I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

    I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
    And Mourners to and fro
    Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
    That Sense was breaking through –

    And when they all were seated,
    A Service, like a Drum –
    Kept beating – beating – till I thought
    My mind was going numb –

    And then I heard them lift a Box
    And creak across my Soul
    With those same Boots of Lead, again,
    Then Space – began to toll,

    As all the Heavens were a Bell,
    And Being, but an Ear,
    And I, and Silence, some strange Race
    Wrecked, solitary, here –

    And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
    And I dropped down, and down –
    And hit a World, at every plunge,
    And Finished knowing – then –

A friend of mine once lamented signing up for an entire semestral course on the works of this famous poetess (or simply female poet, as some consider the suffix to be as sexist as the tail of a long ballroom gown).  Yet he lamented this choice not because of the work itself, nor owing to the narrowness of the scope that it covered, the inevitable repetitions that a poet, dying young, are likely to incur.  I cannot really comment on the repetitions, having read only about a hundred of her poems; but from what I have absorbed, a tempting conclusion presents itself that may not please all her admirers or detractors: the repetition of which my friend spoke might not be a product of young age (Dickinson was fifty–five at her death), but a result of a lack of interaction with a wide public.  Now there is the old chestnut about real writing taking place in the mind and being betrayed by the page, and that many great writers have never published a word.  This is an acceptable premise, and I think every writer will tell you he has much greater success in conceptualizing his thoughts than reflecting them on pale parchment.  Dickinson barely published anything during her lifetime (research reveals only a dozen non–posthumous poems), which would be fine if she were writing about the Peloponnesian war or Boethius.  These were not, however, her subjects; her one and only subject was something perhaps far richer: the tapestries and whirlwinds of her soul, as in the unfinished poem above.

In our modern times, there is more than a mild impetus to foist psychological problems on an artist whose turbulent inner life has been a playground for critics since the publication of an authoritative collection of her work over fifty years ago.  I will not belabor the matter; nor is it, I may add, of any importance.  Few eager psychotherapists would ever tell you that many rational persons (especially those of extraordinary imagination who secretly try their hand at every possible internal experience) allow themselves during more pensive periods, or perhaps even to get to sleep, to think of themselves in wholly altered states.  Death being the most altered state (or "not a human experience," as a second-rate philosopher famously quipped), thought first drifts beyond this life.  Out of pride, love, or simply out of longing, we then tend to picture our mourning by those we have loved and, more fantastically, those we have yet to love.  But there is another, even more capricious leap to be made: the condition in which the artist is dead because she can no longer create. From those outside her soul, even those tenderly loved, this death may not be immediately, if at all, obvious.  But as soon as this death is confirmed by the artist, then everything and everyone seem to be participating in a large funeral march, the slow progression to death that becomes increasingly unbearable and heavy as if the artist were being pushed lower and lower into the ground, buried beneath thousands of other forgotten souls.  

Dickinson’s initial humility yields an even more remarkable impact.  She is willing to endure almost three stanzas of what may be loosely termed hackneyed imagery just to make us believe this is but another self–important writer fantasizing about the tragedy of her demise.  But she pastes a mystifying end to the third stanza, “then Space – began to toll,” and we see things a little differently.  This line is followed by one of the finest stanzas in American poetry: the heavens, the wild paradise of the artistic soul, are forevermore the monotone peal of a bell; her being, her artistic essence, is only a passive ear so that she may observe but not create (an artist’s true prison); she and silence are cellmates, ethnic pariahs from the world of life and language; finally, being unable to do anything creative she is alone for all eternity — only the dead remain grouped in endless multitudes —and the saltations of her poem are complete.

There is also the matter of the comma in the title and first line.  Dickinson’s punctuation, a subject of much scholarly analysis, can be described at best as idiosyncratic, but the comma (not included in every citation of the poem) certainly does alter the sense.  The spongy realness of the word brain, as opposed to mind or soul, make any sort of feeling inherently physical and inferior to the abstract ecstasies of the human intellect.  But “I felt a funeral,” as oddly as the line rolls off the tongue, has in it undeniable poetic appeal.  There is something Viking and epic about this presentiment, the smell of war or battle or Valkyries finding warriors strewn like slugs over a shore of pebbles and carnage.  A grand and tragic end to a queendom of lyric beauty left almost entirely to the whims of history.

This Craft of Verse

A marvelous writer once stated with regard to a lesser writer (I shall spare you both their identities) that "self-conscious eclectic literariness" was the genuine sign of postmodernism, that dreadful beast that has Grendeled our beautiful world.  That designation is only true by virtue of the inclusion of "self–conscious," the hallmark of the modern mind who thinks so much about himself that he either forgets that other people’s opinions may be superior to his, or so much about others’ opinions that he fails to see his own genius.  Another marvelous writer — at times, the most marvelous — had a lovely observation on this fact:

I think that one of the sins of modern literature is that it is too self–conscious.  For example, I think of French literature as being one of the great literatures in the world (I don’t suppose anyone could doubt this).  Yet I have been made to feel that French authors are generally too self–conscious.  A French writer begins by defining himself before he quite knows what he is going to write.  He says: What should (for example) a Catholic born in such–and–such province, and being a bit of a socialist, write?  Or: How should we write after the Second World War?  I suppose there are many people all over the world who labor under those illusory problems.

Far too many, but their number is no longer legion.  We are returning, little by little, to a world with values — eternal, moral values, the only type that resists all movements, waves, and so–called revolutions.  People are growing sick and tired of relativism, or hearing how whatever one throws on a defenseless canvas or page must be deemed equal to the great masterpieces of all our centuries.  What the proponents of the smears and bangs that compose modern “art” perhaps do not know is that there has been inferior stuff floating about in every century; there have been puppets and pantomimes and infantile attempts at significance that make anyone with a drachma of aesthetic taste shudder; but history has wisely chosen to obliterate them.  True art defies all these mindless categories and rises above them to a greater arena: that of the morally admirable.  And of all twentieth–century writers, perhaps no one is as morally admirable as Jorge Luis Borges.   

If you have never read Borges, this short collection of six lectures he gave from memory at this renowned institution of higher learning forty years ago will readily impart the bones and twigs of his fortress.  For those of us who read Borges every week, we get a rare opportunity at seeing himself present his ideas orally and, most interestingly, in English (Borges, owing to familial diversity, was bilingual from an early age).  Borges is obsessed — and all great writers are obsessed — with certain works, lines, authors, periods of language (Old Norse and Anglo–Saxon, for example) but not really with big, bland ideas, the fodder for the literary criticism he so shunned.  His lectures, he claims, are about poetry, but then he adds prose and verse are "all one."  He postulates some ideas about translation, a field in which he often exceeded the work he rendered into Spanish, then quickly retracts them.  He retracts any idea pursued to too great a length for the simple reason that he wishes it to remain a hint or suggestion and not to become an argument:

As I understand it, anything suggested is far more effective than anything laid down.  Perhaps the human mind has a tendency to deny a statement.  Remember what Emerson said: arguments convince nobody.  They convince nobody because they are arguments .... But when something is merely said or — better still — hinted at, there is a kind of hospitality in our imagination.

This explanation, coupled with Borges’s admission that he does not write novels out of laziness (only half–true) and owing to novels’ inherent padding (movement from scene to scene, continuity, etc.), gives us the core belief of his world: that poetry, even poetry expressed in prose, remains the only way in which anything of any substance can be conveyed.  When we think back on our lives, we want our memories to be poetic, we want each last promise, farewell, or ecstasy to suggest more than it could say explicitly.  We want a world of hints, allegations, and mystery, because that way we remain at least partially undiscovered, still waiting for the perfect soul to understand us.  Like any good poem or novel waits patiently for its perfect reader.

Since these lectures are given from memory (Borges was almost completely blind at the time), there are repetitions that may lead the casual reader to think Borges the type of older gentlemen ensnared in a handful of trivial detail that he likes to inflict upon younger generations as his contribution to the world of Truth.  Borges surely loved detail and does have certain favorite themes and authors, but he was far too careful a speaker and interviewee to allow himself to get more than superficially embroiled in a dispute that could only be resolved in writing.  For the purpose of his talks, he limits himself to literary moments where he finds real poetic insight, including lines or phrases from Keats ("thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!"), the Ode of Brunanburh, Lugones, Chesterton, Stevenson, Carlyle, Frost (especially his pre–sleep miles), and an obscure quote ("a rose–red city, half as old as Time," referring to this city, one of the Seven New Wonders of the World) from an obscure writer whose name even Borges cannot recall.  An amazing fact if one believes the story that Borges still remembered in 1976 an eight–stanza poem recited to him by a Romanian refugee in 1916, although Borges himself never spoke Romanian.

The web of these notions (to borrow Stevenson’s metaphor) comprises what one thinks of when asked to define poetry, which Borges calls, very tentatively, "the expression of the beautiful through the medium of words artfully woven together."  He and his readers all know that this definition is insufficient because poetry defines itself by expanding its reach over what we find poetic.  Over time and many pages, we come to understand the difference between what is vulgar, platitudinous and morally indefensible, and what is just, poetic and moral.  Whether morality itself is inherently poetic may be a matter of scrutiny and perhaps even of taste, but as Borges warns all frivolous relativists: "if a reader thinks that you have a moral defect, there is no reason whatever why he should admire you or put up with you."  And not having any moral defect at all is the divine word itself, from poet or god, that he so worships.      

The Literary Foundation Pit

This article appeared in Novaia Gazeta on a rather fascinating topic: the hypothesis (and alleged proof) of the complete and utter fraudulence of this author's work.  As the article states on numerous occasions, most controversies hinge on the authorship of this large novel (a thick dull slab that, I must say, I could not bring myself to read in its entirety), but Zeev Bar-Sella thinks the whole construct of Sholokhov the writer is a sham, hence the title : “Sholokhov was not a writer at all: On the intelligence agency project that won a Nobel prize."

Twice before the subject of a Novaia Gazeta article, a long-awaited book is finally out: Zeev Bar-Sella’s groundbreaking monograph, The Literary Foundation Pit: The “Sholokhov the Writer” Project, published by the Russian State University for the Humanities press.  

Its publication may signal the beginning of genuinely scientific Sholokhov studies.  It is not a dig at Sholokhov, nor a polemic attack.  Whenever the words “studies” or “logic” are attached to a thing or person, the connotation is a desire for scientificity.  But this project has more specific goals: objectivity, impartiality, and obedience to the facts, not to emotions or market demands.  Yet the overwhelming majority of the texts that have been published under the rubric of “Sholokhov studies” have been distinguished precisely by extreme partiality, an unwillingness to adhere strictly to the facts, the ignoring of opponents (sprinkled with, more often than not, some primitive barbs towards those parties) and frank apologetics well outside the bounds of science.  The same can be said of anti-Sholokhov literature, which features the same emotions, the same absence of strict methodology, and the same recycling of private ideas.

Besides, all the polemics around Sholokhov inevitably lead to the discussion of one narrow problem: the authorship of Quietly flows the Don.  But as Bar-Sella so rightly notes: “There cannot be a scientific discipline concerned with only one individual object, even if this object is Quietly flows the Don.”  That is why “basic conscientiousness forces us to consider the attribution of other texts.”  To this subject Bar-Sella devotes 460 pages in A4 format, sixty-five of which compose a scientific-linguistic apparatus.  On these pages he develops a rather harmonious concept of the appearance, progression and function of the “Sholokhov the Writer” project in which Sholokhov is accorded the role of a sort of placeholder or locum, or, more precisely, of a trademark, a label of an extremely  successful literary project.

The author worked for 20 years and came to certain conclusions; he has stated them and given justifications for their existence.  And from now on we can’t get off cheap with our usual spate of viral abuse such as the terms “Satanic dances,” “slander,” and “literary assassins.”  Now both official Sholokhov scholars and anti-Sholokhov scholars will be forced to sit down together at a table and begin conversations on this book’s core arguments.  It’d be good if the table turned out to be round.   

Not so long ago in Literaturnaia Gazeta, Felix Kuznetsov and A. Ushakov wrote that you were a recent student at Moscow State University.  So tell us a bit about your life before you became a mythological figure in Sholokhovian circles.
If "recent" means 38 years ago,  then one could say the same about my opponents.  I was indeed once a student at Moscow State University, but I finished my studies in Jerusalem.  My first book, however, was published in the USSR, in Makhachkala in 1974.  It was called Investigations into the field of  historical morphology of the East Caucasian languages.  Unfortunately it was a short printing run, owing to the fact that I was already living in Jerusalem at the time.  Friends of mine were able to send me only a few copies.  My second book came out in the U.S. ten years later, although the place of publication listed is Tel Aviv.  It’s called Master Gambs and Margarita, and was written jointly with Maia Kaganskaia.  You’ll find references to it in any subsequent study on the novels of Bulgakov or Ilf and Petrov.  Moreover, a large part of the book was incorporated into a reader for Russian schoolchildren.  Last year in Moscow my third book was published: Yesterday’s tomorrow.  It is a collection of the work of three authors (myself, Maia Kaganskaia, and Ilana Gomel) devoted to science fiction, mostly from the Soviet era.  Excerpts from my following book − Quietly flows the Don: against Sholokhov. Textual criticism of a crime − were published starting in 1988 in the Israeli press, and from 1990 on in the Soviet, then the Russian press.  I was very happy to find out that Solzhenitsyn had a high opinion of this work.

Now to your name.  Ms. Kotovchikhina from the Moscow State Open Pedagogical Institute stated that you are hiding behind your mother’s maiden name...
This would be logical if my mother’s name were Ivanova, and my father’s Rabinovich.  As it were, it’s just the reverse.  Officially, I am Vladimir Petrovich Nazarov.  And my present name, with which I have been living for the last quarter of a century, is nothing more than its Hebrew translation.  Zeev Bar-Sella, is simply Vladimir Petrovich, that is Wolf Son of Rock (in Greek, petros).  

I take it that, of all your visits to Moscow, this is the most pleasant?   
And how!  And that’s because I get to present my fourth book, The Literary Foundation Pit: The “Sholokhov the Writer” Project.  I am infinitely grateful to the people at Russian State University for the Humanities press which has taken on a very heavy workload for the preparation and release of  such a technically complex book.  I am no less grateful to the editorial and publishing council of the University consisting of the most outstanding scientists (but most of all to academician Mikhail Gasparov), who recognized not only my work, but also that the problem itself was worthy of genuinely scientific investigation.

And yet more recently (at a session of the presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences on May 13th) Felix Kuznetsov − correspondent and member of this same Academy − said that, “the scandalous question regarding the authenticity of his (Sholokhov's) authorship is secondary.  [Foremost] is the imposed and unscientific subject.”  And the presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences agreed with him …       
At one point, the French Academy declared the problem of meteorites unscientific.  And they keep falling and falling.  The very fact that there have been questions for 70 years regarding Sholokhov's authorship says that the matter requires scientific resolution, which is exactly what I try to do in my book.  And my method is just as academic Yuri Osipov has said: “by not taking a great interest in emotions.”

But the problem of authorship concerns Quietly flows the Don.  More precisely, its first two volumes.  And yet in your book, not a word about Quietly flows the Don.  How come?
Because I understood that it was necessary to divide two problems cleanly from one another: authorship of Quietly flows the Don and the “Sholokhov question” as a whole.  There cannot be a science of one literary work.  Therefore it is impossible to answer the first question without having answered the second.  At the current time it is not important who the author of Quietly flows the Don really was.  Whoever it was, it was undoubtedly a writer.  And today, it is absolutely clear to me: Sholokhov was not a writer of any kind, and my book is devoted to proving this statement.  Therefore, up till now I have not had any need for Quietly flows the Don.  But only up till now.  There will be a second part to my investigation.  My impatient readers will simply have to consult the works mentioned from the series Quietly flows the Don: against Sholokhov.
  
What do you see then as the central thrust of your most recent book?
It is well-known that a researched and academic biography of Sholokhov does not exist.  Even the writer himself − as always, not quite competently − declared: “My autobiography (!) is in my books.”  It is abundantly clear, however, that neither the description of the First World War (when Sholokhov was 9 years old), nor the description of the Civil War (Sholokhov was still only 14) cannot possibly have anything to do with this “autobiography.”  And then a surprising biography is revealed: “He had no ... did not participate ... was not...”  Instead, "he was exposed ... and was part of.”  What is passed off to us as “The Life of Mikhail” has been repeatedly refuted by Sholokhov himself.  This concerns his childhood, his youth, his adolescence, his tenure in the Komsomol, his tenure in the special purpose detachments, his time in court, his military service, the funeral of his mother, etc.  All this is illuminated in the book and supplied by extremely detailed references to sources.  So no emotions.

So what does all of this yield?
All of this yields the fact that Sholokhov's biography was written by backdating according to the compositions published under his name.  This is not a life of a real person, but a politico-ideological project.  We even managed to find the initiator of this project: the information department of the Joint State Political Directorate.  To put it more simply, the information department of the special services of that time specifically supervised the intellectual life of a whole country.

But you worked nonetheless with manuscripts of Quietly flows the Don?
The history of finding (and, simultaneously, of concealing) manuscripts of Quietly flows the Don explains why The literary foundation pit has already come out, and the completion of Quietly flows the Don: against Sholokhov keeps getting postponed.  As is well–known, we first learned about the existence of these manuscripts from Lev Kolodny in the early 1990s.  First there were a few facsimile reproductions in the newspapers, then more than one hundred pages of the manuscript in Kolodny’s book.  Finally, already around the time of the centennial celebration of Sholokhov’s birth, Kuznetsov reproduced several dozen pages of the manuscript.  At one point, nineteen of them were actually available on the internet.  Now, as Literaturnaia Gazeta announced, the complete manuscript has been published but ... in Kiev, with money from the Leonid Kuchma fund.  One thousand numbered copies in leather bindings and cases under lock and key.  In the Institute of World Literature at the Russian Academy of Sciences, I was informed that the book would not be sold, although the Academy’s name and symbol are printed on the book.   In other words, despite its wooden box − or rather its box of Koscheis − this edition is obviously not intended for researchers.  But as soon as I find a key to this lock, the book about the authorship of Quietly flows the Don will immediately be finished.

Our newspaper has written about your book twice before.  Naturally, before your study came out. What would you be able to say about the reaction to your ideas, even if only expressed in brief newspaper form?
To my work on Sholokhov starting in 1988 there have been about 120 responses.  And to the two articles mentioned − your articles, by the way − no fewer than thirty.  And yet, except for two or three, all of them contain nothing but abuse: “Slander is the revenge of cowards ” (whom are we avenging, I wonder, and what are we are afraid of?).  “Troubled waters,” which for some reason “do not die down,” “Satanic dances,” “a witches’ Sabbath,” and others in the same vein.  And the funny thing is that you state my ideas, but it is you who is generally the target of these insults.  I am simply “a certain Israeli” (true enough, with “limited intelligence”), but you are the “accommodating interpreter” and even a “hairy mongrel.”  But Anatoly Kalinin stated it powerfully and especially well: “an old reptile who crawled out of Novaia Gazeta.”

That’s both funny and annoying.  But there is a label  for the two of us: “literary assassins,” like some kind of  brigade or something.  But I would like to make one circumstance clear to our readers.  Some critics have directly hinted that somehow I am either bribed or recruited by you as some sort of literary Mossad.  In fact, you and I have known each other for almost forty years.
Yes, we became friends during that  recent  university period of mine.  I was in the philosophy department at Moscow State University, you were in the historical archives, and for a time we worked together at the Russian Language Institute of the Academy of Sciences in the USSR.  And did you notice then how I was sweet-talking you?

But let’s get back to our topic.  I wanted to ask how this bibliographical battle is reflected in the book published by the Institute of World Literature for the anniversary of Sholokhov’s thousand-page bibliography.     
To my great amazement, there are fewer than ten names given in the bibliography, much fewer than even those known to Kuznetsov who is thanked by the compilers.  One gets the impression that the overall objective of the bibliography is to hide the international significance of studying a problem of authorship.  The same purpose is served by the recently published Dictionary of the language of Sholokhov, edited by Professor E. Dibrovaia.  Being a linguist, I could not assume that it was possible to forge the dictionary.  It turns out that if very necessary, it is possible.  This question is too specialized for newspapers, so any interested parties should consult the review by L. Katsis in Knizhnoe obozrenie, issue no. 22 of this year.

Well then, let’s wish the bibliography much success and be done with it. What was the main substance of the responses? 
Clearly, it’s not Sholokhov's name which has gotten the public all wound up.  Everyone is used to hearing about plagiarism, and the problem of authorship of the first two books is even accepted as a topic of eternal debate.  Which explains the shock value of claiming that one of the authors of the novel They fought for their country was really the great Russian writer Andrei Platonov.  Unexpected support has been rendered to me by a member of the committee for the celebration of Sholokhov’s anniversary, correspondent N. Kornienko, member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.  This bit of assistance allowed us to find textual affinities in the novel not only to Platonov’s prose on war and military matters, but also to the classic pre-war story Fro.  I should say right away, however, that this is but one example of fruitful interaction between the representatives of two opposing camps so as to carry out a scientific investigation of Sholokhov.

Bunin, "Свет"

This poem "Light," by Russia's first Nobel Prize laureate in literature, can be read in the original here. 

No emptiness, no darkness waits
But faceless light, the sire of time ...
By midnight gloom, no church bell chime:
You stare and see in blackest shapes

Above you endless, hueless sky,
An inner arch; a window wall –
Far, narrow, blind – evades the eye.
It blinks in secret if at all,

Eleven hundred years, each night ...
Beside you now do crosses weep,
Stone backgrounds, the delicate plight
Of hidden buried saints who sleep
 
In awful prayer in their moss,
Having achieved by unsaid ways.
Before the throne two ingots cross
And in their blackness bend in praise.

And do you see its hard embrace
For Him who suffered for His grace?
In secret our unseen guard, He
Shines light beyond the darkest sea.

The End of the Affair (film)

There is an old adage about serious writers’ contempt for thrillers, detective novels, and other such crime games, and truly, the vast majority of these products do not need our dislike, since their wooden characters, lackadaisical style, and preposterous plotting indicate they already despise themselves.  Certainly, they are not meant to be re–read and are as disposable as the brown paper bags in which we carry other guilty pleasures.  Yet most of us, I think, enjoy a good mystery if indeed there are still good mysteries to be enjoyed (they are perhaps fewer about than in mystery’s Golden Age, but many page–turners can still be found).  The premise behind these works, be they literary or cinematic, is that either something extraordinary or unusual will be revealed to us, or the process by which this revelation is made will be fascinating (in the best mysteries, both these features converge).  The thrill of discovering a solution to a complex gambit — or, to be more modern about it, some multi–tiered conspiracy — is very satisfying after a long day of work, and gives us the impression that we are in tune with the shapes and shifts of the world, that our intuition is still sharply honed, and that we have learned from life and can apply these lessons to future days. 

 

In this way, mysteries are the most basic form of literature.  They simultaneously explain and amuse, which accounts for the development in the twentieth century of this novelistic form as well as the proliferation of books and films that exploit chicanery, deception, and cabalism to wretched commercial ends.  One topic that seems caught in the undertow of this wave of intrigue is actually the most exciting of them all: that of personal mysteries and personal discoveries.  Introspection is a nice and trendy word, but it also breeds bellybutton–staring.  More acceptable practices are learning about ourselves through others and learning about these same people through ourselves.  In other words, mastering the basic recipes of human psychology and then serving them to guests.  Some guests (as we have learned) always praise the food, regardless of what they really think; others will only emphasize what could be improved; then there are those most maddening and unreadable types who say nothing and just chew quietly like some lonesome cow.  It is not clear whether they are being politely taciturn, whether they are incapable of expressing what they really feel (either good or bad), whether they do not care about food in general and consider it a biological necessity, or whether they do not care about you, the cook, who, in principle, believes in what you are serving and tries to accommodate your guests as best you can.  Now make all those guests the romantic interests you have had over the years and make your food emotion and affection, and we come to why today is about love, which is the greatest mystery there could ever be.  It is the greatest of mysteries precisely because it involves a continuous revelation of something extraordinary and unusual, and because no solution is ever guaranteed.       

The setup for this film by renowned director Neil Jordan is the mystery of how people may spend years apart and, upon seeing each other again, be swept up by that same wave and dragged mercilessly down to a bottomless trench.  The afflicted is a young novelist called Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes), and the year is 1946.  England has survived the war, or so it claims, and quilts of memories are tattered by the losses that each endured, even in a country that hardly bore the brunt of the destruction.  Maurice has lost enough of his sense of idealism and optimism to become surly and resentful towards this new world, and although he maintains a rough exterior, inside he is ravaged.  His ravager has long red hair, incomparable cheekbones, and a plain name, Sarah Miles (Julianne Moore).  Maurice and Sarah are as old as the war, having begun their love in 1939, and like the war they are over, although Maurice is as haunted by what went wrong in his small, private tragedy that is utterly unimportant for the history of the world as every citizen wondered how in God’s name such a calamity could befall civilization.  The most injurious part of Maurice’s pain is his love’s inexplicable termination towards war’s end: he is, as he always will be, in Sarah’s arms, when a shell smashes into his London home.  For a few minutes both he and Sarah think they are dead, or, much worse, that only one of them has survived.  We are given Sarah’s point of view on this event, and it takes more than a few minutes for her to realize that Maurice is still alive and will probably live.  But she leaves, wordlessly, submissively, and cannot or will not explain why she feels this step to be necessary.  I should add that she has been married all this time to a rather sympathetic civil servant by the name of Henry (Stephen Rea), and she is still married to him at the beginning of the film when Maurice bumps into Henry one miserably rainy night.

There's a mystery here having to do with Sarah’s reason for leaving Maurice’s house that day, and the reason is both good and ludicrous.  To carry out a story of such basic structure requires exquisite acting, which is provided by Moore and Fiennes, but also by Rea, who just wants his wife to be happy and understands she could never be happy with only him.  The original novel has components of the time period that allow Jordan’s adaptation to give us flavor without intrusion into the mores of the era (a tactic that is far less successful in the hopelessly anachronistic love affair in the filming of this book).  Doubtless, the steady, cuckolded husband is an old cliché, as is the artistic lover who makes life and love more intense, or the seductive beauty caught between duty and passion, and so forth.  But there are other details as well, including a small boy with a horrible affliction, that seem at first superfluous but then turn out to be essential.  Fiennes and Moore are so skilled at the small gestures and tortures of genuine affection that you will have a hard time believing they are not a real–life couple (this film might well be banned in both actors’ family settings, and not just for the corporalities).  You will also marvel at what people in love do for one another, even at the risk of losing them.  And that is a mystery that will never be solved.