The Sea

One should never trust a book by its publisher's blurb, never mind the ridiculous cover ultimately inflicted upon it by the brokers of style (occasionally, a first edition hardcover will be more to the writer's tastes, thereafter wigwammed into hideous shades of bland).  Blurbs of course are even more egregious offenders.  Yes, they are meant to sell, which means, I suppose, that they must provide tout pour tous without offending anyone too heartily.  They must in a way resemble women's dresses: enough is left to the spectator to propel dark fantasies; enough is removed from conjecture to affirm its authenticity.  I will spare you this book's blurb not because it is nonsensical, but simply because it is as vague as its title – pun fully intended – and neither title nor blurb nor first edition hardcover picture binds it with the thinnest strand of justice.

Our aging narrator is an art critic, a widower, an Irishman, and someone whose command of English ebbs and flows in soft, scummed pats on an endless beach.  His name is Max Morden, and if he finds the name of his dying wife's treating physician, Dr. Todd, "a joke in bad taste on the part of polyglot fate," one would do well to consider his own.  His obsession, apart from the past (famously stated to "beat inside [him] like a second heart"), is the meaning of all his time and space if his life were a series of pictures by his beloved Bonnard, or by some of the other, mostly post-Impressionist names he so casually drops.  His quandary is what life has cost him, why he now awaits in agnostic gloom the withering of his Anna; why his daughter Claire, because of her sturdy and almost clomping awkwardness, will never marry; why he was born into one lowly station and never allowed to board a first-class train.  His imagery will be dreams mixed with the past, or the present tinged with other hues, such as "those plangent autumn evenings streaked with late sunlight that seemed [themselves] a memory of what sometime in the far past had been the blaze of noon."  The Sphinx's riddle this is not quite, but his steps and circuits do suggest a certain path:

A dream it was that drew me here.  In it, I was walking along a county road, that was all.  It was in winter, at dusk, or else it was a strange sort of dimly radiant night, the sort of night that there is only in dreams, and a wet snow was falling.  I was determinedly on my way somewhere, going home, it seemed, although I did not know what or where exactly home might be.  There was open land to my right, flat and undistinguished with not a house or hovel in sight, and to my left a deep line of darkly louring trees bordering the road.  The branches were not bare despite the season, and the thick, almost black leaves drooped in masses, laden with snow that had turned to soft, translucent ice.  Something had broken down, a car, no, a bicycle, a boy's bicycle, for as well as being the age I am now I was a boy as well, a big awkward boy, yes, and on my way home, it must have been home, or somewhere that had been home, once, and that I would recognize again, when I got there.  I had hours of walking to do but I did not mind that, for this was a journey of surpassing but inexplicable importance, one that I must make and was bound to complete.  

Morden, like the narrator of this novel, is tall, almost disruptively large, and a proud dipsomaniac.  He remains not so much drunk during the novel as hungover, gliding between the realm of wishful wanting to the dry sardonicism of resigned failure.  His thirst seems quenchable only by an ocean, his tone vacillates but never falters, and his main interest will always be the four Graces and the sea.

The family Grace boasts the normal components of upper-middle class life, a stratum that eludes our poor Max.  Max endures a childhood of parental bickering to become the itinerant teenage son of a single mother, arriving at each new lodging house "always it seemed on a drizzly Sunday evening in winter."  It is then no surprise that he focuses his efforts on a childhood summer in the vicinity of four persons he is not quite sure ever existed: Carlos Grace, a grey-chested ruffian, Connie Grace, the thick and voluptuous mother, and their two children, the mute Myles and the waifish nymphet Chloe.  A brief aside: I have always found Chloe an odd name to bestow upon a child, almost signifying in advance a weakness or vulnerability that could burst as easily as a jellyfish – but I digress.  Chloe will become in time the vessel for Max's affection, although his first attraction is for the bulging and shapely Connie, both of whom have some affinity in name with Max's eventual wife and child.  Once Anna is diagnosed and the hourglass flipped, Max returns to that same sea, if the sea can ever truly be said to be the same:

Throughout the autumn and winter of that twelvemonth of her slow dying we shut ourselves away in our house by the sea, just like Bonnard and his Marthe at Le Bosquet.  The weather was mild, hardly weather at all, the seemingly unbreakable summer giving way imperceptibly to a year-end of misted-over stillness that might have been any season.  Anna dreaded the coming of spring, all that unbearable bustle and clamour, she said, all that life.  A deep, dreamy silence accumulated around us, soft and dense, like silt. 

Early in our narrative, Morden agrees with this Russian poet – almost always a wise choice – about the incomparability of October upon the creative psyche, and yet he betrays Pushkin's testament with his obsessive revisiting of the poet's least favorite season, summer (I should add that that the second sentence of this passage is one of the finest in the English language).  And there lingers another character amidst these Graces and the burgeoning historian, a nanny of sorts, a lithe, pale girl with the name of Rose.  Rose has a cruel secret that cannot be rightly shared, and its late discovery relegates it to oblivion.  No, whatever we may think of these band of merry players, it is our hero that demands attention, that shifts and jumps in unmeasured steps to the beat of the past beating within him, beating him because it has escaped and is immortal and he will fade into the ocean whence he and memory sprang in tandem.  We also remember another Russian author's tortured recounting of a summer gained and lost to chance and, ultimately, to consumption, a summer from which poor Humbert never recovered.  Count Morden among the eternally convalescent.      

Verlaine, "Après trois ans"

A work ("Three years gone") by this French poet.  You can read the original here.

I pushed the narrow, wobbling door, 
And strolled within a budding grove,   
As morning light so softly strove,      
Wet sequins on each petal's shore.   

No thing had changed: the rattan chairs,      
The humble pipe of maddened vine, 
The purling spout, its silver spine, 
The aspen old as dullest cares. 

Still roses throb like wildest hearts,  
Still lilies preen to walk the wind,       
Still friends of mine these sweeping larks;

I found above the Veleda,       
Thin plaster flaked at avenue's end, 
Amidst faint scents of reseda.  

Conversation Piece, 1945

During my wonderful days and nights as a graduate student, I happened to peruse a German book on the life and times of this famous Russian author.  The book, picture-laden, almost worthy of an equally lovely coffee table, was surely condensed from the two Nabokov biographies extant, but one quote in particular from the old master tickled my memory.  What distinguished his wife Vera from other women he had met was that "she was one of the few women who do not view the world as a reflection of their femininity."  Perhaps my young age prevented me from seeing the incredible truth behind these words; perhaps one of the more painful things to admit is how people find excuses for their behavior that will accompany them to their graves.  And anyway, one supposes for Europeans there was really only one conversation piece in 1945, a year that brought as much relief as incredulity.  All of which provides a brief introduction to this story.

Our narrator begins his tale with a complaint: he has a double.  Or, we should say, there are two Russian emigrants "complete from nickname to surname" (a much greater likelihood in that language's narrow nomenclature) who have been confused and confuted by others with such regularity as to foment doubts about their distinction.  Our narrator claims no similarities with his "disreputable namesake" save a boundless travelogue and White Russian heritage – and here we are quickly turned away from what could become a game in identity and directed towards the main event.  Our man, still nameless, has moved from Europe to Boston and begun to separate his past from his present.  That is, until he receives an invitation to attend a small gathering in one of those New England houses that exist in structure but no longer in inhabitants.  He accepts, puzzled at how a Mrs. Sharp, a name he does know, has mistaken him for his revenant twin, but the matter seems aboveboard and he has, it becomes quite clear, really nothing better to do. 

The life of the party appears as a German professor by the name of, well, he doesn't catch his name (our man is not one for focussing on such bureaucratic details), but who will be known to us as Dr. Shoe.  Shoe is surrounded by a  particular brand of spectator:

None of the women was pretty; all had reached or overreached forty-five.  All, one could be certain, belonged to book clubs, bridge clubs, babble clubs, and to the great, cold sorority of inevitable death.  All looked cheerfully sterile.  Possibly some of them had had children, but how they had produced them was now a forgotten mystery; many had found substitutes for creative power in various aesthetic pursuits, such as, for instance, the beautifying of committee rooms.  As I glanced at the one sitting next to me, an intense-looking lady with a freckled neck, I knew that, while patchily listening to Dr. Shoe, she was, in all probability, worrying about a bit of decoration having to do with some social event or wartime entertainment the exact nature of which I could not determine.  But I did know how badly she needed that additional touch.  Something in the middle of the table, she was thinking.  I need something that would make people gasp – perhaps a huge bowl of artificial fruit.  Not the wax kind, of course.  Something nicely marbleized.

The women, we notice, are at least as old as the century – and a miserable century it has been so far.  One cannot conclude with any affirmation that our narrator thinks little of women; much better to say that he thinks little of women who think little.  Dr. Shoe proceeds, in disgusting fashion, to present a point of view that would now gain him imprisonment in his native land; even more horribly, his interlocutors all agree.  Among them sits a colonel, or a general, or in any case, a bald-headed Soviet soldier who chimes in with some funny English about the greatness of the leader now in power – now in 1945 – whom he sadly associates with fantastic feelings of patriotism and religious fervor.  The skeptic would suggest that all of this must be hogwash; the open-eyed critic would detect a political parable (so would, as it were, the close-eyed critic, but no matter); the artist, on the other hand, knows people like this and knows that they are legion.  Was this scene sadder as war was extinguished, or now when sixty-five years have increased both our knowledge of what did occur and diminished, by dint of temporal distance, its wicked and banal reality?  There is no doubt that Dr. Shoe could still have an audience somewhere on whose naive prejudice he can regale himself, but we certainly don't need to attend.

About those women and that double.  The ending of our tale implies that our double has not been truthful with us, which might also imply that he has also not been truthful about a web of other details.  Only a gormless fool would believe, all this data seemed to insinuate – only a gormless fool could think that two men could waltz across Russia, then Europe, then the United States in some kind of perpetual and distanced synchronicity and be constantly taken for one another.  A French consul even refused the fellow entry because his last stay had been quite unofficial.  Perhaps I should forget all about those women (perhaps I already have) and focus on our double.  He leaves the horror show in the form of a casual tea party with a few, unkind, albeit stammered words, and escapes with his coat and, as he learns soon enough, not his hat.  The hat belongs to the Shoe, so to speak.  And when the Shoe knocks, he has more conversation in a frantic and almost absurd vein while we ponder the intricacies of his having been invited to a social event where he could not possibly be welcome.  The hat, that is to say, the Shoe hat, ends up flying out a window in the general direction of its owner, landing near a puddle, and is retrieved with a grateful, unseen smile.  And I won't mention the odd correspondence our double receives in the end.  But then again, who would believe such a thing if not a fool.

Taxi Blues

It has been almost nine years since my last visit to this fabulous city – an extended absence I plan on rectifying late this summer – and somehow, as they say, things do not seem to have changed.  The nostalgia one feels for places loved is always magnified by the cinema, partially because most films do their best to romanticize the scenery, partially because when we glimpse a city at twilight, at dawn, on a rainy fall afternoon, we become flush with emotions and thoughts that simply cannot occur under the dry desert sun.  Moscow certainly boasts all the drawbacks that congregate in major metropolises, but its history and culture have few peers in Europe or beyond.  And traces of this great and often troubling labyrinth are evident in this film.

Our protagonists are designed to be perfect foils, and their differences are so flagrant as to make us wonder whether two people who live in the same city and speak the same language have ever been so different.  The first is Ivan Shlykov (Petr Zaichenko), a strapping proletarian and, in the salad days of New Russia, a taxi driver.  He occupies an area in a communal apartment somewhat bigger than the standard allotted ninety-six square feet, has a girlfriend who works at a meat-packing plant, lifts weights with grim obligation, downs his vodka unhesitatingly, and is cruel and unusual to those called in Russian "white hands," that segment of the population which has never had to do manual labor.  He is also prone to fits of anger that may have less to do with what he thinks of New Russia and more with what he once thought of Old Russia.  As our film opens, his cab is stuffed with three rowdy couples who have as their ringleader the flamboyant and rather annoying saxophonist Aleksei Seliverstov (Petr Mamonov).  Seliverstov is malnourished, toothless, feminine, uncontrolled, loquacious and completely insincere; Shlykov is brawny, ferociously macho, laconic, almost of military bearing, and too straight a shooter for his own good.  Such people are often labeled gullible; and unlike Shlykov, most of them do not have the muscle to disarrange that presumption.  The taxi party, which initially had the makings of an orgy, dissipates as Seliverstov – a hard-core alcoholic even by Russian standards – stops one time too many to satisfy his urges.  To pile insult upon injury, it is Shlykov's secret stash that he acquires by flashing a fistful of rubles large enough to quell any thoughts of a setup.  He ends up alone, asks the cabbie to take him home then loiter outside for the fare and, to no one's surprise except Shlykov's, never comes back down.  And the fact that Shlykov waits until dawn to convince himself of this disastrous truth says much more about his personality than the musician's.       

In a way, this is the film's key and climactic scene.  Seliverstov has no intention of paying anyone who has not fulfilled the tacit agreement of getting him the physical satisfaction that, as "a genius who talks to God," he feels he wholly deserves.  That is to say, a taxi driver taking Seliverstov and a girl home cannot be reasonably compensated unless that girl gives the saxophonist what he has desired all night in the same way that no restaurant could expect payment if vomiting or diarrhea ensued.  This twisted logic has always appealed to children, but also to that spoiled demographic that Shlykov has mistrusted his whole life: the intellectual elite.  Shlykov is not an educated man, yet he knows enough about history to sense what has occurred in New Russia as well as why.  "You write music and books and tell us how to live," he says at one point to Seliverstov, who cannot respond because the statement describes philosophers and artists in all centuries at all times.  It is then no wonder that this climactic scene takes place at the beginning of the film because, like socialism, it is bound to fail, a system that was never created for the proletariat but for a less ostentatious type of demagogue.  Shlykov finds the musician and confiscates his most prized possession, his saxophone.  Modest appraisals from his fellow cabbies do not convince him, however, so when a pawnbroker acquaintance offers him four thousand rubles – almost sixty times the unpaid fare – for the instrument, he decides that Seliverstov's claims to indigence are as nonsensical as the Soviet promise of rule by society's lowest stratum.  He pursues Seliverstov to all ends of Moscow, enduring humiliation, fisticuffs, and water damage to three floors of his apartment building, yet Seliverstov's arrears keep mounting.  Even when Shlykov can inflict unduly harsh retribution and have his adversary locked up for five years for assault, he ultimately retracts his testimony to make Seliverstov work off his debt the old-fashioned way – on his hands and knees.  

What ensues is chaotic, almost unscriptable, but correct, including a ridiculous vignette with a legendary jazz musician, and what I assume is Shlykov's worst-ever birthday celebration, although given the abject lack of fun in his life, one can never be sure.  Those reviewers who love topical issues will find enough symbolism about New Russia to caption each scene in smug whispers, and we will leave them to their task, yet one issue needs to be addressed.  In almost every blurb on the film, much is made about the fact that Seliverstov is Jewish and Shlykov, in turn, a hidebound anti-Semite. The basis of this pronouncement may be Shlykov's vaguely insane flatmate whom we first see ranting about the "conspiracies of global Zionism" (that should tell you all you need to know), as well as the urgency of maintaining the two men as polar opposites.  Shlykov does emit a few slurs during the film, and not only against Jews; but what he does with far greater frequency and passion is trumpet the dignity of the Soviet working class.  It is the simple man forced to make love to his girlfriend in the machine room of a meat-packing plant that will resent the easy melodrama and make-up sex in Seliverstov's luxury apartment (apart from vodka bottles, bathtubs are the film's most used prop).  In fact, while Seliverstov has some anagrammatic affinity with the traditional name for New Year's Eve, the name Shlykov – a creditor in more ways than one – may ironically remind you of this title character.  So what are we to make of the scene in which Seliverstov's enraged landlord shreds and stomps on a poster of the musician whose face Shlykov then faithfully reassembles?  Perhaps that nary a lender can exist without a borrower.           

A Christmas Carol

The study of human soul has been claimed by many a discipline, both scientific and pseudo-scientific, which means that while the conclusions boast the stamp of empirical evidence, the data culled is almost purely subjective.  The latest cabalists on the scene are neuropsychiatrists, and their particular methods border on the fascinating while, at the same time, straddling the ridiculous.  Do certain parts of our brain (forgive my simplifications) rev and rumble when certain things happen to us?  Well, I suppose they do, since we are nothing if programmed robots when it comes to chemical conflict.  Can we understand abnormal behavior through abnormalities in our cerebral structure or patterns?  I'm sure that those beleaguered by delusions will light up an odd selection of ornaments and constellations.  Should we at all be worried that our interpretation of brain activity is subject to the subjective filter that is our own mind's pulse?  How could frontal-subcortical circuitry not produce the desired personality, might be the retort echoing against our silent discomfort at the ease of such conclusions.  And the personality in question may well be the main character of this renowned story.

We begin with an affirmation of the material world: Jacob Marley, the long-time partner of Ebenezer Scrooge, is dead and has lain in such a state for seven long years.  Marley must be dead for the events of the story to occur as they do; but he must also be dead (and he is killed repeatedly on the story's first page) so that we may consider a belief in his reappearance.  We must also depict our protagonist as someone so unlikely to accept the contrivances of the spiritual world as to be immune to the faint whiffs of humanity that encircle the dowdyism of his wretched soul:

Oh!  But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!  Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.  The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice.  A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin.  He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.

As subsequent episodes reveal, Scrooge once had a soul and wishes for a happy life within society.  He forfeited these dreams once business became his only burden; over time his wizened countenance has come to reflect the lack of human humidity.  He is spouseless and unchildrened, year after year he rejects his deceased sister's only son's Christmas dinner invitation, and in dreariest winter his poor clerk is allotted one feeble coal to match his number of paid yearly holidays.  Is Scrooge a caricature?  Most evidently; his name, now a figure of common parlance, suggests the coiled grip of a lusty hand.  Even his domicile bears his blueprints:

They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again.

Scrooge was free and full of the freshest dreams that a promising young life can hold; what closed him off to the world we shall never know for sure.  Could the smell of pocket change have replaced violets in his imagination?  Could the smooth sides of bullion imbued him with a more concrete sense of nature's perfection?   Perhaps Scrooge was always there for the tempting, awaiting his turn on the rickety stage known as financial prosperity, a mystery that is better left as Dickens intended: an inexplicable yet all too common deviation from the straight road of moral well-being.

We have still said nothing about those famous ghosts.  They are three, like the Magi; and like the Kings they are harbingers of something fantastic from which no mind can avert itself in indifference.  They vary in physical size, or at least the size of what they represent: the Ghost of Christmas Past is an old man shrunk to the dimensions of a child; Christmas Present is a jolly green giant, if an evanescent one; and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come bears a remarkable resemblance to the Keeper of the Scythe (and like He, the future is dark and mute).  I stand corrected: four apparitions envelop Ebenezer Scrooge that lonesome Christmas Eve, and it is the first among them that will be the most affecting because it is the ghost of his old partner, Marley.  Marley appears in the chains that Scrooge tells himself are customary for spirits, but chains of "cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses" – the souvenirs of lifelong dealings with the greatest miser of London.  After some staring and banter (the ghost first announces his presence by mimicking Scrooge's knocker, but then is quick to materialize fully), Marley's spirit cuts to the chase and warns his erstwhile associate about what is to befall him during the longest night of his life.  Scrooge will eventually believe him, but his instinct hints at a more modern explanation for such phenomena:

'Why do you doubt your senses?'

'Because,' said Scrooge, 'a little thing affects them.  A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats.  You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.  There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!'

Modern science informs us that digestive obstacles manipulate the retinogeniculocalcarine tract, which in turn redounds in the summoning of visual hallucinations; that would explain those particularly vicious images after a spicy meal.  Ah, but Scrooge likes his meals the way he likes his morals: unaccompanied, tasteless, and wholly pragmatic.