The Captain of the Polestar

The man becomes a greater mystery every day, though I fear that the solution which he has himself suggested is the correct one, and that his reason is affected.  I do not think that a guilty conscience has anything to do with his behavior.  The idea is a popular one among the officers and, I believe, the crew; but I have seen nothing to support it.  He has not the air of a guilty man, but of one who has had terrible usage at the hands of fortune, and who should be regarded as a martyr rather than a criminal.

Perhaps I am naturally suspicious of those described as well-read because it implies that reading an indefinite amount of books can convert an average human being into an extraordinary one.  Yet man cannot learn on reading alone.  Life in its myriad tragedies and triumphs must imbue a learned person with perspective on his shelves that cannot be gained if he never abandons their side.  The dialogue of two Victorian lovers will only sound stilted if one has heard two contemporaries mutter sweet nothings; the desperation of frustrated dreams and private pain will only resound if the reader can reflect upon his own losses; and the postmodern, relativist nonsense that masquerades as deep thinking will only be exposed to the mind who knows the history of letters and also knows garbage when he smells it.  That is not to say, of course, that we should succumb to the adolescent habit of masking the cast of fiction with faces from our own reality.  One finds, I think, certain faces and manners – be they of people we know personally, those of certain celebrity, or odd amalgams not immediately traceable – particularly enchanting, and it is they who become our regulars, our fetished players.  We may even discover that we are haunted by images beyond our ken summoned only as fiction dictates – which brings us to this tale of unease.     

Our narrator is John McAlister Ray, Jr. (which may remind readers of the usher to this novel), a skeptical man of science who apparently learned nothing from his father, also a doctor, who appears towards the story's end in very unusual circumstances.  Ray is commissioned for reasons still unclear to us to an Arctic whaler commanded by Captain Craigie.  There are some gestures in the direction of this magnificent work – Craigie's bizarre,  almost pathological obsession with reaching a certain point in the trajectory, his seeming insouciance for the welfare of his crew, and his sudden outbursts of violent rage – but they are quickly subsumed under the carapace of another tale: a ghostly white figure  floating over the seas of ice has been sighted by several members of the fifty-man company.  Craigie is "remarkably well read" and has "the power of expressing his opinion forcibly without appearing to be dogmatic"; he also has a particular hue to him that may or may not mark his character:

A man's outer case generally gives some indication of the soul within.  The captain is tall and well-formed, with a dark, handsome face and a curious way of twitching his limb, which may arise from nervousness or be simply an outcome of his excessive energy.  His jaw and whole cast of countenance is manly and resolute, but the eyes are the distinctive feature of his face.  They are of the very darkest hazel, bright and eager, with a singular mixture of recklessness in their expression, and of something else which I have sometimes thought was more allied with horror than with any other emotion.

How eyes can be "of the very darkest hazel" and yet "bright" at the same time comprises one of the conventions of art that may confuse those who only read to pass the time or those who never read anything at all.  Somewhere, from among the thousands of faces we have gazed upon and their twinned portals, we can imagine exactly what the effect of these eyes might be.  What we cannot imagine is what they conspire to behold in both sleep and waking hours.

The secret of the Polestar's skipper may not really be a secret at all.  The atmosphere created is so conducive to terror, however, that we are almost obliged to take the whole series of events – if that is the right word – at face value, something that Ray is very hesitant to do.  Our story evolves in journal entries that monitor the crew's dwindling supplies and mounting anxiety.  Ray even misses the birthday of his fiancée, his beloved Flora to whom no one could possibly compare, while the sailors lament Craigie's extended circuit because herring season, the most profitable time of the year, begins in short order.  It is here that Ray comes across an item of unavoidable interest in the captain's quarters:

It is a bare little room, containing a washing-stand and a few books, but little else in the way of luxury except some pictures on the walls.  The majority of these are small cheap oleographs, but there was one watercolor sketch of the head of a young lady which arrested my attention.  It was evidently a portrait, and not one of those fancy types of female beauty which sailors particularly affect.  No artist could have evolved from his own mind such a curious mixture of character and weakness.  The languid, dreamy eyes, with their drooping lashes, and the broad, low brow, unruffled by thought or care, were in strong contrast with the clean-cut, prominent jaw and the resolute set of the lower lip.  Underneath it in one of the corners was written M.B., aet. 19.  That anyone in the short space of nineteen years of existence could develop such strength of will as was stamped on her face seemed to me at the time to be well-nigh incredible.  She must have been an extraordinary woman.

Could Ray be thinking specifically of his own favorite?  Perhaps the attitude conveyed so unambiguously by the artist may explain what we learn as our story resolves itself into a certain coherence.  That is, if you consider what happens in one of the planet's most silent regions to be resolved.

The Future of Faith

The wellsprings of faith upon which some of us draw may seem dry at times – even for longer than the typical instant of doubt that assaults all believers every now and then – dry, dusty and riddled with the scrapings of centuries of delusion.  Perhaps living in an environment where your views are not contemned on a daily basis would aid the believer in his quest to find inner peace.  Yet such isolation simultaneously robs him of something of undue importance: the humbug of the non-believer.  The non-believer is an exceptional person.  He has understood, to whatever degree, that he is not immortal, neither in body or soul, and has valiantly elected to carry on as if this realization – the most momentous realization at which a man can arrive – should not affect anything, from his morning ablutions to his nightly cocktails.  One wonders what precisely drives such a person to rise from his bed and embrace his routine as the semblance of an existence.  Oftentimes, it is material gain, which is the straight road of perdition; other times, the same mindless musings of which he so timorously accuses the believer ("all this is not real; all this is very real, but death is not real because death is not what we think it is; perhaps we are all already dead"); on other occasions it is the individualist's desire to separate himself from the masses and responsibility towards others.  In my mostly pleasant traffic with self-proclaimed atheists and agnostics, their spineless cohorts, I have found this last scenario to be the most causative.  Religion is a prison, an opiate, a necessary mirage to soothe the simple minds of the loitering rabble; religion enslaves, massacres and lies – as opposed, of course, to science, industrial capitalism, fascism, communism and any other movement that thinks it has all the answers.  One day we shall have the cure for a coryza, and perhaps on that same eventful day our universe will reveal its inner workings to us at last.  Until then, let the deluded and weary take comfort in essays such as the one above from this collection.

The future of faith has everything to do with its past.  For the Abrahamic religions, that past might indeed extend to Adam's navel, or to a tree gilded by a slippery shadow, or the first homicide that released us into a den of thieves and killers,  but science has indicated this is all plain hogwash.  Numerous non-scientists have unwittingly buttressed the anticlerical movements ignited by, among other catastrophes, the French Revolution, and Updike produces to that end a lovely quote from a strange bedfellow's work:

Our walk through Mantua showed us, in almost every street, some suppressed church: now used for a warehouse, now for nothing at all.

I know this book (it no longer sits, however, on my shelf) and should not be surprised.  Christians march to Italy the way Muslims idealize Mecca, and the endless array of fountains and churches, the Vatican, the incomparable art, music and food all glorify the chosen seat of the Faith to millions of yearly visitors.  How piteous, therefore, to consider for a moment the treasons committed and evils allowed in this same holy land.   Updike recounts some of the blasphemies (often at the turn of each century; Updike was writing in 1999) that have usurped enough power and credence to become the rule rather than the outlier, and then gracefully intercedes with his own visit to Italy. He and his second wife take in the beautiful and eternal and nod in assent to both those qualities.  When he opts to stroll through this famous museum, his wife commendably "decline[s] to waste her time on modern trash."  What Updike finds in that shelter of gizmos, rebellion and utter talentlessness is amusing but also sad.  Art is the reflection of a man's soul; from all indications the modern soul most closely resembles a graffitied toaster.

Updike also saunters through childhood memories, some rather frivolous because they are too intimate, and discovers the paradigms that structure his own faith.  He is, after all, the grandson of a preacher and a lifelong churchgoer who, although an adherent to one Protestant church, had been a member of two others.  He wisely passes over this indecision with the tacit admission that each venue serves the same purpose and, as it were, the very same Power.  His attendance, seen by his consorts as "an annoying affectation," puts him squarely in the minority:

Belief in the afterlife is going up, even as church attendance drops.  Attendance has been drifting lower ever since the baby boomers, joining churches as they began to generate families, started to wander away again.  Though for decades polls have pegged the number of regular churchgoing Americans at around forty percent ... [it is estimated] that only twenty-eight percent of Roman Catholics attend Mass on a given weekend and fewer than one in five Protestants are in church on Sunday morning.  Home study and the Sunday-morning religious shows on television are helping empty the pews.  As part of the do-it-yourself trend, the sales of religious books have risen spectacularly, by fifty percent in the last ten years.

Such statistics belie the general tone of the essay, which is subjective, personal and saltatory.  In fact, upon close inspection the whole affair reads as a disorganized clump, a tumbleweed grasping or lunging at random ideas of beauty and redemption (the most sensational being a Florentine thunderstorm).  This confession from the "New Yorker's token Christian" is not nearly as organized as the systematic brilliance of this theologian or this great thinker – but religion commingles the unshakeable pattern of reason with the wildly sentimental disarrangements of the Romantic.  In other words, if you can experience both within a short time, you can assert without fear of perjury that a sense for the religious is not alien to you.  Updike also has an eloquent observation about his father's faith:

Where many fathers – some of them described in late-Victorian novels – conveyed to their sons an oppressive faith that was a joy to cast off, my father communicated to me, not with words but with his actions and his melancholy, a sense of the Christian religion as something weak and tenuous and in need of rescue.  There is a way in which success disagrees with Christianity.  Its proper venue is embattlement – a furtive hanging-on in the catacombs or at ill-attended services in dying rural and inner-city parishes.  Its perilous, marginal, mocked existence serves as an image of our own, beneath whatever show of success can be momentarily mustered.

That we are embattled needs little discussion; that success is too often defined by everyone's definition except your very own continues to baffle people until they become old, grey and unsuccessful.  But that the way of the Lamb can use whatever strength we can grant it should be reason enough to wonder about the meek and our future inheritance.

The Original of Laura

 A short essay of mine on this same subject appeared almost two years ago.

For better or worse extramarital activity holds a special position in modern literature, and we should ask ourselves why.   Apart from the rare arranged marriage where neither party has ever felt an inkling of affection toward his appointed mate, adultery is pure emotional violence.  It is a scythe, a brass bull, a shrapnel bomb, and its scars are more likely to be hidden than to heal.  It is and will always remain the most classic of middle-class crimes, and not only because it is often induced by passions so alien to the mediocrity and caution commonly incident to the bourgeois.  The poor cannot be bothered with such freedoms; the rich consider flings – impulsive or sustained – a nuisance akin to maids that steal, waiters that spill, and wrinkles that do not fade.  No, a cozy family home replete with creature comforts and a certain level of daily enjoyment is the exclusive privilege of the middle demographic segment, and with that comes the vulnerability that each of us dreads.  Adultery is nothing new to this author's oeuvre – nor, for that matter, are homosexuality, oddball academics, frisky lasses, and the creeping delusions of a mad artist – all of which feature in this long-awaited posthumous publication. 

Our protagonist is a clinically obese neurologist, Philip Wild (literally a "wild horse"), a native speaker of French, a wheezer, a popular professor, and an admirer of a young woman named Flora (at one point referred to as FLaura as if she hailed from the American wetlands).  Flora is of Russian stock, raised in France and England by her ballerina mother Lanskaya (at one point referred to as Land-sky-ya), and sexually precocious in a way that no longer surprises us in Nabokov's oeuvre.  That she is attractive and promiscuous we take as a given; that she would fall for someone like Dr. Wild – who also happens to find some young men her equal in sensuality – would not rank high among our guesses:

A brilliant neurologist, a renowned lecturer [and] a gentleman of independent means, Dr. Philip Wild had everything save an attractive exterior.  However, one soon got over the shock of seeing that enormously fat creature mince toward the lectern on ridiculously small feet and of hearing the cock-a-doodle sound with which he cleared his throat before starting to enchant one with his wit.  Laura disregarded the wit but was mesmerized by his fame and fortune.

A paramour is needed to reattach our characters to cold and banal reality, and such a volunteer is found in the person of Rawitch (at one point referred as Raw Itch, and at another as Rah Witch), a Polish painter of some talent.  Rawitch does not get what he wants, which is to pry Flora away from her hulking hubby; so he exacts an even more terrible revenge by composing a novel and gleefully handing a copy to the selfsame neurologist.  Since painters are stealthy chaps, the book is entitled "My Laura," hence the above passage, and it takes very few of the indefinite oceans of Dr. Wild's brain cells to understand that the bastard is talking about an adulterous love affair with his wife. 

Laura or Flora or whatever you wish to call her has had a long and generally satisfying sex life, even if her first fleshy encounter resembled rape more than anything else.  The perpetrator, a certain Hubert E. Hubert, is a bald fortysomething widower and a family friend, a term that has come to denote someone either deranged or lonely.  Mr. Hubert takes advantage of Flora's late father and despicable mother to ingratiate himself into the household's trust; he then sets about his main objective:

She was often alone in the house with Mr. Hubert, who constantly "prowled" (rôdait) around her, humming a monotonous tune and sort of mesmerizing her, enveloping her so to speak in some sticky invisible substance, and coming closer and closer no matter what way she turned.  For instance, she did not dare let her arms hang aimlessly, lest her knuckles came into contact with some horrible part of that kindly but smelly and "pushing" old male.

Hubert's surging desire yields an even better description, and another that might easily have appeared unedited in one of Nabokov's prior novels.  There is also the small matter of Dr. Wild's remedy to his personal ills, both physical and psychological – but I will devolve the research of such details to the interested reader.

It should be noted but not belabored that The Original of Laura has little claim to being an ordinary novel.  The book is composed solely of one hundred thirty-eight index cards faithfully reproduced and followed on each page by a printed transliteration; almost no amendments are made apart from a few obviously misspelled words (although "bycycle" and "stomack," both of which appear twice, are left untouched).  The cards are detachable and, in principle, easily reordered – but we have already reached the gimmick portion of our program.  The book's value will ultimately reside in its incompleteness, in the occasional triumphs of artistic genius and the blueprints for further successes, all of which provides a remarkable view into a fantastically creative mind.  Unfortunately the format, which greatly mimics the themes broached in the book, has gained the ire and mockery of the critical pundits who reiterate like dusty phonographs that the work should have never been published for two inane reasons: it was Nabokov's wish, and, well, it's not all that good.  Another source of disdain has turned out to be Dmitri Nabokov's supple yet acerbic introduction, which reveals resentment and loathing (mostly towards these same critical pundits) not extant in any other of his discursive writings.  I shall not quote it but its elegance and argument would probably gain a nod of approval from the father the Englished casting of whose Russian works became Dmitri's primary filial duty.  Those who love Nabokov will feel a special obligation to the book; those who do not know him will have little to say and even less to contemplate; but its uniqueness and originality of presentation will never be doubted.  And what of Laura herself?  What are we to think of a libidinous, golddigging twit?  As another great mind once said, if a woman cannot make her mistakes seem charming, she is merely a female.   

Pushkin, "К сну"

A work ("Sleep") by this Russian poet of genius.  You can read the original here.

O sleep, my old and dearest friend, 
The guardian of my weary bones,  
Where are you now? Plain roof will bend 
To peaceful bed above the stones,  
In silent night and wordless tones.

Come by and blow out my last light,   
And bless the dreams that dance and sway; 
By morn shall joy have gained in might,  
That joy of love both bold and fey. 

Keep memory from lonely plight,
That sad decree of farewell's choice,    
And let me know my dearest sight,       
And let me hear my dearest voice!         

When darkest night spreads black above,
And you cast eyes upon my soul: 
If only it could forget love 
Until new night has taken hold!

Aes Triplex

After a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through.  By the time a man gets well into the seventies, his continued existence is a mere miracle; and when he lays his old bones in bed for the night, there is an overwhelming probability that he will never see the day.  Do the old men mind it, as a matter of fact?  Why, no.  They were never merrier; they have their grog at night, and tell the raciest stories; they hear of the death of people about their own age, or even younger, not as if it was a grisly warning, but with a simple childlike pleasure at having outlived someone else; and when a draught might puff them out like a fluttering candle, or a bit of a stumble shatter them like so much glass, their old hearts keep sound and unaffrighted, and they go on, bubbling with laughter, through years of man's age compared to which the valley at Balaclava was as safe and peaceful as a village cricket-green on Sunday.  It may fairly be questioned (if we look to the peril only) whether it was a much more daring feat for Curtius to plunge into the gulf, than for any old gentleman of ninety to doff his clothes and clamber into bed.

Those of artistic bent face a quandary that, compared to the perdition looming over so much of the world's population, may seem petty.  When we are young and unsung there are few who will heed our opinions.  Our parents and teachers smile at our sudden discovery of age-old platitudes, while the women we seek to impress cannot possibly be impressed with the unsteady observations of callow manhood.  As time progresses we marry and procreate, become greater experts in whatever field we have chosen either provisionally or as a simple means of sustenance until we blossom as artists, and if we are not careful, we wake up one morning and find ourselves no longer young.  Around us walk members of a whole new generation that consider us nothing more than martinets of stale values and ideals; if they're particularly rebellious, they will even deride our playfulness as inappropriate.  To all this, of course, we nod our heads and remember our own churlish gibes at our elders, part and parcel of becoming authorities on what it means to live.  Yet what no one can hold forth on with any credibility is the end of days, how life resolves itself either into nothingness or something greater still.  And how we should approach our evenings is the subject of this famous essay.

The most important thing about death is that we have no contrast for its understanding.  Life as we know it is not really life, but the pursuit of living – be that living wildly or quite prudishly with one eye cast above to the gathering clouds.  We continue nevertheless to prattle on about life in the most abstract terms as if it were a recipe or an amorphous mass of an invisible element, which is precisely what bothers Stevenson:

In taking away our friends, death does not take them away utterly, but leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon intolerable residue, which must be hurriedly concealed .... and, in order to preserve some show of respect for what remains of our old loves and friendships, we must accompany it with much grimly ludicrous ceremonial, and the hired undertaker parades before the door.  All this, and much more of the same sort, accompanied by the eloquence of poets, has gone a great way to put humanity in error; nay, in many philosophies the error has been embodied and laid down with every circumstance of logic; although in real life the bustle and swiftness, in leaving people little time to think, have not left them time enough to go dangerously wrong in practice.

A cursory glance at these words and further inspection of the essay should not result in the indifference so commonly incident to daredevils and other defiers.  Practice has been to worship those we loved, and that practice will never stop, at least inwardly.  But as children, a stage of life that greatly concerned Stevenson, we are told and shown a plethora of rituals that, as we age, do not necessarily become more intelligible.  Surely a blessing for safe passage is clear even to the greenest among us, but what of wakes, cremation, or burial among the filth we scrape daily off our shoes?  What possesses a society to exalt the enskied spirits of our beloved if we rudely dispose of their former forms?  This is no place for comparative anthropology on death rituals – a subject that always seems to infiltrate college curricula – so let us but roam amidst an infirm Scotsman's preset boundaries.

Death has its admirers, normally those among us who either seek exculpation from their sins or a release from what they perceive as unending torment.  The monk who beseeches his Lord to do away with his sullied body so that his soul may be clean is worthy of both our respect and pity; and those poor mortal coils who take matters into their own hands deserve even greater remorse.  But Death lingers on as the most impenetrable of human mysteries because it sustains more readings than life.  Ask a physician about our terminus and he will point to diagrams and x-rays; ask a theologian and he will nod in grave acceptance of our Fate; ask a soldier and he will see battlefields strewn with his companions, fallen but never forgotten; ask a very old man and you may notice a sadness as all of life flashes behind his eyes.  As the highest form of human expression, it is literature which assumes the task of imagining death most explicitly, and we do so by "rising from the consideration of living to the Definition of Life."  Death becomes what will be taken away and, in the view of some, never replaced:

Into the views of the least careful there will enter some degree of providence; no man's eyes are fixed entirely on the passing hour; but although we have some anticipation of good health, good weather, wine, active employment, love, and self-approval, the sum of these anticipations does not amount to anything like a general view of life's possibilities and issues; nor are those who cherish them most vividly, at all the most scrupulous of their personal safety.  To be deeply interested in the accidents of our existence, to enjoy keenly the mixed texture of human experience, rather leads a man to disregard precautions, and risk his neck against a straw.  For surely the love of living is stronger in an Alpine climber roping over a peril, or a hunter riding merrily at a stiff fence, than in a creature who lives upon a diet and walks a measured distance in the interest of his constitution.

Death, we recall, "outdoes all other accidents because it is the last of them"; after that some might say that there are no accidents, only destiny.  Yet as we pass middle age and move gently into that good night, we may have prudence and caution as our only bedfellows.  We may desist in any acts of generosity and instead devolve into an insular being surviving against the rest of the predatory world.  That survival has so casually come to replace life in common parlance among men of science says much about the world that now surrounds us: we have relinquished any hope for salvation and put our efforts into genetic experiments that may prove to be the greatest catastrophe we will have ever wrought upon mankind.  Already in Stevenson's age  and shortly thereafter there appeared scientists (including this scholar who inspired more than one literary understudy) who felt untouched by God's hand and yearned for a reality they could fashion in the image of our most perfect beast.  What you may think of these would-be creators will probably reflect what you think about our ultimate destination – but that is a subject best left to one's own conscience.

The title of the essay is from a citation by this Roman writer, but applied in anecdote to an English lexicographer and critic whose weighty step still resounds in our best libraries.  One may chuckle at the famously elephantine Johnson garbed in three layers of brass, but one should remember where he was at the time: roaming the Scottish highlands, ill of health, and accompanied, as one now imagines always to have been the case, by another Scotsman named Boswell.  A model of "intelligence and courage" to expose oneself to such a climate when many a physician had already surmised the end to be near.  But for some of us, our beginning is in our end.