Billy Budd, Sailor

Life's real tragedy, we are gravely informed in a quite famous and now quite old French film, is that "everyone has his reasons."  To someone of stern principles this may seem to be a throwaway observation by one of the forefathers of our contemporary relativists who don't like principles because principles imply responsibility, the mortal enemy of modern man – yet this is not the true context.  Our reasons may be our own and they may be complicated, deranged, or volatile.  The mere fact that they exist, however, allows us to choose or reject interaction with the other inhabitants of our world.  I have my reasons for writing, and some may suspect they involve egotism, megalomania, and moral preachment, charges that could be leveled against any writer.  Nevertheless, any regular reader of these pages would correctly enumerate as the motive forces aesthetic bliss and the discovery of inner truth because those are the only reasons one should write at all.  That's why when a second-rate poet once accused this great genius of writing in two languages out of excessive ambition, he simultaneously betrayed his commensurate ambition and inferior talent.  So if everyone has his reasons, how can we possibly enact legislation to govern millions?   Where do we cleave intent from result?  A few questions for the thoughtful reader of this incomparable tale.

According to our narrator it is no uncommon occurrence on a large ship, especially one with high turnover and many fresh new tars, to find one seaman who distinguishes himself solely by his good looks.  Upon this man is conferred the unspoken title of "Handsome Sailor" (sailors generally abjure fancy appellations) and he walks among his peers exuding some of the magnetism which in our days we normally reserve for movie stars or divas.  While he is "invariably a proficient in his perilous calling, he was also more or less of a mighty boxer or wrestler," a perfect combination of "strength and beauty."  In short:

The moral nature was seldom out of keeping with the physical make. Indeed, except as toned by the former, the comeliness and power, always attractive in masculine conjunction, hardly could have drawn the sort of honest homage the Handsome Sailor in some examples received from his less gifted associates.

This is, we remember, only a typical portrait; our man Billy does not appear to have any of the puncher in him.  But he works hard on his ship, the Rights-of-man, earns an inordinate amount of respect given his petty duties, and his captain is soon loath to part with him.  Yet as fate would have it, a larger vessel by the name of Bellipotent (a lovely bell-ringing pun) requests his services, and he is transferred despite his being the Rights' "jewel" and "peacemaker" – which brings us to a small aside.  There could not be a clearer Christian parallel than the use of these two epithets, but not all parallels signify anything more than the recurrence of circumstance.  Billy's ingenuousness – he cannot even read or write – extenuates the impact of his looks and converts him not unquickly into a pleasant reminder to his shipmates of their long-lost youth.  For that reason, we learn, does he incur the wrath of a man by the name of John Claggart.

Claggart holds a special place in the pantheon of villainy because we are allowed two glances into his person.  The first is in his outward appearance ("a man about five and thirty, somewhat spare and tall ... his hand was too small and shapely to have been accustomed to hard toil"), by which he is likened to Tecumseh, a cleric during the English Civil War, and some distant Greeks, probably Spartans, with whom he, as the Bellipotent's master-at-arms, may have shared some notions of naumachia.  He is also rumored to have been a chevalier who was Anglicized and stowed aboard to compensate "for some mysterious swindle" (as with many manifestations of the Devil, he neither has an accent in English nor really speaks like a native).  The untraceability of his origin corresponds to that of evil itself, and as evil cannot exist in a vacuum and must have a referent, so must Claggart come upon something to unleash the demons that dance around his soul.  He finds his bugbear in the comely shape of William Budd, who one day just so happens to spill his supper upon the deck and Claggart's path:

It is more than probable that when the Master-at-arms in the scene last given applied to the sailor the proverb Handsome is as handsome does, he there let escape an ironic inkling, not caught by the young sailors who heard it, as to what it was that had first moved him against Billy, namely, his significant personal beauty.  Now envy and antipathy, passions irreconcilable in reason, nevertheless in fact may spring conjoined like Chang and Eng in one birth.  Is Envy then such a monster?  Well, though many an arraigned mortal has in hopes of mitigated penalty pleaded guilty to horrible actions, did ever anybody seriously confess to envy?  Something there is in it universally felt to be more shameful than even felonious crime.  And not only does everybody disown it, but the better sort are inclined to incredulity when it is in earnest imputed to an intelligent man.  But since its lodgement is in the heart not the brain, no degree of intellect supplies a guarantee against it.  But Claggart's was no vulgar form of the passion.  Nor, as directed toward Billy Budd, did it partake of that streak of apprehensive jealousy that marred Saul's visage perturbedly brooding on the comely young David.  Claggart's envy struck deeper.  If askance he eyed the good looks, cheery health and frank enjoyment of young life in Billy Budd, it was because these went along with a nature that, as Claggart magnetically felt, had in its simplicity never willed malice or experienced the reactionary bite of that serpent.  To him, the spirit lodged within Billy, and looking out from his welkin eyes as from windows, that ineffability it was which made the dimple in his dyed cheek, suppled his joints, and dancing in his yellow curls made him preeminently the Handsome Sailor.  One person excepted, the Master-at-arms was perhaps the only man in the ship intellectually capable of adequately appreciating the moral phenomenon presented in Billy Budd.

The "person excepted" is Edward Fairfax Vere, the Bellipotent's captain, who one night will become the third party in a dark reunion in the first mate's quarters.  Of Vere much has been said, both in Billy Budd and in the story's expansive secondary literature, so we would be best advised to keep our comments short.  Vere is praised as a brilliant sailor, the best of his active rank, and a man of philosophical bent – which makes his opinions on Billy's actions all the more damning.  Vere also persists as the object of much speculation because of his "pedantic" and allegedly "aristocratic" disposition (at one point his person is described as "a streak ... of King's yarn in a coil of navy rope").   That Billy will at different junctures be suspected both of blue blood and foreignness renders his relationship to Vere and Claggart all the more crucial – and no more needs to be said.   

If style were all that mattered, Billy Budd might be the best-written prose work in the English language, no meaner than the sagas of a bowelless Scotsman and a melancholy Moor.  As it were, some of Melville's far less gifted associates have entrapped our poor sailor in a Christian allegory, which it is in a way so obvious as to divest it of any allegorical meaning, or a study of latent homosexuality, which we can safely say it isn't.  Proponents of gender studies, that claptrap of indignation, have never really understood what could bond a squad of non-related heterosexual men together in an army or a sports team, a plain term called camaraderie.  That there are no women in Billy Budd, or scarcely any in this masterpiece, confounds and upsets them profoundly, but there is little we can do for such minds.  The best way to understand our boy Billy is as a victim of what can be bluntly described as fate and more roundly described as man's manifold reasons for opposing the good that rests in all of us.  That is to say, there may be one instance of justice in the codex memorized by the judge in a now dimly-recollected law school classroom, and another embedded deep within the valves of his almighty heart.  Billy falls distinctly between both natural categories and could just as easily be absolved as condemned.  There is also that pleasing ballad ("Billy in the darbies") that concludes the story.  The attentive reader may ask himself why the rather unusual "darbies" is an anagram of "seabird," or why, for that matter, the poem's name an anagram of "I, Billy, death's brine."  And that same reader will not fail to notice that very singular conversation between the ship's purser and its surgeon.  Maybe heavenly phenomena should be not limited to the firmament.

Pasternak, "Chopin"

An essay on this Franco-Polish composer by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

It is easy to be a realist in painting, an art so visually oriented towards the outside world.  But what does realism in music mean?  Nowhere does one part with conventionality and evasiveness as one does in music; and no creative field is so imbued with the spirit of Romanticism, that ever-achieving and yet in no way verifiable beginning of whimsicality.  All of this is based, however, on exceptions.  There are many of them, and they constitute the history of music.  There are also exceptions to exceptions, and of them there are two: Bach and Chopin.   

To us, these creative pillars of instrumental music do not seem to be heroes of imagination or fantastic figures.  They come off instead as the embodiment of trust in their own contours.  Their music abounds in detail and produces the impression of a chronicle of their lives.  More than in the works of anyone else, reality surfaces through sound.  When we speak of realism in music, we do not at all mean the illustrative inception of music, be it program music or opera.  No, we are dealing with something very different.

Everywhere, in any field of art, realism does not seem to represent a definite direction but rather a certain degree of art, a higher level of authorial precision.  In other words, realism is that decisive measure of creative detailing which does not require from the artist any general aesthetic rules, any contemporary listeners, or any audience.  Here is where the art of Romanticism always remains, and in this it takes satisfaction.  How little it needs to bloom and flourish!   At its disposal gather a stilted pathos, a false depth and an obsequious affection – all the forms of artificiality to do with them as it will.

In an entirely different position is the realist artist.  His reality is a cross and a predetermination; therein lies not a shadow of willfulness or fancy.  How could he play and amuse himself when his own future plays with him, when he is its toy!  First of all, what makes an artist into a realist, what creates him?  An early impressionability in childhood, the thought occurs to us, and an opportune conscientiousness in his vision.  Precisely these two forces put him to work, work that would be both unknown and unnecessary to a Romantic artist.  His own memories drive him into that realm of technical discoveries that is so vital for their reproduction.  Artistic realism, as it seems to us, is the depth of biographical imprint left by the primary motive force upon the artist, which then pushes him towards novelty and originality.     

Chopin is a realist in the same way that Leo Tolstoy is a realist.  His creative oeuvre is thoroughly original not because of its dissimilarity to those of his rivals, but because of its similarity to the temperament with which he wrote.  It is always biographical, not because of any egocentrism but owing to the fact that Chopin, like other great realists, considered his life a tool of knowing all life on earth, and led namely this extravagant personal way of life, this wasteful and lonely type of existence.

2.

The primary means of expression, the language which expounded everything that Chopin wished to say, was his melody, probably the most genuine and powerful of all melodies known to us.  This is no short, melodic motif returning in couplets, nor the repetition of some aria with a voice ringing endlessly in the same tones, but a gradually developing thought similar to the pace of a riveting story or the contents of a historically important narrative.  It is powerful not only in its effect upon us, but also because Chopin experienced himself the traits of its despotism, pursuing in this harmonization a refinement of his art in every possible subtlety and twist of its demanding and subduing formation.   

Take, for example, the theme of the third Étude in E-Major.  It would have bestowed upon the author fame akin to the best song collections of Schumann, and in more general and moderate resolutions.  But no!  For Chopin this melody was his emissary for reality; behind it stood some real image or event (once, when his favorite student played it, Chopin raised his clasped hands and exclaimed: "O, my homeland").  And so, having exhausted the modulations, Chopin was obliged to sort out seconds and thirds of the middle voice up to the last semitone, so as to remain faithful to all the purlings of this flowing theme, this prototype, and so as not to stray from the truth. 

Or in the eighteenth Étude in G-sharp Major, in thirds with a winter path (this composition is more commonly termed the tenth Étude in C Major, number seven), the mood can be likened to one of Schubert's elegies, and could have been achieved through minor exertions.  But no!  Expressed here are not only the dives into the potholes upon a sled's course, but also the white flakes which fly in from every angle and reduce visibility.  From another angle one sees the leaden black horizon, and this painstaking pattern of separation could only be conveyed in such a chromatically fleeting and irretrievable, lifelessly ringing, and freezing minor.

Or in the Barcarole in F-Sharp Major, similar to Mendelssohn's "Venetian Gondola Songs," there could have obtained an impression of more modest means, for precisely here one would have found the poetic nearness which one usually associates with such titles.  But no! Oily fires turn and flow about the embankment in the black, curving water; waves, people, talk and boats all collide; and in order to further the impression, the entire barcarole itself, with all its arpeggios, trills, and grace notes, had to rise and fall like a pool of water, fly then tumble onto its own pedal point, softly announcing its major key with the minor shudders of its harmonic elements.

Before his eyes there is always a model of a soul (but this, too, is sound) which we should approach, listening, perfecting ourselves and then selecting.  Hence the tapping of drops in the D-flat Major Prelude; hence the cavalry squadron in the A-Flat Major Polonaise trotting atop the listener; hence the cascading waterfalls upon a mountain road in the last part of the B-Minor Sonata; hence the inadvertently flung open window on a country estate during a nighttime storm in the middle of the quiet and serene Nocturne in F major.

3.

Chopin traveled, gave concerts, and spent half his life in Paris.  He was known by many: about him we have accounts from such leading lights as Heinrich Heine, Schumann, George Sand, Delacroix, Liszt, and Berlioz.  In these reviews there is much to be valued, but even more conversations about undines, golden harps and love-wrought feathers that are designed to give us a notion of Chopin's compositions, how he actually played in concert, as well as his appearance and character.  So incorrectly and incongruously sometimes does man express his ecstasies!  This man was inhabited by few mermaids or salamanders; on the contrary, magnificently worldly parlors were teeming with hives of Romantic moths and elves as he would rise from the piano and cross through their parting ranks – this phenomenally distinct, brilliant, and almost comically restrained man, mortally exhausted from writing at night and giving lessons to his students by day.  It is said that right after such evenings, so as to draw out of its stupor the guests upon whom he had just heaped his improvisations, Chopin would sneak off to a mirror in the foyer, disarrange his tie and hair, and, having returned to the parlor with this altered appearance, begin to perform humorous numbers with a text of his own composition: the distinguished English traveler; the ecstatic parisienne, the poor old Jew.  It is clear that the force of tragedy is unthinkable without the sense of objectivity; and yet the sense of objectivity cannot be circumvented without the vein of mimicry.   

It is remarkable that whatever Chopin might show us and wherever he might lead us, we always give ourselves over to his imagination without concern for the feeling of appropriateness, without any intellectual embarrassment.  All his tempests and dramas touch us closely, and they occur in the age of railroads and the telegraph.  Even in his fantaisie, a part of his polonaises, and in his ballads, a legendary world appears, in subject matter partially connected to Mickiewicz and Słowacki, and yet even here threads of a certain plausibility extend from him to contemporary man.  These knightly legends are in the treatments by Michelet or Pushkin, but do not involve a shaggy, bare-legged fairy tale in a horned helmet.  A particularly great imprint of this seriousness can be found in the most Chopin-like of Chopin's works, his Études.

Chopin's Études, named for their technical mastery, truly resemble "studies" more than textbooks.  They are musically expounded investigations on the theory of childhood and separate sections of the forte-piano introduction to death (how amazing that half of it was composed by a twenty-year-old!), and they instruct us in history, the building of the universe, and whatever else might be more distant and commonplace than playing the piano.  The significance of Chopin is broader than music.  His reality seems to us to be a repeated discovery.

средний голос

Pushkin, "Зимний вечер"

A work ("Winter evening") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

A stormy haze has cloaked the skies,     
In swirling snow it beats and throbs; 
It'll howl and wail, a beast abroad,  
And softly weep just like a child.     
Like fresh-dried straw in sudden pain,    
Upon the feeble roof it'll crack,    
As late-come travelers might rap               
Upon our window's frozen stain.               

Our aged hovel, dark and plain,           
Shall wait in sadness 'til death nears.            
Well then, my old, my sweet, my dear,        
Why sitt'st thou silent by that pane?                       
Or has the storm engaged thy mind, 
My friend, and drowned thy dreams in stone?  
Or dost thou sleep beneath the drone 
Of thine own spindle and its bind?  

Let's drink, dear friend, and never stop,  
From my poor youth forlorn I part;                 
Let's drink from woe, and where's my cup? 
Much gladder soon will be thy heart.     
Sing first a titmouse song or two,            
Of quiet life beyond the sea;          
Sing then a water girl's sweet glee,                 
That lass whose pails each morn ring true.

A stormy haze has cloaked the skies,
In swirling snow it beats and throbs; 
It'll howl and wail, a beast abroad,
Then softly weep just like a child.
Let's drink, dear friend, and never stop,
From my poor youth forlorn I part; 
Let's drink from woe, and where's my cup?
Much gladder soon will be my heart.

Pen, Pencil, and Poison

Since his death on the doorstep of a new century, this famous author's work has been denigrated and endorsed by various critics and yet retained the inviolable mark of greatness: no reader has shown himself indifferent.  How could anyone ultimately be indifferent to Oscar Wilde?  More than the other dismissive dandies of his or any age, Wilde was a supreme moralist.  That is to say, while he spared no one his thorns, he knew where to embed them if given the choice.  Morality was not something to mock in the day's spare hours but a mist that coated our every thought and action, an echo of our meanings, a prism of our treatment of others and ourselves.  While his most famous prose work is often construed as an ode to decadence, it is precisely the opposite: a protracted allegory on the shades of the soul.   Which is why we should view this essay with some healthy skepticism.

Our subject is undoubtedly a villain, if one of whom you likely know very little.  His poems are hardly read, much less studied; his drawings have garnered the interest of those who peddle morbid collectables; and even his reputation for evil has diminished.  How could a man of artistic ability and temperament consign himself to oblivion by murdering two family members and an old chum?  Wilde offers the rather reprehensible explanation that similar fates have befallen Roman emperors whose crimes have become the stuff of cocktail parties and other frivolous banter – reprehensible because it suggests that we slacken our morals as memory slackens its hold.  A survey of Wainewright's pursuits will give us an excellent idea of our subject's disposition:

This young dandy sought to be somebody, rather than to do something.  He recognised that Life itself is an art, and has its modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express it ... His essays are prefiguring of much that has since been realised.  He seems to have anticipated some of those accidents of modern culture that are regarded by many as true essentials.  He writes about La Gioconda, and early French poets and the Italian Renaissance.  He loves Greek gems, and Persian carpets, and Elizabethan translations of Cupid and Psyche and the Hypnerotomachia book-bindings, and early editions, and wide-margined proofs. He is keenly sensitive to the value of beautiful surroundings, and never wearies of describing to us the rooms in which he lived or would have liked to live. He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals. Like Baudelaire he was extremely fond of cats, and with Gautier he was fascinated by that "sweet marble monster" of both sexes that we can still see at Florence and in the Louvre.

From such a portrait we may draw several conclusions, even if they are all blurry sketches.  Our man is first and foremost in love with his taste, and then secondly in love with himself – both of which compose the halves of his genius.  To be a genius, an Argentine novelist once claimed, you have to think you're a genius and be right.  And while we harbor serious reservations as to the genius of many contemporary writers who spend years composing works of dubious character and authenticity, with Wainewright no such hesitation arises.  He is thoroughly convinced of his powers to create and destroy, the magic to which every author feels himself entitled.  But, as we know, he takes things a step or three too far.

Why does Wainewright even merit mention?  Whom does the recapitulation of a murderer's habits befit?  With our contemporary fascination for real crime, this poet-poisoner would have gained a considerable portion of the limelight, but he would have faded much more rapidly than one would expect for two inevitable reasons.  Firstly, one may forget an above-average murderer, but a blessing indeed would be to remember an above-average poet; secondly, a murderer's fame rests either on the identity of his victims, their quantity, or the methods with which he dispatched them to extinction.  His methods were plain and bitter; his victims were relatively few for our gory times, only a triptych; and his victims were the most nameless of enemies, his mother-in-law, his sister-in-law, and then a long-time family friend.  None of this will make our subject into more than he was in real life, a petty demon with a taste for green, and the excerpts of Wainewright's own works resemble abstract heraldry, motley and cruel.  But Wilde insists on promoting one strand of this fiend's accomplishments:

Modern journalism may be said to owe almost as much to him as to any man of the early part of this century.  He was the pioneer of Asiatic prose, and delighted in pictorial epithets and pompous exaggerations.  To have a style so gorgeous that it conceals the subject is one of the highest achievements of an important and much admired school of Fleet Street leader-writers, and this school Janus Weathercock may be said to have invented.  He also saw that it was quite easy by continued reiteration to make the public interested in his own personality, and in his purely journalistic articles this extraordinary young man tells the world what he had for dinner, where he gets his clothes, what wines he likes, and in what state of health he is, just as if he were writing weekly notes for some popular newspaper of our own time. This being the least valuable side of his work, is the one that has had the most obvious influence.  A publicist, nowadays, is a man who bores the community with the details of the illegalities of his private life.

You may have never heard of the term "Asiatic prose" (the formulation of this man of letters), but it is akin to what in some circles is now termed "ornamental prose."  And Wainewright, to be described thus, seems to have been one of the first ancestors of many members of our social networking and blogging communities who are so eager to impart the minutest details of their lives to strangers in exchange for some fleeting attention. 

What is even more remarkable is the date of this essay's composition, 1889, six years or so before Wilde's detractors got the better of him and ended his hope if not his physical existence.  How odd to see a young man whom one could not but admire for his ingenuity, wit, and insight into morality construct the most decadent texts, chant the most rebellious slogans, and all the while conceal longings for things that Victorian society deemed ill and outlandish.  The "illegalities" of Wilde's "private life" caught up to him just as he was willing to explain everything to everyone and in so doing, cease to be the mysterious figure known as Oscar Wilde.  That could never do.  And if his favorite poisoner had still been around, he might have even asked him for a favor. 

With a Friend Like Harry

Upon graduation from high school eighteen years ago, I was convinced – as are most of us, I suppose – that a fifteen- or twenty-year reunion would be something extraordinary.  Everyone’s life would be so utterly different that we would approach classmates with remarks appropriate for such a hiatus and be shocked to learn that these were not the people with whom we attended classes, but their spouses.  Some people would have mutated so drastically as to be unrecognizable, and all in all the experience would be akin to going to a masquerade at a zoo of futuristic intergalactic humanoids.  The only question remaining would be on which side of the glass (or bars) we should look for our old chums.  Well, I don’t know about you, but the few people I’ve seen from my graduating class over the years haven’t changed appreciably.  Let me rephrase that: they changed more over the course of high school than they have since, which is to be expected given the hormonal and orientational zigzags that highlighted our existence at that time (especially true for men).  So it would surprise me greatly if at some point before our school’s glorious silver reunion I were to encounter a classmate whom I knew reasonably well and be unable to identify that person when prompted.  More surprising still would be a reuniting that did not seem that random, that smacked even of some sinister plot, and that began to take over details in my life until that long-lost coeval became, well, a sort of advisor.  Yes, this can really only happen in a work of fiction, and that would be this odd but entertaining film.

The course of events is indeed what I mention above, and the person who usurps my place in this narrative is Michel (Laurent Lucas), a husband and father of three hampered by the usual battery of familial duties and restrictions.  In a rather bizarre locale for such life-altering happenings, the bathroom of a gas station, Michel meets Harry (Sergi López), a man probably his age (both actors were born in the same year) but otherwise as different from him as can be.  It is Harry who recognizes Michel, a gentle, perhaps overly passive sort, but Michel cannot place Harry, who speaks French with a pronounced Spanish accent and is as brash and pushy as Michel is pliable.  After numerous attempts to elicit a memory or some kind of repressed memento of their former friendship, Harry plays his trump card and recites a preposterous poem that Michel wrote in high school called "The Dagger in the Skin of the Night."  Since, in films, quoting someone’s work back to him begets either flight or an unbreakable bond, the two men decide that they should honor the past and become buddies once more, and to that end, Harry and his girlfriend follow Michel and his family on their vacation in the countryside.

Who exactly had been privy to this poem apart from its juvenile creator, we may never know, but a rather unpleasant thought crosses our minds at this juncture and the script never persuades us that this conclusion may be incorrect.  I will not say what it is because the more I reflect on that possibility, the more likely it seems.  A better way of engaging the subject is to consider the following: we are duly aware that Harry is up to no good, for if Harry had only happy and caring intentions for Michel and his family, we wouldn’t be watching a mystery but an afterschool special.  We doubt that the film will simply devolve into bloodletting (although, be warned, it is not free of violence), because blurbs would inevitably betray this derailment and it would be shelved alongside so many other films involving an intruder in the family.  So what could Harry’s secret be?  Not much is revealed by telling you that Harry, being the altruistic fellow he is, takes one look at Michel’s plain but stable life and thinks that he has wasted his time being a family man.  "You are a great writer," Harry tells him, in some form, more than once.  But what he is really saying is: "You are a coward.  You have chosen the easy bourgeois path and taken as few risks as possible."  That’s all well and good, but what purpose could such reprimands serve?  If Harry wants Michel to do him a favor, his mafioso tactic of bestowing upon him an unwanted gift (in this case, a lovely sports utility vehicle that the family of five cannot possibly afford) would make perfect sense.  Harry would then bide his time and then, one day in the near future, come to Michel with a request.  He needs him to do something that is rather unpleasant, but he knows he can count on him because they’re such good friends.  After all, he gave him that SUV.  And the next thing we know, the local mayor is bound and gagged in the trunk of that four-wheeled token of friendship and the two of them (Michel with some repulsion, Harry like a hurricane) are beating him into bloody oblivion.              

But this is precisely what does not occur.  Harry’s acts and words (his motto is "solve every problem") are not high-interest loans that require no payment for the first twelve months then balloon to unwieldy amounts thereafter.  Rather, Harry seems to embody everything that Michel thinks he should be doing but doesn’t have the wherewithal to pull off.  These tips for better living include dealing with Michel’s bickering elderly parents, returning to writing (Harry also quotes a equally ridiculous science fiction story that a teenage Michel left incomplete), and having sex like a real man, like Harry has with his girlfriend Plum.  Yes, Michel could be so different if he just tried, so why doesn’t he try?  After all, he has nothing to lose but a boring life and a deadweight family who doesn’t appreciate the artistic genius he’s held bottled up all these years.  You may also ask why nothing is made of the fact that Harry is a foreigner from "the South," and why he seems to embody every vice taken to its socially accepted limit (and sometimes well past it).  Why not, Michel, says Harry.  And again and again Michel finds himself repeating those words, and then acting on them as if they had been his ideas all along.  Is this just more evidence of that truthful adage about friends knowing more about you and what you need than you do yourself?  Let's just say that's one interpretation.