The Silence

Our first glance at this film suggests incomprehensibility: two blonde women in their thirties and a small, equally blond boy are training to parts unknown from parts unknown; the heat is unbearable in the compartment; outside, a single file of tanks parallels the train's progress; and on the compartment door sits a sign in a language that no one, including the viewer, has ever seen before. Soon one of the women will get violently ill, the three of them will disembark, and our action – if that is really the right word – will be moved to a hotel in a very foreign city, a subdued metropolis from every indication on the brink of war.   

We learn in time that the two women, Ester (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), are sisters; the boy, Johan, is Anna's, although from how Johan interacts with his aunt, it is clear that she exerts considerable influence upon him. Like many siblings, Ester and Anna go out of their way to emphasize their differences. While the older Ester is lonely, cultured, and intellectual (she works as a literary translator), a raging alcoholic, and probably a manic depressive to boot, Anna is decidedly none of the above. In fact, what Anna is and is not made The Silence, at the time of its release, a revelatory picture, even if the revelations seem tepid and stale in hindsight – but first we must return to that train. An internet search for "Nitsel stantnjon palik," the train door sign, yields links exclusively on The Silence, which means that we are dealing with invention.  (An educated guess might be "no smoking when in the station" since palić is "to smoke" in Polish, the middle word resembles a misbegotten calque of "station," and the first word could be a Slavic homophone of "incomplete" – "smoking [is allowed] not having reached the station.") Two later words – and words will be very important in a film that underscores soundlessness – kasi ("hand") and naigo ("face") appear to be Estonian. So when, in a fabulous scene, Anna opens up a newspaper knowing full well she'll only be able to look at the pictures, all the words seem familiar in a sense that they might be words from various European tongues. Someone more politically sensitive than I would avouch that this means all of Europe is at war, Babel as a metaphor for battle, but I refrain. What the language isolate does imply, however, is the need for non-verbal communication, gestures, looks, and, of course, the other senses: smells, tastes, and whatever can be deemed tactile. During the course of the film, both Ester and Anna will maintain a relationship with a male waiter – Ester with the hotel's old and attentive servant, Anna with a libidinous young man from a street café – with whom she does not share a language. Nevertheless, both women are convinced of the significance of each relationship and are pleased at the distance the lack of language permits them ("How nice that we don't understand one another," says Anna to her partner).                    

Why do they need that distance? That is the mystery of The Silence, one of the few first-rate films that become more obfuscated, not clearer, upon re-viewing. This ambiguity, I fear, is predominantly caused by modern minds who are hell-bent on seeing things in the worst or, rather, most sinful or crooked way possible (an inevitability Bergman appears to anticipate). Thus the most popular and incorrect explanation of The Silence is provoked by Anna's brief visit to a movie theater in which she happens to catch a man and woman coupling vigorously and obliviously. As if, one might venture, Anna were not there at all – the very act of cinematography. Other scenes seem to point in the same, bawdy direction, but actually do no such thing: a bathing scene in which Anna asks Johan to lather her back –  there is no other person to ask but Ester, who is both incapacitated and, as we will learn, unwilling; Anna's decision to sleep topless next to her ten-year-old son, who has seen her thus since, well, the very beginning of their relationship; Anna's sessions with the waiter, who craved her the moment he saw her open that local newspaper and understand absolutely nothing; in one amazing scene, Anna's walking through the streets for almost a minute and being surrounded only by men; and the rather weighty dialogue towards the film's middle, when Anna and Ester bicker like jealous lovers. The sexual undercurrent seems even more important given its notoriety as the first major Swedish film to feature a gamut of risqué scenes, but such silliness need not concern us here. What we can say about these vignettes is that they are in line with the plot: they are neither gratuitous nor somehow stylized to invoke greater meaning (when there exists nothing of the sort). In point of fact, if we accept ten-year-old Johan as the film's true protagonist, then these discoveries abate drastically in sensation, because, of course, all such moments are sensational to a budding adolescent.

Accept Johan as the protagonist? Most certainly: Bergman has been labeled the most autobiographical of directors for good reason, as his stories are about individual doubts, not wars of ideas in which individuals are conscripted. His heroes struggle with faith like the Romantic poets struggled with love: in each case this represented the most elusive and vital element of life. And like the Romantic poets approached love in myriad ways, with poem after poem dedicated to one or another princesse lointaine, so did Bergman address the serious questions about his Christianity by examining it through individual perspectives that all funneled back into him. As a ten-year-old, Johan's faith begins and perhaps ends with his mother and aunt, and he is hopeful to "return home" to his grandmother (some mention is made of his father, but the latter is clearly not much involved); yet something inside him does allow for the contemplation of a large and fleshy painting in the style of this artist. Walking the halls of the surprisingly grand, if empty, hotel, he comes upon a troupe of dwarfs, who do not imbue him with the same feelings of awkwardness as they would an adult. The titular silence then becomes what is never said to a child, what is withheld, omitted, censored, or distorted, all in the name of protecting him, of maintaining his innocence in a world racked by war, pornography, alcoholism, and hatred. He gazes through the window one evening to see a tank occupying the entire street, like the tanks he spotted from the train, a little boy's dream and a father's nightmare. It is through Johan's eyes that we notice the different ways in which his mother and aunt comb their hair and regard themselves in mirrors; it is also of little coincidence that Johan is reading this book in Swedish translation. After all, little boys love adventures about much bigger boys who get in and out of danger. But who, sooner or later, make it back home to grandma's house.          

Hugo, "Hier au soir"

A poem ("Yesterday, in the evening") by this French man of letters.  You can read the original here.

Breathe, evening wind of yesterday's lost truth, 
Which brought us scents of flowers' last bloom phase;
Night fell with birds asleep in shaded maze. 
The fragrant Spring has nothing on your youth;
The stars shone bright, but far less than your gaze. 

My voice kept low.  It was the solemn hour  
When souls their gentlest hymns so love to sing.
As night is pure so are you beauty's power; 
To gilded stars: on night the heavens shower! 
And to your eyes: sweet love upon us bring!

The Black Prince

It is the woman's privilege to save herself at the man's expense.

You may know little about this author apart from what was depicted in this film, which for more than one reason I cannot recommend. Despite Bayley's presumably good intentions, the portrait of his wife could not have been any less flattering (if Iris had its way, Murdoch's sexuality and dreadful descent into dementia would become the bookends on her memorial), although writers in film rarely come off as anything other than bores, neurotic bastards, or incorrigible dreamers. Pondering what Murdoch the woman was and wasn't does not befit the discriminating reader: any biography of hers may have anecdotal value, but her true life is her literary oeuvre, the history of her soul. An odd interest in Murdoch has persisted owing to a childhood recollection of two of her books gracing my parents' shelves. The first one has a most peculiar name, but everything thereafter came as a disappointment; the second, far greater work, is this fine novel.

Our time and place is early 1970s London, and our narrator is a high-strung, largely unsuccessful British writer by the name of Bradley Pearson. Readers who like symbols and crossword puzzles will immediately note that the book's title and protagonist share initials (readers such as these, I fear, will find little catnip among my pages). At fifty-eight, Pearson is well past life's middle path; he is childless and bitterly divorced, although his sexual affiliation will be questioned on more than one occasion; his friends and acquaintances are few; he is most certainly an alcoholic; and his family consists primarily of his sister Priscilla, who will turn out in her harmless Philistine way to be one of the most annoying characters in modern literature. Pearson has published a few books to critical and consumer indifference but insists, as good writers must, that his inner life replete with unwritten tomes more than compensates for this lack of recognition (his style is streaked with genius). His nemesis, therefore, must be a prolific and utterly worthless writer who hardly bothers to edit a single line of his trendy triteness. A profile apposite to Pearson's old chum, Arnold Baffin:

I 'discovered' Arnold, a considerably younger man, when I was already established as a writer, and he, recently out of college, was just finishing his first novel .... He was a schoolmaster, having lately graduated in English literature at the University of Reading. We met at a meeting. He coyly confessed his novel. I expressed polite interest. He sent me the almost completed typescript. (This was, of course, Tobias and the Fallen Angel. Still, I think, his best work.) I thought the piece had some merits and I helped him to find a publisher for it. I also reviewed it quite favorably when it came out. Thus began one of the most, commercially speaking, successful of recent literary careers. Arnold at once, contrary as it happens to my advice, gave up his job as a teacher and devoted himself to 'writing.' He wrote easily, producing every year a book which pleased the public taste. Wealth, fame followed.

Like all thriving second-raters, Baffin is worshipped by the average person impressed by his own ignorance and too scared to develop his own opinion (indeed, one minor character stares dimly as she labels Baffin "her favorite writer"). That Pearson has maintained his alleged friendship with Baffin, going so far as to have become a weekly dinner guest, might bespeak envy or simply the proximity that two people who love books require, even if what they get out of books is decidedly different. The fact that Pearson accords most praise to Arnold's first novel (likely started while still an undergraduate, when one knows absolutely nothing), and that the novel's title suggests a young readers' paperback about Biblical characters, should tell you all you need to know about Arnold Baffin.  

As we begin our tale, therefore, Arnold summons Pearson to his house after a domestic incident concludes in abject cruelty. Mrs. Rachel Baffin, a tall, spatially disruptive woman with freckles, is comforted by Pearson and we quickly learn about their insidious past together. Of course, since there is nothing easier to write about than betrayal, this past will bleed into the present, a point that cannot be overstated, and yet Pearson is only half-heartedly interested in Rachel the person. Rachel the fictional creation of the novel he is "destined" to write, however, fills him with action, literary action, that is, the unquenchable desire to reproduce emotions and thoughts in a tidy, ethical framework. I say "ethical" framework not only to betray my own sensibilities, but also those of Bradley Pearson, that self-anointed "puritan," and lifelong member of "some old unpassionate, rather ascetic cult." Pearson's wish is that we see him not necessarily as "ethical," but that we see him at all. That we notice him from amidst the throngs of published authors who write about themselves and their circles of family, friends, and lovers and hope to God that a somewhat less ordinary existence could interest an outsider. We meet the other persons in this circle and grow more suspicious of Pearson's motives: there is Priscilla, his only sibling, a hysterical, wretched disaster freshly dumped by her rat of a husband, even if, knowing how she is, no one could possibly blame him; Francis, Pearson's brother-in-law and, as opposed to Bradley, a non-functioning alcoholic; Christian, the erstwhile Mrs. Pearson, a rich widow fresh off a couple of decades in the New World; and finally Julian Baffin, twenty, female, named after the saint, the Baffins' only child and the third main character with an androgynous first name. Why is that significant? Well, it likely isn't; it is rather a tactic to remind us to consider another, far less interesting reading of The Black Prince of the kind so beloved by fashionable minds who construct their insipid labyrinths only to cloak their utter lack of talent. Pearson will learn something very interesting about Christian and something in a way just as shocking about Francis. But his aim throughout is self-discovery, the writer's "dream of a silence which [he] must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn," and over the novel's longish arc we will discover quite a great deal about Bradley Pearson.  

Murdoch's prose has much to offer those who cannot do without impeccable style, a fact which, coupled with her strong moral compass, would be enough to guarantee her legacy. Nevertheless, she is often deemed a "philosopher," as if the added title does her or that nebulous word any justice whatsoever. Even if we were to consider The Black Prince the summit of her achievement, masticating too long on the asides and aphorisms would only direct the preprogrammed and dull to explore vacuous alleys. Samples of the style prove the point: "Julian suggested that we should collect some wood for the fire, but this proved difficult because every bit of wood we found was far too beautiful to burn"; "These were not words, but the highest coinage of human speech melted down, become pure song, something vilely, almost murderously gorgeous"; "The future had passed through the present like a sword"; "In waiting time devours itself .... yet at the same instant the terrified mind has flown ahead through centuries of unenlightened despair"; "The return of a passionate letter unread desolates far regions of the imagination"; "Death always seems to commit truth to some wider and larger court"; "The hand of death modelled him speedily, soon made his head a skull"; "Like spirits of the damned pricked by the devil's fork we bounded up." A casual sexist − a most unintendedly fabulous term − might comment that far too many humid, chatty conversations surface in The Black Prince, conversations that no male writer would ever deign to record. Given what Pearson consistently says about such techniques, the inclusion of these chats (some of them, admittedly, could stand to be diminished) should be understood as ironical, a brilliant method allowing characters to perjure themselves. And why would any one of these fine citizens perjure himself? Perhaps because no character, fictional or otherwise, may have "unassailable dignity." But whether they have any at all is another matter entirely.  

Akhmatova, "О тебе воспоминаю я редко"

A work ("You I recall but rarely") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.
 
You I recall but rarely,
Your fate I shan't pursue,
Yet my soul's slate's swept barely
Of phatic words with you.

Your red house, willfully passed,
Your red house dusks the river.
I know I have trespassed
Before your calm sun's shiver.

Though you as prostrate nurse
Did not avow love's reign;
Though you in flaxen verse
Did not extend my pain;

A future spell is cast.
Were evening fully blue,
I would foresee at last
Eventful words with you. 

A Nursery Tale

The original title of the above story found in this collection would be "a fairy tale," which suggests something not altogether fit for young ears. As it were, there is little to distinguish the prototypical fairy tale, replete with anthropomorphism, violence, and more than occasional wickedness, from our narrative. The protagonist is a lecherous bachelor still of marrying age by the name of Erwin; the place is a "fairy-tale German town." From our childhood on we learned that, by virtue of their beauty, serenity, and order, German towns tend to be perfect backdrops to the unusual and eerie. Erwin has a lot of free time on his clammy hands and spends it observing the nubile unattached maidens in his vicinage. There are many and he is but one, as alone as the toad upon the lily pad, so it takes him hardly any time to feel overwhelmed. After one unfortunate incident that ends in an upbraid and a hint of deterred sexual assault, Erwin alters his scheme:  

In compensation, separated from the street by a windowpane, clutching to his ribs a black briefcase, wearing scuffed trousers with a pinstripe, and stretching one leg under the opposite seat (if unoccupied), Erwin looked boldly and freely at passing girls, and then would suddenly bite his nether lip: this signified the capture of a new concubine; whereupon he would set her aside, as it were, and his swift gaze, jumping like a compass needle, was already seeking out the next one. Those beauties were far from him, and therefore the sweetness of free choice could not be affected by sullen timidity. 

I believe the waggish modern term for such a hobby is "eye candy"; it is undoubtedly one of the oldest and most forgivable hobbies in the world, as well as one of the hardest to relinquish. We would not be presumptuous in thinking that Erwin's fantasies are sketches for later portraits, hung ingloriously on the four bare walls of his humble studio. It is in this vein then, "on a frivolous evening in May" with the flower aria from this opera playing in the distance, that Erwin meets the one woman who can give him everything he wishes. And that woman is the Devil.

She introduces herself as such and also has another name, Frau Monde. Monde seems interested in pleasing Erwin and strikes up conversation in so casual a fashion as to be unconvincing in her claims. As Erwin reaches for his hat mumbling the niceties his mother taught him to mumble in such awkward situations, Monde directs his attention to an old man crossing before one of the ubiquitous trams loved by any lover of Germany and predicts disaster. The disaster occurs, although her phrasing allows the man to survive, and Erwin stops leaving, uncertain as to what turn their relationship is about to take. Monde fills him in concisely:

'Here is what I suggest. Tomorrow, from noon to midnight you can select by your usual method' (with heavy humor Frau Monde sucked in her lower lip with a succulent hiss) 'all the girls you fancy. Before my departure, I shall have them gathered and placed at your complete disposal. You will keep them until you have enjoyed them all. How does that strike you, amico?'

There is, as there ordinarily is with such pacts, an additional stipulation: his harem must be odd in number. Should midnight chime with an even collection, he will lose every single one of them – and perhaps a little more than that. So Monde stealthily exits, a mildly flabbergasted Erwin begins looking forward to tomorrow's eventful errands, and the dollhouse is built.

The informality of the encounter may remind students of Russian literature of this subsequent novel, both of which owe much more to the Faust legend than to each other (Nabokov's story antedated the palaver at the Patriarch's Pond by several years) – but close analysis yields no comparison of any value. What Erwin does or does not accomplish by midnight possesses much of the suspense wrought by the best of fairy or nursery tales, stories that do not so much as shock as fulfill expectations in an offbeat way. You and I and Frau Monde and any other experienced reader all know that Erwin and his harem are quickly parted; what we do not know are the circumstances of his occlusion. When he sets out that fateful afternoon, we are treated to a magnificent scene:

He went out just as the church clock had begun the laborious task of striking noon. Sunday bells joined in excitedly, and a bright breeze ruffled the Persian lilacs around the public lavatory in the small park near his house. Pigeons settled on an old stone Herzog or waddled along the sandbox where little children, their flannel behinds sticking up, were digging with toy scoops and playing with wooden trains. The lustrous leaves of the lindens moved in the wind; their ace-of-spades shadows quivered on the graveled path and climbed in an airy flock the trouser legs and skirts of the strollers, racing up and scattering over shoulders and faces, and once again the whole flock slipped back onto the ground, where, barely stirring, they lay in wait for the next foot passenger. In this variegated setting, Erwin noticed a girl in a white dress who had squatted down to tousle with two fingers a fat shaggy pup with warts on his belly. The inclination of her head bared the back of her neck, revealing the ripple of her vertebrae, the fair bloom, the tender hollow between her shoulder blades, and the sun through the leaves found fiery strands in her chestnut hair.

You would think this would be enough for most people, and indeed, our Erwin would have been better off stopping right there. German trees in the shape of playing cards will also call to mind another Russian work of art that again traces its spindly roots to Doctor Faustus and his endless thirst for what we boldly call knowledge. After all, Frau Monde's late third husband was a professor. And a worldly one at that.