restraints and conventionalities of society.  He desires less the fresh air and the green trees, than the utter license of the country.  Here, at the road-side inn, or beneath the foliage of the woods, he indulges, unchecked by any eye except those of his boon companions, in all the mad excess of a counterfeit hilarity—the joint offspring of liberty and of rum.

The town blackguard?  What town blackguard?  Our year was 1844 and we still tended in that era to blame small, roving bands of criminals for all the ills of society while robber barons were becoming billionaires and slaves still roaming plantations.  The curious reader may discover the rest for himself.

It has been often lamented that The Mystery of Marie Rogêt is the weakest of the Auguste Dupin adventures, and, on the whole, one of Poe's least flavorful works.  Yet Poe is one of the few writers whose style is invariably impeccable; his subject matter, however, may be of dubious value.  His fascination with the macabre cannot be conveniently explained away by his use of laudanum, nor by some psychological perversions (his marriage to a thirteen-year-old cousin is commonly cited) concocted by some very modern and very ignorant minds.  No, Poe had all the attributes of literary genius -- style, precision, strong opinions, touchiness regarding any criticism in his direction, and something we can loosely term a sadistic streak.  Literary genius thrives in tragedy, not comedy or the doldrums of historical codswallop (as one writer famously quipped, every author should make horrible things befall his fictional underlings to see what they are made of).   We are mortal beings and the implications of this limit should and do scare the writer of genius into a labyrinth of unending nightmares.  What he finds therein depends principally on what lies in his own soul.  Even if it be entrapped in blackest night.   

A work ("A farewell") by this Russian poet, born two hundred thirteen years ago today.  You can read the original here.

One final time your gentle shape     
In my thoughts I dare to caress;            
And with heart's force these dreams rewake,
In timid, cheerless joy I shake,
And let to me your love regress.  

Our years bring change and then our doom, 
Like everything, so change we both;
For your sweet bard I see you groom'd,
Garbed greyly in sepulchral gloom,
For you a friend lost long ago. 

So distant friend, now please accept, 
From my young heart a last farewell: 
A widowed spouse so now bereft, 
Two friends embrace before they're cleft,
And one retreats to darkest cell. 

The conclusion to a short story ("Letter to a young lady in Paris") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

You must love the beautiful wardrobe in your bedroom, with that large door that opens generously, those empty planks awaiting my clothes.  Now I have them here.  Here inside.  True, it seems impossible; even Sara did not believe it.   But Sara suspects nothing, and he who suspects nothing proceeds from my horrible task, a task that in a single swipe of a rake snatches up my days and nights, scorching me from the inside and hardening me like the starfish you placed above the bathtub.  That starfish which at every bath seems to fill one's body with salt, with lashes of the sun's whip, and with great murmurs of profundity.

During the day they sleep.  There are ten of them.   During the day they sleep.  With the door closed the wardrobe offers a daytime night only for them, and there they sleep in peaceful obedience.  I take the bedroom keys with me when I go to work.  Sara gives me a dubious look -- she must think I do not trust in her integrity.  Every morning she appears as if she wishes to say something to me, but in the end she keeps her thoughts to herself and for that I am so very glad.  (When she straightens up the bedroom from nine to ten o'clock, I make some noise in the living room and put on a Benny Carter record that soaks the entire atmosphere.  And since Sara is also a fan of saetas and paso dobles, the wardrobe seems silent and perhaps it is indeed so, because for the bunnies it is night and a time for rest.)

Their day begins during the hour immediately after dinner, when Sara takes the tray, mildly jingling the sugar tongs, bids me good night -- yes she most certainly does, Andrée, the most bitter thing is that she bids me good night -- and locks herself in her room.  And so I am left alone, alone with that condemned wardrobe, alone with my duty and sadness.

I let them out, let them hop around the living room.  They are a lively bunch, smell the clover hidden by my pockets, and now on the rug turn into ephemeral daggers as they alternate, move, and end in the moment.  They eat well, quiet and properly, and up to this point I have nothing to say: I simply look at them from the sofa with a useless book in my hand -- I who wanted to read all your Giraudoux, Andrée, and the copy of López's Argentine history you keep on the bottom shelf -- and they eat up the clover.

There are ten of them.  They are almost completely white.  They raise their warm heads towards the living room lamps, the three immobile suns that comprise their day, they who love the light because their night has no moon, no stars, no street lamps.  They gaze at their triple sun and are happy.  And this is how they hop about the rug, on the chairs, ten light blotches shifting like a moving constellation from one part to another, whereas I would like to see them still, at my feet and still -- to some degree, the dream of every god, Andrée, the unachieved dream of the gods.  But this is not how they insinuate themselves behind the portrait of Miguel de Unamuno, then, in turn, the clear green vase, the black cavity of the desk.  There are always fewer than ten, always six or eight, and I find myself asking where the other two might have gone, whether Sara might get up for some reason, and about the presidency of Rivadavia that I wanted to read up on in López's Argentine history.

How I resist, Andrée, I simply don't know.  You will remember that I came to your house to relax.  It's not my fault if now and then I vomit up a bunny, if this move transformed me from the inside -- this is not nominalism, or magic, but simply the fact that things cannot change so soon; sometimes things do swerve violently, especially if you expected to be slapped by a right hand and -- but so it is, Andrée.  One way or another, but it is so. 

I am writing to you at night.  It is three in the afternoon, but I am writing to you during their night.  During the day they sleep.  What a relief is this office teeming with yells, orders, Royal typewriters, vice-presidents, and mimeographs!  What relief, what peace, what horror, Andrée!  Now I get phone calls from friends worried about these peaceful, secluded nights of mine: Luis, who asks whether I would like to go for a stroll; Jorge, who has this concert to which he wants to take me.  I almost do not dare tell them no and instead invent long and ineffectual tales of bad health, of overdue translations, of evasion.  And every night, when I come back and take the elevator all the way up, between the first and second floor I irremediably nourish the vain hope that all this is not true.

I do what I can in order that they do not destroy your things.  They have gnawed a bit on the books on your lower shelf; you will find them hidden so that Sara does not catch wind of it.  Were you particularly fond of your porcelain lamp speckled with butterflies and ancient knights?  The chip is barely noticeable; I worked all night with a special glue that was sold to me at an English store -- you know how those English stores have the best glues -- and now I stay out of the way so that their paws never again reach the vase (it is almost beautiful to see how they like standing up on their hind legs, nostalgia of the distant human, perhaps an imitation of their god walking around and giving them a surly look; moreover, you might have noticed -- perhaps when you were a child -- that one can punish a bunny by having it stand upright, paws against the wall, and there it will remain, totally still, for hours and hours).

At five in the morning (at this point I've slept a little stretched out on the sofa, waking up to every velvety footrace, every clinking) I put them in the wardrobe and set to cleaning the apartment.  This is how Sara always ends up finding everything in tiptop shape, although sometimes I've detected in her a certain contained surprise as she stands there gazing at an object, perhaps a faint discoloration in the carpet, followed by a renewed desire to ask me something, whereas I whistle some of Franck's symphonic variations like nuns might.  So as to recount to you, Andrée, the ill-fated details of that dull and lifeless morning in which I walk half-asleep with clover stems, stray leaves, bits of white fur, running into the walls, crazed with sleep, my Gide translation overdue, and that Troyat that I haven't translated, and my responses to a married woman far away who may already be asking herself whether ... so as to follow all this, so as to follow this letter I write between telephones and interviews.

Andrée, my dear Andrée, my consolation is that there are but ten of them and not more.  Fifteen days ago I held in my hand one last bunny, but since then -- nothing, only the ten with me and their daytime night.  And they are growing: as newborns they are ugly and long-haired; as adolescents full of urgency and capriciousness, jumping over the bust of Antinous (that is Antinous, right?  That boy with the blind stare?), or losing themselves in the living room, where their movements create resonant noise so that I am obliged to shoo them out of there out of fear that Sara may hear them and appear before me horrified, perhaps in a nightdress, because Sara simply has to be like that, in a nightdress, thus ... Only ten of them.  Think of this tiny joy I possess in the midst of it all, the growing calm with which I cross anew those rigid skies of the first and second floors.

I interrupted this letter because I had to do some work for a commission.  I am continuing here in your apartment, Andrée, beneath the dull grisaille of dawn.  Is it really the next day, Andrée?  A chunk of white on the page will be your interval, hardly the bridge to link yesterday's writing with today's.  If I were to tell you that in this interval everything has broken down -- that is, where you perceive an easy bridge I hear the furious waist of water -- for me this part of my letter does not maintain the calm with which I was writing when I abandoned it to do some commission-based work.  In a cubic night bereft of sadness eleven bunnies sleep.  Perhaps at this very moment -- no, not at this very moment.  In the elevator, after a while, or upon entering.  It no longer matters if the 'when' is now, if it could be in any of the 'nows' that I have remaining.

That's enough.  I have written because it is important for me to prove to you that I was not culpable in the unstoppable destruction of your apartment.  I will leave this letter waiting for you.  It might have been sordid for this to have been delivered to you one clear morning in Paris.  Last night I returned the books to the second shelf, and they were able to reach them standing up or hopping, gnawing on the spines to sharpen their teeth -- not out of hunger, mind you, as they have all the clovers I buy and store for them in the desk drawers.  They ripped the curtains, the fabrics off the armchairs, and the edge off the self-portrait by Augusto Torres; they filled the rug with fur and also yelled in a circle beneath the light of the lamp, in a circle as if in adoration of me, and again and again they yelled in a way that I did not think bunnies could yell.

I have tried in vain to remove the hairs that damaged the rug, smooth out the edges of the gnawed fabrics, and lock them again in the wardrobe.  The sun and the day rise in tandem; perhaps Sara will be getting up soon.  It is almost strange that seeing them hop around in search of toys does not matter to me.  I was not very guilty in all this.  You will see when you come back that most of what was destroyed has since been properly repaired with that glue I bought in the English store.  I did what I could to avoid an annoyance ...

As for me, moving from ten to eleven has been an insuperable gap.  Ten were good, you see: with a wardrobe, clovers and some hope, how many things could be accomplished!  No longer the case with eleven, because saying eleven is surely saying twelve, Andrée, twelve that might be thirteen.  So now it is daybreak, a cold solitude in which happiness, memories, you, and perhaps many more things end.  This balcony above Suipacha street is now brimming with dawn and the first sounds of the city.  I do not think it will be difficult for them to link eleven bunnies splattered upon the cobblestones -- perhaps they won't even notice them -- now occupied with another body that they will need to remove very soon, before the first schoolchildren pass by.

Part one of a short story ("Letter to a young lady in Paris") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

Andrée, truly, I did not want to come live in your apartment on Suipacha street.  Not so much for the bunnies, but rather because it pains me to intrude upon a closed order, built up through the finest mosquito nets, those which in your house preserve the music of the lavender, the fluttering of a powder puff, the playing of the violin and the viola in Rará's little room.  I resent entering a place that someone who lives beautifully has furnished as the visible reiteration of her soul: books here (on one side Spanish, in French and English on the other); green cushions there; on that precise part of the coffee table, a crystal ashtray that seems to be a section of a soap bubble; and always some perfume, some sound, some rising plants, a photograph of a dead friend, the ritual tea trays and sugar cube tongs. 

Oh, dearest Andrée, how difficult it is to be opposed -- and in so doing, resign oneself to the complete submission of one's own being -- to the meticulous order that a woman installs in her frivolous residence.  How guilty one would feel if one took a little metal cup and placed on the other end of the coffee table simply because of the English dictionaries one had brought over to this end, where they needed to be, within easy reach.  Moving this cup counts as a horrible, unexpected red amidst Ozenfant's modulation, as if all the double basses' strings suddenly snapped in unison like a terrifying whip at the most silent moment of a Mozart symphony.  Moving this cup alters the relations of the entire house, of every object with every other, of every moment of its soul with the soul of the entire house and its distant inhabitant.  Scarcely can my fingers approach a book, absorb the cone of light from a lamp, or take the top off a music box, without a feeling of outrage and defiance passing before my eyes like a flock of sparrows.

You know full well why I came to your house, to this quiet, popular noonday salon.  Everything seems so natural, as is always the case when the truth is not known.  You left for Paris; I was left with this apartment on Suipacha street.  So let us work out a satisfactory plan of mutual convenience until September brings you back to Buenos Aires and forces me to another house where, perhaps ... but this is not why I am writing you.  It seems fair to tell you that I am sending you this letter because of the bunnies, because I like writing letters, and perhaps because it is raining.

I moved last Thursday, at five o'clock in the afternoon, between fog and tedium.  I have closed so many suitcases in my life and made so many trips that have ended up nowhere, that Thursday was a day filled with shadows and straps.  Because whenever I see the straps of a suitcase it is as if I were seeing shadows, elements of a whip that lash me indirectly, in the most subtle and horrible way.  But I packed my bags, informed the maid who had just moved me in, and went up in the elevator.  Somewhere between the first and second floor I felt that I was going to vomit up the first bunny.  This had never been explained before, do not think for disloyalty; but, of course, one does not simply tell people that from time to time one vomits up bunnies.  As always, I managed to do all this alone, keeping it to myself just as so many proofs of what happens (or what one makes happen) in complete privacy are kept.  Do not reproach me, Andrée, I beg you, do not reproach me.  From time to time I happen to vomit up a bunny.  This is no reason not to live in a particular house; nor for someone to have to be embarrassed, live in isolation, and walk the streets in silence.

When I feel like I'm going to vomit a bunny, I put my fingers in my mouth like an open forceps and wait to feel that warm fuzziness rise in my throat like an effervescence of liver salt.  Everything is rapid and hygienic; everything takes place in the briefest of moments.  I remove my fingers from my mouth and they come out holding a white bunny by the ears.  The bunny seems happy: it's a normal, perfect bunny, only very small, like a chocolate bunny, the only difference is that it is white and entirely a bunny.  I place the bunny in the palm of my hand and raise his fur by caressing him with my fingers.  With the look of a bunny perfectly content with having been born, he responds by pressing and rubbing his snout against my skin, moving it in that silent, ticklish grinding particular to a bunny snout in the skin of one's hand.  He searches for something to eat, so I (I speak of that time when this took place in my house on the outskirts) take him with me out on the balcony and place him in the big flowerpot next to a clover which I just so happened to have planted.  The bunny raises his ears high and envelops the tender clover with a rapid spin of his snout, and I know that I could leave him and go, continuing for a while a life indistinct from the lives of those who buy their bunnies on a farm.

Between the first and second floors, Andrée, as if announcing what my life would be in your house, I knew that I was going to vomit up a bunny.  Consequently I was afraid (was it fear or surprise?  No, fear of this surprise, perhaps) because before leaving my house but two days before, I had vomited up a bunny, and so I was safe for a month, five weeks, maybe for six weeks with a bit of luck.  Now you should understand that I have the bunny problem completely resolved.  I planted a clover on the balcony of my other house, vomited up a bunny, placed the bunny by the clover, and at the end of the month when I suspected that at any moment ... and so I would then give the bunny as a present to Mrs. de Molina, who believed it to be a 'hobby' and said nothing.  When, in the other flowerpot, a tender, propitious clover began to grow, I waited insouciantly for that morning when the tickle of rising fur would dam my throat.  And from that moment on the new bunny would repeat the life and habits of its predecessor.  Habits, Andrée, are the concrete forms of rhythm, the quota of rhythm that helps us live.  Vomiting up bunnies was not so terrible if one had already entered the invariable cycle, the method. 

You might like to know the reason for all this work, the reason for all these clovers and for Mrs. de Molina.  It would have been preferable to kill the bunny immediately and ...ah, but you really need to vomit up just one of them yourself, take it with your fingers, and place it upon your open palm as it clings to you for this very act, for the ineffable aura of your hardly broken proximity.  One month is distance enough; in one month it will have grown, its hair will be long, it will have savage eyes and leap all about the place.  A complete and absolute difference, Andrée: one month makes a rabbit, it really makes a rabbit.  But that first minute, when a warm, bubbling ball conceals an inalienable presence ... Like a poem in those first minutes, a fruit from a night in Edom: more like you than you yourself ... Yet at the same time, so not like you, so isolated and distant in his plain white world the size of a letter.

I decided nevertheless to kill the newborn bunny.  At this point I might have been living in your house for four months already: four -- perhaps, with some luck, three -- spoonfuls of alcohol in the snout.  (Did you know that mercy allows one to murder a bunny instantaneously by giving it a spoonful of alcohol to drink?   His flesh will evince the flavor later, they say, although I ... three or four spoonfuls of alcohol then the bathroom or one more bag joining the rest of the trash.)

As we crossed the third floor, the bunny was moving in my open palm.  Sara was waiting upstairs so as to help get the suitcases in ...  How can one explain this to her as a whim, as a pet store?  I wrapped the bunny in my handkerchief and placed it in the pocket of my overcoat, leaving the overcoat unbuttoned so as not to stifle the animal.  It was hardly moving.  Its tiny consciousness ought to have been revealing important facts: that life is a movement upwards with a final click; and that life is also a low sky, white, enveloping, and smelling of lavender, at the bottom of a warm well.

Sara saw nothing: she was too fascinated by the arduous problem of adjusting her sense of order to my garment bag, my papers, and my offhand manner in the face of her elaborate explanations which teemed with the expression, 'for example.'  I was scarcely able to lock myself in the bathroom; now I would kill it.  A fine zone of heat surrounded the handkerchief; the bunny was utterly white and, I believe, more beautiful than the others.  He was not looking at me, but simply remained fidgety and happy, which is the most horrible way to look at me.  I locked it in the medicine chest and went back to unpacking my bags, disoriented but not unhappy, not guilty, not washing my hands to strip them of a final convulsion.

I understood that I could not kill it.  But that same evening I vomited up a black bunny.  And two days later a white one.  And on the fourth night, a gray bunny.

For the first few minutes of this film we simply hover.  We are drawn down slowly to a street mime, then to a respectable-looking gentleman in a trench coat holding a coffee cup who makes sure that the street mime doesn't accost him.  Just as that gentleman comes into focus, however, we start hearing some odd sounds (we are still, it should be noted, a low-flying hawk).  Soon we are taken to the possible source of those sounds who is, of course, perfectly soundless, and the crosshairs of his long, slender sniper rifle.  Yet this is not a rifle.  Only after enduring a variety of angles do we understand that positioned on the roof of an elegant San Francisco office building is an ultramodern microphone.  We are still in the process of witnessing an assassination, albeit one of character not of mortal coil, and the device's symbolism as a weapon cannot be understated.  What we thought was a rifle is indeed trying to open hearts and minds, to make them bleed for all to see – or at least for some to hear.  The targets are a young couple, Ann (Cindy Williams) and Mark (Frederic Forrest), and the mastermind behind this eavesdropping operation is a respectable-looking gentleman in a trench coat by the name of Harry Caul (Gene Hackman).

Harry, we soon learn, is a superstar in his field.  To avail myself of a contemporary analogy – we are ironically nearing the end of the Nixon era, although Coppola conceived and composed The Conversation years before – Harry is the Jackal of all wiretapping trades.  His assignment, which he has accepted with the same sang-froid as so many previous jobs, is to follow Ann and Mark, record every word the lovebirds exchange, remaster the recordings to crystal clarity, then sell them to an unscrupulous corporate aide (a diabolical Harrison Ford).  Harry’s collaborators Stan (John Cazale) and Paul (Michael Higgins) wonder and joke about their subjects because “that’s human nature,” but Harry insists on remaining aloof and impassive.  “The only thing I want from this is a pile of tape,” he says so peremptorily that Stan quits his employ.  After circumstances lead Harry, a guilt-stricken if impious Catholic, to visit his father confessor (a terse scene whose abrupt ending renders it disingenuous), we learn that his vocation has resulted in people getting hurt before.  He doesn’t ask questions of those deep-pocketed and curious enough to hire him, so why should be responsible for the consequences of his snooping?  This trope, the notion of responsibility for taking orders, be they staked on self-preservation or, far more unforgivably, large financial gain, is one of cinema’s and indeed art’s oldest (you may have seen a movie or two about an emotionless ‘driver’ who takes anyone anywhere for exorbitant fees), and it is one that informs the shape and being of Harry Caul.  He may be but a middle-aged nobody, but even middle-aged nobodies can have mistresses (Terri Garr) and hobbies, in Harry’s case, a saxophone always played in accompaniment to, well, a recording.   

With the tapes more or less remastered, Harry makes an appointment with the aide for a cash handoff, especially generous for a day's work and perhaps a week's planning.  But something irks him; something isn't right or, at least, what it appears to be.  Admittedly, the sleek, serpentine aide, whose name is Martin Stett, and his crooked smile do not inspire much confidence.  Harry won't even try an allegedly homemade Christmas cookie until his host has swallowed one and survived.  Stett repeatedly prevents Harry from meeting the corporate director bankrolling this scheme -- so adamantly, in fact, that, if it weren't for his youth, one would have suspected Stett of being the man he claimed to serve.  Somehow, however, we sense that the aide is not the font of evil, but gleefully in the thrall of a greater demon.  Reviewing The Conversation I am convinced Harry changes his mind about just about everything due solely to the timbre of Martin Stett's voice.  To his trained, musical ear so adept at making the finest adjustments to achieve perfect audio, something is hideously wrong.  In Stett he detects a profound wickedness and becomes terrified (the Catholic elements of Harry's personality, which wax and wane at some of the most inopportune moments, may have played a role).  In the film's best scene Harry storms out of Stett's office only to espy someone he never expected to see by the elevators.  As he turns away in surprise he glimpses, at the other end of the long hall, a fuzzy, writhe-like figure gently waving a triumphant envelope.  Stett seems far away, yet as Harry escapes to the elevator the doors close upon the aide's devious grin like the shutters to some witch's cottage.  Thus it is no coincidence that Amy, Harry's unbearably young and unbearably naïve part-time lover, is angelic in every respect and that he subsidizes her apartment with money from people like Stett.  Just as uncoincidental is the fact that his birthday comes on the day on which he achieves his masterpiece of surveillance of those two young lovebirds, because a new life has begun.  Perhaps, however, unbeknownst to Harry.

Other characters float in Harry's vicinity but their invariable aim is to shed light on our protagonist.  Amy's inquiries into Harry's line of work -- her discovery that it was his birthday makes her feel like they have come closer -- exiles her for the rest of the film.  Paul and, in particular, Stan gaze upon Harry in awe, although awe may be the last earthly thing their colleague desires.  Harry may be regarded by people in his field as a hero and a genius, but his passion has not made him wealthy; to liken him to an impoverished poet only appreciated by other poets is more than a bit plausible.  His counterpart, then, must be a rich fraud envious of Harry's untouchable reputation and keen on embarrassing him in front of those who respect him.  We get this cardboard cutout in William P. "Bernie" Moran (Allen Garfield).  Reviewers have praised Garfield's performance, but his every word and gesture is boilerplate, and we are very relieved when he finally completes his mission (humiliating Harry) and disappears.  Yet his annoying presence illuminates aspects of the plot and Harry's scruples, both of which converge in a magnificent warehouse scene where Harry is pursued by Moran's slinky assistant, who turns out to be available on an hourly basis.  Harry and this lady, who is neither young nor old, a perfect way to pass a night, will split some sheets, an encounter that evokes a gorgeous nightmare and an explanation for our hero's surname.

What we have intentionally omitted, of course, is the conversation itself.  Without spoiling what has been revealed in countless reviews, the distinct advantage for the audience of The Conversation -- and indeed, the film would otherwise be unwatchable -- is the pan to Mark and Ann's faces as snippets of dialogue (perhaps the most important has to do with an old hobo) are restored by Harry's wizardry.  Are we privy to emotions that Harry can only imagine, or are we seeing what Harry imagines and which did not happen at all?  That matter is never resolved, even at the end when some loose ends do appear nicely bowed; as such, we must remain at the full mercy of Harry's interpretation.  The innuendo when Harry spends that long and regrettable night with Moran's assistant is heightened by his very conscious choice to fall asleep to the conversation, to let it invade and alter his dreamscape.  Harry, you see, is really a Romantic poet in disguise.  A Romantic poet who, like a cloud, sits upon the air to dart upon his spellbound prey.

Apart from one unfortunate line, this famous story is absolutely perfect -- a miniscule flaw, admittedly, but a telling one.  Nevertheless, The Insanity of Jones still ranks as one of the most spellbinding tales of suspense ever composed, even if its suspense is a matter of when not what.  Its genius resides in its convictions; that is to say, our narrator is utterly convinced that John Enderby Jones can see something we cannot see.   In that particular argument our narrator cannot lose.  What Jones sees, however, and more importantly why, shall remain the subject of unflagging speculation.

Our Jones leads a "strictly impersonal life" in the type of clerical position which, in our modern times renowned for dehumanizing the mediocre with bureaucracy and insignificance, has spawned many a maniac.  We know nothing of his family or his future, in no small part because Jones cares little for what has yet to happen; instead, he is focused on what has already happened.  But if Jones floats in the plainest and most colorless of ponds, what events could possibly have shaped his turning squarely towards the past?  We must answer that question by first understanding what Jones sees as his past:    

Among the things that he knew, and therefore never cared to speak or speculate about, one was that he plainly saw himself as the inheritor of a long series of past lives, the net result of painful evolution, always as himself, of course, but in numerous different bodies each determined by the behaviour of the preceding one.  The present John Jones was the last result to date of all the previous thinking, feeling, and doing of John Jones in earlier bodies and in other centuries.  He pretended to no details, nor claimed distinguished ancestry, for he realised his past must have been utterly commonplace and insignificant to have produced his present; but he was just as sure he had been at this weary game for ages as that he breathed, and it never occurred to him to argue, to doubt, or to ask questions.

Why did he never consider that his sentiments might be flawed?  Do we all from time to time not have doubts about our dearest convictions?  A rather simplistic mind will answer that precisely because Jones does not have doubts is why the story is not called 'The Wisdom of Jones' or 'The Clairvoyance of Jones,' or even plainly 'The Knowledge of Jones.'  But Jones does harbor doubts: he wonders throughout our tale as to whether he may be deceived, especially by a man whom our narrator describes as unflatteringly as possible, a being only known as the Manager.

Perhaps it is important to note that Jones and his supervisor are strangers ("Jones had never exchanged a single word with him, or been so much as noticed ... by the great man"); indeed, in personality they are as opposite as two members of the same species could be.  While Jones remains lean in both physique and conversation, the Manager is fat, myopic, bald, sweaty ("in hot weather a sort of thin slime covered his cheeks") and red-faced, purple-faced "in moments of temper, which were not infrequent."  Lest we think him the epitome of pasty privileges -- the description befits a debauched Roman emperor -- a sidelight on the manager reveals him to be "an excellent business man, of sane judgment and firm will."  What is the truth behind this portraiture?  And why can't the truth be both?  Why can't an oppressive man (our Manager is "coarse, brutal almost to savagery, without consideration for others, and ... often cruelly unjust") who has never sullied his fingers with daily labor also excel in his particular field?  Because we need an unadulterated villain, a monolith of evil, to be able to side with Jones and his instincts about, well, a prior existence in which he and the Manager were acquainted under very different circumstances.  Such ambiguity would never survive a lesser tale; but The Insanity of Jones is not about ambiguity, it is the exemplary short text that can be read two entirely different ways with equal plausibility.  So when Jones retreats as he does every night to his dinner in a French restaurant in Soho, he senses a "half-remembered appointment."  This turns out to be with a former colleague, "an elderly clerk who had occupied the next desk to his own when he first entered the service of the insurance company," a man by the name of Thorpe.  He sits down at Thorpe's table and they engage in serious exchanges, although those in their vicinity do not quite see it that way:

There was a wonderful soothing quality in the man’s voice, like the whispering of a great wind, and the clerk felt calmer at once.  They sat a little while longer, but he could not remember that they talked much or ate anything.  He only recalled afterwards that the head waiter came up and whispered something in his ear, and that he glanced round and saw the other people were looking at him curiously, some of them laughing, and that his companion then got up and led the way out of the restaurant.

Where this lonesome duo ventures and what the ultimate subject of their dialogues involves shall not be revealed here.  Despite his somewhat cadaverous appearance, Thorpe clearly holds some sway over his erstwhile coworker, who acknowledges Thorpe as a key component to an understanding of his multifaceted reality.  That Thorpe "had been dead at least five years" does not bother Jones, although it may indeed bother us.

Reading Blackwood is invariably a rewarding experience because even his missteps are the errors of genius.  The wayward line in Jones's narrative is less of a line and more of a phrase, but it taints the substance of what we are witnessing with wholly unnecessary psychological mumbo-jumbo (mumbo-jumbo is too massive and unwieldy; perhaps we should say mumbo-mini).  What may be most interesting about Mr. Jones is how he resists reveling in publications that would buttress his world view ("he read no modern books on the subjects that interested him") as well as finding acceptance in a group of like-minded individuals ("nor belonged to any society that dabbled with half-told mysteries").  No, no one can quite relate to Jones, because he offers almost nothing to the outside world, firmly ensconced as he is in a realm within.  A realm, I might add, of a thousand screaming souls who all coalesce into the screaming of just one.  

A work ("Spring") by this French man of letters.  You can read the original here.

In frenzy drift long days of love and light!
March and soft smiling April give us spring
In friendly months: May flowers, June burns bright!
Sweet sleeping brooks to poplars in warmth cling, 

Swept like great palms, they curve in tender pleas;  
Yon in the warm, calm woods, a songbird throbs; 
Old nature laughs alone!  And those green trees,
United, glad, now versify their sobs.

Most fresh and gentle dawn shall crown day's rise;
In evening, love is full; at night, we hear
Knells through thick shadows and the blessed skies, 
Eternal joyous singing of one near.